The Joe Rogan Experience - #499 - Cenk Uygur

Episode Date: May 12, 2014

Cenk Uygur is a political commentator, Internet personality, and political activist. He is also the main host and co-founder of "The Young Turks"

The Joe Rogan Experience. You don't have to go through a million different steps and get approved by producers. You just create your own show. It's relevant. It's interesting. It's engaging. People tune in. And then all of a sudden, boom, look at that. You're the number one news show on the internet. I mean, that's pretty crazy.

Yeah, it's totally crazy. Thanks for saying all that. It's been a crazy, crazy ride. And I love doing a podcast here because it reminds me of how we started. And we literally started in my living room and we're about to hit like 2 billion views. 2 billion? Yeah, it's madness. What year did you start?

2002, we started sending in taped shows to Sirius Satellite Radio. Wow. We were actually Sirius' first original talk show. That's incredible. So what was the thought process behind it? Like you just said, you know what, nothing out there is representing my point of view. Let me just create something. Yeah.

Okay, so first let me just quickly say thanks for having me on. Thanks for being on. I've never gone on anything, TV, anything, where people were more excited that I was going to come on someplace. Really? Yeah, they're like, oh, you're going on Joe Rogan's podcast. That's awesome. Well, we've spoken highly of you and your show many times on it.

Thank you, man. So I think there's a lot of people that are connected here. Yeah, I appreciate that. So initially for like three and a half minutes I was a lawyer, and I hated that. I couldn't stand it. So a friend of mine suggested I take like a course on how to start your own TV show. I was like, that's mental.

That's not, you can't do that. Right. And so I went to a learning annex course in New York and this lady just took our money and said, hey, schmucks, go to your local public access. You can start any show you like. That's it. That was the whole thing. And so I was like, OK, I still don't believe it.

I went to first day at the law firm. I left early to go to orientation at a public access station. And I went there and, you know, you've got to go through this whole process, get trained up, yada, yada. First time I go on air, we did an hour-long show with me and my friends half of it was on politics half was it half of it was on philosophy okay like we had the philosophical debates on god and all that stuff and everybody else was bored to tears i walked off the stage thinking that's what i'm doing god i love that i love that that's what i'm doing the rest of my life wow so i got started there then got like bars my way into local radio wrko in boston wwrc in washington just weekends

fill in whatever they'd give me i drive nine hours to boston to do weekend show uh and then and then i went to miami and got on tv same, like bars my way in, started in sales, worked my way up, somehow got on air, somehow became the supervising producer of their flagship show and on-air commentator. And then that got sold. I was Barry Diller's group. And then I came out to LA and I started writing because that's my main job at the TV station had become head writer for the show. And so then I was wrote on three different pilots here in LA. And I remember when I, the straw that broke the camel's back on that was I was writing for Daisy Fuentes and they're like, okay, now you need to use Daisy's voice. And i was like i don't know what daisy's fucking voice is i

don't know that at all i've never met her and i don't want to be daisy's voice i want to be my voice right so i was like i gotta get back into radio because that's the only place they let you do a talk show that's back in 02 right oh one actually at that time and so i called up my old friends one who was a program director at wrko in boston who then gone to xm he's like jake dude you got to go to serious right now they just opened the door go i'll put in a recommendation for you and basically like bars my way in there started the young turks what we know now is the young turks i started with ben who was the anchor at the station in miami that I was working with.

And they literally didn't even know we were on the air for the first six months. And then when they found out, they're like, oh shit, now we got to pay you. They didn't know you were on the air? No. Because some consultant had hired us. And then when they eventually hired a program director for talk, because we were their first Talk Show. They didn't even have a program director for that. Then they hired one and they're like, oh, right, right. These guys are on there. Okay, what should we do with them? And he had me go into New York and he sat me down and listened to some tapes.

He's like, you guys are surprisingly decent. All right, fuck it. We'll pay you. And that's how we got started. Are you guys still on XM? Well, now it's Sirius and XM, right? They've combined. No, we were on there for a million years.

But honestly, the online video got so much bigger than radio that it became not worth it. Even for the minor hassle of doing formatting, doing three hours, we're like, it's not worth it. So we just let it go. Do you guys have a podcast version of it or an Audible download version of it? Yeah. So on iTunes, we got a free audio podcast and a free video podcast that's like two out of the six segments we do every day so people can sample it. It's not bad, actually. It's already like probably more than a half an hour of content for free.

And then if you're hardcore and you like the show then you just go to our website tytnetwork.com and it's a ten dollar uh membership and so then you get all of it you get the main show you get all the network shows you get everything so if anybody wanted to they can get plenty of free content but you do so much stuff that if you want to be so what percentage of the people that like like get to it and start downloading it do you know like what percentage of the people that get to it and start downloading it, do you know what percentage actually sign up? Sure. You have a huge amount of subscribers. Right.

So on YouTube, we have a little over 1.5 million subscribers for The Young Turks, the flagship show. For the whole network, we have, I think, about 3 million subscribers. When you have all of our shows like Pop Trigger, What the Flick, which is movie reviews, TYT Sports, stuff like that. And we have 64 million views a month on the network, 24 million uniques every month. But when you're talking about people paying $10 a month, we almost never advertise it, which is so stupid of us. It's partly because we had troubles with the website and stuff. The people who pay the $10, that's around $4,000 to $5,000. Still, though, wow.

It's amazing. So you've essentially set up your own studio. You have your own network. I mean, it's not just a show now. You have this entire thing that you've developed. You're only on some of those shows, right oh yeah yeah there's a gang of other people working for you now yeah so there's 29 channels so if i was on all those shows my head would explode my head's about to explode as it is running the network and being on the show and then i for three years i did tv at

the same time which was just so crazy like it it was just, I was going to melt down. My body was breaking down. But yeah, all those channels, great hosts. We got 30 people that are full-time. But then if you add all the hosts that are not full-time to it, then you're talking probably 50, 60 people. That's insane. Yeah. And we all, we literally started in our living room.

Like when Jesus, who's still with us 12 years later, walked in as an intern, he was like, okay, there's like a 12% chance I'm getting murdered today. This is this guy's living room and it's kind of scary looking. Okay. And I can't believe he stuck with us, but he did. Now we've got this big studio space in Culver City and we're producing shows like there's no tomorrow. Wow you guys recently did you use kickstarter or something to fund your your

studio what did how did you set that up what did you do we did indiegogo um so it's basically the same thing as kickstarter and uh we like it a little better and we thought all right uh we need money to build the new studio because we had been with Current Television and they had paid our rent. We had this great deal with them where they paid me to be a host. They paid some of our producers and they paid for the rent. Great deal. So when we left, they got bought by Al Jazeera and we didn't want to be with Al Jazeera. So then we had to go build our own studio, which is incredibly expensive.

So we're like, OK, let's try this because, you know, we built everything with our audience. Let's try to build this with them. And I remember we sat around in a room. There was like six, seven of us. We're like, what should we go for? And every single person agreed, $150,000. Like, let's go for it. Let's go nuts.

Let's try to get $150,000. So then it came back around to me, and I was like, okay, that sounds good. We're going to go for $250,000. Okay? Because I'd rather try for $250,000 and get to $175,000. Right. And then people are like, oh, you didn't make it. I'm like, yeah, but I got an extra $25,000 I didn't expect, so that's awesome.

You know, I don't care what people say as long as we can actually use the money to build a studio. Anyway, it turns out we got basically a little over $400,000. Whoa, that's incredible. But that's just a sign that what you're doing resonates. So that's got to be very fulfilling. That's got to feel nice. Yeah, yeah. So my dad is a guy who will focus on the positive for about a second and a half.

And then he'll be like, okay, yeah, but let me tell you all the things that are going wrong and yada yada so i've unfortunately internalized that i mean it's got a good aspect to it and a bad aspect but so like i never take a moment to be like yes right i a little bit when we did the billion views party we did that at youtube space and i was like dude billion is kind of a hard number to deny, right? Yeah. Like if you told – I'm like – in some ways I'm humble because I think I failed so much in my life that it's impossible not to be humble, right? But in other ways I'm a massive egomaniac. But even when we started, if you told this egomaniac we're going to get a billion views, I'd be like, dude, come on.

Bounds are recent. That's not going to get a billion views, I'd be like, dude, come on, bounds are recent. That's not going to happen. That's crazy talk. So then I soaked it in a little bit. Yeah, and when the audience delivered and it was over 400,000, that was another moment like, just like you said, it wasn't the money as much. And the money was great. But it was more like, man, they really believe in us, man. And that comes with a responsibility.

As, you know, Spider-Man's uncle told him, with great power comes great responsibility. That was before he let the crook get by and killed his uncle. Well, what you're doing is what people have wanted to see for a while. Someone who has, it's an opinion straight from the source. It's an opinion straight from the source. It's not filtered by the networks, by the executives, by all these people that have measured statistics and looked at numbers and decided this is the approach that would best suit them. And, you know, we need to take the Fox girls and their skirt should be one inch shorter than it is right now. We've shown that we can get an extra one million views a month if we have more leg.

You know, what you're doing is this is my name is jank uger this is my opinion boom i'm gonna put it out there and i don't give a fuck what you think and that is what everybody has always wanted because what you're getting when you listen to the nightly news today on wall street we learned you're getting a fake voice with a guy who's reading off a teleprompter with a a gang of people that their objective is just about making money and about producing this program, this business that's called the news. And so what their, their objective is not getting information out to people. Their objective is not debating the hard facts. It's not rabble rousing. It's not telling people like we better wake up and fucking realize what's going on here. It's none of that. There's none rabble rousing. It's not telling people like we better wake up and fucking realize

what's going on here. It's none of that. There's none of that. But you come along and that is exactly what you're doing. And then and then people start going, hey, hey, look at this. Look at this. There's another thing going on over here. This guy's got this thing and he's using the Internet and the Internet. Oh, nobody could tell him what to do. No, nobody's telling him what to do. This is his opinion. And then it takes off. And that's a very important thing that, in my opinion, sort of embodies or personifies this time in our culture. It's a very unique time. and you know you could become one of those people like there's i i found out this guy the other day online some science podcast that he has on youtube or some science show on youtube somebody told me hey you should check this out i looked at it each video was like 17 million views six million views i'm like holy shit how many of those fucking guys are out there now you've just find out about them

and already they have millions and millions and millions of subscribers. There's never been a time like that. There's never been a time like we're experiencing today. Yeah. You know, I think our success is bigger than us. Like it's not about us, right? Just like you said, it's about a certain period of time in the history of media that in essence what they've done is the mainstream media has handed us like 80% of the market just by their abject failure. So you turn on TV and it's wall-to-wall fakeness. It's guys

reading from a prompter. It's guys who are supposed to be reporters that never ask follow-up questions because they don't actually know the material. Their producers write out the questions ahead of time. I've been there, right? They write out the questions ahead of time i've been there right they they write out the questions ahead of time they read it they're they're not news anchors they're news actors that's a great way of describing them and so and then they got that fake voice that you're talking about i mean like what is that why do they talk like that yeah like so i remember there's a story i told on the show once i'm in new orleans for mardi gras we're pretty fucked up and and then we turn on the TV, and it's a normal local news lady. And she's like, and the number of ambulances doubled,

but so has the number of injuries. But why? Why are you saying it like that? That's really weird. Like, if anybody in real life talked like that, you'd be like, they're tripping. There's something wrong with them. There's two parallels. There's the Top 40 DJ

and the Strip Club DJ. Those are also fake voices that they adopt that are uniquely attached to that job. Yeah, and so when I was in radio, people were like, dude, you're mental. You're going to keep the name Cenk Uygur?

And the Cenk is spelled with a C in the beginning? They're like, you're nuts you're gonna keep the name jank huger and and the jank is spelled with a c in the beginning they're like you're nuts dude jack unger jake underwood who cares who cares right and i even once ran into gene simmons at uh some local la uh news station here and we were both in the green room and he's like oh you're the dumbest guy i've ever met who keeps a name like jank huger okay he's like yeah you, you're the dumbest guy I've ever met. Who keeps a name like Cenk Uygur? Okay. He's like, yeah, you just make up a name. Gene Simmons is made up. Kiss is made up.

Keep it simple, stupid. Okay. And so he yelled at me. But what it turned out to be is kind of an ironic advantage because there's no way Cenk Uygur isn't real. Right. Right. That's my real name. It's a pain in the ass.

But I'm not fake like everybody else on TV and radio. And I'm not going to be like, hey, everybody, this is Jack Unger. Right. Doesn't everybody want to say fuck you to that guy? Yeah, I think we do now. We also want to say fuck you to politicians that talk like that, too. Do you think there's going to be a time where we get a guy who talks in a political speech like that, like you? Like a guy who comes along and says,

you know what, ladies and gentlemen, the United States that we know today, this great nation, that's, that, we're tired of that. We're tired of these weird pauses. We're tired of this weird theatrical presentation. You know, we, we would like someone who's running for president, who's running for any office, Congress, whatever. Just talk. Talk like a fucking normal human being. You could talk with passion. You could talk with energy. You could talk with a real engaging sense of the present and still be you.

You don't have to be this fucking strip club DJ. All right, on the main stage. That same voice is repeated throughout strip clubs all across America. I did this recent thing where I was calling in a bunch of radio stations because of a Comedy Central special that I had that was coming out. And when I'm calling in to talk to them, there was three or four stations where I'm like, okay, this fucking guy, I'm talking to the exact guy. He's just using a different voice.

And now he's in Memphis, you know, and now he's in Dallas and now he's in Ohio. It's fucking crazy. Like they adopt that same fake voice. We, you know, I think we need we need a change. We certainly need a change in the way information is being broadcasted to people. And that's a start. So this Saturday, we held a debate for the 33rd Congressional District. Henry Waxman is retiring.

And so there's like 15 people running and 12 of them showed up at the Young Turk Studios. This is a U.S. congressional seat. And it's funny. The guys who were higher up in the polls were the guys who unfortunately like more polished but polished meant like they like point to you like this they don't want to use a single finger they do the bill clinton point or they do this and then they talk in talking points but what was cool is that like nine out of twelve guys weren't like that and then you're like oh wow a political debate where that guy's an actual human being

yeah and so when the guy with the talking point talked it sounded weird right like hey why are you using that voice that's weird right so it was an interesting contrast yeah and and i think people got to find and i did follow-up questions so they do their talk like you know how in a debate you ask a question and then they'll just answer it any way they like right that's what sarah palin realized yeah like she was super nervous about debating biden and then realized oh right i don't have to actually answer any of the questions so she memorized what she was going to say about x number of topics and that's how she got through the debate so that's what they were doing and then i was like oh that's interesting okay now

the question i asked was actually this okay Okay, so what's your real answer? And so that was, I don't know, maybe we can change that too. Well, I think that you saw that a lot in the early days of stand-up comedy. There was a lot of guys who had the stand-up comedy way of talking. It was almost like an affected thing that everybody borrowed when they went to do stand-up comedy. And then as people started getting better, you sort of dropped that and became more of yourself. But I think in a great sense, politicians don't have that luxury of practice. So they try to sort of connect with what they think is the most effective voice possible.

And that voice is the voice that sort of in their head represents professionalism. Yep. That's it. Yeah. It's a weird term, right? Professionalism is a weird term because you want someone to be dedicated. You want someone to be focused and disciplined, but you don't want a fucking professional. And the last place you want a professional is a politician. Exactly. Yeah. So two things about that. I talked to a consultant, was a political consultant, and he said, look, Cenk, part of the reason we give them the talking points and try to keep them on message and make them sound robotic is because you'd be surprised how stupid they are. And he's like, and if we just let them talk, they will make terrible mistakes and they will lose.

One of my favorite moments at all of politics is the Rick Perry moment where he forgot what he was talking about. Oh, yeah, yeah. He forgot his points. Yeah. Because I don't remember the other ones. Like, that's it, dude. You're done. You just tapped out.

I mean, he really did just tap out. Yeah. He literally said in that debate, like, he forgot, paused, paused, like the most wonderful, awkward five seconds in any debate. And then, like like he said oops that and then there's a homeboy from vermont uh what's his name who was screaming in that and that's howard dean where it crushed him one one yeah one yell one yell and it tanked the whole thing well he see at that point he'd already lost Iowa. I actually really like Howard Dean.

