The Joe Rogan Experience - #1977 - Dave Smith

Episode Date: April 27, 2023

Dave Smith is a stand-up comedian, Libertarian political commentator, and podcaster. He's the host of the "Part of the Problem" podcast, as well as a co-host of the "Legion of Skanks” podcast.www.comicdavesmith.com

the Joe Rogan experience let's fucking go oh we're live hello Dave Smith hello sir see you my brother yeah it's great to be back fun times last night unbelievable man, that was your first voyage aboard the mothership. Yes, it sure was. If you're going to get abducted by aliens at a comedy club, it's the one to be at. Yeah, imagine. Imagine if they showed up there. I imagine if they were going to pick a comedy club to start abducting people, it would be yours.

Well, they would know that we'd be open. That's true. The props would probably like charge them whereas you would greet you would welcome them in yeah put them on the guest list it is i know i just i feel like i'm just saying the same thing everyone does but the club is really amazing man you did an incredible job it's pretty dope well it wasn't me i mean it was sort of but it was a lot of people and uh a lot of it, Richard Weiss, the architect and designer, he's the fucking man. He did an incredible job. The whole thing's just very bizarre, you know, if it wasn't mine, I'd really be able to appreciate it.

Yeah, I'm sure that's true. But it's cool to see something, you know, like there's something cool about having a concept in your head and then seeing it manifest into reality yeah because i remember you know you talking about this over the last couple years like we're gonna do this and it's gonna be like this and then like it's cool to see it materialize i've never done anything like this before obviously but i mean to just to have an idea and to just like go all in on this idea and just really try to cut in zero corners and just do the best version of it. And there was a lot of delays because, you know, we said, okay, let's change this. Let's change that. Let's do this. Let's do that. And when I had an idea, you know, an idea to change things, it's just like you have to kind of follow through with it. You just, you know, it's like you have one chance to do it right and you

don't want to go back and close for two weeks so you can do new construction and fix something and so we just you know took a long ass fucking time you know there's a lot of people saying whenever you're not opening your clothes bullshit it's all bullshit It's all bullshit. They just didn't. I knew once it got, I'm like, talk all that shit. Because once this thing gets open, you're all going to want to come. And the ones who can't, a lot of FOMO. Dude, I thought, do you remember? This was like a month ago or something like that.

You texted me, or I texted you congratulating you for the club opening it was like right around when it opened and uh you texted me back uh i can wait for you to come see it i think you meant to say i can't wait yeah i'm sure but i thought there was something so funny about just texting me like i was if that was your way of telling me you don't want me at the club i can i can wait i can wait for you to see it, actually. Oh, that's hilarious. It has been a problem, though, because a lot of people want to come. And some of them are just, you know. People are weird that want a headline and you know that they know.

Like, you know that you're not really a headliner. Like, what are you talking about? No, I'm in the position where I was talking to adam about it because i'm trying to find a uh he's trying to find me a weekend and then he was like i was like i'm free this weekend and he's like you know i offered that to schultz but let me see and then i have to be like you know you don't want to book andrew schultz man he harasses the staff and stuff so like you know i just have to lie about my friends you're like he's actually gotten really into drugs man he's been assaulting people you don't want to have him here yeah he like loses it on stage yeah it's really not cool yells at people it's weird when have him here. Yeah, he like loses it on stage. Yeah, it's really not cool.

Yells at people. It's weird when you hear stories like that, like someone like losing it, yelling at people and shit. I've heard like weird stories about people. Yeah. I think the pressure of stand-up, like the constant performance. It's like running an engine at very hot, at high RPMs for many, many miles. Like things blow. And we're all kind of crazy people to begin with. some people have that more in check than others but yeah i don't want to name

any names but i've seen i've seen a couple hot ones yeah yeah yeah yeah it's the most fun people though yeah that fucking green room like the hang in the green room it's like one of the greatest things of all time it's just excellent man it's it's set up like you can just tell it was designed by a comedian you know what i mean or at least like there was uh that perspective was taken into account and tonight uh after the show we'll go to the bar because the bar becomes like a speakeasy at 11 p.m it's a private club from 11 p.m on so it's open to the public until 11. And then after the shows, the comics and the staff all come down and hang. Amen. It's the best, dude.

Hell yeah. We just created what I thought would be the perfect environment to develop comedy. So there's two nights of open mics, which I think is very important. And Bill Burr and I were talking about this when he was in town. And he was like,

that's something that a lot of these clubs just forgot. They just want to fill the place every night and make a lot of money. But you've got to have a farm team. You've got to have guys coming up. You've got to have places where women can go on stage, where men can go on stage, where anybody can go on stage. You don't have to have any experience. You don't have to have nothing. You just have to have a dream and some ideas and a sense that you think you

could be funny and you can get up yeah and when you know one of the things that's cool about it and i think a lot of this is like because it's your club that there's just um there's this kind of like uh there's just this thing in you where you're like, you can be fearless here. You know this is like, to borrow a safe space to be a comedian, like go for it. And it's almost because it's your club and you know the crowd knows that, they know that like they're coming for comedy here. And it's just great because that's one of the things

that's especially in cities across America now. Like in terms of like regular showcase clubs, it's different when you go out and headline, because that's kind of like your crowd coming, but just random spots and stuff, that's a lot of comics that's kind of in the back of their mind, like, oh man, is there gonna be someone here

who's looking to get offended at something I'm saying? That's a real thing. There are, I've seen it. I've seen it at clubs, it's fucking bizarre, where someone will start a premise, and then someone will yell out, bullshit, fuck that. They'll yell out to virtue. They'll have my flag of virtue.

I will hold it up in this crowd of people that are trying to enjoy something that's obviously not real. It's called stand-up comedy. You know what it is. I remember I had a bit about this on my Hour that I put out in 2017 and it was just like right when Donald Trump, you know Like first came into office But I remember like working out stuff at clubs in New York City and if you started a premise about

Donald Trump you could feel the tension in the room where people being like you better not like him like you better get to the Point where you're against him like are you on my team? You're not you're not on my team yet, but you could like feel it in you know, especially, New York Yeah, dude. I was there when he got elected and Me and my friend cam Haines were you there Jamie? We're walking us in Jamie to we're walking down the street And there was an anti-trump protest and I was watching this guy And this guy this fucking stereotypical liberal progressive white guy was walking down the street and he was

He was chanting out Donald Trump KKK Racist sexist anti-gay, Donald Trump. And then he saw this black couple walking towards him and he starts going, black lives matter. Black lives matter. He just like on cue. It's like he got up. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That part. Black lives matter. He just starts in like, this is adorable. These people are adorable. It is really. It's something bonk. He really, Donald Trump, um, he broke a lot of brains. Yeah. I don't know.

It's a really weird impact that he had on people where he just got them so angry that they could no longer think straight. I remember I was living in the Upper West Side of Manhattan at the time. Um, when, when he first got elected and I remember seeing like some of those like protests. I remember seeing, you know, like I remember a couple with like their little girl, like maybe she was like 12 or something like that. And she was holding up a worst president ever sign. And you're like, OK, first off, he's had the job for two months. Second off, this is very disrespectful to all of the horrible presidents before him. Like LBJ slaughtered like two million Vietnamese.

He doesn't even get like a shot at contention here. You're already giving it to Trump. Give him time. He'll do some bad things. He's probably involved in the Kennedy assassination as well. Almost certainly. Yeah, probably. You don't want to talk about that.

Seems like he didn't like JFK. Seems like maybe he liked the CIA. It seems that way, but you don't want to talk about it too much, Joe. You could lose your Fox News gig that way. You know what I love about LBJ? He used to take a shit with the reporters like standing there. Yeah. With a stall open.

He was a wild dude. Just take a shit. Come on, come on. Let's talk. He would just sit there and fucking grunt one out. It's the strangest but yet most alpha thing to possibly do. Yeah. To just comfortably

shit watch me shit while you while you talk to someone about cambodia yeah but yeah that's a wild move watching people shit it's a wild move watching it's it's more wild to just have the confidence to just shit in front of people he's like i'm the fucking president yeah he's just i guess yeah he was a bad guy elected would have never been elected well you can't say never because if biden was running against him he probably would have been elected yeah jesus oh biden was only 50 at the time the fact that he's running again is so wild when you watch him talk the fact that there's no leadership that can find a solution to this because there really is no solution.

I mean, we've bantered about it, you and I, and a lot of other people have as well. Like, what are they going to do? Like, what is what is that other than Biden dying very soon and then someone stepping up in a big way that makes sense? Which is not beyond the realm of possibility. He's older than the average life expectancy, I believe, already. Not saying he will die, but that is possible. I'm sure there are a lot of people in the Democratic establishment who have been... I could just imagine there's a boardroom with very powerful people meeting who they're like, okay, we're getting them out.

What's the plan? How do we do this? And I think they just cannot come up with one. I can't come up with one. I mean, I'm not a political strategist, but I know the landscape. I know who's out there. He's perhaps brilliantly insulated himself

by making Kamala Harris his vice president. It's not a bad move. Because they're like, well, we can't have her. It's like with Dan Quayle, with Bush. What do you want? You want this guy? Look at this fucking guy. Yeah, it's amazing. It's a good move.

I mean, it's kind of a bitch move, though. You know what it's kind of like? It's kind of like those headliner comics who bring terrible openers. Yeah, that's what it is. You know? You really want to do an hour after Kamala Harris? Like, all right. The crowd's dead, but all right.

Time is like time. It just passes and time is something that we're all aware of. But I gotta say, I don't understand a joke, because sometimes you'll see it and you're like, all right, you're doing a thing here. Like, this isn't real. You're like, is this a strategy of some sort to just say nothing and like sound as dumb as possible?

Because you can't be this dumb. I think it's panic. Maybe. I think it's anxiety and I think it's panic. And I think no one can understand, even you and I who perform live in front of strangers all the time, we would never be able to understand the kind of pressure that must be on a person who's deeply unqualified for the job and then all of a sudden finds herself in there through, you know, some, I mean, he went out of his way to say that he was going to have a black woman.

Like it was a thing that he wanted to do. It was like they had these these diversity and inclusivity checkpoints that they had to reach. Which is also just a really shitty thing to do to her. It's like a you know she's a you want a woman of color in there or whatever the the thing to do would be to say I'm gonna find the absolute best most qualified person and then pick her but if you do that like that would be more generous toward her because then it makes it look at least like she was the best person for the job whereas if you say I'm gonna make sure I pick a black woman now you get all the the brownie points for like oh how woke you are but now you kind of undermine her as like well she's the best black woman i could find that's not necessarily the best candidate or you know so it's a shitty move i think it's a good thing that i've talked to a lot of intelligent people that think it's

important for representation and i'm like i would i could see how you would say that in a lot of intelligent people that think it's important for representation and i'm like i would i could see how you would say that in a lot of jobs but this is probably the most important one that anyone could ever have ever so see what i gotta be it's got to be a meritocracy well what's what's weird about it is it's almost as if there's some weird prejudice built into that idea. Because if you don't believe in like superiority or inferiority of different races or different groups. Or genders. Right, different genders.

Then you would just go, well, make it a meritocracy and let the absolute best person have the job. And I'm confident in that system that lots of different people will be represented. Whereas if you're saying like, well, no, we need to make sure it's, like, wouldn't it be more ideal to just have the best person at every job than to have any type of forced diversity?

Like, why would that not be better? Everyone in society is better off if the best person qualified for jobs gets those jobs. You want the best scientists and the best doctors and the best pilots and the best, you want everyone to be the best person qualified for jobs gets those jobs. Yes. You want the best scientists and the best doctors and the best pilots and the best, you want everyone to be the best. Yeah. No one ever wants, you know,

no one ever wants like your surgeon to be picked based on anything other than the best at performing this surgery. Yes. Yeah. You don't ever say, I want a white man doing surgery on me. Who the fuck,

is that Chinese lady the best? Bring her in. Like do more people survive when she does it? Jesus Christ. I'd like her. Who's the expert? Fix my brain. Yeah.

It's interesting because it's like, it's very similar in some ways to affirmative action, right? And affirmative action, in my opinion, is you're addressing a problem without addressing the root of the problem. The root of the problem is why are so many people of color disenfranchised? Why are so many people who grow up in neighborhoods where there's rampant crime and violence? And why haven't they fixed those fucking neighborhoods? They're dumping so much money into all these problems overseas

We have systemic problems in America that never get addressed until those and this is like Generations it takes to fix these problems generate. It's like a long-term strategy But I always said this if you want to make America the best what would be the best way to do that? Well, you want less losers, right? So what's the best way to have fewer losers? To give more people opportunities. So who are the people that have the least opportunities? The people that are in the most fucked places.

You could fix that. There's ways you could dump tons of money and resources into inner cities, into these problem areas with law enforcement, with community centers, places where people could go, where they have things to do and people can train them in whether it's athletics or different jobs and different, and show them and mentor them. That's all, that's not like prohibitively impossible. You're not saying like they all deserve their own nuclear power plant.

You know what I'm saying? It's like what you're saying is totally doable. And that's the way to fix all these problems of disparity. Because people that grow up in wealthy communities where everyone is sort of trying to achieve things. There's a vibe of those places. And so many of those people from those places wind up succeeding. Yeah, I think it's a lot of it. I think also is that there's a very kind of like shallow narrative about what it is that keeps people in these areas down.

And so it's kind of like, you know, it's just, well, it's racism or it's systemic racism, just these kind of terms that aren't specific. It's like, wait, what is actually happening here? And so much of the problem is that like the kind of culture and family units have just been destroyed. Like they've been decimated. And then it's like you can pump money into like the public schools there, which we do. We spend a lot of money on public schools and they're still crappy schools and the results are still bad. And if you're not like, you know, even back in. And there's a lot of like like Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell, who are both like two black conservative, really brilliant thinkers. They both wrote a lot about this, how like in the 40s, even during there was, you know, segregation in the South and there was like a whole bunch of horrible policies. But even back then, you know, you could walk around Harlem with no threat of like violence or anything like that. And family units were together.

I believe the black legitimacy rate was higher than the white legitimacy rate at the time. And there were a lot of policies that came in that really destroyed like the family unit. Like what policies? Well, the rise of the welfare state was a really big one. It kind of subsidized single parenthood, which is it's people respond to incentives, even though it seems like that's an ugly thing to think. But if you subset, if you pay people for having children out of wedlock You do get more of it than you otherwise would have and the other major one to me was the the war on drugs Which I just think was absolutely devastating to these these neighborhoods It's you know when just like with prohibition of alcohol where we I think was still the highest homicide rate in American history was under prohibition of alcohol and

And then when once they legalized alcohol again, it drastically reduced in the next few years. The same thing with the prohibition of drugs. You create these black markets. You create a lot of violent crime. And that's what's really destroying these neighborhoods is the violent gang culture. And it's all built and funded around drugs, the black markets for which would not exist if we just called the whole thing off. It's just calling the whole thing off is so scary politically, because if you were a guy like Joe Biden that said, I'm going to legalize all drugs, you know, people would fucking turn on you.

They'd freak the fuck out. Yeah. Well, getting the political will up to do it is something. But I mean, you even see it even with this. You know, we got like 100,000 ODs a year now. And so much of it is driven by the fact that people are getting fentanyl and shit that they don't even know it. That's not supposed to have fentanyl in it because it's in black markets. And Joe Biden is absolutely, I mean, it's hard to like hate him so much now because he's so old and senile, it's hard to even hold him responsible. But his career career he was like probably the the worst person on this issue joe biden since the 80s was pushing ramp ups in the war on drugs he he challenged ronald reagan from the right uh partnered up with strom thurman uh and was was criticizing reagan for being too soft on drugs and then he was the one who authored the crime bill

that Bill Clinton signed into law. He's got a lot of death and destruction on his old hands. Yeah, that crime bill. The whole just war on drugs thing is such a strange issue because logically everyone knows that when you legalize things and certainly when you decriminalize things, you get a giant drop in violent crime. You get a giant drop in addiction. It's, it's so counterintuitive, but people are so terrified because drugs have been so devastating.

Like the, cause I think that if we did legalize all drugs and it happened quickly, you're going to have more overdoses. You're going to have more deaths You're going to have more addicts. You're just going to because there's gonna be more access Yeah, but you know, I don't know when does it balance out? Well, I don't know I think there will be more access for sure but I don't I think so many of the overdoses now are because people become addicted to pain pills or become addicted to Heroin and get fentanyl in it. And you wouldn't have that if drugs were legal.

So you wouldn't have, you would have, like there's not a problem with people smoking cigarettes and finding out there was fentanyl in their cigarettes. You know what I mean? Because it's not, but there would be, or there could be if it was on a black market and you were just getting it from some gang member, you know? So it would reduce,

I think it would reduce overdoses in that sense um there's no question it's a trade-off there's no good perfect solution where there's not any costs but um but the major benefit would be you would eliminate like the the gang violence and already even i think when they um i don't have this like numbers right at the top of my head on the front of my head but um the the weed trade from mexico that used to be the big thing and I think that's all but gone now because like necessarily It's not Apparently because there's so many states where marijuana is still illegal, right? Most of the illegal weed is actually being grown on state land by the cartels. Is that right? Yeah

Yeah, there's a guy named John Norris. He wrote a book called Hidden War and he came on the podcast to discuss it. He actually was a game warden and, you know, wanted to have a job like, you know, checking fishing licenses and stuff, doing game warden stuff. And he detailed it in the book how they found this creek that had been diverted and dried up and they were trying to fit. They thought maybe a farmer had done this or something some obstruction and they traced it to this grow up that was in the middle of the forest and his unit became like a tactical unit because they were

having gunfights with cartel members instead of it being like game warden now it became like a dea type situation right where you're running into these public land grow ops where these guys they take this area and they level it and they they grow weed there and these guys were camping there and you know they had guns and it's wild shit man it's the whole book is incredible and the story interesting so that's 90 he was saying of all the illegal marijuana that's being sold in America is coming out of these places. Yeah. Yeah. No, there's, I mean, this is why, again, this is why I think you just got to call the whole thing off at a certain point. It's been a failure. I mean, we've been doing it for, what is it? 40 something

years or something. I mean, it's like, or maybe more than that. Is it 50 years now? Yeah. I think it's 1970, 72 or something like that. It started, you know, 50 plus years. Yeah, I think right 1970 72 or something like that. You know 50 plus years Yeah, I mean it's like okay, so we fought a war and the drugs won and now it's time to just like with the Taliban They're not to accept they keep winning like they're winning and they're killing us It's destroying our country and it's not the legal ones It's the illegal ones and the reason why it's destroying it is because they're illegal So it's also propping up the cartels. It's like they just right.

You could walk right over there. People walk over here, walk right over there. And you have literally one of the scariest results of drug prohibition right there where you have insane crime and insane resources. The cartels have They control the government. They control cities. It's wild shit. And it's all because of our policies. And it's interesting that we got the guy in the White House

who was the champion of it for those entire 50 years. I mean, maybe he wasn't in the whole 50 years, but he was in for like 40 plus of them. And he was the great champion of it. And it's so funny that now he like, you know runs on like diversity Yeah, but I you know, but I hired the first you know, vice president who's black or whatever, you know It's like yeah sure I threw you know hundreds of thousands of them in cages, but now look at me I got one right next to me. Yeah, and yes, she's an idiot, but okay

They're so funny how Dylan Mulvaney is But okay, but it's so funny how Dylan Mulvaney is like the person they all go to whether it's Bud Light or the president like even the president was getting interviewed by Dylan Mulvaney, which is like What do you why like what is the like and she's talking about day 300 of womanhood and biden's like bless your heart like you know it's so funny did you did you hear the thing where joe biden uh lied and said he was for gay marriage since like the 70s or something like that or whatever it was so he's yeah he's just making stuff up but it was so funny because it's um because he's just so old and you know when old people try to say the politically correct thing and no matter how they say it, it still comes out like old and raw.

