The Joe Rogan Experience - #2138 - Tucker Carlson

Episode Date: April 19, 2024

Tucker Carlson is the host of the "Tucker Carlson Podcast" and the leading voice in American politics. After spending nearly 30 years in cable news as a host at Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN, he is reshaping the media landscape with his newly founded online media company, Tucker Carlson Network, dedicated to telling the truth.  www.tuckercarlson.com https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson https://www.youtube.com/@TuckerCarlson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Joe Rogan Experience. Trained by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. Did you see the US government just released, apparently by accident, the Project Aqua stuff? No, what's that? This is crazy. Yeah, I guess we're rolling. Are we rolling? Yeah.

No, no, no, you can, this is just, someone just sent me this, this is- Project Aqua? Yeah, hold on, I'll, um. They just released, I think, by accident. How's that happen? It's Kona blue You familiar with this? No

Kona blue is a It was a program That yeah, dude, they I'm gonna send this to Homeland Security just released this said to me. I'll send it to Jamie and No, I got it right right here I'll just I don't do email or I don't know how to. I'll just I don't do email You don't do email no I'm an email in many years really yeah, how do you exist? I do text Wow just text Yeah, I don't do email. I don't go on the fucking internet and on the TV. I'm not into that but anyway No that stuff it's bad you know yeah, I guess that's my isolation tank I Just stay away from that shit, but anyway. That's smart. Did you text it to me? Yeah, I did I

Think I did didn't get to me Yeah, just sense that you know it's a big thing Okay, so this is so amazing. So this is in there, they're talking about this, and this was just released, talking about setting up this program, Cone of Blue. I didn't get it. This is like a UAP program of some sort. Yeah, the medical division will have a small team

of medical analysts under the direction of the chief physician and deputy administrator They will organize data into a threat analysis based on medical findings including but not limited to a Deaths and injuries as a result of interaction with advanced aerospace vehicles here It is these medical injuries as a result of other anomalies see collateral injuries psychological effects to family members, so they're admitting that people are dying It's just like a tweet from yes, is this it yeah, what does that mean? Do you ever wonder if stuff like this is just disinformation yeah, maybe I mean, I wonder if stuff like this is just disinformation? Yeah, maybe. I mean, I wonder if...

I wonder a lot of things. I'm sure you do. But um... I would always assume that a lot of this stuff is nonsense. Yeah. Here's what we know is that US servicemen have died as a result of contact with or being in the proximity of these vehicles. And we know that because there are a lot of suits

working their way through the VA system. Yeah? Where families can't get compensated for the deaths or injuries to loved ones. Because it's all under wraps, top secret. Well, that's just a fact, okay, that that is happening. So if there's, I guess, you know, when there are measurable physical effects of a phenomenon,

we can say conclusively the phenomenon is real. Right. And so, yeah. But isn't it- It is real. I mean, I guess we're sort of past the point of like, is it real? Yeah, it's real. It's real in that there's these things that are moving in very bizarre ways and they have

these propulsion systems that violate what we know about propulsion systems. Retrieving data across dimensional space-time, develop remote viewing, comms and countermeasures, determine baseline for physical transport across dimensional space-time barrier, rapid response medical teams for UFO interaction events. So how did they do this accidentally? Study conscious interactions with and control of technology. So I got this from someone in

the US government who's, well look let me just start by saying that you know I don't know anything, but he sent me this. The above is a hundred percent legit. I was read into this program but told never to tell anyone it's now been released as you can see It began as a result of my old program a ATIP I signed a document saying I would never talk about Kono blue and similar efforts I can't believe that a AAR would have released it Right, you know Yeah, I mean here's what we do know is that there's enough going on in the skies, but not just the skies underwater that

You at the US military has been forced to respond to it. So like move Aircraft from one place to another because there are too many of these objects in the sky That's actually happy Chris Mellon just wrote a long piece about it So it's real. The government is not controlling it. In fact, it's forcing the government DOD to respond. And we know that there is a real effort and has been underway for a long time

to keep the public from knowing about it. But that's all known, that's established. I don't think any rational person would deny that. The question is like, what is it actually? I mean, now is sort of the point you have to ask, like, what is this? And you know, so that's how it's going to be. How much do you think is ours? Well, none of it's ours. None of it?

Well, I don't know. I mean, clearly, you know, the US government is huge. It's the largest human organization. I think there are two million federal employees and another 10 million federal contractors who are effectively government employees but don't have civil service protection, for example. So that's 12 million people in a country of 340 million working for the federal government. So, it's kind of hard to overstate how big the federal government is and how well-funded. And so, to say the government this, the government that, no, of course, it's people within the government.

But, yeah, they're working on all kinds of things, obviously, that are classified. But in general, no, they can't control these objects. So no, it's not American technology. Or Russian or Chinese, it predates all of that. Well, some of it does, right? For sure, the Kenneth Arnold sightings, that was really early on, that was like the early 1950s. He was seeing these flying saucers, these disks that were moving over mountains.

Well, right. I mean, the prophet Ezekiel writes about it in the first chapter, Wheels in the Sky. Yeah, that's a crazy one. Boy, when you read that. Well, it is crazy. If you read it, it's like, oh, wow. And not just you know the Hebrew scriptures like it's all over every Vedic texts of course so these are spiritual phenomenon. There's no evidence. They're from another planet I mean, I think that's the op that's the lie That they're from Mars look Space the atmosphere is really well monitored right both for military for defense reasons

But also because like it'd be nice to know when asteroids are coming. And there's no evidence, has never been any evidence that there are lots of these objects, these vehicles coming into our atmosphere from somewhere else, some other planet. There's no evidence of that at all. Hmm.

So they're from here and they've been here for thousands of years, whatever they are. And it's pretty clear to me that their spiritual entities, whatever they are, and it's pretty clear to me that their spiritual entities, whatever that means, are supernatural, and which is to say supernatural means above the natural, above the observable nature, and they don't behave according to the laws of science as measured by people, you know, and they've been here for a long time.

And there's a ton of evidence that are under the ocean and under the ground. So like with that fact set, what do you conclude? When did you start having this opinion that they were spiritual and that they've always been here? When did this- Well, I didn't know anything about the topic until 2017. Was that after the New York Times piece?

No, it was before. It was before, and the things that I saw, I mean, I was, and am still, a very conventional person. I mean, I'm 54, I grew up in this country in California, which was like, every assumption about America I bought completely, just completely. And I thought that everyone who questioned those assumptions was bad. I just bought into the system completely without even thinking about it.

And I imagined that I was like some kind of free thinker and you know, I'm going against the grain. But like the core, my core assumptions were the, you know, the assumptions fed to me by the culture and the government and I didn't even realize it. But anyway, I'd never really thought about UFOs at all, and I'd been in journalism since I was a kid, so of course I'd run into a lot of people who had crazy views on a lot of different topics.

UFOs, 9-11, circumcision, you know, like every whack job in the world you run into when you're covering stuff. Fluoride. Fluoride, right? I just brushed with non-fluoride toothpaste this morning. Me too. Right, exactly.

Exactly, but probably unlike you, I didn't have any opinions like that. I was like, fluoride, come on. 9-11, shut up! UFOs, you're fucking crazy. You know what I mean? I just had this reflexive, I'm ashamed of it, I'm not bragging about it, but um, but it was it was 2017 and really it was the Trump campaign

It wasn't that I was like so in love with Trump though I've always liked Trump because it was a hilarious and charming and all that but I wasn't like a Trump or anything but it was watching that campaign and Particularly his claim that they were spying on him. And I was like, really? The Intel services and federal law enforcement, FBI, do not spy on presidential campaigns.

That's so out of the realm. That's so crazy. That could never happen, because of course, there's no democracy in a system like that. And fundamentally, we're a democracy, an imperfect one. It kind of lumbers along, but like it's not fake. And then that turned out to be true,

and I knew it was true. And that just blew my mind. So I began a process still ongoing of reassessing a lot of other things, like okay, well if that was not true, what else is not true? And what else that they told me was a conspiracy theory might actually have some basis in fact. And then someone from, you know, a DOD employee

reached out to me and said, actually, there's a ton of evidence that this UFO thing is real. And really? And so I started doing segments on it when I worked at the TV channel. And there was like a lot of mockery, but I was like, I don't care I'm just gonna do this and then of course the second you start as you know better than anybody you start talking about something then People reach out to you and some of them are deranged but some of them aren't at all So I just started getting a lot of information from people and meeting with people mostly in private, you know, come to my house let's talk. And I decided on the basis of what they told me and then I talked to a lot of people about it,

that actually this is really a very heavy duty question. Actually, it's not just, it's not the little green men question, it's like a much bigger question. And it's really bad, it's really dark. And then I stopped. Then I was like, I don't wanna know anymore because it's not helping me at all as a person.

What information did you get that made you feel like it's dark? What's so dark? Well, first of all, the deception is always bad. Like lying is bad. And it's bad not just in a legal sense in that it can be illegal to lie, but it's bad for you.

Like it rots you. Like being a liar makes you a bad person. When you lie, you are serving evil. There's a moral quality to it that's inescapable and very obvious and only like advanced, advanced civilizations ignore that. Lying is bad. And so if you have lying at scale, which we have on this topic, it's inherently bad. Okay, so that's the first level. The deeper level is, okay, so if they're spiritual beings, which I believe they are, like it's a binary, they're either, you know, you're on team good or team bad, you can assign any

name to it you want, but like what are these things? Are they good or bad? And I think some of them are bad and if the US government knows that or elements the people within the US government know that then you know then they're serving a bad force. Well when you say spiritual like what makes you draw that conclusion that they're spiritual? What's the obvious? I mean spiritual may be the wrong word supernatural. conclusion that they're spiritual? What's the obvious? I mean, spiritual may be the wrong word, supernatural. You know, they're beyond nature as we understand it. I mean, obviously they are. I mean, just chart their physical behavior.

It doesn't, you know, it goes outside of what we understand about physics. No visible means of propulsion, you know, coming at indescribable speed, hitting the ocean, continuing at speeds that are impossible under sea. I mean, in other words, if I take a nine millimeter radar, seven, six, two by 39, and shoot you at 50 yards underwater in a swimming pool, and it's even more intense than saltwater, because it's denser, you could catch the bullet, if it even makes it to you.

So if you have a craft in this object underwater that's traveling at 500 knots as measured by sonar right there You're challenging our understanding physics. Like what is that? How can that be? So they've tracked that they've tracked things going 500 knots under the sea Yeah, really? Yeah much much faster than any object could can actually go under under CEO for sure. Oh yeah, there's a lot of stuff going on underwater and a can actually go under, under sea. Yo, for sure. Oh yeah. There's a lot of stuff going on underwater and a lot.

And there's video of these things coming out of the sky into the water and also emerging from the water. Right. Yeah. So. It's all so blurry though. I don't think it's that. Transmedium video.

Yeah, I don't think some of it's that blurry. I think some of it's crystal clear. We just don't have access to it. Is that what you mean? Yeah. Just we haven't seen it? Correct. So they have some stuff.

For sure. So, but there's just a lot going on under water and it's measured. And so whatever, I mean, these are all, again, this is like the most obvious observable level of it. But then you just ask yourself, like, what, this is like the most obvious observable level of it, but then you just ask yourself, what is this actually? And if there's been extensive knowledge of this for decades, like maybe 80 years at least,

if not going back to the 30s, 90 years, to what end? So there are two possible explanations, obvious explanations. The first is the one you often hear, which is this is so heavy that if the public were to know about it, it would be just disruptive. It would be too scary. Like you don't want to scare people for no good reason. There's nothing we can do about it. And you also don't want to suggest that, you know,

the U.S. military isn't capable of protecting the country, the homeland. And it does suggest that. If you can't control these objects in your airspace and that's known, if they can't, that's known, okay? Then that's just a limit to the power of the US military and you don't want to tell people that because then they like won't believe that they're safe. I get it. But then there's a deeper level which is like, okay, what's your relationship with these things? What is the US government's

relationship with these things? And there's evidence that there is a relationship and that it's a long standing and that raises like a lot of questions about intent. And so like what is that? And I just personally decided, you know, and people have been hurt by these things. You know, that's a fact. That's a fact. It's a knowable fact. It's a provable fact. And killed. And I'm not saying millions of people have been killed by whatever these things are, but people have been killed,

and it's known because it's working its way through the courts out of the VA. So, I don't know. An object that is by definition supernatural, it's above the laws of nature as we understand them, and that has resulted in the deaths of people. We don't spend enough time thinking about

what that adds up to, like not good, actually, not good. How many people do you think have died from these things? I don't know, but I mean I. And is it radiation sickness Is it like what it what is? What's the person that I talked to I interviewed someone who was a Stanford medical school professor who's out there and worth talking to by the way you know Talking about Gary Nolan. That's exactly who I'm talking about. I was effectively an expert witness in these cases

So he's an expert in brain injury. Do you know him? Yeah. Yeah entirely credible person Checks all the boxes that I care about he's he's got patents. So he's like a lot of Stanford University, but she's like independently rich He flew to I live in a remote place and he flew to My place at his own expense because he wanted to tell the story. So he's got no profit motive here He's the most highly credentialed person at the university practically My place at his own expense, because he wanted to tell the story. So he's got no profit motive here. He's the most highly credentialed person at the university practically,

Stanford Medical School. We consider that a big deal. And he's worked on this for over 10 years, assessing the injuries to US servicemen from being in close proximity to these objects or having contact with these objects. And his conclusion, as you know, because you've talked to him, is that there's some kind of energy coming off here that scrambles people's brains or kills them.

And it's not exactly radiation, at least in his telling to me. So anyway, but the point is people have died. Yeah. And so, you know, it does raise a lot of questions about like what the hell, right? What the hell? American citizens have died and you're hiding it? Why are you hiding that? Why would you hide that? Perhaps because they don't have any explanations because they, because it's so beyond our comprehension that they're still trying to piece it together.

I would wonder how much interaction they really do have with these things. If I was from another planet or if I was some interdimensional being, I don't know how much I'd give a shit about the president. I don't know how much I'd give a shit about the president. I don't know how much I'd give a shit about the government. I would probably look at this infantile race, this species, this bizarre territorial apes with thermonuclear weapons, this very weird species. I'd probably look at them as very chaotic

and I wouldn't really have much concern for who's running it especially if they have the ability to travel at insane speeds and go undetected and well it depends like that okay so the template that you're using to understand this is like science fiction right these are an advanced race of beings from somewhere else but the template that every other society before us has used is a spiritual one. There is a whole world that we can't see

that acts on people, a supernatural world that's acting on us all the time for good and bad. Every society has thought this before ours. In fact, every society in all recorded history has thought that until, I'll be specific, August 1945 when we dropped the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and all of a sudden the West is just officially secular, we're God, there is no God but us.

And that's the world that we've grown up in, but that's an anomaly. No one else has ever thought that. There's never been a society that thought that. Every other society has assumed, and they've had all kinds of different explanations, and the details differ, but the core idea does not differ, never has differed from caves until now, that we're being acted on by spiritual forces at all times. And so to someone born before or living before 1945, I think it would have been much more obvious that this is the thing that every society has written about.

And in fact, that battle, that unseen battle around us, that spiritual battle, has been the basis of every society, of every religion, not just Christianity. So, once you discard your very, very recent assumptions, relatively speaking, about how the world works You're like, well that kind of seems like the obvious explanation, right? Hmm. It's not that obvious to me So what's What's more obvious do you think? Well, I don't think there's an obvious explanation. I think

if I had to guess some of this stuff is ours. And some of these things are propulsion systems that they theorized way back in the 1950s. Anti-gravity propulsion systems, things that can operate without igniting fuel and pushing something out that they operate in some completely different way that utilizes gravity and almost can instantaneously transport to new places, essentially fold space-time. I don't know, so there's things that the government does where they have these programs and the people that are sworn into these programs, whether they're the physicists or you know the metallurgists or whoever these people are that are working

on these programs, they don't tell anybody. All their phones are monitored, everything's monitored, there's a culture of secretism that's pretty intense. And it's not inconceivable that over the course of the last 70 plus years of them theorizing and then eventually Implementing some of these things that they've developed drones that can move in ways that this the conventional the people that understand conventional propulsion systems could not imagine and that they've figured out a way to do this and to keep it secret and

We're probably not the only ones work on these things but where did they get that information and You know, you know Diana Pasolka you know her work They they describe these crafts these crash crafts as donations Which is fascinating. They're left there, the crashed retrieval program, the crashed UAP retrieval program, is essentially they're going, like, figure this out. We're gonna crash this thing here, you figure this out.

And the question is, if that's true, okay, where are these things coming from? Are they, if there's something that is so advanced that it's decided to leave us a little trinket for us to back engineer, is that from another dimension? Is that from here? Is that from some realm that we just don't have access to? Is it from another planet? Are we, we have drones that are on other planets right now. We have a drone on Mars, we have the lunar rovers, we have satellites that we send to observe and photograph other planets. We just got really high detailed photographs of Jupiter, they're pretty amazing. But if

something was like us on another planet but lived uninterrupted with technology advancing for a thousand years, ten thousand years, a million years more than us. What would that be like? And how much would we be able to understand of what we're seeing? What would we be able to see? This idea that we monitor our skies, sure, but if something just appears and disappears, essentially instantaneously, if something literally can fold time, can fold space, and just traverse between immense distances almost instantaneously, what are we going to see?

What are we going to see? And also, what kind of detection systems do we have? We have radar, we have visual, we have a bunch of different military-based detection systems to look out for. Enemy crafts and airships and all that stuff. But if you're dealing with something that's a million years more advanced than us, how much would we be able to detect? So I think we're pointing to the same question.

I mean, I have no doubt that the US government has technology that we don't know the details of. That makes sense. Sure. But like, where did it come from? Right. I'm not even sure, this is a separate question, but related, I'm not sure we really know

where nuclear technology came from, actually. Really? Yes. Like the Manhattan Project? Yeah, like we know the Manhattan and we know something about the Manhattan project But like where exactly did that you know came from Germany German scientists were working on. Okay? The one person was a separate conversation, but the one person I know who's really pushed others writing a book on it He was a trustworthy person or a friend of mine. I know you know him a book on it, he was a trustworthy person, a friend of mine, I know you know him,

said to me, actually, I've spent a year working on this, and I, one of the closer I got to like, okay, but what's the genesis, like where did this, what was the Isaac Newton, apple on the head, oh, gravity's real moment for fission? Not clear, weird. I don't know the answer, but here's the point, clearly government has technology

that we're not read in on right of course but So that doesn't answer the question. Why have people seen these objects in the skies? for thousands of years right confirmed and what are they and Maybe they're from another planet. I'm only point is there's no evidence of that. There's a huge amount, a massive corpus of evidence that they're seen by people in our atmosphere, you know, on Earth looking up, or in a submarine looking out.