I do as well. Right? So that was after he'd lost the big race. So he probably would have lost anyway. And I think what really put a hatchet in him was the media. Like they didn't want a guy who was an actual, like, independent and rebellious, et cetera. They wanted someone super boring and dull who was totally pro-establishment,

just like John Kerry. So they leaned heavily in Kerry's direction. And look, some people will go further and say, oh, the media manufactured the scream. No, they didn't. I remember, and we covered it on The Young Turks, we're like, oh shit. We really liked the guy, but he sounded

like a maniac. Well, folks who don't know, when you're in a large audience like that and you're yelling into a microphone, you don't usually have a monitor or anything in your ear. So you don't know how you sound to, when something's

broadcast directly into a microphone that microphone is going directly into the recording device and it's very different than what you're hearing when you're yelling so if a bunch of people are screaming like and we're gonna go straight to the white house yeah you're you're you're yelling this where there's thousands of people also yelling there's an overwhelming amount of sound. But what goes into that microphone is connected to your face, stupid. And it's loud as fuck. And people are going to hear this maniacal screech that comes out of you. And it's not going to be in perspective.

It's not going to be in the perspective of the actual rally itself. Yeah. And look, whether it's media or politics, oftentimes people make the mistake of playing to the room instead of people watching, right? And there's so many more people watching at home than there are people in that room. So that's why politicians keep getting caught on tape because they're not used to the YouTube generation. So, like, they'll go into a room full of funders and they'll be like, oh, doesn't the 47% suck? Ha ha. Screw the poor.

Yeah. sense suck, ha ha, screw the poor. Then they'll go to another room with other people and say the exact opposite, and they'll just keep going room to room, saying things that don't match up. But, dude, like, hello, catch up to 2014, everything's on tape,

and then you play the two tapes next to each other, and they look like assholes. And that's because they're used to playing to just whoever's in the room. Yeah, they're used to playing to just whoever's in the room, and they're not used to the repercussions of the truth getting out there. Because it's unescapable. And I personally think there's this lack of privacy comes with a lot of concerns. A lot of people are worried.

A lot of people, they look at the future and they say, well, we're not going to have any privacy anymore. Yeah. But ultimately, I think that the truth, it's more beneficial that people have complete total transparency across the board than it is for people to engage in the same sort of corrupt activities that have turned this nation into this. It's basically a bought and sold system. And there's no other way to get past that bought and sold system than ultimate complete total transparency. And when you have that ultimate complete total transparency, which we're starting to see manifest itself in politics and in social media, this is kind of across the board. It's a slow, steady progression to no secrets. Sorry, but that's just the way of the world. It's going that way.

You could bemoan it. You could scream at the top of your lungs, I'm moving to the woods. I'm going to live off of fucking logs, and I'm going to have my own well water. You can do that. But everybody in the cities, everybody in the congested centers of population centers,

they're not going to have secrets anymore. It's just going to be. Just like if someone was in China, you used to not be able to call them on the phone. Well, you can now because that's what happened. And in the future, there's not going to be any secrets, man. And so if you're running for politics or if you're running for a political office and you want to say shit like 47% of people aren't going to vote for me anyway, so fuck them. People are going to know that that's your real attitude. You're not going to be able to hide your attitude.

I think that's great because I don't believe that there's bad people out there, that it's only bad people that run for office. It's only bad people that can get into office. It's only bad people that run companies. I think you allow bad people to run companies, bad people to run corporations because of the fact there's no transparency. repercussions for environmental damage, for employing third world country people in third world countries for a fucking dollar a month. All those repercussions are going to be all on the table now. And it's not going to be as simple. So two things about that. One, a great example of it is today with Donald Sterling. Yes. So he does his apology that they're going to broadcast on CNN tonight. And for the transcript that they released, the broadcast on CNN tonight. And if you, uh, for the transcript that they released, the parts of the excerpts that I saw, he never apologized to black people. He apologizes to the other NBA owners. And he says, you know, once in 35 years, uh, I did a slip up and it's just one mistake. Can they find a way to forgive that what he's saying is i slipped up in letting you know

how i actually think like so he hates transparency and he's like god damn it like they caught me once but like he doesn't get that no no it's your mentality that's the problem like and because they're so used to being like i own the clippersippers. I'm a, you know, multimillionaire. You don't get to know anything about me and I could be in as racist as I like. I could cover it up, et cetera. So that this new world is shaking them up and they can't get used to, they can't wrap their mind around it. And he keeps thinking like, why can't I just take that back? And then everybody goes back to not realizing I'm a racist. So, so that's part of it. The other part is that we've got this split, right, where you have television and radio and all that

that's super fake, and then you have the new media, like your podcast, like what we do online with video, that's super real. And it's a fascinating clash. And old media hates us. They don't want to acknowledge we're real like what even like people that work in media they're when they're covering it like when we say okay we got this many views etc they're google verified go check with google they're like i can't

i don't know i can't understand internet numbers well then maybe you shouldn't do that job you can't understand the internet numbers the internet numbers the only numbers that are real when you look that's right if you look at numbers like the the ratings for a television show if anybody knows how how television shows are ratings it's voodoo it's crazy there's like i don't know how many thousand boxes that are supposed to represent 300 plus million people but it's nonsense those nielsen ratings are fucking crazy like they really don't know not only that the reality of the difference between the nielsen ratings and the ratings that they've pulled from digital boxes from dvrs from satellite it's a very different number it's a very different number and there's

a lot of shows that would benefit from them releasing the numbers that are on DVRs, the numbers that are on satellite boxes and cable boxes, but they can't really do that because they can't acknowledge, first of all, the fact that they keep track of what everybody's watching all the time. And then also, the Nielsen system is like an established system that people have been benefiting from for a long time. And to throw that out and shake it up, millions of dollars would change hands. See, that's a huge advantage for us, though. Because we can tell them exactly what they're doing wrong. And they can say, hey, Joe, Cenk, you're right.

But they can't turn the ship around. Because they already make too much money doing what they do. And, yes, they're killing off their audience. Yes, eventually they'll hit that iceberg and sink so quick, right? But they can't stop doing what they're doing because their ship is too damn big and they can't turn it around. So, hey, sad day for them. Isn't that sort of the same thing with politics as well and with corporations as well? It's like what they've done for the longest time is just that's how they extract money. That's how they get money out of the system.

That's what they do. And for the longest time, they've done it this way to put a pause on it and sort of reshuffle and redistribute where the money's going. It's like, fuck, that's too hard. We're just going to crash into the rocks. Let's just ride this bitch right into the beach, hit the rocks.

The boat will shatter. We'll get off, whoever survives, survives, we'll make a new boat. It seems like that's what they're doing. So, two things about that. Now, first, on the radio end, do you know how they do radio ratings? Because it'll blow your mind. Arbitron, yeah, those books they send out to people and they, what were you listening to?

Oh, this. Yeah, I mean, of course 99% of the population doesn't know how they get the radio ratings and they, what were you listening to? Oh, this. Yeah, I mean, of course, 99% of the population doesn't know how they get the radio ratings and they send out these books and you have to fill it out for three months. What were you listening in 15 minute increments? So, and everybody fills it out at the very end when they have to turn it in.

So they're like, okay, a month and a half ago at 2.15 PM, I don't know, I think I was listening to Rush. I don't know. Do they pay them to fill those books out? I think like five bucks. So they're just like, give me the five bucks, I don't care. Like it was comical, comical, right, how low that they pay.

So everybody makes it up. So like the radio numbers are pure fiction, pure fiction. So then that was the old days. Now they're going to people meters, which is a little bit more accurate. And then when they went to people meters, they're like, oh, my God. Nobody listens to Rush Limbaugh. Nobody. Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, nobody listens to them.

And what are the numbers? What's the difference between what they thought it was? Yeah. So first of all, the number that Rush Limbaugh used to go with was he threw out a number, a fake number. Excellence in broadcasting right his fake number was 20 million nobody ever questioned where he got that number nobody even knows if it's per week or per month right it's not funny like what do you mean that's that's a big difference right he's like 20 million that's it okay and then talkers magazine uh did a bullshit guess and they're like, 14 million.

Okay, first of all, the difference between 14 and 20 is pretty substantial, but it doesn't really matter. So a reporter asked Michael Harrison from Talkers Magazine, he's like, where'd you get the 14 million? He's like, I guess. It's amazing. They don't know. They don't know at all. So the difference per market between what Rush claimed to be getting and then what he got in the people meters, that level of detail, I don't know. I do know that WABC in New York, which is the main conservative talk station, is thinking of changing format because that's how disastrous it was.

Glenn Beck lost to, like, San Francisco and Philly, I think, immediately. As soon as they found out the real numbers. Right. And Sean Hannity is in a tailspin so they still got money to milk from that system you know they still have their contracts that last for x number of years right but they're on their way out so those numbers are super fake now compared to that now if you go tell a old media writer whatever name it you know new york times whatever cnn and you say young tur Turks is bigger than Rush Limbaugh, they'll laugh you out of the room.

No way they believe that. No way, right? But the reality is he's nowhere near 14 million listeners a month. Nowhere near it. And we're Google verified 24 million uniques, let alone 64 million views, right? We're at least twice as large as rush limbaugh but nobody like but there's also no let it go there's no media hype behind you there's no

promotion that you you got to i got to you from my internet message board just complete word of mouth somebody threw up a video check this out you know i don't i don't even remember what was the original thing but i remember oh this is a cool show oh i like it boom and then i started listening and paying attention and that's how you spread whereas you know if you if it's rush limbo excellence in broadcasting or sean hannity i mean there's a whole fucking machine behind these things there's a whole i mean it's a part the thing the sean hannity thing is particularly disturbing to me because what he represents to me is like this sort of consolidated ignorance, like this decision to be ignorant about things. Like we're on the right.

We're right wing and we're going to stick with what is American flag behind me and God bless our troops and cut to commercial. And this sort of agreement to not delve into the nuances of very difficult topics and to you know to take a hard stance towards the right i think that's like one of the most damaging things about the whole paradigm of the right and the left is this hard line you know almost religious acceptance of one side or the other and it was really personified with hannity a bunch of things but recently by this Bundy Ranch incident. This fucking crazy asshole in Nevada that these shitheads got behind. This guy is fucking crazy.

He's crazy, and he says a bunch of nutty racist shit like black people were better off when they were slaves on the plantation because now I go to Vegas and I see them running around and they're not going to school and they're getting each other pregnant. What? to Vegas and I see them running around and they're not going to school and they're getting each other pregnant. Like, what? What? You fucking take time off of your ranch and you drive through a bad neighborhood in Vegas and you decide you've got a fucking synopsis of black people like, holy shit, this is the guy you fucking people got behind a guy who's this nutty fuck who's letting his cows roam all over the place, eating grass.

He doesn't want to pay for it. Like, it's bizarre. It's a a very bizarre thing but they saw him they saw this bundy character as sort of this poster guy for uh you know america that's fed up with the intrusion of the federal government into our lives and the socialist obama. And Hannity jumps on board with this. And now he just looks like a complete fucking idiot when more and more of this information comes out about this guy. So he says black people, Bundy does, black people mooch off the government. Dude, you owe the government a million bucks.

A lot more than that. It was like nine million or something crazy like that for more than a decade, right? The whole point of this controversy is that you're mooching off the government. Yeah, a lot more than a welfare person. Right. I mean, literally a million times more than a welfare person. And then imagine if the situation was reversed. They decide that they're not going to pay their taxes in Compton, reversed racially, right?

And then they're like, oh, if the government comes here to collect the taxes, fees, whatever, all the black folks in Compton are going to grab their guns, and then they're going to point them at the federal government and make them back down. What do you think Hannity's reaction to that would have been? Like, oh, new black party destroyed the country, Obama years. How could they do this? These are good honest cops. They don't respect authority. All of these black people this? These are good, honest cops. They don't respect

authority and all of these black people and their guns are dangerous, right? White militia shows up with guns. They're like, yeah, fuck the federal government. It's fascinating. Yeah, it is fascinating. And those people that did show up, the real problem with any of those subjects is that people have this sort of knee-jerk side that they take, this knee-jerk reaction that they take. You see a bunch of cops with dogs, and they're telling this rancher. You think of a rancher as a farmer. You think of a farmer as America, the backbone of America, a guy who's farming.

But there's a lot going on here. This is a big fucking long, complicated tale, and you can't describe it in in five minutes and you can't break it down to a guy like sean hannity that has a billion other fucking things on his mind he just sees it as a category oh it's on the right right support white people yeah they don't want the obama we got a black president fuck yeah run with it you know it's like it's this really complex issue that they just shuffle in and it kind of highlights why that system sucks. I mean, it's one of the best stories, one of the best recent stories to highlight why this right-left paradigm on television really sucks.

So one of my big surprises when I got into the talk show world was how stupid Sean Hannity is. And honestly, because when I went in, was like i thought okay look if i get make it on tv and i might have to debate like somebody like sean hannity i gotta really come correct right i gotta make sure that i've got all my information etc and then as i heard him throughout the years i'd be like wait wait those two thoughts were not connected that there was no logical nexus right i'm like that and then i realized oh my, he's just going from one talking point to another. He's another news actor, but he's paid to be like conservative Republican propaganda news actor.

He's just reading the shit. He's just, he, those two, like he never makes logical sense. It's like you could be Republican or you could be a conservative like Ron Paul. He makes sense. Yes. Like you agree or disagree, but you go, okay, I understand the logical jumps he's making here. And's like no this is my talking point on how i

hate obama the next thing sounds like the exact opposite but it's still a talking point about i hate obama and so i was like oh wow these guys are dumb well this is gonna be easy i don't know if it's dumb as much as it's not thought out it's's also no motivation to be open-minded or objective or look at it from a different angle. The motivation is to fall into a category that's easy to profit off of. Yeah. So you're right. And they get paid to be on a certain team. I mean, look, I went through that at MSNBC. What was that like? Because you're uniquely qualified to discuss this because you've been behind the scenes. Yeah.

And just to be clear, they're not all dumb. I mean, Bill O'Reilly is a really smart guy. You know, agree or disagree. I mean, that guy knows how to do broadcasting. The tide comes in. The tide comes out. You can't explain it. You can't explain that.

Not one of his top moments. No, but maybe it is because maybe he shows what he's doing. He's playing all those fucking monkeys out there that agree with him, just sucking money out of their accounts. But at least he knows how to play to them, right? Yes. And so he's bright in that sense, unlike Hannity, I think. So the guys on the right, they are riding a certain gravy train, right? Whether it's the conservative talk guys or the Fox News guys.

And you can't get off that gravy train. Because I remember when we were first starting out, I sent my R tape, the Young Turks tape, to a station in Minnesota. And the guy's like, I loved it, the program director. I'm like, oh, great. So what are you thinking? What time slot? And he's like, no, no time slot. I said, why?

He said, everyone we have here is conservative on the air. I can't – if I put you on the air, people – my audience will hate you and then they will hate me, right? So if you want to be on this station, you have to be conservative. So if those guys had a genuine change of opinion, right, well, they'd lose their jobs because they couldn't be on that station anymore. You see what I'm saying? Yes. So if you're a local guy in Minnesota doing conservative talk, you have to keep doing conservative talk. Otherwise, you can't feed your family.

There is no liberal talk station, especially back then. Now there's a couple left around. So that's one reason why they stay on the team that they're in and they're not interested in listening to your ideas. Now, when I was at MSNBC, as I found out, it turns out they were Team Democrat. And it's one thing to be conservative or to be progressive. I think that's totally fine. The Nation is a progressive magazine. That's who they are, right?

We're progressive. That's who we are. But we're not on Team Democrat. So if a Democrat is not doing something progressive, we're going to call him out. To me, that's obvious. I don't even – I had trouble comprehending that other people didn't think that way, right? To them, who cares what your ideas are, man? Your principles, what are you talking about?

Right. No, no, no. This is Team Democrat and you stay on this team. So, I mean, I don't know if you ever heard the story, but the reason I left MSNBC is I got a speech from the head of the network, Phil Griffin, who said, hey, look, man, I'd love to be an outsider. Outsiders wear leather jackets. They ride motorcycles. They're super cool. But I'm like, oh, I didn't know that.

I've never ridden a motorcycle. Motorcycles actually kind of scare me. They scare me too. Yeah. He said, but this is NBC. We're insiders. And I was just in Washington. They're not happy with your tone.

And we're the establishment here, and you got to start acting like it. Whoa. Isn't that amazing? It's not just amazing. It's like a scene in a movie. Exactly. it's it's not just amazing it's like a scene in a movie exactly that's what i always say i felt like i was in a movie and i was like i'm like dude and maybe maybe he got off on that maybe he felt like he was in a movie and he was going to give this big speech right right but as i talked to i don't want to name the person but i talked to another anchor that was there and that we had lunch and that person was like why did he say

that to you like that's such a you're supposed to be more subtle than that yeah like that was such a stupid thing to say and especially you you came out of the internet the whole thing is like truth telling and being super progressive why did he say that to you and not even give you a raise while he's telling you the way to do it is to say, listen, you're an insider. So I have a new package for you. Right. And this package is shares and this and this. See, Joe, you nailed it.