You know, it's just like, you know, they're just like, colored people could read just as good as me and you. And you're like, oh, dude, that's the most racist thing. So he goes, he goes, he's telling the story of when he was a kid and his dad and he saw two gay people kiss.

And then he goes, and then one of them walked into the bank. Like they had a job just like you or me. You know, like, he was like, you're like, yeah, dude, they're people. Like, what are you, this was a revelation to you? Like, it still just sounds so fucked up, but he's trying to be cool.

What was the thing that he said something about, just like white kids can? He was talking about poor people? He said, poor kids are just as bright as white kids and you're like oh my god jesus the freudian slips like ah it's like you just but it's just also like you know in the same way that if any of us had like you know our 85 year old grandpa at the table yeah every now and then if they say some things you're going to roll your eyes you're almost like yeah you can't expect him to be with the times on this.

You're like, just stop making Biden talk about this stuff. He's not with the, but the fact that he has to not only do that, but has to be with the latest woke insanity. Like that this guy, like that any man in their 80s has got to be like, oh yeah, Dolan Mulvaney. Totally. That's a beautiful woman right there. That's what I'm looking at. Beautiful woman. But he's got to like actually do that is just hilarious.

Yeah, it's very interesting. It's really interesting the mental gymnastics that people will put themselves through. Yeah, it's really something. Just the idea that they're not stopping him from running again. I mean, it's just, you can't. I'm shocked. I didn't think, I thought they were going to replace him as the nominee at the last minute in 2020.

I was shocked he did that. And I was sure he'd be a one-term president. And I'm still now not even convinced he's going to be the nominee in 2024. But the more time goes on, I guess they're actually doing this. Well, the fascinating thing is they will not allow for the primaries. They're not going to allow debates. Oh, they don't want to let RFK on a stage with Biden. Yeah.

RFK will rip that old man up. And then imagine if his voice was good. It's really a shame. It is a shame. It's really the job. Really. The job is really a speaking tour. Yeah.

And it's a it's a real issue that he has. He job really, the job is really a speaking tour. Yeah. And it's a real issue that he has issues speaking. He did have surgery recently and it's better than it was before. Is it better? Yeah. But he's an interesting guy in a lot of ways. And I know people will say, you know, because he was like a vaccine skeptic way before the COVID vaccine. He's been a skeptic of vaccines in general. And a lot of people say that's like,

oh, you know, this is a conspiracy theory or it's too far. But you know, that argument after COVID is really much weaker than it used to be. Because people are actually like, yeah, I'm listening now. Now I'm actually kind of listening to that guy. It seems like there's a playbook.

And you guys have been following this playbook forever. Yes. And I got his speech, his announcement speech last week. He spoke for over an hour. And I mean, it was really fantastic. I don't agree with everything the guy says. But the major theme of his speech was that there is this unholy alliance of big business and big government. And they're working together to screw over the American people.

And like damned if anyone can argue that that's not true. No, that's just so obviously the case, you know, and he went through this whole thing. He's really he was really great on the stuff on the war in Ukraine and being skeptical about like, what the hell are we doing here? Really, really great on the COVID stuff. And he's a Kennedy. And he's not just like one of these like, you know, like peripheral Kennedys,

like I married a third cousin type Kennedy. Like he's Bobby Kennedy's kid. There's something powerful about that, even still. And it's amazing that we've come so far, we're so far gone that they're not grasping that. They're not latching onto that. You want a Democratic president? Like, he could be the guy.

But the thing is, they don't want that. They want someone who adheres to the narrative 100% completely, doesn't get off track, is in cahoots with big business and big tech and everything else. Well, it's just that like the narrative is part of it, but the narrative serves the system, you know? So the problem is that he's kind of outside the system,

at least to some degree. At least he seems like he is. I don't know. But there's also something to, you know, look, I don't know exactly. In fact, I haven't heard him address it. I'm sure he has. But I don't know exactly where he is on his uncle and his father's, you know, assassinations.

But I know that his dad was completely convinced that the JFK assassination was a conspiracy that they weren't telling us about. He did not buy it all into the Lee Harvey Oswald lone wolf thing. So it's got to also be, you're a different type of outsider to the system if you believe the CIA killed your uncle. That's a little bit different than just- And maybe your dad, too. And maybe your dad, yeah. That's a little bit different than just like,

while I disagree with my opponent, I respect his opinion or something like that. That's a real like, no, you understand how evil and corrupt this system is. And that's what makes him an attractive candidate to me. I like people who recognize how evil and corrupt the system is because it really is both of those things. And he's got direct connection to it.

It was evil to his family. Yeah. It's just... Have you read the real Anthony Fauci? His book? No, I haven't. I've heard him talk about it in several different interviews. Yeah. If he hasn't been sued yet, and he hasn't been sued yet for it, like, does that mean it's true? I mean, he's got so many references in that book.

If you read that book, just when they talk about what they did during the AIDS pandemic, holy shit, man. Fauci's a very bad guy. What they did, I mean, in the book, I mean, I don't want to paraphrase. I want to make sure I'm accurate about this, but they tested vaccines on foster kids, including babies. Like, when you read what they did

during the pandemic, and it's spooky fucking shit. Also shit also like the application of AZT as a treatment that AZT was a chemotherapy medication that was killing people quicker than cancer it's scary stuff man when you when when he talks about Arthur Ashe and Arthur Ashe taking AZT and dying very quickly afterwards and that Arthur Ashe didn't even like have any symptoms before he got on medication. Well, it's one I think one of the things that people a lot of people have woken up to this over the last few years with all of the covid insanity. And I think a lot of people have woken up to this over, say, the last 20 years of all the disastrous wars in the Middle East is that it's very. say the last 20 years of all the disastrous wars in the Middle East, is that it's very easy for them to just be like, oh, look, we have consensus amongst the expert class.

You know, like we have consensus amongst the scientists that this is we need lockdowns and then we need these vaccine mandates and we need all of this. And all this is the science. The scientists agree. But then once you actually like look into it a little bit, you realize that it's like, no, it's not that it's like, no, it's not that there's consensus amongst the scientists. It's that any scientist that doesn't agree with the consensus gets kicked out. Like they all get excommunicated and silenced. And then, oh, it's just, it's this completely corrupt group that is very involved with this money making

machine. And you're like, oh, there's such perverse incentives here and so it's like and and the people realize this when after time it just gets demonstrated that what they were saying is wrong yeah like no one's art no one can argue anymore that if you get the covid vaccine you can't get or transmit covid no one's arguing that anymore because it's just you can't keep up that lie anymore that was so quick yeah it was so I mean, that lie was being pushed on mainstream news just a couple of years ago. Well, dude, me and you were like talking about this stuff. It's so it's like it seems like not really that long ago. Right. That we were having like some conversations where there'd be these clips of what we were saying.

And it would be like, look at this covid misinformation. And it's and now you're like, uh-huh. Let's let's look back at that. The World Health Organization is now saying that the vaccine shouldn't be given to kids. And the thing you said that was so controversial that Fauci had to comment on it was you were like, for young people, I don't know if I'd really tell you to take this vaccine. Just be really healthy. Say like, eat really well, exercise, get a lot of sunlight. That was your dangerous misinformation that you were

spreading. Let's put that up against. And at the same time fauci was saying if you get the vaccine you're not going to get covid you can't transmit it you're like so who's who's spreading misinformation oh yeah they knew it was misinformation because they had never tested it for transmission yes they they knew it the woman uh i'm blanking on her name but she was on the task force the original task force in 2020. She's the lady who's always there at the podium with Trump and Fauci. Yes. Yes. She said in like a kind of diplomatic way, but she was like now she goes, I always knew that it wouldn't prevent transmission. And I felt that we overreached when we were making that claim.

I felt that we overreached when we were making that claim. And you're like, overreached? Lady, all of the policies that you put into place were built around that idea. The whole idea of vaccine mandates and vaccine passports and all of this, this was all predicated on the idea that it wasn't just your choice. Like, it wasn't just like, oh, you're choosing for your own health risk, that you were protecting other people. That was the whole idea that the whole thing was based on. If that's not true, then there was no justification for this.

And millions of people lost their jobs over this. Not to mention just the amount of people who were just like disenfranchised, like in major cities across the country. You couldn't go to a restaurant or couldn't go to a basketball game or whatever, which may seem less important than the ones who lost their job. But it's still fucked up. It's all fucked up because it was also incentivizing people to go along with something that they might not have wanted to do. Yeah. And then when you see the amount of people that got damaged because of that, both financially,

physically, vaccine injuries, you know, ostracized from their communities, how many marriages broke up, how many marriages broke up? How many friendships broke up? I know a lot of people that were skeptical about the COVID vaccine and they were shamed by their friends and they lost contact with those people. They stopped being friends with them. I know a lot of people whose mental health really deteriorated during the lockdowns as well. Oh, yeah. Without a doubt. There's a lot of people that were already struggling before the pandemic and that pushed them over the edge.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's really like it's something to look back on it now a few years later and just like how crazy it was that we did this, like the lockdowns that you were just like people were at home watching TV to find out from their governor holding a daily press conference telling you what you're allowed to do today. That was reality. And if you think about it from like a mental health point of view, what could be worse than to just be like, okay, listen, I want you to stay home. I don't want you to see your friends. I don't want you to go out to a game. I want you to stay home and be terrified of a floating abstraction that can come get you at any point. And on top of that, you're probably also gonna be terrified about your economic security, your financial future, all of this stuff. It's the worst thing you could do for people.

So yeah, like you said, for people who are on the edge already, that's really bad. And then there was a lot of old celebrities who were really terrified of it, who were just calling everybody a fucking moron for not taking it. You're you fucking idiots. You're going to ruin it all for everyone. Fuck your freedom.

All that stuff. Remember that? Yep. That's all that shit is wild. It's so wild to see now. Yeah. And I do think like I'm not my personal view is that I think like I think for the people at the very top, like I really do think there should be criminal charges. I think we should have Nuremberg-type trials for what people did.

I think it's one of the greatest crimes perpetrated on the American people by the government. Especially if we funded the research that caused it in the first place. Which we did. I mean they can argue, no, we were funding other gain of function research at that same lab. But come on, man, we were funding the lab where this virus almost certainly came from. So, but just saying that at the top level, I think people should be prosecuted. They should go, Fauci should be prosecuted, clearly, at least for lying to Congress, if nothing else. And he out and out lied. Straight up lied. And now that's proven. if nothing else.

And he out and out lied. Straight up lied. And now that's proven. Yes. But then like for other people, like you can't, I'm not saying everyone who supported the lockdown should like go to jail or something.

We have to forgive people. But I do think there should be some process where like some type of reconciliation, but I don't, I don't think people should forget. Like I don't think people, like the thing you were just saying

about Arnold Schwarzenegger and stuff like that and all that. Don't forget what these guys were willing to jump on board with. Yeah. Like, and how much further would they have gone? Right. You know what I mean? Like, they pushed it pretty far and these guys were completely on board. Like, is it really that unthinkable to say if they were like, hey, we're going to round up the unvaccinated and put them into camps, take them away from their family you know is that i don't think so some people would have gone along

with it imagine if the pandemic was worse imagine if this disease instead of killing a fraction of one percent imagine if it killed five percent people would be on board with it if it killed ten percent people would be on board with it it would i mean it's funny because what um sam harris had that uh that uh thing he had a clip where he was saying that basically like he was making the argument that like hey if this thing was worse you all we wouldn't have tolerated any of this covid misinformation here's why that's wrong because the vaccine still sucks yeah no it's yeah i mean if you change if you change all of the fundamentals and you make it a vaccine that's perfect and the thing is worse than, okay, fine.

But when he said it, the first thing I'm thinking of, it's like, oh yeah, no, even in your scenario, you guys would have gone full Nazi. Like that's what would have happened if it was way worse because you guys wouldn't have just been like light totalitarians. You would have gone to like some full dark totalitarian thing. And so what now? Now you're going to what? We no longer have freedom of speech and you're going to just, what are you going to do?

What are you going to do to the person who says, I don't want to get the vaccine now? And when you eliminate that freedom of speech and you allow that government overreach and control, it never goes away. It never goes away. way. It never goes away. And the fact that people don't recognize that and they can't just make these logical thoughts about the future. Like if we do this, what happens if someone gets in power and they're evil and they already have these new controls that we put in place? Like that was during the NDAA. Remember when Obama was like, we would never, you know, detain people for no reason. Remember when Obama was like, we would never, you know, detain people for no reason. Like, yeah, you wouldn't.

As he signed it into law. Yeah. But just saying that you don't, you would never use it, then don't have it. Yeah. You should need a fucking warrant. There should be like a reason why someone gets detained. There shouldn't be an indefinite detention. Yeah.

Indefinite. If people don't know the reference in the in the NDAA Act forget which year it was 2011 I think there was this provision that said that under the auspices of the war on terror that The government can detain an American citizen and hold them indefinitely with no charges if they decide that you are in some way Connected to some type of group and obama signed it into law but he put a signing statement on the bill and said i do not plan on invoking this this privilege and i we do not plan on detaining anyone be like but that's not enough to veto the bill like that's like oh yes this bill does technically repeal the bill of rights but i'm still gonna sign it but you don't worry about that it should be illegal it should be illegal to go against the ideas that founded this country.

Well, the thing is, what's weird is that it is illegal. I mean, like the Constitution is the supreme law of the land. This is what they all hold their hands up to and take an oath to swear to protect and defend. But the thing is that it doesn't really matter. Like the thing about laws is that they're just words written on a piece of paper. So it doesn't really matter what's technically legal or illegal. What matters is what people can get away with doing. Like Obama murdered American citizens with no charges, two of them at least. That is illegal. That is very clearly illegal. This was, you're talking about drone strikes. Yes, it was

suspected. Well, there was, it was Anwar al-Aw al-haqi and his his son now with the son who was like 14 or 15 they came back and killed him a few weeks after they killed the father now i believe they claim he was not the target of the drone strike like that he was just collateral damage still i would argue should be illegal um but i also most people don't buy that because it's just like, seems very obvious that they were trying to take him out. But the Anwar al-Awlaki guy certainly had been radicalized and I think had sworn allegiance, uh, allegiance, uh, allegiance to Al Qaeda. Um, but he's still an American citizen. And the rules are, if you're an American citizen are, you have to be charged with a crime and then you get a lawyer in a suit and a judge in a robe

and 12 people who are like pooled randomly and they decide if you're guilty of a crime and by the way they can he was in Yemen at the time but they can charge you and have a trial and if you don't show up to it they still you know what I mean like convict you of it right but there's a whole process you don't just have the president drop a sky robot on you because he says you're guilty of these crimes. And it's funny when people, they'll still talk about Obama, be scandal-free administration. What was his biggest scandal? He wore a tan suit or something. And you're like, how about the murdering American citizens without charges? That was a pretty big scandal, in my opinion. And what about the people that got killed by drones that were totally innocent, which is somewhere in the range of 90%?

It was over 90%. There was one report that came out about that that I think said somewhere in the neighborhood of like 95% of the people killed in drones were collateral damage, were not the targets of the drones. People like to think of these things as they call them precision strikes. Yeah, surgical. We're not the targets of the drones. These, you know, they like to, people like to think of these things as they call them precision strikes, but like they're not surgical strikes. They're bombs that blow shit up. You know what I mean? And yeah, a lot of innocent people die. And then out of those, it's even higher than that because what they're counting as the

target of the strikes just means you were put on a list, which is not always, does not always mean that you were actually a terrorist because what happens is a lot Of times they're working with these groups on the ground They kind of bribe them to rat out who's a terrorist but a lot of times those groups are just giving you like their enemy You know what I mean like someone they want to get killed or they're just coming up with names because they want you to keep Bribing them the whole thing was such a clusterfuck man And some of it is still going on to this day although now we've decided to flirt with an even much more dangerous nuclear war. But, yeah, and even the Saudis and giving them the green light

and refueling their fighter jets so they could genocide the people of Yemen for eight freaking years. That was the worst of it. And just goddamn tragedy. Yeah, but he talked so well. He gave a hell of a speech. Great president.

He really gave a hell of a speech. Great statesman. People forget how good he was. The job aged him a lot, too. So he wasn't as good at the end as he was at the beginning. But if you go listen to his, it's nonsense. It's mostly just like gooey nothingness. But if you listen to his speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, his official acceptance speech.

It's just like, it's a masterclass on public speaking. He would just say these things, even when they were like meaningless. But he would, like, I remember, I'm trying to think if I can remember. He has this thing where he's like, he's like, he's like, I love this country and so do you and so does John McCain. The men and women who have fought and died in our armed forces have been Democrats and Republicans and independents, but they did not die defending a red America or a blue America. They died defending the United States of America.

It's like, but the way he would deliver it, it really just tugs at your insides and makes you like, God damn. And then after a little while, you walk away and you're like, wait, but what did he say right you're like oh there was nothing i mean there's nothing it wasn't like you know well that's a he did say some good things when he ran though he did i mean he he ran on some really good policies like ending the the the wars and uh closing guantanamo bay and repealing the patriot act and restoring the rule of law and you know ending torture and all the shame is he did none of it. And I think that's, like, I go back and forth. You could pick any president really of my lifetime.

You'd be like, who ruined the 21st century for America? You could certainly make an argument for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. But there's something about Obama, I think I put probably more blame than anyone else on him because he was supposed to be the response. And like that's – the way this system of government is supposed to work or so they say is like, well, we have these democratic processes. So you can – if you're upset with these guys, you can kick the bums out and vote for

these guys. And obviously we all know it's like, then they narrow it down to two teams and those two teams happen to have the same policy when it comes to the military industrial complex or the banking industrial complex or the pharmaceutical industrial complex. They're all on the same side. So that's how the uniparty works. No matter who you vote in, they're all supposed to be. But the country was so furious with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who handed him two disastrous failed wars and the worst financial crisis in 100 years. And they were so furious with know, everything that was the opposite of George W. Bush. And he was supposed to be the answer. And then he got in and just continued the Bush, like the Bush administration. It might as well have been the third and fourth term of George W. Bush.

And that is where the country spins out to me. That's where you end up with Trump. I bet if you were friends with Obama, if you could, if you really were friends with him, if you could have a couple of drinks, maybe spark up a joint and talk to that guy, if he really trusted you and knew you were never going to tell anybody, I bet he could tell you some shit. Yeah, I bet you're right. I'm more of like a believer in what Putin has said about this when he talks about how he's been through three different presidents and they all have these plans and he goes and they get into office and people that are dressed in a suit like mine come in, sit them down and tell them how everything works. If you think about how much access to the real understanding of how the government works is

ever going to be given to a junior senator who's running for president. I bet very little. I bet very little. I bet there's no speeches. I bet there's no conversation about it. I think once you get in, once you're in the Pentagon, once you're in the Oval Office,

once you're meeting with these people and you realize, like, holy shit, and then you realize this machine behind you that's pushing all the buttons and you're a spokesperson for this machine. Yeah. I think this might be why they hated Trump so much because I think that speech just didn't work on him.

