What Is ESG & What's The Real Purpose Of It? | Environmental, Social & Corporate Governance
ESG data assess the externalities that an organization produces in terms of environment, social welfare, and corporate governance.
ESG data helps investors determine how risky an organization is, and the organization can use the data to measure success. But that's not all- investors may also value a company more highly if it takes sustainability into consideration for all stakeholders. This reflects in their long-term risk-adjusted return on investment. Organizational stakeholders include but not limited to customers, suppliers, employees, leadership, and the environment.
ESG goals were first established by the UN in 2004, and there has been a recent focus on incorporating this data with SDGs. The term "ESG" was coined in a report called "Who Cares Wins", put together by financial institutions at the request of UN. In the past two decades, the ESG movement has exploded in popularity worldwide. What started as a corporate social responsibility initiative by the United Nations now represents more than US$30 trillion in assets under management.
According to Morningstar, Inc., in 2019 capital amounting to $17.67 billion flowed into ESG-linked products--a 525 percent increase from 2015. Critics contend that ESG linked-products have not had and are improbable to have the intended effect of raising the cost of capital for firms that pollute. They have also accused the movement of greenwashing.
Wasn't there one estimate that was like $2.4 trillion or something?
unidentified
Yeah.
I mean, I'm not saying that he doesn't deserve to potentially pay financially, but that's, you know, the crime doesn't fit the time in that, in my opinion.
And I'm not really sure, because obviously I'm not a lawyer, how it works in a defamation case like this, where if you're convicted of defaming a number of people across a number of different states on the internet, what jurisdiction are you supposed to be tried?
Is it just wherever the victim is?
And so if there's victims in three states, there's a different trial in three states, or is it where you are as the host?
Like, how does that work?
It seems like he's being attacked a million times.
unidentified
Yeah, you have to establish that the venue's proper so that you're filing suit in the proper jurisdiction.
And I don't, I mean, I just sue the federal government.
So it's a little bit outside of my purview.
But it's one of the things, especially when you're filing lawsuit, that you've got standing and that you're in the proper venue.
So my question is, how can they, are they suing him personally or are they suing Infowars?
You know, I'm not sure how familiar you are with the case.
unidentified
I'm not that familiar with the case.
I just know that I think it was very shortly after the two of us appeared.
I think that the verdict came down.
So it popped into my vision.
But I really don't know whether or not, because I haven't been following the case, I don't really know whether or not they sued him personally.
I mean, generally speaking, you sue the deepest pockets.
And I can't imagine that whatever insurance policy he had would cover a trillion dollars.
I mean, who could afford that kind of trillion even?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
I mean, I have insurance policies and they're in the millions, not into the billions, to let alone the trillions.
But, you know, it's unfortunate that, first of all, I would never want to believe that there were people out there that were evil enough to pretend that they had children that were murdered.
It's just that was a conspiracy theory that was beyond, didn't pass the SNP test to me.
I love conspiracy theories when it comes to just the entertainment value of them.
I find them hysterical to play through.
And I love seeing the production value of the things that you see on YouTube.
And you go through all of it.
And it's pure entertainment for me.
I mean, I'm entertained, but I don't really view it as anything other than entertainment.
Even though they may raise very, very valid questions and potentially could have kernels of truth in them.
The flat earthers of the world don't have any standing in my court.
Well, I was in a situation in which I couldn't avoid it because I was like at a, I'm a Freemason, so I was at a Masonic Lodge meeting and there was a Flat Earther that visited the Lodge, you know.
You get all sorts of people at a Masonic Lodge, by the way, that show up.
Like a lot of people are like, are the Illuminati real?
So this guy was talking about how the Earth is flat and he was going into the science and the gyroscopes.
And I'm just like, if the Earth is flat, then how come every other planet is round?
And he's like, just some answer.
And finally, I was like, all right, all right.
So let's assume that NASA and the government and everybody's lying and the Earth is flat.
Why are they lying?
And his response was because the government doesn't want us to believe in God.
unidentified
Okay.
Once again, people are going to believe what they're going to believe.
And I've come to terms with the fact that there are things that I'm not smart enough to understand, number one.
And number two, no one on earth is smart enough to understand.
I'm fairly confident that in 100 years we're going to look back on the current science and it was untrustworthy.
It was not worthy of our trust.
I mean, you just look at what we believed to be medical fact a year ago.
It doesn't really seem to play out from year to year.
And that's one of the things that we were talking about Elon Musk before we got on the air.
What he's doing is so absolutely important to this very topic, and that's allowing for open debate.
I mean, during the pandemic, anyone with a dissenting opinion with regards to the medical science of COVID and its origins and the treatment thereof, there was such a coordinated effort from legacy media, the Democratic Party, the scientific community to get behind this group think that we have the established narrative that is dogma.
It's religious dogma.
And it was flat eartherism.
I mean, either you believe in this or you don't believe in God.
And their God was their scientific truth, which was not scientific fact.
I'll just read it right now, just to see what you think, because I'm interested in your feedback on this.
I won't necessarily read the whole rant, but rather than try to rephrase it, I'll just read the carefully thought out phrasing I already used.
So I said the government is pressuring businesses to censor freedom of speech, which is unconstitutional.
Government officials and business leaders who advocate for the suppression of speech are either violating their oaths of office or fundamentally anti-American.
Then I said platforms that have been previously ambivalent to things like child pornography, CCP espionage and manipulation on TikTok, privacy violations and other serious issues are suddenly expressing concern over the quote health and safety end quote of users.
This is a front.
The fact of the matter is big tech in conjunction with government officials do not want free speech because it isn't conducive to their political agenda.
There's a concerted effort to conglomerate the flow of information so it can be controlled, i.e.
so you can be controlled.
And it's just, it baffles me how the App Store is, you know, Apple isn't criticizing Snapchat just based on the fact that 14-year-olds are sending new pictures of each other constantly on that platform, but they're worried about, you know, not censoring dangerous misinformation on Twitter.
Like, what are the priorities here?
unidentified
Well, I mean, it's a double standard and the hypocrisy is mind-numbing.
The reality of the situation is, is that, okay, so there's tons of different ways to look at this.
And now I'm digressing, but there's tons of different ways to look at it.