You nailed it because that's what came next. No! Okay. So in that speech, I've been working at MSNBC as a host. And then Keith Orban leaves. They give me the 6 o'clock slot, right? And I'm on there from January to April, okay, at that point. April, I get the speech, and I think to myself, fuck that.

I'm not doing that, right? I will go the opposite direction. I'll criticize Obama more. I'll criticize the Democrats more, right? Because I don't want to play their game and then get mediocre ratings ratings and then they say you got so i turned it on between april and and the beginning of july i murdered in the ratings highest ratings they ever got at six o'clock okay because i was more me all right and so like in stylistically i listened to them they would say like be more senatorial i'm like why would you want to do that like i'm like senators are the most boring people i've ever met why would you want to do that? Senatorial? I'm like, senators are the most boring people I've ever met.

Why would you want to do that? Right? That's crazy. Anyway, so I open it up. And then at the end of June, Phil calls me back in to your point, right? And he's like, Cenk, we decided we're going to put you on the weekends, not on primetime at 6. OK? And we're going to give that to somebody else. I was like, oh, that's interesting. Like I thought I was prepared for it

because I had gotten the speech a couple of months earlier about it. And you kind of ignored it. Yeah. And I knew that's when I was like, I'm done with this. Right. Like if they want to keep me because I got kick-ass ratings, great. I'd love it. Okay. As long as they let me say what I'm going to say. If they don't want to keep me, fuck. Okay. So he pulls me in and I said, okay, Phil, so let's go through a quick exercise here. Are my ratings good? Well, he can't deny it. Yeah, they're the best they've gotten at six. Yeah, they're great.

Like, is anybody, am I dick? Like, is anybody in the building said, hey, Jake's a dick. He's hard to work with. Right? Nope. Great. Like, everybody likes you in the building. Right?

Yeah. And every, like, great relationships, right? Right. I said, so if you put me on the weekends and it's not related to the speech, right, then how would I ever get out of the weekends, right? Like, then what is it related to? Like, if I murdered on the weekends, I already murdered at 6 o'clock on the rating. So we can't. And so I said, what is it?

And he stood there for about 30 seconds without any answer. And I was like, wow. And then he said, I'll double your salary. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I'll double your salary, but what? I'll double your salary and put you on the weekend still? Yes. So you go from

prime time to weekends, but they offered me literally double my salary and for a three-year contract. So they thought there's no way I'm going to turn that kind of money down. Like I've been a struggling radio host and then internet host my whole life at that point, right? There's no way I'm going to turn that down. And you know, look, it's easy to say they don't know me. Ha ha. I'm a tough guy. Yada, yada. But the reality is what they underestimated was the size of our audience. I knew that I could go online, which I never left. I did the online show while I was at MSMC. People were like, well, you already got on TV. What are you still

bothering with the online thing? I'm like, no, no, no. You schmucks. The real deal is online. So I had the luxury of being able to go back to this giant audience online and telling them to fuck off. That's beautiful. And explaining your story. Yeah. But you see, that's exactly it. You nailed it again.

Because part of the reason they double your salary is so you shut up. Okay. So they say, oh, progressives, what are you talking about? I got this fire breather jank huger from the young turks on on the weekends he's part of our staple ask him ask him and then you have to come out and be like yes msnbc is very good they like progressives and you're thinking about your boat and you're thinking about your vacation house and you're thinking about your vacations you're thinking about all this shit that that money provides you yeah yeah oh and i got young

kids yeah and and look if you didn't have the luxury that i had think about if you're in one in You're thinking about all this shit that that money provides you. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's hilarious. And I got young kids. Yeah. And look, if you didn't have the luxury that I had, think about if you're in one of the other host positions. There is no fallback. The fallback is a cliff. You're either going to get paid really well, you're going to be a star, they treat you so well when you're there,

car rides everywhere, first class everywhere, et cetera, or you face the abyss. Nothing. And you were almost, you become unhirable. That's right. If you don't work well with MSNBC, why would CNBC pick you up? Why would this network or that network pick you up? They wouldn't.

The word goes out in the street, he doesn't play ball. The Oberman thing was an interesting thing because I don't know Keith Oberman. I've heard he's difficult in a lot of ways, but it's fascinating to see him go from being this fireball, anti-government crusader, this sort of like – I mean he kind of in a classic sense sort of an Edward R. Murrow character and then now he's talking about baseball. It's weird. I watch him on ESPN, and I'm waiting for these fiery political statements, these big, strong monologues that he used to create. I mean, they were very long-winded.

The monologues could have done with some editing, for sure, right? I mean, they were so verbose and obvious, and they reeked of ego because it wasn't just a statement. It was him trying to make a statement in an eloquent way that would be impressive. Like, it smelled like that. Like, you picked it up, you're like,

I don't think this is good. You know, like, I'm with him. I'm on a lot of shit, but I just don't like it. I don't like your monologues. They're too long. There's too much funkiness in them. So Obermont. Obermont.

Obermont. Sounds like the Ubermunch. Yeah. He's a complicated character. Lots of upsides and lots of downsides. And so the upside to what you're discussing, the commentaries that he did, was that he changed the face of television.

Before that, it was all conservative. And he did it despite MSNBC saying, under penalty of law, do not do that special comment on the show. And Oberman being crazy, that was the upside of crazy. He's like, that's kind of your opinion, man. My opinion is I'm going to go do this commentary. And when it worked and it got such great ratings, then management got behind him and pretended to be on his side the whole time. Like, of course, of course we wanted those special comments, sure. And they realized that there was a racket to be had in Team Democrat, right? But at least Oberman, even the score, it was like, okay, now you had MSNBC doing Democratic talking points. And I'm not taking anything away from Oberman. I think he's

principled on his politics. And then you had Fox News doing it. So that was a huge breakthrough. So he's kind of a historic figure in that sense. On the other hand, he's crazy. Like, just crazy. Like, what way? Crazy. Okay.

Folks not listening, Cenk's eyebrows went way up, his eyes got very large. And so that's why they put him to his ESPN contract that he's not allowed

to talk about politics. Oh. Right, that's why he's, and he loves sports, that's genuine, right? So he's just doing sports and he's,

look, a great example it was Ashley Banfield back when MSNBC was conservative before the Oberman special comments and stuff around the Iraq war, exactly as the Iraq war was happening. She did this speech at a college in Kansas and said, this is crazy, the Iraq war. We shouldn't do this. And explained why really eloquent, really smart. MSNBC said, yeah yeah you're off there okay and

they literally moved her into a closet and so uh they said we're not going to let you out of your contract you're not allowed to say that and they moved her office into a closet that sent a message to everybody shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up okay And so if you don't play team ball, that's the fate that waits you. And so Keith has kind of been banished into the closet of sports. Yeah. Like it's a closet we like. I like sports. He likes sports.

But they're not going to let him out again to talk about politics. Why doesn't he go online? Probably too old school. It's hard for him to figure it out. I mean, look, man, you're going to go online like you do what we do. You got to be hungry, right? You got to be ready to roll up your sleeves and take a lot of shit and get battered and then get back up and stuff. Those old school guys who've made a gazillion dollars, they don't have it in them. That's interesting. That's an interesting comment.

Yeah, you definitely can get too used to that whole system of everything being set up for you. Like I have a buddy who does a podcast, and he does a podcast on a network, and the network is owned by a major television network, and they were censoring his podcast. And I was like, what the fuck are you doing, man? This is a podcast.

The last thing you want is someone telling you what you can and can't say and taking the bad words out of your mouth on the fucking internet are you crazy like you're ruining everything that's great about the internet and doing it this way but he was like how do i do it outside of that i'm like oh come on man you fucking get a microphone you plug it into an mp3 recorder and you start talking and then you take that and then you throw it online it's that simple simple. And if it grows, it grows. You throw seeds out the window. Some of them will become trees. Just fucking do it. Just do it. Too much work. Too much thinking. Too outside the box.

Plus, a guy like Keith has been on TV for so long. I keep calling him Keith like we're friends. We're not. I mean, so- Do you know him? Have you had conversations with him? I've had a couple conversations with him. On a one to ten wackiness. Ten. Whoa.

Yeah. Strong. Now I want him as a guest. I want to bring him on. Is he allowed to do interviews where he talks about politics, where he talks about things? I would be shocked, but I don't know. I bet he's not, right? I bet they fucking trapped him.

Plus, I bet he doesn't do it. So, like, if you're on TV, Rachel Maddow gave me a great speech before I ever got on TV, warning me about TV. Really? Okay, because we used to work together at Air America, and then she was really helpful and stuff at MSNBC. And she's like, just, it'll get into your head. Don't let it get into your head man because you take one too many limo rides you'll have

one too many people telling you how great you are and then you lose track of what reality is and so a guy like Oberman who's been on TV for so long and so successful for so long he spins into an orbit where he thinks he can't do anything wrong and like the ego becomes so he thinks he can't do anything wrong. And like the ego becomes

so gigantic that it can't be punctured. So if he were to go online, it would get punctured, right? You know, you like, there's a lot of compliments online, but there's a lot of criticism, right? And an ego that large cannot handle that. Yeah, I agree. I think that I find great benefit in that criticism. I mean, I know that some of it's completely unfounded and some of it is just 100% douchebags that are just assholes. And you go to their Twitter page and you'll see just them just shitting on one person after another, just random people that they don't know, celebrities, commoners, people that have blogs, whatever, and just hate, hate, hate, hate, hate. There's folks like that.

There's also folks that will say something that you don't want to hear, but you should hear it. And you take that into consideration, and it'll make you better. It really will. And the Obermans or the people that don't want to engage in that, your ego's going to take a beating, but your fucking ego should take a beating. Your ego's a dangerous thing. And if it grows too much, it can create a canopy that doesn't let all the other things grow underneath it.

That's 100% right. So some people hate the comment section on YouTube. I don't. I love it. I mean, I know there's mental people on there. And if you listen to every comment, you're going to lose your mind. Don't do that. You can't do that.

But overall, if most people, if 80% of the audience is agreeing to something, it's almost certainly correct. So if they tell you, hey, you're going in this wrong direction, well, I take note of that, man, and I adjust. If you don't adjust, they're trying to help you. You know what they are? They're in the new media. They're your editor. Right. They're your editor saying, hey, don't adjust, they're trying to help you. You know what they are? In the new media, they're your editor. They're your editor saying, hey, don't do that. You look like an asshole.

Do this. And if 80% of them agree on something, I've never seen it be wrong. And sometimes there's a thing that you're doing when you're discussing an issue where someone might have a criticism on it. And it's one of the things that I like about doing this show is that this show is three hours long. And one of the things in having a three hour conversation is that you get to really thoroughly discuss a point because you could take snippets out of a lot of things. Like there was a thing they did on real sports the other day about Fallon Fox, you know, Fallon Fox is she's a woman who used to be a man who decided to get a sex change and then fight in women's MMA. And me, as a martial arts expert, I was like, I do not agree with that at all. Because there's certain undeniable advantages of the human frame, of the male frame, when it comes to combat sports.

When it comes to being a woman or being transgender, I'm 100% in support of it. You should be able to do whatever you want, man. If you want to marry your desk, I'm for it. If you want to live with cats in the woods, I don't give a fuck. Just don't hurt anybody. I couldn't care less. And if you decide that you identify as a woman, you want to be a woman, I'm 100% in support of that. I couldn't

imagine what it's like to be that person and have these feelings and have them rejected by society. I'm fully in sympathy and support of it. Real sports uses one five-second thing of me saying, first of all, it's not a woman. It's not. She has a Y chromosome.

I mean, I will call her a woman, but when science finds her body a thousand years from now, they're going to go, oh, that was a man. When it comes to combat sports, when it comes to social interaction, when it comes to culture, when it comes to how you treat people, I'm fully in support of transgenders. But as a person who's a professional mixed martial arts commentator and who's lived my entire life training in martial arts, I'm very aware of the distinct advantages of the male frame. It's just that simple. There's a reason why we don't let men fight women.

And when you didn't disclose the fact that she used to be a man. Anyway, real sports takes five seconds of that and throws it out there. That's the difference between a podcast and a television show. becomes a three-hour discussion where you go over all the aspects of the emotional, the damage that you must get being a child, wanting to be a woman and being a man and all the different realities of what makes you a person and whether it's learned experience or whether it's genetics or all these subtle variations and trying to put yourself into that mindset. There's so much to be said on so many different subjects.

But when you're on a fucking television show, you don't get a chance. When you're doing one of those seven-minute things on Red Eye on Fox, and it's like, what's your take on global warming? Real, not real? Jank? And you're like, well, the statistics say, who's making the statistics? We'll be right back with commercials. You're not getting to talk about things enough. There's too much information. There's too many subtle variations in thought that need to be sort of explored when you delve into any sort of subject. And I think that when

we're talking about this whole right-left paradigm and this whole team Democrat thing that you faced when you were on MSNBC or the team Republican that Sean Hannity is a part of, that sort of embodies the whole problem with television that really doesn't exist in the same form on the internet. You're going to have people that agree and disagree in the internet, but in a format like this, you get to really cover a subject and really sort of let down your guard and explore all the variables that TV doesn't let you do. Look, I miss our radio show so much because me, Ben, and Jill Pike at the time, we'd come in and we'd do a three-hour show and we'd just have the time of our lives. How come you can't do that now? Well, it's because every format is different, right? And so our show is built for being online video. Right.

So I got to squeeze in as many topics as I can into the two hours that we do so we can clip them up and put them up on YouTube, okay? But I'm not going to do... I'm going to do them justice. Right. So I'm going to take as long as I need, but not a second more. So I've done like 17 minute explanations of a topic because it needed 17 minutes. Right.

It might've been the NSA, you know, wiretapping, whatever, but I needed to explain that and I explained it. So I'm not rushing through anything. But at the same time, I can't have a conversation like this because this is great for a podcast. That's why your podcast does well. It does great. But if you put this up on YouTube, people are going to be like, wow, three hours. Well, we do put it on YouTube.

Well, I hear you. We just started recently. What, a year ago? About a year ago? Yeah. So it's just a different format, and I've done all those different formats, but I miss the radio days.

Like, we'd walk in in a t-shirt. Like, you didn't have to worry about your forehead, you know, shining. Do they powder you up for the Young Turks? I powder myself up, yeah. In the beginning, I remember when I was in Miami, I always thought the signal for success was if you got makeup. You knew you made it if you were getting makeup.

Oh, that's great. Yeah, but then when I was on TV, I hated makeup because it felt like it was a symbol of the fakeness of television. Right, right, right. Like they cake it on you you and then you feel like one of these like shepherd smith yeah you if you feel like you're uh in the capital you know in hunger games like you yes you know they put on this makeup and you go out there and you entertain the masses whatever i don't know i so now i just put on my own i figured out uh is this a hilarious

conversation but what foundation works best for me? And so like five minutes before the show, I'll go in the bathroom and I'll put it on. And it's not caked on. It's just so that my forehead doesn't shine. Yeah, I shine like a motherfucker. But I do also, during the UFC, they tried to, well, they don't now, but they tried in the early days to powder me up. You know, the other guys that I work with get powdered up. They put the makeup on you.

I'm like, behind me, people are going to get kicked in the fucking face. Their head's going to swell up like the elephant man. And you're worried if my skin is shiny? There's no way I'm letting you touch me with that shit. We're going to fight. If you try to fucking powder me up, we're going to have a real problem. Because this is ridiculous. This is what I look like. All this shit, if I have real problem. Because this is ridiculous. This is what I look like.

All this shit, if I have a zit, I have a zit. That's what I look like. My problem is that if you don't put at least something to take the shine off, it looks like I'm sweating like a maniac. I'm not, but it looks like it. Right, right, right. Well, you have good skin. You're oily. Yeah, I'm Mediterranean. It's healthy.

Yeah. you're you're oily yeah i'm mediterranean it's healthy yeah so i i once i was super late for an interview i was going to do with some guy who's the rhino hunter or whatever and i jump in the seat i didn't do the foundation and he's conservative and he's a hunter right is this the guy who won that yeah oh wow yeah the guy that was going to kill the auction to kill the whoa right so then i come out of the interview and people were like oh yeah Yeah, the guy that was going to kill the endangered rhino. The option to kill the, whoa. Right. So then I come out of the interview, and people were like, oh, yeah, I see that guy. That guy scared you, right? That's why you were sweating like that. Oh, that's hilarious.