Yeah. He's like, yeah, there's this story and I don't know if this is true or not, but it sounds so true. I think it was in Bob Woodward's book. I can't remember where it was, but this may not be true, but it just sounds so true that I guess after Trump won the election and he goes to Camp David, I think this is still while he was president elect. It might've been right after he got in. I'm not sure, but I guess he goes and he's like at this like CIA like thing. And they said that he came in and there's like a wall for like agents who died in the line of duty. And they said, Trump just walks in and there's like a wall for like um like agents who died in the line of duty and they said trump

just walks in and stands right in front of it which is like crazy disrespectful to do and he said he just starts talking to the room about how tremendous his victory was like he just gets there and he's like everyone said we were gonna lose but we won big and we won it just sounds like i don't know if that really happened but it so sounds like that really happened And you just imagine all these CIA agents just like we gotta get rid of this guy But like what you said about this stuff like the speech they get who knows it's a real interesting thing to think about I would love to talk to Trump about it's a great bill Hicks The bit about showing the Kennedy assassination from a angle you've never seen before. Such a great bit. But there's, I will say that there definitely are, like what we know, is there definitely are forces that kind of roll over presidents.

And even with Obama, like, you know, if you remember the story with General McChrystal and how he went to the media and told them. crystal and how he went to the media and told them this is the guy who uh michael hastings ended up getting fired because he was you know talking shit about obama to him in a bar maybe whacked well you know he just was driving too fast that night i guess i don't know i don't know the story there let's talk about that one in a minute sure sure i i'm not sure if that is like what happened with that because i have heard that like his brother said he started drinking again or something like that so i don't know the details of that story exactly. Oh, I would drink two of Assassins. Yes.

If I was working on uncovering CIA corruption, I'd probably be drinking. Not just working on uncovering CIA corruption, but you were embedded with these soldiers and they got comfortable with you. Yeah. And then you printed all the things that they said. printed all the things that they said which but what's what's very interesting about that is that it it it was a really good it was really important story because it makes you recognize that like wow even these like very high-ranking generals are talking shit about the president like this ah this fucking asshole doesn't know what he's doing and that but so mccrystal before that interview he went to the media because obama i guess gave him the surge he wanted but he put

an end date on it it was like but our troops will be out by this date and that pissed him off and so he went to the media and told them that you know uh he said i haven't had any contact with the president and we haven't been talking since this and that and then the media was like put all this pressure on obama like you're not even talking to your guy over there in afghanistan and basically kind of tied his hands politically so that he kind of just had to continue the war. And there's a lot of stuff like that that happens. And with Trump, I mean, it was reported that they lied to him about the number of troops in Syria. And when

he said he wanted to pull the troops out, they lied to him and said there were far less than there actually were. And they're just bragging about this. It's really, you realize that this thing is all fake. It's not run the way people think it's run. Yeah, and that is, if anything, I mean, even if you're a Trump hater, you have to recognize that he exposed that. He showed us that in a way that we'd never seen before because they were so furious at him.

They were willing to show their powers. They were almost like witches that start casting spells. You're like, oh. Well, what's weird is that so many of the Trump haters, which like be a Trump hater. I don't know. It's fine. There's a lot to criticize there.

But like so many of the Trump haters will talk about like, you know, undermining our democracy. And he incited an insurrection against like this democratic republic or whatever. But then you'll see things like, look, this just came out within the last week and a half or so that we now know that it was it was Blinkett, the current secretary of state before he came in, who requested that the CIA put together this letter that said there were 50 intelligence experts who had determined that the Hunter agencies are interfering in an election. They're doing it to undermine who was the current president of the United States of America. The guy they work for. They're also openly lying.

Yes. Yes. I mean, all of these are big problems. But the fact that that's not freaking people out, that they openly lied about that. Yeah. I mean, all of this stuff is very troubling. And then of course, you know, um, I mean, that's dictatorship. Well, they just, just not supposed to be how America works.

And if you're a guy that's involved in doing that, like Jesus Christ, how much power do you need? Like you, you can't do that. It's so deeply un-American to, To lie to the American people about something that might affect an election is crazy. And to justify it because you want very important. I think all these people that are understanding what's going on in the world and with no filter, they have all the access to information. If you don't have that in this world, this climate that we live in, I think you're fucked. You can't do that because that's gonna undermine everybody else's Understanding of what you're you're willing to do so all the good work that they do people are gonna mistrust it There's a lot of people that have lost their faith in the intelligence community because of things like this Well and because of the stuff that they do I mean it's like it's not but it's kind of like but I think a lot Of those people are fucking Patriots, which is so fucked.

Yeah, I'm sure there are some. But they're stuck in a system. Yes, but that's the problem. It's like when people say that people are losing trust in these institutions, it's like, well, yes, but it's because they've found out what the institutions are doing. It's like if your wife found out that you're cheating all over her and you're like, well, this is a problem because she's losing trust in me. It's like, well, yeah, but she shouldn't trust you because she found out what you're doing. You know what I mean?

But isn't it who's going to watch the watchmen? Isn't that it? Because when you have any kind of a position like that, where you have just insane power over information and policy and what gets done and no one, no one is managing it from outside of it that's saying, hey, what are you doing? No, that's the constitution. You can't do that. Don't do that. There's no oversight where there's someone who is completely objective is loyal only to the constitution the bill of rights and lays out like the rules these are the fucking rules for america like you can't operate outside of these rules just because you want your guy to win that's un-american that's as un un-American as anything else that you could

be prosecuted for that we get. Think about what Assange did, what they're trying to get after is what's more un-American lying to the American people or exposing the American people to information that has been hidden from them. That's deeply disturbing that would change their opinion on things. And that's criminal, you know, i mean like expose actual war crimes like what is what is america that's the thing like what are we are we the shining light of the world are we the this incredible garden of creativity and innovation because we're that too yeah we're we're a wild fucking amazing experiment in self-government but we've

got to stick to the fucking rules and if you get people in power and no one is able to stop them from not sticking to the rules and then when they do violate the law there's no consequences we forgot what it is to be american it's not good for them it's not good American. It's not good for them. It's not good for us. It's not good for any of us. We're all in this together. You can't do that. Yeah, well, like you said, we are kind of all of those things. You know, we're like, we are this like, you know, it's like in the wise words of the great Eminem. I'm all for America.

Fuck the government. You know, like we're a great. Not even fuck the government. Fuck the bad parts of the government There's there's people in the government that are trying to do the right thing. I know there are there's people in the government that are patriots There's people in the government that really want this place to get better You don't think Bernie Sanders wants the government to get better. I think he definitely wants the world to maybe I think that guy Realistically wants the world to be a better place. I think Tulsi Gabbard realistically wanted the world to be a better place.

She was in government. She was a congresswoman for 10 years. But look what the system did to a good congresswoman. Yeah, but you know what? She recognized that she wasn't willing to be compromised, and she removed herself from what she thought was a corrupt organization. Right, but then like, so what does that say about Bernie Sanders? Right, but I'm just saying that's kind of the way the system works. So it chews up and spits out the people who have some integrity.

Not all of them. There are some who, you know, like stay in. But there is some, I mean, Tulsi Gabbard got called a Russian asset by Hillary Clinton, by the establishment of her own party. Wild. You know, a woman who served, was embedded in a medical unit in Iraq. Served twice. Yeah, really saw the cost of war. Yes, really saw it.

Developed that white streak in her hair from that. Yeah, the war that Hillary Clinton lied us into and voted for. And then she turns around and calls her, like, she says she betrayed the country. It's wild that they think they can say say that because they used to be able to say That with no recourse. They're operating in a world where there was no internet They still have that programming from the world of no internet. Yeah, and also operating in a world You know It's kind of like what you were talking about with like the CIA getting so much power that it just becomes so corrupted and I think

A lot a lot of the story of America and how we've just become so degraded really kind of goes back to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fact that what Charles Krauthammer called the unipolar moment. That in the 90s, it was like, oh, for the first time ever, that's it. America is the lone superpower. And this really is like what all of those guys said, like all the neoconservatives, like the Project for a New American Century and those guys. They were like, this is our moment. We can do whatever we want. We are the sole power in the world. And what they wanted to do was a lot of really awful things.

But it almost created so much power and so much hubris that they just think they can get away with everything. Like there's no limit on what they can do. And it turns out that actually you're not gods. You're just people. And all of these, this carefully perfect, like, okay, well, this is what we'll do. And then this is what's going to happen. You know, we'll overthrow Saddam Hussein and then democracy will sweep the region. And it's like, no, it's actually not going to work out that way.

And to me, to me, that's the whole story of the war in Ukraine right now, too. It was all like, we're going to we've got this perfect plan that we'll just keep expanding NATO and we'll just keep interfering. We'll have these color coded revolutions. We'll take over more and more and we will be the dominant force. And it's like, you know, well, there's consequences to that. It doesn't doesn't just work as perfectly as you planned it out. Just like with all the wars in the Middle East. And what's happening now is very spooky.

It's really spooky because so many people are dying. And they're trying to put a positive spin on it. It's like, what is the end game here? How does this end? How is there not negotiations? And when Trump says that it would have never happened when he was in office and he would be able to stop it now. People listen to that and they're and like that's dangerous too. It's dangerous to have this one solution.

Like he's going to fix it. He's going to fix it. Hey, what if he can't? What if he can't? What if this is a thing that's just like Eisenhower warned everyone about? What if this is a thing? What if there's a fucking whole business just like we're in the business of telling jokes You know people who make pies are in the business of pie making and people make war are in the business of war making and once

That machine gets moving. I mean, it's like a tank with no brakes. It's certainly very hard to stop it we haven't figured out stop it we haven't figured out how to yet and You know Donald Trump can say that. And I would say I think his rhetoric has been much better on this than Joe Biden's. And at least he's talking about negotiating. Do you think he could stop it? Do you think there's a way to somehow or another? Does the president have that kind of power where the president could go in and say, I want to meet with Putin.

I want to organize a negotiation. I want to end this right now. He could say it and then, you know, and then see what I don't know. You know, I don't have to get NATO to pull their arms back. Well, the I mean, the president could certainly you has a lot of leverage there. You know what I mean? Like how much power do you think they really genuinely have? It's an interesting question.

I don't know exactly. I think that's what Putin's. I don't know exactly. I think that's what Putin's point was about getting into office. Yeah, I think that's what he was saying. And it does seem like there's a lot of truth to that. I also, one of the things that makes me skeptical about how great Trump would be on this, that Trump wasn't very good on this issue while he was in. I mean, Trump was the one who sent the weapons into Ukraine. This is, you know, when he got

impeached, it was famously over the Ukraine gate thing was he said he was they said it was a quid pro quo where he was holding up the weapons, putting pressure on Zelensky to investigate the Bidens. But the part of that story that doesn't get talked about that much is that then he caved and he gave them the weapons. And this was a major this was a major reason, I think, why this war ended up happening. And what they said at the time was that they were sending in the weapons to deter the Russians. And so either they're really bad at deterrence or it actually was a provocation because it certainly didn't deter Vladimir Putin from going in. was a provocation, because it certainly didn't deter Vladimir Putin from going in. And I think that, and Trump also got us out of the INF Treaty. He also, like, it was just, he was not good on this. He was, in fact, I think he was trying to prove how much he wasn't a Russian agent. You know what I mean? That he was kind of like being more hawkish toward Russia. Interesting. To show you what a Russian agent I'm not. Oh, no. So I don't know. I don't know what he would do.

It certainly couldn't be any worse than what the plan is right now. And, you know, to your point that you made, because I know last time I was on the show, I talked a lot about this, like kind of the cause of this war in Ukraine. And I put a lot of blame on American foreign policy. And it went super viral.

And I heard back from some people who disagreed But the the funny thing about it is is that it's not like when I was talking about like NATO Expansion and how much of a provocation this was to the Russians when you were talking about like the good people in government It's it's not like it's just Kooks or you know crazy libertarians like me. It was not just like Ron Paul and Noam Chomsky and Pat Buchanan, like the outsiders who were all against NATO expansion. But the list of people within the government, within the national security apparatus who completely opposed NATO expansion is really impressive and long. There's a lot of like really wise people within

the government who were completely against NATO expansion in the 90s when it first started. At least three secretaries of defense, Robert McNamara, Robert Gates, George W. Bush and Barack Obama's secretary of defense, William Perry, who was Bill Clinton's secretary of defense and the secretary of defense at the time, they all opposed it in like the strongest possible language and all explicitly for the reason that this will provoke a conflict with Russia. And they were like, George Kennan, who was the founder of the containment strategy, the old school cold warrior. There's this great interview he gave with Thomas Friedman from the New York Times. You can find it online. And it's in the 90s when they're doing the first round of NATO expansion. And he is like furious, like his anger comes through the page when you're reading it because he's like, what are you guys doing? We won the Cold War. We won. And now you're picking a fight with Russia. And this isn't Vladimir Putin's Russia. This is Boris Yeltsin, you know? And he's like, these aren't the Soviets.

These aren't the communists. These are the heroes who overthrew them. Why are we picking a fight with them? And he was a cold warrior. He was like, you're throwing away my life's work. And he said, and this was a really, you know, a crazy prediction, really ominous. He said, the people who are advocating expanding NATO are going to continue advocating expanding it and expanding it and expanding it. And then there will be a Russian

reaction. And then when there's the Russian reaction, they're going to say, see, that's proof that we have to keep expanding it. And damn, if he wasn't right, if he wasn't right about that. And one more little detail on this, this is really interesting is so there's in 2008 in February of 2008 there was a private cable that the current CIA head Burns Bill Burns who's currently the head of the CIA at the time he was the ambassador to Russia and so he sent a private message to Condoleezza Rice, who was the secretary of state at the time. And this, the only reason we know about this is because of the heroic Julian Assange dumped this. So this was not for the public. This is like what

they were saying to each other. And this memo was titled Nyet means Nyet. And it was about Ukrainian entry into NATO because this had been floated out for a while. Yeah, there you go. Basically, the whole piece is this, the current CIA director telling Condoleezza Rice that this, and he's saying it in diplomatic language. Read it for us.

Yeah. So he says, Ukraine and Georgia's NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns Read it. Readts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split involving violence or, at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene, a decision Russia does not want to have to face.

Now, there's another memo that comes out later that year where he says, and it's really, it's a really interesting thing where he goes, he said, Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines. And Burns says to Condoleezza Rice, again, not to the American public, just to let the secretary of state know, like, this is what I'm saying. He goes, I've spoken to everyone over here. He goes from the craziest right-wingers to Putin's sharpest liberal critics. And it is unanimous to a man. They all agree that Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of red lines, that this is a direct threat to Russia. You cannot do this in the same way Jack Kennedy was saying, you cannot put missiles in Cuba. You cannot bring Ukraine into your military alliance. That was Putin's position. Then this is what they were telling him. And three months after that memo that we were just reading.

So this was in February. They had the Bucharest summit where NATO announced that Georgia and Ukraine were coming into NATO. And this is what, it's like our ambassador to Russia told our secretary of state, do not do this. And then they went, we're just announcing that we're going to do it. And three months after that was the war in Georgia because they announced Georgia and Ukraine were coming in. And then Georgia got ballsy because they felt like they had the backing of the West and they attacked a breakaway province, South Ossetia. And they had Russian peacekeepers there. And Vladimir Putin responded. That was like the first like real response. And he went to war with Georgia over that. And then, you know, like the stuff we talked about last time is when in 2014,

when there was the coup backed by the West in Ukraine. You know, what I like about these segments, too, is like people can argue with like this because I know there are people arguing with me the last time I was here. If you you remember we played the video of Gideon Rose Just bragging about this and he was like dude. It's not me. These are that's the CIA directors words That's Gideon. That's the editor of Foreign Affairs magazine saying this like this is what people in the government were saying and Like one more note that I'll say is that Bill Clinton, secretary of defense, he wrote about this in 2015. So this is after the coup in Ukraine, the Maidan revolution, and after Putin took Crimea. And he basically said that like, this is all my fault. And that his biggest regret was that he didn't resign over NATO expansion. my fault and that his biggest regret was that he didn't resign over nato expansion he said i think he said his biggest regret was that he didn't like do everything he could to stop it and that he didn't ultimately resign over it because this was destined to be like the future that it was

like you know people will say i know people will argue with me on this and they'll say like but like you know nato is just a defensive alliance so why should vladimir putin care if you know we expand this defensive alliance and it's like yeah it's a defensive alliance. So why should Vladimir Putin care if, you know, we expand this defensive alliance? And it's like, yeah, it's a defensive alliance, except for all the times it's not, you know, except for all the times it fights aggressive wars like in Serbia or Libya or Afghanistan. Other than that, I guess they claim it's a defensive alliance. But from Vladimir Putin's perspective, this isn't a defensive voluntary alliance. This is the European wing of the American empire, the most war hungry country in the world who started seven wars in the last 20

years and slaughtered millions of people. Like from his perspective, when you put dual use rocket launchers in Poland, that's not like we're just trying, the official reason is we're just trying to make sure that Iran can't nuke Europe with the nukes that they don't have. But from Putin's perspective, he's like, no, you're trying to cut down on the time it would take for a nuclear weapon to hit Moscow. And so, like, again, it's not that Putin's a good guy because he's not. It's not that he's justified in invading Ukraine. He's not. And all the stories of, like, horrible shit that you've heard that he's done there, he's probably done a lot of them. But man, it's just

that all these guys, these same dumb neocons who had this policy to remake the Middle East, they're the same ones who also had the policy to expand NATO all the way to Russia's border. And man, this is just the dumbest, most reckless policy ever that's now put us in a position where we are closer to a risk of World War III and nuclear war than we've ever been in my life. And for what? For what, to make sure that the Donbass region is ruled by Kiev rather than Moscow?

Like, is that really worth it? Jesus Christ. And you know what I didn't consider until this all broke out? When I started looking at the borders of Russia, you know, when people are explaining why this is so important and why control of Crimea and why control of all these places is so important. Once you look at what used to be the Soviet Union, you realize like, oh, there's all these countries that are connected to them. People can just invade anywhere. The United States has a very unique position in the world.

The North America's position in the world, just where we are separated by oceans. Up until these hypersonic weapons, that was a barrier. It was a huge barrier. And it's still a barrier to conventional warfare. Right. But I don't think we really it's still a barrier to conventional warfare. Right. But I don't think we really have to worry about that. I agree. We have to worry about wild

shit. This is what freaks me out about this whole UFO thing. I wonder how many of those fucking things that we're seeing is a government who's reached some form of technology that we're not aware of yet. And how many of them are ours? And how many of them are China's how many of them are Russia's do those exist?

I don't know. I mean if they exist I would I would think China more than anyone, you know Cuz they they're technological capabilities are fucking so high. Yeah, but I think Russia's put a lot into that stuff also So, I don't know, you know, I don't know that's mean putin claims like he's developed like all of these crazy you know what i mean things over the last few years that that's really what that basically he said that once once uh nato kept expanding so much that they left him no choice but to develop faster and crazier missiles and different technologies and it's just like um you know it's it's weird because i've heard a lot of people i've heard people on this show and on lots of other shows say that the big concern they have is Vladimir Putin winning the war, taking all of Ukraine or just keeping the parts that he wants or something like that. And that then he might be like, oh, hey, I can get away with it.

I'll take Poland or whatever. Now, that to me seems very far fetched. Like he's having enough trouble just taking Ukraine. I really doubt he's moving on Poland next. But it's like, okay, I understand kind of in theory where that concern is. But what about the concern if he loses? Like what if he's humiliated on his own border and Russia is completely destroyed and humiliated? What if like he's attacked within Russia?

What if he's convinced that he's done and he's going to be overthrown or he's going to die? To me, that's actually the most dangerous scenario. Because really nobody's probably going to launch the first nuclear strike unless they're already convinced they're dead anyway you know what i mean and then it's like all right you're gonna take me out i'm bringing you with me type deal right and to me that's the biggest concern what you want to find here is like an off ramp where everyone can save face a little bit you know what i mean like everyone can go home and tell their own people like we did the job you know, like a justification somehow. And it really, it's got to involve like negotiating some type of compromise. And you know, what if he does get overthrown and Russia becomes a failed state?

