Andrew Schulz and Akaash Singh dissect the Trump-Zelensky stalemate, arguing the Budapest Memorandum's lack of Senate ratification invalidates U.S. security obligations while criticizing European reliance on American aid. They pivot to domestic politics, diagnosing the Democratic Party as dominated by elites ignoring class grievances like egg prices, and debate Stephen A. Smith's viability as a populist outsider against identity-driven messaging. The conversation expands to global comparisons, contrasting Japan's safety with its rigid gender roles against Mexico's volatility, before concluding that "thermostatic public opinion" demands presidential vigor over passive inaction to prevent trust collapse. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Netflix Special Premiere00:05:04
Flager family, hello, how are you?
I'm very excited for this episode, not only because of our illustrious guests, but also because right now, March 4th, my Netflix special, Life is streaming currently right now.
You can go watch it.
You can watch it right now.
You can watch it after the episode, halfway through, however you want, whenever you want.
I just want to say thank you so much to everybody who came out to the tour.
Thank you so much, everybody who came out to the tapings.
I'm really proud of this piece, man.
I worked really hard on it, and I hope you go and you get something out of it.
You get some laughs, get some feels.
And if you want to spread the word about it, that'd be amazing.
That'd be incredible.
Let's blow this thing up, man.
Let's blow it the fuck up.
Let's set some records.
I want to set some damn records.
So spread the word, scream it from the rooftops.
And again, thank you guys so much for all the support throughout this entire process.
I love y'all.
Now let's start the show.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome, Flagrant.
Today we are joined by...
I would say the perfect guest to explain all the chaos happening around us.
We have Sager back in the year.
We have a lot of things we need to discuss.
We got Zelensky and Trampito and Vance.
Vance making a big move.
The Tate brothers coming back to Danny.
Tate brothers come back to the West.
Shout out the West.
Welcome home.
Welcome home.
They're like the new Britney Grani.
Whatever y'all said about Brittany Granny, y'all better keep that same energy about the tapes.
Yes or no?
A weed pen versus human traffic.
So you did that, though.
They're innocent.
What I'm saying is you call daddy when you get in trouble abroad.
These Muslim rapids.
We have enough Muslim rappers.
Yeah, that's right.
Another great point.
If you've got an issue with the Muslim migrants, keep that same energy.
That's right.
Now, what we can say on this pod is that's an American struggling abroad that needs our help.
And we got to go present those Americans.
He's a dual citizen.
He's an American.
He's American.
He's also Romanian.
So it's like, well, which law try on?
American.
Once you're American, you're always American.
All right.
That's like in Rome.
It's like he, if you're a Roman citizen, nobody fucks with you.
That was the rule.
Did you guys ever watch the HBO's Rome?
Do you know what I'm talking about?
No.
There's a great.
Spoiler alert.
Sorry.
I came up 20 fucking years ago.
So Daniel.
Where I think it was Pompeii got his head cut off by, I think it was Cleopatra or the Egyptians.
Okay.
And Caesar arrived.
And they're like, we cut his head off.
And they're expecting him to be happy.
And they're like, nobody executes a Roman citizen.
Except for another Roman citizen.
That's fire.
I fucking love that.
I like that.
So we are the ghost.
So if you're American, you're American always.
That's the rule.
Okay.
All right.
Even if you don't get that other citizen, we are enabled to see this.
We might as well start acting like Romans.
Yes.
Like, let's be honest.
If you saw two passports at the airport and one was the American one and then the other one was like magenta, whatever colors, the other people's passports, which one are you taking citizenship?
I'm taking America.
I mean, I don't even believe in dual citizenship, to be clear.
So I think I don't even think it should be allowed.
Can I go one further?
Yeah, go ahead.
I don't even believe we need passports.
Okay, why not?
Oh, it's Americans.
Yeah, you're right.
We're coming back.
Don't ask me what happened.
You're telling me to go to Thailand and they're like, you got to hit 45 days.
I'm like, oh, I like it.
I'm going to say it over three years.
But I'm coming home.
I'm $20.
You shut up.
I don't want to get nothing from no official anywhere in the world.
You're totally right.
We should be able to go wherever the fuck we want.
It's insulting when I show up to even Canada and they ask me about passports.
Especially.
I feel insulted.
Yeah.
How long are you going to stay?
As long as I please.
As long as I please.
We're in the 51st state now.
That's not going to happen.
Listen.
Greenland.
I don't even know if I want Greenland the way they're doing it.
I want Greenland.
No, no, no, no.
But the way they're acting, I did want to give them the opportunity to be American.
Oh, really?
And the fact that I don't see a lot of like tweets on like Greenland Twitter or whatever like that, I need to see more energy and excitement.
Why not?
I mean, they wore their MAGA hats for Trump Jr.
Do they really?
Well, I mean, there's controversy around it.
Why not?
Well, because they're saying that they rounded up a bunch of homeless Greenlanders and gave them migrants.
Don't know if that's true.
They say that's almost Greenlanders.
That's what I was thinking.
I was like, there's only 50,000 of you.
It's not big.
It's a huge place.
Listen, hard.
We're going to give a quarter pound of whale blubber to anybody that wants to join America.
Okay.
You can cut it open with that little bit of a paper.
What is it?
$50,000, $1 million each.
How much is that?
I mean, what is that?
Like five, either, what?
Five.
We're not paying anybody.
All right.
All right.
That's too much math.
Well, we don't pay anybody to be American.
Look at that.
That's what I'm talking about.
There you go.
That guy looks American.
He looks great.
That's a Greenlander.
Yeah, that's a Greenlander.
Yeah, he looks like a dagger wrestling.
Anyway, listen, we got a lot.
Well, no, what else we got?
We got a Doge.
We need to explain Doge.
Sure.
Oh, you're the expert on Doge now.
Apparently, I actually, I have no fucking clue what's going on.
I really have no clue, but you came in today.
Like, I think you, what did you say?
What did I say?
That I'm going viral.
Oh, no, you are going viral.
Yes.
You and Charlemagne's back and forth on Doge has been.
I've seen it everywhere.
That also could be my algorithm.
We're the top political analysts in the world.
JD Vance Peace Statement00:06:35
No offense.
You are.
No, no, no, no.
I'm taking.
People want to know what's happening.
You're the top MMA journalist.
You're the top political commentator.
I don't want anything.
It's not a top everybody.
It's just too much.
It feels like I've been bragging about it.
You're like a polymast, you know?
Yes.
Yeah, you and Charlemagne are kind of breaking points.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah, that's true.
Yeah, no, it's the same concept.
That's true.
It's the same concept.
