The Joe Rogan Experience - #1936 - Krystal Ball & Saagar Enjeti

Episode Date: February 4, 2023

Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti are political commentators and hosts of the YouTube show and podcast "Breaking Points." http://www.youtube.com/@breakingpoints

the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day all right now the first time we did this my hair was fucked up the whole time and neither one of y'all told me about it so i hope we're better friends now you just don't say a word is that recorded did you record that we should leave that part i was just like you look beautiful crystal are friends now. You just don't say a word. Is that recorded? Did you record that? We should leave that part out. I was just like, you look beautiful, Crystal. I watched it afterwards

and I was like, what the fuck? Mine was fucked up too. Yeah, wait. Okay. Number one, it's different. Number two,

I had like, this piece was like, protruding. I've been bald, like shaved head for like 13 years now or something like that. So I don't even think about it.

Like, your hair is fucked up. I'm like, who i get it i get it yeah it was a real betrayal but it's okay we're moving forward we're moving well it's really on him because you and i were just getting to know each other then so it was really his fault no you guys are a very unusual combination it's very funny because they're like having someone who's on the right and having someone who's on the left, it's usually like some sort of a formulaic thing. You know what I think of Hannity and Combs? Yes.

Do you remember that? Yeah. Oh, God. Because it was fake. It was a thing. Exactly. It's kind of hard to describe what we do because if you say like, you know, we're on the right and we're on the left, it does sound like

this sort of thing. A little bit country. I'm a little bit rock and roll. Remember that? Yes. Or like, like that terrible CNN show Crossfire

is the other thing. Who was on that one? Well, the original one was Tucker. Paul Begala. Paul Begala. Fuck, there were two others.

And then they did the reboot of it, which was rough. Tucker was on the right and Tuck back then. Yes, and Bacala was on the left, yeah. And Tucker used to have bow tie on. That was when he had the bow tie. That was bow tie. He's never lived down that.

People still, in their head, I feel like that's the picture they get of Tucker. He hasn't even worn a bow tie in 15 years. But it's just like seared into people's memories that this is what this man wears. There's something about bow ties. There's Crossfire. Yeah, there it is. Oh, that's Carville. And there's the infamous Jon Stewart when he just destroyed that.

Yeah, and then they did the remake with Newt Gingrich. Oh, wow. Remember that? Oh, and Elliot Spitzer was on there, right? No, no. That was another terrible show. So Newt Ging? No, no. That was another terrible show. So Newt Gingrich and Van Jones. That was Stephanie Cutter, who was one of the most unlikable people ever created.

And then Essie Cuff is actually a long time. She and I were at MSNBC together. So she and I are friends. So I can't say anything bad about her. She's a very nice person. She seems nice. I love her. Yep. So anyway, that was Crossfire. I don't know who that other lady is Stephanie Cotter? She works for Obama

yeah I think was she a Hillary person? I can't remember I can't watch those shows it was bad anyway that's not what we're doing I hope no you're not doing that at all but what is really fascinating is that having these long form discussions like you guys, uncensored and undirected, right, without an executive leaning over your shoulder and telling you what to do, it's the best way to discuss things.

And when I get to hear from a reasonable person on the left and a reasonable person on the right who respect each other, it's like it gives me hope like, hey, we can all get along like we can sort through what's good and what's bad. It's possible. That's that is actually the core goal of the show, because, I mean, we are living through incredibly like politically fraught times where you have a lot of people whose whole business model is to persuade you that like half the country hates you and is destroying the country and it's existential and we're headed to civil war and so i feel like if saga and i can you know agree on some things which we do and have

debates on topics that are you know difficult and tense and fraught and be able to do that day after day in a way that is respectful that's like not just trying to score points, but actually trying to learn from each other. You know, I hope it makes a small difference in the political atmosphere. Yeah. I mean, what I'm most proud of in like in our analytics is like half the audience is genuinely right and half the audience is genuinely left. And one of the pitches that we give our people, we're like, hey, if you're going to gonna support us like you're not gonna agree all the time so you're almost conditioning people to be like hey this is a message that i'm buying into and i think the most impactful like sometimes you don't meet people or whatever and they're like man you know i watched a show with

my dad and i'm just like dad like crystals what i believe and dad is like i'm with saga on some things and we sit down and we talk about it afterwards and like that we're building that for people that's so important man it's. And like that, we're building that for people. That's so important, man. It's completely gone. Because that is one of the dangers in independent media. There's a lot that's so exciting about independent media right now. I mean, you see the traditional media is just like dying. The ratings are failing.

People are abandoning them in droves. Obviously, trust has completely fallen off a cliff. But there are some pitfalls in independent media, too. And one of them is that you develop an audience that is one ideology that just wants to hear one thing and is there to hear what they already think about things. And so I think because of the fact that we have different opinions and our different political ideologies, that has sort of protected us against having an audience that is there for any one particular idea. And, you know, we'll see sometimes like people go, oh, you guys said this and that. We disagree with you. And it's like, you know what?

If this isn't the thing for you, you owe it to yourself to go somewhere else where you're going to hear every day, I guess, whatever it is that you want to be told from within your bubble. Well, I think you guys have reached a point where I have to give you the speech. And it's like, you got to stop paying attention to the comments. Yeah, it's so true. I've been giving you the speech for like three years. I've been giving you the speech.

I'm telling you, I'm right. I'm right on this. You are right. Kyle actually preaches this to me all the time, too. No, Kyle's indoctrinated. Yeah, he's fully bought in. He's fully on board with the philosophy. It's so true,inated. He's fully bought in. He's fully on board with the philosophy. It's so true though. It's true.

You feel like you should engage with your fans and everything like that, but you just gotta tell them, look, I love you guys. I'm just not reading your shit. I love you. I love you. I do this for you. I hope you enjoy it. I'm happy that you enjoy it. I'm not reading your shit. The hardest is whenever it's like people

who pay, like help support the show and they'll be like i pay ten dollars a month and like i pay you to represent me i'm just like all right man like then maybe you should cancel because that's actually not what we're here for not reading that yeah i'm not engaging yeah i'm not fuck you and you i'm not gonna do that that shit will get in your head too it will and it will mess with you in terms of like just your clarity of thought so 100 i mean the trade-off is sometimes people do have good critiques valid critiques good ideas whatever so you do you know there is a trade-off there but ultimately i i also buy into the the rogan philosophy of just don't read the shit well as you guys get bigger and bigger the numbers

become more and more untenable it just becomes ridiculous yeah you can't bigger and bigger, the numbers become more and more untenable. It just becomes ridiculous. Yeah, it's true, too. You can't engage. And it's also, we are creatures of community. And when there is any negativity, that negativity gets highlighted so much more so than positivity. And by the way, you don't need positivity. You're good.

You guys know you're good. You guys, you know what I'm saying? Like like you're objective you neither one of you has is crazy you know you sometimes yeah but you're not you don't have a distorted perception of what you do you guys do great you do great work you try hard you can't like those little negative ones they will get in your fucking head yeah because we're creatures of community and that person that you don't know that lives in fucking Indiana that is on meth and it's like really mad because you know the progressive in her district doesn't represent her views and she's like typing the meanest fucking shit like even though you know that that's nonsense this is probably a crazy

person that's in your head now you know the toughest thing actually was when we and by doing the show is actually by disconnecting from the broader like because in traditional media the way it works is like we used to go on fox uh when you're in fox is like an ecosystem you're in the green room there's all the other conservatives that are around you and then there's all these other people who work in conservative inc like conservative world and you're not if you can't dissent and actually the best most rewarding part of our show is we're not connected to the system anymore i'm like i don't give a shit like they're like i don't really appreciate we see you know trump's person or whatever some trump flacky is like you didn't say this about president trump i'm like i don't give a fuck i'm like what are you gonna do

you're gonna take me on fox i don't care i don't care i don't actually want to be on fox i'm like i could be on my own show but being disconnected from like the broader dc machine it totally frees you up for conversation on stop the steel anything anything that's controversial and i just be like i think this is bullshit i i truly 100 guys i believe this is bullshit i see commentators out there who i know don't believe what they're saying and are saying it because they have to they have to maintain their context they maintain their salary that's the corruption that's horrible that is it and that's like a self-imposed corruption if you're doing that online.

Yes. And some people are doing it online. And you guys are not. And I really appreciate it. I know that I'm watching you guys. I'm getting like real opinions. Like I'm getting well thought out, informed opinions.

And you know, and you guys are going to be cool to each other. I mean, we take it, we do take it really seriously, and I think we take it this year even more so than ever. Our biggest podcast download and our biggest YouTube numbers last year were right when Russia invaded Ukraine. And you talk about a high-stakes situation

where it's very difficult to sort through all the propaganda to really figure out what's going on. And, you know, we were trying our best to do that in real time. And the fact that so many people came to us to try to understand this conflict and what the U.S. is role in it, what it should be, that really meant a lot, number one. But it also, I think, put on both of our shoulders like a real sense of, all right, we got to make sure we're on top of our show. We got to read as much as we possibly can. We need to go back and look at like Russian nuclear doctrine and just go as deep as we possibly, you know, are capable of on this topic, because there are a lot of people who tell us we're it in terms of the news that they consume. So we have shifted to focusing,

you know, we still do like fun and stupid and silly topics or whatever and indulge whatever our little hobby horse interests are. But we've shifted the program somewhat to do more hard news because we care about it, because it's important, because there are a lot of people who are looking to us to understand

what's going on in the world. And also because ultimately, you know, if there's going to be an alternative to the liars and propagandists at places like CNN and Fox News and MSNBC and some of the mainstream print outlets as well, you're going to have to have that kind of serious coverage of hard news events

that people feel like they can trust what you're presenting them. And listen, we say all the time, sometimes we're going to fuck up. Sometimes we're going to be wrong about something. We're going to predict something. It doesn't happen, whatever. That is going to happen 100% of the time. But what you can count on us for is we are always going to come back. We're going to correct it. We're going to own up to the mistakes. And we are trying from the beginning, our very best to sort through what the truth of the situation is. Yeah. Every six months I do a monologue.

I'm like, here's everything I got wrong. I was like, totally wrong about this. People love it too. Totally wrong about that. I'm like, here's what, here was my thought process at the time. I'm like, I didn't think this was going to happen, but man, Ukraine has been a doozy. I'm like, we've said some controversial shit over the last couple of years that I've never experienced a level of pushback than going against the Ukraine narrative.

That is like number one the most controversial topic i have ever seen discussed yet in politics that my favorite moment of the beginning of the ukraine conflict was candace owens having a twitter battle with the new york times oh yes but the new york times says to Owens, like, where are you getting your information from that they're corrupt in Ukraine? Ukraine corruption, yeah. And she goes, your newspaper? And then she puts all these different links that show all the different stories from as recently as 2017 that talked about the immense corruption in Ukraine. Like, what the fuck is wrong with you guys?

You're supposed to be the New York Times. This is one of the primary ways that we've been gaslit in this conflict. And it just came out. I don't know if you saw this. You probably did. That Zelensky fired a bunch of his cabinet officials over corruption. And it was like they were taking these fancy vacations to Europe. One of them was accused of basically overcharging the military for meals. And remember, I mean, the amount that we have sent to Ukraine propping up

not only their military, but their government, their economy, etc. When they're taking that money, that's like coming directly out of the U.S. taxpayer pocket. And nobody reported on any of this until Zelensky fired people. And then it then we were allowed to be like, yeah, there's some problems with corruption there, maybe a little bit. Maybe we should like worry a little bit about where the weapons are going and what exactly is happening there. But before then, you weren't allowed to say it. Even better. The Times actually changed his headline. They were like Ukraine goes corruption drive. And it was like Zelensky aims to stamp out corruption just to make it a little bit less like the appearance. I have some fun numbers for everybody.

This is from a past monologue I've done. U.S. aid currently at $100 billion is double what the entire rest of the world has given to Ukraine. In one year, surpasses what we gave the Afghan military in 20 years. The total amount to Ukraine now exceeds all U.S. military aid to the country of South Vietnam between 1956 and 1975. Wow. A hundred billion dollars. And listen, I think what Russia did was wrong.

I think it's an atrocity. I think the Ukrainian cause is just. But the total lack of debate, the lack of willingness to say like, hey, when we got into this, what you sold to the American people is you're going to provide defensive weapons only. So Ukraine could defend itself. Now we're sending tanks. Now we're sending it just came out longer range missiles. These were things that were totally off the table. And then suddenly, step by step by step, not only are they on the table, but you're not allowed to question it. You're not allowed to say, hey, guys, are we setting ourselves up for World War Three here, which is something the president himself was talking about not very long ago, and yet no debate. And that's the thing that, you know, however you feel about the Ukraine conflict and,

you know, the buildup to it and how we got here and all of those things, I think at the very base level, the total lack of an ability to have dissent and debate and understand the potential consequences of what we're doing, that is fucking terrifying. Because we are talking about a nuclear armed superpower that we are engaged in a proxy war with. And you're basically not allowed to say, hey, how does this end? What do we need to do to try to get to negotiated settlement here? How do we avoid having a conflict with this nuclear arm superpower? World War III seems like a bad thing to have on the table right now. And you guys are one of the few voices of reason that will say that, that agree on both sides of the fence.

And this is a thing that there's a lot of videos out now. And I don't know if these people get these videos, but I get them. I get these videos of horrible war encounters in Russia and Ukraine. It's horrendous. And it brings me to this thing that I think about a lot. Because I think about things that other people do for a living and their jobs. And I think about like they live in a world that I don't understand. You know, there's like I'm fascinated by professional chess players. They live in a world that I don't understand because I don't play chess.

I love the fact I kind of know how the pieces move, but I've really only played like maybe 10 times my whole life. Yeah. There's a thing that people have. It's a quality of being a human being. You only know what you know. And other things become like these sort of like ethereal narratives. They're not necessarily real. And war is one of them.

Yes. War is one of them. Yes. War is one of them. There's a thing that people, the way my friends who've served talk about war is so titanically different than the way people who ideologically support or disavow it. Like, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about if you say there's no need for a military. You're crazy. We are going to get subjugated. Someone will come here with men

with guns. If you take away all the guns that everybody has and no more military, we're fucked. And if you don't think that, it's because if you'd never gone to the dark parts of the world, or you've never gone on Telegram, I'll send you some videos. I saw a guy get killed with a hammer yesterday. This is so important for people to understand, which is that we are 75 years removed from what war on the European continent actually looks like. And, you know, Joe, I'm the same way. One lifetime. I've been on fucking LiveLeak since I was like 12, which is probably bad for you.

Terrible for you. Terrible for you. My girlfriend's like, what are you watching? I'm like, what? And it's just like a beheading or something like that. My wife would come into my office and I have to pause videos. And I'm like, you really want to see this? They always say yes.

But then they can't handle it. I can't handle it. I can't handle it. I don't do well with blood. The point, though, is that, you know, we have to try and convey this to people and just say like, hey, when you're on Twitter and you're like, hey, you know, fuck you. You know, anybody who is against an Arab, you're like, this is not a joke. Like hundreds of thousands of Russians are dead. Hundreds of thousands are Ukrainians are dead.

Millions are displaced. We have no idea what the end game is like. And just what Crystal was saying, I have this thing where the Fight Club line on a long enough timeline, I'm like, on a long enough timeline, Ukraine is getting everything that it wanted. So originally it was like no-fly zone. And Biden was like, I'm being responsible. I'm saying no. Well, first they ruled out Patriot missile systems. Patriot missile systems are now on the way to Ukraine. They ruled out tanks. Now tanks are on the way to Ukraine. Right now, there's an article talking about how F-16s, they're thinking about sending Pentagon F-16s.

Biden says no now. Right, exactly. We'll see. He was saying no to tanks like five days before they sent tanks. He doesn't remember that, though. You're right. You got to dig deep, too. Like, for example, originally, we're like, we just want Ukraine to take back what it originally lost. And listen, if I was Ukrainian, I'd be pushing for the same thing. I have 100 percent sympathy. They are not in the wrong here. They've been invaded by a foreign and aggressive power. That said, like, we got to think about what's best for us. Right now, there's a New York Times article about U.S. warms to helping Ukraine take back Crimea. I'm like, well, hold on a fucking second.

I'm not saying it's just that Russia took Crimea in 2013, but they formally annexed it. And if you ask people in Russia, Crimea is Russia. So if they use, if Ukraine uses, a Pentagon provided F-16 to bomb Crimea, now what? Like now, that's a violation of Russian nuclear doctrine. They've updated their nuclear doctrine, by the way, to not even say it's defensive. They can say they can use it in any capacity that Vladimir Putin wants to. That was a significant change if you look in the history

of the way that the great superpowers actually consider their own nuclear first strike use. It's something that is considered ironclad and then boom, it changes like that. You're not even going to hear about this. And I was heartened a while back when there were some leaks that came out of the Biden administration that he at like a donor event in San Francisco or something said basically like, we're you know, we got to make sure we avoid World War Three. I'm paraphrasing, but that was the he was like, we got to avoid nuclear war. We got to avoid World War Three. And I was like, OK, good. He's he's thinking about that. That caution that existed at that point seems to be totally out of the window. And if you read, you know, the official sort of like state state paper, the New York Times about the administration's thinking, they're like, well, you know, Russia said this nuclear stuff and it didn't happen.

So they must just be bluffing. It must just not be real. And it's like, OK, number one, was there a timeline before they could press the button? Exactly. Oh, they didn't blow up the whole world yet. So we should be fine. Fine. I mean, that's insane.

Number one. And number two, the idea that Russia hasn't escalated in response to our actions is just not true. They've been striking critical energy infrastructure, including, you know, in and around Kyiv, which was an escalation. They went through with a conscription that there, you know, was very politically dicey for Putin. There's rumors that they may go through with another draft. So the idea that they just like took all of this lying down and didn't escalate is a fantasy to start with. But it's incredibly dangerous and foolish to think just because they didn't push the nuclear button yet that, oh, it's all fine and he's just full of it.

Thank God there's people like you guys out there, because there's so many people that they have Ukraine in the same category of importance and significance as they do climate change. Climate change, which is a real thing, but it's a politically divisive alleyway where you're not allowed to veer from the course and even look at any kind of science. It's the same thing with Ukraine. A support for Ukraine is undeniable. You must put it in your Twitter bio. And you guys are saying, you're not saying don't support Ukraine But you're saying look where this is going Do you understand what this is because you can't just openly support something you don't understand without a comprehensive view of what the fuck?

The factors are and how it got to be that way in the first place and you're not going to hear that in a five-minute Clip on mainstream news. You're just not going to it's so important important for us to internalize that message. We're not saying we hate Ukraine. We're not saying we don't even support Ukraine. The Ukrainian cause is just, what we're saying is, what about our interests? There are interests that supersede Ukraine. If I was Ukrainian, I would do exactly what they were doing. But guess what? Ukraine does not exist without the United States. We provide the vast majority of the military there for the diplomacy perspective. If we cut off military weapons to them tomorrow, that's it done. They are literally are forced to the negotiating table. I'm not even saying we should do that. I'm saying what is the end game? And, you know, in my neighborhood, there's more Ukraine flags than

there are American flags. It's like Ukraine flag, gay pride flag, no American flag. But then it's like, OK, if you go to those people and if we would just say what they said, they say this is disgusting. This is Russian propaganda. It's up to the Ukrainians for when they want to stop. And I said, yeah, I completely agree. But it's also up to us for whatever we stop providing them weapons. We're like, hey, if you want to defend this part of your territory, that's totally fine. That's our end game. My end game is not having a nuclear conflict, is making sure that we have peace on the European continent. Vladimir Putin is in opposition to that peace. But Putin and Russia are going to exist. You know,

something I think people should take home, too, is you had Peter Zayhan on. He said it really well, which is the first year of every Russian conflict is a total shit show. If you look at Finland, if you look at the first year of Hitler's invasion, even going all the way back to Napoleon and some of the czars campaigns before that, they lose a shit ton of people looks like a complete mass, they fire a bunch of generals, all of this. And then what do they do? They use their vast rush, the Russian Colossus is known out of that for a reason, because they have a shitload of people, they a lot of military material, they amass it, and they throw it at them. And so people are like, you know, Sager crystal, like what you guys are saying will be valid, but Ukraine is winning.

Look, we are barely a year into this. One year into the First World War, I could make the easy case that Germany was going to win the First World War. Second World War, I could easily make the case the Nazis were going to win. If I go back to Civil War, I could easily make a case the Confederates were going to win. All three of those, it didn't happen. Why? Because these things go on for a long time. You have no idea what it is. And one of the reasons that many of those conflicts, first and two,

went on and ultimately came to the conclusion they were, was because millions of lives were lost. And the whole point from those conflicts, if you look at the way that people talked, was we have to learn the lesson. We have to learn the lesson. But it's been 75 years, and now this is all a game. This is a tweet that people are saying about Ukraine, but it says real-world consequences for people. Yeah, that's it. That's it exactly. And the total lack of an ability to have a reasoned debate

without just being smeared as a propagandist. Yes. Again, don't read the comments. It is a terrifying moment. And there's a couple things that do give me some heart, which is, number one, even though like I can't really blame the people who are just who can't understand seeing it another way, because the propaganda that is coming from every network really like almost across the board is very strong and it's very hard to avoid that. So I have sympathy for that perspective. But even so, a poll just came out that had from NBC News. They buried this at the very end of their write up of the poll. Public's now 50 50 split on continuing aid to Ukraine.