That's a pretty dangerous scenario too. Imagine Russia becomes like Libya, because when they overthrew Muammar Gaddafi, Libya fell apart. they overthrew Muammar Gaddafi Libya fell apart yep Libya's they have open air

slave markets where you can auction slaves off you could watch them on YouTube Libya's terrifying well it's

that's why it's so crazy because you'll hear people like you know like Lindsey Graham and like idiots like that

will talk about like if Putin's overthrown like almost like it's a given that things are better then and you're like how even if it didn't go to like a failed state like Libya like how about like if Putin's overthrown like almost like it's a given that things are better than You're like how even if it didn't go to like a failed state like Libya

Like how do you know it's not just like a far worse right-wing dictator who comes up and takes over you know what I mean Like why is it's not if there's one thing we've learned from the 20th and 21st centuries It's like sometimes you can overthrow a government and it can be much worse than the one that you overthrow You know we threwments were overthrown after World War I in Russia and Germany. And then came in Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, right? Like it can get a lot worse, even if it's not a Gaddafi failed state type deal, which is also much worse. But you could be looking at something that's far worse than what we have right now But isn't it amazing that that's taken place so many times and yet we still have this idea that Overthrowing them or getting rid of our enemy is that's the solution to the problem. Yeah, it's uh,

Well, it's unbelievable even the fucking Game of Thrones Kings handle it better. Yeah Thrones kings handle it better. Yeah. Yeah, they really... I mean, they fucking got together and worked shit out. Here's when Obama said that the greatest regret of his presidency was not thinking about what would happen the day after they overthrew Gaddafi. And you're like, but you didn't... Like, we just did it in Iraq.

You didn't... That wasn't your thought? You didn't think maybe this... Maybe it'll go crazy? Yeah, this could be bad. Do we have journalists in Libya now? I don't yeah that wasn't your thought you didn't you didn't think maybe it'll go crazy yeah this this could do we have journalists in libya now i don't think so i mean maybe i don't know i mean they've they've done a few pieces on like the open air slave markets i haven't seen anything in a few years who's running libya so i i don't think anyone's running libya libya is like basically warring tribes jesus christ And the only way someone's going to take control

is the biggest warlord. That's usually how it goes. And what are their resources? Is it drugs? Sudan militants spark huge risk in lab with samples of deadly viruses. Oh, terrific. Wonderful.

Terrific. We just happen to have deadly viruses laying around where there's a revolution. You know, it's interesting if you go back and read these guys, like I was talking about the Project for a New American Century. Have you heard of those before? I've heard it from you. 9-11 conspiracy guys, like even some of the kooky guys, it fueled a lot of them because it was basically this, it was a think tank. Its founding signatories were like the Bush administration. It was all the neocons in the nineties who were out. So it was Robert Kagan and, you know, like Bill Kristol and Dick Cheney and, you know, like all the, Paul Wolfowitz, all the kind of like

neocons who ended up taking power in George W. Bush's administration. And they laid out their plans for what they wanted to do. And one of their plans involved overthrowing Saddam Hussein in Iraq and fighting multiple wars and NATO expansion in Europe. And so the 9-11 conspiracy theorists would jump on this and go, aha, this is why they brought the towers down, just so they could get the war in Iraq that they always wanted. Whereas I think the simpler explanation was just like they took advantage of the opportunity when it came and realized they could get what they wanted. But regardless, there's no debate. They're on record. They wanted it back in the 90s. And

one of the, so basically what it's about, it's what the title is, it's a project for a new American century. And they're like, hey, we're in the 90s here. The Soviet Union has fallen. The 20th century was the century of America. And now what's our plan for the next century? What's the plan for the new American century? And they actually say in one of the most famous policy papers, it's really something to say, is they go, look, we have no real threat to our vital interests right now.

There are no real threats to America, our dominance right now. And so what we need to do is fight wars in multiple theaters. So we need to go and now show our dominance to the rest of the world. And so they're actually saying, if you read between the lines, not that much. They're like, we don't need to fight a war, but let's go fight them. Let's go fight him anyway. And this is what happens. They won.

Like all the wise people in government who were opposed to them lost and all the dumb George W. Bushes and Joe Bidens won. And they got their way. And we're living through the results of it. And you're like, oh, great. Isn't this wonderful? Do you remember when that general, was it West? Wesley Clark. Wesley Clark. Wesley Clark, that's right.

Wesley Clark told this reporter in this interview, find that interview because it's so fascinating. He said five countries in seven years or seven countries in five years. And he was like, what are we doing? And, you know, I mean, he's this decorated general who's being presented with this plan. And let's play this because this has not been discussed enough. This can never be discussed enough. It can never be discussed enough. And it's also it's all out there and you're not hearing it.

You know, and this is the fact that journalists aren't like putting this in everyone's face this very information that you're giving out today well the good ones are to be fair I mean like the Glenn Greenwalds and the Aaron Mateys and the Taibis they're doing a great job on this stuff coincidentally all independent yes and coincidentally all vilified

by the establishment and weren't independent initially these guys have all had to stick to their principles and leave to listen to this. Cause this is very fucking wild. About 10 days after nine 11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw secretary Rumsfeld and, and deputy secretary Wolfowitz.

I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the joint staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, sir, you've got to come in and talk to me a second. I said, well, you're too busy. He said, no, no. He says, we've made the decision we're going to war with Iraq. This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, we're going to war with Iraq?

Why? He said, I don't know. He said, I guess they don't know what else to do. So I said, well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda? He said, no, no. He says, there's nothing new that way. They've just made the decision to go to war with Iraq. He said, I guess it's like we don't know what to do about terrorists, but we've got a good military and we can take down governments. And he said, I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail. So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, are we still going to war with Iraq? And he said, oh, it's worse than that. He said, he reached over on his

desk, he picked up a piece of paper. He said, I just, he said, I just got this down from upstairs meeting the secretary of defense office today. And he said, this is a memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran. Sudan. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, they haven't – it's not like that plan was followed perfectly to a T, but a lot of it sure was. And it's pretty crazy to see him – by the way, I don't think he needed to grab Amy Goodman's piece of paper there, which was a weird thing.

Like he goes, look, they showed me a piece of paper just like this, and just takes her paper. Just like regular paper. You could have just told the story without, you didn't really need that visual aid. Yeah, why did you need to grab her? You won't see on her face for a second. She's like, that's all my notes and stuff is on there. I have all my next questions. That's such a good point.

Piece of paper, just like this one. It's a weird thing like like it's a very like military guy type thing to do though this weird kind of alpha like let me just take your shit right here and show you up here anyway but it's pretty it's like insane that this was just said and that's not

just like like if we didn't have such a corrupt press how do they not talk about that every day every day like why does that never come up? Oh, it's like oh as we fought all of these wars no one went, but this is exactly what I heard Mr.. Four-star general tell me was your plan, and you've never come to the American people and said this is my plan You're just like so and what's really interesting about it, right? Is it just reveals this prop like the way propaganda works because if you think about it

We start fighting the war in Afghanistan right, is it just reveals this prop, like the way propaganda works, because if you think about it, we start fighting the war in Afghanistan. We're in the war in Afghanistan by late 2001. It's not till 2003, we're in Iraq, right? And then it's not till 2010 that we're in Libya, 2012, we're in Syria, you know, and then in Yemen, then in all the, and it's like, each time they had their own little propaganda story for why we had to go into this war now. And you're like, no, motherfucker, this was always planned. You decided in 2001, you were doing this. So don't tell me this is because Gaddafi is about to go genocidal or because Saddam has weapons of mass destruction or because Bashar al-Assad is killing his own people. It's

like, no, no, no, no. This is just your latest little excuse now for the war that you already wanted to do. And that's how this shit really works, man. It's like they decide they wanted to fight these wars. Then they make up a bullshit excuse that they tell the American people. Then these weapon companies rake in hundreds of billions of dollars in profits and babies get slaughtered like that's what really happens like innocent men women and children die get exploded to death starve to death get displaced like it's just the most evil shit in the world and we want to think of ourselves as the good guys well that's and that's by the way that's the essence of my point with the whole thing in Ukraine, too, is that it's like I'm not because people go like, oh, you're spreading Russian propaganda.

Like my loyalty is to Vladimir Putin or something like that. Ridiculous. But it's like, no, can you at least even if you support the war in Ukraine, let's say you're like, we have to continue this proxy war of choice in Ukraine. We have to fund Ukraine all the way to the end. Fine. Can you at least acknowledge that our politicians are the biggest hypocrites in the fucking world when they say things like Vladimir Putin's a war criminal, Vladimir Putin invaded a sovereign nation. Like, come on, man. Did you ever see, by the way, and again, it's just, it's pretty entertaining to me, but Vladimir Putin,

he gave two speeches, I think, when he first invaded in 2022. But he did one where he like ran down the list of presidents. And he did one where he was like, he needled Bill Clinton for his war in Serbia. And he was like, he goes, well, there's a, there's an ethnic minority being oppressed. So we have to go to war, right? Bill Clinton. And then he goes, we got to check out about weapons of mass destruction, right? George W. Bush. And then like, kind of like went down the list of, and the point he's essentially making, and he's kind of right about it. And he's like, you have no leg to stand on to tell me that I can't do this. I can't violate international law. You guys sure can.

So why the hell can't I? And that doesn't mean he's justified in doing it. It means like really none of them are justified. But the level of hypocrisy that America thinks we're in any position to lecture anyone about war. But isn't it fascinating that as long as the people are in a place that we don't have a lot of familiarity with and as long as the people speak a language that we don't understand and we can't read it seems like less is going on in some strange way like if the united

states did what it did to any of these other countries it did to England yeah imagine that imagine if there was some propped up bullshit reason why they needed to invade England holy fucking shit would that be wild yeah because then you would have people that speak the same language talking about this going what the fuck is going on yeah Yeah, look the same skin color, same religion, more or less. You know what I mean? Especially England, because England is similarly diverse. Right. It would be everybody.

You'd see everybody. You'd be like, what is going on? And you would hear from them. They would be able to talk in a language you clearly understand. All the newspapers would reflect their positions. And the craziest thing- Whereas in Sudan or in any other place any place we we we need someone needs to interpret it for us right right and just well just like imagine if like we fought crime here with drone bombs or something like that well you know they were like oh there's a drug dealer in this building

he's a suspected uh killer and so we're just going to bomb the building. You know, they're starting to use robots. Yeah. I mean, not the bombs yet, but the robots. No, but they're starting to deploy robots to fight crime in America. This is literally a fucking Terminator movie. Yeah. It's some pretty creepy shit.

This is so crazy that we're ever going to allow them to use robots to fight crime. What are you fucking talking about? Like, what are you talking about? Like, first of all, you don't know jack shit about whether or not those things could be hacked, whether someone can take control of it. If it's a computer, there's someone out there smarter than you. They could probably figure out a way to take over that thing. Well, and the crazy thing is that, you know, there's, to take over that thing.

Well, and the crazy thing is that, you know, there's, which is a major push from the Biden administration. Glenn Greenwald just did a video on this the other day. It's really fantastic. But this has been a major push from the Biden administration

since he first, but even before he took office, just after the election in 2020, that this is their new thing is like a domestic war on terrorism, that the big threat that they're worried about is domestic terrorism, which is a very loose definition. What they're worried about is someone trying to oppose them.

Yes. There's kind of this war on dissidence. Yes. And it's very creepy that the same people who pushed for these wars in the Middle East are now the the ones saying, oh yeah, and we need to, and they're calling it the same thing. They're saying, we need to bring what we had over there right here. They're calling you domestic terrorists.

It's the Department of Homeland Security that was created in the name of the war on terrorism. This is now going to focus on, you know, this problem we have here at home, which is like, again, it's just like the fact like you what you were saying like okay if they did this to england or if they did this to chicago or whatever it would be so much more blatant to us you know but it's like oh they do it to iraq or they do it

to somalia that just doesn't seem quite as real but you're like but those people who were okay doing that there don't be so comfortable that they won't do that to you too. It's like if somebody, you know, if there was like someone who had like, you know, like attacked kids and then you were like, yeah, but they did that over in a different neighborhood.

I'm letting them babysit my kids today. You're like, I mean, you know, I know it was a different neighborhood where they spoke a different language, but like that person's comfortable killing kids. Like, I don't think you want them anywhere around your kids. And like, that's kind of what we've got with these people in our government.

Like they're comfortable making decisions where innocent people die and die by the millions. Like if you add up the death toll of all the wars, it's in the millions and somewhere in the range of two to four. Let's just let's just go with Vietnam. of all the wars, it's in the millions. Somewhere in the range of two to four million. Let's just go with Vietnam. Go with Vietnam because that's one that's provable that we got in under false pretenses. Yep. That's a legitimate false flag.

I think two million Vietnamese and something like that died. I don't know, you double check me on that, but it's a lot. And that's a war that everybody opposed yep Or so well a lot of people a lot of people a lot of people opposed And now everybody opposes at what's and nobody thinks it was yes. Yes Well, it's kind of like the war in Iraq now, you know, like everybody kind of even John McCain wrote in his memoir like whoopsie Yeah, no, he's good. But that's kind of what it is. Did you see the Tucker Carlson interview on full send? I guess I saw I didn't watch the entire thing

But I saw a few out clips of it when he's talked about how much he regrets supporting the war in Iraq That's we were referring to. Yeah. Yeah, I believe him. I think he really means it I believe in sometimes, you know, sometimes there's people like there's like John McCain types who go like – or Hillary Clinton. They'll admit, OK, it was a mistake. But then they still support every subsequent war after that. It doesn't seem – whereas Tucker is like, I'm so ashamed that I supported this. I'll never forgive myself for it and has opposed every subsequent war after that. And I'm like, OK, I think this guy really believes it.

He's different than people want to pretend he is. First of all, the guy was a deadhead. Yeah. You know that? He used to follow the dead around. Yeah. So for sure dropped acid. That'd be my guess.

How else can you enjoy the music? I think it's legally required that you take an acid at least once if you're going to enjoy The Grateful Dead. I'm not sure. I don't know. I haven't brushed up on the statutes. I think that music comes alive to LSD according to my friends who've been there and done that. It's really interesting

what the public perception of Tucker Carlson is or particularly how polarizing he is to people that it's almost like they're describing a different person than he actually is. I think he was the most interesting person in cable news, the most thoughtful, most intelligent. He was really, I don't agree with him on anything. You know, on my on my podcast, completely opposed to big pharma and all of the covid insanity. It was really good on like speaking up about a lot of really important issues, issues that you would think like a good leftist would at least appreciate that he's good on that issue, you know. And some some of them did This is what he's the guy who's having Glenn Greenwald on his show. You know what I mean?

He's the guy who's having Aaron Matei and Jimmy door. Yeah, right waiters. He's having like that He's having a lot of left wingers and it was it was very interesting. He wasn't a partisan He would be completely against the Republican Party was viciously critical of the Republican Party hates the Republican Party, was viciously critical of the Republican Party, hates the Republican establishment. And even the stuff I see, I've seen so many people be like, you know, he was, he bought into Trump's claims that the election was stolen. And I'm like, I don't know, dude, do you watch him? Because I watch his show. And that's actually not, he was the guy, he took a lot of heat from this, right-wingers that immediately following the election of 2020, he really aggressively called out Trump's lawyers, Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, I think was the other one, because they were making claims about the Dominion voting machines that they flipped millions of votes. and Tucker Carlson went on a show and he goes, okay, if this is true, it's the biggest story in the history of the United States of America. So what evidence do you have? And he's like, we have reached out privately to the Trump's lawyers. We've gotten nothing in return. So to

be clear, they're making this claim and providing nothing to back it up. He really was like, no, no. Now what he has said later is there'll be like the poll quotes and be like, yeah, but he referred to 2020 as a scam or something like that. And it's like, yeah, but you don't watch his show. So you don't get that. Like what he was saying was, yeah, the dominion vote flipping thing is bullshit. No one's ever provided any evidence of that. But the fact that big tech and the intelligence agencies work together to undermine the Hunter Biden story to get Joe Biden across the finish line is bullshit. Like that's, you know what I mean? That's a scam. And he's, that's a completely reasonable position to take. Again,

it's just, you know, like, look at this dude, Don Lemon is out at CNN, right? I promise you, whoever replaces Don Lemon has the same exact views as Don Lemon and the same exact views of everybody else at CNN. And that's not true for Tucker Carlson. Like, at least there was a guy out there who like would disagree with the rest of the people at his network, disagree with both political parties. He's really designed for the internet.

I hope he goes there. He's going to, unless they've paid him off to like the, I mean, if I was a person in a position of power in a wild card, like Tucker Carlson got released from Fox news and maybe rumble makes a deal with him or something like that. Do you have any fucking idea how big that would be?

How big his show, it could make that, that app, it could make that, that It could make that platform. I mean, if Tucker Carlson goes over there, it would be worth it for them to invest a considerable amount of money. But if I was Fox News, that's the last thing I would want. So I would make sure that we have him locked up for the entire term of some contract, some no compete, and pay him off. You'd be better off just giving him the same amount of money

he made when he was on the air. And then you would have him opposing you. I wonder what he's already under contract for. You know what I mean? Like there may already be some clause in his contract that says, you know, if we leave, there's X amount of time. I don't know. They're fucking Fox News, man.

They're smart. They're not stupid. But it was very shocking seeing him leave. Yes. I was surprised. Although one Yes, I was I was surprised although in hindsight one of those things were like I was surprised right away And then like two days later. I'm like, how was he ever even there? Like how would this guy was on the 8 p.m.? Hour at Fox News saying the CIA killed Kennedy here like how did how was that ever a real thing? You know, it's like it's insane what he was like it but what's crazy to me is that like so many progressives have like

it's like you're it's like invasion of the body snatchers or something it's like is this the real you man have you just been replaced with an npc the 8 p.m hour at fox news is saying the cia killed kennedy that's not interesting to you right that's not like something like i'm not saying you have to agree with him on everything but like that's not kind of, that's different than Bill O'Reilly. Yeah. This is a different world we're living in now. This is something. Yeah, it just seems kind of surreal now looking back at it almost,

but Bill O'Reilly did leave and he went and started a podcast or something, I think. I don't know. Yeah, he's got something, I think. The problem is his average viewer was like 86 years old. Yeah, they're on the border. A podcast now? Yeah.

What's that? Yeah. Was that? Yeah. Getting them to download an app. Good luck. Like, I'm going to have to call my grandson. Where is it? How does it work? I need to be angry.

This is just talking to like my like in-laws about like scanning a document or something like that. I know. Let alone, you know, telling him how to download an app and listen to a podcast. I don't know. Try to talk your mom through one of those things. Yeah.

But, you know, but it is, I do think it's very interesting. I'm very interested to see what his next move is. It's gotta be the internet. He'd be crazy to do anything out there. Well, there's nothing else. I mean, he's not going off CNN. He's not going back to CNN or back to MSNBC.

By the way, he used to be on both of those networks. I know. But he got a lot better since he was on those networks, and they got a lot worse. Yeah. It was a different time when he was on those networks. I mean, there was a video that was just released. Who is he interviewing? Is he interviewing Britney Spears, I think?