Whoa.
I'm liking it.
Yeah, dude.
Did you steal our shit?
Yeah, I think I did.
You're smart people.
You're just brilliant, brilliant.
Okay.
And then we got more.
Like, there's a bunch of things that you are absolutely perfect to explain to us.
Oh, the gold card citizenship, I want to know.
I want to go off on that one.
Like, why Steve Bannon's back arounds?
Like, I just want to know all these things.
So, where do we want to start?
Obviously, the Zelensky thing is the biggest thing.
Probably, yeah.
Did you watch the whole thing?
I watched the whole thing.
Can you give us your honest breakdown of it?
Sure.
I mean, well, let me disclose my bias.
I've been very, I've been very against more aid to Ukraine.
I've been for a settled, you know, a settlement of the conflict now for quite some time.
So my bias, like totally upfront.
And so seeing that all happen was very, like, very pleasing to me.
But I'll try and be just like neutral.
So it was a 53-minute interaction.
It was during something called a pool spray, which is, so I used to cover the White House.
The way that these things usually work is you have the king chairs where Trump was in that chair, and you have Zelensky here.
It's like the head of state chair.
We usually, the camera, so like if you and I were sitting, the people who are watching, there'd just be a wall of cameras right here.
And it's supposed to just be diplomatic fineries.
Like it's supposed to just be like, yes, Mr. President, we welcome you to our country, blah, blah, blah.
For about 40 minutes, it mostly was totally chill.
Even Trump was like, you guys have been very brave.
If you watched a lot of this, he was very much trying to keep things under control.
But there was this moment.
And what happened is that Zelensky hates JD Vance for a variety of reasons.
Well, back when JD was a Senate candidate, so 2022, he had a viral moment where he was like, I don't care about Ukraine at all.
He said it on camera.
It became a huge controversy.
Obviously, he became a villain inside Ukraine, but he's also been kind of a chief opponent of more military aid to Ukraine or what I would call is like the Atlantic religion, like this idea that the United States and Europe are inextricably linked, that the invasion of Ukraine is not only an attack on democracy, it's an attack on America.
It's so that's kind of the Eurocentric Atlantic mindset, very Cold War mentality.
God is all right.
So Vance is somebody who's much more of a realist.
Like he thinks that there are checks and balances and that stockpiles are actual trade-offs, right?
So he's like, we can't just ship unlimited weapons to Ukraine because we have to worry about our own stuff or we need to worry about Taiwan or we need to worry about any other out.
It's pretty reasonable.
I would say it's quite reasonable, but you know, that's that they would say otherwise.
And that's fine.
It's a democracy.
But anyway, so put that all together.
JD, I think, was making a statement about bringing peace.
And it was at that moment that Zelensky really, you could see him lean forward the way I am right now.
And he's like, let me ask you a question, JD.
And that's when I was like, oh, shit.
Because, well, first of all, JD was calling him Mr. President.
He's calling him JD.
He's got a lot of hatred there.
Don't forget either, Zelensky came to Pennsylvania and for Josh Shapiro.
Not only that, he gave an interview here on U.S. soil attacking JD Vance, saying, I forget, you might be able to find it, Mark.
He either said he was too radical or something like that.
So Zelensky's had it out for JD for a long time.
I love your comfort telling Mark to go look somewhere.
Oh, I didn't say last time.
You know, Saka's making money when he's telling white people what you're doing.
That's our natural state.
That's what Vivek showed, right?
Our natural state is to tell you what exactly.
Tell that low-caste piece of shit.
Go Google something, man.
What do you got?
What do you got?
He's too radical.
There it is.
All right.
Google Waller.
Yeah, Zelensky.
Oh, man.
Zelensky calls Vance too radical, suggests that he needs to study World War II.
Yeah, so that was September.
That was right before the election.
And they start bickering basically over the terms of the 2014 ceasefire.
And it was then that this all starts to get very, very contentious.
Can I ask a real quick question?
Yeah.
Before this whole meeting, was this to present the agreement on the ceasefire?
Is that the idea?
Well, there's no ceasefire yet.
So it's called the minerals deal.
So over the last, let's say, a couple of weeks or so, Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Besson, went to Kiev basically to negotiate this long-term minerals deal.
The terms of the deal are, it was kind of complicated, but like basically it would give the United States rights to Ukrainian rare earth minerals, and U.S. companies would effectively have a monopoly over that.
In exchange, there would be an interest from the United States in a free and a sovereign Ukraine that would not be attacked.
Now, Zelensky wants something called an explicit security guarantee.
So if you attack us, we start bombing you.
We start bombing you.
Exactly.
So he wants his full-blown NATO membership.
That's not going to happen because it would mean Article 5 could get triggered.
That would obviously bring the United States into a nuclear war.
He's willing to settle, of course, settle for an explicit U.S. guarantee over what I think Ukraine controls now, although he's never even said that.
That would be a concession for him.
So this was supposed to be a meeting of fineries where we're like, yep, we're here.
We're here to work together.
We're here to work towards peace.
Zelensky just loses it over a couple of things.
One was Trump being like, this guy can't even say anything about peace with Putin, which, you know, I mean, let's give Zelensky the benefit of the doubt and all this.
His country's been invaded.
He's been at war.
His people are being killed.
So that's probably a lot to swallow.
But the thing is, is that from a pure diplomatic point of view, there's a template for all of this.
The king of Jordan was here two weeks ago.
Him and Trump are huge differences over Gaza, right?
Trump controlling Gaza.
And Trump says all this: oh, we're going to control Gaza.
Yeah, Jordan, they're going to give him a trip.
I mean, that Trump Gaza IG post was.
Look, it was wild.
It was wild.
Even the guys with the women with beards.
Those women with beards, I think, were great.
It's a very progressive Gaza.
Gaza's gotta woke.
Maybe that's why they cover him up.
Okay, go on.
All right.
So what happened?
But the king sits there.
You know, it's all diplomatic fine.
And then afterwards, he releases a saving.
We had great discussions, but and he just lays out his terms.
So that's an idea of contentious meeting, U.S. ally, but Jordan, you know, at the end of the day, receiving a shit ton of U.S. aid.
We're a major guarantor of their security.
Zelensky just can't take it and he breaks down.
So you can even see his posture.
He starts going at JD both over a ceasefire and he starts questioning basic facts.
Zelensky Forced Conscription00:13:26
So the fact that really set Zelensky off is when JD said, you are pressing your own male population into forced conscription because you don't have enough manpower on the front lines.
That is an objective fact.
The average age of the Ukrainian military is somewhere between 40 and 50 years old, which is insane.