There is the version that big tech and corporate America, Wall Street, et cetera, the big banks, that they're working, they're colluding with the Democratic Party to be able to,
number one, be profitable, but also to advance their social justice narrative that they find to be more palatable because of the people that are now in those industries.
But I don't necessarily know if I subscribe to that theory.
I think I subscribe to the theory that they're not working in concert with the Democratic Party.
What they're doing is they're trying to distract us from what's actually going on because it impacts their bottom line.
They don't want us to, they want, they're the gladiator show when Rome's burning.
You know, feed them wine, feed them marijuana, keep them happy, keep the, so that they don't notice that we're sending billions of dollars a month to Ukraine to launder and it's being completely unaccountable for.
And meanwhile, there's 87,000 new IRS agents that are going to be cycling through the agency to make sure that the average American who's actually paying taxes, someone like me, a small guy who's a small business owner, has a small law firm that happens to make a little bit more money than the average American, that I'm paying 50% of my income in taxes.
And the Elon Musks of the world, they don't give a fuck about taxes.
So the point being is that you don't have to be an election denier to realize that we're not operating on an even playing field.
There's a double standard on all planes of our political system, our educational systems, everything that is slanted against a certain viewpoint.
And there's got to be point that we can figure out because it can't be just the conservative versus the liberal political narrative.
I just don't think that I just don't think that people in big tech, people in big legacy media, big government and corporate America really care that much about a biological male competing with biological females.
I don't think that that's not high enough on their radar that they could care less about or so that they could care less about it or they couldn't care less.
And one of the things that was abundantly made clear in that story, and I don't think this is just Hollywood, this is the nature of the story that what we experienced 2006 through 2008 is that the banks knew what they were doing and they knew it was going to pop and they didn't care because they knew that they were going to get bailed out.
And so if we're talking about entities with that level of lack of conscience, then when they talk about ESG or diversity, equity and inclusion, there's no fucking way I believe that they are just bleeding hearts from their corner C-suite offices for minority communities when they're constantly fucking them with interest rates and bad loans and adjustable interest rate loans and just loan sharking all they don't care so
The question then becomes, if they're not really about this ESG stuff and this DEI stuff, why are they pushing it?
There's got to be something in it for them, right?
unidentified
Well, they're becoming unfathomably wealthy, and they don't care because once they have theirs, it doesn't make a difference what happens to the economy.
They've got their money.
If you've got a bank account with $50 million in it, until hyperinflation hits, you're still living large, and you've bought your freaking compound in New Zealand that you're going to take your private jet.
And hang out with Matt Lauer, because he's got a place down there.
I mean, if you look, Google billionaires buying up land in New Zealand.
There's a whole bunch of these billionaires that have basically, they're creating like these doomsday bunkers.
And people from Silicon Valley who are, and I am not saying that this is any.
this is that's going to happen, but they understand that with technology, there is a certain amount of obsolescence of humanity.
There's a limited amount of, like, for example, going to a grocery store, Walmart, any one of those stores, good luck seeing a checker anymore.
There's no checker.
You go to those kiosks and there's one person there checking a receipt as you leave and a camera right there, making sure that in case you get caught, that they bust you.
There's very few checkout people anymore.
There's kiosks at McDonald's.
They're eliminating all the low-paying jobs because they've mandated $15 an hour minimum wage.
So, I mean, they've eliminated the low-end jobs to allow kids to have their first jobs and get some experience in the workforce.
That's what those jobs are for.
They're not for a 52-year-old man who's got two degrees.
Those are entry-level jobs that used to be filled by kids.
And guess what?
Kids don't want to fill those jobs because they figured out, college-aid kids, during the pandemic, that they got paid for staying home.
They were getting checks.
In New York State, they were getting a check from New York State, plus that they were making like 30 grand a year for sitting at home for a year or two.
I mean, why is it that they're never going back into a low-end workplace job?
And then you've got all the unionization.
I mean, look at these Starbucks baristas.
I mean, they're looking to make unions out of their coffee pouring job.
I mean, when I was a kid, pouring coffee, I mean, I'm look, I'm not.
So, so my theory about the ESG stuff, and just for the sake of the audience, ESG stands for environmental sustainability and governance.
And it's what I believe to be an intentionally obscure parameter by which major banking institutions determine who is worthy of investment, right?
So there's ESG scores.
Companies get these ESG scores, whether it's Exxon or Tesla or whatever.
And the thing is that there's no objective system by which an ESG score is attributed to an entity or an organization.
It's usually done with like panelists.
And it's sort of like a whimsical, it's almost like a beauty pageant where like people just hold up a card, like, you know, 10 or 8 or whatever, like the Olympics.
And so, in my opinion, it seems to me like the ESG narrative is a front for basically this mechanism that these institutions can use to determine who gets investment or who doesn't on a global scale at just the whim of whoever's in charge of putting together the panels and the entities that provide these ESG scores.
So if I'm a major globalist banking institution and for some reason I hate Elon Musk, right, because he's catalyzing freedom of speech on the internet, and I don't want Elon Musk to have any access to any capital for his Tesla factories because I want him to suffer and because I want him to be rendered powerless,
then if I have this ESG mechanism that all these global or major centralized banking institutions have agreed to abide by, we can just simply give Tesla an unsatisfactory ESG score, which renders them disqualified from any sort of finance, right?
So we're not going to loan you the $100 million for your new Tesla factory or whatever, even though we know that you're going to make a killing and we're going to get our money back because you didn't meet our ESG requirements.
So I think that it's, I think it's a front and it's just an excuse to only provide capital to entities that follow a certain political agenda.
unidentified
Yeah, I just can't believe that these banks would be stupid enough to eliminate the vetting that is historically responsible, which is to give people money when there's a likelihood of them being able to repay it.
And during the first Too Big to Fail, I'll never forget.
I was in my first home.
I was a young lawyer.
I didn't have a ton of money or anything along those lines.
And I was offered very shortly after that I, and I had like, I don't remember what my first interest rate was on my first house, but it had to be like 8% or 9%, something like that.
And at the time, I was happy to have it.
But they were offering me the ability to refinance.
And they were willing to give me twice as much than my house was worth.
Like basically, you're just sign on the dotted line.
We'll give you twice what your house is worth.
But it was going to be a variable interest rate.
And I was like, variable interest rate.
I wasn't an econ major, but I was an English major.