That guy scared you? Yeah, I'm like, first of all, we agreed on like 90% of stuff. I don't know what you're talking about. But that's the perception that people get. So that's why I don't want to seem like I'm sweating like a maniac. That's funny. They want that perception. They want that. They look for't want to seem like I'm sweating like a maniac. That's the only thing. They want that perception. They want that.

They look for that. They look, oh, he was scared. He was scared. They would form that opinion before you even sat down to talk to that guy. Yeah, I was scared of what? The guy's going to come hunt me down from Texas? You don't agree with him?

Yeah. That guy's hunting the whole country then, if that's the case. I mean, he's going to hunt a hundred million people that are angry at him for wanting to shoot that rhino. Yeah, That rhino story was a very fascinating story because if you, if you talk to the conservation people to say that rhino had to be removed from the herd anyway, because it was a larger, older male and it was trying to kill the young males because it didn't want them breeding. And it's actually dangerous for the population of the rhinos. Like many things, that whole African hunting thing is a very confusing and complex issue. Yep. He made a really good case for it on the show.

Well, we were talking about it with Louis Theroux. You know Louis Theroux, the documentarian from England? Fascinating guy. And he's done some amazing documentaries. And one of his best ones was on these African hunts. And in Africa, these wild animals that used to be on the verge of extinction are now, like, in the greatest populations we've seen in years. Like, they're really healthy populations, but they're all in these high-fence hunting areas. So their populations are great, but people get to pay to kill them.

So it's like whoa fucking that is humanity in a nutshell right there that's society culture and just the fucking the weird contradictory nature of the whole thing where it's not very black and white there's a lot of weirdness going on there yeah absolutely like i think we get carried away with the conservation mentality here's what i mean by that. Of course we need conservation. But, like, then they'll be like, okay, well, that rhino is an older rhino, so he will attack the younger rhinos. So it's actually better to kill him so he doesn't do that. But I'm like, wait a minute.

If we're trying to preserve how they actually live, that's what older rhinos do. They attack the younger rhinos. Yeah. They didn't make that up. That's in their DNA. The problem is there's not enough rhinos to support that. The issue becomes when you have a large quantity of rhinos, that's fine. That's natural.

It's normal. Right. But when you have a small herd, that could really do some serious damage. Right. So that's why it's so complicated. Yeah. Then how do you resolve that? Do you let people kill them? But if you do, your whole point was conservation.

Why are you letting people kill them? But if you do, your whole point was conservation. Why are you letting people execute them? But on the other hand, if you don't, then maybe you cost yourself three younger rhinos, and that's a real problem. So the problem is humans. We've taken over everything. We're the virus. And so since we've taken over everything, we've got all these little things in artificial cages. It might be a small cage in a zoo or it might be a large cage in one of those preserves in Africa. But in essence, we've killed what, quote unquote, naturally happened.

Well, we've become the stewards of nature itself. And we've decided that, I mean, I have this point that I've been talking about a lot lately about zoos, about how terrible it is for the genetics of all these animals, for them to be isolated. The idea is that you're preserving these animals, you can come see them. Oh, we've let these pandas breed. Well, you know, here's the reality. Pandas are supposed to breed if they can, if they don't get eaten by tigers.

Because there's supposed to be tigers around the pandas, or whatever the fuck their natural predator is. And there's supposed to be jaguars around the monkeys, and there's supposed to be lions around the giraffes. I mean, that's just what happens in nature. And when we have them all segregated in these apartments and we slide food under the tray, in a tray underneath the door, like, what the fuck are we doing here? We're anti-nature here. This is everything against, I mean, these things are surviving, period, no matter what they're surviving. We're not trying to preserve nature. We're trying to preserve a time frozen,

you know, like nature frozen in time at that time, right? Yeah. This is what we're used to. We like the drafts like this. We like the pandas like that, and we'd like to preserve it. But in reality, nature is not in the conservation business. It's in the... The struggle business. Right. And so oftentimes things will go extinct because that's what happened because the tigers ate all the pandas. Sad day. And what will happen is the panda will then breed with a koala or whatever, I mean, to speak incredibly ignorantly.

And then you'll get a new species. Right. But that's what's awesome about nature because, like because you don't know what's going to happen. There'll be destruction, there'll be creation, but we have short-circuited that, so there is no good answer, right? The answer isn't, fuck them, let them all die. That's not the answer. And the answer isn't, let's stop all progress and all creation right now, right, and try

to preserve it as it is today. Yeah. That's not the answer either. So I don't know what the answer is. Well, the answer is also that human beings are a part of nature and that our nature is to fuck with things. And that is nature. And it's a very strange thing for us to think about in that way, but all human behavior, everything from computers to pollution, to communication through cell phones. All that stuff is natural. It's just natural with human beings.

And it's a very strange, just as natural as a macaw making weird noises and, ah, ah, that's natural too. It's just as natural for you to send a dick pic through your fucking cell phone. These are natural things. It's just, it's so complex and so outside of the norm for every other multi-celled species on the planet that we don't like to think of it as natural. We think of it as human created. But everything human created is just as natural as a beehive, just as natural as an anthill. Those are natural as well.

You know, I never thought about it that way. But you're right. There's nothing more natural than a dick pic. No, but like literally like you know we have larger penises than other primates do because that's part of how we attract women we swing our dick around so that's us swinging our dick around over the internet and saying hey anybody interested there's also a direct correlation between the amount of promiscuous females and the size of the male penis so it's there's all these slutty women of a goddamn problem that's

why dick pics exist it gets better so so my favorite thing is is discussing the genetic reasons for the male anatomy and female anatomy but the so our penis is designed both like a shovel and as a vacuum. And the reason for that is that there is intervaginal sperm competition. So within the vagina, there is an expectation that several different men in the same rough time period have ejaculated. So our penis is designed to get our semen in and the other guy's semen out. So that's why our penis is designed like a shovel to shovel out the other guy's semen and like a suction. So it takes all of the semen that it finds in the vagina before it entered and suctions it back out. So if you think women are monogamous, our DNA would tell you otherwise. Yeah. In small groups, they're not very monogamous at all. That is an interesting

thing that the head is designed in that way to plunge out sort of as a plunger. Right. And the size of the testicles are in direct correlation to the amount of promiscuous females that are around. With men and tribes that have larger testicles, usually the women are more promiscuous. That's why chimpanzees have large testicles, but gorillas, small testicles and small penises. Gorillas have a one-inch penis. Tiny little penis that falls out all the time. You ever watched Gorillas Mate? I have. When you watch Gorillas Mate, they have a hard time keeping it in there. There's not a lot of length to work

with. It's because they have complete total control over the females that around them they have a whole harem yeah who needs a large penis when uh you know if you got any male competition just crush their skull yeah i have my friend kevin has a little dick and he always admits to it and uh he jokes around about he goes man, it feels good for me. I don't care. That's sort of how the gorilla feels. Yeah. So we have large balls. And that means, of course, that males are also not monogamous. And so we live in this, in our own little preserve where we're in monogamous relationships for a lifetime, which is clearly not natural.

And I had a guy who does porn on the show last week. His name is Dave Pounder, and he wrote a book about it. Is that his real name? Of course not. He said when he was getting into the porn business, his two choices were Dave Pounder and Dave Impaler. And he thought, ah, Pounder is a little better than Impaler. Okay.

So he did a documentary and a book. He's a really smart guy, super smart guy. And he said a guy who's in a long-term relationship that's monogamous is like a gay guy in a closet, right? The gay guy is that gay whether he admits it or he doesn't, right? And in your monogamous relationship, you're actually polygamous whether you admit it or you don't. You're just in the closet about it, right? Because there's nobody who's actually monogamous. Do you see what I'm saying? You can act monogamous, but you're not monog closet about it, right? Because there's nobody who's actually monogamous. Do you see what I'm saying?

You can act monogamous, but you're not monogamous in your mind. You're not monogamous in your nature. So when you don't admit that to your wife or your girlfriend, you're just like a gay guy in the closet. You don't admit what your true nature is. Right. That's a very fascinating way of putting it. There's a good friend of mine, he's Dr. Chris Ryan.

He has a, I don't want to call him doctor. I don't want to call him doctor. He's a PhD. No, no, Chris Ryan. I've had him on the show, Sex at Dawn. Yeah. We do a podcast together once a month. Oh, you do? Oh, that's awesome. Okay. He, Duncan Trussell and myself, we do this. We come up with, we don't have a name for it. We call it the shrimp parade sometimes. Sometimes it's called Old Men in Snow because

that's what Chris used to think about to keep himself from orgasming. He used to think about old like Eastern block men walking painfully in the snow, and that would keep him from having an orgasm while he was having sex. Okay, I'm now going to tell you something I've never told anybody, and that I shouldn't tell you, okay? But I think that's partly the point

of the Joe Rogan podcast. Okay, so, you got to come up with something, right? Yeah. So I used to think about football, but I'd get really conflicted. I'd always think about the Chargers, right, because I really liked the Chargers back then. But then I'm thinking about dudes, and then I was like, and I'm like, I've got to get this out of my head.

Okay, but it worked, because then I wouldn't come. Yeah. So that's partly how you know you're straight. It's also like, it's a fine line. You don't want to think it's about something too fucked up where you start to lose your boner, and then you're like, oh no. Exactly! So you've got all these crazy things going on in your head, but yes.

Yeah, so Chris Ryan had this conversation where on the podcast he was talking to someone, and someone was saying, well look, I'm monogamous. And the guy was like, okay, or Chris was like, okay, you're monogamous. Do you jerk off to porn? And the guy said yes. He goes, well then you're not monogamous. Unless you're jerking off to porn only of your wife okay, you're monogamous. Do you jerk off to porn? And the guy said, yes.

He goes, well, then you're not monogamous. Unless you're jerking off to porn only of your wife, you're not monogamous. You're just monogamous in your actions, your mind. Your fantasies are of these other women. It's undeniable. It's human nature. It's a part of being a primate.

Even if it's not your wife, does anybody jerk off to the same picture or video in porn to the same woman every time? There's got to be a guy. I mean, yeah, there's probably one or a couple of guys, but I kind of feel bad for them. Dude, it's a fantasy. Go nuts. Yeah, get crazy. There's three billion women out there.

It's part of having an imagination, buddy. Explore it. Have an imagination, buddy. Explore it. Yeah, it's a very fascinating topic because, you know, with Chris Ryan's book, Sex at Dawn, he goes into what sort of explores what started out as these tribes of small people or small groups of 50, 150 people that are all living together and exchanging sexual partners. It was very commonplace. And as agriculture gets established and as these populations grow larger and larger, it becomes weirder and weirder and then it stops.

And then we start realizing that our sperm creates that kid and that kid's my kid and I don't want anybody else near my wife who made my kid. And then male paternity line gets established and then you know the dominance of the breed and real real weird weird stuff with human beings when it comes to uh sexuality and monogamy but but fascinating too and you know it's more more evidence as to how contradictory our nature is and how strange we really are yeah being humans trippy i mean like we're these animals right that's what we are we're animals and we have a certain programming. You know, our DNA is like we're a computer with a program, but we're also like animals like we want to fuck.

We want to sometimes rip somebody's head off and we have all these urges and we have these passions. But yet we're conscious of it all. So we can step back and see the animal that we are and the robot that we are. And that's really mind-bending. Yeah, it is mind-bending because it's unique to the actual life on this planet. There's only one at all the animals on the planet. There might be other animals that are conscious like dolphins and orcas.

They might communicate with each other. They might have family groups and dialects and all that, but they don't alter their environment the way we do. So we're conscious, we're aware, we communicate, we alter our environment and we keep records. You know, I don't know how much dolphins know about their great, great, great grandfathers, but we know a shitload, you know, and we'll, We'll quote Parthagoras or we'll talk about Homer and we'll discuss people that lived a thousand years ago as if we know exactly what they were like, and that is very uniquely human. So we sort of chart how retarded we used to be in comparison to how retarded we currently are and see this progress. Yeah. And our nature is oftentimes very much at war with itself and it's a hell of a

balance to pull off. So yes, we're polygamists. There's no question about that. The flip side of that is then why does almost every celebrity, and finally we lost George Clooney, so I can now, I think, say every celebrity, still get married. Because if we were just polygamous, you'd be crazy to get married if you're a celebrity. If you're a guy, right? You get 100 girls, you get 1,000 girls. Why would you get to stay? Because there's also a part of our nature

that wants to nest, and that wants to have a one-on-one relationship. So good luck trying to balance that out, and that's what we struggle with through our whole lives. And then you've got our competitive nature and our nature where we cooperate, right? And everybody makes the mistake of going on one side or another. There'll be a group that thinks, no, people are competitive.

And you're crazy if you think that they're ever going to cooperate. And then there's the guys who are like, hey, no, people are competitive. They want to, you know, and you're crazy if you think that they were ever going to cooperate. And then there's the guys who are like, hey, no, people hold their hands together and sing Kumbaya. And normally there'd be no war and all that stuff. No, well, that's, no, neither side is true. No, we're sometimes incredibly competitive and want to rip each other's heads off, and sometimes we're incredibly cooperative, and we work together to create great things. It's a balance. So, look, in a lot of ways, it's awesome because if the world was black and white, it'd be too easy. Yeah, I agree 100%.

And I think that that conflict is sort of what fuels thinking and what – I think that's the yin and yang of life. You, you almost need conflict to sort of motivate you to work things out, motivate you to improve, motivate you to evolve and to change and to grow and to take into consideration all these different facets of, of, of life itself. And I think that we all want everything to be this perfect you know golden age of of you know love and Sharing and compassion but in order to really truly appreciate that you kind of have to have some shit around too to compare It to it's almost like people that grow up rich They'll never understand how beautiful it is to have enough money to not worry about money. So true.

Yeah. It's like if you grow up in a family where everyone's being driven around in limousines and there's money everywhere and you have servants, it's got to be incredibly difficult to understand a true struggle. Whereas if you grow up like you or like, I don't know what your childhood was like, but my childhood very poor I appreciate every dollar I have I appreciate the freedom that it gives me in that I don't have to worry about money because that weight of Constantly worrying about your bills is one of the worst things that people have

I cut a lot of people a lot of slack that do fucked up things for money That are broke because I remember what it was like to feel that weight. Like, God, I don't know how I'm going to pay my bills this month. I don't know what next month's going to be. What if I get sick? I don't have health insurance. I can't afford health insurance. What if this happens?

What if that happens? How do I take care of that? How am I ever going to stop? Where's my golden years going to come from? Where's the retirement? There's no fucking retirement for a lot of people. It's a joke. This idea that you're going to get to one point where you're going to settle down and everything's going to be great.

You work hard to the end of the day. And the end of the day, it's Miller time. And they look at life like there's a Miller time for life. There's no fucking Miller time, man. It's not happening. You're going to get to a certain point and then you're going to go, now what? And then your heart's going to stop. Yeah. So there's a million things to say about that. But first, you should coin that. There is no fucking Miller time.

There's no Miller time for life. Right. I remember when I was a struggling talk show host on the radio and I remember looking at a snapple for like five straight minutes but i mean like literally five minutes and it was a dollar and i'm like i could just have water with my breakfast i don't need that snapple but god i really want that snapple and i and i always remember that like a dollar meant extra enjoyment that day for me and And I, so I value it. But so that leads to an ironic conclusion. I actually feel bad for people who grew up rich. Like that's kind of a funny thing to say. Um, like Russell Simmons is always talking about, oh, you should meditate and don't worry about money. I'm like, yeah, Russell, but you got $300 million.

It's easy to say, don't worry about money when you have $300 million. It's harder for a person who's trying to pay their rent and figuring out where they're going to get food for their kids and stuff like that. And I know that. I know that feeling of being super stressed out about not having money and the effects of that. and the effects of that. But when you get a little bit, it feels a thousand times better because if you grew up rich, it's not your fault. You just take it for granted because you never had any other context. You have no idea how phenomenal it is to fly first class or business class

or to get driven around in limos. You take it as, well, that's normal. So you can only go down if you lose that stuff oh then you're like oh my god my world has exploded how could anyone live like this right but you it's hard to go up and it's hard to have that context so look i think i'm the luckiest guy alive because i grew up middle class so i had enough that i can get an education and i didn't have to you know sell drugs i don't have to do any crazy shit to get money right so my dad provided that for me but i grew up middle class enough that i value money and i you know and it means the world's like so anybody who says that money isn't important doesn't know what they're talking about, hasn't been poor enough to understand that, yes, money is fucking important.