That's like late stage Nazi Germany fighting in World War II.
That's the civil war, the Confederate military, the Confederate armed forces at the siege of Petersburg.
Who's left?
Exactly.
But that's actually a key point.
Remember, the Ukrainians refuse to drop their draft age from, I think it's 25 or 27.
I'm not exactly sure.
There's a whole generation of 18 to 25 year olds or 27 that are not currently eligible for the Ukrainian draft.
And it's because it's massively unpopular in Ukraine.
So out of both sides of their mouth, they're like, total war.
We're throwing everything we got this.
On the other side, they're like, well, we're also preserving our prime age male population to repopulate the Ukrainian state in the future.
So they're not really throwing everything that they do have here.
And in fact, previously, one of the U.S. demands was, hey, you guys got to drop your fucking draft age down to 18.
The reason they don't want to do that is A, the guys don't want to fight because they've watched probably a million or so people get killed is B, they're just going to flee.
I mean, if you guys go, so I was in Hungary and in Budapest, my guide, we walked past the Four Seasons Hotel and he's like, you see all these license plates?
It was like, Ukraine, These are all filthy rich Ukrainians who've been living in the Four Seasons Gresham Palace in Hungary.
I go to Vienna and same thing.
My guide is like, our strip clubs have never had better business than Russia.
They've been just throwing.
He's like, these Ukrainians have been throwing money around.
They don't want to fight.
I mean, a huge portion of their population is gone.
So there's all of that came to head when JD was like, you're forcibly conscripting people.
Empirically true.
There are videos of people, dude, sadly, even people who are mentally retarded, who have been pressed into service.
Probably the strongest.
It's horrible.
It's horrible.
But I mean, they can probably, dude, but you can also look at the.
If they don't even need a gun, you can send them out there.
They're ripping Russia that far with their embarrassment.
This is some silly think about it.
This is like Soviet Union.
I'm just saying.
I'm just saying.
What does a coach do?
You're going to have helmets on already.
So, guys, dates.
First of all, thank you everybody who came out to Zane's six sold-out shows.
So fun.
Nashville, underrated city.
March 14th and 15th, I'm in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Tickets aren't really moving there, so buy them.
Omaha, Nebraska, March 21st and 22nd.
Columbus, Ohio, these tickets will sell out March 28th and 29th.
Make sure you buy them.
Also, April 10th through 12th, we are making up for the shows that I missed in Tampa.
Those tickets are already almost gone.
Hurry up and buy them.
Also, 420 shows in Denver.
I'm hyped for this.
You know what I do on 420?
I get high.
So April 17th through April 20th, Denver, Colorado, Comedy Works.
We're going to be at both locations.
Those dates and more at Akashing.com.
I love that.
Hell yeah.
Somebody.
What's up, guys?
World's fastest ad read.
Rochester, New York, March 26th, April 27th, Portland, Maine.
I remember the noise can suck nicks.
That's Portland, Maine, not Oregon.
I'll see you guys there.
Let's get back to the show.
Thank you all so much.
Bye.
So the feeling or the sentiment is at least online that the population is fractured in terms of their support of the war.
Yes.
Which is not uncommon with countries at war.
I mean, America, Vietnam, right?
It was probably divided.
Even in an invasion, you have to remember, this is a country which, as a polity, like was very torn apart.
Like it is significant portion of their population, which spoke Russian, had affinity for Russia.
That's largely the part that Russia kind of controls.
Right.
The Donbass.
But then you also have the, yeah, the Donbass region, you're right, the Donetsk, but also you have this new Ukrainian identity, which has really emerged very distinct from how it used to be in the Soviet times and others.
So anyway, it's fascinating.
No, I've never been to Ukraine.
I've been to all around Ukraine, but never actually.
Ukraine is awesome.
Like Kiev is awesome.
Where did you go?
We went during the last war.
Which one?
The Crimea.
Oh, okay.
So 2013?
No, 2010.
It was that far.
Something like that.
But it was like, I got like, I knew something was up because I got an email from Expedia and they were like, by the way, it was something like, it was a, would you like to rent a car for your trip?
By the way, this is an act of war zone.
Be safe.
But that's cool.
We were there and it was unbelievable.
Food was amazing.
Culture, you know, party or beautiful people.
The food was incredible.
The food was incredible.
Food was incredible.
Yeah, I don't know.
Prostitutes were just so incredible.
Like the girl I saw.
No, that's another sad part of it.
What is that?
Just the number of Ukrainian women who apparently are being human trafficked all over Europe.
Apparently, it's a disaster, like all over Hungary, Vienna, in terms of prostitution.
They're being totally taken care of.
We're trying to figure it out.
I'm trying to figure it out.
It's easier with the retards to get out.
Listen, that is fucking horrible.
But these people were in Ukraine.
Do you know how fucking miserable those people in those countries they're going to are going to be?
Those people are going to be fucking furious because I saw a girl who had Areolas like church wafers.
They were the whitest Areolas I've ever seen in my entire life.
And I had to go to four different ATMs to get enough money off the path.
No, but salute to her.
Salute to her, man.
You know, shout out Zelensky.
Anyway, okay, so it seems like there's waning support.
This seems like there's waning support because they're all in the strip club with the white nipple chip.
18 to 25.
Yeah, they're gone.
Yeah, or they want to leave.
No, so it's a problem.
So in that fake an orgasm because I had sex once and then my boy had a girl and then he had sex and then he went back for number two and I'm just sitting on the couch with this poor girl.
I don't want to hurt her feelings.
So I take her back and I got the udon noodle.
My shit is not even close to her.
And then I just kind of pumped away for a little bit and then I was like, ceasefire.
Ceasefire.
Ceasefire.
Ceasefire, Ukrainians can support exactly.
Exactly.
Okay, so you were saying.
Okay.
So in this meeting.
I've also been to Russian strippers, too.
I didn't do anything.
Didn't touch them at all.
Just want to let sense.
Well, you probably should.
I wouldn't.
All right.
So what we have in this meeting is not only all of this beef around conscription, but really what happened is that Vance started to get very frustrated.
And he was like, you come here to the Oval Office of the United States.
You disrespect this office.
The worst mistake Zelensky made is that as Trump is getting furious, Zelensky.
This is the line.
This was the line.
Yeah, he said.
He said you have no cards.
You remember this?
The line to me was the line to me that ended it was you don't have to worry now about the ocean.
In the future, you have an ocean, so you don't have to worry now, but in the future, you will worry.
Yeah, something like that.
That's right.
He was like, don't tell us what to be afraid of.
I mean, that's this is Trump.