Like, from 20 years ago. It's like you're watching this young Tucker Carlson with a bow tie on CNN. You're like, wow. Yeah. This is kind of crazy. Him and Rachel Maddow used to have a friendly back and forth. They disagree, but it was totally friendly when they were both on MSNBC together. You look at it now, you're like, wow, what a different world that those

two could even be in the same room together. But I think that, what happened? Is it just the internet? Is it when people get together in these echo chambers and they reinforce each other's ideas to the point where anybody that opposes that is just the enemy? Is it just some tribal thing that just automatically happens when people are allowed to gather in large groups like they do on social media. I think that certainly plays a role, a major role. I think that there's also like I think the thing kind of came unglued, like the establishment kind of came unglued.

unglued like the establishment kind of came unglued um i think the the the george w bush administration um the wars in the financial crisis really set into motion like a bad dangerous thing where it almost like there i think there was like an effort to distract away from, like I think there were powerful people who wanted to distract away from how much the powerful people had fucked over the country. And then there was kind of like this effort to pit people against each other. And then I think it was very easy

for people to fall into that and just get very, very tribal and very, very isolated. I also think there was like this knee jerk reaction from journalists to not confront their own obvious failure like in that they hadn't really been reporting on the things that actually you know what i mean like imagine there was this like ticking time bomb like the subprime mortgage yeah you know uh crisis and you were just oblivious to it right and you've been reporting on all these stories and you weren't reporting on the time bomb

That was about to blow up on the working class in America. So now what do you report on? Racism, you know, it's all this the problem is that this other guy is lying to you and when Trump got elected Which I think very much was a reaction to a lot of that stuff I think that then it was like of that stuff. I think that then it was like, that's when it really all fell apart because the media, it was so obvious that this guy who you were telling everyone, well, this guy can't possibly win and no one cares about what he has to say. And then tens of millions of people did care about what he had to say and voted for him. And it was like their failure was that much more exposed. And so they just had to snap into like other explanations

for what happened here. No, it's not that we failed on the job for 30 years. It's that Russia and racism and misinformation and like all of this stuff. Um, but I do think in a lot of ways, it was a concerted effort. You ever see that cartoon? It's like a banker in his corner office, and outside his window is all the Occupy Wall Street people protesting, and he's on the phone, and he says, Introduce them to identity politics. I don't know if it went down exactly that way,

but I think that cartoon's getting at something like I think there's a reason I just don't think the government is that competent they could brilliantly socially engineer civilization that way I think a lot of the private interests that own our government are pretty competent actually you know I think the government works in very sloppy ways but if you look at it like if you look at it from the perspective of say like you know Lockheeded Martin and Pfizer and companies making, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars in profits, they're actually working very well, you know, like the system's working very well toward that end. And, um, I just don't think it was completely organic that after we had

these disastrous wars and a financial crisis, and after you had the Party and the Occupy Wall Street movement that all of a Sudden on some grassroots level we were like we need to have a national conversation about chicks with dicks Yeah, I don't think that just happened Every day that's what we got to talk about now. That's the new thing. What is the Beautiful trans women. I'm sorry the the trans. I mean, excuse me, the Russian guy who used to work for the KGB, Yuri. Yes, I know who you're talking about. What is his last name? Jamie Bentonoff.

I know exactly who you're talking about, who gave the lectures on how the Soviet Union was destroying America in the next generation. And he talked about this in 1984. This was during the Soviet Union time. Yuri Bezmenov. Yep, that's him. Yuri Bezmenov gave a speech describing exactly America in 2023, describing how Russia had eroded, the Soviet Union had eroded all of our institutions and gotten in there and implanted ideas of marxism and reinforce these ideas and that this was undoubtedly going to lead to the demise of america there's no way but the way he lays it out it's it's compelling and there's

definitely a lot of things that kind of happened exactly like he said they would happen. Yeah. And it's not, you know, it's all it's kind of evolved. It's not really like traditional Marxism is kind of dead. No one's really advocating for like government ownership of the means of production. It's more now it's just kind of like it's really like corporate control of government with this weird like what they call cultural Marxism which I don't like the term because it means different things to so many different people But the idea that like Marx had this economic view that everything all of human history was a class struggle between like the oppressor class and the oppressed class and If you like applied that to cultural issues,

it describes wokeism to a T. That everything can be reduced to white, black, straight, gay, cis, trans, men, women. It's like everything is the oppressor class versus the oppressed, which is such a shallow, stupid way of analyzing anything. anything. It's just it's there's so much more to reality Than that simplistic way of looking at things, but it's so attractive to people which is really fascinating

And that was what Yuri had described in the speech and how it would become how it captivate people It's just I don't want to believe, you know, here's an interesting thing about something like that. Like, even though we're saying everything he described seems to be happening right now, describes wokeism to a T, describe what's happening in this country to a T,

I still have an impulse, an undeniable impulse to reject it. Like, no, they didn't do that. No, they're not that smart. No, that's not what happened. There's a part of me for whatever weird reason, and I think everybody has this part of them, that doesn't want to believe that something's happening while it's happening. There's a thing that's going on right now because we're so accustomed to being able to do what we do.

We're so accustomed to be able to drive to work and do this and hang out with your family and go out with your friends. We're so accustomed to this. We don't imagine a world, despite all of the evidence of history, you could go see the Colosseum in Rome. You could go see the Acropolis and the Parthenon. You can go see all of these great empires that no longer exist there's just stone structures where these people used to rule the fucking world but in our mind that was then and right now everything's amazing

and we're perfect and if we could just get a trans president we could fucking solve this like we're we are we believe in the moment we can't look at the vast amount of data that shows up that shows us the same patterns of behavior that humans are exhibiting right now have led to disastrous consequences in the collapse of Civilization and it's so easy when you look at those past civilizations to be like, how did you guys not see it coming? I mean it's all around you like how are you not completely again you know there's so many examples like this right it's very easy to and i have the same impulse it's very easy to look in the past and be like sweet there was slavery and you were just like okay with it like you weren't against that every single day

and then you're just like now we of course down the road is a state prison there's a bunch of people there for weed but that's totally different that you know what i mean? It's like, I don't know, in a hundred years, if that all got cleaned up, you'd look back at that with the exact same view. You'd be like, you enslaved people for like bullshit. People are writing about it on their phones, which are literally made by slaves. It's like, there's, right.

There's like all of this stuff right around you. But if you try to zoom out and you try your best to be disinterested and just analyze and you go, okay, so where are we right now at the United States of America? So we are a republic that turned into an empire, got expanded all over the world, something I think 700 something bases in 135 different countries, trying to rule the entire world. Through the process of doing that, we've spent ourselves $30 trillion into debt, and now we see massive cultural decay into just like decadence. Yeah.

What's that story? If that's not a crumbling empire, I don't know what a crumbling empire is. I hear the America fuck yeah song in the background. That's what I hear. America, fuck yeah. in the background that's what I hear America fuck yeah come and save the motherfucking day yeah dude is there anything better that movie was so great dude it's amazing where they go over just like destroy the whole place and they'll be like you're welcome it's one of the greatest movies of all time so great so great it's fun It's fun. That and the South Park movie. The South Park movie when Saddam Hussein has a sexual affair with Hitler.

No, it was the devil. Excuse me. Yes, yes. Was Hitler in that too? No, it was Satan. It was Satan and Saddam Hussein and Satan's like the sub. That's right. Oh my God.

Like Satan's the... That's right. And then there was real dicks. They could show a photo of a real dick somehow or another. Yeah, they always figured out a way to do it. They're so on point, dude. Throughout the years, they've always just been so on point. It's the best show of all time.

It's the best comedy show of all time by far. I just introduced my 12-year-old to it the other day, and she's blown away. 12 is a good age. Yeah, I'm like, it's a perfect age. I'm like, she hears me talk. I'm not very filtered. You know, I just tell them, don't say bad words around adults and other people. Be respectful.

But they're just words. Yeah, that's a good. What I'm worried about is your feelings. I'm worried about what is your intent. What I'm not worried about is words. I'm just at the age. My daughter is four and my son is one. And I'm just at the age now where I'm starting to hear some of the words

that I say coming back out and you're like ah so that's going to be the next chapter when my daughter was three my youngest daughter was three we were skiing and uh we were leaving the hotel we packed all our stuff up and uh my wife realized she goes um I forgot to pack the uh the helmet in like this one bag and my three-year-old goes shit and me and my wife look at each other go no oh no you're like all right it's so funny too because like she was a side too was a side shit like, shit. It's just so real. Like she wasn't like trying to say a bad word. She knew that's the word you say. Somebody fucked up and forgot to put the helmet in the bag. It's everything's packed and stuffed in, shit.

Dude, it's so funny because you have like this life right where you're like, so you're like with your wife when you're just a couple before you have kids and you're just a couple, you know, you say whatever you want. And then even when you have little babies, it's like, it's just not even a thing. And then right around that age where you go ah so we have we have

something to confront here there's two paths number one i can try to watch my mouth and i'm like babe i'm gonna be honest with you very low percentage chance that that works out well and the other one is what you said where you're just like okay let them understand it's just a word but also let them know okay look there's there's time and places where you can't use these words. My parents were hippies. My mother and my stepfather were hippies. So from the time I was like seven years old, they told me you could say whatever you want.

They were like, just don't say it at school. They had no idea the monster they were creating. My mom actually talked about it the other night we were having dinner. She's like, maybe I should have set some boundaries. You can say whatever you want to as big an audience as you want to little Joe Rogan. Yeah, it was interesting It was interesting growing up that way because like that their perspective was like everything that the establishment has created is wrong Like this is not the way to live, live you know right that was the whole hippie movement you know my stepfather had like really long hair the whole thing was very interesting

to grow up that way because you know from the time I was seven I was like I was felt like an outsider because I had moved a lot but then also I had these parents that were really open-minded and very liberal. And they just, they were like, this is all bullshit. Like when, I remember like being a child when the war in Vietnam ended. I think I was like 10 years old or something like that. Thinking, this is great. Now we're not going to have wars anymore.

I really thought that, man. I remember that. And I remember being blown away. Me and my friend Jimmy were watching the Iraq War. It was like whatever year that was. The first one. The first one. H.W. was 1991. 91.

That makes sense because I was living with my friend Jimmy, and we had just come home from work, and we were watching on TV, and he looks at me and goes, what do you know, we're at fucking war. And I was like, what do you know, we're at fucking war. And I was like, what do you know? We're at fucking war. Like, this is real. Like, this is crazy.

Like, I thought we figured this out. I thought we weren't doing this anymore. And you know what's so crazy about that first war in Iraq? Is that, because I remember, I was a little kid, a very little kid. I was born in 83, so I was, you know, eight when we first fought that war.

But I remember being aware of it. I remember seeing the speech when George H.W. Bush announced we were going. And they the whole like all those same neocons who later went to Project for a New American Century. They were all in the George H.W. Bush administration. And then they went into his son's administration. And they all said that they had conquered Vietnam syndrome, as they called it. You see, from their perspective, the country had this terrible Vietnam syndrome after Vietnam, meaning that people didn't really want to fight wars. They had this attitude that, like, we shouldn't fight wars because they can be really bad.

But see, now George H.W. Bush, this hero, he conquered that because they showed how easy the war was. Look, we fought a war now. It's so easy because America is so powerful. We just stormed right in there. Minimal loss of life on our side. Very few casualties on the American side. Toppled it right in there. You know, let Saddam Hussein stay in power,

but easy peasy, that war is over. And Joe, 30 years later, we still have a military presence in Iraq. That's how easy that war was, is that all of these years later, and the war continued through Clinton, not technically a war, but a full blockade of the country, bombing campaigns, massive sanctions, tons of people dying. I don't know exactly how much. The UN had a study, which I think is bullshit, but they said 500,000 children had died from starvation and malnutrition during the sanction campaign in the 90s.

Why do you think it's bullshit? I saw someone, I don't exactly remember, but I saw someone make an argument for why their estimations were wrong and the study wasn't right. So anyway, he was arguing and it seemed pretty compelling. It seems like, oh, that actually sounds right, that they were like counting the wrong way, kind of. So it probably wasn't 500,000, but maybe it was 100,000, whatever. It was like

children just starving due to this blockade. And it was also one of the main things that really pissed off Osama bin Laden, radicalized him against America. It was one of his stated grievances and his declaration of war on America because we kept we kept the bases in Saudi Arabia To you know enforce the blockade around Iraq and he was like okay So you have your bases in our Holy Land to starve other Muslims to death and that pissed off a lot of people over there But yeah that war man That war which they sold it as like look what an easy victory it was in many ways really locked us into a war for decades i remember the first casualties

when a scud missile uh hit those soldiers i remember that was like shocking that a certain number of people had died like that we were so we we had given into this idea that it would be just they would storm it and that's it and once that narrative got set like oh the united states is just wiping out the army like this there is no army it's a joke the whole thing's a joke they're like no one's gonna die and then when people did die like whoa no one's going to die. And then when people did die, you're like,

whoa. But then it becomes normal. It becomes normal. It becomes the idea of losing soldiers becomes normal. And then all these other military actions start happening. Yeah. And then nine 11 happens and then the big ones happen and then it becomes normal for us. And then you're not allowed to take photographs of coffins anymore.

Remember those? Yeah. They didn't allow journalists to take photographs of flag-draped coffins, which is, what is that? What is that? I mean, until this Ukraine war, like the Ukraine war, you're seeing cell phone footage right of war atrocities you're seeing cell phone footage of p i saw a guy get killed with a hammer they killed a guy with a sledgehammer you're seeing people get shot in foxholes at close range you're seeing like hd footage of this stuff it's the war becomes very abstract to people who haven't experienced it i think it's it's hard to even

believe or wrap your head around like it's so hard it's hard to even think that like in that in a society where we mean we have the technology that me and you are sitting in this room and we're also speaking to like millions of people and we'll you, go to a shop and buy something and get lunch and then we'll go do comedy tonight. And someone will be like, oh, great. Thank you very much. It's like a civilized society that we still just have mass murder sprees where we just agree like we're going to like we haven't figured out a different way to settle these disputes it's it's like it's hard to actually believe um like and it's it's uh it's hard and certainly for me i don't think anyone's completely capable who hasn't seen it and certainly that applies to me of like really understanding what that is um but it's bad and it's just like i don't know it's just i can't like i can't believe more people aren't just you know fiona hill had i think i talked about this last time I was on,

but Fiona Hill, who, she, again, this is in Foreign Affairs Magazine, not like Ron Paul Weekly, you know what I mean? I think Ron Paul's the greatest hero ever, but I'm saying this isn't like what the kooky libertarians say, like me. This is like Fiona Hill in Foreign Affairs Magazine. She was the one who reported

that they had a peace deal worked out. Basically, you know, in pencil, not in pen, but like in principle, they had a peace deal worked out basically you know in pencil not in pen but like in in principle they had a peace deal worked out and that boris johnson as a representative of the west went over there and convinced olinsky not to negotiate but not to negotiate don't you give them one inch it's like they want and this is what it seems like for real it seems like they want this war they want to prolong it to bleed the russians dry that's their plan and you're like jesus man but why wouldn't they be that evil i mean why wouldn't they be that evil when they're that evil everywhere else that's what's fucked up it's hard for us to think that's a fact yeah it's it's hard for us to when you're going about your day just hanging out in new york

and fucking visiting your favorite coffee shop it's hard to believe that you're a part of that Yeah, well it's in one of the things that's like I guess it's like after a while Like one of the things that helps me understand this is like you look at people in their track record is that we have a very short attention span, you know as a country But it's like when you look at so one of the absolute best people on The war in Russia and Ukraine people really want to learn about this stuff, is John Mearsheimer, who is the dean of the realist school of foreign policy. He's like a world-renowned scholar.

This guy is not – again, not a non-interventionist libertarian like me, just like a scholar who's like – talks about foreign policy and stuff. And he's written and spoken extensively about Ukraine, Russia, and he was one of the big opponents of this whole policy. And meanwhile, so after the, you know, after the government was overthrown, the one that Gideon Rose was so happy about when we stole Ukraine away, we stole Robin from Batman, Victoria Nuland and Gideon Rose and all of those people who were pushing for this policy, they all said, this is wonderful. Ukraine is choosing to join the liberal world order and they're choosing democracy and hope and everything's going to be wonderful for them. Their country is going to flourish. he said America is leading Ukraine down the primrose path and which I didn't understand what that means exactly but it sounds real good but what it means basically is like we're leading you down this beautiful path that ends in your demise and that basically we were encouraging

them to play tough with the Russians and it's like don't worry you got America's got your back you know it's like you it's like you convincing worry you got America's got your back. You know, it's like you It's like you convincing some dude who doesn't know how to fight like go fight this guy Cuz like I got your back and they're like, oh, okay. Well Joe Rogan's black belt. He's got my back I'll go fucking fight this guy and then when you fight the guy you're like, well I'm not gonna like jump in the fight with you But like I'll yell instructions to you while you're in the fight You're like throw him in an arm bar and And they're like, what's an arm bar?

You know, I'm like, just kidding. So we like led them down this path. And so like, okay, maybe you don't agree, but like whose prediction was better? John Mearsheimers or, you know, Gideon Rose? Who predicted what was happening here better? The guy who said this was going to be disaster for Ukraine or the guy who said, yay. Batman. Robin.

We're stealing Robin away. Ha ha. We distracted you Putin with the Olympics. Like, oh, that distraction didn't work very well. And so it's just like, it's horrible. But that's kind of, that's one of the things that, you know, one of the things that's so interesting about this war too is like when people will defend it, I almost wanna ask people, so if this war is, is like when people will defend it, I almost want to ask people, if this war is so necessary, or it's so necessary for us to arm them,

why shouldn't we intervene militarily? Why isn't America's military going into Ukraine? Why aren't we invading Russia? Why aren't we at least occupying Ukraine and forcing? We certainly have the conventional forces to force Russian's army out of there, no problem. So why aren't we doing that? And the reason we're not doing that is because everyone knows, oh, we can't do that because that's nuclear war. That's nuclear war in a certainty. So you're like, okay, so that's nuclear war. So that's off the table. Biden's not even suggesting that. But so then what does it go from like a certainty of nuclear war to what's the risk of nuclear war if we're just fighting a proxy war and giving them hundreds of billions of dollars and pledging till the end that will drive Russia out? Well, the risk doesn't go to zero.

You know what I mean? It goes to something maybe less, but it's still something. It's still terrifying. Still way more than we should be willing to take. Yeah. Still way more than we should be willing to take. Yeah, if Vancouver got armed by the Russians, and Vancouver was attacking Seattle,

what do you think would happen? Everyone knows what would happen. America would start blowing shit up like crazy. We would go to war with the world, if anyone ever, and look, Jack Kennedy fucking said it, right? He literally said that. I mean, literally, but he basically said, he said, you put these missiles in Cuba, I will blow up the world. I'm treating this as a preemptive nuclear strike on America. If you do that, get those missiles the hell off of Cuba. And I think most people go, yeah, that's reasonable.