I know what variable means.
And variable means that it's subject to change and it can go up and it can go down.
And if it goes down, I'm happy.
And if it goes up, am I going to be able to afford the payment on twice the value of my home?
And I said, no, I'll take a fixed rate.
And I went from there and I paid off my home as I normally would.
But I know that, I mean, that's what happened.
I mean, people were just getting all these variable, they were getting multiple mortgages on their homes.
And then the interest rates all jumped up and they all went bankrupt.
And that's what's going to happen.
That's what they want to do again.
We haven't learned a damn thing.
That's what Biden, I believe that's what Biden was just talking about.
They're trying to get more people back into their homes.
We don't want to get more people back into homes if you can afford it.
But I mean, how are you going to afford it?
What's shocking to me is how few people are returning to Biden's touting unemployment and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
It's not unemployment when people are just going back to work and jobs that were shut down because of the pandemic.
They literally just were allowed to go back to work.
They were unemployed because they weren't allowed to go into work.
And then as soon as the government lifted restrictions and said, you can now go into a restaurant and order chicken wings when you have beer, which is what happened in New York State.
Thanks, Cuomo.
That's not creating a new job.
That's just allowing someone to go back to work.
But as we were just discussing, there's so many people that have no interest in returning to the workforce.
I mean, they want this universal basic income to kick in.
They want to have the ability to just live a life.
And hey, who am I to judge?
I mean, I would love to be able to not have to work and live a great life.
It'd be nice, but someone's got to pay for it.
Unfortunately, I'm the sucker that's going to be paying for it.
You know, the small business owner, the guy that needs his income.
And I called her and I was like, hey, I actually need some help with some stuff.
Do you want to work for me part-time or full-time?
I'll pay you 25 bucks an hour, which is 50 grand a year.
Right.
And she's like, you know, I crunched the numbers and I'll actually get about as much if I don't work.
So I'm just not going to.
I'm going to wait for my job to come back whenever this is over.
No, I'm not really, but I felt I was so pissed because I was pissed.
That was what was frustrating about it to me is that, yeah, it's like I'm still paying you, but you're not working, right?
Like the way that you're doing it.
So I don't know.
I just, and like, you know, I've said the same thing that you just said that, you know, I'd love to not have to work and be able to do whatever I want.
But honestly, if you think about it, I think that's a pretty miserable state of life to just not be productive and sit on your hands and watch Netflix all day.
That's fun for like three days.
And then it just sucks.
unidentified
Yeah, I mean, I'm at the other end of it.
I'm actually at the point where retirement is really not that far away for me, thankfully.
Because I've been, I've worked, I worked hard.
I mean, I work 60, 70 hours a week for 22, 23 years to, you know, amass some wealth and live underneath your means.
Don't buy things that you can't afford.
Just be responsible, which actually goes to another topic of conversation is the Biden student debt forgiveness that got struck down by, I think it was 10th Circuit.
I can't remember which circuit struck it down, but it doesn't make a difference.
It's like, what about people like that were responsible that didn't take out all those loans or alternatively didn't go to a more expensive school and got maybe less of a of a of a ranking on their diploma because there's the school that they went they could have gotten into that i get they got into they elected not to go into because it was going to be 65 70 000 a year and they went to a state school instead
because it was fiscally responsible.
Fiscal responsibility is no longer an American value.
Being smart with your money, being dedicated, working hard, and paying your debts, you're looking at it as a sucker if you do that.
That's what my generation was told to believe.
Work your ass off.
I grew up in the 70s kid, came to age in the 80s with all the Brat Pack, the Gordon Gekko, greed is good, all that kind of stuff.
That's the mindset that I grew up in, which was you work hard so that you can get rich, and you don't become rich by not working hard.
It's funny because I was just watching this other thing, which segues, about the TikTok.
This goes into a couple of the different topics we've spoken about.
In China, if you go on a TikTok, they have it throttled so that the only things that come out are educational-type videos versus here, where it's all these influencers putting up whatever they put up.
And I never bought into that at all because I have a lot of friends that are a lot younger than me and saw what they did to really develop the internet.
I mean, it's not my generation that developed the internet for the most part.
It's the guys that are 10, 15 years younger than me.
Guys your age, 20 years younger than me.
So I see...
And it's not even the...
Millennials get a bad rap.
I'm convinced of that.
I've seen a lot of millennials that like to work hard.
It's this Generation Z. Generation Z, it's the zombie generation.
And I hope I'm proven wrong, but I'm scared to death.
Because God forbid, we've been talking world war.
I mean, Ukraine was trying to goad us into going to a nuclear war with Russia.
Do you really want to see Gen Z in filling our military and fighting a war for the United States?
You grow up pretty quick if you storm the beach in Normandy.
unidentified
They won't get off fucking boat.
Look the guy that got that hid in the boat and got shot.
This is nothing like Call of Duty.
Right.
I mean, and personally, I mean, I'm anti-war.
I'm an isolationist.
I really don't believe that we should be spending.
Our military budget is obscene.
What I would rather see is a fraction of that budget be specifically focused on special warfare.
Like have our special warfare guys be the best trained, the best equipped, and the best paid so that guys like Pat Tillman, you know, these amazing humans are like, huh, I could make $150,000, $200,000 a year and then get a pension going into special warfare.
You know, maybe I'm not good enough to make the NFL or the NBA or whatever, but I'm a physical specimen and I, you know, and I'm a smart guy too, or woman.
And give them give them the ability to replenish our, I mean, those, the special warfare community is plagued by fatigue and exhaustion and suicides because those guys have just been, I mean, we've been in an endless war for 21 years now?
I think he's a Russian sovereignist, if that's even a word.
I think he just believes in the sovereignty of his country and everything that every other country does in NATO is centered around trying to bully Russia into submission.
I even believe that a huge incentive behind the climate change claims over the last several decades has been an effort to move the global energy consumption to renewables in an effort to compromise Russia's economy because 70% of their economy is energy exports of fossil fuels.
So everybody knows that we've got this rogue nuclear power that won't play ball with us.
And the only way that we can buckle them is if we just cripple their economy, similar to how we did during the Cold War.
And I think that that's really the incentive behind this climate change stuff because I don't believe for a minute that any of our politicians are concerned about the health and safety of two generations from now.
unidentified
I just think that there was a once upon a time was a way to turn Russia into an ally.