So people are questioning, even though they're being fed so much propaganda. I think that is a credit to the rise of independent media. I think it's also a credit to the fact that they don't fucking trust the mainstream press anymore. People are smart, both things. But because of independent media, the trust is informed, or the lack of trust, rather, is informed. Right, it's not just knee-jerk. I hope. I mean, that's my hope looking at those numbers.

I think your hope is 100% correct. I think you're right. I think you guys are very important. Glenn Greenwald, very important. Jimmy Dore, very important. Kyle Kalinske are very important. Glenn Greenwald, very important. Jimmy Dore, very important. Kyle Kalinske, very important. People who are real people that actually have done the homework and are going over the details and can inform people. Because there's so many people out there.

Like, I talked to Dave Smith about the history of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. I was like, what? And he informed me about the coup in 2014. I'm like, oh, my God informed me about the coup in 2014. I'm like, oh my God. There's a lot of backstory. And then we played the video on the Colbert show. Oh, that's right. The old Colbert show, which is just fucking crazy.

It's like Gideon something, the guy from the Times, where he was like, what was it? He's got a book. He's selling a book. Yeah, that's right. And in the book, he's comparing Russia and Ukraine to Batman and Robin. And he's like, Ukraine is Robin,

and we want to take Robin and bring him over to our side. And it's like this open secret. They're just openly talking. There were cables from that actually WikiLeaks released and a friend who's a great journalist, Bronco Marcetich, who's been looking at the Ukraine conflict with a critical eye. Marcetich, who's been looking at the Ukraine conflict with a critical eye, he sorted through these cables and he found all of these diplomatic cables from the prior era where you had NATO allies, you had U.S. officials who were all saying, hey, guys, Russia has red lines here with regard to Ukraine and floating NATO membership with Ukraine is a real violation of

their hard red lines. And we're very fearful. And they laid out exactly the trajectory that we could find ourselves on. Now, that doesn't deny Russia agency or, you know, Putin and the Kremlin agency for invading. No one made them do that. However, it is to say that, you know, there was a time when you were allowed to acknowledge that U.S. policy could lead to this exact event. And now when you even suggest that us, you know, floating NATO membership with Ukraine and saying that they were going to be made apart, that some of these things were exacerbating and they crossed the red line and, you know, created a situation that was incredibly tense where this is the predictable outcome. Again, that's you tense where this is the predictable outcome.

Again, that's you're not allowed to talk about that. Well, it's it's also like to bring back the chest analogy is if you looked at war and you you you ignored the human casualties and the horrors and the fact that it should absolutely be avoided at all costs and all human deaths are valuable and bombing apartment buildings and all the horrible shit. deaths are valuable and bombing apartment buildings and all the horrible shit. It's terrible and evil. But this isn't like that.

We are being fed a narrative that Russia made a big move and there was no other moves. Right. And when we find out about the moving of weapons closer to Russia, the discussion of them joining NATO and you realize Russia is getting moved on. There's moves. Now, you absolutely be correct in saying the correct response is not blowing up apartment buildings and starting a war and invading a country. You're right. But this is not an unprovoked situation. It didn't just come out of nowhere from a madman. We're not getting this narrative on television of nowhere from a madman. about these partisan ideas where you're willing to like you're willing to absolutely ignore good

points that the other side says because then you would give them some sort of credit in winning this ideological bullshit game we're all playing that is so well drives me nuts especially on corruption you know you were talking about censorship but corruption is a great one where everybody wants to talk about hunter biden on the right i would love listen we can talk about hunter biden all day. We've been covering him since day one. He's a guy who got hooked on drugs. Right. Yeah.

Okay. To get his duck. Dick sucks. That's not what the problem is. You know, there's, it's, it's just revealing a very corrupt system that everyone wants to ignore. Exactly. And then we were like, Hey, let's talk about Jared Kushner.

And then a lot of people on the right are like, hey, you know, this guy, it's actually great. There are internal Saudi documents where he asked the Saudi royal kingdom fund or whatever for a billion dollar investment in his new fund, private equity fund, right after he leaves the White House. The internal emails are like, I don't think this guy's a very good investor. I'm not sure this would be a good use of our capital and mbs the crown prince is like give him the money they're like it's the interview send him the billion personally to get this guy his two billion i

think it was maybe two billion two billion for his fun that's a baller friend to have yeah but if you're on the right uh let's not talk about that let's talk about hunter biden and his laptop and of course the democrats we had um had Ted Lieu, congressman. This is back in the old days at the Hill at Rising. But I'll never forget. We were pressing him on Hunter Biden, these boards that he was on and the money he was getting, whatever. He's like, people sit on boards and they get paid money. Like it was so part of the Washington, like the water that they swim in. He couldn't even conceive that it was a problem.

I mean, now it may not be illegal, but that's an issue in and of itself. The fact that he could just hand wave away. Well, it's semi-legal. Oh, no, it's just straight legal. That's the crazy part. It's legal, but it's sketchy. Yes. Yeah.

But to your point about, you know, censorship and the the total lack of willingness to challenge your own side's narrative, did you just see this Columbia Journalism Review report that came out about Russiagate? Sagar and I were looking at it. Oh, it's fantastic. It's really long in depth. I mean, it's overdue, right? It's like way after the fact. This is one of the first certainly mainstream and CJR is as mainstream as they come. Mainstream attempts to actually go back through the Russiagate narrative, where it started, how it was sold to the American people and all of the lies and especially the omissions. And they take a really hard look at the New York Times as kind of the main player in the story.

There were other villains as well, but the New York Times is the main player. Times as kind of the main player in the story. There were other villains as well, but the New York Times was the main player. And they would report something that, you know, they would shade it to look as bad as possible with regards to Trump-Russia connections. They would get some other piece of information that was exculpatory, wouldn't be in the paper at all. And they got all kinds of, you know, millions of new subscribers to their paper who were there to hear this like, you know, elaborate tale of Russian conspiracy and the Manchurian canon and whatever. And the underlying narrative that at least I take away from the CJR report is the New York Times and Namas NBC and a lot of other places.

They were more interested in feeding that audience what they wanted to hear than actually looking at the facts of what was happening. And, you know, you read it, it is as damning as it could be. And listen, the way we were sold the Iraq war was bad enough. Like that was a travesty after the fact they actually did some correctives that here's what we got wrong and we're sorry, whatever this they will never admit that they did anything wrong here. They just move forward and pretend like none of it ever

happened. And it's it is astonishing. And they wonder then they turn around and wonder, like, why does no one trust us? We just don't get it. Yeah. Well, we have to make laws against disinformation. That's what we have to do. Misinformation and malinformation. All of those are bad. And this way we can control the narrative. Are you going to are you going to be the one who determines what's what's fact and what's fiction? And actually in the piece, they were like, the U.S. has the lowest media trust in 42 developed nations. And they're like, yeah, how does that fucking happen? I don't think that's true because I think there's an insanely strong trust in independent media.

You are right. They're pointing to the mainstream media. These people that are, they're just who they are. You know who they are. And it's possible to do now. You can be a real person. You don't have to be a propagandist or a spokesperson for the state. You can be a real person and tell people what the fuck is going on.

Because this is a wild game that other people are playing on our behalf with money that they've gotten from our taxes, where we don't even get a say in what the fuck they spend it on it's crazy it's crazy and it it it doesn't affect your daily life you drive to the same place you say hi to your neighbors all it seems fine but you're dealing with a fucking destructive empire that has been doing things to other countries that if you saw them if you were boots on the ground you would be horrified if you watched a drone bomb a wedding party in Yemen. If you were a part of something in another country that we're involved in, that our tax dollars have gone to, that we have just written off as being not of concern. Right.

Right. Which is crazy. Yemen is a great example. I mean, across the board, humanitarian organizations around the world say this is the greatest humanitarian crisis that is unfolding in the entire world. And, you know, we are highly complicit in this through our support of Saudi Arabia. You don't see Yemen flags from people on people's cars. You don't see the news media talking about it. You don't see them humanizing the children that are starving and dying there. And so, you know, part of part of the way that the information ecosystem is shaped is what they decide to care about, what they decide to cover, the way they decide to cover it and what just gets pushed off the page entirely out of sight, out of mind. I think there's an important part to talk about with this, that with human beings, when human beings work inside corporate systems, and these systems have goals, and they're trying, everyone's working together, and there's a hierarchy of people, and you're not allowed to step out of line, we develop a way of thinking that is almost like it's a tribal way and it's kind of a religious way.

And I'm curious to know how you guys feel about your ability to be completely independent outside of that and how that's affected the way you think about things. Because for me personally, like having all these conversations with so many different people about so many different subjects, I'm a different person. Yes. Like I'm a completely different person. It's shaped me so – it's like the most bombarding, overwhelming education that it's like very difficult to process. But if you're in a corporate environment, it's very hard to think independently. It really is. You don't have the time.

You don't have the notion. You definitely don't benefit from it. You don't have the incentive. That's the big one. Yeah, if you speak out, you're fucking penalized. You can lose your job. Just things that aren't even like out of line. Like I remember there was a hockey guy.

He was a hockey commentator. And he said that all lives matter. And he got fired. Holy shit. What an egregious misstep. All lives matter. You know I got my start in media on MSNBC.

Yes, I know. So, I mean, am I a different person from those days? That's why I wanted to bring it up to you guys. I go back and look at it. And, you know, some of it I watch and I'm proud of. You know, I did. I focused on a lot of the same issues I do, like labor and economic inequality, economics, things that I really care a lot about, especially on foreign policy, though. Some of that stuff I go back and watch and I'm like, oh, my God, this is so cringe.

And I just bought into the corporate line. And I just bought into the corporate line. Now, ultimately, shortly before I was let go, I did a monologue when Hillary Clinton was building up to run for president. It was back in 2014. So this was early on. And I did this whole thing that was like, she's sold out to Wall Street. People are going to hate this lady. She's like the terrible candidate for the moment. Please don't run.

And I was allowed to say it, right? I delivered my thing. I did it exactly how I wanted to do it. Afterwards, I get pulled into an office. And, you know, great, Molly, everything's fine. But next time you do any commentary on Hillary Clinton, it has to get approved by the president of the network. Yeah. to get approved by the president of the network.

Yeah. And think about, you know, I mean, I would love to say that I did further Hillary Clinton commentary. There's no doubt about it. But I would love to say that didn't affect me and I was just there to be a truth teller. But listen, I'm a human being. I'm sure I responded to the incentives of that system of like, I don't want to get in trouble with the boss. For sure.

You know, and that's so that's the way that it works. People that's a very blatant example but oftentimes people know where the boundaries are they know what they're allowed to say and so they don't need that direct intervention of censorship and also by the way these people most of them in you know cable news they're not really there because they're talented they're there because they're reliable purveyors of whatever it is that that network wants to purvey. So that's ultimately why they get the job and they understand the parameters of the task. Well, there's just a thing that happens when you're connected with someone.

If you're connected financially, if you're connected in a friendship way, that's why cronyism works. Yes. That's a good point. Absolutely. They weasel their way in. And look, I can give you examples of it inonyism works. Yes. That's a good point. Absolutely. They weasel their way in. And look, I can give you examples of it in my own life. Yeah.

Like if anybody ever comes to me with any kind of criticism of Dana White, and I'm like, you're going to the wrong guy. Like that guy's my brother. I'll never say a bad thing about him. If I didn't know him, if he was some asshole that lived in some other country, I would probably talk shit about him like I talk shit about everything. But I love that guy to death, and I'll never say a bad word about him.

So it's like, you're not, if you're coming to me for objective journalism about one of my friends, you know, you got the wrong person. Yeah, but you're open about it, right? And that's the most important part. You got the wrong person. I won't lie, but I won't ever say anything negative about my friends.

It's just like I don't think that's necessary. And that's something that happens when you get a shit ton of money involved and you get relationships and you're drinking scotch together at a private club and you're discussing the advertising revenue. And we'd like to donate a bunch of money to cnn we'd like to figure out a way that we can work together you know hey i'm a fucking captain billionaire and i want to donate all this money to all these people that own media organizations and i would you know i'd like to be a you be your friend that's it that would be a friend it's cool right who doesn't want to go to fun parties? It's just friends.

We're friends. Yeah, it's all part of a system. We're fishing. This is the other thing, actually, I was hoping to bring up is I don't think people understand that cable is a fake business model. So, for example, we talk a lot about the failing ratings. The key demo numbers on all three of these channels is a joke. I always like to say, like, Crystal and I would be starving in a ditch if we were getting the same numbers as these people. So how do they survive? It's because they're part of something called the cable bundle. And so like when you buy cable, like Cox Communications or whatever, they pay Comcast, for example, they pay CNN and MSNBC

and Fox to be a part of the bundle. The vast majority of the profit of these cable channels comes from the bundle. So CNN made a billion in profit just last year, all propped up by the bundle because they're getting paid just to exist. I mean, can you imagine if we were getting paid to exist, not based upon our actual numbers? Like you can actually reach less people and make more money. And so it's all part of this fake system. But I mean, the benefit is, is that with the rise of independent media, more and more advertisers are waking up, the less eyeballs, the less of an incentive for people, because that is what props up all kinds of bullshit that we don't have like a small d democratic input with our eyeballs on CNN or any of these places. They can exist just fine without us like to truly kill them. We have to get away from live news on TV.

That's that's the number one thing still propping them up today. Yeah. It's kind of a zombie business model. But I will tell you, I mean, I have a lot of optimism, certainly about what we're doing, about the response to what we're doing, about the independent media ecosystem. But we were you and I were talking the other day, Joe, about I do think it's a dangerous moment for people. And one thing we've been covering a lot on the show is you have a kind of breakdown in previous national stories and narratives. And people are very like story driven. You know, you have a breakdown in I'm not a religious person. So this is like not my bag, but you have a breakdown in religion. So some of the stories that have kind of like held the

country together and that people helped use to make sense of their life or even the story about the American dream. A lot of these things are kind of breaking down. Now, that's a good thing because it creates a possibility for a new, more beneficial story. But in the meantime, it is just a like heyday for con artists and charlatans and, you know, people who are willing to sell a narrative to, you know, a lot of folks who feel kind of lost, kind of adrift, and don't like existing in that chaos. So it's like, you know, whether they're being scammed by, like, SBF or this, like, Congressman George Santos who, like,

made up every aspect of his life. That guy's amazing. Crystal's obsessed with him. I just find him a disgrace. You see pictures of him where he's a drag queen in Brazil? Katara. Katara, absolutely.

Drag-ish. Now you can't criticize him anymore. He's trans. The part I'm obsessed with him is, first of all, I just can't imagine being that person who can like, whoever he was across from, he was going to tell them what they wanted to hear. When the dude was like, I'm into volleyball, he's like, I was a star volleyball player at a college he didn't even go to.

I have a very good friend who texted me today and he told me, I'm here with this guy who knew you from Boston and this and that and that and this. And I say, what's his name? He tells me tells me the name I go that guy's full of shit I don't know that guy and so then he tells me that he took a picture with this guy and the guy pretended that he was texting it to me whoa these are real people see that and that's that's there's real people that are just crazy and that's the thing that gets... I'm like, how many of these people are out there, number one? And number two, I just feel like his ability to rise and make it to Congress says so much about the cracks and the holes.

Look at those FTX execs maxed out on donations. I didn't even know that. Of course. They did. Jamie. Of course they did. Look at them. That right there is the perfect news story for our era.

Look at that American flag fucking pin on the lapel. I love it. This is America's congressman right here. Let's go champ. What's his name? Have you seen the video where he's like, hi, my name is Anthony DeValder? Yeah, he changes his name. Who the fuck are you?

He's a full on con man. Full on con man. There's so few people that want to be congressmen. There's so few people that want to get involved that you could be a fucking loon, a fucking loon with all the right bullet points and you can get all the way in. Well, he told people what they wanted to hear, you know, to the donors. He was like, I'm a wealthy businessman. I'm highly successful. I worked at Goldman Sachs, all this stuff. They're like, oh, this is our kind of guy. To the electorate and the Republican, he pitched that he's like this trailblazing, you know, Americans, I am the American dream, like Latino, gay, all this stuff. I mean, it really was incredible the way that he told people what they wanted to hear. And so that's a part that I'm really interested and obsessed with because all of these people are

like a reflection of the holes and vulnerabilities in society. You know, same thing with Sam Bankman Freed and FTX. He told people in Congress, he told the media, he had this very specific cultivated image of his like wacky hair and his like dressed down look and whatever, that he was the eccentric genius or whatever. that he was the eccentric genius or whatever. And a lot of people who were supposed to be super smart in the business press and in the regular press and on Capitol Hill, they all bought it hook, line, and sinker. After Bernie Madoff, you're not going to fool us again. Oh, yeah, right.

We've got it all. We got it now. We got it now. It's not like Theranos was like five years ago. Theranos was an abnormality, sir. It'll never happen again. People like that are rare and they don't really get through. It's actually a good thing, though, just to show people like these people aren't that smart.

When I first came to D.C., you get to the White House and you're like, holy shit, this is the White House. It's like when I met Trump and interviewing him in the Oval Office and I'm'm like holy shit i'm in the oval that's jfk who's sitting there you know like this is where nixon did this thing and but then you know like some guy comes in with his shoes off and you're like oh uh this is just an office like it's just a normal building and so you got to take that veneer off most people actually get this i'm probably just weird which is like these people aren't that smart they're the billionaires and uh they're actually fools like sam bankmaned raised a billion dollars. He was literally playing Counter-Strike while he was on a Zoom call and he was playing a

video game. He said some bullshit and like something about a banana and they gave him a billion dollars. This is one of the top tier venture capital firms in the world. Yes. I mean, these are supposed to be the most sophisticated investors and just totally bamboozled by this guy. And it isn't. And then on the other end, you know, a lot of people who bought into what he was selling or what, you know, NFTs that were being sold or whatever random crypto like scams were out there. You know, they had their own vulnerabilities of maybe they were

hurt in the financial crash. Maybe they feel like it was disproportionately young men. Right. So maybe they feel like the American dream of like getting the house and having the family and the, you know, the like basic middle class prosperity wasn't really open to them. And they're being sold this sort of hero journey narrative about you know fortune favors the brave and you got to get in early and this is secret special special knowledge that's going to allow you to achieve your goals of wealth creation that has been held out to you of like what is at the core of being a man it's a very seductive story it's a very seductive story connected to the manscape the mans manscape and crypto and NFTs.

Because it all is this whole. You know, it's interesting. Some of the most viral content that we've done in like the last several months is just problems with men. Like we did this video. It's like the problems of boys and men with an author, Richard Reeves, who's actually fantastic. He wrote a great book on this. You'd have a great conversation with him actually. It went super viral.

And he talks a lot. He's like, look, I understand. He's like, I'm not an anti-feminist. He's like, what we are talking about, though, is in the last two decades, we've had a crisis amongst young men. And something we talk about on the show is what Crystal's getting at with the decline of the American dream, like the idea that you are going to do better than your parents. And that's just not really true anymore. And that's just not really true anymore. Even if you went to school and you have a shit ton of student debt, even if you're working class in terms of wage growth, upward mobility, people who are graduating from high school who are men and working class having much more trouble actually finding a mate.

So there's a big college imbalance right now where a lot of men are dropping out of college. They no longer feel accepted. And you're reaching almost 60-40 splits of women and men in college, especially who are graduating. A lot of women who have college degrees don't actually want to date somebody who doesn't have a college degree. And so there's this big imbalance in the dating market. And then also among single men, you see a big decline in lifetime wages. But what really makes me really sad is the drug overdose numbers and

they die much earlier. They're much less likely to exercise, much less likely to fulfill a more like a stronger life. And that's what gets to the charlatanism of like being able to buy into the charlatan, signing up for some MLN scheme that you might see online, buying crypto. By the way, you're looking at a crypto victim. I lost $5,000 on BlockFi. Got fucked out by that. There's a lot of men that feel by their very existence that they're bad. Yeah. Yeah.

It's a big cultural problem. They're fed this thought of toxic masculinity and the things that they're attracted to, they think they've been told are stupid or that they're evil. They've been told they're stupid or, you know, that they're evil or, you know, there's a thing about being a man in this world today that I think we have to look at all human beings as just human beings. Yeah. And you don't you can't help that you were born a man and you can't help the things that you enjoy. Like if you enjoy going to football games, you enjoy getting loud with your friends. This idea of toxic masculinity. It's like, yeah, there's toxic aspects of men.