Like, Trump is not only transaction, it's about respect.
Apparently, they told Zelensky to wear a suit before he came and he didn't.
Zelensky decided not to.
So Trump called him after.
Did you see Trump?
Yeah, he goes, oh, you're dressed.
What did he say?
He's like, you dressed up.
He's dressed up.
It was fantastic.
But that line to me is where he lost everything.
Absolutely.
Because you're threatening.
He's basically acting acting this way for three years.
That's the shocking part of it.
Is he has this false look?
I mean, this is where I'm going to put my own bias on the table.
Let's look at all of the arguments for supporting Ukraine.
Number one is that we need to defend NATO.
And you're like, okay, well, Ukrainians are, or Ukraine's not in NATO.
Okay, got it.
Two, we need to defend democracy.
It's like, yeah, I mean, it's a democracy in the way that any corrupt Eastern European country is.
Zelensky's canceled elections.
Their parliament or their constitution says they can't even hold an election during wartime.
He has banned opposition parties, censored the media.
I mean, it doesn't look that democratic to me.
And actually, one of the core demands of the United States is like, hey, you need to hold an election.
And he's like, no, we can't do that.
Because I can't have that.
Until I, even in his, even in his interview on Fox News afterwards, they're like, Would you resign?
He's like, That is up to Ukrainians.
I'm like, How?
They can't vote, dude.
Yeah, it's like, How does that work?
Yeah.
Three was okay, and this is the most sinister and the disgusting one: is well, we need to support Ukraine because we're weakening Russia, which means what?
Which is that we are forcing the Russians to pour millions of men into Ukraine and kill as many Russians as possible.
And somehow, that's in the national interest of the United States: is that we're weakening Russia and we're making their economy poorer.
Here's the thing: Russia's not like here.
It's also not a democracy in a sense.
They don't give a shit about a million guys who get killed.
Go look at their history.
What always happens?
The war is a disaster.
It's a total shit show.
They make up for it with the vast population that they have.
They pour as many people in there very inefficiently to kill a shit ton.
And for some reason, the population, I mean, they don't love it, but they're not rioting in the streets in the way that in America.
It's like, dude, it's part of their lore.
In the Soviet Union, they lost almost 20% of their population.
That's a foundational myth of their country.
We went to Russia as well.
We did comedy.
We did comedy in Russia.
That actually must be horrible.
Well, we did it in Ukraine.
And so basically, and I was asking them about this, and I think that what they have culturally is a lower expectation of happiness.
Absolutely.
You're absolutely right.
And the advantage of that is there's like a suffering built into the culture.
It's in their story.
Yeah.
Like their story going back to the 1600s is just invasion, is projection.
All of Russian national security policy, all the way back to the time of the Tsars, is what?
Defense through depth, is vastness.
Our population, we conquer as much as we can, force the population to come through.
I mean, they've had horrible episodes.
They were conquered by the Mongols that went through and devastated all the way up to Kiev.
I mean, obviously, invaded by the Nazis, invaded by Napoleon.
Their strength is their vastness, is their population and their just capacity for suffering.
The Chinese have very somewhat different.
The capacity for suffering is huge.
It's built into the culture.
It's built into their literature.
There is this understanding that one does suffer.
Absolutely.
One of the and something very powerful about that, and I think this is something that Americans maybe do not have is since we haven't seen war on our front lines.
And I'm talking about actual war since the Civil War.
Oh, yeah, that's the closest we ever came.
And remember, what was that?
2% of the U.S. population was killed.
Remember, they got 20% of their population that was killed.
They had general orders during Stalin, the not one step back policy.
Stalin's son was captured and he threw his daughter-in-law in prison because they said any person who gets captured, your whole family is going to the gulag.
That is the DNA.
Now, I don't know Russians.
I don't know if this is like a benefit to this, but what happens when 20% of your population dies and it's men is that any man that's alive is like an absolute has six women.
That's right.
And this is why there was no standard for like not being an alcoholic or not being a piece of shit.
That's like interesting.
And it's true.
Literally, because if you had a cock that worked, that was the only way to continue procreating.
And I spoke to a guy who was like taking us around Ukraine.
He was like essentially our fixer right there.
And he was, and that's what he does.
He like takes people around these places where you might feel a little uncomfortable.
And he's like, yeah, there was a time where like six is an understatement.
You could have 12 different girls.
If you had a job, you could pay the bills and you could feed them.
And the girls had to kind of put up with it.
Now they get upset with that.
So what happens when they get upset about it?
There is a sexual revolution because you have to compete for the guy.
You're not in the position to be like, yo, I'm keeping my pussy tight because seven other girls are like, I'll open it up for whatever.
So now you have this like, yeah, 20% of the guys die, but the guys who are alive are like, it's party time.
Not even 20% of the guys died.
They just lived.
It was probably only women, right?
They just lived through the conflict.
Actually, I read a book about what Moscow was like when they thought the Nazis were about to come.
And it was the most debaucherous party that Moscow apparently had ever seen.
Like, people were just housing vodka, like having sex and stairwells.
They were right, they were excited.
There was just like, this is it.
They're about to die.
So we're all about to do it.
And so they just, it was crazy, man.
It's the same way.
If you read about how our guys behaved in London, the airmen, in World War II, you're like, yo, dude, this is disgusting.
You're like, this is bad, man.
Like, the U.S. Army's like trying to find prophylactic kits that will actually work.
The entire Piccadilly circus was a literal whorehouse for U.S. soldiers.
Dude, they have this is part of the World War II.
My grandma survived.
They've been doing this non-stop, okay?
My grandmother survived World War II.
I'm wrong, British piety.
She's a monkey British piety.
Barely survived.
She's a Piccadilly silly.
She doesn't take advantage.
She never goes as many pictures in the city.
She was in a bunker.
She's in a bunker bunker.
Jimmy Nice stockings.
Apparently, that's what they really died there.
No, U.S. soldiers stopped.
U.S. soldiers were paid five times the wage of a British soldier at that time.
US Army WWII Lore00:15:40
The guys had no chance.
The Brits were furious about it.
They're like, our invasion is here of these yanks.
These are Yanks.
They're oversexed, overpaid, and over here.
That was like all my family was over there at that time.
Boys.
Wait, you said Russia doesn't care about losing people, but why did they?
They don't care as much about it.
As much.
Why did they recruit North Koreans to fight for it?
Well, that's actually an interesting thing.
So, first, I think the North Koreans want battle experience because they have one of the world's largest militaries.
But two is the North Koreans have tons of ammunition.
They have a stockpile.
And actually, this is a useful thing for geopolitics.
I saw a tweet today.