You know, like it's kind of reasonable to say we cannot tolerate Soviet nuclear warheads pointed at us from a little island a few miles off our coast. That's just like can't be. And like, look, we have a Monroe Doctrine. Monroe Doctrine says that America does not tolerate any faraway power coming in and interfering in our realm of influence. And essentially what Vladimir Putin has been saying for years was like, well, I want a Monroe Doctrine for Ukraine. Like, I want a Monroe Doctrine for this part of the world. And that doesn't mean he's a good guy, and that doesn't mean that that's a perfect system. world. And that doesn't mean he's a good guy. And that doesn't mean that that's a perfect system, but at least prior to invading Ukraine, he had a point, like he had a reasonable point to say,

I don't want you interfering in my biggest neighbor right here. And, and a very strategically important area to him. Dude, hold that thought. I got to pee. Yeah. All right. We're back. So the leaked document, what was your thoughts on that? Because the whole thing was crazy that this guy had access to it. I guess he was showing it to his friends or something. Is that what it was? Well, it seems that way. A lot of people kind of were criticizing the guy, and they were kind of saying like, well, look, this guy's no Ed Snowden. I mean, he didn't like take this to Glenn Greenwald at the Guardian to have him vet through it and

properly disclose it. He's like bragging to friends on a discord server or whatever. And essentially that seems right to me. Like that does kind of seem like what happened. But again, like that's not the interesting story here. The interesting story isn't like what this guy's deal was or what his motives were. The story is like, oh, the government's lying to you again. And also that it's they have this information that they claim is so vital that it's so horrible he leaked it. And yet you're so reckless with it that, you know, it's like it's funny. I remember Glenn Greenwald making this point when people would talk about like people were at the national security apparatus or whatever would be talking about how how reckless it is

that Snowden just like gave all of this information out and you're like well then weren't you pretty reckless too because like if this information is so vital you didn't even know it was gone right they didn't even know it was gone until the Guardian published it and then they were like oh I guess this guy took all of our documents um What another of what the documents say well? It was just right before that one of the other real interesting thing is that they came out so a couple days after the leak first like was getting reported the

Reuters had a piece, an article, where they had three high-level U.S. officials under anonymity said that. You'll never believe this, Joe. It had all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation. And so isn't it just amazing that they'll go, and then, like, two days later, they completely gave up on that and went, let's just smear the kid who did it, you know, like, forget all that stuff. There were some some interesting revelations from from the documents, things like they they're evidently there are NATO and US military embedded in Ukraine

Like help assisting them basically Which is which is pretty dangerous? Western special forces operating inside Ukraine One document dated 23 March refers to the presence of a small number of Western special forces operating inside Ukraine without specifying their activities or location. The UK has the largest contingent, 50, followed by Latvia, 17, France, 15, and the US, 14, the Netherlands, 1. Western governments typically refrain from commenting on such sensitive matters, but this detail is likely to be seized upon by Moscow, which has in recent months argued that it is not just confronting Ukraine,

but NATO as well. And essentially, look, this was the, I think when Putin ultimately decided to invade Ukraine last year, I think basically what he concluded was that they did it. They brought Ukraine into NATO. Even though Ukraine is not an official NATO country, at this point, they backed the coup

that overthrew the democratically elected government under Yanukovych. They poured weapons into the country and they were doing joint training exercises with NATO and the Ukrainian military. And I think Vladimir Putin was basically like, we told them this was our brightest of red lines and they crossed it. And I got to do something. Now, I'm not saying he should have done this. There's other things he could have done. There's lots of things. I mean, I don't know exactly. You get creative, but he could have cut off all natural gas to Europe. He could have dropped a nuke in the ocean. I mean, he could have done something before he did this, you know. But he basically concluded that Ukraine is de facto a member of NATO. And if you look at the way we're responding to this whole thing, he's kind of right. I mean, like, we're backing them all the way because they were invaded. That's what we're supposed to do to a NATO country, you know. them all the way because they were invaded that's what we're supposed to do to a nato country you know um and so this is bad that this comes out although i gotta say i'm surprised to some degree

how much uh you know they've i mean nor if the nordstrom bombing didn't you know like do it i don't know if just like some special forces being embedded there is gonna like you know create some big escalation but um but yeah this this is something stream bombing is wild well look dude i mean there's been in the last you know trump predicted that germany if they don't if they don't take steps to stop this they're going to be completely dependent upon russian oil and it was one of those things where people were making fun of him at the time like what are you talking about i don't know i don't know if I completely agree with Trump on that, but there's, there's no question that, but they are dependent upon it now, right? Because of the Nord Stream

pipeline blowing up. Well, not anymore. It doesn't exist anymore. Uh, but I think that there's a lot of, a lot of people were there. A lot of very powerful people were very against the Nord Stream pipeline. Right. I have a different, pipeline. I have a different view of it. I think it was great. You think it was great? Yes. Why? Because the worst thing that's ever happened in the history of the world was Germany and Russia going to war. In World War II, something like 30 million people died just in that conflict. It's like the worst thing that's ever happened in the history of the world. And so for them to be interconnected and interdependent, which is how I would see it trading, you know, like where goods

cross borders, armies don't have to that old saying, I think it would have been a good thing for them to be together. Oh, look, now you're directly incentivized to not be enemies because you want the cheap natural gas and they want your money for their cheap natural gas. And so, however, there is there's a big view from like the neoconservatives and the neoliberals, the kind of establishment that this is the scariest thing. The scariest thing is that Germany and Russia align. And I don't know exactly if this is true, but some people like I'm blanking on the guy's name, the guy who founded Stratford, Friedman, I believe is his name. He basically said that this is the centerpiece of American foreign policy since World War Two, that like the whole idea of NATO is to like keep Germany in and Russia out.

And that their biggest fear is that Germany and Russia would unite against us. And that that could be the only thing that could really challenge American power is like the ingenuity of Germany with the manpower and natural resources of Russia. So there's a lot of people who have been against this from the very beginning. No one would ever think of that today. Like your average person today would think maybe Germany and Russia could unite again.

Well, you know, it's- You know what I mean? Like that's not- But to those, well, to, you know, to some people, look, the neoconservatives Who are and let me say this delicately. Well, let me preface this I'm Jewish Okay, so let me just say that there's a there a lot of Jewish people in the neoconservative like movement and There this is part of the reason why they're very very pro-israel It's also part of the reason, and I'll say somewhat understandably, while like it's a big

German independence is a big concern to them. They still live with that kind of like, this is the great fear that Germany will rise again one day. And like, oh, if they're connected with Russia like this, ooh, they're not under the EU's thumb and NATO's thumb anymore. Now they could possibly go in a different direction. So for years, there were a lot of people who were against this. Now, when Ukraine invaded, I'm sorry, when Russia invaded Ukraine, they did turn off the pipe,

like Germany was boycotting. So they weren't using any of the gas from the pipe. However, they've also adopted all of these crazy like climate policies and like completely destroyed a lot of their own internal energy sources. Like they've denuclearized and all that stuff. And so I think the concern was that going into winter, what if there is pressure on them to decide to turn these pipes on and that this might be, uh, then Germany might start, you know, siding with Russia, or at least if they're getting their natural gas from Russia, they're not going

to be so harsh on, on Russia. And they're not going to be so willing to play ball with the EU. And there's already, you know, like a history of this, like what I was talking about before at the Bucharest summit in 2008, when they announced Ukraine was going into, would eventually join NATO. It was Merkel was really against it. They got that in over her wishes. So they're already a little concerned that like maybe Germany is not quite as anti-Russia as we are. And so going into the winter, I think they were concerned there was going to be a strain

on power in Germany and they might be tempted to turn that pipeline back on. And so they made sure it's, as Victoria Nuland said, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea. Could you fucking imagine if some time in the future we're going to war with Germany and Russia united against America? Yeah. Well, I think what's much more of a concern than that to me right now, at least, is look at how crazy is this, that over the last year, while this war has been going on, NATO has been attacked twice. There was missiles in Poland and there was the Nord Stream bomb. And those are two attacks on NATO. And yet both of them didn't come from Russia. You know what I mean?

Now, if you remember, do you remember the story a few months back? So there was these missiles hit Poland, killed a couple people there. Zelensky immediately said this was Putin and that the West has to respond. And then eventually, a couple days later, it came out it was actually Ukraine. And they were like, oh, it was an accident. That's why they say it's an accident. I mean, who knows? Maybe it was intentional to try to blame on Russia or something like that. But even, it was an accident. That's what they say. It's an accident. I mean, who knows? Maybe it was intentional to try to blame on Russia or something like that.

But even saying it was an accident. OK, they accidentally attacked NATO. And then the Nord Stream pipeline, which was clearly not Russia. No, that was what they said at first. Oh, this is a Russia blew up their own pipeline. Why? You saw the video of Biden saying that they would do something like that. Yeah.

He promised that it would happen. Yeah. You know. Which is just wild. The whole thing is just, it's all in front of our faces. Well, it's an act of industrial terrorism and like environmental terrorism to do this. And, you know, Cy Hirsch reported, and I trust that guy a lot more than I trust most other journalists. And he reported that it was America

Even I think the New York Times now concluded that they said it was some pro-Ukrainian Group and you're like, okay, but that includes all of us Do you see the the article in the New York Times that said maybe we should yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's great journalism right there We don't know who it was The title was literally something like we don't know who blew up the Nord yeah, yeah. That's great journalism right there. We don't know who it was. The title was literally something like, we don't know who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline and that might be for the best or something.

Something along those lines. It's like you can't like, I don't know, you can't make this shit up. That is such a crazy thing for a journalist to write. Well, I mean, I remember, sometimes you can just kind of like,

you know, you can just look at these things logically. Like I remember in 2017 is when I was still a contributor on Essie Cup show and she was at CNN. And the big story came out that Assad had gassed his own people. And I remember right away. And this is before any of those like OCPW whistleblowers came out or anything like that. But just right away, I remember the day after being on TV and just being like, I don't think he did this. And they're like, how can you say that? Everyone's saying he did this. And you're like, well, look at it. It's like two weeks ago, Trump announced that we're leaving Syria, like we're withdrawing from Syria. He won after this five-year bloody civil war where he's been fighting for his life to not be Muammar Gaddafi.

He has just announced that he won. And so now you're telling me for no strategic military advantage, he just did the one thing that will keep this war going and maybe end up like Muammar Gaddafi? That doesn't make any sense. I'm not buying this.

And then it did kind of come out as these whistleblowers were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, it didn doesn't make any sense. I'm not buying this. And then it did kind of come out as these whistleblowers were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, it didn't come from the sky. It came from the ground and it was done in rebel-controlled territory. And this does not look like it was Assad. But I remember when they first, it was like the same thing when they first,

we think Russia blew up their own pipeline. But why? Why would they? So you're telling me vladimir putin just took away the option that germany might cave this winter and want to buy his natural gas again why would he do that and then of course it comes out later like no that's not what it was it was probably british intelligence or uh some some u.s allied group if not directly us and so yeah that's pretty crazy it's pretty pretty hard to look at that

and still feel like we're just the good guys in this war. And again, when I say we, just for everyone, disclaimer for this entire, like those great Eminem lyrics, I'm all for America, fuck the government. When I say America did this or America's wrong, I'm not talking about you or your daddy or your hometown or anything like that.

I'm just talking about Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and Barack Obama and Dick Cheney and Donald Trump and all of them. Bill Clinton, Jeffrey Epstein's rapist friend. That's who I'm talking about. Turns out these guys aren't good people. It's so wild when you, if you looked at us from outside of us

and you looked at the human race and these patterns that repeat themselves over and over again, you would wonder, like, why aren't they seeing these patterns? Like, why don't they recognize when these things are happening as they've happened to so many civilizations before? Like, what is it about watching everything erode before your eyes that's not shocking enough to wake people up to what's happening? Well, sometimes I think there's kind of like a pattern and there's big forces at play that are hard for individuals to get a hold of, you know? Like there's kind of this thing where there's like,

governments are power centers and they're just, it's not just like, governments are power centers. And they're just, it's not just like, in the same way every business kind of wants to get bigger, wants to have more profit. You want to have more listeners to your podcast. You just kind of want more. But the government isn't in the market. in the market, it's not like, oh, I have to provide something of value in order to get more people voluntarily to listen to my show or come to my business or something like that. They're in the game of take things. They're in the game of force. You pay your taxes or you go to jail. The government is a monopoly on legal aggression, like on force. And so governments,

it's almost impossible to stop them from just getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And the bigger they get, the more corrupt things get and the more power they have. And it's almost like this cycle, you know, where like if a government is limited, then the country is prosperous because they have more freedom. And then the more prosperous they are, the more the government has that they can leech off of. And then the government gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And it's almost like I don't know what can happen to stop that cycle. You know, the thing that makes me optimistic is that they really rely on propaganda. Like they really need the propaganda and they know it. You know, they know they can't just like roll out the vaccine

mandates without a huge propaganda campaign. They got to convince you and then try to get away with their tyrannical policies. And I do think that the propaganda is being undermined more than ever, more than ever. Like it's really, really hard for them. It'd be really, really hard for them to sell us on some next bullshit policy, Much harder than it used to be. Think about how easy it was after 9-11. George Bush could have done whatever he wanted to. Yeah. Well, that's how we got into Iraq.

Yeah. I mean- He had a blank check. Yeah. Everybody was like, take care of it. Yep. Take care of it. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I remember feeling the strangest sense of patriotism driving down the road and seeing everybody with an American flag hanging off their car people were all in yeah dude i was 18 when 9-11 happened and i was living in uh prospect heights which is like it's um if flatbush avenue kind of runs down to the manhattan bridge and the brooklyn bridge is down there too it's like a couple miles away from the world trade center and i remember um we got out of school. I think I was a senior in high school. And we got out of school, and I remember walking to my house and looking down Flatbush Avenue.

So this has been a couple hours now since the towers came down. And seeing people covered head to toe in soot, like they walked over the Brooklyn Bridge and just came home because there's like no subways running or nothing. So they're just walking, just cover like, Oh, that guy got caught in the, you know, in the middle of it. And it was a crazy feeling in the city. The whole thing was insane. It seemed like we, it seemed impossible. No one could ever hit us. This is America in the nineties. You know, I mean, it wasn't the nineties, but it was, it was still the nineties until nine 11. You know what I mean?

And you were like, this is impossible. This couldn't happen. And I remember when George W. Bush came and gave that speech on the megaphone. And it was almost perfect in his simplistic way where he goes, I want you to know we hear you in Washington, D.C. And pretty soon the people who knock down these towers, they're going to hear you too. And I remember being like, fuck, yeah. You just picked a fight with the baddest motherfuckers and we're going to fuck your shit up. You know, but I was an idiot fucking, you know, kid.

But I fell for it completely. Everybody did. You know, but it was just like, that's kind of how it is. When you're hurt and you feel like you got hit and they killed our people, well, we're going to fucking kill your people, motherfucker. But then you kind of realized, and this is what like Ron Paul taught me, is it's like, yeah, okay, you know that impulse that you just had? Exactly. That's what they feel. So it's like the same way that you went, you kill us, motherfucker, we're going to kill your fucking people.

We go, that's, that's it. That's the same exact thing that the fucking terrorists are feeling. That's the same thing their side's feeling. That we're like, oh yeah, you come here and bomb our fucking village,

we're going to kill your fucking people, you know? And you know, it's kind of like, that's the whole fucking cycle. It's like, I don't know. It's like, I don't know. It's like, you know, I remember literally saying this when I was arguing with S.E. Cupp and them on our show where they'd be like an attack.

Even like the littler ones. I remember there was one where like a New York guy, some Muslim guy in New York, like hit people with his car and he was like said he was part of ISIS or something. I don't even know how connected he was. And they're like, they're all like, well, don't we have to do something about this? I mean, don't we have to go bomb Syria or do something about this? And you're like, right. You just got hit, and now you feel like we have to do something. But what's something?

Blow shit up. Right? Yeah. It's not just like something, like give a speech. You're saying we got to blow shit up over this. It's like, all right. Well, maybe that's their perspective too. And also once you blow shit up, people want to blow shit up back. Yeah.

And now you're just continuing this. And so like, oh, we got to fight him over there so we don't fight him over here. But you're like, well, maybe that actually ensures that we have to fight him over here. And isn't it wild that during this most chaotic of times in our history, if we think about the future of the world, we think about the possibility of war, it's escalated. And we have the craziest situation as a president and a vice president. The thing is wild. president and a vice president it's the thing is wild like the only options we have what or from the right or the left we're like what the fuck this is it like this is all that's left it's like going to the supermarket during the pandemic and there's nothing on the shelves yeah like oh my god

all that's here is a trump and a biden we're gonna that's all we have all right we're gonna eat a jar of mayonnaise and pickles. Oh my God. That's all that's here. And the thing about it that's kind of crazy is that it's like,

it is so entertaining, even though you kind of know it's a disaster. Like, I remember when Trump announced he was running again, it was literally like my exact, I was like, this is so bad for the country.

God damn, this is going to be fun. Like, all in one thought, like, God damn, this is going to be funny as shit. Like, it definitely was that. It definitely was funny. No, but I'm saying 24 is going to be funny. Like, it's just, but it's bad.

Hopefully, there's, like, more. I really hope that Robert Kennedy Jr.'s campaign, like, has some impact and, like, takes off. I that Robert Kennedy jr. campaign like has some impact and like takes off I hope more good people run how could he possibly win well he's probably not gonna win if they're right so like all he's doing is getting the message out getting the message out but I don't I think that's that's valuable you know I think that's very valuable. And I also think things like that can check the establishment a little bit. If they're like, whoa, a lot of people like what this guy's saying. Maybe we can't get away with this right now.

Maybe we can't get away with that. There have been examples of that before where that happens. Maybe we can't get away with that like there have been examples of that before where that happens They try to do something and they realize this is gonna be too like too many people are gonna be upset about this Yeah, wasn't there talk during the Obama administration about some sort of regulation of the Internet? Yeah, the SOPA built the SOPA and the PIPA There were like these proposals that were like real deal gonna regulate the internet not like big tech Censorship shit like really the government was gonna regulate the internet'm telling you joe they just shut your show down if that shit had passed 100 if sopa had passed there's no way your uh podcast goes through the pandemic

no there's no way you're allowed to have dissident uh doctors and scientists on to give like their point of view on how the whole every policy is wrong they just wouldn't have allowed it and so and and so that didn't happen we're still like in the game with a fighting shot because enough people, you know, got furious about that. And look, I should be, to be fair, there was also corporate help with that. Like back then, a lot of the tech companies were against it because they were still like, they weren't in bed with the government as much back then and there was like i believe google was really against it and so they helped push kind of that message so i do think also like we're gonna need a mass awakening in this country but we're also gonna need like powerful people this is like what you see what's really encouraging with with elon

musk buying twitter is you kind of see that like yeah that's necessary too you got to have like a badass billionaire right who's like on board with, who can actually do something about it. Cause he's so valuable. Yeah. Yeah. That move. I know that pissed a lot of people off. There's a lot of people that are just missing the fucking point, man. They're mad that questionable people are allowed to be on it. Listen, the fucking all sorts of questionable people are already on there yeah the taliban's on twitter the the ccp's on twitter joe biden there's all types of bad people there's there's always been people like there's always been people on twitter yes yes and and come on it's like it's also like you kind of just like miss

You know like don't just don't get it twisted It's like again like when it's like what I try to say with the Ukraine thing It's like look if the people who didn't have anything to say over what happened in Yemen over the last like seven years are Really upset about the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine. It's like Just don't be a fucking mark right like see what's going on here I'm not saying you can't be upset over the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, but I'm just saying recognize what they are doing. They don't really care about the humanitarian crisis. They're using this. They're manipulating you.

And in the same sense, don't think the people who are like all for big tech don't. Look, you may really hate if there's like a neo-Nazi or something like that, like on Twitter or something, you know. Okay, I get it. I get where you hate that. But understand why they hate it Yeah, they don't hate it because of that like they don't care about that They they got no problem sending weapons to the neo-nazis in Ukraine, which by the way, we haven't touched on that But there's some real-deal ones in there. But my point is it's not that they hate neo-nazis. They hate dissidents

Okay, so you might find one example of a dissident who we all agree is a real bad guy or something like that But they're not shutting down guy or something like that. But they're not shutting down people like for that. They're shutting down Alex Berenson for making data driven arguments about why the covid policies are wrong. Yeah. That's who they write for The New York Times. That's who they're going after. You know what I mean?

So like like asking him to be removed. What are you doing about it? And it's always in like coded kind of mafioso terms. Like, yeah, I didn't technically say you should kick Alex Berenson off. I just went, what's up with this Berenson character? He has a lawsuit now. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, didn't he win his lawsuit against Twitter originally, against the old Twitter regime? He has one against the Biden administration. That's real interesting. Yeah. Good for him. I think he wants to find out what was said. He wants to find out what did you do? What internal discussions were there?