I totally agree with you about being unfortunate if you grow up rich. I really do. that don't sort of explain to you in great detail how fortunate you are to be in a situation and the importance of appreciating the struggle. But I have this weird relationship with money and it's gotten weirder and weirder over the last few years where it's going to sound really crazy and it sounds crazy even to me, but I objectively look at humans and I look at what we're doing and I look at this sort of system that we set up and we think it's just this is the way people operate. You exchange money for goods and this is our society is based on money and it's all about trying to earn money. But I look at it and I go, well, that's just a creation. That's just a man-made creation.

And what else is going on? Well, what else is going on is there's this slow but inevitable sort of dissolving of the boundaries between human beings and information. And whether that information is the secrets about the NSA or that information is, you know, things that are on the Internet, emails, photographs. There's the trend is to have ultimate access to all information for everyone. And I think that we're going to come to a bottleneck. And the bottleneck is going to be that what is money exactly? Well, at this point in time, it's just ones and zeros. It's just information. Money now is broken down to, we don't have a gold standard anymore. Our money is based entirely on information. It's information in a database somewhere. Well, there's going to

be a point in time where we have to decide as a civilization that the only way to continue to move forward with our innovation, to continue to move forward with technology, we're going to have to dissolve the boundary between human beings and the information that is money. Money is not going to be worth anything anymore. It's going to be a weird – we're going to have to come up with some new way in order to transfer wealth or to determine wealth or to determine reward for effort or for whatever you're doing. Because if we're just basing it on what we're basing it on now, it's inevitable that it comes to this point where you're not going to be able to protect your money. You're not going to be able to store it. It's not going to be anywhere.

And if it's just ones and zeros, everyone's going to have access to it. The distribution of it is going to get very weird. So I'm trying to understand that. So is the main problem there, you think, if you follow that to its natural conclusion, that it's going to get hacked? No, I don't even think it's going to be. I think we're calling it hacked now, but I think the trend seems to be to no secrets. No secrets, complete transparency. I think the ultimate hive mind state that is talked about in sort of Eastern mysticism that we are all one, I think we are all one. And I think we're going to achieve that through technology. that no one saw coming. I think that the hive mind is going to come through something that this cellular mind invents. And then there's going to be some sort of a connection between all the people

all the time. And we're experiencing that now by being able to access the database of human knowledge on your cell phone, to be able to ask Siri what the answer to a question is, you know, use, ask Google and boom, you get answers. I mean, that's unprecedented in human history, but that to me is just like, that's like one of those old schooly photographs where they have to throw the cape over and everybody stands still for a minute and poof, they press that button and the thing flashes and everybody has to stand still. And then you get this weird black and white image, which was magic in 1850 or whenever the fuck the camera was invented. I think that that's this step that you've gotten to now where I have thousands of photos on my phone, thousands,

and I take them instantly. I can press a button, it goes, and it'll take a series of pictures in a row. That's madness in comparison to that big stupid cape. Well, I think that the access to information that we enjoy today by being able to Google search something, by being able to go to your phone and find the information, it's going to get closer than that. It's going to be something where it's a chip that you put in your body

and it interfaces with your mind. There's going to be something, whether it's nanotechnology, whatever it is, they're going to continue to innovate. They're going to continue to expand on technology. And the trend is that there is no boundary at one point, at the zero point. There's going to be no boundary between human beings and information. And money is just information. It's all it is.

It's information on a database somewhere. And there's going to be a bottleneck where we have to decide how we manage that database, how we manage the access to that information. Because if the ultimate trend of this technology is to erode all these boundaries and to have us all communicating in sync, you're not going to be able to have anything restricted. You're not going to have anything that is outside of the access to everyone. And money is that thing. So we're going to come to a point in time where we're going to have to evolve as a culture, as a race, as a species. And part of that evolution is to restructure our ideas of wealth, restructure our ideals of the distribution of wealth,

what it means to have wealth. What we're talking about now, I grew up poor, you grew up middle class, and now I appreciate money and you appreciate money. That ain't going to even be an issue a thousand years from now because it'll have been dissolved by technology. First of all, fascinating. And I like your vision of, I don't know if you're Neo there in melting the matrix, but it's, so money is a tool, right? And so in your ultimate vision, I don't know how that tool is then applied.

So in our current society, we make this huge mistake of thinking that it's the end. But it's not the end goal. It's only a tool. If you think it's the end goal, you're going to make yourself miserable. Right. Because then there's never enough of it. And the point of the money was to make you happy. But if you've replaced happiness with the end goal of money, there's no winning of it. And the point of the money was to make you happy. But if you've

replaced happiness with the end goal of money, there's no winning that fight, right? So it would be really interesting to see how that paradigm would be in your transcendental world. And there's this great, fascinating circle there because everybody being one is something that I largely believe in as well. And it's what almost everybody that thinks it through once they get past religion gets to. So whether it's the Taoist, you know, that you're referring to in Eastern philosophy, it's the transcendentalist here in theS., the Ralph Waldo Emerson's, Henry David Thoreau's. It's the Sufis in Muslim tradition. They all come to the same conclusion. We're all one. It's not necessarily a God above us. It's that we're all united in some way that

we can't tell in the physical space that we're in, right? In the physical space that we're in, we all seem divided. Like you're right there and I'm right here. But if you break it down, you know, on a cellular level, you realize that that's actually not necessarily the case because everything is not stable. It revolves. And so the difference between the air and my hand is not nearly as distinct as we think it is, right? But what would be interesting is if the oldest philosophy we have, the Taoist philosophy of everyone being one and united at some point, met with the future where everything is united in its zeros and ones

and zero is nonexistence and one is existence and we are all one, right? In the vision that you have. And I think that you might be right. But that's really hard for our minds to grasp. Like then what happens to money? What happens to individualism? What happens to all those things that are so important to us now? And how is that part of our nature now but is not necessarily part of our eternal nature?

So those answers I don't know. I think that everything works to ultimately become more and more complex. Our society becomes more and more complex. Our technology becomes more and more complex. Our language, our understanding of each other becomes more and more complex. And when I look at what human beings used to be and what we are now, and then I just take myself out of the situation that I've become so accustomed to, you know, modern life in 2014 with, you know, the language being noises that come out of your mouth and typing on a keyboard. And I sort of extrapolate, like, where's this going to go? Where's it ultimately going to go? That's where I came up with this idea of the money bottleneck. Because I really think that money is ultimately just that.

It's just information. And our idea that we have to exchange money in the way that we do now in order to stay alive, that's not true. Because there is times and there's cultures right now where they don't have money. They have a barter system. You know, there's people that, you you ever watched that show Life Below Zero? No. It's a show on – God, I want to say Discovery Channel. But it's these people living in Alaska.

They all live above the Arctic Circle. And a great deal of them don't use money. They just barter. They give each other caribou and this guy has a belt for your snowmobile, and they exchange like this. And quite fascinating, and very, very friendly, happy, healthy people, at least how they're portrayed on the show. And it gives you this thought process of like, well, what is money? What is money? To these people, they don't really buy things. Everything they get is from fishing or from hunting and then using that.

You're like, I'll give you this. You give me that. But I might disagree with you on this one because to me that sounds miserable. Well, like I want to go grab a burger. Have you ever had Popeye's fried chicken? And so look, in small communities that can work. And of course, that's the essence of money is barter, trade. I do in. And so, so look, in small communities that can work. And of course that's the essence of money is barter, trade. I do this, I do like, I do a talk show and I get paid a certain amount of money for that. And then I exchange it for burgers and rent and all that stuff. Right.

So I think money is a good tool as long as you realize what it is. It just makes things more efficient in a larger society. So I don't want to go back to living like Eskimos. Nor do I. But I think when I'm looking at the complexity, I view these people that are living in this sort of a barter situation as a step along the way. And money simplified the entire process of exchanging goods and it simplified everything. Well, let's just agree upon coins that equal this and we'll have a bank of these things. But it simplified everything. Well, let's just agree upon coins that equal this and we'll have a bank of these things. But then somewhere along the line,

that bank became a fucking hard drive somewhere. And that gold is like, where's Fort Knox? Does it even fucking exist anymore? What's in there? It was under WT7, man. You can fucking open up a door and you see this empty room, like dust on the ground. You're like, what the fuck?

Where's the gold? Yeah, it was under WT7, right? Okay. And by the way, I'm joking. Everybody calm down. Well, he knows. He knows things. Okay.

I think that what we have established today is functional. It works. It's great in a certain sense. It is good to be able to use a credit card and buy a television if you need a television. You don't want to have to fucking figure out how many trees you have to chop down in order to give a guy to get a television back. It's a way simpler process. But this is just a step along the way. And this process is not going to maintain.

It's not going to stay the way it is now. This is not the way it was in the Roman days. And it's not the way it was even 100 years ago when we were on the gold standard. It's going to change. So, okay. On that note, I've talked to, I don't know, countless financial experts on the show because whether it was part of the TV show or the online show, I mean, over the course of the last 12 years that I've been doing The Young Turks, I've talked to guys who've written books about the Fed, guys who are in the Fed, just everybody. First of all, let me just state, no one knows what the Fed is. You get me the top financial expert on the Fed, I will break him down in a matter of maximum okay, to the point where he will say, oh, yeah, no, I don't really know how that works.

Like they don't – like no one knows. They know as much as I do. They know the – okay, all right, this is what the Fed kind of roughly does. But where is the money? Who prints it? And then once it's printed, why do they give it to the banks? Why does it have to be given to the banks? Why can't it be given to the American people?

Who controls the Fed? I mean, look, some of those things have simple answers. But when you start going deeper down into that rabbit hole, no. Like, no one knows. And it's really scary. And by the way, it is almost, in my mind, it's indisputable that we will have a massive global meltdown, economic meltdown. Indisputable. I think, I don't know if it's a year and a half from now.

I don't know. Jesus, maybe they keep it together for 12 years, 15 years. But at some point, this whole thing will melt down because it's just one giant pyramid scheme. Yeah, it's built on a foundation of unfixable bullshit. That's how I describe it. Yeah, there's that plus the system. It's like, you know, earlier we were talking about why do we have the politicians that we do? Why do we have the media that we do?

It's all based on the system that you build. Why do we have the humans that we do? It's in our DNA. That's what was programmed into us. And we have programmed our politics to be fucked up. We program politics to be, politicians need money to get elected, so they will do the bidding of the people who give them money. Now that's, why do we build it that way? That's ridiculous. That's so stupid. Then they're never going to

represent you. They're going to represent the people who give them the money. Like, we should fix the system. That's what I want to do. That's why I set up a super PAC called Wolf PAC to basically obliterate all the other super PACs, right? Because as long as there's money in politics, we're fucked. They will never represent us. That's not how the machine is built. The machine is built to represent the donors. Ninety-five percent of the time, the person with more money wins, right?

In corporations, and this is what leads to the global economic meltdown, as soon as a corporation is born, it's like Oedipus. It wants to kill its dad, capitalism, its mom democracy okay and because it doesn't want the free market a corporation wants a monopoly it wants ultimate growth it wants maximum expansion and wants to destroy everything in its path and i don't mean like in some like environmental way or they'll destroy things i mean no no like destroy the competition so that there's no one left so they make money easier right and okay i get that and i understand the need for corporations but you've got to write rewrite one line of code there you can't let public corporations uh run amok the way that we have here's here's what i mean just a little bit

more specific if you're a public corporation in your executive of the public corporation you have no is you don't even care what happens that corporation all you care about is your short-term benefit as long as you're an executive in that corporation so you will do what ever it takes to make short-term money

including especially if you're at a bank, a public bank, take as much risk as humanly possible because more risk equals more short-term reward. That system is built to explode. You will eventually take so much risk that the bank will collapse. It happened in 2008, and they were barely able to piece it back together. The next time that they want to do maximum risk, maximum risk, if you're a gambler, I'm a gambler. If you gamble, you know you take maximum risk for long enough, it's a fact, it's a certainty that you will lose all of your money. That's what they're going to do because there's a wrong line of code in there

where the executives of the public corporations don't care about the public corporations. They don't care about the American democracy, the American people, et cetera. And then we let them buy our politicians. Yeah, the representative democracy that we exist in right now too, I think it's a terribly flawed system, and I don't think you need to represent people that can speak for themselves. It seems to be that what we used to need

and the way it used to be established was back when communication was incredibly difficult. You couldn't just vote online. You couldn't just talk online. You couldn't just answer questions or express your opinions on things, but now you can can and so to have this antiquated system representing us and then the fact that this transparency that we're seeing evolved before our eyes change rapidly on a day-to-day basis I mean there's new revelations

that come like the NSA spying thing like Within a year, the whole world's attitude about email and transactions and doing things online completely changed. Within a year, everyone assumes that everything that you put online, whether it's an email you send to a friend, whether it's a text message that you receive from a lover, all those things are public. All those things, if not public now, very well may be public one day and at the very least are accessible by the government who may or may not use that to intimidate and or manipulate you. So we've changed the way we think and then ultimately intimidate and or manipulate them because just like technology when when technology first enters into the human arena it becomes a tool of the the wealthy and the privileged like cell phones that's where you go to the old rapper videos you see rappers with those giant big

stupid brick cell phones they were letting you know that they are wealthy and privileged that's part of the whole rap culture but now you you can go to South America in the jungle and you'll see someone with a fucking iPhone. I mean, it spreads. And I think that that technology is the spreading of that technology, just indicative of this constant ripple effect of progress, of technological progress, rather, and that this is ultimately going to happen with transparency as well. What the government has the ability to do now with this NSA spy, it's a spy, this gent guy, he's got a fucking big mouth.

He likes to talk. Let's find out what he's doing. Let's get into his email, see if he's got some gay porn that we could blackmail him with or something. Let's, let's. I don't, I definitely don't. I don't know why you would say that because I don't. I don't know why that came up because I definitely don't.

It's just an example. You know, let's dig into this guy's life. Well, we're going to be able to dig into their lives too. It's just right now we can't. But we will be able to. Everyone will be able to dig into everything everybody else has. Okay, now that you're going down that road, I realize that, and I just came upon this as you were talking because you were making a really interesting point.

It's not just that we can go into their lives. It's that going into our lives is going to be a really valuable asset for them for a limited window. Right? Until we all realize how fucked up we all are. Yes. Right? So they'll be able to go into and say, ha ha, gay porn, ha ha, this,

and then eventually be like, wait a minute, everybody's ha ha this or ha ha that. Yes. So then who gives a shit? All right, fuck it. Exactly. I think that's a very important point. And that, you know, uh, Anna Kasparian had that exact same point where we were on the podcast and we were sort of talking about transparency. We're, we were saying that at a certain point in time, we're going to, everybody's going to look at everybody else's bullshit and it's not going to matter anymore because it's going to go away. The same way during the Victorian era, they were putting dresses over the legs of tables because they were freaked out that people were going to be sexually aroused by table legs. Oh, I didn't know that.

That's true. Oh, yeah. That's awesome. They used to do it with piano legs. I mean, they were fucking crazy. They thought people were going to get sexually aroused by the legs of chairs but i mean on the other hand have you seen piano legs pretty hot yeah depends if you're alone and during the victorian era everybody smelled piano legs are probably a healthy alternative but i think that

same with muslims down i mean sure like oh my god if you see someone's ankle well obviously you're gonna want to fuck that ankle. I'm not sure how obvious that is, but if you cover everybody up, you know. Isn't that crazy that we live in a world? It's 2014. We're talking about technology and how it's going to change the world and full transparency. And we've got a significant percentage of the world walking around with curtains on their heads. Fascinating.

And not only that, doing it on television, like you watch them on television, you can see it transmitted through this incredible medium, this technology, the internet and video is displaying these people that are wearing these crazy medieval outfits or pre-medieval. It's hard to imagine that in 2014, we live in a world where you have Google search and women aren't allowed to drive and they're not supposed to learn. There's a significant population that thinks that women shouldn't read, that they shouldn't be allowed to go to school. Well, look, anything that wants to hold onto the past is going to fight education tooth and nail, is going to fight knowledge tooth and nail. That's why the very first chapter of the past is going to fight education tooth and nail. It's going to fight knowledge tooth and nail. That's why the very first chapter of the Bible is don't eat from the tree of knowledge. That is the biggest sin you could ever... In fact, we got expelled from heaven because we

ate from the tree of knowledge. That's what Adam and Eve did. So if you've got your old way of doing things and it ain't right, well, the first thing you want people to make sure they don't do is find out what is right. Yeah. Right? So they block your attempt to get knowledge. But to your point, Joe, they're fucked. Yeah.