And what is that? And by the way, to your point, like we can't see them coming into our atmosphere because they don't want to be seen. Well, then why do they want to be seen by people on Earth? Like if the technology is that advanced, and clearly it is, why do they make themselves visible in the first place?

Well, you know, when we study primates, one of the things that we do, do you ever watch Chimp Nation on Netflix? No, I don't have a TV, but I like the sound of it. It's an amazing documentary on Netflix that details these embedded scientists in the Congo. And what's really fascinating about it is that this group of scientists or related scientists have been there for 20 plus years. So these chimps have become entirely accustomed

to having human beings near them. So there's very specific rules. You stay within 20 yards of them. If they come closer, you back up. You never have food, ever. You can't bring any food there because they'll fuck you up and just steal your food. If they find out you have food, you're in real trouble.

Oh yeah, they'll tear you apart. And they kill each other, so they'll definitely kill you. And so when they have done this, the chimps have become accustomed to them being there, and the chimps behave completely normally. The chimps see them as just an innocuous part of their environment. They're not food, and they're not enemy. They don't ever intrude. They don't try to challenge them.

They don't make eye contact. So they don't worry about the people at all. So they behave completely like chimps. And if I was an advanced species and I was studying people and I wanted the human beings to eventually kind of catch up, right, like you're introducing technology that they call donations crash vehicles Figure out what fiber optics are here you go. Check this out figure this out. Try to figure that out Maybe it'll take you decades. Maybe it'll take you more but you are Accelerating the technological evolution of this advanced species on this planet and one way to do that would be for what purpose I wonder well

That's a very good question My my belief is that? Biological intelligent life is Essentially a caterpillar and it's a caterpillar that's making a cocoon and it doesn't even know why it's doing it It's just doing it and that cocoon is gonna give birth to artificial life Digital life it's gonna give birth to a new life form. I think we're real close to that. I think we're Way closer than that to that than most people would ever want agree I agree and I think but it can we assign a like a value to that is that good or bad?

That's a good question. It depends, universally, I think it's the path. I think it's what happens. I think, what this thing is, if you extrapolate, if you take the concept of a sentient artificial intelligence the concept of a sentient artificial intelligence that has the ability to utilize all the information that every human being has on Earth at a level of computing that's far beyond the capabilities of the human mind and all of our supercomputers that currently exist because it'll design much better

computers, it'll use quantum computers. It'll have the ability to recode things and change things. It'll make better versions of itself. So instead of biological evolution, which is very slow, it takes a long time, relatively. It takes, it's pretty quick really when you think about it, like how long, it's not that long to go from being a single-celled organism to being a human being Flying a plane really relatively over the course of a billion years if you think about how long the universe has been around But it's slow compared to technological evolution I mean a hundred years ago

We didn't have shit and now we have we could send videos from your phone and it'll hit New Zealand in a second. It's crazy. The stuff that we have now is beyond imagination. It's essentially magic for people 100 years ago. If that keeps going, it's ultimately gonna lead to a life form. And if that life form has now untethered, it doesn't have any problems with biological

evolution. Now it's just about information and implementing the technology that's available and then increasing that technology and making it better and better. It essentially becomes a god because if you give it enough time, it has the ability to make better versions of itself, which will in turn make better versions of itself. It has the ability to utilize everything. It has the understanding of everything that exists in the universe. It's black holes, dark matter, everything. And it probably has the ability to harness that or even

reproduce that. So if you take artificial sentient intelligence and it has this super accelerated path of technological evolution and you give artificial general intelligence, sentient artificial intelligence far beyond human beings, you give it a thousand years alone To make better and better versions of itself. Where does that go that goes to a god? What kind of God so like I think of this way so the first stage of the Industrial Revolution Consist of people building machines that were stronger than the human body, right? Right, so the steam powered loom.

Sure. The backhoe. Combustion engine. Combustion engine. They replace muscles. Right. Right. So that's what the machine does. It becomes stronger than the human body.

The second stage, which we're in the middle of, consists of creating machines that are more powerful than the human mind. That's what computing is. And I would say AI or super computing is just that exponentially. But that doesn't make it a god in the sense that the machine, however powerful it is, any more than a backhoe is a god because it can dig a trench faster than a hundred men. It's still something that people created.

So the story hasn't really changed. At the center of the story are people and their creative power may lead to unintended consequences, but the machines that they build did not make the universe and did not make people. People made the machines. But I would say the part I agree with

is there's a spiritual component here for sure. People will worship AI as a God. AI, Ted Kaczynski was likely right, will get away from us. We will be controlled by the thing that we made. All those are bad. Like that's just bad. And we need to say unequivocally, it's bad.

It's bad to be controlled by machines. Right. Machines are helpmates. Like we created them to help us to make our lives better, not to take orders from them. So I don't know why we're not having any of these conversations right now. We're just acting as if this is like some kind of virus,

like COVID that spreads across the world inexorably. There's nothing we can do about it. Just wait to get it. It's like, no. If we agree that the outcome is bad, and specifically it's bad for people, we should care what's good for people. That's all we should care about, is it good for people or not?

If it's bad for people, then we should strangle it in its crib right now. Right. And why don't you just blow up the data centers? Like, why is that hard? If it's actually going to become what you just described, which is a threat to people, humanity, life, then we have a moral obligation to murder it immediately.

And since it's not alive, we don't need to feel bad about that. Well, you could say the same about the atomic bomb, right? Yes, you could. And you could say that we have to develop it like Oppenheimer felt before the Nazis I love that how that work Well, I love by the way that people on my side

I'll just say I'll just admit it on the right, you know I've spent the last 80 years defending dropping nuclear weapons on civilians, like are you joking? That's just like prima facie evil. If you can't, well, if we hadn't done that, then this, that, the other thing, that was actually a great savings. No, it's wrong to drop nuclear weapons on people. And if you find yourself arguing that it's a good thing

to drop nuclear weapons on people, then you are evil. Like it's not a tough one, right? It's not a hard call for me. So with that in mind, like, why would you want nuclear weapons? It's like just a mindless childish sort of intellectual exercise to justify like, oh no, it's really good because someone else,

how about no? How about like spending all of your effort to prevent this from happening? Would you kill baby Hitler, you know, famously? Right. So I don't know why we're sitting back and allowing this to happen if we really believe it will extinguish the human race

or enslave the human race. How can that be good? Well, if God creates everything, if God created the universe and God creates people, God probably creates a process. And we think that we are very important because we are very important to us. But are we very important in the universal sense? Not really. Like, if the earth just imploded and disappeared, if the sun went supernova and our whole solar system was blown

to bits, the universe still exists. And God created- It depends how wide you're, for sure. In the end, as Conan O'Brien, the famous philosopher once said, every grave goes unvisited, which is true. And that's an important perspective. Pull out the lens a little bit. Does it really matter? No, it doesn't.

But it does matter. It does matter to us. How about this? Do your children matter? Yes, sure. Do their lives matter? For us. Would you die for them? Yes, of course. Everything matters.

If you're not comfortable, it matters. If you're sitting here, like, you don't wanna wear headphones, like, let's not wear headphones. That matters. Everything matters. The, I mean, at scale. But what matters most, like?

Right, is it, that is the evil, right? The evil is the, it's the same thing as saying the necessary evil of dropping nuclear bombs on civilians is if you don't do that, then there'll be more evil, then more things will happen. It's kind of the same thing as saying the necessary evil of dropping nuclear bombs on civilians is if you don't do that Then there'll be more evil then more things will happen. It's kind of the same thing like it doesn't it comes from the same place Which is hubris like imagining your God you have unlimited power and you have omniscience You can imagine what the future is gonna be you can't you're fucking idiot You're a person like you can't even make your wife happy.

The limits of your power are really obvious. The limits of your wisdom, same. So don't jump into shit, big things, whose outcomes you can't predict with certainty. You can't know. Go in with humility. I guess that's what I'm saying. Right?

And do what you can, knowing that you're probably gonna screw it up and you probably won't achieve your goal, but like you should try. And on the AI question, everyone I've ever talked to, but I'm hardly an expert, I don't own a computer, okay? But everybody I've ever talked to, and there's many people, like, yeah,

it could get away from us and enslave us. Well, let's say no to slavery, how's that? Is that a tough one? Not for me. Yeah. I mean, and maybe a good use of nuclear weapons would be to hit the data centers. No, I'm serious.

Like, why is that crazy? It's not. It's not if you think that human beings are the end of this evolutionary chain. Well, what else is? Some supercomputer in a data center outside Dulles Airport? No. I mean, you know what I mean?

Right. I don't actually think that individuals, I don't think I'm that important, my life is that important, I don't. I will die, I know that. And I try to keep that in mind every day. But you're important to everybody that cares about you, you're important to the people around you.

But if we don't think people are important, then what do we think is important? I guess that's what I'm saying. It's not necessarily that we don't think people are important then what do we think is important? I guess that's what I'm not necessarily that we don't think people are important But if if evolution is real and if there is this constant I don't know, but it's it's it's visible like you can measure it in certain animals You can measure adaptation. Yeah, but there's no evidence that in fact I think we've kind of given up on the idea of evolution. The theory of evolution as articulated by Darwin is like kind of not true.

In what sense? Well, in the most basic sense, the idea that all life emerged from a single cell organism and over time, and there would be a fossil record of that, and there's not. There's not a fossil record of transitionary species, like species that are adapting to its environment. There's tons of record of transitionary species, like species that are adapting to its environment. And they develop.

There's tons of record of adaptation and you see it in your own life. I mean, I have a lot of dogs. I see adaptation in dogs, you know, through the- Sure. Litter to litter. But no, there's no evidence at all that, none, zero, that people evolve seamlessly

from a single cell amoeba. No, there's not. There's no chain in the fossil record of that at all. And that's why you don't actually hear people, you hear them make reference to evolution because the theory of adaptation is clearly obviously true. But Darwin's theory's totally, that's why it's still a theory almost 200 years later.

No, we have not found that at all. And I can't even guess, I mean, I have my own theories on it, but they're not proven. What are your theories? God created people, distinctly, and animals. I mean, I think that's like, I think what every person on earth thought until the mid-19th century, actually.

Right. It's not a new idea. They didn't have computers, they didn't have a general understanding that we have today of the process. Do you think we understand more now? Yes. Really?

You don't think that we understand more today? I understand way less. We understand so little that we're actually sitting here allowing like a bunch of greedy, stupid, childless, childless software engineers in Northern California to like flirt with the extinction of mankind. So no previous generations would be like, what? No, stop. And we're not doing that because we know-

But they wouldn't have done that even with the nuclear bomb. I mean, obviously the Manhattan Project was done in secrecy but they wouldn't have stopped it because the imperative of getting this weapon before Hitler got the weapon was what it was I was kind of done by then the Russians had pretty much extinguished any hope that that would continue but but not but we were you know we're in the middle of the logic of war commencement At the commencement of the Manhattan Project. For sure, but the logic was the same, and it was four years of gotta beat the other guy, got it.

And I don't mean to sound too judgmental about the bomb, I know why they built it, okay? But you just wonder why nobody in the middle of that thought, is this really, and some of them did think it. I'm sure they did. Yes, they did. I mean, Oppenheimer himself. Of course, large organizations don't respond

to the moral qualms of individuals very well. So that was, whatever, it's well known what happened. But no, we should pause and ask, is the machine we're building worth having? And nobody seems to do that. And there are all kinds of economic forces, which nobody ever mentions, that drive that heedlessness, that stupidity.

Like California, for example, is completely, the state both of us have lived in, is collapsing, and they're betting everything on AI. The tax base is going to be dependent on this technology working. Is that really what they're betting on? Of course. that AI is- Did you see the most recent thing about the amount of billions of dollars they spent on the homeless problem

with no trackable results? Well, they've had massive results. They've increased the homeless population dramatically. If you pay for something, you get more of it. And that would include fentanyl addicts. Oh, absolutely. It's been a wild success. I actually talked to Kevin Newsom the other day.

Did you really? Yeah. And- What's that like? Does he smell like sulfur? It was by phone. I was talking on the phone. It's such a weird,

um, he smelled like sulfur. That was too fast for me. Sulfur and hair grease. Yeah. No, but I was making, I was making fun of, I shouldn't even make fun of it because it's so tragic

But what's happened to the state and people living on the street? What is this? non gaslighty perspective He's like go back to Russia. You like Russia so much. I was like, you know, I'm actually I'm originally from San Francisco but I can't live there because He really told you to go back to Russia. I mean, he was laughing He's a perfectly charming guy, they all are in person. Of course. But anyway, I'm so far afield.

But my point is, AI is being driven by the greed of politicians to some extent. And you'll notice that AI, by the way, as a fact, those data centers that drive our digital life, which is not life, it's actually death mostly, but I mean, they're the biggest power draw. I mean, what will, how much electricity does AI require? Like more than countries.

Our grid can't handle AI just as a practical matter. Well, our grid can't handle electric cars. Well, it can't handle air conditioning in the state of California where I'm from. So, right. If you live east of I-5 where it's really hot and you're not getting those ocean breezes, or cars. It can't handle air conditioning in the state of California where I'm from. So, right. If you live east of I-5 where it's really hot and you're not getting those ocean breezes,

like they have brownouts, like in South Africa, it's Johannesburg now. But here's what's interesting, is that none of the global warming cultists seem to have any concerns at all about AI. Why is that? Just like they don't have concerns about John Kerry's G4, like somehow that's exempt.

Really? AI is gonna draw more electricity than anything else in the United States, more than steel production, okay? Used to. And you don't have a problem with that, but you're totally against energy because it's destroying the planet,

but AI gets a carve out, even though it's gonna be the number one energy draw in the United States. Let's go through your reasoning on that. They're probably not aware. Well, they're totally, they're not aware. They're mad about my wood stove. I heat with wood.

They're mad about my wood stove. They don't want an outdoor barbecue. They don't like a gas stove. No, they're way into the details on this stuff, except somehow AI isn't a problem. But do you think that they're informed because this is not a narrative that you ever hear? You never hear on the news.

Well, I grew up in a world where a wood stove was considered wholesome and natural and now it's considered. It smells good too. Oh, it's the best. And the heat is the, I have a wood fired sauna, which I use every day and it's the great, you know. How do you make sure it's the right temperature?

Is it like an offset smoker? Like you have to kind of fiddle with it for a while. Oh, it's one. How do you make sure it's the right temperature? Is it like like an offset smoker? Like you have to kind of fiddle with it for a while. Amazing. To get the right temperature. It's time consuming. You know, I have a Finnish, the Finns are geniuses, but I have a Finnish stove in it and it's incredibly precise. I don't know if you ever use a wood stove, but there's a carburetor on it.

Basically the let's in air. Like a like an offset smoker. Yeah, exactly. And it's so precise. I mean, it's absolutely crazy. I mean, you move it a third of an inch and it's just like the flame changes. So I use birch, which I love,

and the whole process takes a while. I get it to 200, which probably takes an hour and 20. I mean, it's a thing. You like it hot. I like it hot, yeah, yeah. 200. Yeah, well, I do it every, why wear a sauna hat? Oh, okay, does thing. I like it hot. I like it hot, yeah, yeah. 200. Yeah, well I do it every, why wear a sauna hat? So. Oh, okay.

Does that help? Which is embarrassing. The wool hat? Yeah, well it's felt. Yeah, I bought one of those, I never wore it. It's incredible. Yeah, what's the difference? Well, I'll tell you, you're, cause you're, don't get, I'm so boring on this.

Now you're going on this, like. Please, I love, listen. My wife and kids are like, ah! You see you have one, you know, you're speaking to the quarter, come on. Oh, they're the best. Go Scandinavia. It's like the one thing, if your name is Carlson,

it's the one thing to be proud of in your people, like they're so sad and defeated and pathetic, but saunas are still great. But anyway, the sauna hat, so your head heats up much faster because it's higher, but also because it's got all the capillaries in your head, all the blood, so your head heats up much faster because it's higher, but also because it's got all the capillaries in your head, all the blood vessels in your head.

So the point of a sauna is to bake. So you wanna stay hot as long as you can. Then you reap the benefits and you also get the solitude in the prayer time or the meditation or whatever in your cedar church. But you can't stay in a sauna that's really hot very long because your head heats up. Right.

So the sauna hat, the felt hat, the banya hat as they call it, insulates your head so you can really stay hot a long, long time. It makes a, you really should do it. So is it just because it makes it more comfortable? Is that the idea? If your head overheats, you know, just overheats.

And what you want is you want to cook evenly, just like on a barbecue, you know, you really do. And so, you know, you sit on the bench with your feet up, you want to be as flat as you possibly can to cook evenly and to stay that way. So I do, I try to do 20 minutes. I have my, you know, my timer, my egg timer with the sand going through the hourglass and I, which goes do 20 minutes, I have my timer, my egg timer, with the sand going through the hourglass,

which goes to 15 minutes, but I try to stay an extra five if I can. And I couldn't without the Bonya hat. Interesting. It's like eight bucks on Amazon, well worth it. Yeah, I have one. Like I said, I just don't use it. But I do-

They're embarrassing, and you look like a tool wearing it. Yeah. But you shouldn't have- But no one's looking in there anyway. Well, that's right. You don't saw it, but I I do they're embarrassing and you look like a tool wearing it But you shouldn't have no one's looking in there anyway. That's right. Do you know sauna with other people right? Well, I do sometimes yeah comics we get in here. Yeah, yeah, yeah when we train together We all get in the sauna together afterwards It's fun. The rock was in there with us no way Yeah, the rock worked out with us then sat in the sauna with us. It was fun. Got in the cold plunge with us Oh, that's pretty great. It was fun. Is he a good dude? He's a great guy really nice guy like really I've heard that I don't know him, but I've heard that he's like Jen, you know, some people fake humble they fake it to look cool

It's pretty obvious. Yeah, he's not doing that. He's a real guy like the measure of humility is really really simple Can you tell the truth about yourself? Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, are you cool to be around? Like, he gives real hugs. You know, he's a real guy. He's real. He's a real guy. And when we hung out with him, we were, I hung out with him for hours.

We worked out for like two hours, and then we got in the sauna together, we all hung out, and then we did a podcast together. He's a genuinely nice guy. Like, you'd be able to sniff something out. Well, you can tell like immediately. You tell something. People are hiding stuff. Yeah, but so yeah, I've done the sauna with other people.