And that's real. That's a reality of being a male human being. If you look at the history of war, it's all started by men. Men did all of it. Men do all the raping. I had this guy on the podcast once. It was hilarious. He goes, actually, you know, statistically speaking, men get raped more than women do.

I go, yeah, by other men, you fucking idiot. I go, it's not packs of cheerleaders raping football players. The fuck is wrong with you? The problem is 100% men. That's the problem with manosphere is that there's grifters in the manosphere that aren't actual real men. And by real men. Yes. And by real men, I mean they don't have resolve. Like if you took them on a hike, they would get tired.

They would sit down. You would have to leave them behind. They're not, the word tough is a word, but it's like, oh, you're tough. No, mental toughness is fucking important. It's a really important quality of life. And it's been diminished to this thing that's like a part of toxic masculinity ideology. Well, and this is where, you know, the Andrew Tates of the world come in and they perform this just like caricature ish, ridiculous, masculine, whatever they're doing. And then also maybe as a sex trafficker, we'll find out.

We'll see what happens there. But it again speaks to the fact there used to be a really clear sort of cultural narrative right or wrong about what it was to be a man. And at the core of that was being a provider. Right. For women, it was like, you know, it was other things being like a mother and a nurturer and like the way you look for men. It's like about the wallet. Right. The pocketbook. And then, so I think when we've had an assault on the middle

class, on the working class, where it becomes so much harder to be able to fulfill that cultural narrative of what it is supposed to be to be a man. I think that's been, this is this woman, but you know, from my external perspective, I think that's been really, really devastating. And I don't want to pretend also, though, like it's only young men who are getting scammed right now. Everybody has their... There's...

LulaRoe. And there's a great series about this MLM multi-level marketing scheme of these fucking ugly leggings that a bunch of Midwestern housewives for some reason love these things. No, no.

That's it. Okay. First of all, you and I are on the wrong page here because I think those are kind of fly. I like them. That's some shit if my wife wore, I'd be like, I like those. So would you let your wife buy them off Facebook Live from another Mormon lady? 100%. I don't have any say over what she buys. That's some shit if my wife wore I'd be like I like those Facebook live from another Mormon 100% I don't have any say over what she buys. That's how we work get this for your

She feels about it. I'm a non-criticizer of my wife's that's that's a good. That's a good idea But so I mean the thing that they sold To the women who ended up like selling these Beautiful leggings. I think they're fly. Beautiful fly leggings. Stars on them and shit. I like it. You're going to be able to make your own money. You're going to have like this financial independence.

Yeah, you sell them to other people who like cool shit. You're going to be able to still have time with your kids. You're going to be able to have it all. But then as the thing went on, and originally there was like a real demand for these leggings and people really did want them. So you felt like, oh, I'm doing the thing went on, and originally there was like a real demand for these leggings and people really did want them. So you felt like, oh, I'm doing the thing. But then as time goes on, the only people who are making money are the people who are convincing more to get into the legging sales business. And, you know, it's a classic basically pyramid scheme.

And over time, the quality of the leggings degrade. They're sending out packages that like smell bad and they're ripped and whatever. But the bottom line is the only way to make money was by bringing in more people after you, which is definition of MLM. That was for the Midwestern housewife or whatever. Maybe they just have a marketing problem

because someone should tell them how fly those leggings are. You made that fucking guy's date. You're going to get contacted. Next thing you know, we're going to listen to Joe's podcast. He's like, this is brought to you by LuLaRoe. Have some little mini mouses on them. Let's go.

Let's go. But I think it's also a broader cultural thing where being in the mainstream, you know, mainstream masculinity is not really represented. And because of that, that also opens a space for a lot of grifters. I mean, I was looking at that with the whole liver king thing, which I know you covered quite a bit, but I saw something. Well, I called it. I didn't cover it.

Oh, did you? Yeah. Yeah, I called it way in advance. I'm like, that guy's on the sauce. Just from looking at him? A hundred percent. So you just don't naturally get that way. Yeah, you can naturally get that way if you have superior genetics

and you're in your 20s. Yeah, you're right. Like if you're in your 20s, this is in his 40s. He's like 45. He's carrying around too much mass. Like you would have to be, by the way, in your 20s,

you know, your hormones are flying, right? If you're like 21, 22 years old, there's some natural guys that i follow that are fucking jacked yeah but it's a different kind of jack that guy's a juiced up jacked and it's hard he also i think something's going on with his abs too i don't know yeah i don't believe the surgery you think that's real i don't know but anyone who's willing to lie about doing steroids when it's so obvious to anyone who understands hormonal optimization and steroid use and like that more plates, more dates guy, Derek, who's, I love that guy.

You know, he called it, we both called it way in advance. Like there's not a chance in hell. There's no way. It's like, if you look at Mr. Olympia, right? No one thinks they don't take steroids. Zero people. And you would be correct. But then when you look at that, like, do you blame him?

Because you know all his competition is doing the same shit, right? What is that? Well, liver pink is an influencer. No, no. She means Mr. Olympia. Of course. Of course. That's the same way I think about like Tour de France.

Tour de France is a dirty sport. And it always was. And, you know, the greatest documentary about it is Icarus. And it's not about Tour de France, but it's about bicycle racing and doping and how prevalent it is. And worldwide. It's amazing. Have you seen it? We had it on the show.

Brian Fogle? Yeah, we had Brian on the show. Amazing. I remember. He's the same guy that did The Dissident, the Amal Khashoggi documentary, which is another amazing documentary. Yes, yes, yes. He's fucking fantastic. But it's a dirty business.

It's a dirty business. So other people are doing it too? Okay. But that's why I want people to be honest in the manosphere. I work out at a bodybuilding gym, and so I'm like, there's guys who are on gear, and then there's guys who aren't fucking on gear.

And that's just what it is. But the liver king thing drove me nuts because you were looking at like teenagers who thought they're like, oh, this is real. If I eat like bull testicles or if I buy, you know, whatever his bullshit supplements are. I don't want to say bullshit. Whatever his supplements were. I don't think the supplements are bad because what he's doing is desiccated organ meat.

Right. And there's actually been peer reviewed studies on feeding desiccated liver. I think it was to, see if you can find it. I think it's to mice. I also want can find it. I think it's to mice. I also want to see the abs when you have a chance. His abs? Yeah. Well, there's quite a few people that have those now.

People are accusing Oscar De La Hoya of having them now. That's what Oscars say. He got etching. He got etching. Oh, okay. He's being honest. Yeah, he got etching on a radio show. Oscars being honest.

Good for him. What do you think, Crystal? Good for Oscar. So those look to me preposterous. The amount, it just doesn't make sense. Now, you do have people that are outliers.

Like, there's certain people that just have bizarre traps or crazy back muscles. Like, right there, if you show me that picture on the right, I would say that looks fine. That's a guy who's just jacked. But there's something about the one on the far left where he's holding up the piece of liver. Yeah.

That is just like, what is going on there? Yeah. I buy that. Especially knowing now. Sauce to the fucking gills. That was the best part about Derek's video. It's like 12 grand a month. Yeah.

His entire hormone stack. Well, when Derek got a hold of all of the, yeah, I mean, come on, son. Look, they look great, but. Do they though? I mean, it's not to my taste. I'll just say that. Oh, you're just being nice to Kyle. I want to see Kyle on the sauce.

You know what it is? It's like people like different things. You can't, oh, you're wrong. That music sucks. No, it sucks to you. Yeah. All right? Some people want a giant, juiced up fucking Viking dude.

Yeah. That's what they want. And some people want like an Alex Honnold, the guy who climbs the rocks. Oh, yeah. I love that guy. Like slim and lean. People like different things. Yeah.

So to some people, That's the optimal physique problem What's a little different? Yeah? Oh my yeah that that physique is ridiculous. Yeah, yeah, it really is Well, they you know like he's in the middle of full exertion there right on a spear Look the guys built like a brick shithouse. No ifs, ands, or buts. You don't get that way without putting in a lot of work. That guy works hard.

There's no way. There's no way you get there without the hard work. The real tragedy in this is that this guy had an opportunity to say, what's possible with chemical intervention, and here's the pros and cons and this is the dangers of it and also this is the nutrition that i take to optimize my body which is also critical you cannot get to that physique with just steroids you must have amazing work ethic incredible discipline ability to push through exertion and just have a fucking force of will. And you have to have amazing nutrition.

You have to be really fucking healthy to allow all those tissues to recover and nourish them and then stay that lean. So you have to be very disciplined with your diet. So what he's done is very, very, very impressive. But he lied. Right. That's the problem. and it's such a disservice is he i haven't i admit i haven't watched a lot of liver king content i'm not exactly in the core demo for this um is he like is he a charismatic guy oh yeah you feel like if he hadn't cheated and lied and whatever he still could have made it i you know i don't know. We don't know. I mean, I think so.

I think that there's been a bunch of people that are openly taking performance-enhancing drugs and have enormous social media platforms. I don't think that's the problem. I think the problem is just being dishonest. Lying. If you're the liver king and you're talking about your stack and explaining to people what you take and that you're doing it all legally. And then you're also eating all this food. The question is, is that a thing that would influence other people to do that when they shouldn't do that? And I think that's a personal choice.

I think the real responsibility that someone has when you're in that situation, if you are doing that stuff, you should be honest about what you're doing and then also honest if something goes wrong. Yeah, I think it's important. So I didn't get into health and fitness to like two years ago or so. And it's so important to have realistic expectations about what you can do, about what you can get, about what it actually means to diet. So like Dr. Lane Norton, who I use his app Carbon, like, you know, you realize after a couple of weeks into a cut, you're like, oh, this fucking sucks. And you're like, and I'm only losing, you know, I'm only losing whatever, two pounds a week. And then also even with heavy resistance training, four times a week, diet relatively on point. Shit is hard, man. It takes

years. Like you are not going to look like Liver King overnight. And that's actually important to understand that. Well, I mean, number one, you just aren't going to look like liver king unless you do what he did. But number two, I mean, yeah, some people that's just never going to be on the menu. Totally. But I'm more saying like for kids, especially, you know, look, I didn't know a fucking thing before I started consuming all this content. Like Huberman and all these other folks, Derek, all these videos. And Derek had a video once of a guy who was like one year out, I think. It was like, this is what a realistic like six pounds of muscle looks like.

And he was like, yeah, it doesn't look great. He's like, but that's what it looks like, man. And I was like, yeah, that's actually very helpful to me as somebody who was just starting off from the ground. And then I think about 22-year-old me. I would have fallen for it, man. I would have bought the supplements. I would have bought the, you know, if I was 18 years old. Absolutely.

I'm like fat kid in college station. Have you really thought that's all it took to get jacked? Yeah, I'm like, that's all it takes. I would have bought the supplements. I would have bought the, you know, if I was 18 years old. Absolutely. I'm like fat kid in college station. Have you really thought that's all it took to get jacked? Yeah, I'm like, that's all it takes? I'm like, fuck yeah, I'll do it. It's like you got to consume good information and have real expectations around that stuff. And that's the biggest problem, I think, with like Manosphere and Instagram culture and all that. There's some great ones out there like Lane, like Huberman and a few others. But there's a lot of fraudsters well and to go back to Andrew Tate apparently part of what he's

arguing it's like oh this is just a character that I'm playing but it's like you know at the end of the day does it really arguing though I think so I think I saw that but at the end of the day does it matter if you're playing a character if people believe it you know then there's no difference whether you're just like playing a character character because you're still selling the same thing to a public that's buying it yeah then what do you do about steven cobert when the cobert report he just worshiped it because he was great that was a character that was great on that show that character was so funny that character was amazing it was it was

amazing on the daily show when he went and did did the roast of the president at the White House Correspondents with George W. Bush. I like it so much better than the real one. I know. The real guy does the talk show. It's so cringy. You need to get them Daily Show writers back. Let's go back in the closet, buddy.

Last time we were here- Put the character back on. It was so much funnier. I remember last time we were here was the day after he fucked up Jon Stewart's bit. About the, about Lively Cove. Yes. That's right. You're stepping on him.

I got that from you. You were like, you're stepping on his fucking bit. 100% on purpose. That was the first time I watched that thing was here live with you guys. Hilarious. Well, he just, the narrative was like, he saw his yacht slipping away. He's like, no. Well, I'd like to see some evidence if you have it.

I've had dinner with the folks at Pfizer. They're wonderful people. I don't even think it's that. I think it's like the social proof thing. Like we were talking about. I mean, people feel like, oh, this is my club and this is my tribe and so I gotta represent them or I'm gonna get backlash. I'm not gonna get invited to the party. Have you ever seen him

dancing with Chuck Schumer? Of course. And the high fives Chuck Schumer. It's amazing. It's amazing. You're in the club, buddy. You made it. Congratulations. Hope it feels good.

But that is what was the only thing that was available until independent media arose. Yeah. You had to do that. And if you wanted to be the... That's true. That's why Jay Leno hid in the closet

when they were discussing the Tonight And if you wanted to be the – That's true. That's why Jay Leno hid in the closet when they were discussing The Tonight Show. Everybody wanted to be the head of a late night talk show. And if you could find a way to get to that spot, that was the holy grail. That was the thing that everybody wanted to get to. I watched that documentary, The Comedy Show, or The Comedy Store, about The Comedy Store. That era was so crazy. store. And that era was like so crazy where it's all anybody wanted was to get on that. And that actually, I don't know, I'm, I'm of two minds on the, I didn't grow up in that, you know, I was born in 92. So by the time

I was like aware it was on the internet, but that there seems something comfortable about that mass media environment, like the three channels, the Walter Cronkites, everybody looks at that as an era, which was better. But you know, a lot of the reading I've done in terms of JFK and Vietnam lies and all that, I think shit was just as bad. It was like we just didn't hear about it. People just had no idea what was going on. But, you know, I mean, when you talk about JFK, which is like this is another one of the things that I've gotten really into. I mean, it's not like the public bought the narrative. That's true.

They never bought the narrative. They still don't buy the narrative, you know. So but I do think in general, it was easier for them to sell a unified, like propagandistic narrative to the American people, except when it came to things that were just like farcical on their face. You know, and you have something like a late night talk show. It's so easy to co-opt. All you have to do is just say, advertise on it. Right. And then you kind of control what the people can and can't talk about. It's not hard at all. I mean, that's the thing with the existing, like the legacy media business models. There's no,

you know, CNN has a new boss and he's saying different things and trying to, it's like, you're still dealing with the same beast here, though. Same incentive structure. You're going to find yourself falling into the exact same mistakes and holes. I mean, that's why, you know, you see the same dynamic going on at Twitter right now where it's like the part of the reason they were making the censorship decisions they were was because of ideology. And I think that comes out in the Twitter files. Like you had a couple of people. You had a lot of people who didn't want to make a decision. They're just like, you know, that's in general. People don't like being responsible or making decisions. And you had a couple of people, you had a lot of people who didn't want to make a decision. They're just like, you know, that's in general, people don't like being responsible or making decisions.

And then you had a couple of really ideological actors. But you also see in the fallout with advertisers fleeing now that a lot of the reason these censorship decisions were driven was about the money. It was about the bottom line. It was still just like with legacy media. It was the advertisers shaping what was the bounds of acceptable discourse. You see that on Twitter. You see it on YouTube.

I mean, anywhere that's ad supported, you're going to have that same dynamic. We have that shit constantly on YouTube. It's like you do a video about Jeffrey Epstein, fucking kiss it goodbye. Oh, you did a video about, you know, the vaccine. Forget it. Kiss it goodbye. You did a video about gain of function. Oh, my favorite was about, do you remember the Chinese tennis star, Peng Shuai?

She accused that guy of rape. The video got demonetized on our channel. And they were like, hey, all videos on sexual assault are demonetized. Well, first of all, when you do news, sometimes the news is fucking bad. So, you know, I don't know what incentive you're setting here, but we've done other videos on sexual assault that weren't demonetized. They told us literally anything to do with like a Me Too story was demonetized out of the case. Well, it's controversial.

So people don't want their advertising. I get it. That's it. That's it, exactly. But then, you know, you think about the incentive structure you're creating, how many people are going to want to cover those stories knowing that they're not going to make any money off of it.

I mean, we, you know, we built our business model so that we could try to insulate ourselves from those incentives because we're human beings too. And we don't want to be so arrogant to assume that we're not also shaped by whatever incentive structure we ultimately live in. But yeah, that's how you end up with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, et cetera, making very similar content moderation decisions because ultimately it's all about what the advertisers are going to feel comfy with. Let me tell you a story about when we got the Spotify deal. Yeah. We were always getting demonetized. We got demonetized. YouTube paid us a lot of money. And I look, I'm not an anti YouTube person. I love them. I think the problem with YouTube is monitoring at scale.

Yes. Yes. And managing the insane amount of content that goes through YouTube. It's fucking impossible. And then you have ideological actors that are inside the company and you have mandates and they have their own opinions about things that lean heavily left. But we were getting demonetized like 25% of our videos. But it's like, okay, I don't change. This is what I do. And most of the money that I was making was actually off of advertisers on iTunes, on Spotify.

So you were good. So we go over to Spotify and then magically all our demonetization stops. Really? Because they wanted to get all the rest of the money before we left. Oh, that's fascinating. Right, Jamie? Did we have any of them that were demonetized after the Spotify that might have been like one? That is fascinating.

Maybe one if we had Alex Jones on or something. I was just going to say that. They're like, oh, the Alex Jones one. We'd like that cash, but we just can't do it. Yeah, or someone like fucking super off the grid crazy. You know, someone, I don't remember who it was, but maybe we had one. But it was the difference between 25% of our revenue from YouTube. And it's a significant amount of money.

So you would self-censor. And I know that there's many friends that I have that are making YouTube shows and they self-censor. Let me give you a good example. We cover the news, obviously. So YouTube has a policy where if you play a clip of Trump claiming that the election was stolen, that they're going to take down that whole video. And I was like, well, that they're gonna take down that whole video. And I was like, well, so we're a politics show, we cover Donald Trump, when we play clips,

that doesn't mean necessarily that we agree or endorse those clips, so how are we supposed to cover the news? And they were like, well, as long as you say that it's not true, and I'm like, yeah, okay, even, probably would say that anyway, but it's like, why are you dictating the way that I have to do my coverage we're going to cover a state of the union in a couple of days

like a live stream so that's Biden I mean are we supposed to interject every time he says something that's not true and live fact check it no because that's outrageous you play the clip and then afterwards you're like okay here's what I thought about the state of the union if Trump is he's going to be possibly the next president of the United States, very least probably the next Republican nominee, how are we supposed to set that standard? You can't just make shit up for people. If Nixon says, I'm not a crook, you can't take that off of YouTube.

You just play it, and then you're like, well, he might be a crook. Well, it's possible. Right. Yeah, you have to be able to discuss it. If someone says something crazy, you have to refute it. Right, right. And the other piece is, you know, it'd be one thing if the standards were consistent and clear, but they're just like, you just don't know. I mean, just like with your videos, suddenly they were monetized and who knows why or what happened or what that conversation was like.

And so it makes it a challenging situation. I understand their place. I understand what they're doing. I get it. And I understand they're trying to make the most money possible. There's an enormous industry that's around that. And they're incredibly successful. And I'm very, very happy for YouTube.

Same. But it's an issue. That in particular is a giant issue. That's a logical problem. But the problem is if you say, okay, we'll let Crystal and Sager talk about it because they're going to mock this guy's claims. But then you're going to have some right-wing QAnon person who's going to put it and then they're going to have it. And we need to do this because of that. And then it's a call to arms.

Yeah. Oh, Jesus. Well, it's a free country. You know, at the end of the day, you just got to step back and be like, you know what? Is it a free country still? Well, I don't know about that. I mean, and that is the thing.

Supposedly. Here's my real question about election fraud. Yeah. What percentage of election fraud do you think exists? Because I don't think it's zero. I don't think it's zero, but I think it's fairly, I mean, they go, you know, they'll go back and do like recounts when you have a close election or whatever. And usually the count changes by maybe 50 or a hundred votes, but

they've never been able to uncover like a large scale. One of the only ones recently that may have shifted the results. Remember this one in North Carolina? It was actually a Republican candidate who won because they were using this like sketchy system of ballot harvesting. And like that one actually got uncovered and it was a very close race and it was enough to throw the result. That's the one of the only instances I know where there was enough sufficient to actually change what the result was. It's important you ask that question too. And we covered this at the time. We were like, look, we're not gonna make fun of you. We're gonna cover every single lawsuit that the Trump campaign filed.