They're like, why is the world take Russia seriously?
Like, smaller GDP than Texas, you know, all of this.
And I was like, oh, the answer is like 9,000 nuclear weapons.
It's like the same thing with North Korea.
I don't even know what the North Korean GDP is.
Like, probably a county in Choplin, Mississippi.
You know what I mean?
It's nuclear weapons and natural resources.
Yeah, of course.
Because if you just have one, you can't really compete on the global stage.
But when you have nuclear weapons and you have oil and gas, no one could really tell you what to do.
Bro, I was in Istanbul.
Yes.
And I saw the Russian oil ships coming through because they have to go through that.
Yeah, that's right.
What is that little strip bosphorus?
Bosphorus, yeah.
I think that's what it is.
And they basically took away the Russian lettering on the side of the ships.
Right.
So that's like, remember, there's like an oil embargo.
Nobody's going to buy Russian oil.
Total bullshit.
They just painted over the side of the ships and then Russian oil became useful exercise in like how power works.
So America, like our economy doesn't do, we don't produce anything.
We're a service-based economy.
And so we were like, oh, well, we're cut the Russians off from here and we're going to fuck them over.
And it's like, oh, Russian GDP is exploding.
Their war production is incredible.
They've increased year over year.
Their GDP is expand or their economy is expanding because of war production.
We tried to Karen them.
We canceled them.
No, yeah.
We literally tried to dare do business with Russia.
That's right.
We went woke and they made a lot of money.
And they made a shit a lot of money.
And actually, the European Union has spent more in year three just on Russian oil than they have given to Ukraine.
So there's a lot of talking out of all sides of their mouth.
But this is a very less useful lesson for America.
Guns, bullets, oil, that's the only shit that matters.
That's all that matters.
Oh, Nvidia stock or it's bullshit.
It means nothing.
Yo, right now.
You need this market.
We need this market to hold.
I don't think it's going to hold, man.
We need this market to hold.
There's some bad signs on the horizon.
Stop it.
That's interesting.
What's happening?
Oh, goodness.
I mean, what's the SP 500?
I don't think it's good.
It's been dropping like 1.5%.
Yeah, but in business earnings, and they have a new chip that's going to do really well.
But I didn't need to buy it back over the last month.
The XP is flat on the month, which is not great, but it's been dropping a little bit from somewhere.
Yeah, there's some signs that learn.
Yes, I mean, don't get me wrong.
It's like, we're still doing fine.
I hit up my guy and I was like, are we selling?
Say again?
Crypto's in the tank.
Yeah, crypto's in the tech either.
Okay, not really, though.
It's like when Bitcoin crashes from 100 to 80, you're like, come on, bro.
Like, you know what I mean?
It's like, two months, that's kind of crazy.
Okay, sure, but I'm not like, I'm not saying that.
Okay, it's like, what does crash mean?
Like, and this is also where we should be honest about the SP, where it's like, look, it's still up 20% on the year.
Don't even talk about SNP.
Like, it's fucking fine.
Just talk about NVIDIA.
Like, you got to speak about NVIDIA.
What is NVIDIA right now?
But you got to speak about it in the same way as Bitcoin then.
Sure, yeah, absolutely.
Because if you're going to look at that exponential growth over the past decade, listen, I'm saying, in terms of like national character, like, for example, I've been thinking a lot about this with cars.
With, look, American cars, like, if we're being honest, and if we had a totally free market, I'm buying a Chinese EV yesterday.
Wait, what?
Like, are you kidding me?
They're incredible.
There's this guy, Forrest, Forrest Auto Reviews.
He's so good.
He does all these videos showing BYD, the Xiaomi cars.
The BYD just rolled out full self-driving for even their car that costs fucking $10,000.
Like, if you buy a Tesla, FSD will cost you an extra shit.
No, no, no, no.
I don't want these to be sold here.
I don't want them to be sold here.
But that's my point: is that we have to recognize our cars, even though they suck.
This car industry, it's not only jobs.
During World War II, what did we do?
The Ford factory, that's rolling tanks off of there, right?
That's what the Russians have.
The Russians don't prioritize economic growth.
They prioritize guns, bullets, and strategic autonomy.
So this is also the problem with Ukraine.
Ukraine does not have any of that.
They're totally reliant on the United States and on why is he pulling up talking shit?
That's my point.
I just don't understand.
So you're giving us the facts.
You're giving us like the truth behind it.
You're acknowledging your bias.
Yeah, 100%.
But I think most Americans are just reacting emotionally to this.
Of course, which is the idea.
Of course, as people do.
And it's important to speak to them at the emotional level because that's where most people lie.
So the idea that we have here is: hey, we've been giving you billions of dollars.
And then you came up and you were kind of talking spicy to the person who's feeding you.
Yeah, that's right.
Now, I don't know why he thinks he can't just come kiss the ring.
Does he think he'll lose the support of the people in Ukraine if he does it?
I think he's why does he feel like he has leverage?
That's huffing European glue.
So the thing is, is that if you look right now, so right now, literally as you and I are speaking, they're in London crafting a peace agreement, which they're going to propose to us.
But this is where it's all bullshit.
So the France and France and Germany came up with a peacekeeping plan.
We'll have 30,000 troops there.
You don't have to do anything.
No, no U.S. troops on the ground.
I'm like, okay, good.
They're like, but you have to pay for it.
You have to provide ISR, which is intelligence support, you know, and all that.
You have to do your ISR.
You have to provide all the bullets.
You have to pay for it.
And so what are you revealing to us?
Is that France and Germany don't even have the capacity to forward deploy 30,000 peacekeeping troops in a tiny country like Ukraine?
I'm saying compared to the rest of the globe.
What should that tell you?
These militaries are nothing.
NATO's own chief says that the Russians produce more ammo in three months than all of NATO combined in an entire year.
That's with the United States.
Zelensky is acting as if there's another option.
Yes, he thinks that he can't be so naive.
He is, oh man, I think he is.
The rhetoric is he trying to do a deal?
He wants the UK and France and Germany and all the other NATO countries to give him a security guarantee before he will provide or he will sign any ceasefire or any deal.
But again, as I just told you guys, any peacekeeping deal signed by France or Germany is bullshit without even items.
They don't have any.
So here's the thing.
Why?
They're paper titles.
I heard what he said.
Yeah.
I heard what he said in it, where he's essentially like, hey, we could do this ceasefire agreement, but they haven't respected ceasefire agreements in the past.
Right.
Which I understand.
No, he's actually correct about that.
So he's like, why would this matter if I do a ceasefire agreement if we know for a fact that they don't respect me?