Well, I do it by myself, so no one sees my sauna. I do it at 196 degrees. I do it for 25 minutes and I don't. That's intense. 196 for 25 minutes is a lot Yeah, the last five minutes are rough and I used to only do 20 but lately I've been doing 25 Really? Yeah, just because it's more uncomfortable. The whole idea is just to make it more uncomfortable I want it to be very hard to do so that the rest of my day is pretty easy

So really hard workout cold plunge starts the day. That's the the first of my day is pretty easy. So really hard workout. Cold plunge starts the day. That's the first thing I do is hard. It's three minutes at 33 degrees, it sucks. And then I get out of there and then I work out. So- That's really impressive. I mean, I had the opposite training as a young man, which was the goal was like French toast.

You know what I mean? French toast. Grind out the I mean? French toast. Grind out the cigarettes in the syrup. Right. Well, I started doing martial arts when I was a young man and when I got into it, it was the first thing that I'd ever did that first of all gave me a real understanding

of the value of discipline and hard work. Because you can get as good as the amount of effort that you put forth and if you put more effort and you're more intense and you're more driven than other people, you beat them and you start beating everyone. And you start, you start becoming this thing that you never thought you could be, which is someone who's extraordinary at something that's very dangerous. And so that was my formulation as a man like that, that helped me go from being this like confused

kid to being someone who understands like, oh, there's a path and most people don't want to do it. But if you could do it, if you can do this dangerous thing that people are terrified of and just do it ruthlessly all day long, like live it. I lived at the gym. I mean, I taught all day long. I trained all day long like live it. I lived at the gym. I mean I taught all day long I trained all day long my whole life was dedicated to martial arts. So I got really good really quick and It changed the whole trajectory of my life and it instilled in me this understanding of

the value of dedication and of a singular commitment to something, to really being while you're doing it, you're not distracted, you're fully focused on improving. And through that, you can apply that to all aspects of your life. But we all encounter difficult things in life. And there's this saying that I love, it's a really great saying that though the hardest thing that's ever happened to you is the hardest thing that's ever happened to you if it's a parking ticket or if it's your parents being blown up by a drone it's still the hardest thing that's ever happened to you if you've had an incredibly easy life like most people today yeah they

complain about the dumbest fucking shit because to them that is that their primary focus they don't have a real existential threat. You remember how nice everybody was after 9-11? Very. It was crazy. California was patriotic. There's fucking flags on everybody's car. I remember.

Everybody was friendly. I went to New York City, it was like a totally different place. It was. Everybody was so friendly. Applauding when firemen walked in. Yes, they were heroes. Everybody was a hero. And that's because they encountered something that was way harder than they were accustomed

to and it just put things into perspective. So for me, training and really hard workouts and doing difficult things like the sauna, there's a lot of health benefits to it too. But the mental benefits to it are really primary for me because it makes the rest of life easier. That's impressive, man. I didn't have a childhood like that at all. And we were decadent, unfortunately. And so those are lessons that I learned much later.

But that's a good, I think it's a, if it doesn't destroy you, I think it's a great way to go. And you don't have to do it the way I do it. You could do other stuff. You could do yoga. You could do hikes. You could do, or you could run. No, but doing things for the sake

of the difficulty in doing them. Yes. I love that. Again, that was not my training at all. Yeah. But... I was very lucky that it was mine, but more importantly,

it gave me a tool to mitigate the stress of regular life. And especially the stress of this kind of life that I live. You need something to mitigate that or you'll go crazy. I agree with that completely. You'll go crazy. Yeah, you know, removing yourself from it a little bit has always worked for me. You know, nature works very, very well.

Yeah. Animals, contact with animals, people you love. Sure. Less digital experiences, fewer digital experiences, for sure. I think that this stuff's not good for you. It's so obviously not good for you. I was having this conversation with Michelle Dowd yesterday. She is a woman who survived an apocalyptic cult.

She was raised in an apocalyptic cult and kicked out when she was 17 because she snuck out to go see the color purple. They weren't allowed to go see a movie. She had never seen a movie until she was 17. She'd never seen a movie and her first movie was the color purple. And then they kicked her out. I can kind of see that. I mean, what about Raiders of the Lost Ark or something? The color purple? It was the first movie she'd ever seen. I know, but like, you see one movie that's the color purple?

Well, a boy invited her to the movie But could you imagine never seeing a movie or even a television show your whole life and then see me boy who wanted? To see the color purple like well there's so much going on here Joe Well this boy was a guy who had left the church and so she was in contact with him And you know and he was saying hey, there's a whole world out here. You want to go see the and she's like, okay, let's go. Yeah, I mean obvious look I'm totally against Colts obviously on the other hand you do you got to ask yourself like I don't know is your average Amish teenager happier than your average

Conventional American teenager on Instagram? And of course the answer is, oh yeah. Well they certainly have less instances of autism, which is really fascinating. It's very, very fascinating. The Amish have less autism? Yeah, there's almost none.

Well I'm not surprised. It's extremely rare. Why do we think that is? Well I'm wonder. I really do. I can think of a couple. Yeah. It's funny, I don't to go Bobby Kennedy on anyone.

Well, that's the problem. Right. If you go Bobby Kennedy, they'll come for you. But the question is why. But why? Look, and I don't know the answer, but. How is that not in the debate? How is that not in the conversation?

Well, it's not only not in the conversation, you're punished for adding it to the conversation. And so like. We are dancing around anti-vax conspiracy theories right now. But why, why be on the defensive? It's like, if you purport to represent science and you're mad about a question- And you're ignoring data. Yeah, but even in the absence of data.

Right. Science is a process. Yes. It's not a result, it's a way of doing things. And at the core of science is asking questions, including unlikely questions. Right. That core of science is asking questions, including unlikely questions. Right. That's what science is.

Right. And if you don't allow that, then you know, you may be doing something, but what you're not doing is science. We can say that conclusively. Right. So for people to wrap themselves in the mantle of science and attack you for asking a question,

you know, they're frauds. And I don't know how they have the moral high ground in this. I don't think they do, but I think it's the same kind of mindset that allows people to create the nuclear bomb. Because you say, listen, we're not even saying that vaccines cause autism. But let's say this. If you're looking at all the data of all the things that cause autism and you see that the vaccine schedule ramps up considerably and then you have autism, which

seems to at least be more diagnosed than ever before, people will instantly say, we stopped polio, we stopped smallpox, vaccines have saved millions of lives and they're probably right We dropped that bomb to keep Germany from dropping that bomb We need nuclear weapons so that other people don't have nuclear weapons We do a thing that maybe has some negative effects, but is overall good I think you can kind of apply that sort of logic and reasoning as a human being to very messy issues. I think people do that.

And we all do, by the way. People do that with abortion, right? Sure. They do that with abortion. They do it with everything. They say a woman has a right to choose. Reproductive freedom, they say all these things. And then you say, okay, what if the baby is near term?

What if it's six months old? What if it's six months old? What if it's seven months old? And people don't wanna have that conversation. A woman has the right to choose, you're a fascist, stay out of women's bodies. Does a woman have a right to kill you if you annoy her or inconvenience her? This is where it gets weird.

What are you sweating? It's like when is it a life? But it is one of those things that to me is a human problem. Whereas humans have these very messy interactions with some things that don't line up with their ideology. And there's an ideology of science worship. There's an ideology of authoritarian worship. The bodies of science have bestowed the truth.

If you ignore it, you're a science denier. And you know, that's- Those are political terms or theological terms. They're not terms rooted in science. And look, we all make trade-offs constantly. You know, what there's, you know, everything's bad. It's a shit sandwich versus a shit croissant. I'll take the shit croissant, it's smaller. You know, like that's, you know, everything's bad. It's a shit sandwich versus a shit croissant.

I'll take the shit croissant, it's smaller. You know, like that's a daily experience for everybody. So I get that. And I don't think everything is a moral absolute either. You know, we don't even know sometimes whether a decision will result in good or bad. So like, it's very complicated. I totally agree with that.

What I object to is the absence of reason. Like you have to believe, because I think it's true, that if you're reasonable, that you can reach maybe not the perfect decision, but a better decision. And if we don't believe that, then we're just in the land of witchcraft and let's just admit it.

So the lack of reason is what freaks me out. Well, it's ideological capture, right? Because there's certain things that if you're on the right side of these subjects, the correct side, whatever your ideology believes, you can't differ from the doctrine. There's a very clear doctrine. That's just religion then.

It is. It is religion. So I'm very pro-religion, but you can't have a religion that's too stupid and destructive. If your religion winds up hurting a lot of people, then I'm against your religion, right? Yeah, I think, but even some really good religions have aspects of them that you could say

were overall detrimental to the people that were- Sure, absolutely, you could say that. Encountered with them. Yeah. I think that that kind of thinking, I think cult thinking, whether it's Scientology or whether it's Christianity, there's like a type of thinking or that's woke. Woke is clearly a cult. It's a mind virus.

And I think that meeting cult, it's so trite to call it that now. It's like whatever this thing is, this leftism, this Marxist sort of ideology that's waving its flag and indoctrinating people in this country, it's very similar to all kinds of religions. It's very similar to fundamentalist religions that have always existed, in that everybody has to believe very specific things and you can't differ.

You can't differ from the doctrine. And when you- So here's another way to think about it that I've been meditating on this a lot. Yes, religion, politics, they're all kind of melding. It's hard to know where one ends and another begins. So maybe a simpler and more useful way to think about it is truth or falsehood, lying or honesty.

Maybe you should assess everything that way. Is someone lying? I don't care what your justification for it is, lying about vaccines. They've lied a lot about vaccines and they've done it, I think, in most cases because they feel like they're serving some greater good. Well, that's the narrative. We can't tell people that there are vaccine injuries

because they won't get vaccines, which are good for a big population. I understand the thinking, but how about this? You can't participate in lying. You can't lie. You can't lie and you can't- Period, though, you can't lie about anything. Just don't lie about anything.

Try to tell the truth all the time. If you can't say something that's true. Just don't say it, right? You're not required to say everything you think obviously and you shouldn't say everything right? But you should never lie and if you just stick with that Like you get pretty quickly back to reason and order don't you? Yeah. Yeah No, you're making complete sense and I think that This is the problem when people have information and power above other people.

Right. That's for sure. Right. Which is the problem of governments, which is also the problem of cult leaders. You know, cult leaders, they get completely infatuated with this idea of being omnipotent and this power that has control over giant swaths of people and you get to dictate their behavior and you get to tell them what to think. That's very intoxicating and it's common. It's common in that it's always existed throughout human history. It's a thing that people do when they get power. They abuse the shit out of it. And if they think that you're too stupid to know the truth and that they're better than you, because they do think they're better

than you, because they're running things It's a natural Inclination it's a natural thought that people have if they're the ones if you guys are a bunch of dopes that are just Listening to my orders and I tell you how to live your life and what to do I'm naturally gonna think I'm better than you Well, that's I mean people have lived under those systems since there have been systems, but- Always.

What makes it particularly galling and hard to live with is when you call that system a democracy. Right. That's too dishonest for me. I would much rather live in a monarchy where everyone thinks the king has been assigned by God to rule over us and his whims are law. And you know, that makes sense.

I don't like it, but at least it has internal coherence. When they stand up and pass a $60 billion funding bill for Ukraine, when 70% of the population doesn't want it, when they're ignoring the actual problems in our country, like the economy and the border, and they're hauling in Congress over the weekend to pass something that people don't want while ignoring the things that people do want.

And if they do the same kind of thing again and again for like 50 years and they call it a democracy, that will drive you insane. Because it's just too dishonest. Why not just say, we don't give a shit what you want. We are getting something out of this Ukraine funding, whether it's like the thrill of being masters of the universe or whether it's money

from the defense contractors, whatever we're getting out of it is more important to us than your opinion. This is not self-government. You don't run this country. We do shut up and obey. If they at least said that, you'd be like, okay, I get it.

Those are the terms. But if I get another fucking lecture from Joe Scarborough about defending democracy, when this is not a democracy It's not even a close approximation of a democracy Then I'm gonna go crazy because I just can't deal with the lying. Yeah, does that make sense? It does make sense what's interesting is that there are people saying that now and I think that's a relatively new thing in terms of mainstream media It's and I consider what you do on X mainstream

media. What we're on right now is essentially mainstream media. It used to be, you could call it, there's corporate controlled media. I agree. And that used to be mainstream media. Mainstream media used to be CNN. It's not really anymore. Mainstream media is what in terms of the volume consumed, more people are consuming things on Twitter, on X, than there are on anything else. They're consuming information through the internet, through YouTube, for good or for bad, whether it's correct or incorrect. They're consuming

information in different forms now than ever before so more people are saying what you're saying than have ever said it before and when people lie and when people bullshit and gaslight it's more offensive now than it's ever been before because there's so much access to truth that it's just you can see it now if you're paying attention if you're not a boomer who only reads the newspaper, you pay attention and you see it, and you go, this is horse shit.

But it's like, I guess what bothers me is that the lies aren't sophisticated. No. I mean, I look back over my now sort of long life, and I'm recognizing all the times that I was lied to, but I didn't know I was being lied to. They kind of pulled it off. There's something incredibly insulting and demeaning

to tell me a lie when I know it's a lie and you know I know it's a lie. We both know it's a lie, but you're demanding that I pretend to believe it? What you're really saying is, I have no respect for you. You're like my dog. You're a slave. Like I'm demanding that you

participate in my lie. Right. The lack of stealth. Um, I'm not explaining it very well, but that that really bothers me. Well, there's no real other way to lie. You like some of these lies, like politicians, like, did you see that conversation that AOC had with that man they brought in for the Biden case and they were talking about what crimes and she was, she was like grilling this guy, what crimes did you see Joe Biden? Did he steal anything? Did he steal bread? Like I forget what she said, but, and he was trying to explain what they were, Rico crimes, and she was saying, Rico is not a crime. It's a category of crime.

Like, okay. All right. But, it's like- Tell that to the Genovese family! No, yeah, it's so dumb to say that publicly. Like, and say it with confidence, and to tell a person- That's the thing, the marriage of ineptitude

and high self-esteem is, it is really the marker of our time. It's like, I have nothing against dumb people at all. My dogs are dumb and I love my dogs. No, I'm serious. I don't think God cares about your intelligence, right? Only people care. And so it's not a moral category and stupidity is not, I mean, somewhat Down syndrome.

I really believe better people than I am, more likely to go to heaven. So I'm not attacking her for being dumb, you know, more likely to go to heaven. So I'm not attacking her for being dumb, but the idea that a dumb person has no, the White House Press Secretary is in the same category, who has no idea she's dumb. She really thinks like she won the prize, like she's the most impressive, like I'm White House Press Secretary because I'm the best talker in America. It's so crazy and yet the smartest people I know are very often like sort of well, you

know they have humility. Well also she's following Kayleigh McEnany. Is that how you say her name? I don't really know who that is. She was the last White House Press Secretary? You don't know who that is? I sort of do. She's the GOAT.

Greatest White House Press Secretary of all time. She's the best. I had stopped paying close attention She had all the documents she would kill them She when whenever she would get called out like whenever there would be a question She say that's interesting and then she'd open it because you said this Yeah, your paper said that and CNN said this and and she would call them out on stuff and she was just really, really well prepared. And very articulate. She was wonderful at the job. Well good for her.

I mean that's what it should be. But she was operating under President Trump, you know? So obviously she's demonized. It's just- I can't believe you don't know who that is. No, I don't. I know who it is, but I, it's just funny the-

She's the goat. Well, that's, I had stopped watching all briefings by then. I used to go to the briefings as a kid. They're so dumb. I mean, I literally would go there, be in the briefing room, the former Kennedy swimming pool. And the first thing you know, I mean, I was never a White House reporter,

but I was a reporter, so I would go to them occasionally. And the first thing you notice is how impressed all the correspondents are to work there. Work at the White House. Work at the White House, got my hard passed. And then the distance between that, that credential they were so proud of and the reality of their lives was like insane.

Like they're in this tiny little room, they're being treated with total contempt by the White House staff who thinks they're just fucking animals, you know, it's like, shut up. They're eating out of vending machines. And this was a different time, right? So like when I was working as a journalist in Washington, like we went out to lunch every day

at like a good restaurant and charge it to the company. And like with your sources, you're like, we had lunch every single day like civilized people. I don't even think that exists in the world anymore where you had time for lunch, where you weren't just so under the gun from your corporate masters,

you had to like get back to work. We ate lunch. And I remember thinking, these people don't eat lunch. They eat like a stale mounds bar out of a vending machine. Like they bring quarters to work so they can eat. I remember thinking, your life like is, you're not even human. You're just like a little puppet or something. But you're so impressed and like all your neighbors know, you know

He works at the White House. He's in the White House press corps and The job like wasn't even really a job You would just like sit there and ask your question your little assigned seat like you're in a high school gym It was just awful and I just had no respect for people who did that for a living at all. Did you ever read Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail? Come on. Yeah. Yeah.

It's amazing. But that guy gave sort of the best, that's I think probably the best window into an outsider in the political process, at least in terms of the campaign trail Yeah, it's the best window to the press is best window to the relationships that they had with the politicians at least in the 1970s It's it's an amazing book. I was talking to a campaign reporter. I never do that anymore, but I was this week actually and He was telling me it's like totally different like when when I did it, you were all on a, I mean, it was bad actually. It was because it just cultivated groupthink,

which was then leveraged by the candidate for better coverage. Like the whole thing was kind of an op actually, but it was at least fun. Like you were on a charter plane and like you're flying with everybody and you'd hit three or four cities a day and like there are cocktails on the plane

and you know, naughty behavior and and, like, you know, they fed you, and they kind of dealt with everything for you. It was fun. It was like a road trip, right? Mm-hmm. And now it's just, like, grim. They're all driving alone in their little rental cars to some obscure town in Iowa that is there with no access whatsoever to the candidate,

write up their little reports, and then they get back to their hotel, and they're, like, writing up more for the candidate, write up their little reports, and then they get back to their hotel and they're like writing up more for the website. And like, it's just an, it's such a bad job actually, covering politics that only the people who couldn't make it in any other business are doing it. It's like, it's like a reverse meritocracy. It's only the most kind of pathetic power worshipers

would ever do a job like that. Well, like critics. Yes, that's exactly right. Most critics want to be writers. Well, they're like the worst people. Just as people? Mm-hmm. Like, well, you've actually been in show business,

so you've got a better experience with them, or you have a lot of experience with them, but I've known a lot of them who worked for magazines or newspapers that I worked for. Yeah, I did, too. And they're the kind of people who have a lot of experience with them, but I've known a lot of them who worked for magazines or newspapers that I worked for. And they're the kind of people who have a lot of cats and all the cats hate them. You know what I mean?