Right. You guys are trying to remove my First Amendment rights. Yeah. And it was data-driven stuff that he was talking about. You're trying to silence a journalist. But that's also, you realize that it's kind kind of like that's why it just all has to be protected you can't silence journalists but but it's also why it's it's like even if he wasn't making data-driven arguments he should have a right to make the arguments you know what i'm

saying like even if even if it's not like you have to protect even the dangerous speech otherwise you have no leg to stand on so like anything short of incitement of violence or some type of criminal activity or something like that, but you have to like, it's like, otherwise you have this slippery slope and it's amazing how quickly it happened, right? Like you remember when that happened with Alex Jones? So like not that long ago that it was like, oh, all of the companies colluded together

to all kick him off and silence him at once. And then everyone goes like, yeah, but it's just Alex Jones, you know? And then like before you know it, oh, it's not just Alex Jones. It's gonna keep going. It's a thing that feeds off of removing people that you disagree with.

And this is why Elon Musk pisses them off so much. It's the same reason why Donald Trump pisses them off so much. It's almost like he interrupted the inevitability of them winning. Yeah. You know, like progressives will say you're going to be on the wrong side of history. Yes. Which is like a really presumptuous thing. If you think about it, like you're saying you already know how history is written and that you are the right side of it. But that kind of is their worldview that it's like, like look we're going in this direction

And that's the correct direction and what's gonna happen next is Hillary Clinton's gonna be president you say that's the next step And they're like well this wasn't supposed to happen Trump was not supposed to be here and the same thing was like we're going in the direction of content moderation and you know Cracking down on misinformation whatever their euphemisms for it are people you disagree with yes and then all of a sudden elon musk you're like wait what am i what yeah the richest man in the world had 44 billion to burn and he just bought twitter and it's like and and you know so you could criticize him he it's twitter hasn't been perfect since he took it over there's like you, it could always be better or whatever, but it's pretty awesome that he did this.

It's pretty awesome. The getting away, eliminating verification is weird. It's strange. Because like that seems, look, if regular people want to get verified and there's a fee for that, that makes sense.

Okay. It pays for the site. But if, and especially for people that are addicted to it and they're on it all day long anyway like just give them some money but for celebrities and like musicians and people and you know like that there could be someone impersonating them like why don't you just give them their check because it makes it work better for all of us. And it does add to confusion a little bit. You don't need confusion. When Don Lemon announced that he was fired from CNN, there was no checkmark next to his name. And I'm like, I thought this is someone trolling.

Like, you know what I mean? So that's a little bit confusing. That doesn't make sense to me. I agree. That makes the experience of using the app less good. I agree with that. I love labeling state-funded media. State-funded media.

I love seeing the reaction. So funny, the reaction of NPR. Yeah. Like, this is outrageous. But it's true. Well, aren't they just 1% state-funded? No, it's actually much more than that, because then they get... It's like 1% is directly funded by the state and then they also take money from like local groups that have like collected taxpayer money and stuff like that.

So it's actually more – Crystal Ball did a thing on their show kind of breaking this down. So it's actually, in reality, it's more than 1%. But regardless, they take taxpayer-funded money. So I think there's nothing wrong with labeling them that. And if taxpayers are forced to fund any amount

of a news organization, and then that news organization is going to turn around and say, like, we won't report on the Hunter Biden laptop, or we won't do this or we won't, you know, their stuff during COVID was just God awful. I have no problem with

them having a little label there, especially one that pisses them off. I love that. Who did he label 69% state funded? Oh, I don't know. Was it the BBC? Maybe. Maybe he did. I also love that he's having fun with it. There's just something great about it. He's a billionaire troll.

Yeah. He likes to troll people. The fucking one that he did with Bill Gates is my all-time favorite. When he had a photo of Bill Gates standing next to the emoji of a pregnant man. And it said, if you want to lose a boner real quick. That is so crazy. Did Twitter label CBC's account? CBC, okay.

69% government-funded media. Opinions were mixed on whether or not Elon Musk was making a sex joke or just thumbing his nose at the Canadian Broadcast Corporation or both. So, yeah, it says 69% government-funded media. Well, is that the actual number? I don't know. Did you see this during it too there were Chinese journalists that had that label on their account Twitter drops government-funded label on media accounts including in China Well, he did you know I know he dropped it on the ones he dropped it on um on NPR too

I think in what he was just fucking with him for a little while, and then he was like, all right, we're not actually going to do that. You've got to realize, ladies and gentlemen, that oppose him. This is so much better than the alternative. Because the alternative is a system like China has, where it's a state-controlled system. Their social media is monitored. People go to jail for dissenting. It's very dangerous. Well, look, look i mean if you

it's a good time to show you this video video shows how china is using ai in their schools again so this is from an instagram account that is popular what they show is like an edited video i don't know how accurate all this is though but china know exactly when someone isn't paying attention. These headbands measure each student's level of concentration. The information is then directly sent to the teacher's computer and to parents. Classrooms have robots that analyze students' health and engagement levels. Students wear uniforms with chips that track their locations. There are even surveillance cameras that monitor how often students check their phones or yawn during classes.

But schools say it wasn't hard for them getting parental consent to enroll kids into what is one of the world's largest experiments in AI education, a program that's supposed to boost students' grades while also feeding powerful algorithms. That's about it. Whoa. Yeah. Whoa.

They're going to kill us. Well. They're going to dominate. They're going to dominate. I'm always a little bit skeptical of some of these things because you're kind of like, okay, is this just like one random school is doing it this way in China and it's like a little experiment? Because I have heard people say that – like I've heard people who run businesses in China. I heard a podcast with this one guy who lived there or still lives there in China.

And he was like, I don't know what everyone's talking about with this credit, social credit score. He goes, I've never heard of it. It's never affected me. I don't have a social credit score. You know, and I almost like wonder, like, sometimes we do get a lot of propaganda about China because there's also a whole bunch of people like who are real hawkish toward them. So I always try to kind of be skeptical of some of this. No doubt the CCP is really creepy. You know what I mean?

And they're definitely like an authoritarian, fucked up government. They're a dictatorship. Yes. A one party dictatorship for sure. And when you've got something like that, that's how you run it. Yeah.

But there were like, like that dude, Adrian Zen, who was like, he was like putting out a lot of the stuff about the Uyghur genocide. And he was like drastically like misrepresenting what's happening. And he actually, I believe he apologized for it,

but he just got called out like, like literally like just doing bad math. Like, Oh, you didn't carry the one here, motherfucker. It's 10 times less than what you're saying. And it's not like the evidence for that is not nearly what they kind of

suggested. It's, it's more seems like, Oh yeah, China's a real authoritarian government. and they limit how many children everyone can have. And it's, OK, they don't have the one-child policy anymore. Now you're allowed three or whatever. But it wasn't quite like the story that was originally put out there.

I just always get worried about that. So is there a Uyghur Muslim genocide? I have not seen... A German scholar named Adrian Zenz has recently stood out on the anti-China stage with his reports accusing China of detaining Uyghurs and other minority groups or imposing sterilization on ethnic minorities

in its, how do you say that? Xinjiang region? I believe that that's right Xinjiang region Zenz has been welcomed by the US and Western media as a leading expert on Jingjiang He was quoted by Pompeo When Pompeo declared that they were committing a genocide hmm Okay, and so was it say full of lies far-fetched assumptions, and baseless accusations.

Hmm. There's, if... Yeah, if you go, they did a good piece on this. If you go to antiwar.com, which I recommend everyone do every day, and just search Adrian Zenz there, they did a really good piece breaking down. It's straight up like his math is wrong. It's not even like there's an argument about this.

It's like, no, look, he's got these numbers completely wrong. So it's just people get real carried away with this shit. And my biggest concern is just that like after this whole stand in Ukraine, Taiwan is going to fucking be next. And it's like, oh, so now we're going to be flirting with a nuclear confrontation with Russia and China. So that's like my biggest concern in all of this. I do.

I do agree though, that the whole like AI in the classroom and all this shit is creepy as fuck. I don't want it around my kids nationwide. First of all, the problem would be, it would work and kids would get way better because you'd make them work. Yeah. You'd force them.

You'd hold them accountable. There wouldn't be any hiding. It would also be terrible for getting people to recognize that figures of authority should be questioned. You're not going to develop any of that. You're going to have to adhere very strictly to these rules. Yeah. Which I think part of going through school is learning that different people are more or less effective at communicating that you want to pay attention to them more or less that the, there's something, there's an education you're getting in a shitty class, believe it or not. You're getting an education on what happens in a shitty class about how much you hate it and how much it sucks and how stupid your teacher is yeah and how disinterested they are in the subject that they're teaching you and how they expect total compliance

and they don't understand human emotions and the way people think and behave that's a that's an education too like going through bad schools gave me a great view on what some adults are potentially like. I learned a lot from really awful teachers about what I don't want to be in this world. Yeah, man. Think about how much interaction you have as a child with adults, right? You have your parents and you have your friends' parents. And then very rarely are you alone with strangers, except when you go to school. And then you go to school and you get sent by the least motivated.

I mean, sent to the least motivated people. Oftentimes people that aren't happy to be there. They don't enjoy it, especially if it's a bad neighborhood. That's a sketchy job to begin with. You might get jumped by some kids and these people are just brow beaten they get in there, and they don't even want to be there. And these are responsible for showing your children, for most of the day, what an adult is like. And if that kid doesn't have a strong figure at home, if that kid doesn't have someone at home that's kind and generous and works hard and is very engaged in them with their life then they think that that's what adults are like and has been for since the beginning yeah you know

it's kind of important that they had that already for years before they they go to school you know that's still better than robots yeah that's still better i don't i mean i want compliance yeah i want my kids to develop like uh discipline and a work ethic and I want like all of that stuff. But I don't want them to do it because the robot's watching them. Right. I want it to do, I want them to live and be a human. But here's the other thing. And then be convinced that like, oh, it's really awesome to develop these things because life's better that way.

But there's also something that we have to take into consideration that there's all, there's a wide spectrum of things that people are interested in. And oftentimes when kids are bored in class, their imagination is running wild and they'll start thinking about what they want to do with their life. They'll start thinking about things through boredom. But Joe, if we just give them this pill, they'll pay attention.

I know. Thank God that shit wasn't around when I was a kid. Oh my God, I would have been medicated for sure if I like like parents who couldn't handle it. I got a Medic so I I'm lucky in a sense, but I got diagnosed with ad day, and they prescribed me Ritalin and I think my mother begrudgingly Put me on it for a week And I was just fucking I was just a little kid tweaking out on fucking ritalin and i wouldn't eat or sleep and so she took me off it right away and she was

like no fuck it we're not doing this um and then i never did i'm thank god i got off it yeah so you really don't i mean like i've done adderall like as an adult you know what i mean and you're like yo this is a serious drug, man. To just be giving this to children is really insane because he's a little boy who wants to run around. Like, let him run around more. I don't know. It's wild that different ways of thinking about life and different things being interested

and whether or not you can pay attention can be a disease. Like, if you can't pay attention to things, like we think there's something wrong with the way your mind works. and whether or not you can pay attention can be a disease. Like if you can't pay attention to things, like we think there's something wrong with the way your mind works. But meanwhile, those kids who can't pay attention to things, watch them play a fucking video game. Watch them play World of Warcraft. Watch them play whatever the fuck the kids play today.

What do they play? What's the big one? Yeah, one of those fucking things. These motherfuckers can play that shit all day long and be fully locked in how come because it's interesting because they're kids kids are bored as fuck and if they they haven't been interested in math previously and then they're behind and then they're trying to pay attention in class I remember just struggling through math because I was so dumb I was like are there calculators and they're like yes I do we have like basically an unlimited supply of batteries and they're like yes I'm like well I'm out well I'll figure all this shit out with a camera I'm not learning how to do that but that was the

the stupidest way to think but as a kid that left me thinking about other stuff. Like I was bored and because of bored, I would scribble on my notebook. I would draw, I would think about things. You know, the, the history of school, where it comes from the term school, it comes from, uh, Prussia as they, they were the first ones to invent school. And this is the Prussian system is what we adopted in America. The Prussians were the geographical and cultural precursor to the Nazis. And the reason they did it was because they had this problem that their conscripted armies would not fight. Like they'd get out there and they'd draft these people into an army and tell them to go to war. And they'd like piss themselves and run away. And they were like,

what are we going to do about this? And so they were like, we got to get them at a young age, uh, and really like indoctrinate them toward like being subservient to the state. And Horace Mann, who's considered, you know,

the, the godfather of education in America, he literally said, I think it was in the late 1800s he literally said we're adopting the prussian model and he was like but you know surely if this model can be used to support like prussian you know uh like authoritarianism it can also be used to support republicanism of america you know and like support the great republic and it's literally i mean that is the first thing they would do at schools is like, have you pledge allegiance to your government, you know? And, um, that's why I do think it's interesting when a lot of these, uh,

you know, like right winger types today, they'll be like, oh my God, they're propagandizing these kids in school. And I, I will grant that I do find the latest, um, insane gender sexualization of kids to be particularly troubling. It's not like it's a new thing that they're propagandizing kids in school. In fact, that's kind of what the whole thing was set up for. And it's like, it's, you know, like my kids are like, I got little, little kids, but like even just from like, like, like my four year old man, it's just like the state of these little kids are so magical and amazing.

And all they want, like they have this amazing passion for life that's built into them. All my four-year-old ever wants to do is ask me why. Like that's all she wants to do is understand how things work. She wants me to explain to her. She wants to help. You know what I mean? Like everything you can think of, she wants to do a little task and then say, I helped. You know, like mom baked muffins and I helped.

I stirred. Like they want so badly to know things and participate in the adult world. And then we're like, oh, okay. Well, what we're going to do with you for the next 14 years is send you to go sit in a row of desks and memorize and regurgitate information that an authority figure hands to you. It's just horrible. You're like, that's the best we could come up with? With the date in the 1800s in Prussia?

That's what you've got for me? And we're so locked into this idea that that's how to do it. Yeah. Yeah. Like they can't learn how to read and write and learn something about history and math in a different way that's like better. I'm not saying I have the answer to it. It's just like someone smarter than me should. Well, the problem is people are busy and you don't have enough time to invest in your kids education restructuring. A lot of people don't at least. Yeah. That's the thing about it is you just kind of, what's the best school in my area? Yeah. You fall into that. And, of course, because the schools are largely monopolized by the government,

it's also like there's not that much ability to change things and try new things. I think there's a really important factor that goes on with schools, though. It's these kids getting together and recognizing these teachers are idiots. And it's these kids getting together and recognizing these teachers are idiots. It's like when you have a conversation with your kids as they get older, they're going to tell you about some idiot teachers. And these conversations are hilarious. I got to witness some in California because my daughter during the pandemic was on Zoom. So she'd have to do Zoom school.

Okay. Or whatever it was. You know, they had a streaming service they used and so i i get to sit in a room with her while she was doing zooms and just to see how disinterested this teacher was how about how unbelievably boring it was to listen to the stuff that she had to say and there's no engagement no no thought of the fact that these are kids and a lot of these people don't have kids and they don't have kids that age either, or they're not accustomed to being around. Kids don't want to fucking pay attention.

You've got to make it fun. If you don't make it fun, they don't want to do it. They don't want to do it, but that's normal, and that's healthy. You want people to do things and have fun. Ideally, your life should be you doing something you enjoy. We've got to figure out what you enjoy, you enjoy Bob and we got a drill it into you Sally we're gonna fool you find what what you gravitate towards. Let's encourage that Yeah, 100% man and like there's you know, like and I knew like I had a few great teachers

Like in my life, but like three, you know Like they're the they're the minority and then there were tons of awful teachers just tons And here's the question man, like what creates an artist? like Most people if they had artistic talent in some way shape or form they'd probably want to do that Because it's a fun thing to do. There's something exciting about creating things. Well, where does that come from? Is that in all of us, but it's just discouraged so hard in some people and through this sort of rigid Adherence to whatever is in control whatever whatever power structure

Whatever authority figure is that? Does that squash it in so many people that only a few of? Tortured childhoods get out and maybe we associate Creativity and we associate brilliant art with with people with tortured childhoods for all the wrong reasons Do you ever hear that I always loved this quote so much, but someone asked Jerry Seinfeld Or they were like when you were a kid were you like the funny one in your group of friends? And he went, we were all funny. And then everyone else got jobs.

Wow. You know? And it's kind of like, there is something to that, man. Like, what do you mean? We were all hilarious. I just kept being hilarious. They all decided to stop at some point. I'm like, I don't think everyone could be an artist.

There are some people who are wired for different an artist There are some people who are wired for like different things There are some people who are like like this dude's a chemist or this dude's like a computer programmer And he was made to be that like he had like a real propensity toward that But I think there's no question a lot of people have that squashed a lot of people like you know I've known people like that who are like the most bitter people they're the most bitter people what's sad there's something tragic about that you know the guys that wanted to be in a band but it just didn't work out or just didn't it didn't have the balls to like go for it and then got a job and then had a family well now you got a family you can't leave this job now you know what i mean like and yeah that's there's something so tragic about that man

it's weird you know it's a it's a sad person to be around. Someone who just, it didn't, they didn't chase their dream or they didn't have the encouragement or the, they didn't have the confidence. They didn't have the circumstances. They had bad circumstances that befell them. Yeah. Well, if you're, if you're like young and you're, you're listening to this, like keep that in mind. I remember, I remember Jordan Peterson said once, I think it might've been on, on with you. I can't remember. Maybe it wasn't, but he said something about like, you know, there's people who are like in a job that they hate or in a career that they hate. And they'll think about

like, well, I can't like, I can't leave and pursue something else. Cause what about all the risks of doing that? And you're like, yeah. What about the risks of not? What all the risks of doing that yeah and you're like yeah what about the risks of not yeah what about the risks of doing something that makes you miserable for the rest of your life yeah because that seems like a risk worth considering you know i was really lucky in having no stability when i was young which doesn't make sense if you think about it because you want to provide your children with as much stability as possible but I was really lucky that I didn't because I didn't believe in like normal systems. Like I didn't believe in them. I'd never, they seemed alien to me. Like the idea of getting a job in an office was like so crazy. I never even considered it. I've never had an office job ever. Even when I had other jobs, I took these weird alternative jobs. Like

I did construction or I drove limos. I did stuff that like anybody could do. Like you didn't need, there's no barrier to entry. Like it was, working in an office to me seemed like madness. Like to sit in, I for sure have ADHD or whatever the fuck it is. But it works for regular life. Like if you have just a life you enjoy, it's actually beneficial. life like if you have a just a life you enjoy yeah it's actually beneficial but this idea of sitting and doing a job all day that i was completely unemotionally attached to not creatively attached to i couldn't do it but if i had to do some stuff for money that i knew was

temporary i could do that that's easy deliver newspapers fine that's just stuff i'm doing something kind of physical where you're like doing something it's just a little bit of a different thing for money it's not a job right of physical where you're like doing something. It's just fine. I'm doing something for money. It's not a job. Right, right. I'm not going to move my way up the corporate ladder. Are you fucking crazy? It was so impossible for me.

I was just programmed so different. No, I'm well aware of it in myself too where there'll be things sometimes that like something like even like shopping, like clothes shopping or something like, even like shopping, like clothes shopping or something like that, if it's like going slow, I'm like, I've never been so miserable in my entire life. I don't know why this is so excruciatingly painful. I have no interest, I don't freaking care. Like let's go.

I'm so bored. But if I'm doing the things that I'm passionate about, I could focus on that forever, like limitlessly, you know? That's where marijuana comes in. Because marijuana and shopping, it's a totally different experience. Then you're just having fun. You're relaxed and just walking around. You could walk around with the slowest shopper ever and just make fun of everything that happens.