It matters because Uncle Sam is the person who is signing underneath it.
That's the fundamental difference.
You also signed protections before for the Ukraine, if I'm not mistaken.
Well, was it in Budapest that we decided if they would relinquish their nuclear weapons and we would support the USA?
So let's talk about that too.
I hear this a lot from the pro-U.
Before we go back to the, before we get to that one, again, I'm not trying to like catch you here.
What I'm trying to do is somewhat understand his perspective.
And this is what I thought.
Because there's a part of me that goes, listen, as long as Trump is in office, Russia is not doing a single thing if this is agreed upon.
Yeah.
Nothing's, and if Trump was going to be in office for the next 40 years, this version of a ceasefire where it doesn't guarantee American muscle behind it, this version of ceasefire, Russia's going to respect 100%.
Here is my concern if I am Ukraine.
Yeah.
Or if I am Zelensky.
And I think he handled it horribly in the room.
There's a much better way to say, like, if I was him, if I did want to litigate it in the media, as JD Vance said, what I would say is this.
I know I could sign this deal with you and you would protect us.
And I know that Russia would not mess with you because they take you seriously and they would not.
But what happens if next election we get the same people back that they did not take seriously and they're not afraid of?
Yes.
How do I get security?
I'm not worried about the next four years because I know that Putin would not be stupid enough to mess with Donald Trump.
I would keep on going that he would be crazy because you would do the ultimate thing.
But in four years, according to your laws, you're not going to have Donald Trump.
We don't know what would happen.
And now we're left in the dark.
And the next administration could have the same sway with Putin as the last one did, which is Putin is not afraid with him.
He'll do what he wants.
What do you say to that?
You're not wrong at all.
And that's why you should have shut your fucking mouth and you should have signed that minerals deal.
Because in that minerals deal, it was in strategic interest for the United States to have a free, a sovereign Ukraine, a business relation.
For example, why do we care about Europe or Taiwan or any of these places?
You think we care about fucking democracy?
We care about the TSMC chip in Taiwan.
Okay.
Why do we care about Vietnam?
Because they make all of our clothing.
Why do we care about Germany?
How many German cars are on the road?
All relations between states come down to trade.
That is a fundamental insight.
The problem of the post-World War II order is what's led to this: we have decided, oh, it's democracy and feelings and all this other bullshit.
It's like, no, the purpose of a Navy is a good thing.
So you're saying a trade deal would incentivize the United States to protect them because if Russia invaded any further and it negatively impacted our resource economy, yes.
Now, what if they invaded further, but it didn't impact the places where our resources came from?
Yeah.
Well, this is a, well, that's a bigger question of whether we should even have NATO membership for a lot of these countries.
Look, it's settled.
It doesn't matter.
The U.S. Senate has ratified the treaty.
But there were a lot of people in the 90s when they were talking about NATO expansion into Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.
We're like, guys, this is in the traditional, not only sphere of influence, but what compelling interests does the United States have in these three countries?
Like bilateral trade of those three probably does not even equal bilateral trade between us and a single province or a single state in Mexico.
Like, and see, this is the thing.
We don't want to talk in balance sheet terms, and it's important.
But coming back to your point, you're right.
But here's the problem: you have no leverage.
At the end of the day, you do not matter to the United States.
And this is my bias again, but at the end of the day, the United States has no compelling interest over who compels the Donetsk region of Ukraine.
They just don't.
In fact, all of Ukraine, even before the invasion, ranked like 50-some billion bilateral trade with the United States.
That's one fourth of what we do with Brazil.
If Brazil was invaded by Argentina, I'd be like, see you.
I was like, good luck.
Work it out.
I'll buy my coffee from Colombia.
It's amazing.
It's amazing.
That arrogance.
He must know something we don't know.
By creating a financial alignment, I feel like he loses even more leverage.
Like by creating an ideological position.
Yo, you're exactly right.
That's just more of a position.
Well, because on that planet.
Can you explain that?
Well, in my mind, like if you're just making it purely financial, then Russia could now broker a deal and be like, hey, if we can protect the money, which they did.
They said that.
They were like, hey, we have rare earths too, by the way.
And Russia will warn them.
Which they do.
They actually have a lot more.
So by making it purely financial, now Russia could just come in and be like, hey, it's a race to the bottom.
We'll just beat them on purpose.
Or we'll go.
You're totally correct.
Or Russia could go, we're going to invade.
We're going to take over those resources.
And we're going to give them to you for half price.
Russia just got a little bigger, bro.
Because Zelensky knows this.
It's a race to the bottom.
So then now he has to say it's ideological we have to protect democracy.
Yes, you're double-click everybody on that one.
So we have to so we have to protect democracy, even though he is not protecting democracy within his own country.
It falls apart on its very own line.
Sure, but emotionally, he's doing the right thing to protect the longevity of the United States.
No, he's played his cards incredibly.
But not this moment.
No, not this moment.
Up until this, you will study Zelensky.
And I do not like Zelensky.
I think he's taking advantage of the United States.
I think he's an arrogant prick, all of this.
The way he handled himself immediately after with the media by convincing the West and others that there is this compelling interest, he was managed to get $100 billion from the world superpower, more than we spent on 20 years of the Afghan national security forces we have sent to Ukraine in three years.
Think about that.
That's fucking insane.
The greatest transfer of military aid in modern U.S. history.
On top of that, he convinces all of these European nations, Germany, France, the great powers, not only to come to his defense, but to tie his borders to their own and say it is the strategic interest of the French, of the German, of the UK people to make sure that we're compelling.
And, you know, in the beginning, a lot of them did support that.
But, and this is where it all starts to fall apart.
Now we're watching what will actually happen with a Europe led by Europeans.
So when we look at the polling that's in the UK and France and in Germany, they're like, support for Ukraine was sky high.
Now they're like, should we continue or should we have a deal?
In almost every country, it's flipped.
So the Europeans are now in a position where they would probably have to increase military aid to their maximum capacity, give them everything not stripped down to the ground.
And they would still maybe, I don't know, maybe one sixth or something like that.
And it wouldn't be the United States provides.
I mean, already the United States, we have given Ukraine $67 billion in military aid.
That's more than every other country in the world combined, right?
The Europeans are like, oh, we've given Ukraine a bunch of aid.
It's like, bro, you've been fucking refugees.
Yeah, but I'm saying I'm mad.
But I'm saying you could throw it.
Guns and bullets are the only.
You can throw 10 trillion at Ukraine and Russia will just match it with dead bodies.
Yeah, almost certainly.
I mean, it's a little more complicated than that.