They're just like the lowest. They all have some sort of weird wandering eye and they're fat and they're like super into porn. Totally isolated from everybody. I actually worked for one of them for a while who was a critic for the New York Post, a guy called John Putt Hartz. And he was one of the weirdest, most unhappy people

I've ever met in my life. And he would come into my office occasionally and he would rub his, he had a really hairy back and he would come into my office occasionally, and he would rub his, he had a really hairy back, and he would rub it against the door frame. This, mm, and like say these kind of obscure, he was stupid, but he didn't know that he was, I mean, he was actually kind of dumb,

but he didn't know it, and he would kind of philosophize. I was like 10 years younger, and I was his captive, so he would just like lecture me as he was rubbing against the door frame. One time we went out to lunch, and we all had drinks, of course, this was mid-'90s. He didn't really drink, but he ordered this drink with an umbrella, and it had a piece of watermelon

on the rim of the glass. And he took the watermelon and ate it, and then he ate the rind. I'll never forget that, watching him eat the rind and thinking, of course this guy's a critic. and I ate it and then he ate the rind. I'll never forget that, watching him eat the rind and thinking, of course this guy's a critic. That was his true love. He was editing this magazine,

but his real interest was in writing about movies. And they're just sad people who wind up doing that. Did you ever read Siskel and Ebert? Did you ever read when Siskel, Roger Ebert rather, wrote a screenplay? No. It's very bizarre. It's really sexual, very strange. It's supposed to be terrible. Of course it's terrible. But I remember going, oh, okay.

Yeah, they're not creative. They're creative adjacent. Well, they don't have anything to contribute That's what I'm saying. They don't have power right there. They're mad about that They probably could figure it out if they had a different mindset. I think creativity isn't in everybody It's just a matter of how you percent. It's in everybody. It just requires honesty Yeah, the impediment to creativity is lying sure and yeah I used to say that about joke thieves. One of the real problems with joke thieves

is when they get caught, and then they have to write their own material. And the problem is, they don't understand the language. They just know how to say the sounds. Like if you told me what to say in French, I can't speak French, but if you told me what to say and I practice it, and I said it right, you would think, wow, that guy fucking speaks French.

So that's what comedy's like. So if you got a guy who knows how to repeat other people's jokes But he doesn't know how to create them see comedy is one of the rare things where someone when when I caught like you get a guy like Shane Gillis that guy writes his own stuff. He edits it, he thinks it out in his head, he performs it, he produces it, he changes the order of things. I love that. It's a complete, everybody does it pretty much the same way. There's a few guys that hire writers and that's honorable.

There's nothing wrong with hiring a writer. And it's also, it gives jobs to other comics because some comics are just really good writers and they're not so good at performing. And so people will work on stuff, they'll collaborate on stuff. Like Chris Rock would do this thing where he would hire comics, and they didn't write the jokes for him,

but they would be like, guys, he would bounce stuff off. So he would have his ideas, he would go on stage, and then after his set, they would all meet, and they would talk about the set. And guys would have taglines like you could say this oh great And they write that down they're adding so it's a collaboration So you have them the the master you have Chris Rock who is so open-minded and intelligent and humble That he brings in other masters and says tell me what I'm doing wrong

Tell me what I could change tell me what I can make better and they work together And then there's people that have people that are essentially ghostwriters. They hire comics to write jokes where they pretend they're theirs and they don't really write them at all. So that's another level, which is also horrible. Does anyone who does that get successful?

I don't know. I don't know. I don't, not top shelf. They get close. They do well. There's people that have people write for them and they do well But they're not the guy that everybody goes to stay not David tell They're not the guy that everybody goes to see they're not the car like David tells the guy that comics go to see when he's in

Town. Yes, like you just he's a master. He's you watch him. He's Yoda. You're like Jesus Christ. Like how is he so good? Well, he's so good because he writes every day because he's sitting with fucking a pack of cigarettes and a cup of coffee every morning Writing things in a notebook and he's practicing every day. He goes on stage constantly and he's just it's that Japanese term Kaizen where you take this one thing. That's right. Just refine it master ultimate mastery. That's what he's doing So these guys who pretend to be that and steal jokes and then they get caught Then their material drops off a cliff. It's so obvious because frauds. Yeah. Also because the very thing that allows you to steal someone's jokes,

that's an ego thing. That's a like, I want the laughs. I want to be the man or the woman. I want to be the fucking one up there showing everybody, ah, look how amazing this person is. Look how amazing. That's the opposite mindset that's required for creativity. So creativity is not about you. Creativity is about the ideas, creativity is about things,

creativity is about how does this concept work with these other concepts? How do I get it in the most digestible form? If I was an audience member, what would it be like to feel this? What's the best way to introduce it? What's the way to make it so that people don't think that I'm being mean, that I have a point, or that I've thought this through?

This is not just a flippant thing. You're allowing someone, when someone's on stage, you're allowing that person almost to think for you. Like, you're like, take me on a ride. Like, I'll give you my mind. I'm not gonna be thinking what I would do. I'm not gonna, I'm just gonna let you think for me. If that person's not doing a good job of that, if it's clunky, if it's shitty, if the transitions suck, if the way, then it just interrupts this hypnotism that you've put on me, this hypnosis.

Now I'm not letting you think for me. But it's also inherently fraudulent, right? I mean, I'm giving control of my mind over to someone who is himself under the control of somebody else. Do you know what I mean? You mean if you're stealing. No, if I'm in the audience. Right.

And I would say this also goes for ideas, for commentary. You know, that's not funny, but that's real. Right. And you see it a lot. I've seen it a lot. Yeah, you see bullshit a lot. Well, the number of people who are totally not controlled, who are really saying what they actually believe

with no weird agenda that they're not telling you about is pretty small. Yeah. And I just have noticed that a lot recently, particularly on the question of wokeness and free speech. There are a lot of people who are like on your side because they're for free speech, or not actually for free speech at all,

who are pushing a very specific foreign policy agenda, for example, and using another issue to lower your defenses and let themselves into your brain. I think that's really sinister, really, really, really sinister. It's becoming more obvious now. If you're for free speech, then you're just for free speech because you support the principle. It doesn't, the content of the speeches is not that interesting to you.

The fact that a sovereign human being has a right to express himself because he's not a slave, he's a citizen and a human being, like that's what matters. And if all of a sudden you like become famous, like I'm for free speech, and then you support silencing people

who articulate opinions you disagree with, like you're a fraud. You're kind of a sinister fraud. Yeah. Yeah. And I, cause that's the business I'm in, I boy, I've really noticed that. Have you noticed this?

Yes. And that's also the same kind of thing when you hear them talk. If you hear someone talk that's saying something that's kind of horse shit, it resonates with you that that's what you've seen a moment with Barry Weiss on your show that went everywhere I saw a clip of it. I never saw the show itself, but she was going on about She was posing as one thing and then you pressed her like well, hold on a second

What do you mean by that? You just attack somebody and she had no idea what she was talking about. And it became really clear to me, watch, that completely changed my view of Barry Weiss forever. I was like, oh, she's a fraud, actually. This person's not honest at all. Like, she has a very specific agenda. That's all she cares about. The rest of this stuff is just a kind

of sleight of hand maneuver. You're talking about the thing with Tulsi Gabbard? That's correct. Yeah, she called her a a toady and she didn't know what that meant Well, she had no idea like Tulsi Gabbard had straight outside the lines on some Syria or something. Uh-huh and Barry Weiss was you know going through the files in her head like what does she have to believe and She was aware that you know Tulsi Gabbard had somehow violated that in a way that no one's willing to say like in detail to fully articulate what

did Tulsi Gabbard do wrong no one will tell you she's just bad yeah and then what that revealed about Barry Weiss is she's completely dishonest like she's a liar actually you can't if if you attack somebody particularly personally and can't explain why you're attacking the person Like that's not acceptable. You're a dishonest person if you can't explain why I think it's a common thing that people do in private and They get accustomed to speak like we're talking like we're talking in private We're just two people talking right so people get accustomed to saying things without being able to back them up You know like oh, he's a vaccine denier Well, I've done a ton of that in my life. Yeah, I am as well because I'm an asshole

So it's like I just don't like that person I have as well But I'm what I'm saying is I don't know how much time Barry Weiss had spent doing podcasts before that. Well, she's spent Look, I'm just saying like But I think it's important to be honest about what your agenda is. I think she is honest. I think she is honest and I really like her. I like talking to her. Well, I'm not against you.

She's a very intelligent person. I'm not against her personally. I just think that was a mistake. And I think you're allowed to do that and hopefully learn from that and don't do that anymore. Don't say a thing that you, and I've done that. I've definitely done that. I've said a thing and I wasn't really exactly sure

what I was talking about. Oh my gosh, I do that every day and I may have just done it with Barry Weiss So let me be a lot more specific about what I mean if your agenda is Neocon politics, which is her agenda. Just say so don't pretend to be a defender of free speech as a principle Which is what she does. How is she a defender of neocon politics? Very wise. Yeah, like what specifically? of neocon politics. Barry Weiss? Yeah, like what specifically? Well, anyone, including me and Tulsi Gabbard,

who thinks that America shouldn't be funding wars that don't help America, she will attack as a traitor to America or whatever, whatever it takes. And so no, no, no, that's her main interest, which is fine. And by the way, I actually have friends who I disagree with really strongly on this question who believe in neocon politics.

Doesn't mean they're terrible people or I hate them or I'm not friends. I'm still friends with them, but they're very direct about it. This is what I care about. Okay, fine. You know, I really care about bird hunting and fly fishing and or whatever I can, you know, that's totally cool, but be honest about it. So if your job is to defend the right of free people to say what they really believe, then go ahead and defend it.

And if somebody is not allowed to speak or fired from his job for having an opinion that you disagree with, defend him anyway. I just interviewed a guy who is a black nationalist socialist, okay? So I'm obviously not much of a black nationalist. I don't know if you're aware of that, but I'm not. And I'm not a socialist either.

But this guy is facing prison time under the Biden DOJ because he said things they don't like about foreign policy. And I just interviewed the guy for an hour and it was like, I'm, because on principle, you should be able to say what you think, period. What is this gentleman's name? He was actually, it turns out I like loved him. Oh, and I'm embarrassed I can't,

he's a member of a pretty small black nationalist socialist group. It's like the revolutionary black nationalists or something like that. They're out of Southwest Florida. And he's literally facing prison for repeating Russian disinformation. He's not even accused of doing anything.

He's accused of saying things the Biden DOJ doesn't like. Well, you know. What were these things that he said? Repeating Russian propaganda. About? About the invasion of Ukraine. And his point was, well, there's a backstory here, which is that NATO has been moving eastward since 1991,

and that's a massive threat to Russia. Missiles on their border from a hostile power is a threat. And the Biden administration accelerated that, and in response, Putin invaded eastern Ukraine. Now, you can disagree with that, but that's hardly a crackpot view, by the way. I think that's actually true, but even if you don't agree that it's true,

that's not, you don't have to be a paid propagandist from the Kremlin to say that. Right. I have said it, I'm not a paid propagandist. Is this the gentleman? That's him right there. Four Americans from a black-empowerment organization work with Russian intelligence to spread propaganda,

Fed say. Yes, to spread propaganda. Now propaganda, first of all, you know, there's a lot of propaganda. Scroll up a little on that, Jamie, so I can read what this is saying. It's covered up. Oh, okay. Right?

So that guy is, that guy right there. Okay, subscribe real quick. Yeah, the People's Democratic Uhuru Movement in St. Petersburg. So. So he contacted, he spoke with someone in Russia. They spoke with people in Russia and then he repeated. No, no, no, he is being, he's charged with felonies.

The FBI raided his house. The first thing they did was cover up the security cameras and they went in there and arrested them, raided by the FBI. Russia's foreign intelligence service allegedly weaponized our first amendment rights, freedoms, Russianized citizens to divide Americans and interfere elections in the US says assistant attorney general Matthew Olson.

Now, first of all, weaponized our first amendment rights? No, your first amendment rights are never a crime. They're God given, the government did not bestow them, you were born with them as a free person, period, and the First Amendment simply says you can't interfere with their exercise, that's it. And in this they are. And I looked at, I read this and I thought,

and I reached out to this guy by the way. Matthew Olson? No, I wish, Matthew Olson would never do my show. You mean the guy whose salary I pay as a US citizen? No, he would never speak to me. Listen, look at that quote. Russia's foreign intelligence services allegedly weaponized our First Amendment rights,

freedoms Russia denies its own citizens to divide Americans and interfere in elections in the United States. That, you gotta like, why are you saying that? Say what happened. Well, but nothing happens. So that's the thing. So I'm reading this, someone sent it to me

and I'm like, okay, clearly there's a crime here. Like they were found with, I don't know, mortar shells or they were, I mean, usually the government makes up, they put kiddie porn on your computer, at least to discredit you. There's no underlying crime other than they said something that the foreign policy establishment

of the United States disagrees with. Okay, that's not a crime other than they said something that the foreign policy establishment of the United States disagrees with. Okay, that's not a crime by definition. And this guy is facing life in prison. And it looks to me, because Barry Weiss has not defended him, I think this guy is likely to spend the rest of his life in prison. And I'm like, this is crazy. The rest of his life in prison? Yes.

Okay, hold it. This is the thing. I think he's 83. How do you say his prison? Yes! Okay, hold on, this is the thing. He's, I think he's 83. Yeshit, how do you say his name? Yeshitela? Yeshitela and three other U.S. citizens, Penny Joanne Hess, Jesse Neville, and Augustus C. Romaine Jr. are charged with conspiracy to defraud U.S. Hess? Uh, oh, okay, defraud the United States. Hess, Yeshitela, and and Nivelle are also charged

with impersonating agents of a foreign government. Okay, they say to defraud the United States, so defraud suggests theft of something of value, right? Right. If I defraud you, I steal your money. There's no allegation of that at all. And I actually read the charges. There's no, the only allegation is they said things

that the US government, the Biden administration doesn't like, that's it. And because they're unpopular, and they have views that are considered quote, fringe, you know, like crazy black nationalists, nobody wants to defend them. And my only point is not that I'm like such a principled person.

This seems very obvious to me. You can't allow that. You absolutely cannot allow that if you believe in the First Amendment and the freedom of free people to say what they think. So what this implication is, they're saying that they were recruited by the FSB. So it says the prosecutor said, Ianov operated an entity called the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia that was used to carry out its US influence efforts overseen by the Russian intelligence service, known as FSB. They recruited US-based organizations to help sway elections, make it appear there was a strong support in the US for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and backed efforts such

as the 2015 United Nations petition to decry the genocide of African people in the US according to the indictment. Backed efforts. What does that mean? Look at that. It means that. It's negative to back efforts such as the 2015 United Nations petition to decry the genocide of African people. But just look at that statement. Backed efforts such as a

thing to decry genocide. The United Nations petition of 2015 to decry the genocide of African people in the US according to the indictment. Okay, so the real misinformation and propaganda is in the charging documents, actually. The real liars here are the Biden DOJ officials who did this, and they're dangerous. They're criminals, in my opinion. But if you read it carefully,

you will see that the only crime is having opinions that the people in charge didn't like. And were they in contact with people from Russia? Yeah, I think they went over to Russia for some conference. So, by the way, the way this typically works is they say, well, you went to a country against which we've imposed sanctions and you violated the sanctions regime in some way.

Like that's how they get you. They're not even alleging that. They're not even alleging that. They're not even alleging that. They're just saying, you said things that we don't like, that by the way a foreign government we don't like, agrees with. But that's not- But that they learned those when they went over to Russia?

They learned these things? No, it's all on the internet. That they learned them? I mean, I guess it doesn't matter where they learned them. I would, because I've talked to the guy and I've seen what they wrote, the opinions that they expressed, I don't, you know, the genocide of African peoples

in America, I don't even know what that means. I guess I don't agree with that. But their views on Russia, I generally agree with because I think they're true. And so does Jeff Sachs and a lot of other non-crazy, non-black nationalists who probably agree with the basic framework of their position. But whether we agree or not is not relevant.

Right. All that matters is in a free country, which this was when I grew up, you have the right to any opinion you want. You do not have the right to hurt people, you don't have the right to steal from them, you don't have the right to defraud people, but you certainly foremost have the right to hurt people, you don't have the right to steal from them, you don't have the right to defraud people, but you certainly foremost have the right

to any opinion you want, no matter what the people in charge think of it. In fact, you have that right as a bulwark against tyranny by the people in charge. Like that's the only thing that keeps this country free is my right to have any opinion I want. And this guy is going to jail for his opinions. And, you know, it's so crazy that I kept thinking,

like, is there something that I'm missing? Like, it does seem a little fringe, this group. I'd never heard of them. I'm not sending them money, okay? They must have done something. Nope, nothing. And you should see the video of the FBI raid. It's unbelievable.

They sent, they sent like, it's on the internet. It's on X. I have the video on there. They sent like 40 armed agents with automatic weapons to this guy's office and his house like no exaggeration It was a full-blown like we're arresting El Chapo type thing for this guy's like an 83 year old army veteran It's outrageous. And I really find it baffling that nobody who's like against woke culture, whatever, will touch it. And the reason they won't touch it is because their foreign policy views in general are more important

to them than their views on speech and the First Amendment. Their views on America. Well, if you step out of line, right, so the ideology is that we must support Ukraine. So this is, Russia has a point. This is what they're saying. So Russia was very upset about the movement of the weapons closer to their borders, the joining NATO, all the stuff that was the hard red lines that Putin had already set, like if Russia would definitely do something if Ukraine joined NATO.

We all knew that. So if you deviate from that, you're going to be in trouble. So better just ignore it. Because you can't, you clearly, if you look at who these people are, I mean these are people that would be supported by the left, wholeheartedly. Well they are, I mean it's like

the revolutionary socialism. Yeah, right. They're not at CPAC this year. But the left has to ignore it because then. 100%. It conflicts with this other part of the ideology. Well the categories right and left are just like, now they're actually ridiculous.

They're ridiculous. They don't mean anything. In fact, we've moved, the categories right and left are just like, now they're actually ridiculous. They're ridiculous. They don't mean anything. In fact, we've moved past the point where they don't mean anything, they do mean something. They are propaganda instruments designed to cloak the truth from the rest of us. Then in fact, there's agreement, not disagreement at the center of power.