Well, dude, I mean, I started smoking pot like very young in life, life like 14 maybe and I became like an everyday smoker very quickly And I think there was something to that connection that the things that were so boring and miserable to me in life were like Oh now this is fun. This is not that anymore. It's like oh look I found the cure for this 100% that was my entire time of filming fear factor I found the cure for this. Dude, 100%. That was my entire time of filming Fear Factor. The entire fucking every episode of every season except the first four episodes. The first four episodes I did sober.

I was like, oh, my God, I'm going to go crazy. And then once I started getting high, I was like, this is awesome. I could see where that would change the experience quite a bit. Oh, my God. It was a much better experience It was much better it was like night and day I was like oh yeah this is an amazing job For the record I don't recommend other

14 year olds get high all the time There were problems with it And it wasn't for the best but I was very fortunate that I was during My entire like From high school age to like The time I started doing stand up I didn't party at all

like very very rarely because I was competing so because of that I was always scared to lose and I was always scared that I would lose because I had gotten drunk and then I was hungover and you're not talking about losing a basketball game you're talking about getting kicked in the face and yeah it's not fun you don't want that to happen to you so i was obsessed with not getting kicked in the face but kicking people in the face and so if like not getting drunk was like the solution to a lot of those problems and it's also i just knew that there was a lot of kids that i was friends with at the time i was you took the opposite of the john jones approach well john jones so goddamn, he could dominate while partying.

Was that on here when he said that? Yeah. To you, that he said he would do it? Yes. So he had an excuse in his mind? Yeah, in case he lost and he still won, he still beat everybody. He beat people with like minimal training, man.

He was so fucking good. Jon's so good and he comes from a family of super athletes, like both of his brothers are in the NFL. I mean, it's just, it's just, kiss by you know you're just like there's people like that man there's roy jones juniors and mike tyson's and they have all the talent in the world and the athletic ability but they're also kissed by god yeah there's just great but john jones fought cyril gone and you're just like i guess you could have just always been fighting heavyweights this whole time like you just probably could have always done this.

And it's just like, it's not even like a competition even about, you're like, there's not even a next fight that I'm dying to see. Yeah. Because I'm just kind of like, I mean, he's just, there's no one. John's so good. There's no one who's going to fuck with him. He's so good. He's the GOAT. I mean, if you're going to have a GO a goat I don't think you can argue that John's

not the goat I think the argument really is who are the greats because it's so subjective if Nurmagomedov was better than John Jones it's so what do you like longevity do you like total dominance because in total dominance Nurmagomedov

is the goat total dominance man just smashes everybody nobody had a chance do you understand Total dominance. Because in total dominance, Nurmagomedov is the GOAT. Total dominance, man. Just smashes everybody. Nobody had a chance. Do you understand how crazy it is to watch a guy storm through an entire division with masters like Justin Gaethje, a master of destruction? No one has a chance. Conor McGregor, master of destruction.

No one has a chance. This motherfucker, he gets everybody there's an argument that he's the goat there's an argument that mighty mouse is the greatest expression of martial arts in the history of combat sports I would make that argument yeah in his prime he's the greatest expression slamming guys into arm bars and that crazy shit and he's a ghost he's standing right in front of me he's tagging him and he's a ghost. He's standing right in front of him. He's tagging him, and he's a ghost. His footwork is magical. His last fight where he won the belt back, that knockout was insane.

And it was a repeat of what the guy did to him. The way he timed it as he's following him into the cage. It's just like insane shit that that guy does. Masterful. And he's in his, what is he, 36? How old is Mighty Mouse? Let's find out how old Mighty Mouse is. Because for the 125 pound division

to be competing at a very high level in a natural athlete in his 30s He's 36? Yes. Recall. They say marijuana kills your recall. That's bullshit. It fuses a little. It's a little cloudy sometimes. How did he know Mighty Mouse was 36

then? That guy when he was in his prime, like when he beat Cejudo the first time, when he stopped him in the first round, he was the ultimate expression. I forgot about that. Oh, my God. They meet him to the body, right? Oh, my God. That's right. And it was real close.

The Cejudo second fight was very close. Dude, I went behind Mighty Mouse once when he was behind backstage at the UFC, and I just grabbed him to hug him just to play, just to play. He's my friend. And I just grabbed him to hug him, just to play, just to play. He's my friend. I go to hug him, and he turns and just to fuck with me, hits me in the body, touches me, the most gentle touch, with two knees so fast that I couldn't believe they actually moved that quickly. It was just, he went, just did that to me. I was like, oh, my goodness.

Yeah, he is an unreal talent. Dude. No, he's got an argument. When he's got an argument with those knees to the body I remember watching that going. I don't think I've ever seen anybody land a knee to the body more precisely It's a shame that he magic that's a hoodo It's a shame that he left the UFC when he did and didn't get like Like the third fight with so who do a rubber match there? I think would have been so huge You know what? I mean like I feel like he never got the fight that had like that type of height behind him Like the third fight with Cejudo, a rubber match there, I think would have been so huge. You know what I mean?

Like I feel like he never got the fight that had like that type of height behind him. I believe you're correct. It was just like kind of like hardcore fans knew. Like they were like, yo, this guy's like unbelievable. Like he's the best. But I think he just didn't quite have the moment. There was also talk of him moving up and fighting TJ Dillashaw. And I think there was like a contractual dispute or something like that.

Didn't happen. But it's a shame that he didn't get one of those huge moments, because even when he beat Cejudo the first time, he wasn't that big of a name yet. People didn't know who that was, whereas by the third fight it would have been a huge thing.

And then GSP also is in the conversation. He's gotta have an argument. Yeah, he's in the conversation. He's got to have an argument. Yeah, he's in the conversation for sure. The dominance of the welterweight division. And the fact that he beat everyone he ever faced and came back and won the middleweight title after a leave. That's hard to not consider him there. Yeah, especially how brilliantly he handled it. He just beat Bisping and said, I'm done. I do think all of this is kind of subjective.

Like you said, it's like, what do you like? But I would say that for me, Jon Jones has the strongest argument because he dominated multiple generations of fighters. Like he dominated the Shogun Rampage, Machida generation of fighters then he dominated um what was it gustafson the gustafson the first fight's the most impressive because he didn't train for it yeah that's just the most impressive thing is that john jones pulls out the first fight

in the later rounds he wins the decision by dominating the later rounds in a fight that he didn't train. And we had never seen him in a dogfight before at that point. You were like, sometimes there are these guys, I remember thinking the same thing with Israel Adesanya when he fought Kelvin Gaslam, whereas all we had seen from him

was just like dominating everybody. And so there's something, there's kind of a question mark a little bit with that where you don't know, some people like when the going gets tough, kind of look for a way out. And if you remember in that fight in the fourth round, Kelvin fucked him up in that fourth round. He really hurt him. And he was busted up.

And you remember before the fifth round starts is that he looks at him and he's like, I'm prepared to die for this. He said it. And then he went out and dominated the fifth round. And you were like, oh, okay. This dude's special He's not just like a talent that can dominate people, but he's also like a real fighter He's so special that he chose to fight Pajero For the fourth time after getting knocked out and he was getting the last fight, too He was he was getting fucked up

His leg was getting fucked up leg was getting chewed up and and he was cornered and he was taking the last two he was he was getting fucked up his leg was getting fucked up his leg was getting chewed up and and he was cornered and he was talking about it after the fight he's like not again he's getting me again because he was getting him again with the same goddamn thing that guy is so clever here he goes he says i'm prepared to die i have no problem i'm prepared to die and look how fucked up he like he was really beat up man i'm prepared to he said i'm prepared to die i'm prepared to holy shit do i I'm prepared to die. I'm prepared to. Holy shit. Holy shit, dude.

I do like at the end of it, though, not knocking him, just singing his praises. He's the greatest. But at the end of the fight, he's like, that's it. He goes, we're not fighting again. He goes, I don't keep score. I end score or whatever. You're like, I get where you're coming from on that one. You're like, because you should really move up.

You should move up and go fight a deadweight. Yeah, move up to 205, fella. Get the fuck out of here. It's pretty funny to be three and one and go, I think we've all seen enough of this.

Well, I don't think he's three and one. I think he won the first fight. Oh, yeah, that's right. It was a bad. It was a bad decision, I believe. You can say this.

And he got saved in the second kickboxing fight. Adesanya had him on skates. Right. He was in real trouble. And he was winning. He was standing eight count, which is huge.

Especially, you look at the first round of the first MMA fight. And he drops, yeah, yeah. He was in real trouble. And he was winning? He was standing eight count, which is huge. Especially, you look at the first round of the first MMA fight. And he drops him in the end of the first round. Now, imagine if he dropped him. He rocked him. I don't know if he actually fell. I don't know if his hand touched the ground. I think he just rocked him. You're right. He rocks him in a very similar manner to when he finishes

him off in the second fight. Imagine if that had taken place and the referee had stood in and gave him a standing A count. Pejeta is a monster. He recovers quickly. Like, he can get cracked, and there's some speculation that some of that has to do with the fact that he's cutting so much weight. Michael Bisping, I believe it was, there was a few other fighters. Oh, I think it was Sugar Sean O'Malley.

We're talking about this insane weight cut that this guy makes to get down to 185 pounds and the fact that that could affect his ability to absorb punishment. Very possibly. But imagine a scenario where he gets rocked like that, but then you give him eight whole seconds to recover. And the referee's doing like one two three like they don't want him to lose right and so they give him this little ability to recover and he survives and then he winds up winning and knocking out pay it or knocking out Adesanya in this spectacular

fashion hits him with this monster left hook but that's the thing about that guy that's what's so terrifying about fighting him and that's why is he so special that he's like i can figure this motherfucker out well i you also got to look at it like you know there's almost like there's like a winner versus loser mentality to that and i remember thinking of this going into that last fight we're like look you could look at it and say i i was fighting my best fight and he still got me. You know what I mean? Or you could look at that and go, I had this guy. I was winning that fight until the fifth round.

You know what I mean? The thing is there's zero margin for error when you fight that dude. Zero. Like you can't fuck up once. It's almost you got to crack him because like him saying that he was going to get him early, I think he kind of knew that you the punishment he puts on your legs it's so it's so sneaky how he does it man but he throws the best calf kicks in the fucking business man yeah he really does he's gonna be a force he'll

be a force at 205 i mean he's a real dangerous guy at 205 he's gonna have a problem with real elite grapplers i think yeah there's Yeah, there's some big grapplers. That's a little bit of an issue. But it'll be kind of interesting to see how he can do. It'll be very interesting. But he's training with Glover, and Glover's one of the best grapplers that ever fought in the 205-pound division. Yep.

So he's going to get amazing. But when you saw the first Adesanya fight, when Izzy took his back, when Izzy was on top of him, you could imagine someone who's an elite grappler in that division like having their way with him in those situations well when Israel Adesanya moved up to 205 uh and um fought uh Blachowicz like that was the issue that he had with him he was like okay I know what I can do to this guy but he's bigger and stronger than than Izzy Blachowicz is huge no no I'm saying but Perhera is bigger and stronger than Izzy. Bohovic is huge. No, no, no. I'm saying, but Pajera is bigger and stronger than Izzy.

So it's a question. How good can he get? That fight at 205 would be fucking insane. That's a real good fight. Jan Bohovic versus Alex Pajera at 205 would be fucking bananas. Dude, that fight, him against Hill would be a great fight. Any of the matchups there would be really good. You can make any mistakes against Bohovic,

and Bohovic can take it. That guy can take it. Holy shit, is he an animal. Yeah. No, he's good. And then you've got Ankhalaev. Like, Jesus Christ, man. And the champ is, well, not the champ anymore,

but he's out for a few years, I think. Jamal Hill? No, no, no, no, no. Jamal Hill is the champ. Now, what's his name who was the champ but didn't lose it? Shit when I was fucking the guy Yeah, what's his name? He's literally just got a big shoulder injury. Oh My god, I'm blanking. Yeah, yeah, he I not fucking catch that. I'm that's how good this fucking Ric Flair weed is

That's hilarious. See, there, my memory sucks. Yep, there you go. My memory's great, and it sucks. One for two so far. Prohaska, do you know what happened with him? I know he fucked his shoulder up in a real awful way, right? Dude, he fucked his shoulder up so bad,

the UFC surgeon said it was the worst shoulder injury he's ever seen. This is what happened. His shoulder came out of place during training, and they yanked on it to put it back in and fucked it up. Jesus. Yeah. That sucks, man. That sucks.

Wally's champion of the world, too. Wally's the champion of the world. Jesus. Coming off the most insane fight with Glover Teixeira. I mean, that was a fucking insane fight. One of the best fights ever. The fact that he submitted Glover to win, he's so unusual. You watch his movements.

Yeah, it's crazy. Everything is so different. It's so hard to prepare for this guy. Here he's training again. So he'll do this like he's just fucking around. He's like loosening up, I think. Is that what he's saying he's doing? Yeah, yeah.

It's just showing up while you're talking about it. Oh, but his movement when he fights is so unusual. So this is why they stripped the title right away because they were just like, this is going to be— He relinquished the title. Oh, he just relinquished it because he was like, this is going to be a long time. He's the real deal, man. No, he's incredible. He relinquished the title.

He decided that that injury was too spectacular, that he needed real time to recover. to recover but what what's interesting about this is like shoulder injuries are notorious for being they repeat it's very hard like a shoulder is a complicated joint you got to really rehabilitate that thing perfectly before you come back so many guys have come back from knee injuries and shoulder injuries too soon. Ed Shortfuse Herman, who just retired, he got his ACL reconstructed, and in training, like getting back into it blew it out again because it wasn't really recovered yet. You've got to give yourself the right amount of time.

You're an elite athlete. And so he was talking about getting back in there I think in July, and I think that's all scrapped. But I think he was talking about getting back in there very quickly, he says he knows his body, but man, that's a complicated joint. These guys that are surgeons today are the greatest that have ever lived.

They can do amazing things with people's shoulders. But even T.J. Dillashaw, he's had a shitload of surgeries and his shoulders are fucked. That was awful seeing that in that fight with Algermaine Sterling. Horrible, horrible. But horrible but tj's shoulders have been fucked for a long time he just compensated for it to the point where it all eventually just fell apart well he looked real good in his fight before that i mean i don't know i guess he said he had a lot of problems with it in uh in that training camp well in that fight he looked really good before it and cory sanhagen destroyed his knee destroyed his knee

in that exchange yeah his knee was fucked up man and so from that he goes and wins that fight he wins that decision and now he's got fucked up shoulders his shoulders are so bad and he got surgery on him but they basically said like you're not gonna be able to fight again like they they just won't hold up like it's been too much damage and that's what I'm worried about when I hear people having a catastrophic shoulder injury and then saying I'm gonna get back in there as quickly as possible like you know be careful shoulder injuries they're just like they're a tough one knee back I mean when people recover from like Aljamain Sterling recovers from a neck surgery where they replace one of his discs with an artificial disc and goes on to retain the title. Like, holy shit, man.

Like, you got an artificial disc in your neck and you're fighting. Like, the stuff they can do today is wild. Yeah, it's incredible. Shoulders do seem like the trickiest one, though. And they seem like the ones that like, you know, it's incredible shoulders do seem like the trickiest one though and they seem like the ones that like you know it's weird like when you see people i remember this from like basketball like in in like high school and shit whereas there'd be someone who like their shoulder popped out like they dislocated their shoulder and then that just happens to them then that's just a thing that like regularly like not like all the time but you always like no it could happen again and like

there's really like uh i don't know that's the thing i want to recommend for shoulder health if people are interested in this there's a product that i have no affiliation with other than i bought it it's called crossover symmetry and it's these bands and they come in various weights and you put them on a post or you can hang them on the wall or whatever and you do a series of exercises whether it's pulling them upwards or pulling them across pulling that pulling them this way and that way and it's all shoulder strengthening and it really can help people and it really can prevent injuries too if you do it on a regular basis if you stick to it you got to think of your shoulders as like something that you're protecting

you're not just like building it up you should protect the joint like that's what knees over toes guy is really interested in. Like his whole thing is about like strengthening all the muscles around your knee. And strengthening the muscles around your shoulder is so important too. And so often when people are training in a thing, whether it's jujitsu or Muay Thai or anything, you're only training doing that thing. And that thing can strengthen you and it certainly will. but it would benefit you to doing things to prevent injuries and strengthening joints and strengthening the tissue around vulnerable areas in your body, whether it's your neck or your shoulders or your knees. It's very good. It's very important. Everybody should do it if you can.

Well, I know who's happy right now is the people who run that company with those shoulder Do those shoulder straps a bunch of different mean you like to think someone's listening live like yes That's my thing. Well the knees over toes guy has a great system that he does too with just he uses dumbbells and Different external and internal what rotation exercises and those are all very good There's a bunch of different things you could do with with just dumbbells And those are all very good. There's a bunch of different things you can do with just dumbbells. There's a bunch of different exercises you can do that all are just low-weight things that strengthen your shoulders. Another one that's great is club bells.

I don't know if you've ever used them before. But they're like – it looks like a small bat that's made out of iron. And you do all these – the Iron Sheik used to do it with those big wooden ones. You ever seen those things? No. You do things like shield casting where it's all – you have this thing in your hand that's like a bat and the weight is weird. So you don't even need much weight. Like 15 pounds, you can get a really good workout. And you're holding these things out and you're doing all sorts of different exercises with these things.

You're swinging them. You're swinging them overhead. Like look at this. That's the Iron Sheik doing it yeah those things are tremendous for shoulder strength wasn't a lot of people Colgan ha ha ha that guy was a beast dude in real life he was yeah I lead athlete elite wrestling really oh yeah I didn't know that yeah I leave wrestler for your Ron like legit oh okay that's where he wrestled right it wasn't fake right Oh, yeah. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, elite wrestler for Iran. Like, legit. Oh, okay. That's where he wrestled, right? It wasn't fake, right?

Because you never know with those people. Like, he came from Iran, right? I mean, he didn't lie about that, did he? Back then, you could just lie, though. There was no internet. Dude, my favorite wrestling story ever, my favorite storyline. Who did he wrestle for? We should give him his props because Iron Sheik was the fucking man.

I'm 99% sure he wrestled for Iran. But he was like an elite wrestler. So what year? Yeah. When did he wrestle for Iran?

Probably... 68. Oh, okay. So that's before the revolution. That's when we liked the government. Look at him. Fucking animal.

By the way, the CIA overthrew the Iranian government in 1953 and installed the Shah. You motherfucker! That's what we liked the government. Look at him. Fucking animal. By the way, the CIA overthrew the Iranian government in 1953 and installed the Shah. You motherfucker. I'm just saying that wasn't a good thing. And on that note, dude, we're like almost four hours in. Oh, can I just say the one thing that I wanted to say for you except my favorite wrestling storyline ever was during the first Iraq war that we were just talking about, Sergeant Slaughter defected and became a pro-Iraqi. That was his thing, that he was the American Slaughter, because that was a big problem he had. He was like, I realize Iraq is right.

Oh my God, that's hilarious. That's hilarious. Look at him, he's getting the fucking, oh Jesus Christ. Dude, it was so easy in 1991. It was so easy. Can we play it? Can we play it? And people are like, boo!

Sasha's son betrays America. He conquered Kuwait. He conquered Kuwait. His name overnight became a household word around the world. What an amazing What an amazing move American sergeant defected to Iraq This is amazing What is he unwrapping?

What is his boot? An Iraqi military boot Nice job, dude he unwrapping? What is this boot? An Iraqi military boot? People are so angry. That my career will follow your lawfully standards. Justice to you, Dr. Dwayne. Let a ballsy move. I will wear your gift. And I will be your champion. Yes, I get it.

I get it. I will be your champion. The ultimate warrior, and the Royal Rumble. All right. It's over. The podcast is over. That's amazing.

All right. Bye, everybody. Bye.