We're like, here's the lawsuit. Here's what they allege happened in Milwaukee. Here's what they allege happened in Arizona. Here is what they were able to prove in court. At the end of the day, that's probably what matters, right? Here's the judge ultimately dismissed it in this case. And I believe, I don't remember the exact number of, I want to say it was like 40 or 50 cases. Every single one of them was thrown out. And so I think with election fraud, it's important also to think about what level of fraud is being alleged, what exists actually

today, how corrupt our elections actually used to be? In some measures, we actually have some of the least election fraud in modern American history. We're sitting in Texas. One of my favorite books, Means of Ascent, which is about how LBJ straight up stole the 1948 Senate election here in Texas. There's a lot that happened with JFK, too. It's happened with JFK, too. It's like Box 13, where they straight up stuffed ballots on day six of the Democratic primary before the things were about to get counted. And there was a whole Supreme Court loss.

Anyway, LBJ is never president without stealing that election. JFK, a lot of dead people voted in Chicago in 1960. West Virginia. I want to revise my previous statement about that North Carolina election being the only one. I mean, to me, the most obvious example of election fraud was the 2000 presidential election, where it was like, you know, top down and they had all the officials in place to get them to stop the count. And like, OK, it's going to be George W. Bush. So in my opinion, that was probably the greatest election fraud. Yeah, I mean, you got the secretary. What was it?

OK, so you think that there was John Kerry, right? It was Gore. No, that was Bush the greatest election fraud yeah i mean you got the secretary what was it this okay so you think that there was john kerry right it was gore no that was bush v gore which one was john kerry that was oh four oh four was a weird one too right there were some allegations about oh this was a democratic allegation against ohio which went gop but there was nothing on the level of 2000 so 2000 is the one well 2000 remember that was with the hanging chats jeb bush yes george's brother was the governor of the state yeah so he was like in control and so basically you know they they when it looked like okay if we actually count all these ballots it's going to go to gore i don't remember do you remember hackingacking Democracy? Of course, yeah. Hacking Democracy. It's an HBO documentary? Yeah, the HBO documentary covered the issue with the Diebold machines. Yes.

The Diebold machines had a third-party input available where a third party could input information that would change the numbers. And they did it live. They did it on film and they showed how this can be done. When was this from? I don't know anything about this. It was about the Bush elections because one of the allegations was that Diebold was a huge contributor to the Republican Party.

Wasn't there some Cheney connection there too? Of course! You think that guy doesn't have his fucking hands and everything? He's like immortal too. He's literally in the Bible. It's important, though. He's a man with no heartbeat. Remember when he had that fake heart?

We had no heartbeat. We had no heartbeat. We had three hearts, right? He had three hearts. Well, he had an artificial thing going on where he had no pulse. Yeah. So it was just like circulating his blood. Now he's got someone else's heart in there.

He's a creepy one. I used to have a joke about him. They had one secret service agent that didn't get to eat what everybody else ate and he was like on this like vegan diet and they were giving him all these pills like what the fuck? Why am I jogging every day?

And he was just the guy the moment Chaney drops dead they fucking shoot this guy in the head takes him duck hunting, open up his chest and pull his fucking heart out and stuff it into Dick Cheney they take him on the duck hunt Cheney shoots him

the quail hunt I'm sorry well do you know those are like the most gross hunts of all time they just open a box and they let these birds fly out it's called a canned hunt

wow they're the grossest hunts of all time how do you enjoy that? well I don't know you have to be a person just like shooting birds out of the sky. Well, we have this thing, and I did this post once about the hierarchy of dead animals on social media. Okay. And I said, okay, I'm going to show you a piece of fish.

No one's going to be offended. And then I'm going to show you a dead fish. Still, fish, they don't even take care of their kids. Fuck fish. Right? No one cares about fish. And then I was holding up a dead turkey. fish. Still, fish, they don't even take care of their kids. Fuck fish. Right? No one cares about fish. And then I was holding up a dead turkey. Yeah.

Like, this is a turkey I shot. Okay. And then I had a package of bear meat. And I'm like, this is just bear meat. What kind of bear? Black bear that I ate. I shot him and I ate him. Like, black bear is a very edible and delicious food.

In fact, the pioneers that traveled across the country during the Daniel Boone days, they preferred black bear meat over venison. Because of the fat, I'm assuming. It just was closer to beef. It's very close to beef. So they ate bears and they used deer for skins. So they all wore their clothes, their buckskins. Interesting.

Yeah. The word buck, the dollar buck, comes from one buckskin is worth a dollar. So buck, the dollar buck comes from. Oh, that's right. One buckskin is worth a dollar. So that's where a buck comes from. I think you've had him on Clay Newcomb. Is that right? Yeah. He's got a great series on this. He's amazing.

Clay Newcomb is the Bear Grease podcast. He's a brilliant guy from Arkansas. I love that guy to death. And he talks about the history of this country and wild animal conservation and stuff. But that's one of the parts of the story is that people ate bears. That was

the favorite food. That's the picture of my bear meat. And so did people, were they like, you're a monster, you murdered Winnie the Pooh, basically? No, no, no. Everyone was fine with it because I didn't have a dead bear. But if it was the dead bear, that might be different. But if you had like a grip and grin, I think it would be different. Yeah.

Well, there's pictures of me with a dead bear. Oh, that's fine. And people get very upset at it. But look, I ate that bear. And by the way, that bear, here's something that people need to understand about bears. Because people think about bears like, oh, there's a beautiful animal in the forest and it's also a teddy bear. It's Winnie the Pooh.

oh, there's a beautiful animal in the forest and it's also a teddy bear. It's Winnie the Pooh. I was there when there was a brawl between a male bear and a female bear. And the female bear scared the male bear off and the male bear killed one of her cubs. And then she ate the cub. Oh my God.

So she scared the male bear off of the cub that was killed and then she ate the cub. Oh my God. You know there's that bear off of the cub that was killed, and then she ate the cub. Oh, my God. You know there's that bear fighting grizzly man? My friend saw it. Oh, that's horrible. He was there while this happened, while we were all in camp. That's crazy.

Yeah. So, you know, and there's, I mean, you're hunting something that can kill you, too. There's kind of a wild part of that, too. Like, you're not just hunting a deer. You're not hunting. Which people don't have a problem with. You're not hunting quail that have just been

released from a fox for your pleasure. My joke about Chaney was he shot his friend in the face and his friend apologized. He's like, sorry,

I look like a bird. Go fuck, don't kill me bro. I mean, he got shot in the face by Darth Vader. You gotta let it go. You gotta let that one go.

These are all like two, it's so weird how much the culture has changed changed in terms of the way that the theocratic right and the way they would think about who was advocating for censorship. That's where I grew up. I grew up here in Texas. And then it's like you get to D.C. and I feel like everything changed very quickly. It was always bipartisan, honestly, because if you go back to the Tipper Gore days, that was Al Gore's wife. And she was the one that was advocating for censorship of rap videos and rap songs. What was it called?

The V-chip or something like that? It was like the censorship chip in television or video games, I want to say. It was a whole moral panic around rap music. That was like, what, early 90s? 80s, 90s stuff. I remember. I was- Sagar was like, not allowed yet.

Oh, yeah, there it is not allowed prevents blow jobs this keeps you from getting all the jets gonna get you in trouble what is that oh my god that's where they ended up with just this. Oh, TVPG, yeah. Yeah, and they started putting the ratings on the video games. Yeah, it was a whole moral panic then. It was in like 1989, 1990. I remember I was at a gym on a treadmill listening to Straight Outta Compton for the first time.

And I was like, holy shit. Like, this is crazy. Like, at the time, I was like a young man in my early 20s who was a kickboxer and I was like, this is kind of nuts. I'm like, I was getting into a ring with

fucking no clothes on in my underwear kicking people in the face and I was like, these guys are a little wild. These guys are wild. I mean, I was living the wildest life. I had no health. And I was like, these guys are a little wild. These guys are wild. I mean, I was living the wildest life. I had no health insurance. I was out there fighting for no money. Oh, my God.

Yeah, I was traveling around the country. You felt alive, though. Wow. Oh, man, I was alive. But listening to that, I was like, this is crazy. So I can imagine if you're some dumpy housewife who's married to some politician. It's like, I'm going to put a stop to this.

This is outrageous. Your son comes home straight out of Compton. You know, like, no, no, no, not my Billy. Yeah, that's so true. I mean, I don't know. I sort of struggle with now, like the music that is popular and like what's age appropriate for my children, even the censored versions because it is just like, it is a lot.

I'm not saying any of it should be like censored, but in terms of my own personal choices in the household, what's appropriate for the kiddos? I take an approach that was my parents were hippies, luckily. My mother and my stepfather were hippies. And they didn't care what I did. They were like, I want you to be you. They were like, you can swear if you want to. You can say whatever.

But don't swear when you go to school or get in trouble. Don't swear around people's parents. They'll get upset at upset at you yeah and they just were like real reasonable about it so because of that i had this like open way of communication so i have that with my kids i'm like you can swear my wife used to get upset in the beginning she was like stop saying fuck around the kids i'm like they need to know that that's a word because someday someone's going to say it it's going to make them feel bad. But I can see that when they're in even like third, grade four, where they're able to understand there's things we can say here, but we can't say in this other place. But I mean, I have a five-year-old in kindergarten right now. I don't know that she would really get to make the distinction. I understand that.

But eventually that information is going to get to her. Sure. So it's like, when do you tell her Santa Claus isn't real? I just don't need her teacher thinking I'm a bad person. Right. I live in a small town, okay? I don't want to be outcast. She definitely shouldn't be saying it. I gotta keep up

appearances. That's what I'm saying here. I know that feeling. She definitely shouldn't be saying it. Yeah, don't say it. I don't say it when I'm around people that I think are going to be offended. Yeah. If I go over to someone's house and I meet their parents and they're older folks, I'll go, hey, what the fuck's going on, Bob?

Like, I don't do that. Yeah, they're an asshole. How are you, sir? Nice to meet you. Right. Hi. Nice to meet you. I just didn't, I'm not going to say who.

I'm not going to name check. It's okay. I did an interview a little while ago and they sent me a list of words I wasn't allowed to say and it was fucking hilarious. Well, what was that list that they gave of problematic new words

and new phrases? I put that out there. Yes. It was like, where was that from? It was from Stanford University. Oh, really? Let's pull up the list.

Wait, is that the one that said the French? No, no, that was the AP. That was also great. Did you see that? The AP put out like, you know,

their style guide or whatever. It was like, don't put the in front of a group. It could be offensive. It's othering. Yeah, it's othering, and one of their examples was... People with disabilities, the French. And it said, refer to them as people with, so it was like people suffering from Frenchness.

Yes. Oh my god. That is an affliction. Oh my god. University language guide, grandfather housekeeping, spirit animal are problematic words. Spirit animal? Spirit animal is a Oh my god That is an affliction Oh my god University language guide Grandfather Housekeeping Spirit animal Are problematic words Spirit animal Spirit animal

Is a problematic word Oh man Grandfather I thought that was just For funsies Grandfather I thought that Spirit animal

Was just a Listen Ninja Is something You can't take from us Wait I from The martial arts community

You are not allowed to say that ninja is a pejorative because ninja is something that we like, we will talk about a guy who's a jujitsu expert and like, dude, that motherfucker's a ninja.

It's a compliment. That's a thing. Yeah. Okay, listen. I agree with you, but the one that I just can't even understand the rationalization of

is grandfather. Uh. Gender? Like, I can imagine how a deranged mind would come up with these other ones. Look what it says. The clause originating in the American South, the 1890s, the way to defy the 15th amendment and prevent black Americans from voting. What?

Oh, I see. Because it was referred to as the grandfather clause. But that means that the grandfather name was grandfathered into the grandfather clause. Because the grandfather name, that's like way before that. Why don't you just teach people what the grandfather clause is? Just, yeah, get rid of that stupid fucking clause. Like, don't get rid of the name grandfather.

That's so dumb. There's so many more grandfathers than there are grandfather clauses. There was another one, Jamie. I think you can look for, I think it was Stanford. And there was one, it was I think you can look for it. I think it was Stanford. And there was one that was around merit or something like that. Hold on. Go back to that because it said preferred pronouns are problematic. Where were you right there?

Yeah, here it goes. Hold on. The language guide also considers preferred pronouns as problematic because the term preferred suggests that a person's pronouns are optional. So what are you supposed to say? Mandatory pronouns. Your pronouns. Follow the rules or die.

I like this one. Phrases with man. Manpower. Oh, yeah. That's so silly. Well, I mean, that maybe, maybe you can make an argument for that if you're working at a 50-50 fucking workplace.

Even a 90-10 workplace and 10% of them are women? Like, man hours? Like, what about human hours? You can say human hours. Sure you can. You could. That's not an issue.

Yeah, but are you really taking offense at that? But grandfather! Leave grandpa alone! Yeah, come on. What the fuck are we doing? But the thing is, is like, once people get things established, they never will stop. Like, we're good. We have a perfect balance in society.

No, they want to keep pushing. Yeah. And if they're pushing in that general direction to try to restrict language, define what's acceptable. You're right, though, that it is such a bipartisan instinct. It's much more about control than it is anything else. Because we see like, you know, the right, I think, very strategically has embraced, like, the narrative of, like, freedom of speech, etc. And then you see dudes like Mike Lindell,

the pillow guy, starting his own social media platform, and he's like, it's a free speech platform. No curse words allowed. No taking the Lord's name in vain. What about porn? No porn.

Definitely no porn. That's the crazy thing about Twitter. Twitter still has hardcore porn, which is really weird. They honestly do a pretty good job, I feel like, of keeping it... What does that mean? What does it show up in my feed? That's what I mean. It's like, if you aren't there for, like, dicks and asses,

you're not going to get it in your feed. And if you are, then you are. Yeah. I saw somebody tweet at us once. They're like, love Crystal Ball and Saga. I was like, oh, who is this guy? And I show up and it's just a giant dick in my face. He's like a male form Saga. He's a male form. I love that guy.

I love that guy. Shout out to him. They're political too. Absolutely. They got to fight for their rights maybe more than anyone else. Just because you fuck on camera doesn't mean you're not a person. Right. That's right.

Yeah. It is. It's a wild time to be alive. But that's why I think that a show like yours is so important. Because you are from the right and you are from the left. And I think I'm like a person without a country. I'm an island. I really do.

I'm so left wing on so many different things. But then they get to a certain number of things and I'm like, no fucking way. Stop. Because you're denying crazy. You're denying all sorts of real psychological conditions. Amid backlash. Stanford polls. Harmful language. Amid backlash. Duh, guys. crazy you're denying all sorts of real psychological conditions you're doing amid backlash stanford polls harmful language amid backlash duh guys get out of your fucking bubble those are people that need to read the comments sometimes people shouldn't but stanford should read the comments

i think there's a lot of people who feel like you do joe where they just don't i mean i was so left my whole life we both feel the same way you do in terms of like, you know, I don't see myself as like fitting with the Democratic Party and everything that they're doing. I just saw like Nancy Pelosi is endorsing Adam Schiff for California Senate. When you read through the way that man lied to the American public through all of Russiagate, you're like, he should be like in prison for perjury, not being bolstered by one of the most powerful women in the country for a United States Senate. Do you see him sitting next to Ilyan Omar where she's apologizing for talking about it's all about the Benjamins? Yeah. Which is just about money. She shouldn't have apologized.

That's not an anti-Semitic statement. I don't think that is. It's about, Benjamins are money. You know, the idea that Jewish people are not into money is ridiculous. That's like saying Italians aren't into pizza. It's fucking stupid. it's fucking stupid i understand that the way she phrased it like she could have phrased it a different way so that people would have less of a freak out but can you not talk about the influence of money in dc of course i mean this is very obvious. There's a very obvious reason why for my entire life there's been a uniparty consensus around our policy vis-a-vis the Israeli government and a total inability or unwillingness to criticize the Israeli government.

It has everything to do with organization and, yes, money, just like every other fucking interest in D.C. And so, yeah, the fact that she said that and she got kicked off the Foreign Affairs Committee. Look, I have issues and disagreements with Ilhan Omar, but she actually is one of the more courageous voices on foreign policy who's willing to call out some of the hypocrisy and bullshit in U.S. foreign policy. Extremely rare in terms of United States congressmen. So it's actually kind of a real loss that she got kicked off that committee. She, whether you agree with her or not, she has a bold opinion, and that opinion is not her own.

There's many people that have that opinion, and they should be represented. My point is, she's sitting right next to Adam Schiff, and no one says shit. She doesn't say, yeah, yeah, I probably should have said, hey, motherfucker, what did you say? Right. Yeah, you're right. You said some crazy shit that wasn't true at all. No, he was the, I mean, he loved having his face on the cameras during all the Russiagate stuff.

And he would go out there and just like go right up to the line of basically saying, yeah, we got the goods on Trump and Russia. And he fed it so hard. And then you look at that and what a disservice it was. What a like giant, elaborate conspiracy was constructed to distract the American people from so many more important things that were going on. And here's one of the key figures. And he is very likely to be the next senator from California, especially with fucking Nancy Pelosi's endorsement now. It's fucking ridiculous. Yeah, no, I agree. You know, it's also funny in terms of like what you're not allowed to say, what you get censored off of a committee for. Like you said, look, I don't agree with Ilhan Omar on a lot. I mean, I also don't think that it should be out of bounds to talk about influence of any government, including the Saudi government, of which a lot of these people are on the take. This is the type of hypocrisy which drives me fucking crazy.

It's crazy. Yeah. It's like, you know, they'll censor or they'll go after Eric Swalwell, rightfully, in my opinion. What did he do? Okay, he had a relationship of some kind with a Chinese spy. He basically slept with a Chinese spy. It may not have been. Some of those Chinese ladies are very hot in his defense. And this was apparently before he was married.

It's hard to resist. He said he had no idea. Her name was Fang Fang. No idea she was a Chinese spy. Jamie, I'm sure you can find a picture of her. There's a picture of the two of them together. You get a hot sext from Fang Fang. What are you going to do? You meet her at a conference. You're a Chinese spy. Jamie, I'm sure you can find a picture of her. There's a picture of the two of them together. You get a hot sext from Fang Fang. You meet her at a conference.

You're a fucking nerd. You're the weirdo who always wants to be a congressman. She's in a lingerie in front of a mirror. I mean. Sends you a picture. Who among us? Let's go. Let's go.

As long as I don't tell her any secrets. Who gives a shit? No harm, no foul. No harm, no foul. There she is. There she is. Look at him and look at her. Let's go champ. He looks like a look at her. Let's go champ.

He looks like a fucking dork. Let's go champ. Of course he did. She had like intentionally, I think my recollection is, infiltrated a bunch of like San Francisco sort of like Democratic donor circuits. The crazy thing is she's like a seven. You know, imagine if they brought up one of their bombshells. She was probably like the early ones.

Listen. You know, the Russians send out the first fucking group of people to die. If you're a seven and you know how to stroke a congressman's ego, you're going to be fine. Oh, yeah. She was probably like the early ones. Listen. You know, the Russians send out the first fucking group of people to die. If you're a seven and you know how to stroke a congressman's ego, you're going to be fine. Oh, yeah. No problem. Especially with a couple of cocktails. Yeah. Let's go.

You didn't need to send in a 10. He was. Probably better. You trust the seven. That's true. She's a regular gal. It was like Maria Bettina. The 10 is like a little suspicious.

She was like the Russian one. She seduced a bunch of like NRA members. Let's go. It's like 2018. We actually exchanged her. She's back in Moscow. We did a prison exchange for her. Isn't she a lawmaker now? I'm pretty sure she's a lawmaker now.

You're right. I think she was elected to the Duma or something like that. What did she do to the NRA people? She would go to a bunch of CPAC and NRA conferences and ingratiate herself with gop officials and then she would sleep with them and then basically try and get as close to trump as possible it's like a there's a lot of governments that do this right the israeli government does this the russian government the chinese government what was she trying to do what

was her goal it's all like soft power stuff like i think a lot of it's related to trying getting sanctions off of certain oligarchs that's what a lot of it comes back to she was in a real like long term ultimately relationship with like somebody high up in the NRA NRA don't something like that she was living with him and like

so the idea was to get close to power I guess basically I never saw the Americans oh great fuck great that's all I heard The same thing right it was like Russian spies that were honey integrated. Tell me we don't do that Mean that's the argument like kicking Chinese companies out of America. Like, hey, they don't let us do it. Yeah. You know why, too?

If you look at it, they explicitly, when they banned Google, Facebook and all that, they're like, they're going to use it to shape our population and spy on us. Why would we do that? And then we're like, yeah, let's get TikTok on in here. It's all good. Well, not only that, let's let them fly a fucking balloon over the country. Oh, my God. It's crazy, right? Let's fly a fucking spy balloon.

I mean, the funny thing is, it really is like, it's such a shell game because like, we know they're spying on us. They know we're spying on them. But you can't be so fucking obvious about it where your spy balloon is there and a commercial airline jet is like spotting it. And so you can't be so obvious. But it's floating around. Does it have power?