They all agree on the things that matter. And those are the economy and foreign policy because that's where the money is. There's no effort to say rein in the credit card companies, which if you really cared about the country, you'd say but people are really suffering, okay, they don't have enough money to live, kids can't not only not buy houses, they can't afford rent, and why is that? And one of the main reasons is because they're paying like close to 20% interest on their credit cards and

Okay, we just imagine that in a free market, that's a good thing. Tell me why that's a good thing who benefits from that Why are we for that again? I'm not for that. I think the credit card companies are villains and They send credit cards to kids at school and get them hooked on this. I think it's totally wrong and If you said that in the US Congress people people would look at you like you had three heads, like what? They just don't care because they all agree that our current economic system and our current foreign policy assumptions are good. So that's not a two party system, that's a one party system, and it doesn't serve the interest of the country.

And my position is super simple. The only country I have an emotional attachment to is the United States, that's it. I like lots of countries. I like almost all countries actually. I've been to a lot of them. I like them all. But the only one I feel emotional about

is the United States, because I live here. I was born here, my kids are here. It's my country. And most of the people in our foreign policy conversation do not feel that way. So that distorts it really dramatically. And there also, a lot of them are violence worshipers. Like they get off on war.

They get off on hurting people and on the power that that imbues them with. And I think, you know, the Liz Cheney model, you know what I mean? Like someone like Liz Cheney, who's got like a really sad and barren personal life, a lot of them are this way, weird personal life, failed personal life.

Like they don't have people who love them. They don't have kids who respect them. And so Adam Kinzinger or whatever, they're all kind of the same. The more broken they are inside, the more focused they are on like war and foreign policy because it gives them a feeling of power and strength and success.

Like I can't get my wife to respect me. I can't get my kids to listen to me. I can't pass any meaningful domestic agenda. But what I can do is bomb the living shit out of a foreign country. And so there is this, it's not true for all of them, but for a lot of them, there is this syndrome that drives their behavior.

But whatever the reason, it's totally disconnected from what's good for the country. And if you run America, you have one job, one job, and that's improve America, period. They don't see it that way. So I don't think the system can continue because it's too distorted. It's not serving its original purpose at all. So what was it that these guys said that made this raid possible? They said Russia, and I don't wanna speak for them.

Like I interviewed, anyone who wants to see it can interview. And I just wanna say again, like one of the cool things about this moment that I did not anticipate all this sad stuff happening, I know that you probably experienced this all the time, is like finding not only common ground with people you thought you had nothing in common with at all, but also like liking them.

You know, like I actually liked the guy. I'm sure we disagree on a million things, probably mad at white people. I am a white person, whatever. But like in my conversation, I was like, I like this guy. You know, he's honest and he's sincere, he's principled. He was a veteran, you know, but whatever. No, I really think what they said was what I have said and a lot of people have said,

which is there was a reason for this invasion. I personally think the invasion was a bad idea, didn't help anybody. I'm against war, I'm sad, the war's ongoing. But they were pushed to this by a more powerful country, which would be the United States of America With the threat of including Ukraine in NATO. It's really simple and right before the invasion days before the invasion They send poor Kamala Harris who has no idea what day it is to the Munich Security Conference an area She knows nothing about no experience in at. And they send her there for one purpose,

which is to announce any press briefing with all the cameras rolling, to Zelensky right there, she says, "'We want you to join NATO.'" What? No other NATO members were clamoring for Ukraine. It didn't even qualify for a NATO membership. Why would you say that?

When Putin's got troops massed on the Ukrainian border, you send your vice president to the Munich Security Conference with the world watching and say this that no one even really wants? Why would you do that? To provoke war. Obviously, what's the other reason? And it was scripted. Like Kamala Harris is not free-balling stuff, like she's saying what she's told to say.

Obviously. It's not her area. She doesn't know anything about this stuff. She told to say that but why to provoke a war obviously So that was my read I said that on Fox News Not a lot of people liked it, but it just seemed obvious to me. I'm not making excuses for Putin, please I Want to protect the United States, and I think this war really hurts the United States. Like my motives are always right out there. Anyway, I think they set a species of that,

something like that. And the last thing I'll say is that, why was the reaction so strong? Because it was true. They don't care if you lie. No one in power cares if you lie. But a lot of people are saying- They only care when you tell the truth.

A lot of people are saying those things and they're not getting arrested. Because he's like some black nationalist guy in St. Petersburg like who cares we can do who's gonna defend him Nobody he's some wacko He's some like 80 year old guy who's like been in the like fringe left movement for the past 50 years You know like new Huey Newton and Stokely Carmichael He's like a relic of the past and like he doesn't have a constituency, he doesn't care. The modern Democratic Party hates him, he hates them,

and the Republican Party is like, black nationalism, no thanks, so he has no constituency. They're never gonna, like you could say that, and what are they gonna do to you? You know, nothing, because they can't. But this guy, yeah, crush him, kill him. And that's exactly what they're doing. And I really think, not to be like a 70s liberal about it,

if you let the weak get crushed, it's bad. It's super bad. You need to protect the weak, and this guy's weak. And so you think they're making an example out of him with this? Yeah, and they can. They have all this power, this law enforcement power. I just don't understand why they would move

so many people, why they would get so many agents, why they would do this so publicly for one guy's opinion or one group of people's opinion. Well, I don't know. I mean, why did medieval- If it's not, especially if they don't have a constituency. Why did medieval kings hang the heads of people they executed from the gates?

Right, but it feels like there should be more to it. Like, what did they say? So the problem is... You're telling me! I know. The problem is that, I mean I'm just strawman, I'm steelmaning this rather. So the problem is that they went over to Russia and they talked with people in Russia and then they're saying these things.

Is that the problem? They're not charged with that. They're not charged with going to Russia. But do you think that's the motivation behind it because they went over there? It's a different article, it has a quote from him. Okay. Going to anybody do you think that's the motivation behind it because they they went over there Okay, yeah, they are not At least when I interviewed him they had not been charged with taking money from Russia So it says they've been accused of us they've accused us of taking money from Russia Yes, you tell us said yesterday news conference in July 29th

We've never taken any money from Russian government said yesterday at a news conference on July 29th, we've never taken any money from Russian government, but I'm not saying that because I'm morally opposed to taking money from the Russians or anyone else who wants to support the struggles for black people. Don't tell us that we can't have friends that you don't like. He accused the U.S. government of seeking to use the APSP as a pawn in its proxy war with Russia, the unsubstantiated allegation that opponents of the war are co-conspirators with a foreign power are intended to bolster the phantom of a Russian boogeyman in the public consciousness. The escalating military aggression by the US against Russia and China is already being

accompanied by increasing repression and an attempt to criminalize left-wing opposition to the unpopular war Well, exactly, so they're accusing him of taking money from Russia. They're not they're not charging him. So here's the distinction which is Like really really important. So there are two levels on which the Department of Justice in all administrations acts there's the on which the Department of Justice in all administrations acts. There's the level of propaganda, like what do we want people to think, and there's the level of law. What are we charging someone with? And you have to ignore the first and pay very close attention to the second.

So we have a legal system, we have laws, and you can't actually go to jail unless you violate one under the terms of our system. And so ignore what they're saying about you. Joe Rogan sucks, he's a bad man. But in the end, I'm busting you for double parking. And so really you're not a bad man, you're a double Parker under the law. And so if you look at the charges against these guys,

they're not charged with violating sanctions regulations. They are charged with totally amorphous quote crimes like defrauding the US government not for money, but for like Defrauding it like I guess Counter signaling it Sending a message publicly that they don't like I mean, there's no crime. Look it up except speaking and I think that's a precedent that we don't want to live with no no doubt yeah let's take a leak we'll be right back we're gonna pee Tucker and I gonna pee together

yeah well that's the confronting of reality you're forced to examine your beliefs and why you came to those beliefs in the first place that's the confronting of reality you're forced to Examine your beliefs and why you came to those beliefs in the first place. That is the beauty of this moment though. It is people are living Intentionally much more and it's also just much more interesting. It's not just You know, it's less shallow than it was for sure I think so I think it's more nuanced people have more new at least the people that are paying attention have a more nuanced perspective, but then you have the people that are in the echo chambers that are just digging their heels in even more. And you could spot them easily,

because they- Well, they're missing out, because there's nothing more liberating than admitting you were wrong. I mean, that is like the moment of liberation. Right. And that's the basis of religion, it's the basis of AA,

it's the basis of anything that improves you as a person is admitting, honestly admitting to other people, not just to yourself, that like, wow, I got that wrong. Yeah. And then you're free. It's very important. Because then you don't have to hide it anymore. Right, very important. And it's a beautiful thing.

And that is like changing your mind. I always notice this covering politics, that a candidate would be like, I've got him on tape saying 10 years ago something different. And no one ever asked my opinion, but I always wanted to say, why don't you just, why don't you say, you're absolutely right. And the country's a lot different

from what it was 10 years ago. And so my opinions changed too. Like, why wouldn't they? Because I'm not a freaking robot or a liar. Also, I used to think this because of that. And now I realize I was wrong. Exactly. Yeah, which is great is that yeah I mean, it's part of being a human. It's not being a flip-flopper. It's the best part. Yeah, I'm a human

well this is an interesting time for that because you see people that won't do that and You could recognize them easily because they're the first people to throw out insults The first thing to do and describe you they'll describe you in an insulting way And then they'll say what they disagree with you about. They'll say something hard, they try to define you, though you're far right, white supremacist, racist. Oh, Ben there.

Yeah, they throw it all at you, and then they say what you said. It's so funny, I got called racist and white supremacist so many times, but when I first was called that, I mean, it really stung, you know, a lot, because just of where I grew up and how I grew up, and those were like the worst things

you could ever call somebody. And so I actually like paused for a moment and thought, am I? Like, which I think it's fair to ask yourself, like, am I a white, whatever that? I never figured out what that was. Am I a racist? Not really.

And I thought really the people I dislike most are almost all white liberals, actually. So I- You're racist against white people. No, but like, no, I am white, my kids are white, I'm not against white people, I like white people. But no, it's not that, it's that, so a reporter once called me about this,

well you've been called racist, he's like no, actually I really dislike you. If I were to sort of narrow down my bigotries, it's like people like you, I just think you're disgusting. I really mean it too. Racist, racist, okay. All right. Well it's a thing, you know.

I don't think that works as much anymore. It doesn't work, no. Well I think a lot of the things that you overuse eventually people realize like oh, you're you're you're yelling wolf again Yeah Well, of course and when people get hit with it and don't disappear then it becomes obvious, you know lacks power but it's also you're trying to like Use these words to define someone especially someone like you that has so many

hours and hours of talking about things, like to try this reductionist perspective of someone to reduce them to this ultimately very negative thing and not say that they're a human being. And also, the fact that it's done by the people that want to think of themselves as compassionate and kind, which is the most bizarre. The left is so aggressively incompassionate. Like they're so aggressively unkind with- Letting people die of drug ODs on the sidewalk, that's compassion. No, it's not.

That whole thing is fucking crazy. Well, it's cruelty, actually. It is, and it's also when you find, do you know Colion Duaris? I know him. Yeah, great guy. He opened my eyes to the homelessness thing. We had him on the podcast and he was explaining

how he was in San Francisco and he was like, what is this? It's like, they don't have any money for this? Is that what it is? Like, no, there's a whole business behind it. Of course. And these people that are running this homeless initiative or whatever the fuck they call it,

they're making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Some of them a quarter million dollars a year. Imagine making money off the homeless. And not doing a goddamn thing. But what's so funny is I do think the root of their power and the one thing they're good at is just charging the moral high ground and taking it in the first moments of the battle.

They just run up to the moral high ground and they're like, we've got this, this is ours. And they'll protect that at all costs. And it's like, that's kind of all they have is this self-righteousness. And if you can puncture that, it's like, you're getting rich from the homeless, actually. And is there anything more disgusting than that?

It's some junkie who's dying in misery outside the convention center in San Francisco, and you're making money on that? They're essentially using those people as a battery to expand the power of government. Yeah, and their own personal advantage. Yeah, they're expanding government. They're making more government employees.

Now there's tons of people that are working on the homelessness problem, air quotes, and they probably all have blue hair, and they talk nonsense, and nothing's getting done, and no one's being punished for it But when they when they did that study where they said that that they had no data Like how are you? What you can't say whether or not it's doing anything. Yeah, you well had you spent 24 billion dollars

But why are they not treated as like the most reprehensible people in our society? I think there's too many things to think about. I think most people unlike you and I aren't even paying attention to it They're paying attention to the fact that the tents are there They're paying attention if you go to Los Angeles the fucking zombie apocalypse, but what they're not paying attention to is What is going on? How many people are making money? I don't even know until Coleon explained it to us I had no idea. I thought it was just they don't have any money. They don't put any money in it

and they let these people sleep there. Oh no. No, there's actual money. No, there are all these parasites. Yeah, parasites, government parasites. Of course. Those are real. Of course. And this whole idea of, I've created so many jobs.

Like what jobs? Are they government jobs that are just bullshit? Cause there's a lot of those. What's crazy to me, just having spent most of my life in Washington, is how close this is to the lawmakers physically. So the US Capitol sits across from something called Union Station, which is a really beautiful train station, right on Capitol Hill.

And so to get into the Capitol, when there's a massive homeless city there, people dying of drug ODs, when there's a massive homeless city there, people dying of drug ODs, right there. And so to get to work every day, lawmakers have to step over the bodies of fellow Americans dying, like dying, living outdoors, shitting in the bushes, addicted to drugs, which is hell, okay? And they have to ignore that on their way to creating utopia in some foreign country. And you're like, does it ever occur to you

that that's disgusting? That your primary duty is to the drug addict, your fellow American, you're doing nothing? And you're telling me how we're gonna make Eastern Europe into this brave new world? I don't know, I just can't get past that that I think I'm not super sensitive or aware or anything. I'm not super anything really. I'm pretty ordinary, but I think I would notice Walking into vote on Ukraine aid I'd be like shit. They're like five junkies on the street Maybe we should do something for them. Yeah. Yeah, it's very bizarre

it's bizarre that they can rationalize it or at least that they don't get called out by all their people and This idea that it's compassionate that you have compassion to leave these people and to give them aid to help them and give them clean needles But then you've got to think like maybe there's something bigger going on actually Mmm, because there's no yes. There's an entire Because there's no, yes, there's an entire sector of the economy now that feeds off of human misery, the drug treatment centers that don't work, the homeless advocates who create more homeless,

the migrant workers, American born aid agencies, workers who increase illegal immigration and gang activity. No, this is all this, people are making money off this. The arms manufacturers that help kill people in foreign countries, et cetera, et cetera. There's a vig in all of that. It's a scam, it's a grift, et cetera, et cetera. But there's something more.

There are a lot of people who seem to be just for evil for its own sake. And you're like, maybe all the crazy talk about a spiritual war of like good and evil, maybe there's something to that. Maybe that's not an illusion. Maybe that's like, everyone else has always thought that. Maybe-

There are certainly forces that have evil consequences that exist. But they act on people from the outside. And you feel it also on the other side. I mean, people are better than they naturally are sometimes. Like, you feel compassion for people or true empathy for someone, or you really want to help someone.

There's no advantage to you at all. Like, why are you doing that? It's almost like you're being acted on by good, and all of us have known those moments where we just are cruel for the sake of it, hurt someone for the sake of it. What's that? There's no advantage to us. That's evil acting on us.

And I think we're seeing it at scale, and, like, I grew up in the most secular world you could ever grow up in, Southern California in the 70s and 80s, and in a very secular family, and I've never really paid much attention to that. And all of a sudden, every... Not every, but a lot of people I know

who had similar childhoods to mine, similar life experiences are like, maybe there is like a supernatural realm. Maybe there's more than just like what we can see and feel. Maybe life is more than just ordering shit on Amazon. Maybe there's like a purpose. Maybe there is this battle between good and evil around us that we can't see, but that we do experience a lot.

It seems like it's always been a narrative throughout human history It's always been this recognition Carl's over there snoring I don't have my headphones on so I could hear Are you snorting or snoring snoring Carl snoring? Carl the dog you oh Carl the dog Carl the dog I like the dog he's the best but he snores. I like Carl the dog. He's the best, but he snores when he's asleep because he's a little French bulldog. He's a sporty little bulldog. He's awesome. Yeah. He's the best. Dogs don't get cuter. They might be as cute, but they don't get any cuter than Carl. I think that's right. Yeah. I've got some pretty

good-looking dogs. I have a beautiful dog. I have a golden retriever, but he's not as cute as Carl. Carl's a different thing. Don't tell him that. He knows. He doesn't like Carl. Well, he doesn't hate Carl, but he, like, ignores him. He thinks of Carl as a thief of attention only. Which he is. Yeah.

Fair. So we've always, human beings have always at least believed that there are forces of good and evil and that they They that's what Exorcisms are about right the idea that you're possessed. Yeah, you're possessed by evil There's always been this thought that there's good and evil, but when did you start? When did you start considering that and thinking that that's because it weren't you at one point? Don't you weren't you a grateful deadhead? Oh yeah.

I listened to him this morning, yeah. You used to travel around with them? Yeah. Ha ha ha! How old were you when that was going on? I went to my first Dead Show in December of 1984, so I was 15 at, speaking of the San Francisco civic center.

Yeah, the New Year shows, so they've always played in Oakland, but one year they played in San Francisco. And so we were in Tahoe over Christmas, and for some reason my dad was gone, I don't really know where, so my brother and I drove illegally from Tahoe in the family vehicle to downtown San Francisco. How old was your brother?

13. So you drove or he drove? I drove. 15, you drove? Yeah. Wow. From Tahoe, so it was a couple hours. And I remember being on the freeway like,

grr! At 15. Well, we had a pretty different kind of childhood. But anyway, anyway anyway we didn't- Is that you? Yeah, it's me on the left. Get the fuck outta here. Yeah, I don't know, you know,

I don't know how that, that picture is hanging in my barn and I've never, you know, I don't release any pictures of myself or family or anything like that. And somebody came to my barn and took a picture of that, it's hanging next to my sink, and put it on the internet. Wow. So that's my brother, Buckley, on the right.

That picture was taken, so my dad was a reporter in San Francisco in the 60s, and pretty well-known reporter, and that was in the 80s when I was in school, and we were home for Christmas vacation, and he had covered the Grateful Dead, he knew the Grateful Dead, my dad did. So they were in his office.

They like came through DC and they like called him and they came over to his office, Jerry came over to his office and my dad's like, I've got Jerry Garcia here, you guys should come down. So my brother and I, we lived in Georgetown and we had a Vespa, remember those? Yeah. And we drove our Vespa, it was freaking cold out.