I mean, knowledge is flooding in like a tsunami and they can't stop it. You can't stop it. There's no way to stop it. And I think ultimately that knowledge will transcend just simply being able to Google things and read things. And it'll be some sort of – and scientists have speculated about this, not just a knucklehead like me, but scientists have speculated that what we're going to deal with in the probably near future, within the next hundred years, is instant access to information directly through some sort of a neural interface. And I believe that the exchange

of tapping into something like that is that I'm going to be able to get into Jenk's mind too. You're going to be able to get into mine, but I'm going to be able to get into yours. We're all going to be able to get into each other's minds. And then that's going to progress too, that ultimately that'll progress to some new level. And I think that in a sense, I mean, there's a lot of people that they look at the utopian version of a modern technologically advanced society, like becoming, you know, this the singularity is near type thing where is not going to be necessarily through artificial intelligence but through an artificial interface of intelligence where we create something that allows us to instantly access each other and we truly dive into this like joining like a fucking world of warcraft server but the world of warcraft server instead of running around playing a game we're going to be thinking in each other's minds well Well, if that day comes, the first time that you go into other people's heads, there is going to be an initial period of time, five minutes, five days, five weeks, whatever it is, where you will run into darkness before you see the light.

Sure. Like, you're going to be like, oh, my God, that dude is thinking the most fucked up things. Like, no, no, no. He went there. He went there. Holy shit. Right. And then you're going to move on to the next mind and you're going to think the same thing

and the next mind and you're going to be amazed at the darkness of humanity. Right. But then eventually you'll realize, oh, we all think that, but then we also think all these wonderful things. And then it is like, you don't necessarily mean bad by it right and then you'll get to the light of of knowledge that knowing that we're all the same so that guy that the first guy whose thoughts you read who you thought was the most fucked up guy on earth it turns out we're all just as fucked up well or it will just be the the first steps to to the next level that gets like the next generation of human beings that grows up with that technology.

Like I look at my kids now and I look at the Internet and I'm like, wow, what a weird world it is that these little children, they're growing up with no access or no knowledge of what it was like to exist in a world where there was no internet. Well, I think that the people that first experienced this mind meld technology, where we all read each other's minds, to them it would be this crazy alien concept, but they're going to have to somehow or another reconcile it with the biological existence that we were born into and grew up with, and then all of a sudden, boom, connected to each other. But the people that those people give birth to, they will grow up in a world where everyone reads everyone's mind from the jump. And that's when things will get really fucking weird.

And that's when I think the money thing will become the bottleneck. So, Joe, you and I are at this point so old that- We'll be dead before it happens. Well, sure. Or they'll come up with some new shit that gets you to, I mean, they've already figured out a way to use young blood to rejuvenate mice. Like essentially, have you seen that article? Oh, my God. It's essentially a vampire strategy.

They're injecting young blood into mice and they're finding that it reverses the aging process yeah so look they all that's going to happen like i love when america debates like is this ethical and moral to do x y or z like whatever you're debating china's already in the middle of doing yeah okay like they don't give a shit you know the story yaoming yes the chinese government took the tallest uh male basketball player and female basketball player and had them get married. And that's Yao Ming's parents. Yeah. So, like, you think the Chinese aren't going to do it?

Yeah, they created a guy. Right. So there are certain DNA you can have to give you super strength. There's like a German baby born a couple of years ago that's like huge, muscular kid. Myostatin inhibitors. Yeah. Myostatin inhibitors are what regulate the growth of muscles and he's born without them. So he does not have an inhibition to keep his muscles grown within a certain size. They exist in whippets, which is a dog and exists as a genetic anomaly that just happens because of probably overbreeding and also in cows,

occasionally in cows. Oh, yeah, yeah. Have you seen it? Yeah, I've seen the cows too. Crazy. You think that they're not trying that in labs in China right now? Oh, yeah, they are. Okay.

They are, yeah. And you think they're not going to succeed? They are. They are going to succeed. Yeah. And then we will have the superhuman race and then we'll have us. Yep. Okay? And then shit gets really real. race, and then we'll have us. Yep. Okay?

And then shit gets really real. Yeah, they're going to fuck us. They're going to hold us down, and they're going to fuck us. This China thing, or this, excuse me, this mice thing is quite fascinating. And the way to, you can just Google it. There's an article on CNN Health, young blood makes old mice more youthful. But they've essentially found out that when they take the blood of young mice, it rejuvenates brain and muscle tissue in older mice, which is a fucking vampire strategy. I mean, it's really crazy. But that is what we're going – this is step one.

And step one is ultimately going to lead to step 1,000, which is going to be immortality. So what I was saying is that we're old enough that we remember a time when there was no internet. When I try to explain that to younger people, they have a hard time grasping what that means. That we had to actually go to a library, try to look up a book that had knowledge on that topic, read the book. That seems like the Victorian legs that people wanted to have sex with to them. I mean, that seems like it's 2,000 years before Jesus. That's crazy to them. That was in our lifetime. And so we're naturally inclined to believe that change isn't going to happen, that things are going to always be the way they are today, right?

That's natural human instinct. But that is indisputably not true. So we've got a lot more change ahead of us, and it might change things in ways that are so revolutionary it's hard to comprehend. I think it is hard to comprehend. I think we are the caterpillar that gives birth to the butterfly. We just don't realize it. We're going to become something that we don't even see coming. We have right now people who walk around-

So you're super optimistic. You think we're going to get to be butterflies. Well, I'm optimistic, period. I'm a pretty optimistic person. I see negativity and I see positivity and I feel like you could dwell on the negativity, but you could also dwell on the positivity. I'm aware of all the negativity. I'm aware of all the terrible behavior that human beings exhibit. I'm aware of crime, aware of violence, but I'm also aware of beauty and I'm also aware of information being passed in a way that's never been possible before. And because of that, I talk to kids today, I'll talk to 20 year old kids today and they're smart as fuck. And I remember how stupid I was when I was 20. And I was like,

this kid's way, I tell that to my 17 year old all the time. I'm like, you are so much smarter than I was when I was your age. You, you have access to so much more information. You're the, the conversations that you're having are so much different than the conversations I was having. This is a different world we're living in. And just enjoy it. Just take action in exploring your own interests and following your passions and soak up as much of this information as you possibly can. Enjoy it. Take it all in.

Don't look at it as a chore. It's a curiosity. It's amazing. So I don't know how anybody could look at it in a negative way. I see all the negatives. I see the pollution. I see the destruction of the environment. I see all the potential global catastrophes left and right, both environmental and natural.

I see all that shit, but I also see this crazy fucking monkey that knows how to fix things and knows how to make videos fly through space. I think that crazy monkey is going to come up with some new shit and going to continue to. Okay. I 100% agree with you. And it's funny because if you watch our show, the news is so bad so often that it's hard not to be pessimistic. And I think things are actually going to get worse before they get better, right? So we're going to have the economic meltdown.

We're going to be a dark, dark caterpillar for a while before we turn into the butterfly. But long-term, I'm super optimistic. So like if you, one of the things that I loved, I think it was BBC put together this time chart where they showed life expectancy over the last 200 years. And you just see it go, whew, take off.

Right. Like we're also the species that went from being you know living to the average age of 30 or whatever it was to now 70 something you know from or i don't remember the exact numbers but it's amazing and we only did it in 200 years yeah life got so much better like sometimes the last question uh time travel would you go forward would you go backward i'm like you're nuts if you go backwards are you crazy like you think oh my god uh jane austin time no no no you're gonna go there there's gonna be no air conditioning okay you're fucked you can't travel based yeah you want to go you want to go to london yeah we'll take a couple of months out of your life right and you're lucky if you don't die on the way. No, don't travel backwards.

It's a terrible idea. So things have gotten much, much better as we have also deteriorated things. And so I think there'll be a collision that is bad, but then we'll get into the light. Because we're ingenious little fuckers, and we're going to figure it out. I agree, but we might not be us anymore.

That's the real problem. The real problem is clinging to this biological idea of what a person is. I was looking at a guy who was being interviewed and he had been attacked by a shark and he had a carbon fiber arm and a carbon fiber leg. And as he could articulate his fingers and his, he was standing there with no crutches, no anything with this, he was wearing shorts on. And so from his knee down was this artificial leg, and it worked on an artificial hinge. And he could walk around with no limp. I mean, it was amazing. It was perfectly measured to the size of his body.

And I'm looking at this guy, and this guy's happy to have this artificial hand, this artificial leg. And I'm like, okay, what if it's two legs and two hands? What if it's a whole body? What if you're paralyzed, but they say, okay, you're paralyzed, but we can take your brain and we can put it in this artificial body and you can move around. You're like, fuck yeah, give me an artificial body. Well, you know, you won't be able to have sex anymore, but yeah, I understand, but I'll still be able to enjoy almost everything else that other people do. Yes, you will. Boom, you're in an artificial body. Well, they say, well, look, we've got a problem. Your brain is

developing Alzheimer's, but here's the good news news we can take your brain and we can download all the contents of it into this artificial brain and you can essentially live forever in this artificial body whoa now what what the fuck are you then when you become a program that's inside something that a human being created didn't johnny depp just make that movie? I didn't see it. It looked like a piece of shit. It did. But two robots that are already on their way to doing your vision to some degree, right? I saw they were just demonstrating to Chuck Hagel like two weeks ago some defense department. The department within the Pentagon that creates everything like the microwave, all that stuff, the internet.

So that department, they've created the robots, and now you can control the robots from a distance. So the controller does this, the robot does this, right? And so they already exist. It's just a matter of perfecting them, right? And then whatever's in your head, the robot does. That's both incredibly scary and incredibly promising right yeah and then there's the robots that are the sex robots right now they kind of suck right but eventually

they'll be awesome yeah then you can create any sex robot you like to have them look like anyone you like okay and that's a whole different world right And so that stuff gets dark before it gets better, right? Because when your wife catches you with her sister's robot, there's going to be trouble. Yeah, if you have a robot of your wife's sister that you keep in a box somewhere and your wife's like, my fucking sister, you made a robot out of my sister? It was an accident. Yeah. So that's going to happen too. Yeah.

But that connects back to our initial conversation about nature and animals, right? We're trying to preserve something that cannot be preserved because nature is bigger than that. It's more uncontrollable than that, right? But that's also true of us. So we are going to evolve into something that is different than what we have now, and that's going to trip us out because we don't like change. We won't even exist anymore. It's not just that we will evolve into something that we don't like. It's like we won't even be an option. And I really truly believe that that scenario that I took, that I depicted about the guy with one arm and one leg that's happy to have that artificial arm

and artificial leg, that's going to happen with a body. It's going to happen with a whole body. They're going to have, they haven't even developed an artificial skin in a test tube that they combine with spider web spider silk that's bulletproof. They've used artificial skin cells or skin cells that they have somehow or another to some scientific process that a moron like me will never be able to truly describe. But they've been able to, at least in theory, develop this bulletproof fucking skin. Who's not going to get bulletproof skin? Not only that, what is skin? I mean, you see these poor people. Like, there's a fucking Vegas commercial that they're airing these days with Wayne Newton. It's, you know, getting people excited about Vegas. And Wayne Newton has this rubber face, man.

This poor fucker. His face is pulled back and it's shot up with Botox and fillers. I mean, someone needs to tell him, just be an older man. It's way better than what you're doing. What you're doing, you're terrifying to look at. But we're going to be able to just replace your fucking skin. Forget about all this stretching this and pulling that and injecting into that. How about we just take all that stupid

shit off and just like we can give you an artificial hand, we'll give you a whole fucking, a whole organ, a whole skin organ that can't get cancer and it's fucking bulletproof. Okay, so people think, oh well that's unethical, we're not going to do that. What does that mean? Right. Except

when, again I keep going back to China, nothing against the Chinese, it's unethical. We're not going to do that. What does that mean? Right. Except when, again, I keep going back to China. Nothing against the Chinese. It's just they have an unscrupulous government at this point, right? My wife's Chinese. My kids are Chinese. Okay. There you go. Okay. So when the Chinese start making super babies that are super strong like we talked about

and they have the spider skin that's bulletproof and then they start messing with the mind and the kid's smarter than the average kid. Now, what are you going to do? You're going to have your kids be dumber than those kids? You're going to make the decision, no, no, no, I don't want the super babies. Now or then the super babies will be 1%, then they'll be 10%, and then they'll be 30%. And when they're 70%, you're still going to be in that percentage saying, oh, no, no, it's okay.

I'm happy that the other kids are smarter, stronger, have bulletproof skin, but mine won't. Maybe, but maybe not. The much more likely scenario will be that we will be, or I say we, the people that choose to go the route of innovation and to accept what technology is capable of, the ways that it's capable of advancing the mind, will treat everyone else the way we treat chimps. They're not going to let them dominate the earth. They're going to confine them to zoos. They're going to keep them locked up in certain places where they don't interfere with the new evolved race and species of people. Yeah, I think one of the scientists said that they're worried about if aliens find our planet.

Because it's incredibly- Stephen Hawking. I think that's right, Stephen Hawking, right. Incredibly likely that there's other life on other planets. Statistically speaking, it would be crazy if there wasn't. And if they get here, I mean, they could easily view us as we view the ants. I mean, how much regard do we have

for the well-being of ants? We think, well, they're not that conscious. Who gives a shit, right? And we're not that conscious. We're not that evolved. And so the future us might feel the same way about us. Yeah, unquestionably. I mean, look at what we allow ourselves to do to intelligent species like dolphins. I mean, we don't give a fuck. We know that dolphins are dolphins i mean we don't give a fuck we know that dolphins are smart but we don't know what they're saying so because we don't know what they're saying we're like um here's the fish do you want to flip if you flip i'll give you the fish you want to leave oh no you can't leave you're in the tank this is where you live and

we're we're happy you know taking our kids to sea world and watch these fucking things jump through hoops no we're both great species. You know, have this, like you said, we figured all this stuff out. We figured out how to live longer. We're also vicious. We're a vicious species. Yeah. And don't give a damn about anybody else or anything else.

So what happens when you amp that up? Yeah. Well, we're realizing that we're vicious. We're aware that we're vicious. We're aware that we're vicious. But we've spent millions and millions of years developing in a world filled with lions and tigers and bears. Oh, my. I mean, that's the world that we live in.

That's the reality of the world. And that's what our DNA has developed in. And then all of a sudden we reach this point, whether it's 100 years or 300 years ago, whatever it is, we've reached this point where we start being aware of how crazy it is, our dominance over the rest of the species on this planet. But it's a fairly recent thing. I mean, we talked about on the podcast many times, I have this thing about wolves, kind of obsessed with wolves, and also obsessed with this romanticized vision of wolves that most

people have. And the reason why this Little Red R riding hood, you know, the reason why it was the big bad wolf, wolves used to fucking eat people on a regular basis. And in Paris in the 1400s, there was a, uh, an instance where wolves had killed 40 people in Paris. So the, the people that lived in Paris had to band together to fight this pack of wolves that had invaded Paris. During World War I, the Russians and the Germans made a truce so that they could kill wolves because they were in Russia. And when Germany and the German troops and the Russian troops would go on patrol, they would get killed by wolves.

They ran into a super pack. And the super pack of wolves was like 100 plus wolves. And they would find these people that were on patrol and they would kill them so these russian soldiers and german soldiers would come upon these bodies that were ripped apart they would find like shoes and like some tattered clothes and the the fucking femurs would be snapped in half they'd suck the marrow out like they had a real goddamn problem so they had to make a truce to kill these fucking wolves they had to make it truce to kill these fucking wolves. They had to make a truce.

This is the world. This is the real world that we live in. This is not a world where the wolves rescue the baby and bring it back to the doorstep and wink at the family and then run off into the woods to be with nature and chirp around with butterflies and chipmunks. No, it's a fucking vicious, horrible world of predators and prey. And that's the world that we developed in. And so we still have these cruel instincts because of that. And we still have this ability to sort of block

off our ideas that we apply to humans that we love and sort of alienate humans that we don't love, decide that this is the enemy, make these separations with humans. So of course we do it with animals. Of course we do it with dolphins. Of course we do it with almost everything we get a chance to do. So I'm now even happier than I named my super pack Wolf Pack. Yeah, that's great.

Wolves are motherfuckers, man. They're the smartest of all the predators because they're the only ones of the super predators that act as a group. See, that's exactly why we called it Wolfpack. Yeah, it's a good name. So, like, everybody tells us it's impossible to get a constitutional amendment to get money out of politics and all that stuff.