Well, so I don't know, but it was spotted actually over one of the three sites in the United States, which has intercontinental ballistic missiles. And of course, it just happened to fly there and it drifted off, of course, according to the Chinese government. But like we already knew that their spy satellites are able to like see this area and collect whatever data there is to collect. So what's the purpose of balloons? That's a great question. I don't know. That's a great question. I don't know.

Just stick it in your face? I don't know. It's like when, you remember when Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan and China just shot a bunch of missiles into the ocean? Yeah. Killed some dolphins? Yeah. I think that was wildly irresponsible of her to go, though.

I mean, especially at the State Department and Biden, they were like, don't do this. I did a joke about it. What'd you say? I was like, I think they're trying to kill that lady. She's making too much money. Like, send her over there. Nancy, go on. You're fucking up for everybody. We've're trying to kill that lady. She's making too much money. Like, send her over there. Nancy, go on. You're fucking up for everybody.

We've got a special trip for you. You're stealing too much money. Right. What does it say there, Jamie? They don't care about that, Joe. The balloon has the ability to maneuver and had changed course. Right. Oh, terrific.

Well, how did it drift off course then, if they have the ability to maneuver? Well, it changed course. Oh, okay. I mean, it didn't drift off course. Right. It seems like it's under its own power. Yeah. So that's the worry about shooting it down was the payload.

Like it's large. The worry was that there would be debris that would hurt the civilian population. And then the other thing I saw was that they actually wanted to be able to like observe it more and see what it was and capabilities and whatever. It might be more useful to it in the sky than shot up into a billion well the avengers have a net they could shoot out of a jet you're telling me united states doesn't have a net i don't know that's a compromised position i like that what scares me about this is i don't even so did you hear about the circumstance of why it was found because a commercial airline pilot is the one who saw it and so i'm like well did we know it was there before the pilot called? He was probably so bummed out. He probably was hoping it was a UFO.

Oh, I know. Please let it be a UFO. I got one. I got my phone. Joe Rogan. He's like, Joe Rogan's going to have me on to talk about this. This is going to be great. Well, we were at 35,000 feet.

That's too obvious, though. It's too obvious. Yeah. It was too real. I always wonder about what those things are that people keep spotting. I mean, we don't really totally know about their capabilities. As you know, I go quite deep on this. Do you go deep on it at all, Crystal, or do you just roll your eyes when he starts talking to you?

I don't roll my eyes. She just grabbed her drink. That's an instinct. I don't roll my eyes. It's not like I don't go deep the way he does. I find it interesting. I find it question mark, but I can't say I've gone deep down the rabbit

hole. This is more important things to concentrate on in the moment. I wouldn't say that. I just say for whatever reason, it's not my thing that I'm super fascinated by. The mystery of alien life. Do you think that is a more male-oriented thing? Definitely possible. You think so? Well, here's the thing. Out of all the people that I've interviewed

that are UFO experts, they're all men. All Sasquatch experts. All men. I have a joke about Sasquatch experts. I think they're all unfuckable white dudes. Hey, Les Brown is a fucking gem, okay? Don't say that about him. This is the last thing you're going to find when you go looking for Bigfoot.

Black people. You're more likely to find Bigfoot than you are black people looking for Bigfoot. It's like a bit I had. I go, it's all unfuckable white dudes. Like, it shows that Bigfoot aren't. Black people aren't buying it. They're like, bullshit. They're like, we got real shit going on in our lives.

We don't need. We're like, fuck, did you guys get excited about this? It is some white guy shit. It's unfuckable white guys. My friend Essie Cup, who we had on the screen earlier, I wouldn't say she's a Sasquatch expert, but she's super into them. Of course. So it's a little tiny

fly in the ointment of your carry here. I don't think it's fair to put Sasquatch and UFO in the same category. It 100% is. Because I hope they're both real. Don't. put Sasquatch and UFO in the same category. It 100% is. Because I hope they're both real. I hope they're both real.

I just think there's a lot more evidence on the UFO side. Yes, there is. But there's also evidence that there was an animal that was a bipedal hominid that lived alongside of human beings. Oh, interesting. An enormous one. An enormous one. It's called Gigantopithecus. It's absolutely real in the Pacific Northwest

There was well it was in Asia and this was during the time before the Ice Age when the Bering land bridge was available There was an animal that they discovered in the pot the carry shop in China And I believe it was in the 1920s and anthropologists was there and he found these enormous primate teeth. I might be fucking this up I don't think I am though. He found his enormous primate teeth, I might be fucking this up. I don't think I am, though. He found these enormous primate teeth. And he was like, what the fuck is this? And where did you get this? And it led to an investigation.

They found the site where these things were recovered. And they found more. And they found jaw bones that would indicate that this animal is bipedal. Which means it stood up on two legs and was fucking enormous. Which means it stood up on two legs and it was fucking enormous. Like eight foot tall, gorilla-like, orangutan-like creature that existed alongside human beings. Okay. But we don't know exactly, like when did the teeth or jawbone or whatever. We know for a fact that they existed 100,000 years ago because of these bones.

But that doesn't mean they didn't exist 50,000 years ago or 10,000 years ago. We don't know. And if they did exist 10,000 years ago, it makes sense why the Native Americans would have many, many names for these creatures. And they didn't really have mythical creatures. That's what a Gigantopithecus would have looked like. Jesus, wow. So it was an enormous, a great ape that lived alongside us and absolutely 100,000 years ago. And then they found many other creatures that were really interesting that we didn't know existed that absolutely lived alongside human beings.

One of them was the Hobbit man from the island of Flores. So that's homo floressis. That was Indonesia, I believe. Didn't they have some local lore also about that? Like the elders had some connectivity to when that species existed alongside of them? Yes, they called the

Orang Pendek. And by the way, Hawaii has a similar legend. I talked to a gentleman in Hawaii when I was there recently and he was just an old timer. He was great and he was telling an old timer. He was great. And he was telling me all the different names that the native Hawaiians have for things. And he was explaining how there was a creature that supposedly lived when the first people got here. And it was a small,

hairy, ape-like creature that is similar to what's been spotted in Vietnam and in other parts of the world in these jungle areas. They call it the Orang Pendek. And it's identical to this hobbit person. So when they existed, who knows? They might have existed 500 years ago or 100 years ago or 50 years ago. We don't fucking know. But we do know that there were a bunch of different kinds of ape-like creatures that existed alongside of us.

And they think that these Homo floriensis were really like close to human. They were like on a branch. Like they'll use tools. They hunted. They worked together and they might have communicated. They might have had a language. Like we don't know. This is why I think it all connects to UFOs where it's like, I just got to, I got to,

I can't imagine but stepping back and dreaming of like Earth. We't even know what it looked like 2500 bc right beyond that we have no idea that's when written history begins you've talked a lot with graham hancock his ancient apocalypse series and the reason why i think there's a connectivity is like what's possible man that's what the ufo thing i'm like and if there is ancient life here or multiple forms of alien life or you know some connectivity between that or even past contact of all this is like our entire understanding of the world is just completely wrong and i just find that uh so seductive i guess like that idea maybe that's foolish and maybe that's you know part like a male thing like you're talking about but

there's there's enough there that we we can't but be interested. We're like, what's happening? You just persuaded Sagar he was just shitting on the Sasquatch people and now he's like all in. Well, it definitely existed. I'm talking more about homo florescence. The idea that there was a human civilization like a million years ago. The Sasquatch is more likely because it definitely existed. Like they know that within the time that human beings were alive,

we're going to have stories about this creature. Now, whether or not those stories persist long after the creature is extinct and people pretend they see it when they're really just seeing black bears that are walking upright, which they do all the time. I've seen black bears walk upright. And if black bears have a hurt paw, there was a black bear, a famous black bear in New Jersey that had a hurt, very badly damaged front paw. So it would walk on its rear legs.

It would walk upright like a seven foot tall animal. That's crazy. Which is just like, if you saw it through the trees you'd be like, oh my god, it's a giant ape. I saw one in Glacier National Park and I was like, holy fuck these things are so big. I don't think people really know how big our bears are. Bears are big. Well, if Glacier National Park, was it a brown bear

or a black bear? It was a black bear and a brown bear. I saw both. I got really lucky. We were in Montana and we were at this grizzly preserve where they'd taken these problematic grizzlies that raid people's garbage and shit. They said grandfather. Grandfather. Yeah, and they fed this thing a frozen watermelon, and this bear crushed this frozen watermelon like it was a grape. Like you and I would do a grape. Just took giant bites out of a frozen watermelon.

Wow. And I was like, imagine the power of this fucking thing. They're so big. You ever seen a jaguar? Not alive. Yeah, I only saw one in a zoo, but they are some of the most majestic creatures. You know about El Jeuar? Not in real life. Yeah, I only saw one in a zoo. But, I mean, they are some of the most majestic creatures. You know about El Jefe? No, I don't.

El Jefe is the only jaguar in the United States that's been spotted in the United States. They used to be prevalent. Yeah. When the pioneers came across the country, they spotted multiple jaguars. They were everywhere. There's even sightings of jaguars in the northern states. But for whatever reason, they either were wiped out or whatever happened but there's a jaguar that keeps traveling from mexico and that's el jefe there he is wow

that's crazy look at him look at that fucking beautiful thing i wonder how long jaguars live for like it's a good question well they know this one jaguar because they've taken so many trail cam photos of it. Their spots are, you know, you can identify them from their spots if you get still photos of high resolution. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this one jaguar is just this lone 200-pound cat that makes his way through and he's just fucking up deer. That is wild. That is wild.

It's an amazing, amazing animal if there's only one. If they're everywhere, you're fucked. Nice to watch it on the camera. Otherwise, you're like a tribe in the Amazon. You go to get water, you're fucking terrified. It's kind of like wolves. Have you ever seen a wolf? It's fucking huge, gigantic.

And you're like, man, that's pretty scary. Well, we eradicated them, and then these fucking eco people are like, we need to bring them back. They're our friends. The wolves are amazing. Until they're eating your family, until they're trying to get into your house. Your're our friends. The wolves are amazing. Until they're eating your family. Until they're trying to get into your house. Your livestock or whatever. I have a buddy who lives

in BC and he watched one kill a horse. Wow. A pack of wolves killed a horse. So it was like late at night and they hear all this barking and barking and they look out from his fucking bedroom window to one of the stalls and they see a pack of wolves devouring a horse.

Jesus. They got really hungry and it was cold and they took a chance. Wow. There was a story. Sorry, do you remember this? libertarians took over and they like moved to the town they like voted themselves onto the town council and they went about getting rid of like every single regulation they possibly could including the ones that had to do with like the proper way to store your trash to avoid attracting bears and i don't sure enough you don't remember this this made such an impression on me because it was such a like you you know, such a tale of like ideological arrogance, you know?

Yeah. Like, oh, the free market will work it out. Well, next thing you know, bears are coming into town. Bears are mauling people. They have this whole massive like bear mauling issue in this New Hampshire town because of their ideology. Well, there's a similar situation in New Jersey. ideology. Well, there's a similar situation in New Jersey. In New

Jersey, New Jersey has the most bears per capita of any place in the country. Including Alaska. I think including Alaska. They have a ton of black bears. Yeah, it's all black bears. But the governor ran on a platform of getting rid of the

bear hunt. Because people think, you know, most of these people that are in high population areas, they don't have encounters with bears. They think of of bears like why would you want to kill a bear you fucking asshole but meanwhile these people are getting killed by bears a student from rutgers was killed by a bear and then they started seeing a giant uptick 200 uptick in human bear encounters that were problematic we've played this video many times of, what is it, Far Rockaway? Far Rockaway, New Jersey? Is that where it was? Where these fucking enormous bears are duking it out in a really suburban area.

Far Rockaway is like New York City suburbs, right? Yeah, I thought that was like Queens or something. Is that Far Rockaway? No. What is it? No. It just sounds right. It's New Jersey.

God damn it. Why can't I remember it? We've played this clip. It just sounds right. It's New Jersey. God damn it. Why can't I remember it? We played this clip. It is Rockwood. Okay. Okay. Watch this because it's fucking bonkers. This is on people's, that's like, these are two 300 pound bears.

They're fucking huge. Like in your yard. A hundred percent in the yard. And they're fighting over trash. So what happens is they get, or maybe breeding, they get access to the trash in the area. And when another male is there, they try to scare the male off. And these two bears just start duking it out. And when they start duking it out, they're knocking over trash cans.

They're piling out into the streets. So these people are in their cars filming this. Oh, my God. I mean, look at giant chunks of fur flying off of them. These are huge bears. These are giant predators that will 100% kill your dog, 100% kill your kids. You leave a baby outside, the baby's dead, the bear eats it and runs away with it. They don't have any morals, they don't have any ethics, they're playing by a totally different set of rules than you would

imagine from a Disney movie. Wow. But this is what happens when you don't control predators. The wildlife conservationists have long been saying you have to keep these animals in check because it's bad for them. It's bad for the people. And the nutty people are like, yeah, but we're in their area. But they don't understand. Right where we are, the hill country, 200 years ago, probably in this spot, it was a bloodbath. It was pure Comanche range versus rival Indian groups, like, complete just slaughter for resources. Like, I don't think people really get what it really—it was like even 150 years ago.

Like, if you think about Buffalo and the range and the conquering of the old west. I've read so many books about that time period just because I'm so fascinated by it. But that era of what it was like and what the actual west and the range and all that was, it was a dangerous place. Like I've read a lot about Theodore Roosevelt and like some of his original encounters with – on some of his hunting trips and with bears and everything. It's just completely outrageous. Where's the arrowhead, Jamie? Do you know where it is? It's missing. Oh, here it is. We have an arrowhead from here. Oh, wow.

So I have a friend who has a ranch out here and their ranch is overwhelmed with arrowheads. Really? Yeah. They dig all the time and they find these things. That's crazy. That was an absolute Native American arrowhead that they used

either for war or they used it for hunting. Aren't you not supposed to pick them up? I didn't pick it up. It was a gift. It was a gift from a friend. Just shut up here.

But in Texas, I think the rules are a little bit different because it's their land. I did find one on a hunting trip once in Nevada and I was informed that I was supposed to leave it behind.

Yeah. I knew that was a law. That's so interesting. They're like, because I've looked for them before, too, and they're like, even if you find it, you just got to put it back. I'm a lawbreaker, bro. Yeah. If I find it in Arrowhead, that shit's mine. It's like, I'm not going to leave it here for somebody else to pick up.

Yeah, that's true. What do you think is the most difficult of the animals that you've hunted? Nil guy. I just hunted a Nilgai recently, which is an Indian animal that evolved around tigers. And I've never seen an animal that runs so

fast when you hit it. I thought I shot this Nilgai with a bow and arrow and it was a perfect shot. And I was really sure that it was a perfect shot. It was a 52-yard shot, centered my pin, watched the arrow hit it. And that animal ran off on a full sprint like it wasn't even remotely injured. And I was like, oh, no.

What happened? And it ran 130 yards until it died. Wow. At a full clip. Huh. That's a whole football field. Wait, what did they look like? I've never heard of that animal.

Let's see if you can pull a photo of a Neal guy up. Where was this, Jeff? South Texas. Oh, interesting. So there's more Asian and exotic African animals in South Texas than are often in Asia and in Africa. There's some animals that are in their country are endangered. But in Texas, they hunt them regularly. That's a Neal guy.

And that is an animal that evolved around tigers. And those dudes, you can't get close to them. And if you hit them, they run like there's nothing wrong. Like that animal had an arrow that went through its vitals in a perfect shot, passed through its body, went 30 yards past its body where it found the arrow. It's kind of built different, right? Oh, my God. It's like a deer, but like super juiced up.

Yeah. I mean, it was a perfect shot. The animal died. Wow. But they say that happens with rifles. They were telling me they shoot those with a 300 Win Mag, and they have to have another one in the chamber because the guide will do a follow up shot on the animal because they're so fucking tough

because they evolved around tigers wow yeah everybody's like well I'll just live off the land like good luck bitch you're gonna need a grocery store motherfucker you're not designed for this that's kind of the scary part though when you realize how unconnected you are

like if you don't have any skills I Oh, my God. I've been watching Last of Us, and the age of it was fucking fantastic. Really? The last episode just broke me. People out there, no. No spoilers. I won't say anything. I'll watch it, like, three years from now when it's out dated. It's brutal. Anyway, I was like, man, this is so... Because I listened to your Mike Glover episode,

and I was like, yeah, man, I gotta get prepared. And I'm like, I don't know a fucking thing. I'm like, what am I doing here? You know? I don't know a thing, And I've been doing it for 12 years. Yeah. I've been hunting for like, you know, 11 years now. Yeah. I'm still a rookie. It's one of those skills where you have to put it in from a very early age.

And when you learn about indigenous tribes or, you know, I read a lot of history, you know, like the Mongols and you're into as well. They start learning when they're like three or four years old. Like they start pulling bows before they can, like barely when they can start walking. So it becomes part of the actual culture itself. And that level of skill is, I don't know if you could teach that at this point. Oh, you could. 100%. Yeah, you could if people had to.

People are so adaptable. Like we were talking the other day about people that live in the Congo that are working in these cobalt mines. And I was like, you've got to imagine if this is what you were born into because humans are so adaptable. We're so accustomed to whatever we're accustomed to. And if you live there, you would do what everyone else is doing because you would get by.

And if you were born into a nomadic tribe that traveled around and followed the buffalo, you would be hunting them the same way they did. That's just what people do. We adapt. you would be hunting them the same way they did. That's just what people do. We adapt. And that's the whole idea behind Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson's theory about the restarting of human civilization,

is that we have achieved a very high level of sophistication, which explains the pyramids and Gobekli Tepe. It explains all these immense stone structures where they move stones with some unknown technology from as many as 500 miles away. Thousand ton stones through the mountains. We have no idea how the fuck they did it. And then you go 5,000 years later and you have barbarians. Yeah.

And like what happened? Well, most likely a fucking natural disaster that forced people to figure out a way to adapt and overcome. And I think that's one of the reasons why if we go back a few thousand years ago, you have these people with these brilliant minds that live these unbelievably barbaric lives. And I think it's because they're the descendants of people that had to survive whatever was left over after the sophisticated civilization was hit by comets. Crystal just bought me a copy of the Perry Reese map, that famous map, which was the Ottoman admiral, written like 1513, I think he drew it and he based it off from the Library of

Alexandria and it includes that 10,000 year old coastline of Antarctica. Pretty good Christmas gift. It was a great Christmas gift. It's amazing. I love that. It's amazing. And the more evidence that gets uncovered, the more that's a very viable theory. Because the core samples, the hard physical data of those core samples shows that somewhere in the neighborhood of 12,800 years ago, there was

massive impacts all over the earth. As much as 30% of the earth shows evidence of this. 30% of the earth shows evidence of iridium in high levels, which is very rare on earth, but very common in space. Nano diamonds from the impact, carbon from burnt everything. I think people got fucked up somewhere around 12,800 years ago, the end of the ice age. And I think those guys are right. I think the more data that gets uncovered,

which is like almost every day, they're finding new discoveries that point to that. They're finding new impact craters. They found a giant impact crater in Antarctica. They found a giant one off the coast of New Zealand. We get hit. And when we get hit, all bets are off. All your fucking hard drives are useless.

All the known knowledge that you get off the Internet is no longer available to you. And we start from scratch. And that is a 100% possibility for us right now. Right now we're fearful of sort of the other direction. But have you played with the chat GPT stuff? Like the AI that's going to, I don't know, revolutionize everything? Or will it? We don't know. Yeah, I mean, that's the question, right?

We've been playing with it. We're're doing a live show tonight in austin and well it'll be last night by the time this comes out probably but um we put into the chat gpt like write a monologue in the voice of sagar and jetty about ufos and it does a thing yeah it's service like the grammar is good. You know, it doesn't sound like soccer at all. Like, the sort of grammar they use and the way they approach it. Ladies and gentlemen, it's time we have an important conversation about season. If you wanted to be grandiose, it was very important for you. That'd be like 90s politicians, like, ladies and gentlemen, it's time we had an important conversation.

Have you heard Lex Friedman talk about it, though? Lex was on my podcast. I haven't gone fully through your podcast through your podcast the other day i'd be interested to hear what he has to say yeah he said chat 4.0 is on the way oh that's right because it has more information that's going to be it's going to be way way way better see i listened to sam altman who's the ceo of open ai which makes chat gpt i heard he got a question about the fourth version because there is a lot of speculation that it's going to be like a whole other universe in terms of his capabilities, that it's going to be more closely approximating actual intelligence in a way that's going to really super freak people out. That's what a lot of people like Lex and others, I guess,

are projecting. He was really trying to pour cold water on that idea, but that may just be because he doesn't want to get it overhyped. He wants to set the bar low so that when the thing actually drops, it lands with an appropriate, I guess, fanfare. The real thing of concern is that this didn't exist four years ago, three years ago, two years ago, and now it exists and it's gotten better really quickly. Maybe it did exist two years ago, three years ago, two years ago. And now it exists and it's gotten better really quickly. Maybe it did exist two years ago, but it wasn't publicly consumable.