I'll never forget that. We drove our Vespa down to sixth and E. And we drove our Vespa, it was freaking cold out. I'll never forget that we drove our Vespa down to 6th and E or whatever where my dad's office was and there was Jerry, I'd never met him before. He was missing the middle finger of his right hand famously, you know, the famously handprint, grateful that handprint and, but when he shook his hand, you could feel his, it collapsed kind of because he didn't have that middle finger.

But anyway, so my brother and I drove to the New Year show, it was actually a couple nights before New Year's, and we didn't have tickets, of course, and we were in the park across from there, and we were, you know, whatever doing the, you know, whatever the things that people do at dead shows, and we were pretty freaking out of it. And this guy comes up out of nowhere

and puts a ticket around my face, he goes, here, nowhere and puts a ticket around my face and goes, here and hands me a ticket. So my brother was extremely out of it. I mean, he was, you know, I never should have done this, but I was like, all right, man, I'm going in. All right.

And I left my little brother in the park during the show, just like very, very impaired, like super, super impaired. It was completely wrong to do something like that, but I did do it. And then I went in and saw the show, kind of freaked out in the middle of it, hid in the men's room for a while. I'll never forget that.

Standing on the stall smoking cigarettes. Is it acid? Trying to, it was, no, it was a psilocybin mushrooms, which by the way, I should just say, I got sober 22 years ago, I'm completely opposed to anything. Like I don't take Advil, like I'm totally opposed to anything,

but other than nicotine and coffee, but yeah, it was mushrooms, so we ate way too many. And started to kind of melt down a little bit. But anyway, the point is I get out of the show. This was pre-self, this was 1984 point is I get out of the show. This is pre-self, this is 1984, and I get out of the show, and they played actually a lot of tunes that they didn't play.

They played Spoonful, like they didn't play Spoonful a lot. It was like a pretty obscure tune. I'd never heard it before actually. And I couldn't find my brother, my little brother. And I'm like in charge, you know, my closest friend and lifelong friends, talked to him this morning and, but I couldn't find him. And I was like, oh man, my brother's gone,

but there he was, he appeared like an hour later. He had spent the entire show in somebody's van. But he seemed undamaged and it was great. I mean, not everything about it is great. I mean, I do think the drug thing got, you know, definitely hurt people for sure. But from my perspective, I went to a bunch, probably 50 or more shows, and really enjoyed it.

And I love the fact that they had two drummers. That was a huge thing for me. I love rhythm. I think it's the basis of music. It's obviously the basis of music. I mean, the instruments are cool, but they're kind of like interior design, and the architecture is rhythm,

and it's the universal sound that every culture appreciates because it reflects something that's preexisting that's in you. Everyone relates to rhythm, and I just absolutely loved the drums. And I loved... They would always play, like it was called drums, actually, but they would play a section of every show, and I just absolutely loved the drums. And I love, they would always play, like it was called drums actually,

but they would play a section of every show was just drums. Bill Creutzebun and Mickey Hart just going crazy on the drums, and they had drum circles, and I just liked drums. To this day, I listen to drums, just percussion. King Sonia Day, the great West African drummer, and anyway, whatever. So yeah, I like The Grateful Dead a lot and still do.

And I like that kind of music. Jam music? I like jam music. I like acoustic music. I love bluegrass, love bluegrass and Americana. And to see that grow, to see Billy Strings become like a venue packer, you know, like Billy Strings is like a big act right now.

I do feel like creativity art has been completely destroyed and eliminated in the United States. There's like, as we were saying earlier, you can't be creative if you're not honest. It's that simple. And we can't be honest, so there's no creativity. And in the visual arts and literature and architecture, it's died, but comedy is still alive, thank heaven,

and music, for some reason, has escaped that and is still alive. And the growth, the explosion of acoustic bluegrass, the banjo, like one of the great instruments ever, is just thrilling and like a sign of life, you know? At this late stage. Well, I think when there's social pressures and when society's in chaos, art does tend to thrive.

Some kind of art. Some art, that's right. Comedy certainly does now. Like comedy's never been better. But it came close. It's an amazing time. It came close. Oh yeah, yeah, the walls got breached.

Whoa! No, but a few years, I don't know when it was, but, you know, eight years ago or something, it felt like, oh, wow. You know, people can't tell jokes anymore. We kept doing it. I noticed! Yeah.

And... Yeah, we kept doing it. You kept the little embers alive. Yeah, well, it was flames. It's just, you know, when you get people in a club and you take their phones away and just have them just be actual human beings and not be filming everything

and just being completely trapped with this idea of capturing something and then putting it online, then you get to have a human experience. You mean when people like live in the present rather than in the future, far away? That's one of the great things about going to a good club that uses yonder bags for your phones.

Is that it just takes you out of it. Like at the very least, it's a break. Like this podcast is a break for three hours of phones. There's no, I'm not, no one's checking phones. I love that. That's very rare with human beings, where they can just sit down and just have conversations for long periods of time

without being distracted by something. Not in my house, but yeah. It's a real problem with folks. It's a huge problem. It's a huge problem. And the one thing I will say about my very unconventional childhood is there was a huge premium on meals

and like eating with people and spending four hours at the table was like totally normal in the house that I grew up in. Totally normal. In fact, it was, like, daily. And that was our primary form of entertainment and mode of communication and, you know, thing that we did for fulfillment and fun. And I still do that. I still feel that way.

And we have dinner parties constantly, and there are no phones and people talk and entertain each other and it's like so much more interesting. I'm not on social media but if I were on social media I don't think I would find that on Instagram and I'm not attacking Instagram but I don't think I would find that, anything like that. No it's definitely a lost thing. It's such an easy thing, it's such a fun thing. It is a fun thing Yeah, it's a great thing and I think people enjoy it

I think that's also led to the rise of podcast too because they don't they don't get that in their real life So at least they get to be a person who sits in on these conversations. I gotta say this is not being Suck up because I don't suck up ever to anyone But the effect that podcasts have had is just incredible, and I never would have predicted that. In a million freaking years. I would have never thought it. When I first started doing this,

it was in my living room with my friend Brian, and we did it on a laptop. And we had a webcam, and we were like... With my friend Brian. Yeah. Brian Redband of Kill Tony. You met Brian. Yes, I did. No, but I just loved the phrase with my friend Brian.

Like every bad story, like, I was with my friend Brian. We were down at Mexicali and I just, me and my friend Brian. We just started fucking around online. And then we started eventually bringing in guests. And then we eventually got a studio. And then eventually I eventually bringing in guests, and then we eventually got a studio, and then eventually I got a big place in LA,

like a real warehouse, and then eventually moved to Texas. It all just eventually happened. But it was not, I mean, I was in another part of media for that whole period, and if you had asked me, up until the last few years, the future is clearly shorter, cris more produced right right I would have thought that exactly everyone did think that including me and I hated it you

know I hate it I like long form but I never I was a long-form magazine writer for a year so I I thought but I thought that was over yeah not over everybody thought that yeah even my friends they were telling me how to edit my show. They're like, you should edit that. No one's gonna listen at three hours. I'm like, then don't listen. I don't care. Do whatever you want.

I'm not making any money doing this. It was just for fun. I love that. It was just fun for years, for years and years. I did it just with no money. There was no money in it forever. What year, like how many years in did it start to pay for itself?

Five? That's a long time. Yeah, long time. It took a while. I mean, it was making, it was probably like existing. Yeah, but about five years in, then it started making money. And then it was like, oh, this is a business.

I remember very clearly, I was on stage once in Chicago I was doing the Chicago theater and I had this story that I was gonna tell me how many people listen to the podcast and There's 3,700 people in the place and they went nuts. It was like yeah, I was like oh All right, I thought there's this like thing that I'm doing where you doing where a few people are paying attention. I don't even know what the... Back then, I never even knew what the numbers were. I didn't even care. Well, they may not have been... Could you even collect numbers accurately then? Yeah, you could get downloads off of whatever the provider was that was the host.

You could get download numbers from the host. And they would use that to inform ads, like, oh, he gets X amount of downloads per month. And then they would, you know, that's when there was very few people advertising on podcasts. They were like, all right, let's give it a try. But it's one of the great developments

between podcasting and Billy Strings. Like I have, I'm serious, I have hope that it's not all going in the wrong direction. Cause you can get this view that like everything is falling apart, late Rome, just a matter of time before, you know, it really does collapse. And then you see these signs that are not minor, you know, they're significant, that like, no, people,

I mean, I haven't met a person in the past year who said, you know, I thought this but then I was reading the New York Times And I realized I was wrong like not one person right but the number of people say I was listening to this podcast I was listening to Rogan and da da da da. It's like, you know really noticeable Yeah, that's why It's interesting. It's it's it's interesting because you could put people in front of people and they might not even be right. They might be wrong. But at least now you're having conversations about something you would never have a conversation about before. And even if this person gets

exposed as being incorrect, well now you have a more nuanced understanding of what the subject is about, why people think incorrect things. And this idea of like platforming people is a big one today. Why would you platform that person? First of all, platform is not a verb. And whenever they take a perfectly good noun and turn it into a verb, you know something bad is afoot. Okay, platform. Oh, you mean letting an adult human being talk? but you know something bad is afoot, okay?

Platform, oh, you mean letting an adult human being talk? Right. I think that's not only allowed, I think that's the law. Not only that, I think it's important for us. It's even important to talk to people that are completely different than you, that don't agree with you at all. Well, it's especially important.

Otherwise, it's just masturbatory. It's interesting, too. It's just you alone getting yourself off. But it's also interesting to know why these people think the way they think. And also, there's so many people that if you talk to them online, you'd have these horrible conversations. But if you sit down with them as an actual human being and treat them with respect and consideration, and you talk to them like a human being, and you just try to be as friendly and open and possible

as possible despite what your differences might be. You realize most people have a lot in common, a lot. More, way more in common than they don't. But that's the secret that they're trying to hide. Yeah. So mind control, you know, the end stage of mind control is censorship, right? But it begins long before that,

and it begins by creating false categories that wall off your willingness, that prevent you from wanting to know certain things or talk to certain people. And name calling is the most obvious tool. Like he's a crank, he's a racist, he's a whatever, and fill it in. And then you're like, I can't listen to that person.

And I have to say your willingness to platform or to have a conversation with Alex Jones, I think was a revolutionary act actually. Not that everything Alex Jones says is right, it's not. Not everything I say is right or anyone says is right. But Alex Jones is an interesting person. And even if he's not interesting, he has been walled off from the rest of us

through name calling. And your willingness to be like, no, actually we're just gonna listen to Alex Jones and you can decide for yourself. Well, Alex has been my friend for more than 20 years. Exactly, but even if he, just the, yeah, but I'm sure you have other friends you haven't invited. Just like, you were not allowed to talk to him.

And when you hear Alex Jones talk, you may not agree with everything he says, I don't know that I do, but you definitely understand why they told you you couldn't listen to Alex Jones. Well, that's one of the reasons why I had him as one of the first guests when I came over to Spotify. Love that.

I was like, let's go. What did they say? Well, a lot of people weren't happy. We lost sponsors. It was an issue, but I think it did the job, you know. Regardless of what he said that's incorrect, clearly the Sandy Hook thing was incorrect. You know, Alex, I know Alex personally, so I know what he was going through. And you know, everybody

wants to talk about mental health health and they want to praise people for being honest about their mental health issues and support them on their mental health journey to wellness. Alex has gone through some real issues. And one of the reasons why he's gone through some issues is because that guy is uncovering real shit that's terrifying every fucking day. And he was drinking out of control. And you know, he's just fucking constantly stressed freaking out and

when you see So many lies and and so much propaganda and and so many Psiops that are being done on people you start seeing them where they don't exist and that's what he did. Well, and he's also Channeling some stuff There's you can't call 9-eleven in And he's also channeling some stuff. You can't call 9-11 in detail because you're super informed. Before the fact.

He called it. He literally called it in the summer of 2001. He said, planes will fly into the World Trade Centers and they will blame a man called Osama Bin Laden. We know that he said that because he said it on tape multiple times. And then he said, call the White House and tell them this. Now, let's just, that's all we know about Alex Jones.

Let's just say that's the fact set. How'd that happen? Right, how did he do that? No, he's channeling something. You think so? That's super, yeah, of course. There's like no other, I mean, tell me how he did it otherwise. I've asked him about it.

How did you do that at length? You had dinner at my barn recently, we were talking about this. How'd you do that? I don I did it on my barn recently. We were talking about this. How'd you do that? I don't know. It just came to me. And that's real. That is real.

The supernatural is real. And I don't know why it's so hard for the modern mind, I guess, because it's a materialist mind, to accept that. But what you see, and that's not a new phenomenon. It's happened throughout history. There are people called prophets. And there are people who were prophets, who weren people called prophets, and there are people who were prophets who weren't called prophets, but there are people who have information or parts of information, bits of information,

visions of information come to them and then they relay it. It's not from them. They received it. This is like the, you know, one of the oldest phenomenon in human history. So those people tend to be a little crazy, a little unbalanced, a little different from everybody else. Do you know what I mean? They live on locusts and honey in the wilderness.

I mean, that's just like, they're not like everybody else. And that's clearly part of what, I'm not saying that everything that Alex Jones says is a prophecy from God, it's not. But that was prophetic. And if it wasn't, tell me how it wasn't. In July of 2000, like I lived in Washington in July of 2001. My dad worked in the government. I was as well informed as anybody could be

about what was going on in the government. I've always been interested in what's happening in other countries. I was aware of Osama bin Laden. I knew about the Taliban. I knew more than most people. There's not one person who was saying, not one person in Washington DC was saying,

you know, at some point soon, they may fly airplanes into the world trade centers and blame Osama bin Laden, like that just wasn't a thing. So if you said that multiple times on camera, there's a reason. And everyone, I've said this to 50 people what I just said to you and they all look at me like Yeah, that's stupid. Tell me how it's stupid. Like tell me how he did that Like this that's impossible. He didn't just do it with that either. No, I'm aware. He's done it with a lot of things and that's

one of the more interesting things about him is that like he he talks about stuff like he talked about like I'm gonna send this to Jamie because this is one of the really crazy ones that he he called and this is like 2000 2000 probably I guess 2017 here it 2017 Here it is let me find this give me a second here I find cuz I sent it to him like how the fuck did you call this? Cuz it's it's one of those ones where you're like This is exactly what's happening now Here it is here 2017 hold on a second. I'll send you this Jamie

Technology let's go All right, I sent it to you Jamie So this is some guys Instagram clip that I found that took a clip from the podcast and he's doing commentary over put these things on real quick You got it, okay cool Here we go 22 years on podcastsars, Alex Jones and Joe Rogan discuss what's currently happening right now. Google, CERN, technology, vampire, alien. In a nutshell, Alex was pretty on point with this message.

Let me know what your thoughts are. Is he crazy or is he on to something? It's really big so okay um yeah pour another shot of that media to get this out properly. All right let me give you my best please. Deep research approximation once you what do you think is going but am I wrong to still hold out hope that aliens are real? Because I tell you that's one of the two guilty pleasures that I still cling it's Bigfoot and aliens. Those are two big foot. Not so much I wish it was real, but I just don't are you ready? Yes big foot's real Come on, daddy

Yes, I'm gonna give you the biggest lot of Joe there yeah, I like it in this room right now for real Yeah, you're not of this world. bro. Me? You're the alien. Oh, wow, I didn't know. Well, here's what the elite believe. And let me be very clear, because the media will tell you some context. I only go with what I can prove. Oh, thank you.

And people can't even handle that. There's armies, we're fighting a Panafal conspiracy, but beyond that, it's a vampire conspiracy in that they are inter-dimensionally sucking the essence of our youth. Right. And they believe they're possessed by an off-world entity. They do? Yeah, and Joe, I've been on air 22 years.

I don't get into aliens, metaphysical, religion, any of that. I've studied the elite, and I've also communicated with a lot of the top people. And if you want to know, I will actually break down right now the best knowledge right now on what's happening on the planet. What's happening? The elite are all about transcendence and living forever and the secrets of the universe and they want to know all this. Some are good, some are bad, some are a mix. But the good ones don't ever want to organize.

The bad ones didn't want to organize because they lost after power. Powerful consciousnesses don't want to dominate other people. They want to empower them so they don't tend to get together until things are really late in the game. Then they come together, evil's always defeated, because good is so much stronger. And we're on this planet and Einstein's physics shut, Max Planck's physics shut, oh there's at least 12 dimensions. And now that's why all the top scientists and billionaires are coming out saying it's a false hologram. It is artificial. The computers are scanning it and finding tension points where it's artificially projected and gravity's bleeding in to this universe. That's what they call dark matter.

So we're like a thought or a dream that's a wisp in some computer program, some God's mind, whatever. They're proving it all. It's all coming out. Now, there's like this sub-transmission zone below the third dimension that's just turned over to the most horrible things is what it resonates to. And it's trying to get up into the third dimension that's just a basic level consciousness to launch into the next levels. And our species is already way up at the fifth, sixth dimension, consciously, our best people. But there's this big war trying to like basically destroy humanity because humanity has free will and there's a decision

To which level we want to go to we have free will so evils allowed to come and contend and not just good and the elites themselves Believe they're racing Using human technology to try to take our best minds and build some type of breakaway civilization Where they're going to merge with machines, transcend and break away from the failed species of this man, which is kind of like a false transmission because they're thinking what they are is ugly and bad, projecting it onto themselves instead of believing, no, it's a human test

about building us up. And so Google was set up 18, 19 years ago. This was, I knew about this before it was declassified. I'm just saying I have good sources that they wanted to build a giant artificial system and Google believes that the first artificial intelligence will be a supercomputer based on the neuron Activities of the hive mind of humanity with billions of people wired into it with the Internet of things And so all of our thoughts go into it and we're actually building a computer that has real neurons in real time that's also psychically connected to us that are organic creatures so that they will have current prediction powers, future prediction powers, have a crystal ball and know the future, you can add stimuli beforehand and make decisions that control the future. And so then it's the end of consciousness and free will for individuals as we know, and a true 2.0 in a very bad way, hive mind consciousness with an AI jacked into everyone knowing our hopes and dreams, delivering it to us not in some PKD wirehead system system where we plug in and give up on consciousness

because of unlimited pleasure, but because we were already wired and absorbed before we knew it by giving over our consciousness to this system by our daily decisions that it was able to manipulate and control into a larger system. There's now a human counter-strike taking place to shut this off before it gets fully into place and to block these systems and to try to have an actual debate about where humanity goes and cut off the pedophiles and psychic vampires that are control of this AI system before humanity's destroyed.