Well, when I really think about it, I'm drawn to the notion that Russia actually was never an enemy.
And I'm inclined to think that the Cold War was the military-industrial complex and the intelligence community deceiving the various White Houses over the course of that Cold War to exaggerate the threat that was Russia because it was incredibly lucrative to sell ammunition, to develop this technology, the weapon.
I mean, there were so many contracts that there was so much money in it.
I think they exaggerated the Russian threat.
And I think that Russia the whole time was just trying to keep up from a defensive position and that they never had any intention of like forcing communism on the United States or anything like that.
I think that I think the Cold War basically was made up by our own military apparatus because it was incredibly lucrative.
That's my question.
unidentified
I don't necessarily disagree.
I think that there's some validity to that theory.
And why is it that we just abandoned billions and billions of dollars of equipment in Afghanistan?
I think they knew because there were rumors about it for an extended period of time prior to it actually happening, many months.
And I believe that it extended back into the fall before it happened when we left Afghanistan.
Certainly the intelligence community was aware that there were arrangements being made for an invasion of Ukraine.
And if they weren't, they're entirely incompetent.
Like, how do you not know if Russia is planning to do an invasion?
They didn't just decide spontaneously to do it and catch everybody by surprise.
They were working on it, right?
And there's no way we don't have moles and spies.
There's no way we didn't know it was going to happen.
And Biden kept saying it was going to happen way before it did happen.
And I thought he was just lying.
And I was like, bullshit, but he was right.
And so he knew he was getting intelligence.
And so what's baffling to me is why would we leave all the weaponry and equipment in Afghanistan knowing that there was an incredible amount of likelihood that Ukraine would need it, right?
We could have just sent it to Ukraine.
unidentified
Because if we would have done that, we wouldn't have had to sent it to the United States.
And how expensive would it have been relative to the billions of dollars we're giving Ukraine to like, you know, drop off the helicopters and tanks that we had, not arm al-Qaeda or whatever?
unidentified
We're going to hold off on the withdrawal.
We're not going to like, you know, allow our service members to twist in the wind and die while we're pulling out ahead of time.
What we're going to do is we're going to do is we're going to slow down our drawdown a little bit.
We're going to take our equipment out and the pallets of money that are left behind out of Afghanistan first.
We're going to send it over to Ukraine because they're going to need it and because they're about to be invaded by literally Hitler.
We're just going to, you know, because none of it makes sense unless you look at it from the perspective of the people that make meat from arms deals needed to sell arms.
You know, I mean, I've actually gotten to the point, I was having this conversation today with my business manager.
I don't believe that America is capable of being fixed anymore.
So when you have a conventional war like that, eventually there's going to be war fatigue.
All right.
But we don't have a conventional war going on in this country.
I believe the civil war has already started.
Like when the historians write, write the history books about the split up of the United States, which I believe is an evident.
And we've talked about this at length on other podcasts, so I won't get into it too deeply, but it's being predicted.
It's an eventuality that's been predicted by a number of economists and historians over the course of the last two decades that the United States is starting to get a little long in the tooth with regards to our ability to remain united.
I don't believe that there will ever be a conventional war in the United States again.
I think that what we're seeing out in western, excuse me, in eastern Oregon is going to become that what's going to happen there is there's just going to be a number of states, rural parts of states that are going to say, no, we are no longer going to align with the politics of the big city and the tax and spend Democrat policies because Werther's were working and we can't ever get our power
back because of just the populations.
And they're going to align with other states that are more politically aligned with them.
And there's going to be a the United States is going to just, the boundaries are going to be redrawn.
And that's going to be basically the way the civil war will work.
There'll be a redrawing of boundaries and potentially a shrinking of the power of the federal government, where these states are going to stop sending money to the federal government.
They're going to pass laws that are going to limit federal taxation and it'll just starve out the federal government.
And that's going to have wide-reaching effects on a national level, at least on an international level.
I mean, it'll, I don't see the U.S. dollar being the world's currency in 50 years.
Probably just because the government doesn't want us to have any communication about this sort of thing.
So I have a very, I agree with everything that you said, and I think it's very reasonable, but I have a very hard time believing that any territory within the United States will be able to divorce without violence.
I just can't imagine the federal government allowing that to happen.
Because in the event that that would happen, I imagine that we would have a very leftist federal government.
And I just couldn't see that sort of mentality.
unidentified
Well, I want to hope that we will never see a conventional war in the United States ever again.
I don't ever want to see Americans taking up arms against other Americans.
As much of an advocate of the Second Amendment from a philosophical standpoint that I am.
My philosophy on the Second Amendment is I don't like to even think about all enemies, the domestic part of the foreign and domestic.
I think more of the citizenry's, the average citizen's ability to be able to take up arms in participation of a militia.
Let's say hypothetically, you know, China's to come here.
They do some part of an EMP.
They detonate a nuke above a portion of the United States or multiple parts of the United States.
It takes out communications, et cetera.
I like the idea of having citizens being able to band together potentially with conventional firearms to be able to create militias under the direction of state governors and in a National Guard type capacity to be able to defend our country against a foreign invasion, which I think becomes more and more likely as the destabilization of the dollar becomes more of a likelihood.
But in any event, in your scenario, if the FedGov starts to come into the states to take over militarily, I don't think that bodes very well for them at all.
If we couldn't beat Al-Qaeda, they're not going to be able to beat pissed off American citizens.
unidentified
No.
Well, first of all, morale in customs and border protection and Department of Homeland Security and a whole is at an all-time low.
They are having extreme difficulty keeping their people there.
And the Border Patrol, I mean, those people are just been left on a vine to die.
They're been overwhelmed on the southern border.
And this has come from an immigration lawyer.
What the Biden administration has done, I'm switching gears very, but what the Biden administration has done is they have basically stopped enforcing the immigration law in the interior of the United States unless you've been convicted of something really, really bad and have already served your state or your federal sentence.
Then they'll, because they're not getting out of custody and they only have a limited amount of beds.
So they're enforcing the laws to get those people deported back.
And then they're sneaking back in through the southern border, which statistics are bearing out.
But what the Biden administration has done is they've said that if you sneak into the United States, you're good to go.
And we're not going to deport you.
And you have at least two more years.