I think the only thing that would really change is nuclear weapons on the ground, which is not happening.
But that's actually, let's return to that.
Because one of the ways that the Ukrainians often bring up why America not has to support them and not just should is the Budapest Agreements.
And back the Budapest Memorandum, which was in the 90s, where they agreed to give up their nuclear weapons.
And in exchange, the United States was like, yeah, we'll think about protecting it.
Oh, it's not, we're going to protect them.
No, no.
And even if we had said that, it was never ratified by the U.S. Senate.
And this is where you have to flip it and think about the Russian justification for invasion, where they said, your Secretary of State said, we will not expand NATO.
That's true.
Our Secretary of State, Burns, under George H.W. Bush, he was like, look, we're not going to expand NATO.
Don't worry about it.
They were like, okay, that's the position of the U.S. government.
Well, what changed?
They lost the election.
Bill Clinton came into office.
George W. Bush came into office.
They changed the policy.
But the thing is, is that the Russians are like, but you said it.
And what we would say is, yeah, what you just said, the administration at the time said it.
That didn't make it the treaty binding obligation of the United States, where two-thirds of the United States Senate ratified we will never expand NATO.
So no, it's not fair to say that America guaranteed.
That's not how our system works, nor should it, right?
The word of the president.
It's not a king who sets foreign policy for all the time.
Exactly.
And so the Budapest Memorandum, yes, it was a policy document, but it provides no obligation from the United States to lift one finger for Ukraine.
And if we think about, again, where the Russians are coming in, they're like, okay, so in the post-Cold War era, you guys bombed Kosovo.
Is that in NATO?
Why was that a NATO operation?
You guys, NATO literally took out Gaddafi.
You know, one of the things that the North Koreans always tell us, because we're like, hey, give up your nukes.
They're like, I'm not giving up my nukes.
Gaddafi gave up his nukes.
You've shoved a rot up his ass and blew the shit out of his whole country.
Dumb I had to give up your nukes.
Do you think they would ever give up your nukes?
Kim Jong-un will never give up his nukes.
If I was them, I'd be like, fuck you.
If I was never a country in the world right now, why would you?
I would be trying to develop them.
Yeah, that's exactly whatever agreement is going on.
It's the only thing that maintains your security.
You're absolutely right.
And Libya proves that.
Iraq proves that.
The North Korean regime surviving to this day proves that.
And Russia, its ability to invade Ukraine and, frankly, get away with most of it is what?
Nuclear weapons.
So we love that reality.
Is this an argument?
North Korean Nuclear Stance00:15:12
But it's just true.
For Zelensky, then, if we cannot trust the daddy country, i.e. America in this situation, to protect, then why make a deal that you know that they won't reach out?
I mean, so then you're just going to fall apart without us.
Don't fall apart.
Say, we will say, give us nukes.
Okay, yeah, you can say that or just say, no.
Yeah, like, no.
Next question, right?
Give us nukes.
You know what I would say?
Develop it yourself then.
If you're so great, you have all these great scientists, all this.
Go ahead.
Nothing's stopping you.
You can do whatever you want.
Oh, usually we do stop them.
But if they're trying to enroll.
I'll tell them this.
If you guys want to go for it, go for it.
I mean, you literally will, first of all, you're being invaded.
Second, I mean, your country, their own analysts tell us that they'll fall apart in three months after the cutoff of U.S. aid.
This is, again, just where we have a small nation that thinks it's a great power and can dictate terms.
Why do they think that's the European state?
Where's the real new?
So the Europeans are propping him up and thinking that they're like the last line of defense for democracy.
I can't figure out.
How do you not read a spreadsheet?
That's where I do.
I'm like, bro, look at the number of bullets coming in.
I'm just a more...
I'm not even talking about the spreadsheet.
I'm talking about like, what interest does Putin have in expanding Russia into Europe?
Well, that's, well, here's the thing.
Does he have an interest?
Yeah.
In tradition, like, you know, Russia controlled vast swaths of all that territory, Latvia, Lithuania, Georgia, all of these parts were traditional part of the Soviet or the Russian Empire.
But here's the thing.
Three of those countries I just named are in NATO.
So the interest you have to not do it is to avoid nuclear war.
Also, Russia is a Christian nation.
That's true.
I don't understand why he would expand West into Europe with all these Muslim countries like England and Germany.
Keep talking to him.
Go ahead and tell him.
Why do you want Muslim nations to rush?
Yeah, that's right.
He actually does use a lot of that, though.
Oh, yeah.
He talks a lot about the Orthodox Church and about how Ukraine is attacking the Russian Orthodox, which is true.
It actually has been happening.
And they're attacking the Russian Orthodox and how it's like a defense of Russian, whatever.
I don't like that stuff.
So, so, so, okay.
So the, how does this, how does this play out in the very near future?
What do you think happens?
Near future.
This is going to happen.
So he tuck his tail and refused to.
He had Fox interview immediately afterwards.
He had hours to think about it.
He did it live.
It was four hours in between to apologize.
He didn't apologize.
He just said, no.
He's like, we had to have honest dialogue.
Like, he's huffing the European.
Like, he believes that Europeans can protect him.
He's in London, literally, as I said, as we speak.
And the near future is they're going to propose some peacekeeping plan.
America's going to say, no, why should we pay for that?
Why should we continue to do it?
And it'll be, look, it's up to Trump, too.
I mean, if I were Trump, to continue weapons flowing into Ukraine when they're actively working against your policy is ridiculous.
Like, oh, I think that Zelensky needs to find out tomorrow what reality, and this, again, this is my personal opinion.
Moving from analysts, this country, its greatest victory is survival.
You get to live.
Do you know how lucky?
But they don't, that's what I'm trying to say.
Somebody's drinking a Kool-Aid over there.
I don't know what the fuck is that.
I don't get it.
But yeah.
I mean, I do get it in a sense.
Would I accept that?
No, but I'm an American citizen.
We have nukes.
We have the greatest military.
And I want to hear what you're saying, but I don't get it because let's just be honest here.
There's only a few countries.
Every other one exists based on the relationship.
That's right.
Spheres of influence theory.
That's what you're talking about.
Exactly.
Like, China's a real country.
Russia's a real country.
China.
America's a real country.
The U.S., India, UK, Germany.
Well, UK, Germany.
I don't know if they're real.
And they have nuclear weapons.
So, like, you know, it buys you something.
Okay.
And they have, what, G7 economies?
Like, they're not, they're not ridiculous.
They're failure.
They are definitely going down.
If you can't bang on your own, you're not a real country.
Okay.
I agree with you, by the way.
I'm totally with you.
Yeah.