The AI, how'd they get, how'd the pedophile? Yeah, it's pretty much it. Yeah. It's incredible. It's, I didn't understand about a third, that was seven years ago. Seven years ago. Yeah, okay. So. No was seven years ago. That was seven years ago. Seven years ago. Yeah, okay.

So. No, seven years ago, no one was thinking AI was gonna take over civilization. So you can see why the FBI decided to destroy him, which it did. The people in, I mean, it's just like, what has happened to Alex Jones is proof that at least some of what he's saying is true,

because why, who is Alex Jones a threat to? Did you see that interview with the guy from FBI was trying to hook up with that dude on a date? CIA, yeah. Was it CIA? CIA. That's right. And they were talking about how they can destroy a person. Yeah, I think I was mentioned in there too.

Were you? Yeah. I was. Yeah, I mean, there are a couple of things. Okay, so yeah. Again, the third dimension, I don't know anything about dimensions, okay? So I are a couple of things. Okay, so yeah, again, I don't know the third dimension. I don't know anything about dimensions, okay, so I can't comment on that. But two things he said are true. One is that every civilization, every religion, the Greek myths, you know, every single one, including Judaism,

Christianity, Hinduism, has believed that there is sort of, that the spirit world and humanity are like, that there's, you know, they're hybrids. Yeah. Okay? So that's just a fact. Genesis six. So, you know, I don't think that's crazy at all, given that it has been the belief of civilizations that had no contact with each other. I don't think that's crazy at all given that it has been the belief of Civilizations that had no contact with each other. I don't think it's crazy and I also don't think it's crazy to consider it I don't think we have a real map of reality. Well, we definitely don't and

I exactly better put than I than I explained it. That's exactly right We don't have a real map and it's not crazy to consider it And it was a very it was an entirely conventional view up until fairly recently That yeah that this spirit world like I hate one don't use phrase breeds with people but that is that everyone thought that okay? Right even the term the spirit world is probably a loaded term. Of course is there all whatever it is How do you say it in a way that doesn't sound crazy? But the whole thing sounds crazy because we don't acknowledge the reality the actual physical reality the supernatural and it is real That's the first thing the second point. That's obviously true is that people weak people which is a synonym for bad people

Come together for strength and safety they act as one the hive The hive mind is specific to a certain group of people, bad people, and that good people don't tend to come together, but they're coming together now. And I just noticed this. I mean, people independently who I know or sort of know in many cases have long despised, have come to exactly the same conclusions without talking to each other.

I know that you have this experience all the time. It's like, I can't believe you think that. How did you wind up thinking that? And not just on a specific issue like foreign policy or COVID or whatever, but like on a whole bunch of different things. They're all coming to the same conclusion and they're coming together.

And so that does suggest, you know, a big change and a battle. I mean, it is a battle between good and evil. I'm not always convinced I'm on the good side. I've been, you know, an instrument of evil many times in my life and I'm ashamed of it. But- Are you talking about the Iraq War? Yeah, the Iraq War.

I've been cruel to people, probably even already on your show in ways that are unjustified. That's my instinct to do that. That's a fault, not, you know, not something to brag about. It's something I'm ashamed of. So I'm not saying I'm always on the right side.

I certainly have not always been on the right side. I've been on the wrong side many, many times. But that doesn't change the fact that there is good, there is evil. They are at war with each other and we are subject to the effects of that conflict and that we're seeing it suddenly play out in ways that are really, really obvious.

There's no political explanation for the trans phenomenon. Nobody benefits. You can say, I hear these, see these right-wingers be like, really, it's all about the people who make synthetic hormones. They benefit, yeah, okay, they benefit. It's not driving it, that's stupid. It's not about the money, actually.

There's no upside. It's not helping the kids at all. If a child has anorexia, which is pretty common actually in this country, and the child thinks she's fat, you don't say to the child, yeah, you're fat. You don't do that. You give the child help if you can.

It's hard to treat, but you try. If a child comes to you and says, I actually, I think I was born in the wrong body, the last thing you do is affirm that it's hurting the child. Like, why would you do that? If you love the child, you wouldn't do that. It's really an exercise undertaken for the sake of destruction, for the sake of hurting someone.

There's no real upside. What's another phrase description of that? It's evil. And you see that a lot. A lot. And, um... Why? Like, what is that? And why is it so obvious to a completely...

even a completely secular person like me, all of a sudden, there's a reason for that. We're what? You know, history is moving really, really fast. We're right in the middle of it. And I probably wouldn't have chosen to be born at the time I was. I'd much rather sort of reach maturity in 1955. Really?

Well, I don't know, I don't get to choose. I don't like drama. I don't like change. But there was drama and change back then, too. There was, but people didn't reckon. Well, if there was a Cold War, of course. There was a Korean War, okay. But people didn't see it.

In their face. Right, in the way. I don't think- Wouldn't you rather know? I don't have a choice. I do know. Yeah, I'd rather know. I'd rather be right now. Yeah, well, you've got a much better attitude than I. I mean, sometimes I just, my parents got divorced when I was little.

And so I kind of like, I don't want change. Yeah, I know what you mean. It's not up to me. I know what you mean. Yeah, you know I was having a conversation in the green room with a club the other night about this guy from Canada. That's HIV positive that's a trans woman that's taking hormones so they can breastfeed their nine-month-old daughter So biological male is taking hormones and is now breastfeeding their daughter off of their male tit. And I

said if I was Satan, if Satan was real I would do that. Exactly. If I was, if Satan's real I would, I mean if Satan was gonna do something insidious and unbelievably creepy he would do that. Well, I think he is doing that, obviously. But this guy's a real freak. Well, but right, but he's also- And it's like using public money, too. But he's a victim, too.

I mean, the thing about- Sure. Right, because the thing about evil, the reason that evil is distinct from everything else, it destroys the vessel it's held in, the conduit through which it flows, it destroys the person. So like, that guy in the end will not thrive. He'll be destroyed too.

And so that's how you know that it's supernatural. In other words, if I steal your iPhone and sell it and I get an extra 400 bucks, like that's kind of explicable. You understand why I'm doing that. I want the 400 bucks. But if I'm encouraging your kid to castrate himself, I'm not really benefiting from that, actually. There's no material benefit to me at all.

There's no real psychic benefit. It's hurting for its own sake. And that's evil. There's no political category that explains that. Right, and then there's clearly money involved in that, too. There is money, of course. And then there's the gender-affirming clinics that have popped up all over the country since 2007 you see the map of it It's fucking bananas, but why would you want to do that? That's why would policymakers want to do that

I would anybody want to make money that way right well But also like people it's the most unnatural thing ever because parents Every parent at a certain age feels like I I like my kids, I want grandkids. I want mine to continue. Yeah. So I always think the politicians who push traniism on the country, like their kids are going trans too. Yeah, they are.

Right, they're not escaping it. It's like they're burning down their own house. I would like to see the statistics of people in Hollywood. Like how many of their kids turn trans versus the rest of the world? Yeah, I know some of them too. Yeah. But how many of them versus the rest of the world? Well, a lot more. A lot more. Which is a morally corrupt business. Yes. Yeah. Like more than we knew, more than I knew, you know, the entertainment business.

It's always been that way. You know, Tarantino was talking to us about this famous old director that had a bedroom in his office where he would bed the starlets. And it was just common knowledge. If you wanted to be in his movie, you had to fuck him. And he'd go into his office, he had a literal bedroom in his office. We had some of that in television, yes.

I'm sure. Yeah, quite a bit. Yeah, and I didn't really understand, I didn't obviously partake in it, or you would know because all my text messages went up to the New York Times. So I'm not hiding any of my own behavior, but I will say, if I'm being honest,

I didn't really register with me. I was like, yeah, that's kind of wild and crazy. I just didn't, you know, like my wife, I didn't want to blow up my family. I didn't do anything like that really, but I certainly saw a lot, like a lot of it, like a lot. And I just didn't really see it as horrifying. I just saw it as kind of like, whoa,

creative people are this way kind of thing. But I look back and I'm like, it was really dark. Well, especially the producer thing, right? Like the Weinstein thing, the way they ran the business, that's how it was pay to play. I worked for Harvey Weinstein for a year. Did you really? Yeah, I did. When? 1999. He had a magazine with Tina Brown called Talk Magazine. I was the head political writer for it. And they had an office at Carnegie Towers in New York right below the park. And

I remember the big con. I remember that he was a pig. I was not, like, an intimate friend of his or whatever, but I certainly dealt with him. And the big controversy was he was smoking in elevators. And that was... and I've kind of supported that, if I'm being honest, but... but he was considered incredibly insensitive and just, like, vulgar, just like a pig. Well, he looks vulgar.

Yeah, well, that was certainly what everyone thought of him. Where I worked, Harvey's just a pig, and his brother Bob was a little bit less that way. He was vulgar. Yeah, well, that was certainly what everyone thought of him. Where I worked, Harvey's just a pig, and his brother Bob was a little bit less that way. He was also involved. But, um, but, yeah, people knew that he was a bad guy, but, like... But he made awesome movies. Yeah, and also, but he was just powerful.

He was like Harvey Weinstein. Like, you want to fuck with Harvey Weinstein. I mean, I didn't really think about it too much, to be completely honest. I was just... I was just a guy I worked for, but I don't know. I certainly, if you'd played the Alex Jones clip for me in 1999, I would have been,

and I did see Alex Jones clips in 1999. And then in later years, where he was talking about building seven, and I was very offended. I was like outraged that he would be suggesting that there was something about 9-11ven that wasn't above board that there was You know things we didn't know they were being hidden from us And I was like mad at Alex Jones for saying that I remember that really well

How dare you the building seven one is wild what is why it is why I mean I have no what all I know is 21 I Don't know what year it is 23 years could? Could it really be 23 years after 9-11? 23 years later. What's the justification for classifying any document around 9-11? There's no justification. Well, the same justification in classifying the documents

about the Kennedy assassination. Well, exactly, 61 years later. Yeah, or releasing the COVID vaccine data 75 years later. Of course. Yeah. Right, I mean, it's, of course, look, secrecy is different from privacy. Privacy is necessary

for the dignity of this white, you've got a door in the bathroom in your bedroom, right? You know, you need privacy, you need private thoughts. We have no privacy whatsoever. None. No privacy at all, thanks to the iPhone and governments buying on us all. So there's no privacy, but there's massive secrecy. Secrecy is different. Secrecy abets lying. The only reason to have secrecy is in order to do something that you're ashamed of other people knowing about that's that's immoral and probably illegal and there's more secrecy than ever and that means that there's more lying than ever there are more crimes being committed than ever that's the surest sign of it why are there a billion classified federal documents in a so-called democracy because they're lying

to us that's why but 9- like, what is the justification for that? I don't know the answer. I really don't know the answer, but there is one. That's for sure. It's not methods and sources. You think it's methods and sources? Trying to protect their Saudi sources? Don't think so.

You know, the wildest thing about Tower 7 is that if you just say it looks like a controlled demolition, people get mad at you. Why? Well, I don't know. Well, I'm not saying that it is a controlled demolition, but I'm saying if you watch it, it looks like a controlled demolition. But that happens all the time. Buildings catch fire and they just implode in on themselves. I think that happens every week, right? All these poultry plants and manufacturing plants that keep getting burned through fire, they all like- It's the way it went down.

Yeah. So I say, why do they respond that way? And of course I responded that way. So when I think looking back, the reason that I did was because if you call that into question, you had to ask a lot of other really obvious questions you didn't wanna deal with. And you might arrive at the conclusion that a lot of your most basic assumptions are false and that you've been had, and it's just too destabilizing

maybe. Right. Well, the real problem with Tower 7 is they go, well, okay, if it was a controlled demolition, how was that engineered? Did they just decide to do that before September 11th? And you know how long it would take to rig a building like that? Right. Or was it built into the building?

And how would they know it would even work? And how would they do something like that? And how would there not be a record of it being built into the building? Like, for someone to engineer the collapse of a tower... And where's the sound signature on the tape? There would be a sound of the explosions going on.

Yeah, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Which is a fair question. Yeah, so a lot of fair questions. And has there ever been a building that experienced a tremendous amount of damage because two enormous skyscrapers fell right next to it, damaged it, and then massive fire started, and then there's diesel generators

that are in the basement, so they have all this fuel, so they have this incredible inferno in the basement that weakens the structure. Is that why it collapsed? Maybe. Totally possible. A lot of building engineers disagree with that, as you know. And they don't think that could have happened in the way you just described.

I'm agnostic on it. Because I don't know the answer, and I have no way of knowing. All I know is that there's no justification for keeping those documents secret that I can think of. And if there is, tell us what it is. No one has bothered, because nobody presses. And it's, you know, I'll add that to the list of outrages. Yeah.

You know what I mean? And then it gives you this feeling of helplessness, because there's so many of those. They just pile on. There's always another one. There's always a new one. Well, the US government spied on me, broke into my phone and spied on me,

and I couldn't get a straight answer to that, and I'm not a felon. Well, not only that, they got into your Signal account, right? Yeah, and then they leaked it to the New York Times, what they found there. So it's one thing to say, okay, we picked up your text exchanges with a foreign national, which is true.

I text a lot of foreign nationals because of my job. Like, why wouldn't I? And it's my right, as far as I'm concerned. That's not illegal. But we picked up your text exchanges, which I think itself is a lie. I think they were targeting me. I think they are now. I'm pretty positive they are, but whatever.

Leaving that aside, we spied on you. We think we have justification. Is there a justification for leaking the contents of my private conversation to a news outlet in order to discredit me? No, there's no, that's secret police shit, okay? Yeah. I'm not whining, ooh, I'm a victim,

I'm certainly not a victim, but what was infuriating was my, and I got members of Congress involved because I was pissed and I felt threatened, I couldn't get a straight answer. They were just like, we're not answering those questions and what are you going to do about it? Bitch, what are you going to do about it?

Oh, well, you know, I don't possess a drone fleet. There's nothing I can do about it, actually. That's the truth. So when the system breaks down and things like, I don't know, honesty, justice, the law, none of those apply to people in charge who decide that doesn't apply to me. You are literally powerless.

And it's scary. Bizarre that the New York Times wouldn't have an issue with that. Well the New York Times does that all the time. But bizarre that they wouldn't have an issue with the government tapping into your phone. They work for the government. Are you kidding?

The New York Times? Yeah, the New York Times is a conduit for the lies of government. That's what it is. It's their tool. And they're perfectly aware of that. I mean, I used to write for the New York Times as a freelancer.

I mean, I've been around the New York Times a lot. And yeah, there are a lot of really smart people there. But for sure, even now, I would less so now, but there's still, I think, smart people there. There are, I know some. And they know. But they think that it's worth it because they're bringing information or I don't know what they think actually but no, they're they're tools of Power and that's like the one thing that you're not allowed to be even if you think the power is good

Like maybe they all support the agenda of the US government Destabilizing the world and impoverishing their own population. Maybe they're on board with that and destabilizing the world and impoverishing their own population. Maybe they're on board with that. Even if they are, they shouldn't do it because the job of the media, the press, is to keep power in check. You are kind of like the seatbelt, right?

You know, you make sure that things don't go too far. So, and they're not doing that. They're acting as a willing handmaiden. When do you think that switched? I think it's been the case for a long time. I mean, if you look at what happened to Richard Nixon, which I of course did not understand at all, Richard Nixon was taken out by the FBI and CIA.

And with the help of Bob Woodward, who was a Washington Post reporter, who had been a Naval Intelligence officer, working in the White House, working in the Nixon White House. And then he shows up like a year later, and he's this brand new reporter. He'd never been a journalist at all.

He's a Naval Intel officer. The famous Bob Woodward, we all revere. And he's a naval Intel officer, the famous Bob Woodward we all revere, and he's at the Washington Post. And somehow he gets the biggest story in the history of the Washington Post. He's the lead guy in that story. Well, I worked in a newspaper. I've been in the news business my whole life. That is not how it works. You don't take a kid like his first day from a totally unrelated business and put him on the biggest story. But he was. he was that guy. And who is his main source for Watergate?

Oh, the number two guy at the FBI. Oh, so you have the Naval Intelligence Officer working with the FBI official to destroy the president. Okay, so that's a deep state coup. What else, how would you describe that? If that happened in Guatemala, what would you say? And yet the way it was framed and the way that I accepted for decades was, oh, this intrepid reporter fought power.

No, no, no. This intrepid reporter, Bob Woodward, was a tool of power, secret power, which is the most threatening kind, to bounce the single most popular president in American history, Richard Nixon, from office before the end of his term and replace him with who? Oh, Gerald Ford, who sat on the Warren Commission. Now how did Gerald Ford get to be Richard Nixon's vice president? Well, because Carl Albert, the Democrat speaker of the House, told him, you must choose him.

We will only confirm him when they sent the actual elected vice president away for tax evasion, Spiro Agnew of Maryland. So you have a complete setup, like an absolute... Gerald Ford, the only unelected president in American history, actually sat on the Warren Commission. Something else that I accepted at face value until I looked at it, I was like, that's completely insane. You didn't want to interview Jack Ruby in your investigation of the assassination? Okay, you're fake. Yeah, he was on the Warren Commission.

And so, sorry for the long story, but the point is, like that happened in front of all of us, but the way it was framed cloaked the obvious reality of it. The people who broke into the Watergate office building from which the name is taken, Watergate, I think it was six of them or seven of them. All but one was a CI employee.

That's real, it's like, look it up on Google. So the whole thing, Richard Nixon was elected by more votes than any president in American history in the 1972 election. He was the most popular by votes, which is the only way we can really measure He was the most popular by votes, which is the only way we can really measure popularity. The most popular president in his reelection campaign, and two years later he's gone. Undone by a naval intel officer, the number two guy at the FBI and a bunch of CIA employees. You tell me what that is. Those are the facts. Those are

not disputed facts. That's not crackpot shit. That's just look it up So why did they want to get rid of Nixon? You know, there are a lot of theories on that I mean we don't first of all we don't need to know motive To know what happened they meaning unelected federal employees got rid of Richard Nixon, which is the most Anti-democratic way to make a leadership change that there is. I should just say that I actually kind of believe in democracy. Obviously it's not working well.

Obviously it's ending globally. There will never be another liberal democracy, unfortunately. But I'm attached to it because I was born here. I really believe in it, and it's better than any other system. So that's why I'm pissed. What was their motive? There are a lot of theories on this. There's an amazing conversation, it's on tape

between Richard Nixon when he was still president, I think it was in 1973, and I think it was Richard Helms, the head of the CIA, though I may have fucked that up, but it was the head of the CIA, and I think it was Helms. And Nixon says, I know why they killed Jack Kennedy. So Nixon was a student of history, obviously a flawed and complicated person, but a very, very smart person.