And the money that the average immigrant can make in the United States in two years, it makes it worth it for them.
Because they're making two years in the United States, what they can make potentially in 10 or more back in their home country.
So they're flooding the southern border trying to get in the United States.
And who can blame them?
I mean, look at what's happened in Venezuela.
I mean, all of these, even Mexico, it's overrun by gang violence.
It's a war zone going on there.
Yeah.
Any American that is going down to Mexico to vacation in one of these resorts is insane.
I mean, you never knew who was going to win Florida.
Now it's like it's been fortified completely right.
And I don't believe that that's written in stone.
I mean, I think that that's, I believe that we're one.
First of all, I don't ever believe that a Republican will win president again.
I said that before Trump.
I didn't, Trump threw everything on its head on its head.
If it wasn't for the fact that Hillary Clinton is more hated by a majority of Americans than Donald Trump is percentage-wise, because both Democrats and Republicans hate Hillary.
I mean, and I'm not going to say his name because he's a personal friend of mine, but my former congressman, he totally flipped on Second Amendment right issues and was one of the Republicans that signed on to the congressional gun control legislation that just passed.
He was one of the few Republicans that crossed.
It's like, I just, it seems like there are two Democrats in the entire country that are willing to act against the far left of the democratic party and then that's not even and there's 25 or 30 republicans that want to be on that that want to be democrats yeah there's there's not i've come to the conclusion after this midterm election because i thought
it was going to be a red wave just like most oh i didn't i didn't well it's because you're smarter than me but i thought it was going to be a red wave because maybe i'm just uh optimistic and wishful i'm a buffalo bills fan i'm i'm i'm a pessimist i always expect my team to lose well yeah it's a good lawyer right so you always got to think like you're losing right so but but when i saw what happened and when i saw mitch mcconnell come out and say you know we needed to reach across the aisle and you know uh you know focus on the
40 of things that we do agree on i just knew like holy shit this is a uniparty there is no republican and there there are american there's the american left and the american right and those are different the voters but there is no difference between the political left and the political right with few exceptions right and so my thinking now is all right so you know the uni party is not just some sort of sarcastic jab at what's going on like this is a fucking single party state
it's as simple as that so when you're talking about third party and trying to push third parties you're not talking about a third party you're talking about getting back to a two-party system because we don't have that at the federal level at least at all when you have you know republicans voting to send billions of dollars to ukraine knowing that it's a money laundering scheme or too incompetent not to realize what's going on like that's absolutely absolutely ridiculous it's fucking treason colkin and and this is this is our fucking leadership
unidentified
so i don't want to where's our representation i don't want to see anything pass through congress nothing i want to see two years of government shutdown and investigations that's all i want to see i want scorched earth let's strangle every single administrative agency get rid of all of their funding all of it i mean and this is i don't have any visions of grandeur that this is going to happen but it's not enough to just have these
sham investigations i mean they literally need to they need to throw some people in jail i
i believe that and i'm not saying that donald trump i i didn't vote for donald trump's time around as i just said i voted for a second time which we talked about in previous podcasts and i didn't vote for donald trump i voted against the democrats i personally don't like donald trump i think you know i like a lot of the things that he did the first three years of his presidency were the were the uh um the greatest years of my adult life financially uh with
respect to the economy just exploded under him we just were so strong as a country under him so i was like you know what he i'm going to give him my vote based on the fact that what the democrats did to collude with the fisa courts and all those things that i have spoken about right uh it made me realize that i had to punish the democrats and not vote for a libertarian candidate and now i realize that i can't vote for a libertarian candidate anymore because
we're if i mean new york was close it was only like six points lee zeldin almost pulled it out against kathy hockle i mean that was shocking to me that it wasn't a 20 points a 20 point difference that that a republican got within like six percentage points of a democrat in new york state is you know and and i don't believe that new york is savable
just like california yeah it's not savable the people here in new york city where all the people live want new york they want it dead so how are you going to fight against that they i mean majority it's we don't have an electoral college in the states no it doesn't make a difference that the vast majority of new york state is red you look at the the county illinois same thing yeah cook county carries the state every other county is right except for maybe one right
and that's why i'm saying that that's what the civil war is going to look like because it's going to be 10 more how many more election cycles before finally the majority of the the land mass of the country says you know what let's make two countries the big cities and the rural areas of the country and we're going to the rural area of the country is red the bigs are going to be blue and the way we're going to live together we're going to have a free trade agreement between the the
cities and the and uh and the the food producing areas and the oil producing areas and we're going to live in harmony you guys are going to have your craziness in the big cities and we're just going to have our our we're just going to cling to our religion and our guns yeah well what's concerning about it to me is if history is any profit things are going to have to get much worse before people they're
But like if you look at if you look at what happened in Germany in 1933, that was 30% unemployment, right?
So right now in the United States, we have a situation in which if you're unemployed, it's, you know, maybe you're injured or maybe you have a mental illness or, you know, maybe you're just working the system, but you're still like making ends meet, right?
However you're doing it, whether it's by being productive or not.
But when you have 30% unemployment, that means that every day a substantial number of normal, competent people with some skill are going out every morning and looking for an opportunity and coming home having found none.
And you can only do that for so long before people start getting fucking weird, right?
And that's what happened with the Nazi Party.
They just got a little weird.
They started blaming, you know, like the scrub, right?
And they just got and they got rallied behind it.
And so we're not going to see any sort of political change in this country until things get like 30% unemployment bad for years.
And who the fuck are we going to blame when that happens?
unidentified
Let's Jen Saki circle back to my doomsday bunker portion of the conversation.
Why do you think all these big tech people are building bunkers?
Because we're talking about the obsolescence of the workforce, which is going to result in the increase of unemployed individuals.
And you just ask the question, what are these squirrelies?
Who are they going to go after?
They're going to go after people that have.
They're going to go after the people that are living in Mitt Romney house with an elevator in La Jolla, California, or wherever the hell it is.
I mean, that, I mean, there's the have-nots.
Well, there's, there's, I don't know if you listen to anything that Andrew, was it Andrew Chang?
was it andrew chang who ran for for president um i can't think of his name now yang Yang with a Y. Yang with a Y. Yang.
Andrew Yang.
And he was on the bandwagon for universe basic income.