It didn't have a chat function. Right. See, that's the thing is actually this was, again, you know, listening to this interview with Sam Altman. He was talking about how he was actually really surprised by the way that the public, when they got to play with it, were like, oh, my God. Because in his mind, working so closely with the technology, this just felt like the next logical step. But for people who hadn't been deeply enmeshed in the details of the technology, when suddenly you had this thing in front of you and you could play with it, and then you've got this

like the image generators and whatever that it it kind of blew people's minds and we've been talking about how um you've got universities professors who are freaked out this is our favorite about kids cheating on tests and you know using this to write their essays and whatever and so i do think it's going to require a kind of entire rethink of the um of the university experience of what which parts of like what parts of what human beings can do are more difficult to replicate by the machine because the machine can spit out a saga and jetty theoretical ufo monologue but it can't create new ideas right it's lacking a sort of like creativity for now yeah yes for now for now that's the the real thing is for now. Because I think it's going to.

And I think within five years, it's going to be better at us. Better at being us than us. But that's actually important. And it's one of the fun things that we're seeing through the chat GPT education, which I love. And actually, it's fascinating. We get a ton of feedback on those segments because it's a lot of college kids are fed up with bullshit busy work. A lot of professors are tearing up their entire syllabus, and they're like, all right, now we're going to go to oral examination.

We're going to have a discussion in class. And I was like, that's great. That's fantastic. You shouldn't be doing a bullshit essay, first draft. But that also teaches you how to write, which is actually important. Actually, I don't know if it does, actually. It could. Well, but if you have, so the comparison they make is to like the invention of the calculator.

Yeah. It's like you still need to understand the math to know what to put into the calculator. Right. But you don't need to know how to do all that shit by hand. Can we pause this? I have to pee so bad. Yeah, absolutely. Go ahead.

I need to pee too. We'll be right back. Woo. All right. We're back. Think so much better. What will we? Chat TPT. Chat TPT. Colleg back. All right. We're back. Thanks so much, Better. What were we? Chat TPT.

Chat TPT. Colleges. And I do think part of the freak out right now is because most automation that has killed people's jobs has been service workers, has been blue collar. And now you have a lot of white collar workers who are like, oh shit, this could be coming for me. Did you see the BuzzFeed thing? That BuzzFeed hired ChatGP, or is going to use ChatGPT to auto-generate listicles.

Yeah, they laid off. Yeah, there we go. They just laid 10% of their staff off. Oh my God. Oh, and by the way, and their stock, didn't their stock skyrocket? Yeah, their stock went up, I want to say 95% in a single day.

Fire people. Yay, hooray. What people give you more money. Hooray! What a great system we have. Not great! But doesn't that leave room for Substack people? Yes, absolutely. And doesn't it leave room for creators that you get an obvious look into their mind and they take pride in their writing? I would say to young kids, I would say, fuck around with chat GPT. I'd say, figure out what it does because it's an important thing, but learn how to write. I think it's good

for you. And I think if you want to get better at whatever you're doing that requires writing, like if you're going to be a journalist, even if you use chat GPT to give you a framework, you should learn how to be creative. It's good for you. I do think that's a good point, and it's where the calculator analogy kind of fails because the calculations are the calculations. There's no, like, style or voice that goes into it. Right.

Whereas, you know, I mean, Sagar and I write a lot every single week. I know you write a lot as part of, you know, being a comedian. And when you do that a lot over time, you develop your own voice, you develop your own style that you maybe aren't going to come to if you're starting with the chat GPT framework. Even if you're not just wholesale, like taking whatever chat gives you and like selling that off as your own, even if you're taking it and workshopping, whatever, it's not quite

the same as staring at the blank piece of paper and creating it in your voice. And the satisfaction that you get. The satisfaction when you write something that you enjoy, that you're like, oh, I did a lot of work on this and I'm really proud of it. Yeah. It is. I mean, you know, we write these monologues for the show and like we do three a week.

So some of them are going to be great. Some of them are going to be, you know, solid. Some of them are going to be like, oh, it was a bit of a struggle. But when you get that one that it's like, you have the idea and you're able to lay it out in a way that you feel like really captures what you were trying to say

and like makes a point that you feel like hasn't been made before. That's, it's wonderful. That's why I'm celebrating it with the classroom though. Cause I had to do, when I was in college, we had so many bullshit, like busy work quizzes that they were just doing to assign so they could check a box on the syllabus. Now they're sitting in the classroom being like, what do you think? They have to test you live to see if you're either paying attention.

I think that's great. Like that's ultimately like what did we really get out of college? Like, I don't know. In terms of what I use right now, even you were talking about writing. A lot of that was bullshit academic writing. When I learned how to write for journalism it's totally different it's like all the opposite rules actually in terms of the way you do it but from what's being what's useful in life is being able to understand ideas part of what our show is consider an alternative point of view the famous Plato quote it's the mark of an intelligent mind to consider an opinion, something like an opinion that he doesn't necessarily agree

with. I'm butchering it. But that is what you could possibly get out of higher education today, coming together, taking a four-year pause in your life, talking with this professor. There's a professor right now at UPenn, Wharton, who's actually requiring chat GPT in the classroom. He's like, no, no, no, no, no. For entrepreneurship, we're all going to use it. We're going to learn how to use this tool together. And then we're going to talk about it in the classroom. That's what education actually can be. And so I talk a lot about higher education corruption. And really what it is to me is, you know, places charging $80,000 a year, which is outrageous, putting these kids into debt and not teaching them anything which is actually useful in the real world well and i think this is useful it's just like a learning it's just like a stamp

of yeah it's a credential you know it's a credential that's what it is i mean i will say so i studied economics and we obviously talk a lot about economics but the shit that i learned was like you know it's all very doctrinaire it was all very like yeah i mean it was like, you know, it's all very doctrinaire. It was all very like- Supply and demand. Yeah, I mean, it was like a lot of stuff I had to like unlearn the propaganda of, you know, ultimately. Oh, that's a great point too. This is how the Federal Reserve works.

And then we're doing all these segments about the Fed. I'm like, well, maybe it shouldn't. And then it's like, oh, this is all a human design system. So you'll read books. It's like something on Jekyll Island on the creation of the Fed and then what the Fed's actual mandate is. And you're like, oh, the Fed has a lot of power over our society, over our economy, over our politics, actually.

There's a lot of arguments about certain politicians never would have gone if the Fed hadn't been doing the policies that they had, like Jimmy Carter in 1979 with Paul Volcker. We're living actually an era right now of tremendous departure from previous Federal Reserve policy. We went from a zero interest rate environment to higher interest rates. The economy right now is the craziest thing you've ever seen. So the jobs numbers actually came out this morning. We are at one of the lowest unemployment rates in modern American history. Since 1969. Right. So it's a great economy, right? But wage stagnation, it's not keeping up with inflation of goods. Try buying a house right now. Mortgage rates are a disaster. They're

falling slightly. We've been talking a lot about the used car industry. Car loans are a total nightmare. You're seeing all these charlatans in the economy. What is this? What has been created? The tech layoffs is a good example. You have Google cutting 10%, Amazon cutting 10,000 jobs, Salesforce cutting 10,000 jobs. All of this was just because of cheap money. And so that makes you take a step back and be like, wow, like the Fed is a non democratic institution. You and I have no input on the Fed whatsoever. The president appoints a chair and the rest of those people get confirmed by Congress. And then after that, it's up to them. They could nuke the entire U.S. economy if they wanted to. It's literally up to like 14 people.

And you're like, holy shit. Like, well, there's so much of my life is determined by these folks. I don't think people realize that. And it's intentional that they make it very opaque and make people feel dumb. Like they don't understand. It's intentional. Very intentional. This is actually Alan Greenspan sort of innovated this of like Fed speak where any pronouncement he made was like incomprehensible

if you didn't have a PhD in economics. And it hasn't always been like that in American history. You know, Fed policy, monetary policy was hotly debated. There were like populist revolts over it. But there's a real anti-populist movement to consolidate power in the hands of a few like credentialed bureaucrats by posturing like, oh, we're just sort of like doing the math and it's just a calculation and there's no morals involved. We don't need to understand what other people think about it and to make it feel like, oh, we've got this because we're the credentialed experts when, you know, in reality, these are things that affect people's lives. But on the fakery in the economy, I think this is one of the

undertold stories of our era is the we're talking a lot about incentives earlier. The incentives for corporate America are not to innovate, not to create new products, certainly not to invest in their workforce. It's all to engage in financial engineering to reward themselves and their stockholders. So stock buybacks this year, I just saw a stat largest first quarter or first month of the year stock buybacks that we've ever had. You look at companies like airline companies where you think, oh, they're making their money by like flying people around or whatever. No, actually, they're giant hedge funds. And like most of their money comes from financial manipulation.

And like it started with hedging. Let me hedge the cost of jet fuel. But then that turns into big business. And so they basically become Wall Street. Apple, this is one of Rana Foroohar, who's a very great, very smart financial thinker. She wrote a book that highlighted this statistic. Apple, when they released the iPod, their stock that year actually went down. When they did financial manipulation and gigantic stock buybacks, their stock goes up. So it just

shows you how much of our whole economy big picture is basically fake, geared towards financial engineering and not towards actual innovation, development, like growing a company based on a good idea and a good product. Well, you talk about this with your phone all the time, right? You're like, my iPhone, what was like iPhone 4 is not all that different from iPhone 14. That's an exaggeration. But like iPhone 11 and iPhone 14 aren't that different. Apple has actually increased its revenue significantly by through its bundle of services, by increasing the amount of costs that it can pull from the app store. I've got my Mac here, so everything is locked in here. Software as a service, everything is linked

into the Apple bundle. Tim Cook's great, there's a great book, I forget exactly the name, I think it's Apple, Life After Steve, so After Steve Jobs Jobs died, Steve was a product guy. He would invest hundreds of billions of dollars into R&D, into creating game-changing, beautiful new products. Tim Cook is a managerial type. His job is to squeeze as much money out of the stock price. So how do you do that? A, you park $100 billion or whatever overseas so you don't have to pay taxes on it. B, you don't invest necessarily in brand new R&D. You invest in making sure that people get the new phone every year.

You invest in paying $299 for that iCloud bubble. I mean imagine what that is at scale. And at scale, what they're doing is locking people into services with Apple, which are recurring subscription revenue. It's a shitload of money. And I think their stock is like at the highest level ever. But when's the last time you – okay, you have a Tesla. Like when you got into a Tesla, it's like picking up the iPhone 4 for the first time. And you're like, holy fuck.

Like I can't even believe this is real. Like this is a new thing. The first time I had an iPhone 4, it had that beautiful back. And it was like Steve Jobs described it as looking like a Leica camera or something. I remember holding it and just being like, this is the coolest fucking thing I've ever seen. I felt the same way whenever I got into a Tesla. I'm like, I'm not in a car, I'm in a computer. I'm in a computer that drives. And that leap, think about how rare that is over the last 20 years. You had Marc Andreessen on and Peter Thiel also has a famous quote on this. He's

like, we were promised flying cars and all we got was 140 characters, except now we have 280 characters. It's like, yeah, I mean, we had some tech advancements, but at the end of the day, like I've been using the same relative phone for the last 10 years. And if you were to ask me in 2012, when the first time I picked up that iPhone 4, I would be like, no way, man, 10 years from now, who's going to know? We're going to have Oculus, so we're going to be living in this like brave new world, for example. And we're not really there. Chat GPT is the first time I felt excited about something where I'm like, that's new. That's something. Now, is it good?

I don't know. Well, I mean, any sort of tech progress. There's good. There's bad. There's trade-off. There's trade-off. And you hope the good is more than the bad. It usually is.

What's fascinating is there's a never-ending push towards technological innovation that we don't ever see stopping. We are 100% addicted to having the newest, best, greatest, latest, and then companies will continue to do that. I mean, they're going to be manipulating stock prices. They're going to be. But at the core of it, if you want people to buy shit, you have to make better shit. Yeah.

And so you're going to have people there. I wish that was the core of it, though, now, right? Well, at least at the end of the line of what gets done. So if you looked at the earth from above, I use this analogy all the time. If you didn't know us, if you were from some other culture, some other planet, and you were trying to observe what human beings do. Well, they make stuff. They keep making better stuff. There's a bunch of other stuff that goes on.

There's a bunch of just keeping up with the Joneses materialism But what that does ultimately is it forces you to buy more stuff like we are that the materialism? Instinct that people have you know it's a it's a base thing. It's like silly why do it? It's a part of human beings for some strange reason the status thing and that status thing allows people to continue to innovate and buy new stuff and continue to make better and better versions of that thing so you're compelled to buy it. And that's ultimately leading towards something.

So much of public companies in particular, this is where the incentives are the most fucked up. The amount that they spend on research and development now is way less than it used to be, number one, and dramatically less than private companies. Because, again, I was telling you the other day about this, what might be the greatest corporate con in history from this Indian industrialist who was, at least up until the last week, the richest man in Asia, fourth richest richest man on the planet after like, you know,

Elon and Bezos and Bill Gates. And there's no doubt his company is big. He's got close ties in with the Modi government. He's built ports. He's like involved in energy, runs airports, all this all this stuff. But there is a big 100 page report that came out from this group called Hindenburg Research, which is known for sort of like identifying fraudsters. They're short sellers, so let me be clear. Like they have a financial incentive also on the other side. They're betting on this company going down. But what they revealed was essentially that this guy, allegedly, they deny it, had set up all of these shell companies that they were using to manipulate their stock, which propped up the company's

value, which also hid how bad their like debt situation was, that his brother was controlling a bunch of these shell companies. And so over the course of the past, what, week and a half, his suite of companies, like seven different companies, have lost like half their value. A hundred billion in value. A hundred billion dollars. lost like half their value. A hundred billion in value. A hundred billion dollars. He's lost half of his fortune in a week, 10 days, something like that. Yeah, the scheme is actually not all that dissimilar from the SBF thing, which is basically Mauritius, which is offshore. They

were using Mauritius-based shell companies to have cash there that they actually owned to buy their own stock, inflating the stock price. Based on inflation of stock, they're able to borrow actual cash against that stock. So the actual value of the stock wasn't as high as it supposedly was. SBF kind of did the same thing by issuing that own token, which they then claimed had value, and then borrowing actual cash based on the value of this false token. And that's how you get the billions and billions that stack up on each other. And this would all be funny if Adnani was not one of the most powerful men in India.

If his companies did not prop up and not was invested in by the I think it's the State Bank of India. There is a tremendous amount of exposure in the Indian economy to the and Nani is a hero there alongside Ambani and a few of the other industrialists there's a good book if anyone's interested called the billionaire Raj which is specifically about the rise of these new Indian oligarchs and the amount of power that they yield in India is tremendous so this is not a joke I mean this really would be like if Bezos was going down yeah it is that level if but if anything it's not even comparable because we have a lot of bezos's they really only have like 12 like 15 and this guy was number one yeah he was the biggest man not just in india but in all of asia yeah and uh like that half his wealth gone he would they were doing a uh a stock sale

2.5 billion dollars raise more cash for the company, whatever. And he had to actually back out of it because of all of this. There's a video I'm talking about. All of this fallout. He's like, we are well capitalized. We have great assets, good balance sheet. Yeah, yeah. And his response.

Now, listen, I want to be clear the response was 435 pages I do not claim that I read all of it but in part what it said was like

was basically like this is an attack on India rather than responding to the specific claims he's playing to sort of like Indian nationalism

to try to rally the troops it's a smart thing to do if you criticize Anthony Fauci you're criticizing science. That way he pulled the Fauci move. That's what he did. I don't think it's working for him quite as well, though.

Wow. That's crazy. Right? Wow. What a house of cards. How many businesses are like that? Exactly. Who knows?

Good question. The thing about SBF was if CZ never does that tweet, what happens, man? Right. He could be on the Forbes. He could be not even on the Forbes 400, on the Forbes 100. Like SBF, if this whole thing had been going, it's kind of like Madoff. Madoff only fell apart. I went deep on Madoff after SBF.

And it was only 2008 that brought him down. Like if the recession doesn't happen, Madoff sails off into the sun. Like he's fine. I think SBF, I think whether it was then or sometime in the future, I think his ticket was going to get punched. He's on amphetamines and banging nine other willows in a penthouse in the Bahamas. Those people are off the fucking rails. They were nuts. True. Which I would be rooting for them if they weren't doing a swindle.

If they were really super geniuses that were like pulling off some amazing financial move, I'd be like, fuck yeah. Go do it. Go nerds. Yeah. Let's go. But no, I think because, I mean, so much of crypto is collapsing now. And I mean, that's why it looks like, oh, he denies wrongdoing, et cetera.

That's why it looks like they got so overextended at Alameda, which was basically the crypto hedge fund, because they placed all these bets. The bets were going south. They needed more cash. And so they're tapping into their customer accounts over at FTX. It's all a story of leverage. Yeah.

I just feel like with so many of these crypto bubbles and schemes and whatever, it's like they're just rediscovering all of the worst ills of the banking system. You know, it's like, oh, we did this new thing. We discovered a bank run. Like, wow, this is what happens when people like freak out and come and get their cash. That they need regulation. Well, they need...

You have to have some sort of... They need enforcement. It is a little complicated because, I mean, look, ultimately, you know, FTX was unwound. The existing laws do not let you commit fraud. Right, right. So there needs to be enforcement. Now, one of the things that we are keeping an eye on is at some point in the FTX run up when he's buying all these politicians and he's buying all his like puff piece coverage in the New York Times and everywhere else,

there was actually some effort to investigate him coming from the SEC. And there was a bipartisan group of lawmakers that sent a letter that was like, hey, he's our boy, like don't, he didn't do anything wrong. They're like, don't touch the crypto industry, what are you doing?

He happens to have donated to all of them. Yeah, specifically about this guy. And so did that lead to the regulators saying like, don't touch the crypto industry. What are you doing? But he happens to have donated to all of them. Yeah, specifically about this guy. And so did that lead to the regulators saying like, I guess we're going to like take a light touch. We're not going to dig into this. I don't know. That's a question that I have about how all this works. But, you know, I think that's part of why him in particular cultivated this image on Capitol Hill. He cultivated this image with the media and was able to hold up this scheme for as long as he did. Yeah, it's a tough one. Like you were talking, I don't know. On the one hand, I'm a lot more, I guess I'm more sympathetic to the original idea of Bitcoin. You know, like when we think, and to be fair, Bitcoin is very different than a lot of these other shit coins that are out there in terms of the invention by the invention of this mysterious man. And then it has a limited number of supply. The original selling point of it as a hedge against inflation.

And also where I thought it was the most important was the idea of being able to get around sanctions, regulation, people being able to censor you. Where a lot of that came apart though, and this was scary, was if you remember right before Ukraine, what was one of the biggest stories in the country? Canada and the Canadian freedom protesters and how the Canadian government was seizing their banks. And then what was even crazier is they were actually seizing their Bitcoin. So it actually showed us one of the big choke points in crypto. I have some friends who work in the industry, and I haven't really gotten a good answer on this, which is, you know, to be able to seize Bitcoin is because a lot of it was sent on the platforms, which are itself regulated. So, for example, Coinbase is still subject in the United States to U.S. regulation and Canada similarly.

So the idea of the censorship free money, it's possible if you know how to do it. I barely know how to do it. I'm not. So the government of Canada went into Coinbase and extracted Bitcoin? I'm not going to say it was Coinbase necessarily, but they were – Jamie, I'm sure you can find this. It was Canadian government seizes cryptocurrency sent by U.S. citizens to the actual Canadian freedom protesters. Oh, okay. And that was one of the problems was that because some of that was on the exchanges, which are subject to regulation,

it's the same thing as if I were trying to wire them money to a prohibited group in Canada. But you're looking at that and you're like, man, you know, that level of censorship resistance, which I still really believe in, like we got to have something, you know, in terms of there's a current lot of pressure right now for the Fed and for the United States to create like a centralized digital currency. And even I mean, essentially cashless, we don't we basically live in a quasi cashless society right now. If you think about China, one of the ways that they're able to implement their social credit score system is everything is within the WeChat app over there, an Alipay. It's all integrated, not only for your social credit score system, your Uber, all of that is there, and you tap to pay. Well, that's great for convenience. It's also, oh, if you piss off the government like you can't pay for anything anymore. You can't get a bus ticket. You can't get all that. So I don't know what the.