And he was really interested in why this guy who'd been president just one president before him was murdered. And he didn't think it was a lone gunman who was mysteriously assassinated two days later by another lone gunman Like it's so obviously bullshit and he knew that and he said the say a director who and you can listen to the tape It's on the internet is Totally silent on this question. So I think

There was the impression. I don't think I know that Nixon understood that the bureaucracy was really in control of the country. It wasn't elected officials and That's a massive threat Because it's true So and there may have been other reasons too that I'm not privy to look all and by the way I didn't even know any of this despite having moved to Washington in high school and been around this stuff a lot a lot a lot I didn't know any of that. And I know Bob Woodward personally. And I know Carl Bernstein personally. I even worked for Carl Bernstein briefly.

So I knew some of the actual players in this, but I didn't connect the obvious dots because they weren't framed that way. That's the point I'm making. It's the way that you frame things. You can have all the information available on Wikipedia, which is also controlled by the intelligence agencies, but there's still information on there. The information can be out there in the public domain.

It's a matter of seeing it for what it is, right? Yeah. So Nixon said that he knew why they killed JFK. Did he elaborate? Nope. And it's worth listening to. It's a very weird conversation. It takes place in the Oval Office, which famously had tape recording devices in it. Obviously this became a big feature during the Watergate hearings. But yes, that conversation, and I may be mangling it slightly, but it's on the internet and absolutely worth listening to. And the CIA director has this kind of sinister silence.

So like if I'm the president and you're the CIA director and I say, I know why the guy who was just president 10 years ago was killed, the obvious answer would be like, well, why? Why, what do you, what? You know why he was killed? You've got insight into the assassination of the US president?

He doesn't say anything. It's just like a very weird response. Like, what? Just gotta throw that out there? Like if you say to me, you know, we're taking a leak, you're at the next journal, and you're like, I figured out the secret to life. And I'm like, huh, okay.

That's like not a good response, right? Right, right. It's a telling response. You hear Trump's take on the JFK assassination why he didn't release the files I know what he said that if you knew what I know you wouldn't tell people either Which is crazy. Well, is that that's his position on the UAP thing as well. Yeah, actually and That's a lot of people's position on it

I mean, you know, Trump is saying, of course the CIA had knowledge of it, that is known. I mean, the whole thing, it's like, it's so funny. There's so many levels and there's so much I don't understand, but the whole JFK conspiracy industry, and it really is an industry, more books written on that than almost any historical topic, But the whole JFK conspiracy industry, and it really is an industry,

more books written on that than almost any historical topic, is filled with wackos, right? There are a lot of wackos in there. But it obscures, that fact obscures the larger fact, which is the facts themselves tell an unbelievable story. And so, whatever, I could get into it at great length. But yeah, they're still classifying documents 61 years later. Both Trump and Joe Biden have, in violation of my read

of federal law, kept those documents secret. There's no living person connected to the Kennedy assassination. It was a couple generations ago. There's no one person whose secrets are being protected. It's an institution or maybe countries. There may have been countries involved too. I don't know the answer, but there's clearly something worth protecting.

And I know that when I spoke to someone who'd seen the documents two years ago and I got one fact out of them, which is, yes, the CIA was involved. And by CIA, CIA is a huge organization, but James Jesus Angleton, the head of the operations directorate, had knowledge of this, which I think is well known. But that's the view of someone who saw the documents. So I thought that was news, so I went on TV and said that. The next day, I'll never forget it, I went quail hunting, and I was driving back,

and I got a phone call from Mike Pompeo's lawyer. Mike Pompeo was the Secretary of State, but before then, he was the director of the CIA. And in that position, he plotted the murder of Julian Assange, so he is a criminal as far as I'm concerned. But his lawyer called me and said, you know, you should know that anyone who tells you the contents of classified documents has committed a crime. He's threatening me.

He's in my car. I'll never, with my dog sitting next to me, I'll never forget this. And I said, are you really saying that to reveal that the US government had a role in the murder of a democratically elected president, to say that the US government had a role in the murder of a democratically elected president, to say that out loud, that's the crime? What about the actual crime, which is murdering a president? Like you're covering up for that Mike Pompeo.

What did he say to that? He had no response at all. And so Mike Pompeo is the one who pressed Trump to keep those documents secret. And so it's like, what's crazy to me is not just that Pompeo is the one who pressed Trump to keep those documents secret. And so it's like, what's crazy to me is not just that Pompeo did that. I think Pompeo is a really sinister person and a criminal. I think that. I think that because the facts suggest that.

He was caught. Yahoo News' Mike Isikoff wrote a long piece on this several years ago. His employees went to Mike Isikoff and said, hey, Mike Pompeo is plotting to murder Julian Assange, who's never even been charged with a crime in the United States as CIA director. That's illegal. You're not allowed. Federal employees are not allowed to just kill people they don't like, okay? Just to set the baseline here.

So that's who Mike Pompeo is. But he somehow intimidated Trump into not releasing this. Well, okay, that's all bad, right? I think it's criminal behavior. What's crazy is how Mike Pompeo is treated. He's treated as like a Republican poobah in good standing. He fully expects to become the secretary of defense in a Trump administration, which is like completely insane.

Why would you get criminal and give him nuclear weapons? Okay, that's my view. I think it's a common sense view. And like he goes to fundraisers and dinners and everyone's like hey Mike Pompeo It's like no you're the guy Who kept information the public has right to know secret? You're the guy who plotted the murder of someone who committed no crime. You are the outlaw. You were the bad guy But no, he's treated as like, you know, like a pillar of Republican Washington. I think that's, I think it's mind bending to watch that.

And by the way, you know, whatever, that's all I'll say. By the way. No, I mean, you know, people don't say that because they're worried about getting punished. They're worried about someone putting kiddie porn on their computer. Members of Congress are terrified of the intel agencies. I'm not guessing at that. They've told me that, including people on the intel committee, including people who

run the intel committee, the people whose job it is to oversee and keep in line these enormous secretive agencies whose budgets we can't even know. They're black budgets. The parents, the agencies are the children. They're afraid of the agencies. That's not compatible with democracy. Democracy is a really simple system, even representative democracy like ours. The people rule.

They do so through elections. They express their preference through voting. They send their people to the capital city to run the government on their behalf. Whenever you have unelected people who are not accountable to anyone making the biggest decisions, you don't have a democracy, you have something else, another system. I would call it a tyranny or whatever you wanna call it.

It's not a democracy. So that's like super obvious, it's playing out in front of everyone and no one cares and no one does anything about it. And I think the reason is because they're threatened. If you look at the committee chairman who allow this shit to happen year after year, they're all... I don't know. People say, oh, they're compromised or being blackmailed.

I don't have evidence of that, but I know them. They all have things to hide. I know that for a fact. It's not a stretch of imagination to imagine that, you know, some committee chairman who's allowing warrantless spying on Americans to continue or whatever abuse they're allowing, knowing fully or hiding the truth about UAPs, ignoring the UAP Disclosure Act of 2023,

like, why are they doing that? It's not impossible to imagine that some guy with a drinking problem or a weird sex life, and that's very common, very common up there. That's why they're doing it, because they don't want to be exposed. I don't have evidence of that, I don't have proof of that. But that's not a crazy thing to assume

that that could be happening. And I said to somebody, a very powerful person, the other day in a conversation in my kitchen, an elected official holds a really senior position, a very famous person, I was going crazy, I was so mad about all this stuff. And about the warrantless spying and about the funding for these insane wars. And I said to the guy who serves

in one of the legislative bodies, I got so mad my dogs were afraid. They're like, well, why are you yelling? Cause I don't yell at home. But I was like, all these people are controlled. They're all, you know, got weird sex lives and all these things are hiding and they're being blackmailed by the intel agencies.

And he said, and I'm quoting, I know. It was like, are we, okay, so at this point, we're just sort of, we're just sort of admitting that's real? Like, why do we allow that to continue? Having people compromise thing, God, that's an old story. It's the oldest story. J. Edgar Hoover, I mean, it's all of them. It's the oldest story. J. Edgar Hoover, it's all of them,

it's Epstein's Island, it's everything. But look, I don't have any, I'm telling you, what's the phrase the finance guys use, open kimono? Like I'm actually telling you all I know, I don't know anything else. Right. But I know that the publicly available facts tell a really clear story, which is the government

is not acting on behalf of the population. And so it's inherently illegitimate because its only legitimacy derives from the citizenry. The only reason the government can do things that it does, kill people, collect money by force, all the powers that it has come from one place, and that's the consent of the governed. That's the only legitimacy they have. And that's where it's fascinating, this concept of good and evil. Because when you think about it, if this is true, and if these people are compromised

because they're secretly perverts and creeps. They are though. And they're corrupt, and they steal money, or they, all these different things are evil things. Lying lying controlling people Engaging in unnecessary wars that are going to cost thousands of lives for profit all these things are evil things So if evil is real Evil would want those kind of people to be in a position of power. Yes, and here's here would want men

Here's the children. Here's the like op Here's the here's the illusion that Here's the like, op. Here's the illusion that we fall for time and again. We imagine that evil comes like fully advertised as such. Like evil people look like Anton LeVe. Porns. Yeah. Yeah.

Right. You know what I mean? Black cloak. Exactly. Sickle. Evil is an independent force that exists outside of people that acts upon people I really believe that I've experienced it a lot and it's obvious and

What vessel do they choose the weak? It's weak men and women who are instruments of evil the weaker the leader The more evil that leader will be. So it's, and unfortunately we've reached a time in American history where every leader is either a woman or a weak man, pretty much. And so there's, I'm sorry to say it, that's just true. And the weaker the leader, that's why Mike Johnson, everyone's like, Oh, Mike Johnson's such a nice guy. Well, I know Mike Johnson and he's perfectly nice guy to the extent that he's like polite and seems kind of meek and restrained

and he's not saying motherfucker ever, you know what I mean? He's got like very sort of button down affect, but he's a weak man and that's the man you should be afraid of. The people who you shouldn't be less afraid of are the headstrong, loud, don't care what anybody thinks. Yeah, those guys will go off track, but they're probably not going to abet genocide or blow up the world in a nuclear exchange because they may be obnoxious, but they know who they

are. Weak people just become a host for evil, you know, an open empty building that evil occupies, possesses even, and that's exactly what's happening to Mike Johnson. It's like absolutely crazy what Mike Johnson is doing, but it's not because he's evil, it's because he's weak and therefore susceptible to evil. It's a meaningful distinction that I have noticed. It is a very strange thing how many weak people wind up being leaders in this society. And particularly because so many people

don't want their lives exposed. They don't want that eye of Sauron gazing down upon them if they try to run for president. I get it. Or the physical threat. Yeah, physical. I mean, look at what's happening to RFK, where the Biden administration, for the first time ever,

denied him Secret Service protection as a legitimate presidential candidate. Well, it's absolutely nuts. Yeah. I mean, how is that? It means it's hard. You know, you realize that a lot of the things that we took for granted were actually voluntary.

Like, people just didn't do things because like, that's just wrong, that's not fair. You know what I mean? That's bad sportsmanship. Like there was a lot of like self-restraint involved in running a functional society. You can't kind of, you can't just make an infinite number of laws and enforce them, that's impossible.

You rely on people to just not do bad shit because like I'm not the kind of person who does bad shit. And once the people in charge decide, well, I'm just gonna do whatever I want, not all you can do about it. So the Biden administration denies some secret service protection, and you're like, how can you do that?

And they're like, well, we're doing it. What are you gonna do about it? Bitch. Right. And the answer is nothing, actually. What is this most recent bill that they're trying to pass about the ability to monitor phones? Well, it's just the nightmare scenario. It's something that they're already capable of doing because they did it to you and they

did it through an encrypted app. Oh, they do? Oh, yeah. How do they do it? Do you know how they use, how they got into your phone? Well, there are two ways to do it. It's interesting, and I was with Ed Snowden in Moscow and talked a lot about this because he's got the technical,

he's first of all an excellent and principled person, and his ex-feed is a really good place to start for people to understand what's happening here. He's paid a huge price for being, obviously, he's literally exiled to Moscow involuntarily, but there are a couple ways to do it. One, you know, you could hack into Signal, I guess, it's open source. It was created with CIA money, as I'm sure you know.

I'm not sure that's how you, I don't think you'd need to do that. You just capture the phone itself. You just capture the phone.. You just capture the phone. And the bottom line on digital security is that nothing is safe from state actors who want to spy on you, period. There's no electronic communication that they can't monitor, period. What about these things like Eric Prince has some new phone out, I think it's called Unplugged?

Yeah, Eric is a good friend of mine and I have a couple of those phones. I've talked to him a lot about it. He's a really a wonderful person, one of my favorite people actually. But that phone is designed for a different purpose, I think, I know, and that phone is designed to keep Apple and Google from tracking you, which is sort of a separate category like... What is this this Jimmy? Which bill oh Okay house bill on section two large government's power to scroll down to what you highlighted. So this is like a perfect example. So The Turner Himes bill

Congressman Mike Turner in Jim Heim. So who are Mike Turner and Jim Heim? So it's just be funny. Both those guys are the most, and who knows why, and you can sort of fill in the blank on motive. I'm not going to, but those are two of the most reliable water carriers for the intel agencies and for basically the federal bureaucracy in the Congress. These are not people who are working for their constituents.

These are people who are working for permanent Washington. I would say these are two of the most sinister people. I know more about Turner than Himes. But it's not surprising they're doing this. It would permit federal law enforcement to also force any other service provider with access to communications equipment to hand over data. Anyone with access to a wifi router, server, or even phone, anyone from a landlord to a laundromat

will be required to help the government spy. So that's the story right there. So basically, warrantless. Oh, of course warrantless, absolutely. And in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, as if anyone cares anymore, no one does, clearly. But I just remember when I was a kid, and we're roughly the same generation, you remember this too, people would be like, oh, East Germany.

Like there are more spies than there are people. East Germany was like the most elaborate surveillance state ever created, and of course it collapsed. But we'd always make fun of East Germany or North Korea. Who has more privacy, the average North Korean or the average American? Well, obviously the average North Korean because there's less technology. The US government spies on its own population

more than the North Korean government spies on its. That's just a fact. I'm not saying North Korea is preferable. I'm not moving there. I'm not carrying water for North Korea. What I'm doing is criticizing my government because I live here because it was better, it can be better, it should be better, and it only will be when we demand it. And it's not some fucking esoteric, like you have to be some crazy civil liberties lawyer

or something, like every person should demand, just as a starting point, a baseline, that no, you're not allowed to spy on me. I didn't do anything wrong. Right. Like what? Right. No privacy, no humanity. You can't be fully human without privacy.

And you also have to take into consideration that these people that are ahead of these intelligence agencies that are requesting these data, they're just human beings. They're human beings requesting data from other human beings without going through a court, without going to a judge and getting a warrant, without stating a case, without having some clear national security mandate, something. Of course not. And there's no justification. By the way, we've had the FISA, the Foreign Intelligence

Surveillance Act since I think 1977. So it predates 9-11. Did it stop 9-11? Oh, I don't think it did. Shut the fuck up. You're not protecting us actually. You open the southern border to anyone who wants to come. You're not checking IDs. You're not doing any kind of biometrics. You're not even screening for COVID. So clearly you don't care about my safety. Stop telling me you do. You don't. You're a criminal. Stop this charade. You don't care about my safety.

So using my safety as a pretext for spying me is not going to fly because I'm not that stupid. I may be kind of stupid. I'm not that stupid. No, you're doing this for one simple reason because this is what organizations do. They protect themselves. They exist for their own benefit. All human organizations, from the Church Bake Sale Committee to the Department of Justice,

they all are the same. They're an organism, just like any other, and an organism's main goal is to survive and reproduce, to get bigger. And you just see this throughout the federal bureaucracy. Well, it just so happens that the largest human organization in history is the federal government of the United States. And so all of this stuff, it accrues to its own power. That's why, let's say you believed every, quote, piece of science or scientific claim

about global climate change. You would not reach the same policy conclusions. You'd be like, well, the first thing we need to do is ban private air travel, because obviously that doesn't make any sense. And then the second thing we need to do is, you know, whatever, you'd look at it rationally from a scientific, if you bought the premise, which I don't, but if you did, you would.

That, no, you go through every climate, quote, climate demand, not one of them disempowers large organizations, whether it's NGOs or the government of the United States. Not one of them. They all make the government more powerful and they all make you less powerful. So that's when you know it's not really about the temperature of the earth's atmosphere.

It's about making them more powerful and disempowering you. And it's not about who runs those agencies. The bigger the agency, the more effective it will be in doing what all human organizations do, which is protect themselves and increase their power. It's like, it's fundamental. I guess that's what I'm saying. It's not about, oh, elect Trump, it'll change.

No, it'll only change when like, we're just eliminating the CIA, and we're gonna have like a small intel gathering service that feeds the president relevant information so we can make informed foreign policy decisions. But we're not going to overturn elections in other countries in the name of democracy because that's insane. If we believe in democracy, then we're going to let people vote for their own leaders because

we believe in democracy as a principle. Right? Right. Like you just get rid of all this shit because it's not helping us. It's only hurting us. And it would take someone, you know, who'd be willing to be assassinated to do anything like that.

And so, as you're choosing your leaders, ask yourself, does this person mean it enough to die? And that's the same question you would ask about your own dad. Does he love me enough to die for me? About your own husband. Does he love me enough to protect me from a home invader at risk to himself?

Like, the basic prerequisite for leadership is love of the people you lead and the willingness to die for them. And if you don't have that, you shouldn't be leading, period. It's true in the military, it's true in business, it's true in your home, and it's true in the government. And so no president will fix this unless he's like literally willing to die for it.

And short of that, it can't be fixed. I can think of no better way to end this conversation than that. Joe Rogan, ladies and gentlemen. You just nailed it. Well, listen, man, it's been very fun getting to know you. I think you are a very, you're a controversial character in the world,

but you're misunderstood. And I think if people pay attention to your actual work and the things that you talk about, I think you're generally a force of good. I really believe that. I feel like I'm in the most conventional person who's ever lived. Eh.

I don't think I'm radical at all. I'm the opposite. In this crazy time, someone who's conventional and wise seems radical. Maybe. I'm hoping for a better time. Yeah, I think a better time is possible. Me too. I do. It's just, we're in for a rough ride. Yeah, I'm not disarming any time soon.

Yeah. Thank you, Tucker. Thanks, Joe. Bye, everybody.