And I believe that the reason why he was, and honestly, I mean, I'm not an economist.
I don't know how much that would cost.
I don't know whether or not that's feasible.
But hypothetically speaking, if we were, I mean, look at how much money we're giving to Ukraine and how much money we're giving to wasted programs to study the sexual proclivities of squirrels.
You know, if we eliminated all the fraud and waste, if you were to write a check to the average American for $1,000 a month, I don't know if that's possible or not.
But if we were to do that, 100% of that would go back into economy.
100%.
Every single penny would be spent back in.
And it would drive economic growth and it would drive employment.
Maybe, but if you look at what happened in healthcare and what happened in higher education in this country, as soon as the government started picking up the tab, that's when the prices skyrocketed.
So my fear is that if you're flushing the market with cash, you're going to see a situation in which just all the prices go up because everybody has cash.
That's true.
And maybe that's only temporary.
That's my only concern about it.
I would be open to the idea of universal basic income if it came with the caveat that all other welfare entitlement programs be eliminated.
Do you want the check or do you want health insurance, right?
unidentified
100%, including Social Security.
Like eliminate it all.
Like eliminate it all.
And you'd have to tie it to a flat tax as well, I believe.
And that's, I'm not an economist.
I don't know if anything that I'm saying is, I guarantee you, anyone that knows what they're talking about, and I am not someone that knows what he's talking about when it comes to economic issues, will dispel everything that I'm saying.
But all I know is that the welfare system needs is that needs to be completely revamped completely.
But we're too rich of a country to have people sleeping on the streets.
And that's one of the things that pisses me off about the left is they always portray the right as this sort of non-empathetic, like sociopathic CEO, executive type mentality.
And I don't think I've ever heard of a single Republican, with maybe the exception of Ayn Rand, say that, you know, people who are actually struggling should have no help, right?
There are people that make the argument that churches would do it or churches could do it and charities could do it.
And maybe they're right.
I don't know.
But nobody actually believes that people who need help shouldn't be helped.
The problem is that we create these systems and they're exploited by everyone.
And they perpetuate the problem in order to sustain themselves as organizations.
The more money we fund to fight homelessness in Los Angeles, the worse homelessness gets.
And then the more we have to fund.
And it's just like this cycle of constant waste and corruption, it seems like, with all these entitlement programs.
But you're right.
I mean, like, yeah, I don't want to see, I don't want to see anybody struggling to feed their family.
And I don't want to see, I don't want to see people that can't give Christmas presents to their kids.
Like, that's terrible.
And I'm happy to help out of my own pocket voluntarily or if taxes actually could accomplish that, that'd be great.
It's like I say about how many have we given to Ukraine?
If we were to have given each state $2 billion directly for the creation of food kitchens for individuals that are food insecure, I mean, how much could $2 billion, how far does that go?
You have to think that, I mean, I don't know how to get it done.
I just know that sending to Ukraine is not a good idea.
It was the most corrupt country in all of Europe.
All of the leftist magazines were talking about how corrupt Ukraine was.
And I don't know what her play is because I can't see how what she's doing is actually going to accomplish anything for her politically.
But she doesn't strike me as disingenuous.
I think she probably never really was a Democrat and she just had to run as one to get elected in Hawaii.
And that's probably why she did it.
She's probably more of like a libertarian sort of, she's not like an evangelical Republican in that she doesn't believe in, she probably believed in like the right for gay people to get at, but I like her.
She's never really said anything that I disagreed with.
unidentified
She said a lot that I disagreed with on the Second Amendment front, but she's.
Well, she was first up in bands previously, but she just came out within the last month and wrote an entire and gave a talk about how wrong she was with regards to the restrictions that she was advocating for with regards to our Second Amendment freedoms and specifically set forth,
in my opinion, my legal opinion, the correct interpretation of the Second Amendment and what it's for.
And that Second Amendment was there to prevent against an overreaching, tyrannical executive branch that abuses the army in times to restrict the freedoms, the constitutionally protected freedoms of American citizens.
And that a safeguard against that is for the average citizen to be able to have access to military-grade weapons so that they can participate in a militia if called upon by a state governor in order to engage in war against both a domestic enemy and a foreign enemy.
And that we're supposed to have access to those weapons.
So this is what she was saying, and it's correct, very much so.
And that was the one thing that I was waiting for.
Yeah, I just can't, because as I was saying, a friend of mine just me in the ass, someone that I've supported throughout the entirety of his political career, all the way up to being my congressman.
And he turns back on Second Amendment protections at the last minute.
And so I'm very, very hesitant when I hear anybody flip-flopping on that issue because it's like, you know, either you get it or you don't.
But it's nice to see somebody flip-flop from the infringements side to the freedom side.
And here's that, is it JP Sears, the red-headed YouTuber that's really funny?
He used to be sort of on the he came out with a video that said, you know, I'm pro-Second Amendment.
But you got to also think about the context in which the Second Amendment was written.
We were an incredibly vulnerable nation, right?
I mean, the federal government had zero money.
That's why the Articles of Confederation failed, right, when the Bill of Rights was written.
There were Native Americans on several different fronts constantly.
We've just gotten out of a war with the most powerful nation in the world.
And what's to say they don't attack us again now that we're vulnerable?
And so there were all, so they were thinking, we got to have everybody armed.
You don't want a situation where Ukraine gets invaded and the government has to frantically hand out AK-47s to everyone.
You just want everybody to already have one, right?
unidentified
And in USD Miller, they go through, because the new test that's set forth in New York State Pistol and Rifle v.
Bruin is that the government bears the burden of proving that if they intend to pass a law that's going to infringe upon something that's protected by the Second Amendment and a plain reading of the text, anything that's considered to be a bearable arm and modern versions of a musket are covered under as a bearable arm.
Anything that can be considered to be a bearable arm is protected by the Second Amendment.
That the government, if they want to infringe upon that right, they need to show that a history and in the United States of making those infringements.
And they include examples of infringements in your right to carry in certain sensitive locations, which potentially could be like they list like a courtroom and things along those lines.
There's a history and a tradition of having those restrictions.
And that's being exploited by the Democrats, but that's not my point.
My point being that there was a case back in the 30s, USD Miller, where they ruled that the law prohibiting short-term shotguns was constitutional because a short-barreled shotgun is not in common use.