The problem is when you have the wild, wild west, the people are going to rise to the top. It's not an accident that you end up with like psychopathic charlatans like SBF at the top of this thing, you know, because it is like the time in a way the time before you had like a central bank and when you had all these different currencies competing with each other in the US. And so I, too, was sympathetic to the original idea behind crypto, which is like, you know, look, fiat money is also just based on what we all decide to put value on. Now, I would say like our fiat currency is also backed by the United States government and the military, et cetera, et cetera, and being the most powerful country on the planet. So there is more than just a belief in it at this point. But OK. And so if we have this like mode of exchange and this sort of like anarchist principles of organization, it was really a response, a philosophical response, the failures of 2008.

When you see how bankrupt are and corrupt are existing financial institutions are and how rigged and how much they lie and how captured the political system is. And so I understand the impetus for it. But in reality, it has never been used as like actual currency to a significant degree it just became a like purely speculative vehicle and to your point like the idea that the three of us could just go out and be like we're making rogan coin and like we bought we could make a shitload of money like hired kim kardashian to sell you rogan coin and if we can like pump it up and do the confidence game enough then we can run away with real cash and leave all these people holding the bag when i look at that i'm like i think this went astray yeah it went astray 100 no doubt i

think this went but is that inevitable yeah i think it was that's some new emerging thing you're gonna have some crazy people that rise to the top it's like like what Crystal was saying with the original U.S. currency. You know, we didn't have centralized greenbacks in the United States until the Civil War. And that was because the government literally wanted to be able to print money and buy weapons and goods with it without having to pay gold. Before that, we had state-issued and banknotes, which was like a total free-for-all in the U.S. It was actually kind of wild. And it literally took the Civil War to be able to push back against that. And guess what?

There was a ton of charlatans. There were silver runs. There were bank runs. There was like multiple panics of like 1816 or whatever. Or even leading up to the Great Depression and the stock market crash of 1929, there was a lot of there was a whole buildup in the 20s of people were introduced to the idea of buying stock on margin. And they didn't really understand what it meant. And there were all these local dealers who were getting them in on it.

And there was just tons of fraud, charlatans, people lying, all this stuff. And so after 1929, there were a lot of banking reforms that basically made banking boring. Right. They separated all the gambling and wild speculation out from the just like basic customer deposit, like regular bank that people go to. And then, you know, over the years that was eaten away and those regulations were eaten away. And eventually you ended up sort of back to a pre-1929 situation where they were again allowed to speculate in these wild ways and there was no separation. And so after the crash, the housing crash in 2008, there was an effort to reform the banking sector. There were some things that were done through the Dodd-Frank financial reform, but they never went back to just separating out those two pieces and making it boring again, the way that it was boring and stable the way that it was. And so to me, I understand the response of crypto and looking

at this and being like, this system is fucked. We need to just like do our own thing like this. It's corrupt. It's disgusting. I totally get that. But I think the only answer to it is to have better reforms of the existing system to make it like safe and less corrupt and not have this wild speculation that can create these bubbles that just like, you know, destroy the entire economy and people's livelihoods. Is that feasible? Yeah, that's great. Well, that's what they would say. They're like, look, the system is corrupt. It's if 2008 happens and we have Dodd-Frank and the system doesn't get fixed, what are we

supposed to do? I actually get that. I don't know. I'm really of two minds of it. On the one hand, I deeply sympathize with the individualism of like, look, we're going to take it into our own hands, boys. Nobody's coming to save us. This is all we got. There are a lot of preppers actually who bought Bitcoin or sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars because they bought in very early. So shout out to those guys. On the other, look, at the end of the day, systems can change if enough people actually want to do something about it. We've talked a lot about the stock market ban. I think that's actually probably step one. If we get to the point where we can just ban members of Congress from trading stocks, the institutional trust I think that we could all then have within

the system, just at a baseline level, it would help a lot. It would help a lot to be able to get that. But of course, Nancy Pelosi is the speaker. First she says, we live in a free market economy, we're allowed to participate. I think we should be able to participate. When she said that, I pushed the microphone.

Locked off the stage. Your Nancy Pelosi impression is pretty good. That was wild. When she just walked off the stage, Your Nancy Pelosi impression is pretty good. That was wild. When she just walked off the stage, I'm like, that is wild. I mean, she's not the only one, though. I mean, it's a completely bipartisan issue. Oh, yeah.

And a lot of these guys, and, you know, they'll claim, like, look, I don't have any inside information. I'm like, look, motherfucker, you're guilty. Like, you've got to prove that you're innocent. Honestly, I mean, listen, they do. And, like, obviously, they do, and like, obviously, these are not geniuses, and they're all like beating the market and beating people

who are expert at this and whatever. George Soros and Warren Buffett are not as good as Paul Pelosi. Oh, wow. He's better. He's better at trading. He's just an amazing trader.

He has nothing to do with... Right before the antitrust suit was filed, it sold like $3 million. And once again, you're just never going to convince me that you didn't know about that. Like, you're just not going to.

He knew, they knew, she knew, they knew. Okay, let's theoretically say, all right, we believe it. Like, they didn't use their inside information. It almost doesn't matter. Yeah, it doesn't. Because ultimately, the bottom line is people fucking think that you used your information and, you know, are benefiting from it. And by the way, when you look overall, like, you could look at any individual trade and be like, oh, maybe, maybe not. Who knows?

But when you look at the numbers overall and you're like, all you motherfuckers are beating the market. No fucking way. How is that possible? Unusual whales. If you look at the actual speculation, the actual sales and trades, they fucking know. They know something. And they're not doing anything about it. Unusual Whales, shout out to him.

He's really one of the guys who sparked this whole movement. Who is Unusual Whales? He's like an anonymous Twitter account. And he's one of the first people who actually published. Independent journalist type. He published the first trading. This was like 2021, maybe 2020 actually. We're some of the first people who actually picked it up originally about the congressional trading numbers.

And we went through the exact Senate. He loops it all together as an institution and the way that it was able to beat the market consistently year after year after. And this is all publicly available data. Shout out to him. Yeah, great dude. Yeah, definitely give him a follow. He's really he does really good work. And you can actually see it all right there. The full trading report on politicians in 2022. And again, totally bipartisan. Yeah. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Patrick Fallon, Susie Lee, David Joyce, Gary Peters. All look at the blue and the red.

They're all within the graph. And you can even see like, look, it's it's everybody like from all across the board, people who are supposedly against the system, people who are totally within the system. And that's what makes it so disgusting. We have got to ban this. 19.8%? What does that mean? Well, she was down 19.8%.

And that's the other thing with Paul Pelosi. The guy is extraordinarily leveraged. He's always trading options. He's not even just buying and selling individual stocks. He's making much larger bets on these things. I mean, he's got $100 million in access to shit you and I don't have. Boy, Debbie Wasserman Schultz at the top there she's doing a nice little portfolio return 51 on a year over year for in 2022 which is crazy i mean if you compare that to the s&p 500

i actually be curious or with the 2022 s and yeah there you go so eight s&p 500 is down 18 look at every single one of these individual members who are able to have portfolios which are beating the total market. This is outrageous. Pelosi's off her game, though. Look at that. She's actually off her game. It seems like they threw it just because everybody was on to their shit. Yeah.

Yeah. Fucking threw it. But look at the red and blue. Exactly. It's bipartisan. Yeah. 100%. Completely.

And the top is red. It's bipartisan. Yeah. And the top is red. Well, this is and this is like a story of like hope. And it's very depressing because there was a whole grassroots movement to be like bipartisan. You know, the Republicans were pissed off about Pelosi and Democrats were pissed off about the Republicans. Like everyone's like, all right, this is fucked up. Right. Any thinking person who cares about the country would be like, this is fucked up. Why are we doing this? And so then, because there's this organic movement, you see actually some people in the mainstream press start to cover it. There was actually a reporter at Insider. They started digging into the details of these trades and compiling reports. That leads to that, when you're talking about Nancy Pelosi at that press conference, that leads to her actually getting asked a question about it.

And wasn't it incredibly revealing her response in that moment? That leads to a backlash. Kevin McCarthy sees an opportunity with Republicans about to take it. He starts posturing like, oh, if Republicans take the House, we're going to do the stock ban. Of course, they haven't said shit about that since then. Pelosi actually feels some pressure like, all right, we're going to do we're going to try a thing. And they sort of like poison pill that to make sure it doesn't happen, too. And that's where the you know, it's a mixed bag because you're like, all right, we got it on the menu.

There was a lot of pressure. Politicians heard it. They had to do something. But then both parties, again, found ways to just completely, you know, let the issue slide and not actually have to change anything. That is an independent media story, though, because that's one of those where that guy published it. We started talking. This is not just us. This is a lot of people. Dave Portnoy. There's a lot of other people out there who've talked about it. A lot of independent media, people like you have also brought it up. That kind of put it in the cultural pop culture conversation. You got TikTokers out there doing Pelosi trades like they have huge accounts where Gen Z and millennials are totally bought into how corrupt the system is.

That floats upward with the outrage. Insider picks it up. And President Biden actually originally had a line in the State of the Union just last year where he was going to endorse a congressional stock trading ban. The line was pulled at the very last minute. Of all the things, you know, you listen to the State of the Union. It's like a laundry list of check in the box on every fucking thing. 25 check boxes. And that's the line. That's the line that gets pulled. Amazing. Right. At whose request? That's a great question. I would love for somebody in the press to dig into that.

And, you know, Biden, to his credit, when he was a senator, he actually had a personal role for himself. He did not engage in this. He did not buy and sell stock. So he would actually have a place of moral authority to say, like, let's not do this anymore. But somebody got to him. Wow. Yeah. That's a real corruption story. Yeah.

Well, and again, like Republican, you know, all these people like the Republican holdouts or Kevin McCarthy posturing like populist or whatever. This was not one of the demands that they made of like, let's get stuck. Should have made that demand. They should have made it. But, you know, there's a reason why they didn't. And like I said, more public outreach. We're talking about it right now. Maybe it'll help.

Honestly, there's a lot of Republican lawmakers who are obsessed with the JRE. Maybe they'll listen to this. There you go. Make your pitch. I mean, and like I said, McCarthy, he brought it up at a moment when he thought it would serve him politically. But then the moment he actually got the gavel and took power, nothing. That's the key to getting what you want in politics, though.

That's, you know, look, these people, they're never going to do anything because it's the right thing. You've got to force them to do it so it's politically advantageous. And look, there's actually a lot of room for some politician out there. Originally, I think it was John Ossoff, the senator from Georgia. He's a young guy. He's like 30-something. He's like maybe 37, relatively young. I guarantee you, he's pretty online from what I can tell. He was the one who caught this. He goes, oh, I'll just introduce a bill to ban this. He got a ton of good press for being the first senator to actually propose a ban.

So we need to make it and create a system where right now it's politically advantageous to sell out to K Street, which is the lobbyists. That's where they all sell out to big business, Wall Street, military, industrial complex, any of these people. I think what I would love to do, and it's one of the aims of the show, was creating and rise with independent media and working with everybody, is to create an alternate system where you get rewarded for. We had a big conversation about Ukraine.

Just let one politician say it. Right now we've had like maybe two who've ever raised any questions. Rand Paul was one of the old people. He goes, I'm not going to even vote against the aid for Ukraine. Let's just have an auditor to make sure that it's all being spent. Inspector General. Nothing. They don't even vote for that. And by the way, like, what did we just talk about? Zelensky just fired like half of his cabinet for corruption allegations who do you think's paying the cabinet who's paying all the bills we're balanced we're literally balancing their budget the united states congress is which is like their economy is completely propped up by the united states and it might

lead us to world war three as possible it's certainly possible what but when we were talking about ukraine one of the things that I wanted to bring up that I didn't is, is there a solution? Like if we're not going to donate tanks and missiles and jets, what is the rational solution? Is there a way to mitigate the loss of life?

Is there a way to negotiate a way out of this? Is there a way on paper, way out of this? Is there a way on paper other than Russia saying, you win? What is the way? Well, the way would be, look, these are the conditions, Ukraine, at which we are going to support you. After that, we are not going to provide you offensive aid because we believe that we should have a diplomatic solution. You could convene. I mean, look, there's been no real effort between President Biden and Vladimir Putin to actually even sit down. Right now, there's all these EU G7 leaders that are actually inside of Ukraine.

None of them are asking any questions about diplomacy. It's very really what it is, is this is a grand European NATO problem. So we all need to sit down together and hash it out. And look, if the Russians pull out of them, that then OK, like game on, like you're the ones who are pulling out. You're the ones who are saying that we're not going to have any engagement on this whatsoever. But we haven't even tried that. It was in the very beginning of the war. We actually there were some negotiations that were happening. Yeah, that's it. I'm not going to pretend this would be like easy, like, oh, put me in there. And I like make it. And that's a i'm not gonna pretend this would be like easy like oh put me in there and i like make it and that's like the shit that trump is truthing now he's like we'll get a deal on day 24 hours

very easy to do it's like you're ridiculous like it's not easy to do it's a complex situation be incredibly difficult there may be no opening for diplomacy especially right now but saga is right to point to the fact that early on in this conflict, there actually were meetings happening between Russian officials and Ukrainian representatives. There were talks that were happening. And reportedly, they were kind of working out an outline. There were still some very difficult sticking points, you know, based on the reporting that's available. And Boris Johnson, who was at that point prime minister of the UK, and of course they have been our closest ally in all of this,

was dispatched to go to Kiev and give the message to Zelensky. This was reported actually in Ukrainian press. We do not want you to make a deal. That was our posture. We do not want diplomacy. We do not want negotiations. That was our posture. We do not want diplomacy.

We do not want negotiations. So the thing that I object to is the idea that is sold by Biden and others of like, oh, it's just it's just up to Ukraine. That's bullshit. They are where they are 100 percent because of us. This is an incredibly dangerous situation because of the proxy nature of it, because Russia certainly sees themselves and they accurately showed as being in a proxy war versus us. And so the idea that we have no say and no influence over whether or not there are negotiations is completely bunk. piece where my other concern is that we're sort of building up to another Afghanistan situation where, you know, we went in with one goal, like, OK, we're going to get the bad guys, we're going to get Osama. And then when we failed at that, we end up with this 20 year occupation and total disaster at the end of it. And no one can really say how or why we were there for so

long. Like, how do we get to some sort of exit ramp in Ukraine? And here the stakes are so much higher because, as you point out, it's like nuclear war and World War III on the line. And even if that's like a tiny chance, we should care a lot about that tiny chance. Did you see Jimmy Dore on Tucker Carlson? Yes. Yeah. What was he talking about?

China? I think that's what it was. I saw a clip that was floating around. See if you can play it. It was the other day, but he was talking about the industrial military complex

and the influence that they have on what we're doing in the world and this idea that we're some sort of, have you found it? I don't want to paraphrase it,

but he went on this very, very powerful anti-war rant. Let's play this one. Should I use a different source first? Well, just try to. I don't know what this channel is. Jamie, I'm pretty sure it's on his Twitter. I thought I saw, on Jimmy's Twitter,

I thought I saw a clip that was floating around there. On Jimmy Dore's Twitter. What was that one? The one I had? on Jimmy's Twitter, I thought I saw a clip that was floating around there. On Jimmy Dore's Twitter? Yeah. Check that real quick, sorry. What was that one? The one I had? Yeah, something about China? It just, I don't know. That was the clip I knew that he was on, Tucker.

I knew he was there to talk about China. I'm not sure. There it is. Yeah. So play that. We're the ones provoking this war, just like we provoked the war in Ukraine. We are now provoking a war with China. And who benefits?

I'll tell you right now. Your enemy is not China. Your enemy is not Russia. Your enemy is the military-industrial complex, which has been fleecing this country to the tunes of hundreds of billions and trillions of dollars. How many times are we going to have a defense secretary say, hey, we can't account for two trillion dollars in the Pentagon again? That which has happened twice now in my lifetime. So, again, people are being the war machine cannot be stopped.

Who's running this country? The war machine. It certainly isn't Joe Biden making these decisions. I would like to know who is making the decisions. And I just want to remind everybody, the United States is the world's terrorist. We just set the Middle East on fire in the last 20 years. And now we're doing a proxy war in Ukraine, which we provoked, NATO provoked, and was just admitted that we provoked it

by the former prime minister of Germany. And now we're trying to saber-ratter with China and they're predicting a war. Again, China's not going to invade us. China's not our enemy. We might have an economic war. That's what these are. These are economic wars. These are wars for in Ukraine. It's about liquefied natural gas and making sure Germany and Russia never come together because we fear Russia's natural resources and manpower, and we fear them getting together with Germany, with their technology and their capital. And so that's why we blew up the Nord Stream pipeline.

That's why we're doing the Ukraine war. This is all about hegemony, imperialism and economics. And if there's a Marine somewhere, it's there because they're about to steal some natural resources from another country. As everybody's screaming about what a bad guy Putin is for invading Ukraine, the United somewhere, it's there because they're about to steal some natural resources from another country. As everybody's screaming about what a bad guy Putin is for invading Ukraine, the United States is currently occupying a third of Syria. And which third is that?

It's the third that has the oil. And how do I know we're there to steal their oil? Because the president of the United States said so. We're not even benefiting economically. That's, I mean, of course, that's the rub. Jimmy Dore. I appreciate it. Thank you.

Nord Stream, man. I forgot about that. Yeah. You remember how immediately people were like, oh, it was Russia, all of that. And then an independent panel actually just came out, I want to say a month ago. And they're like, no, we don't think it was Russia. Yeah. It's like, well, who was it?

They're like, we may never know. Yeah. Like, oh, really? Well, it's really only a few people who could have done it. You never know. Yeah. I was like, well, who was it? They're like, we may never know. Yeah. Like, oh, really? Well, it's really only a few people who could have done it. We never know. Yeah, we'll never know. I mean, the bottom. Who killed Epstein?

We may never know. We may never know. We may never know. I mean, the bottom line is, look, we've talked a lot about incentives. What's the incentive for the people who make bombs? Like, they're trying to make money. So, and they're very influential. They donate a lot of

money in washington they they go you know revolving door not just from like government officials but also they go on cnn and msnbc and whatever and it's never disclosed like oh and by the way this person is like on the board of raytheon and happens to have a vested financial interest in what we ultimately do here so listen it's it's at the core. The profit motive is at the core of a lot of what happens in this country. It's Eisenhower's speech when he was leaving office. That's it. That's interesting. You know what's something crazy is that even the Navy secretary, we just covered this, he came out and was like, in a few months, we may have to choose between arming

ourselves and arming Ukraine. And then the Biden administration made him come up and, quote, clear up that comment. He's like, oh, I didn't mean it that way. It was just well, no, he actually did mean it that way, because it turns out that we've been sending so many munitions and stuff that we have over to Ukraine. Yeah, there you go. If the defense industry can't boost production, arming both Ukraine and the U.S. will become challenging. He literally came out and said that we may have to choose if these weapons makers don't get their act together. Because actually, and this is the other thing where, you know, military industrial complex, one of the things that we forget is they're not actually particularly good at what they do. If we look at the F-35 program, it was a colossal disaster.

It was over a trillion dollars. It cost way too much money. The U.S., I want to say it was the Zumwalt class, a new— Navy people are going to freak out at me. But it was either a destroyer or something. It was supposed to be a new generation ship. We were going to build like dozens of them. We only ended up building three.

They cost a shitload of money. The gun costs a million dollars a round in order to fire it. So we don't spend – we're not able to even produce what we need. to even produce what we need. This was a big fight during the Iraq War too where guys in the Pentagon would rather fund boondoggle programs than stuff that was actually protecting the lives of our soldiers like MRAPs. Like they didn't want to fund some of the stuff that was actually protecting American soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan,

in Iraq. The A-10 Warthog is another good example. Cheap Plane, which actually has ability to assist people in a tactical situation because they're more interested in their you know ridiculous flying shit so and jimmy also points to the correct thing which is the pentagon did just fail its fucking audit you know we don't really talk about that like a hundred billion dollars they have no idea what it is every year yeah they fail it every year it's a congressionally mandated audit. Every other government agency is able to get through their audit. There you go. And the Pentagon, there you go, fails its audit for the fifth time.

There's no consequences to this either. They're getting more money than ever. What are you spending it on? It's not even close. It's not like they're off by a few pennies. It's by like a few trillions or so. It's like, yeah, and everyone's just like, eh, this is fine. Where do you think that money's gone?

That's a great question. There you go. Where does it go? Representing $7 trillion in assets. That's what we spent on the war on terror, just so people know. The entire GWAT was $7 trillion, and that's what's missing. Actually, I'm reading the sentence wrong. The $7 trillion is the part they were able to give a clean bill of financial aid.

That was only 39%. It was actually much more than $7 trillion. Oh, my God. So 40% is $7 trillion is the part they were able to give a clean bill of financial aid. That was only 39%. It was actually much more than $7 trillion. Oh, my God. So 40% is $7 trillion. Then we're doubling it. That's quite a system we have here. Okay, so yeah, we're talking about like almost $9 trillion. That's more than we spent on the entire GWAT.