Oh, except that every generation of Americans has gotten an amendment except us, right? So it's not impossible, right? Women got the right to vote when they couldn't vote in the first place. That was impossible, right? This is doable. But when people ask me, they're like, dude, PACs are named like fluffy things, like a better tomorrow tomorrow, stuff like that,

Americans for America, you know, that whole thing. What the fuck? You named it Wolfpack, man. Rich people are going to get discombobulated by that. They're not going to want to give money to something called Wolfpack. That sounds fucking dangerous, right? I'm like, exactly.

Exactly. We're not trying to get money from rich people. We're trying to form a pack of a group that works together and that is super aggressive and that is not going to stop until we get this amendment. And if you stand in our way, we are going to chew you up and we're going to drink your femur. Okay. So sad day for you. And look, and people get the message, man, whether you like it or not, we're coming. We're in the woods and we're coming. Well, much like the internet has given people the ability to access information in a way that was never possible before. I think that the internet is also going to give people the ability

to express influence in a way that's never been available before. And a group of 300 million people, I mean, when you say the 1% that they have, you know, more money than, you know, X amount of people put together and, you know, you can buy, you take them, the wealthy 1% in this country, and you combine their wealth with how many people that that that's all well and good, but they compete against each other. And if you can get 300 million people in this country to recognize what a fucking shell game it really truly is, and then say, look, there's only one way to stop the shell game. You've got to remove money from politics and you have to have politicians that act for the people, which is what initially the whole idea of a representative government was supposed to be about. It was supposed to be about having people that represent the rest of us so that everything remains fair, that we're allowed to prosper without being pulled down by the weight of an oppressive government like we were in Europe. It's the whole reason why people came to America in the first place. So what's amazing is that in our efforts to reclaim democracy, because it just doesn't exist on a national level anymore, just one quick thing about that. Princeton just did a research study. They went back to like, I think, 1981 and studied 1,800 policy positions. And they looked at public opinion and elite opinion and lobbyist opinion.

Public opinion had no effect, no effect on what our so-called representatives did at the national level. It did not affect policy at all. Elite opinion, lobbyist donor opinion, complete correlation. What they wanted is exactly the policy that we got. Okay. So we lost the democracy at the national level and people are super discouraged by that. But what's interesting is that we have learned that it actually still exists at the state level. And so we'll go into Maine and in Maine, one of the state reps runs the cash register at her local grocery store. She doesn't own the grocery store. She's the cash register at her local grocery store.

She doesn't own the grocery store. She's the cash register lady. It took her $250 to win her seat. Okay? And they have public financing in Maine. So she got the $250 from that public financing thing. And you know what she does? She gives a shit about the people in her district.

She represents them because she sees them every day at the cash register when they're taking their cucumbers and their orange juice and stuff. And so she doesn't want the kids poisoned in that area, so she tries to stop the pollution. She also doesn't want business to leave because business hires her, right? So she represents the people. And when you find democracy, it's like, whoa, that's mind-bending. That's amazing. She represents us.

And so it's a beautiful thing we're trying to rebuild, right? And it actually existed here, right? It seems like, no, we never had democracy here. All the coups that we did and all the terrible things we did, yada, yada. But on a domestic level, Ralph Nader gotard nixon set up the environmental protection is that amazing like right now ralph nader couldn't get ralph nader to put on his shoes right like he can't it is no way this is a crazy and richard nixon was a bad ass motherfucker right

and he's like is right wing is against it is a all-time so sorry ralph so killed the ocean all the repal tots, what do you need me to do? That's how strong a populist movement was when we weren't swamped with money in politics. And we can get back to that. We didn't have a major banking collapse for 50 years. Isn't that amazing? For 50 years we didn't have a major banking collapse. Why?

Because we actually had a democracy. It all changed in 1976 and 1978. It was before Reagan. for fifty years we don't have major bankless why because we actually had a democracy it all changed in nineteen seventy six in nineteen seventy eight it was before reagan the seventy six supreme court said in buckley v vallejo money is speech in nineteen seventy eight and a lot of the said corporations are human beings and hence have first amendment right to spend money in politics

downhill from that moment on it was over and i talked to Nader and I said, look, Raiders, Naders are running roughshod through the country, right? You're the original Wolfpack and you're bending Nixon to your will. And then you run into a brick wall. So I said, what happened? He said, it was 1978. Funny enough, same year, right? And Tony Coelho is what happened. I said, who who the fuck's tony coeo i didn't know him at the

time he said he's a democratic uh representative he's in the house who went to the democratic party and said oh because of these new supreme court decisions we can take corporate money too so fuck it well we can't compete with the republicans and because they're just taking corporate money let's take corporate money too he He said, from then on, we never had any progress. Wow. It's incredible that that doesn't get recognized. Like the Supreme Court's recent decision, explain that decision for folks who don't understand what happened and how devastating it is. So there's two recent decisions, Citizens United and McCutcheon, right? So Citizens United citizens united university recognizes the thing that killed our democracy but it isn't actually shot a dead horse

it took this system that was already super fucked and just put it up on steroids so once corporations could spend money in politics we were fucked and that's when the prince and study starts is in nineteen eighty one and from then on even back then we had no effect when in fact, in the previous 50 years, we were correlated. Our positions did matter. Our government did represent us, right? So, and then Citizens United, they just lifted all caps

and they said, oh, if it's an independent expenditure, like Joe Rogan's running for Congress, I'm not giving to Joe Rogan, I'm giving to the Joe Rogan PAC, okay? Or friends of Joe Rogan PAC. And then they could spend a gazillion dollars supporting you. Guy just in, I think it's in Montana, set up a PAC, raised all this money, left the PAC, started running for Congress, and that PAC then just gave him all the money. I mean, it's a joke.

It's a fucking joke, right? It's just a way of giving you the money through one thin layer of legal loophole. And then in McCutcheon, they said, yeah, you know, at least then you couldn't give unlimited money to the parties and there were still some rules. Nah, fuck those rules. Okay. Now the old limit was $123,000 that you could give in any one cycle, right through the the super packs but the individual campaigns they're like ah 123 000 is too little so now you can give unlimited money to the political parties and so there's no limits you can do it independent expenditure you can do super packing give to the uh politicians there's tiny little things left but they're just a joke. There are veneer left there to pretend that there are limits when in fact it's limitless

auction. We don't have a democracy anymore. We have an open auction for our politicians. It's so incredible that they're not accountable for that decision because that seems like such a fucking crazy thing to decide. That seems like such a damaging, devastating blow to what this country was supposed to be in the first place. I mean, it's amazing. I wonder how they justify that.

Look, nobody ever wakes up in the morning. I interviewed Larry King recently. I went on his show, and before that he came on my show. And he said something I totally agree with. Nobody ever wakes up in the morning and thinks that they're evil. They think they're like the greatest person ever. Like he said, Hitler got up and he combed his hair and was thinking like, you're looking good, doing good, right? And so these guys have convinced themselves through a series of reading papers from

American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation, these think tanks, venerable think tanks, that they're doing the right thing. Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy say that giving unlimited money like this doesn't even lead to the appearance of corruption. On what fucking planet? I mean, literally, there was a recent poll. Ninety-six percent of Americans thinks that there's too much, money has too much influence in politics. They're in the Supreme Court in the 4% who thinks, nope,

nope, no, I don't see it. It's incredible. It's incredible. It's just an amazing thing to say that they don't think that it creates corruption. It's really an amazing thing to say. What do you think is going on behind the scenes? I mean, does someone sit down the way the MSNBC execs sit down with you? I mean, is that really the same kind of a conversation? No? Look, I think obviously those conversations happen from time to time, but usually it doesn't have to get to that conversation. I think that the system creates the things that it wants. So for, in 1971, a guy named Lewis Powell writes a memo to the Chamber of Commerce and says, one guy named lewis powell writes a memo uh... to the chamber of commerce and says hate corporations should basically go in and affect every part of our society we should spend

a lot of money affecting education affecting politics and affecting the supreme court okay and richard nixon reads that and as he's getting his ass handed to him by ralph nader says maybe there's a good long-term way of fighting back. Takes Lewis Powell, who wrote that memo on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce, and puts him on the Supreme Court. And then Powell is the one who's the deciding vote in Buckley v. Vallejo and Bilotti that then spins us off into this nightmare that we're in now. So it was simply Nixon getting money from businessmen. Businessmen wanted Lewis Powell, who figured out how to,

for businessmen to take over the country, they wanted him on the Supreme Court. Nixon does them that favor because that's where he gets his money. It's just a self-perpetuating system where, like Barack Obama, he thinks he's like a lovely guy, right? He thinks he brought us change and he's, you know, oh, I got you 5% change. You're still busting my ass over this. What the fuck, right? But in reality, what he doesn't know is that he loves the system. This system made him president of the United States of America, the most powerful man on earth. If he was a wrestler, his nickname would be the establishment, right? So Obama does what is natural to him.

How has he gotten successful this whole time? Take corporate donations. Take donations from Goldman Sachs, and give a veneer of change so people are placated and then keep the system going exactly as it is. He thinks that's the right thing to do. So Justice Roberts worked for corporations before he was a judge, et cetera. All these people, they grew up in an atmosphere and in a context just like we were talking about with rich people. It's the context you grew up in. They always had money. They didn't know. These guys always grew up in a world where corporations were always right. And if you argued with that, you're a villager, you are a barbarian, you are a simpleton. You didn't understand. You need corporations to run the world. And you need, if you're a sophisticated person, you

would bow down to the Fed and the multinational corporations. You're very unsophisticated if you don't realize that corporations are human beings and should be able to spend unlimited money in politics. I mean, look at that. That's the other thing, right? They all think that corporations are human beings. I mean, there's only three words to that. What the fuck? Yeah, the idea that you can do that and not address the diffusion of responsibility that comes when large groups act as a large group. The people inside that large group go, well, you know, I'm just a part of this company. This business is business.

And we're moving to Mexico. company you know this business is business and uh well we're moving to mexico you know and if you look there's a woman that was part of a insurance company in california she was a high level executive they raised the rates one year 39 on individual insurance and she said that's inhumane you can't do that people will lose their insurance and they'll die right this was before obamacare they said oh that's really interesting opinion fired. Okay. So the machine will replace anyone with a conscience. She had a conscience and she was immediately replaced with someone who does not have a conscience. Because if they had a conscience, they'd be replaced. So we, like the media, the people who are at the top levels of the media today on the old media, television, et cetera, they

didn't get there by being the smartest, most successful the best investigative reporters no no they got there because they were the ones who are willing to play ball the system rewards people willing to perpetuate the system okay now like we talked about a couple hours ago that is now running into the wolf pack of the internet right so there's pack, literally, that we've formed for politics, but the internet is a pack internet of itself, and they hate that shit and they're tired of that shit. So when those two forces collide, well, they're colliding right now. They are colliding right now.

The internet also realizes that this is the first time maybe ever that people truly have had a voice and the ability to influence things like this that really didn't exist before. You can't really, you know, you couldn't get on Reddit and just start a thread and that thread becomes a fucking revolution. It didn't, there was no access before. There was nothing you could start a protest, you could meet in Washington, D.C. and they would fucking turn the hydrants on you and sick dogs on you and shut that shit down. And then the news would give a really distorted account of what actually happened. And for most Americans, that would be their version of the truth. They would, you know, Kent State, perfect example. You know,

they shot a bunch of kids and they were protesting. The National Guard comes in, shoots these fucking kids. And what is it? I mean, there was outrage because people got shot. But what was the the the official story that got broadcast on the news? I mean, what is the i mean there was outrage because people got shot but what was the the the official story that got broadcast on the news i mean what was the story that most americans took years before people deciphered it and saw what was really going on i mean that has been the the media has had the ability to do that forever i mean that's how they pulled off the gulf of tonkin when they got on tv and said that you North Vietnamese have shot American submarines and sunk them off the Gulf of Tonkin. Holy shit, we're at war with the – meanwhile, it didn't even happen.

They just broadcast something on television that didn't even happen. It's very difficult to do that today. Very, very difficult to do that today. So from time to time, people in the mainstream media will criticize like RT, oh, they're run by the Russian government, or Al Jazeera, they're run by the government of Qatar. So that has validity, right? The flip side is what's CNN run by? So think about this.

When's the last time you heard CNN say the Pentagon is lying? Never. Never. Never, right? So does anyone in America actually believe that the Pentagon has never told a lie? Really, could anyone possibly believe that? So if the CNN never reports the truth, it just reports whatever the Pentagon is saying, then how are they better than Pravda, let alone RT or Al Jazeera, right? let alone RT or Al Jazeera, right?

But in fact, they're more devious in a sense because they have the veneer of being a real media organization and journalists, et cetera. But when you look past that veneer, they do a better job than Pravda at supporting the government. Yeah, that's creepy. Okay, and think about this. What's the last investigative report CNN broke about the government? They don't even have investigative reporters.

Isn't that amazing? Largest cable news channel, well, they're not anymore. But they used to be, right? Their most trusted name in news. They don't actually want to know the news. If you had investigative reporters, if I was running CNN, I'd have an army of investigators. I've had a wolfpack of investigative reporters, right? And I'd be a watchdog,

right? And I'd... Why don't they do that? Because they don't want to know. They're going to get themselves in trouble if they find out what the government's doing wrong. That's why they don't have any investigative reporters. Have you ever talked to Amber Lyon? No. Amber Lyon used to work for CNN. She did this detailed piece on Bahrain.

And then they turned it into essentially an infomercial to get tourists to go to Bahrain. I just heard about that. Yeah. Covering snipers, shooting protesters. And the whole thing was just a fucked system where you had an oligarchy. You had this guy who was in control of this country and just it was a very repressive government and very repressive scenario. But it was also near Iran and we wanted to use their ports and we wanted to be able to control their ports. So they had this relationship with the United States government. So they essentially bought time on CNN. They

squashed her piece, bought time on CNN and made like a tourist piece about Bahrain. Look, our beloved allies in the Gulf, like Saudi Arabia, what are they? They're the worst governments in the world. I mean, they're the most oppressive for 50% of their population, let alone everything else. 50% are women. Can't drive, need permission to go outside from a male. I mean, how fucked up is that, right? And by the way, 15 out of the 19 hijackers on 9-11 were Saudis.

They weren't Afghans. They weren't Iraqis. They were Saudis, right? And we never touched them. Saudis are lovely. The Saudis are great. Because as long as you're on the side of the Pentagon, everybody just salutes. Yeah.

It's a weird world we live in, man. The influence of money in politics is so deep and so intertwined that there's parts of it that people ignore. And one of the ones that I bring up all the time is cigarettes, that you've never heard a politician ever say, we have to make cigarettes illegal. We have to stop cigarettes. Cigarettes are killing almost a half a million Americans prematurely every year. They die in horrible, painful, agonizing deaths. We need to stop this. This is a plague. If there was a terrorist that came to our country and killed a half a million people a year, it would be our number one priority to eliminate that terrorist. But meanwhile, we have this public health problem. You don't hear that

ever. You don't hear a peep out of these people with full knowledge, everyone that's full knowledge of this. But it's because the cigarette companies, the tobacco companies have given them untold billions of dollars of influence. So because of that, everybody shuts the fuck up when it comes to cigarettes. My nickname for John Boehner used to be Tobacco Checks. John Tobacco Checks Boehner. Because early on in his career, he got in a tiny bit of trouble. Not that it mattered at all because he eventually now runs the house, right?

eventually now runs the house, right? Because he was literally handing out checks from the tobacco lobby on the floor of the house as they were about to vote on a tobacco bill. Wow. Handing out checks on the floor of the house. How much were the checks for? I don't remember that part. I would like to know the number. If it's like a dollar, fuck you.

If it's like a million. But isn't that like the picture of corruption? Yes, it is the picture of corruption. That is it. And look at what the system did. It took that picture of corruption, the guy who was doing that, John Tobacco Checks Boehner, and it put him to the top of the heap. It didn't punish him.

It rewarded him for that. Even the way he looks. He looks like a character in a Batman movie that's about to make a terrible decision. You know, it's going to allow some evil superhero. Look at that guy. That fucking picture of him. He just looks like a guy who's just about to fuck over everybody. He's got that look about him.