It's not something that people would need in furtherance of their service in a militia.
It's not a standard issue rifle that you would need to be able to get in line next to your militiamen as a 18 to 34 year old citizen of the United States, which is what the militia is comprised of.
And any weapon and ammunition for that weapon that is necessary as part of ordinary military equipment is protected under the Second Amendment, which means, and this is all in USD Miller.
It's of the Second Amendment of gun laws prior to the Second Amendment in that case, really good case three.
It's not that long.
Most of it's in the footnotes.
And it's hysterical because if you go through that, all of these, and I'm confident based on the current makeup of the Supreme Court and these cases need to make their way through quick, that all of these cases banning semi-automatic rifles with detachable magazines and other cosmetic features has, as it's been said, to make them shootier, you know, which do nothing.
And what they call what they call extended capacity or high capacity magazines, which are nothing more than standard capacity.
They're the magazines that the rifle is designed to take.
30 round magazine is standard capacity that that's most non-automatic rifle.
the 5563 form is it's designed around a 30-round mag that all of those yeah there you go there you go There you go.
So in any, but the point being that I believe that all of these state law restrictions that are making that have already been passed in New York State, Oregon, I think just passed a new law, California, et cetera, and they're all starting to make their ways through the courts.
They're all going to fail.
And I also believe that the ban with the requirement to have a tax stamp on a fully automatic, that any ban on a fully automatic rifle, that a standard infantryman would be issued as standard military kit, that that's illegal.
There's no legal.
Because the reality of the situation is that I should be able to equip myself with the same things that an infantryman has.
And that's what the second was designed for.
So that if I needed to, let's say there is a total breakdown of the federal government.
There is a surgical strike or surgical strikes.
And now we're talking war games crap here, but China, Iran, all of these countries gang up on us and knock us out and the federal government is rendered useless.
I would love to see 300 men with rifles standing a post.
So this was early on, I believe, in the campaign in Afghanistan, if my memory is correct.
And I'm not a military historian, so tell me to shut the fuck up.
But the point being, we could cut our military budget in half and still have the number one largest military budget in the planet, if my statistics are correct.
And it would be nice, nice if part of that is the reserve training.
I mean, if you made it so, if you made it lucrative enough where every single community had a battalion of fucking Navy SEALs or people that were trained by Army Rangers so that they knew that so citizens are matter of fact, it should be part of our education that every single guy is taught firearm safety.
So in my belief, by the time, because one of my pet peeves about our culture today is that people aren't adults until they're like 30.
And a lot of that's due to inflation, just because it costs so much more to get out of the house than it used to 50 or 100 years ago.
And then the other part of it is just cultural entropy.
But there's no reason that normal functioning average American kids can't have an associate's degree by the time they graduate high school.
So why is it that we don't just eliminate summer breaks for kids, actually get real teachers and professors into these high schools, make it so when you graduate high school, you have an associate's degree.
And if you want a bachelor's degree, you can get it for free, but you have to join the military and serve two years and you get to keep your military issued rifle.
You learn how to use it.
You're vetted when you join the military for mental illness.
And, you know, is this guy a wacko?
Does this guy have a drug problem?
And then you have a population that's armed and knows how to use a firearm and they're getting their college education for free and they're able to join the workforce at the age of 20 instead of the age of 26.
unidentified
Well, I personally believe that the future path, the viable path, it's not to go to college at all.
I call my son, I mean, I'm a fourth generation attorney in my family in the United States.
So I always, I grew up, I wanted a lawyer.
It was just, it wasn't put on me.
I just, I loved it.
I wanted to be a lawyer.
Obviously, I like to talk and I like to like to argue.
So it was just in my blood.
But my son doesn't have that in him.
My daughter, maybe, not my son.
And he doesn't have any idea what he wants to do with his life.
And I've told him multiple times, I'm like, look, don't go to college just to smoke pot and get drunk.
I mean, that's not the reason to go to college.
If you don't know what you're doing, either go to a community college, figure it out what it is that you want to do, or ultimately go to a trade school.
Learn to work with your hands.
You'll make six figures within four or five years, being a tradesman.
It's true, but the thing about college that was so valuable to me was not the education, but the fact that I didn't, I didn't fucking waste my four years that I had to do whatever I wanted.
I was like, I joined the Chamber of Commerce, I think, my sophomore year in college.
Like, I was by far the youngest person there.
I was like, I got to network if I want to get a job when I graduate.
I joined several different networking groups.
I joined an out of an adult fraternity, like networking, did all this stuff.
And that the fact that I had four years where I didn't have to worry about a mortgage or a family or bills and, you know, other than things of that nature, had no debt.
So education itself sucks, but just the fact that the kids are blowing four years when they go to school.
They're just not doing anything.
unidentified
Well, you're an exceptional human, though.
I fell into, I played sports in college and that kept me busy because I did well enough to be able to get myself into not a good law school, but I got myself into a law school and didn't do particularly well in law school.
I wasn't particularly interested.
But the second I got out and I had to study for the bar exam, I put it in gear and I kicked ass on the bar exam and I started working and I said to actually apply myself because I wasn't mature enough up until I graduated from law school.
But at the same token, I think that the maturity does not come with time.
The maturity comes with the amount of responsibility that you have.
So if you give an 18-year-old a tremendous amount of responsibility, like in the war in Iraq, those soldiers, 18 years old, are going to be more mature than just your frat kid that's getting wasted at college.
Right.
So whatever the reason is, whether it's inflation or cultural entropy, like we said, we postpone responsibility in our culture today to the point where most people don't actually have to do any adult things until they're close to 23, 24 years old.
And that is unprecedented if you look at the context of our culture, right?
I mean, there were people that were lying about their age To get into World War II, they're 16.
I think the youngest person that stormed the beach in Normandy was 16 years old.
I looked it up once.
I could be wrong about that, but I'm pretty sure there was a 16-year-old kid.
My nephew's 16.
Great kid.
He's totally mature, but I can't imagine somebody who can, you know, barely get a lot of strands of a mustache together, you know, in that sort of a situation.
And I just think that we just have to pass the ball and say, listen, figure it out at some point.
Yeah, give someone an incentive to create, to create the desire to give back to the community and to the country.
I don't know.
I don't know what the answer is.