Our entire economy is $15 trillion. I want people to let that sink in here. But we can't have health care. That would be too much. It costs too much. Can't do it. No universal basic income. We can't afford it.

Yeah, we can't afford that. Where's that money going, though? Who knows? I read once that they have one of the largest HR systems in the entire world. I was like, on what? What are they spending that on? A lot of it, look, I have no idea. That's the point.

Even with terms of Ukraine, there was a great, this is a great media episode. CBS News did a whole documentary about how many of the weapons that we were sending to Ukraine were not making it to the front line, which is bullshit, right? Because if we're going to take all these weapons, I would at least hope a Ukrainian soldier is using it to protect his own life. Literally, the day after that documentary went live, he had to delete it. CBS News retracted it and said, no, actually, the situation has changed. It's not true. That report was out of context. We're going to reissue it.

It was out of date. They said it was out of date. They said it was out of date. They said it was out of date. And then, yeah. And they were talking about the vast majority of the arms we were sending to Ukraine weren't getting there. Also, we have no audit. We have no way to independently verify that anything that we send to Ukraine is actually being used by Ukraine in the way that we want it to. How much money have we sent over there? In terms of how much we've actually spent?

Military aid or overall? If you want to look it up, Jamie, it's called like Der Kegel or something like that. There's a tracker that does country by country and breaks it by economic, financial, and military. I believe we have spent or have sent approximately between $25 and $30 billion. We have an extra $70 billion appropriated to Ukraine. Here's another crazy thing because we actually read these laws because we talk about our show. So it doesn't just work like the president of the United States shall have X amount of money to send tanks to Ukraine. No, it's a slush fund. Biden has a $70 billion slush fund completely to the discretion of the president of the United

States. He could wake up tomorrow if he wanted to and ship any weapon system in possession of the United States over to Ukraine. We have no congressional authority. It has already been appropriated. We have no way as a population to push back against that. Congress abdicated its responsibility in this case. Or he could not wake up tomorrow and then it all be in the hands of fucking Kamala Harris. That's the only thing that scares me more.

Can you imagine that lady with her finger on the button? We're fucked. His 80-year-old heart is the only thing that scares me more. Can you imagine that lady with her finger on the button? We're fucked. His 80-year-old heart is the only thing keeping us alive right now. I mean, at least Biden stood up to the generals when it came to Afghanistan. At least he had that in him. Kamala. Scary. Scary shit.

You know she would start a war with Russia. Do you think so? She'd bumble us into one. I think so. In terms of her competence, she cares about MSNBC. She cares about groupthink. She cares about the elites like really loving her. Biden, to his credit, on some acknowledge it was a mess. It was a disaster. It was ugly. It was not good. All of that. But you see the way that, you know, they came out in force because they hated this decision. They wanted us to continue to be there forever because this was like the endless gravy train for them. And so, you know, that was the most effective, most potent

criticism against it was uniform across the board with the media. And so that they did the same sort of stuff to the leak against you. They'll really damage your approval rating. They're really tied in with the media in terms of like, you know, they're leaking to their sources and they will go on and make their own case, et cetera, with no disclosure that they have financial incentives involved. So it's very, very easy to be manipulated by the people who want to be in a place forever or want to start a war or whatever it is. Absolutely. Yeah.

I mean, I think Trump was subject to the same forces. Obama was subject to the same force. I think part of why Biden in this limited instance was able to buck that trend is maybe perhaps just because he's been around for so fucking long. Obama got totally rolled by the generals. Great book, Bob Woodward, Obama's Wars, about the very first year of the Obama presidency. He promised to run on the good war, Afghanistan, but he's not necessarily wedded to a surge. The Obama's Wars book just details how Biden was the only guy in there being like, Mr. President, what the fuck are we doing in Afghanistan? What should we be? He's like, why should we send 40,000 whatever more troops? What are we going to do? What's our endgame? Let's just have a counterterrorism mission. hence President Obama, and actually actively undercutting him to The New York Times and to the press to create a Obama is soft on terrorism narrative specifically so they could do a surge in Afghanistan under Stanley McChrystal. And look, it's complicated. But if we look back on that, did it really buy us anything in the long war of history with Afghanistan? I know personally people

who were blown up during the surge in Afghanistan. And I also know how much it hurts them emotionally to watch ground that they fought and lost their brothers for, lost limbs for, get retaken by the Taliban several years earlier. It's just like we're talking about with Ukraine. What is the end game? And the end game is not something that Washington really likes to talk about. And even if you're looking at the pullout situation on Afghanistan, it's like, well, why should we stay in Afghanistan? If you're listening to the media, it was like, because so Afghan girls can go to school. And look, I feel very bad for Afghan girls. I do not wish a situation where they are unable to go to school. Does that mean that we should have people there in perpetuity and spend $200 million per day and have several American

soldiers get blown up by an IED? I'm sorry, I don't think so. I think there's a lot of bad shit that's happening all across the world, but they're never going to frame it that way. And that's why, man, the media on this, on war in particular, they offer no nuance. Afghanistan was a real red pill moment for Kristallnacht. And look, I'm not defending it. I'm not saying it wasn't a shit show. What's the alternative? They were like, oh, we should have surrounded the city of Kabul. I'm like, so you want to send thousands of American soldiers to create a perimeter around the city of Kabul? That suicide bomb that happened in the airport, it would have been that times 100 in terms of we were occupying and surrounding an entire city. There are valid criticisms of we should have

held on to Bagram. We shouldn't have abandoned the military base or whatever in that. And that's a tactical consideration. I'll leave that to the people whose job it is. But on a broader strategic level, why should we have stayed in Afghanistan? And I haven't heard a particularly good answer. Well, yeah, you know how much they actually cared about the women and girls by the fact that now that those women and girls are like starving in a mass famine, they don't give a shit. They don't cover it. They don't cover the fact that they're like that we're partly connected to it because of the fact that we, you know, are continuing to hold their central bank reserves. And that's just now it's we're over that we've moved on. Now we're focused on humanitarian stories elsewhere. And so it's just very selective and it's weaponized humanitarianism because Americans are good people. People don't want to see someone suffering. And so they'll use the legitimate humanitarian concerns to try to achieve their aims. And then once those aims are accomplished or not accomplished, well, they don't give a shit. This is not a rosy picture you two are painting.

Well, it can be. We went from the stock band, which I thought was a rosy one. I wanted to talk to you about something that I remember you discussing that I wanted to get clarity on. What was that story that you discussed where there was a company that was working with China and China had bought a large stake in the company? It was about chips and AI. Okay. I forget the exact name of the company, Jamie, but it's basically called the heist of the century. If you Google like heist of the century, China semiconductors, I think it was called AML.

It was a British semiconductor company. Any American or Western business is required to do business in China has to have a Chinese subsidiary. So essentially what happened is the Chinese subsidiary, I believe of AML, was stealing the technology from within it. And after they were reprimanded for something like this, the CEO of the Chinese subsidiary just said, nope, I'm taking it. He stole all of their IP, created an independent business backed by the Chinese government, and is now spinning up, based on their IP, semiconductors that were originally intellectual property of this British semiconductor company. And the reason that this matters is that is just the tip of the iceberg for IP theft that is happening with respect to China.

It's one of the reasons why if you look at Chinese or American businessmen who do business over there, they fully and readily admit the amount of IP that has just been straight up stolen through their fake legal process of this Chinese subsidiary. But really, it's just a farming operation. There's no such thing as private industry in China. You know, I talk about with TikTok all the time, the CEO, Zhang Ziming, he actually was forced to pull one of ByteDance's apps from the Chinese app store and apologize because it was not supporting, quote, socialist principles. He was like, I apologize to the this is the, you know, the CEO of TikTok today, the owner of TikTok. Everything there is totally controlled by the government. They're very savvy and they're very smart. And at this point, they've actually even

reached a point where in some cases they don't even need our IP. In some areas, they are far more superior and advanced than we are. One of the ones that scares the shit out of me is electric vehicle batteries. So the entire EV battery supply chain is connected to China in some way. You've talked about the cobalt and all of that. And one of the things that Siddharth brought up on your show was that it's the Chinese companies that are working with these Congolese gangs. Chinese don't give a shit about labor. I mean, it's not like we give a shit either. So to be fair. But anyway, they're willing to come in and be like, look, we want the cobalt, give it to us. This is actually part of the reason why Elon is in a precarious position.

A huge part of the Tesla EV battery supply chain is in China. Even here in the United States, a lot of the new EV battery plants that are being built, it's a Chinese subsidiary and a conglomerate that is behind that. And look, what did we come through with the whole pandemic? If you're going to have critical supplies being manufactured and connected to China in some way, they're always going to put their interest, as any country should, above your own. You need to have some sort of resilience. Like if we get into Taiwan is another example, TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturer, they are building a plant here in Arizona. They're building, I think it's a hundred billion dollar plant, which is great. I'm glad that they are,

but it takes a decade to spin those things up. They create 92% of the world's most advanced chips. If we have a conflict in Taiwan, I always talk about this on the show, we are all turning this shit into the government so that they can create missiles and bombs. They will literally need to rip the semiconductors and chips out of our cell phones, out of our computers, because we're not going to have anything. Like 92% of the world's most advanced chips,

everything goes dark. Like everything is turned over into some sort of ration thing. Chips is the new gold. It is one of the most precarious as an industry for the United States that we remain in. The Chips Act was a great step in the right direction that the Biden administration passed, but tip of the iceberg, man. That's a whole other level. I mean, that is the, like, if we're looking for a more positive

story, less like gloom and doom. The Biden administration has like dipped their toe in the water of industrial policy, recognizing that, I mean, the best response to China, the problem for us is being so interdependent where, you know, the pandemic, you come to realize like, oh, fuck, they make all the masks. Oh, shit. They make all the like, yeah. And so there was. And then the other piece is we realized with these sprawling just-in-time supply chains that they were incredibly fragile, right? That if you have a disruption, your whole economy is going to go to shit. You're going to have inflation. You're going to have all these backups at the ports and all this stuff.

So they have dipped their toe in the water of having industrial policy that makes us more resilient, less reliant on these other countries, including the Inflation Reduction Act had a lot in it for bringing that green energy production and EV battery production to our shores and has requirements about where those batteries are built and where the sourcing comes from. But it really is just starting to dip your toe in those waters ultimately. We're more than a decade out. It's still so difficult. I mean, the sourcing on the EVs is such a nightmare. And if you're trying to get, you know, conflict-free cobalt or lithium, right now there's a huge battle right now

in South America, in Mexico, in Chile and elsewhere where Chinese companies are trying to buy all of the lithium deposits, which of course you need for a lithium ion battery. And if we also, I mean, look, this shit takes a long time. I think that's the one thing I want people to, you don't just snap your fingers and build a semiconductor fab. You need water. If a single human hair gets into the TSMC facility, the whole thing shuts down. This is the most sophisticated manufacturing basically in the entire world. And we're trying to

rebuild it overnight. It's very, very, very difficult. And then even if you think about from an infrastructure point of view, even if so, we have an explosion right now in electric vehicles. I think that's great. I think EVs are really cool. They're really fun to drive. But if you don't have a Tesla, like where do you charge? You know, if you're driving long range, like where are you going to charge it? It's not like we have a ton of EV battery stations. We need the infrastructure. Right. We don't have the same gas station infrastructure that we all have. We're decades behind on that. So anyway, I would love for the U.S. government

to intelligently invest in it. And a lot of this is ideological. So another thing with the inflation reduction has a bullshit name. You just called it like a clean energy bill, which probably would have polled better than a fake inflation reduction. Whatever. That was Joe Manchin's innovation. One of the important things is ideology, right? Which is not ideologically investing in technology because we want it to work, but because it actually works. Nuclear is a huge part of this conversation. We talked a ton about it on our show. For a long time, we had tax credits, clean energy tax credits were only applicable to wind and solar. Wind and solar are fine.

I think they have a lot of problems. Solar in particular is very filthy in order to manufacture. A lot of it is manufactured in China, and we actually rely on China to build- You also need the batteries for it to be sustainable for when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining. Yes. It's complicated. Whereas nuclear has like a 93% rate at which it's always being able to run. It's actually even more powerful than natural gas, very reliable. Unfortunately, we haven't built a new nuclear power plant in the United States since 1974, which is insane, right? And luckily, California decided not to totally lose its mind and close the Diablo nuclear power plant. Here in Texas, I think only 13% or whatever of our

power comes from nuclear. We get more power from coal, I believe, here in Texas, I think only 13% or whatever of our power comes from nuclear. We get more power from coal, I believe, here in Texas than we do from nuclear in the year 2023. It doesn't make any sense. The point is, is that even if we wanted to, though, and this is the fair criticism, it takes a long time. But with all of these things, no time like the present. Like, we've got to start now. The current system is not working. You know, Texas, a lot of the power just went out here in Austin. One of the reasons why, from what I've been able to read so far, it's actually not the grid. It's because power lines are constructed above ground. And people are like, okay, well,

why do we do that? It's cheap. It's a lot more expensive to have to bury these things underground. So it's a trade-off. And I think that's fair. It's a once in a three yearyear or so event. But even if we look at the previous grid failure here in Texas, it was failure to weatherize the natural gas grid. So a lot of this stuff is preemptive investment to make sure that old people don't die in the middle of a freeze or that horrible situation like in Buffalo, where people were losing power and freezing to death in their cars. It's like that is why we need to have more forward thinking as a country and actually get some agreement about these things. And frankly, we're going to have to throw a shitload of money at it. Like it costs a lot of money. But the idea that people say, oh, but that's like government subsidy.

Listen, we subsidize the shit out of the oil industry. Like you really think we don't subsidize oil? Of course we do. It's critical energy infrastructure. There's so much regulation around it. You can't even get a new nuclear power plant approved if you were to apply to, I think it's the FERC. It's like the Federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission. So we need reform on all these things just to make life better in America. And unfortunately, a lot of it is just corrupted so that it's not really possible. And a lot of it is ideological corrupted so that it's not really possible. And a lot of it is ideological, too.

We have to be honest about that. We have a lot of short-term thinking, a lot of profit-driven thinking, and then that bleeds over into government officials as well because of the corporate campaign contributions. And so, yeah, they don't care really what happens 10 years from now or whether it's good for the U.S. or for China or anyone else they care about. Is it good for their bottom line? It's crazy because all the things that we discussed, health care, energy, all the issues that we have, and that's where it gets really crazy when you look at the money that we're putting into other things like Ukraine. If we had the resources to do what we're doing right now currently, that means we have the resources to attack all these problems domestically.

Right. Yeah, that's right. But we just don't have consensus around it. With Ukraine, everybody, they snap their fingers. They basically 99% of what they want. Nobody in Congress has the balls to actually vote against it. I believe it was a unanimous vote, I think, in the Senate, or semi-unanimous, or whatever. Here's the question about that.

Why are the Republicans opposed to sending more arms to Ukraine? Why aren't they more opposed? Why are they opposed? Because some Republicans are. Some are. Well, you can count them on one hand. I mean, they might say it, but they all vote for it, right? I mean, how many of them actually voted against it?

Jamie, you might be able to look it up what the actual vote count was on the extra 50 billion to Ukraine. I'm not 100 or at least the original 50 billion. It was almost unanimous in terms of what was sent over there. And look, I think a lot of them, what they're saying is a more financial perspective of what you're talking about. Like, hey, why should we spend 50 billion dollars to Ukraine if we have all these problems here? I mean, I don't necessarily agree 100 percent with that feeling. Yeah. Eleven senators who voted against the Ukraine aid bill. But that means that 86 of the entire chamber did end up voting for it. If I were to look at it, I'd be willing to bet a lot of them are fiscal Republicans. So Josh Hawley, Mike Brown, Boosman, Crapo, Hagerty, Lee, Loomis, Marshall, Tommy Toro.

These are mostly more libertarian types. So they're going to be more concerned on the spending side. But the critique that we've all talked about here on the show today, you will not hear a single word of this out in the mainstream. I have not seen one intelligent discussion in any format of mainstream media on Ukraine raising any of the valid points that we just did because the lobby and the denunciation of, oh, you're pro-Russia, oh, you're spouting Putin talking points and all that is vicious. And a lot of these people just succumb to that, unfortunately. I really don't know how to get around it. But if I can have anything take away is what you said is, look, if people were

willing to unanimously relatively agree to send 100 billion to Ukraine, and we have all these problems that we just talked about, that shows you what the priority is. I always look at what's the bipartisan consensus in Washington. That's the only shit that actually gets done. Yeah. Well, a perfect example. So we passed during the pandemic, this expanded child tax credit, phenomenally successful program, lifted like half of all kids that were in poverty out of poverty. You know, they did research on the way that parents were spending this. They were spending it on their kids. They were spending it on like, you know, enrichment for their children. It was like unanimously great policy that worked really well. And Democrats, Republicans decided they were

against it. And Democrats just like let it expire without a peep. And so again, it's like, you know, the hard thing is so many people's political approach is so focused on like whatever the cultural outrage of the moment is that things like that don't even get surfaced they don't get debated they don't get discussed and then this program which was one of the most successful programs we've done in a long time just dies oh that reminds me i know you've been talking about ubi and concerns about it um so we actually been doing a lot of deep dive into this and we looked at a couple of new studies. There's a new one actually just came out that a big part of the, quote, labor shortage is actually men who were working much longer hours during the pandemic cutting back on their hours. So it's not. And actually, it's Matthew Iglesias tweeted this study.

If you want to see it, Jamie, it's from the National Bureau of Economic Research. So it's a couple of things. It's a cutback in the amount of hours that people are willing to work. Also, because 2020, with the initial reopening, there was more labor ability to bargain, many people were not willing to go back to work at the same wages. One of the concerns around unemployment, I know that you would raise, and others was, oh, well, people are getting all this unemployment, they're not going back to work. And there were certainly some cases of that true. But we had a interesting natural experiment where they actually ended unemployment benefits back in 2021. It had little to no change on the overall employment rate. So even when you took

away the unemployment benefits, all of the anecdotal stories of like, I can't get somebody in because they're getting unemployment. They didn't want to work. Actually, when they stopped getting unemployment, a lot of them didn't go back to work. And it wasn't just because they had money saved up, because we know right now, we have some of the highest credit card debt in modern American history, which is never a good sign. In fact, many bank accounts are below pre pandemic levels. And so there's actually just been a fundamental reset in the way a cultural reset reset in the way that a lot of people approach work. A lot of it is women. One of the fascinating things that happened is we had, for the first time in modern American history, we had an increase, actually, in the amount of babies that were born. The pandemic

baby bump that happened from 2020 and 2021, we've almost never had that happen before. People were bored. A lot of it was just during the pandemic. People were bored and they had more time on and they were able to plan pregnancy. Be at home. Yeah. Not have to worry about one week or whatever of maternity leave. So we're living in a really interesting moment in the way that people have evaluated their relationship with work.

There's a real reorientation going on, especially for like white collar workers who were very wrapped up in their like, you know, whatever their work dramas were and their whole life was centered around work and climbing that ladder and whatever. And so when they were forced to go remote and all of that was stripped away, I was like, why am I, why is this the only part of my life that I'm focusing on? This thing that I don't even really like when I have a family, I have a community, I have other things that are important to me? And I don't think that that – I think that is a dramatic mindset shift that is probably not going away, like a cultural mindset shift.

And you see all these people moving to different areas, valuing different things in terms of their quality of life. And so, yeah, as we look at the labor force participation rate, a lot of the decline was actually people not leaving their jobs, not that they didn't want to work, but just working fewer hours and being unwilling to like just dedicate their entire waking life to their job. Yeah. Well, that's probably a good thing, right? I think it's a good thing. The reevaluation process is always good because there's going to be a bunch of people that just,

of course, correct. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, listen, the three of us, we get to do things that we really love, right? We really, we're passionate. We feel like it makes a difference. Like we, you know, eat, sleep, drink it. And that's rare. That's really rare. Most people are, you know, they're like punching the clock. They're doing their thing to be able to get a check, to be able to support their families. And so, you know, there's been this sort of like, I don't know, ideology sold around careerism to especially like college educated white collar workers that like this is the thing that's supposed to be who you are in your whole life and i think taking a step back from that and being more intentional about like well is that actually what i want my whole life to be about and maybe there

are other things that are outside of the workplace that are more meaningful to me that provide me you know more happiness or more joy or more fulfillment in my life i 100 think that that's a positive thing that's our bright note which should end on life, I 100% think that that's a positive thing. That's our bright note. We should end on that. There you go. Let's do it. I love it. That's a positive.

I found it. I think it's great. Yeah, I think it's a positive direction. Absolutely. Listen, I appreciate you guys very much. I love your show. I'm so glad you're out there. I'm so glad you're independent. You're free.

Thanks to you, man. So are we. Trust me. It's because of you guys, 100%. But thank you very much. Thanks for being here Thank you Joe Tell everybody how they can

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