But if you become that guy and you exist in that world for that long, you take on that look. You can just almost look through his eyes, the window to the soul and see like this motherfucker needs oh jesus what's he doing in there and there's a lot of those guys a lot of those fucking guys a lot of them it's amazing it's amazing how intertwined the system is and i wonder what it's going to take to untangle it you know i wonder if we're going to be able to see that in our lifetime well i'm I'm trying. I know you are. I know you are. And I respect that very much. And I support that very much. I think it's an amazing thing. And I think that even without your wolf pack, I think you're trying just by

distributing information and by letting people know the actual roots of it and just sort of getting to points that are being ignored by these influenced networks, you know, because of the fact that you're not influenced by anything other than your own opinions and the facts that present themselves to you. That's super important, man. It's probably one of the most important things. And I think when history is, you know, written down in the future and we go over this era, this will be the era of the internet. I really do believe that. I believe that these decades, this 30, 40 years from the point of the first initial introduction, like the early 90s, when it really became a part of America,

to where it eventually is going to go to, I think this is going to be an incredible era of change and of influence in a way that I don't think has ever existed before. We're a part of it. We're in the middle of it right now. So I don't think we recognize it as my, I think we do kind of, we talk about it cause we, we're, you know, we literally are in it. I mean, we are one of the people that's taking full advantage of this strange new time. But I think, well, history looks back on it, man. They're going to look back at it like this is a a crazy fucking time and then they invented the internet and the whole class goes oh you know yeah and so you know to bring it back to our conversation about darkness and light and

so the pentagon that is this force of darkness for so many things unfortunately in the world invented the internet, right? They fucked up. So the overall story is a little bit more complicated than that, but they had a huge role in it. And so how's that for irony? It's hilarious. I don't think anybody could have ever possibly saw this coming.

I mean, I think if they could pull it back, they probably would. That is the number one biggest problem to govern is the ability that people have today to express themselves and exchange information. And the access to that information being almost completely permeated into our society. It's almost everywhere. I mean, you basically get the news on your fucking microwave now. It's just too much information now. You can't hold it back. So that's almost everywhere. I mean, you basically get the news on your fucking microwave now. I mean, it's just too much information now. So you can't hold it back. So that's the thing. You know, what does the government always try to do?

Because the most important thing is information and knowledge. So they try to collect all the information on you. That's why they do the wiretapping of 300 million Americans, right? Because they want all the info on you. But, like, today, in a story we're going to do on the young turks a woman getting arrested uh winds up audio recording the arrest cops say that you did not get our permission you wiretapped us so they put an extra charge on her okay we're allowed to wiretap the fuck out of you right but if you dare record us arresting you you've broken a wiretapping law

isn't that incredible yep that's because the government knows how powerful information is that's why they think we must have access to that tool and you can't have access to that tool right but they fucked up now the internet's out there and and that's why they do net neutrality because they want to kill net neutrality so they can try to put the genie back in the bottle. Did you hear about this guy who is some net administrator that cut the FCC's pipe to the internet down to 28.8? Yeah. Yeah. What was the website?

Shoot, I forgot. But he's like, oh, no, no, it's no big deal. You're right. Let's make it a transaction., no, it's no big deal. You're right. Let's make it a transaction. You know, you guys like transactions. You want Verizon to have the ability and Comcast to have the ability to bring it down at my speed on the internet and then pay more in order to speed it back up. Great. So give me a thousand bucks and I'll speed it back up for you, your FCC website. They're like, outrageous. What do you mean

outrageous? That's the system you want. It's fucking brilliant. Yeah, it is fucking brilliant. Yeah, and then this net neutrality thing, to try to get rid of that is a very creepy precedent. Because to give anybody in control, anybody with power and influence, the control of the distribution of information, that's the very thing that's endangering their power and control. That distribution of information, that transparency that's showing whatering their power and control, that distribution of information, that transparency that's showing what these fuckers are up to. I mean, not enough people are up in arms, in my opinion. It seems to be a thing that's escaped largely because it's being ignored by the mainstream

media. You're not seeing these stories. You're not seeing these horrible stories of outrage all over CNN and Fox News. You're not seeing them. You're not seeing people freak out. You want to know why? Okay. So number one, the internet is direct competition to old media like television.

Why would they want to support it? Okay. So that's one. But more importantly, all the dirty money in politics, where does it go? It goes to buying TV ads. So you think TV is going to be against money in politics? You think TV is going to be open to the internet, bring you that information so the politicians aren't hooked on the TV ads? Hell no.

Hell no. Nothing wants to eliminate the internet, the free flow of information, and keep money in politics more than television does. Isn't that amazing? You're doomed, TV. It's not going to make it. You're not going to make it. It's not going to last. You're going to be able to see these new shows that are being developed exclusively for the internet, like House of Cards on Netflix.

That's just the beginning. That's the tip of the iceberg and i think shows like yours and and these all these various shows are just popping up on the internet they're going to replace everything you see on television except big budget things like maybe game of thrones that those things will hang on first of all because, because they're awesome, and two, because it's really fucking expensive to make these gigantic, huge shows where you have special effects and just incredible theatrical productions. Those are going to be the most difficult to replace. The Captain America movies, things along those lines. But everything else. So, first of all, if Edward Snow never gets caught, it's no problem.

She's just a man to trial by combat. And then we can solve this whole thing. Did you watch the last episode of Game of Thrones? Don't say anything. No, I haven't. It's last night. All right. Nothing. Don't say a word. Okay. All right. Sorry. I don't even know what you just said. La, la, la, la, la.

Okay. Sorry. Too much information there. Okay. Okay, sorry. Too much information there. So they're trying to hold things at bay, right? But it's like a zombie movie with the things that, you know, we're going to crawl over the walls. You can't build a wall large enough. And they're fighting a losing battle, but they don't know it.

So, of course, look here. I'll give you my example. When I was at MSNBC, I was getting about 700,000 a night, 700,000 people a night. It was a very good number back then. It's still a very good number, right? On our network, we get about 2.1 million views a day. So three times larger than our cable news show. Ooh, cable news, MSNBC, wow, 700,000, 2.1 million now without TV. So they can keep wishing it away, but it isn't going away.

And every day TV gets smaller, we get larger. Well, you're also available instantaneously on a cell phone while you're on a subway. That's the difference. Like, you could get you so much easier. The audio version of your show, the video version, the YouTube, you can get it anywhere. You know, you could get it while you're on a fucking plane. You could watch the YouTube clips while you're on a plane flying over the planet. You can't really do that.

There's no, they don't, their model is so antiquated, their access, the on-demand access is really, it's very limited in comparison to what's available on the internet. And then when they try to compete with us on the internet look what cnn puts out a news clip like who cares what you think man like wolf blitzer if you take away the cnn stuff and put them on the internet and said okay go get them wolf you're gonna fail miserably get like negative 17 views yeah like you're gonna fail miserably and there's no way you're to have enough personalities that are willing to freely express themselves. They don't exist. They don't exist on TV. No, they don't exist.

So what are you going to do? You're going to find internet people that are going to just work for you? And then what are they going to do? Are you going to mold them? Joe, again, you nailed it. That's exactly what they're trying to do now. Are they? again you nailed it that's exactly what they're trying to do now they've are they we've gotten offers uh on at least three of our hosts two of them who've taken it because so much more money to go to tv etc right because they think oh great we'll take the internet host and then we'll mold

them to be tv and then we'll they'll be just as popular right but that's what msmbc did with me oh incredibly popular guy online we'll just make him senatorial an establishment but that's not what made me popular in the first place you missed the whole fucking point right and look i love my host there we got a great like set of hosts on the tyt network and i'm one of them it's not us it's not the host it's the idea and if it wasn't us it'd be somebody else right it's the idea that we're not going to serve the advertisers. We're not going to serve the corporate parents. We're not going to serve the politicians for access, the celebrities for access. We're going to serve the audience.

We're going to serve the audience. And so how are they going to compete with that? They're not going to compete with that. They're not. Because someone can just set up a desk, put a camera in front of that desk, connect that camera to the internet, ready, roll. And they could do just as good. I mean, they could have a show. You did it from your fucking living room 12 years ago. And look at you today.

And let's say that they somehow co-opt us and we sell out, right? Somebody else will replace us. Alex Jones. He's waiting. He's in Austin, Texas. You say you're the number one, but I've got the statistics. I've got the documents right here. And show you're a liar, Cenk.

You're a New World Order puppet. He seems like he's out there working for the people. He's not working for the people. He worked for MSNBC, ladies and gentlemen. You don't get to MSNBC unless you sell your soul to David Icke's reptilians. That was awesome. I've never heard you do that. That was amazing. I've known heard you do that. That was amazing.

I've known that dude for a long time. Alex Jones, in 1999, I did a DVD in Austin, Texas, and Alex Jones and I put on Bush masks. I was Bush Jr. He was Bush Sr. And we wore these outfits and ran around the Capitol, and It was called Live from the Belly of the Beast. It was right before Bush Sr. got elected, and I've known him even before then. I've known that guy for a long time.

My theory is that Alex is a false flag operation. Really? Yeah. Is that a real theory? Kind of. I'm half kidding, half serious. You say that because you're trying to fuck with me. What he's trying to do right now is co-op my mind. I'm sitting here in Austin, Texas. I'm half kidding, half serious. You say that because you're trying to fuck with me. What he's trying to do right now is co-op my mind.

I'm sitting here in Austin, Texas. I'm smoking cigarettes. I'm drinking whiskey. I'm getting fucking crazy. I'm trying to protect people from the government. There's black helicopters. They're flying over my Dodge Charger. So that is as good an impersonation of anyone that anyone has ever done.

Well, I've been around the dude, like I said, for a long time. I know him very well. So here's the false flag conspiracy on Alex Jones. Okay, let me hear the conspiracy. If you were going to do a bunch of conspiracies, but you wanted to discredit the idea that conspiracies happen, you would create someone like Alex Jones who would say plausible things, like 25%, 33% of it makes perfect sense,

and then on top of that, you would add reptilians. So that people would go, oh, that's just crazy talk. Oh, a golf of tongue. Can you think the government set that up? Oh, you also think there's lizard people. You're one of those Alex Jones guys. Tower 7. Chem trails.

You see what I'm saying? I know him too well To believe that I'm friends with Alex I know him very well I would love to get the two of you together It would be a fascinating conversation No I've gone on his show

He's come on my show He's not what you think he is He's definitely crazy He's a little unhinged But he really He's definitely crazy. He's a little unhinged. But he really believes what he's saying. He really does. He might not be right, and he might jump to conclusions too often, and he might cite statistics that may or may not actually exist or be factual.

But he's right a lot of the time, and that's what's really fucking crazy. or be factual, but he's right a lot of the time. And that's, what's really fucking crazy. He, he made a video a long time ago. Um, and it was, uh, 9-1-1 the road to conspiracy or the road to tyranny. And it wasn't just about 9-11, what it was about, not just false flag operations, but it was about agent provocateurs that I really wasn't aware of. I wasn't aware that they will use hired people, whether they're, you know, calm government agents, calm soldiers, whatever they would, they used people where they paid these people

to infiltrate peaceful protests and to start chaos, break windows, light fires, do all these things so that they would have the motivation or they would have the motivation or the uh the the they would have the the green light to send in the troops to stop all these protesters because the protests turned violent so they turned the protests violent and i was like wow that is crazy and then the the expression agent provocateur i'd never heard of it at the time but he does a fantastic job of detailing it in his video and and showing it not just step by step along the way, videotaping these people that were wearing ski masks, they were in military order boots, military issue boots.

I mean, he shows the photos of the bottoms of these boots. He's like, these people are all wearing the same boots, ladies and gentlemen. These boots are the same boots you will see on soldiers, you'll see on police officers. These boots are the same boots you will see on soldiers. You'll see on police officers. And he also detailed how they were all let off, how they all – they cordoned them off in a building. And instead of moving them in and arresting them, they had some sort of a negotiation. They wound up letting them go. So I don't know about the details of that. But I do know that, of course, conspiracies exist in the real world. And false flag operations exist.

The Turkish government just got caught on tape with one of them. What was it? So, the foreign minister was talking to some of the generals or whoever it was that was going to do this. And he said, we have a compound within Syria. They do. It's to protect religious area within Syria that Turkey controls for some obscure reason, right? He said, why don't we attack that and pretend the Syrians did it? And then that will give us an opportunity to go into Syria right before the elections so that we'll rally the whole country to our side. It's on tape.

That's why the Turkish government shut down YouTube and Twitter for a while because the tapes – of course you're not going to see that on Turkish television. They're just as controlled by the Turkish government as any of these are, right? So that's – and then they couldn't control Twitter and YouTube and the prime minister started losing it. So he just shut down all of YouTube because those tapes made it out there. So that stuff definitely exists. What drives me crazy about Alex – and if you've known him that long, of course I trust you that he's not an actual false flag operator. He might be. I might be wrong.

I don't think I'm wrong. But what drives me crazy about Alex is that then he'll start talking about how the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers want to kill off 90% of humanity. And I'm like, no, no. Then you're going to stop. Then you won't get people. Like, that's crazy. That's not true. You don't understand, Cenk.

It's about life extension technology. Life extension technology, what they're planning on doing is taking babies. They'll extract the fetuses, and they're going to put them in your cornflakes with radio ID chips. R-F-A-D chips. He'll go into, we have the documents. We have the documents right here. I'll show them to you after the show. Oh, yeah, yeah.

And then people shut down, and they go, oh, okay, well, then that must all be full of shit. Well, it's chemtrails. Yeah, I know. I agree. I agree that there's no evidence whatsoever that they want to kill off a giant percentage of the population. I mean, they use the Georgia Guidestones as the evidence of this. Keep your population below 500 million in the world. I'm with you. I don't agree with all of his conclusions, you know, at all, not even a little bit. But I think

having a Looney Tunes dude out there like that, pushing buttons and pulling cords, what's interesting is sometimes things get brought to light like the Bohemian Grove world leaders really do dress up like fucking like Obi-Wan Kenobi and light an effigy on fire under the Moloch the Owl God statue

what the fuck? these are world leaders and bankers these people really do meet there every year he really did uncover that the weird skull and bones type shit. He was talking about that way before the John Kerry Bush election. So oftentimes, the great majority of the time in my opinion, there's no cigar-filled room. It's just you build a system and it rewards certain things and provides disincentives for other things.

And that's why you have people news actors who do what they do you have barack obama who does what he does but sometimes there is a smoke fill room right yeah sometimes you get a speech at msnbc saying no no you didn't get the message you got to act like the establishment right and sometimes you have these crazy guys like real important people dress up in funny costumes get together and pat each other in the ass yeah and that's real and that's trippy man it is trippy i mean look that's so when you go back to the masonic lodges and stuff that's like powerful get people getting together and doing each other solids right and and they they want to feel better about it so they do a club and their fraternity or

whatever they are and they wear funny hats and how when you look at dollar bills and you see all the fucking cryptic shit on there and the the pyramid with the eye above it like hey what what what's going on here man what exactly is all this what are you guys up to like what's going on behind the scenes so dan brown and what was the famous book davinci code yeah so the one thing i got out of that book was well he's right i mean the symbols did get there for a reason there's symbols all around us they did mean something at some time to somebody so it's not an accident that there's an eye on the pyramid i don't know what it means and i'm not sure that it's nefarious and i'm positive it's not about the lizard people but you know at some point and

look the masonic lodges were probably good things you know what my guess i have no idea but my guess is that those are the people who were smart enough to get together and be like yeah religion's bullshit right we all agree yeah it's totally bullshit okay now let's like come up with logical shit to actually run this place because there are villagers out there who believe in nonsense. So let's come up with logical rules. Do you see what I'm saying? Yes, yes.

So it might have had a good – but then once you get powerful people in a room, they're like, we should set the rules in our favor, right? Yeah, agreed. Yep, yep. Yeah, exactly. Infowars.com, ladies and gentlemen, for more details. We're out of time, man. We ran into three hours. That was it. Flew by. We could do another three like that easily.

You know what? It wound up being like my first show ever. Half about politics, half about philosophy. Yeah, man. It kind of all seems to fall into that. Well, that's kind of life, right? Isn't it? I think so. It's about who's running us, why do we think the way we think, sex, all those things, food. Everything gets lumped in together. We could have talked about sex a little bit more, but that's okay. Next time. Next time.

Next time. Thank you, brother. It was a lot of fun, man. I really appreciate it. Oh, no, no. This was an incredible conversation. I'm glad we finally got this done. We'll do it more often.

No, no. And I'll do yours, too, for sure. Absolutely. I absolutely love this. This is my kind of show, so happy to do it anything beautiful awesome glad to hear man all right uh follow uh jank online jank uger it's c-e-n-k-u-y-g-u-r on twitter the young turks you can get it on youtube what is the website uh tytnetwork.com. That's our website. On YouTube, it's YouTube.com slash TYT. Oh, you got the fucking Korean cat right in the front.

Oof. Yeah, he's got a badass haircut. Yeah, isn't he making everybody else have that haircut, too? Isn't that the rule now? That's the rumor, but I think it's probably unsubstantiated. That's the government propaganda. And if you want to know more about Wolfpack, it's wolf-pack, P-A-C wolf-pack.com

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