I just know that the way to do the exact opposite is by giving kids $30,000 or $40,000 a year to stay home and not work, or $50,000 for your friend to not work.
That's not going to do it.
I don't know if you, what UBI, I like the idea of potentially getting people above people.
I don't like the idea of the working poor.
That concerns me.
I like the idea of somebody that is working a job that they can have their income supplemented, not make it a robust food stamp thing where it's literally here you go.
Here's a ration card that'll be that's directly for rent and a ration card that's directly for food.
And, you know, I'm not a huge fan of government subsidized housing or anything along those because they usually go, they usually get destroyed, but give somebody the ability to use their subsidized housing voucher to put it towards a mortgage.
I mean, maybe that, maybe what you said before, maybe that's going to inflate the cost of homes, but that could, that, that benefits everybody.
That benefits everybody.
If my home goes up in price because other individuals are being giving money from the federal government, I'm not going to complain that my house is now worth 30 or 40 percent more than it was five years ago.
That's going to benefit me.
However, the question becomes whether or not that results in some sort of inflation.
I'm not an economist, so I don't know the answer to that.
But the bottom line is, the bottom line is we've got a real problem with regards to individuals who have an interest in going into the workforce right now.
We have an absence of tradesmen and the individuals that are going to school are going to school and obtaining degrees that are fucking useless.
You know what's interesting about this conversation to me is that this might be the first time in 15 years that I've actually 10 years that I've actually had a policy conversation because the political dynamic is such that no one's actually arguing about policy so much as who's a Nazi.
And it's funny because we used to, in our country, we used to talk about what the best policies would be the problems that we have.
And now I'm just at the point where I don't want my politicians to get away with money.
I've been studying a lot about World War II history recently just because I see a lot of the same thing.
I'm a big fan of The Fourth Turning.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with that book, but it's basically The Fourth Turning is a book that was a brilliant book that was written about 20 years ago by a couple of actual scientists who are actually smart, right?
Real experts about how history is not linear.
It's cyclical.
And there's four different things that we sort of go through.
And I'm not well versed enough in the text to rattle myself.
You can like send it to a dealer out of state and then have that dealer transfer into state.
unidentified
Comps.com wouldn't send it at all.
I had to go find someone on Gun Broker who would ship to an app.
You always have to ship to an FFL to effectuate the transfer.
In New York State, that's the way it works.
I always follow by the letter.
So I found someone on Gun Broker that was willing to ship to my FFL here.
Then I was able to transfer it on first before I can take possession.
I have to transfer it onto my concealed carry pistol license.
And then from there, they couldn't turn it over to me until they pinned the magazine so that it's permanently pinned so that it's a 10-round MAC.
That's so cool.
Those were hoops that I had, claiming hoops that I had to go through to get this gun that I've been, that Jack Carr has been, has been talking about for the better part of the year.
And he was teasing me.
Oh, Jesus, that's exactly.
There's some cosmetic features on that gun that just make it way too dangerous.
Check out my favorite feature, Betsy Ross flag for the dust cover.
unidentified
Yeah, that is actually something that you should.
There's another, there's a YouTube channel that I follow.
There are these two Second Amendment lawyers down in Texas.
And I'm here.
Hold on a second.
Well, whatever.
I can't remember their names, but one of the things that they were talking about was, because they defend, they do criminal defense.
And one of the things they were talking about was that any modifications to your gun that is cosmetic, that may show patriotism or one of those symbols that the FBI has said makes you the terrorist.
Any of those things, which includes the Gaston flag or any of those things, the thin blue line, those can be used against you in a court of law with regards to establishing intent and your fear of an imminent threat to your life.
So you try to, you should keep all of those symbols off of your firearms.
And I know this is an infringement upon your First Amendment rights because you should be able to say whatever the fuck you're doing.
Anything you say or do may be held against you in the court of law, right?
So it's technically you're expressing yourself with your weapon.
So they can use that as a statement.
That makes sense.
But my position is if I'm using that firearm, I'm probably not going to make it.
You know, I'm either going to die or I'm running from the law anyway if I have to use that one.
unidentified
Yeah.
And that's really the bottom line.
Anybody that's in this country, anyone that is really, really desirous of armed is fucking sane.
Like there absolutely nothing that I want to do with being in a gunfight.
I don't want to be even adjacent to a gunfight.
Like no chance.
And I love I love firearms.
I train regularly.
I have I train with this these great ex-military guys, special force forces guy, this army ranger guy who goes all over the country, teaches handgun tactics and carbine tactics.
Really competent trainers.
I've been working with us for years.
So I'm around firearms on the regular and I'm not afraid of them, but I don't want anyone shooting at me fucking ever.
And you never want to have to be in a position to use it.
But that's why you have to have it.
unidentified
Well, I mean, people like us, unless you're, when you do something like you do, which is to, and what I do, which is to get out on the internet on the social media shit all day.
And they sent me a letter and they said they don't have shit on me.
But I've decided that I'm going to FOIA myself every 90 days or so so that if the FBI ever does arrest me, I can counter sue for them not disclosing I was under investigation.
I just mute because I don't want to give them the satisfaction.
unidentified
That's a good point.
I've just gotten to the point where I blocked because I just don't want them to see what I'm saying because I'm worried about them being mentally unstable.
And I just don't necessarily know.
If it was just me, I wouldn't really care.
But I've got kids.
You know, I just, I don't want to be in a situation where if I've, if I have upset somebody enough that they're making those types of inflammatory statements against me or to me on the internet, I know that they, that I've, I've triggered them to the point that I don't know what they're capable of.
I think if I did actually feel that way, if I did feel that way, I certainly would not express it in a digitally documented way.
unidentified
I don't like to speed.
I mean, and I was somebody that was a speed freak when I was growing up.
I had motorcycles, used to drive cars.
I literally set my control for four miles over the speed limit now.
I don't want to get pulled over.
I don't want to be, I mean, I've been told, you know, if you're within that five to 10 mile above the speed limit range, chances are you're not going to get pulled over in New York State.
And I go below five.
I'm just like, I don't want to, I don't want it.
I don't want any interaction with law enforcement ever.
I just want to, I pay all my taxes, disclose all of my income, don't play games.
I just want to live.
I'm going to play by your rules and I'm going to just exercise my constitutional rights within the confines because it's just, I don't want to be in jail for anything.