But I think when you have a nuke, you can't get it.
Okay, fair enough.
Fair enough.
But now, does real quick, real quick.
So the point I'm trying to say is like, if Ukraine cannot defend itself, empirically, they cannot.
From Russia.
There's no chance without the support of these other countries.
You can't dictate to those other countries what the policy is.
That's right.
Right.
Because you don't have sovereignty.
That's right.
You're not really a sovereign nation.
Absolutely.
You are a sovereign nation as much as someone else will be.
You are a vassal state.
Yes.
You are a vassal state.
If we think about the old, this is the issue with the way that we talk about this stuff: Americans, and unfortunately, a lot of people don't want to speak in reality.
Is America, the rules break international order?
Is that for the benefit of everybody else or is it the benefit of the United States consumer?
Like, let's all be honest here.
Like, let's be that's one of the things I actually love about Trump.
Trump is a mercantilist.
He says shit where he's like, Yeah, we'll protect you.
You have to give us 500 million in minerals or billion in minerals.
People are like, What?
No, democracy.
It's like, guys, oh, we protect democracy, but one of our greatest allies is Saudi Arabia.
Fucking kills people.
We don't care.
We don't give a fuck.
We don't care.
It's like, oh, you have oil?
Okay, let's go.
They don't like it.
They're promoting.
They're doing great work over there.
I apologize, Sheikh Mohammed.
There you go.
There you go.
Sheikh Saeed, please.
They're doing fantastic work over there.
Okay.
It's just, we've been told for the longest Russia's the enemy, Russia's bad.
Why all of a sudden are we okay with just like, hey, Russia, you can invade another country and take their land?
I think that's a fair question.
And it comes down to, I feel bad for the people.
I feel bad for the people who really believe that and are now watching how geopolitics works in real time.
Like the idea that the United States, who invaded Iraq for literally no reason, is going around dictating, you know, illegal and illegal.
That's one of my favorite things, by the way, is Russia illegally invaded Ukraine.
I was like, what's a legal invasion?
There's just an invasion.
There's just an invasion.
There's just a successful invasion or an incidental invasion.
But to return to your point, that goes to the religion.
That's what I was talking about, the Atlantic religion, this idea that all borders are sovereign, that they do not change from post-World War II.
Countries don't just invade each other.
And I don't think they're wrong.
The real politic answer for that would be invasion, all that is bad for business.
But the point that comes down to it is what compelling interest does the United States have in continuing this war?
Not only for our economy, you know, the United States consumer probably paid an extra buck fifty for gas for two straight years because of Russian sanctions.
It was a disaster for our economy.
I actually think it's a huge reason Biden lost the election, if you think about a lot of the inflation, where that came from.
But even more so, What we know at the end of the day is that we cannot change the reality of this war without direct United States intervention.
But shouldn't it be the interest of the world to not let countries do that?
There's no such thing as an interest in the country.
What stops Russia from just keeping women?
Well, what stops Russia is that we have NATO membership around all of these other countries and they're not going to invade because we're going to nuke them.
But every other country in the world is like, first of all, we have no obligation to do it.
But second, what is the impact on America?
Do some deals.
I think Sagar is a lot of people.
Boston Russian oil.
All this shit is propaganda.
Like all this, and the U.S. is kind of a victim of its own propaganda.
It doesn't need to be our enemy.
There's no reason.
There's literally no reason.
That's what I'm saying.
Like, why are we at?
Like, let's, let's, what is that?
What is it?
The McDonald's theory or whatever?
Like, two countries with the McDonald's haven't gone to war, which I think they have now.
Sounds stupid.
But yeah, yeah.
But the idea is like this mutually assured success.
Like, let's get in each other's pockets.
Well, actually, I disagree with that theory.
Really?
It's called democratic peace theory.
It's the idea that democracies don't go to war with each other.
But there's also beyond that is like countries that trade and become more westernized.
It's like, well, China's got a lot of McDonald's and they've actually become more authoritarian.
Like the more.
We're not going to war with them.
No, I agree.
But my point is that it doesn't lead to democratic outcomes per se.
I don't care if they have democracy.
I'm done with that.
As long as we have a democracy.
Okay, good.
I'm done.
Democracy are.
I hate this idea like a country got to get a democracy and within 10 years figure it out.
We had a whole civil war over democracy.
This shit takes hundreds of years.
And even then, every election, it's good versus evil.
And presidents are getting shot at.
Let's stop acting like they got to figure it out immediately.
And if they don't want it, fine, you don't want it.
But this is what happens.
Whatever we say goes.
That's the rule.
Correct?
That's the rule.
That's not happening.
No, but it's not happening.
I think what Sagar's saying is throughout history, it's never actually been about that.
Yes.
We didn't give a fuck about Vietnam having democracy.
There was some other resource we wanted.
We didn't give a fuck about Iraq and we wanted oil.
Yes, but that was a good question.
That's more of an ideological thing.
See, that's a very good example.
That was when ideology trumped national interests.
Ukraine, Vietnam, Ukraine, Vietnam, Iraq all have three things in common.
They are wars not of national interest.
They are wars of ideology.
That's where the American people see through it clearly.
We're good.
We're nice.
We want to protect and stop bad things from happening.
Is that front?
Isn't that a while or is it actually ideological reasons?
Because what I'm picking up from here is what I'm picking up is we give the American people this ideology and that's why we need to invade.
And maybe not Vietnam, I don't see it, but with Iraq, it was oil.
It was whatever.
Get back for George Senior.
Who knows?
There was another real reason.
And it's probably what Trump seems to be kind of cutting through is like, I don't give a fuck.
I'll give you freedom.
It's not about your freedom.
It's about what you can do for us.
That's exactly.
And that seems to be what it actually has always been about.
What I'm picking up here.
When you look at liberals and their main concern right now, they're like, America did not vote with the rest of the United Nations.
I'm like, so who gives a fuck what you know what?
Oh, so the UN had a resolution condemning the invasion of Russia.
I'm overall.
And they're like, oh, America did not vote.
And I was like, okay, so Montenegro voted for it.
I'm like, why should I give a fuck what Montenegro?
Sky, Scott, what are we doing here?
Discussion.
We got to stop just rolling over and letting people.
We got to stop letting people countries like that.
But what is that?
But see, you say un-American, where it's like, well, for example, like, what is un-American about Russia invading a territory which has been disputed by their own population?
You know, it's like so.
Okay, but we didn't really.
I mean, we didn't have a tree.
We don't have a treaty saying that we care about Ukraine.
If we did, I'd say, look, let's go for it.
We have to honor our words.
But Russia, now they take over all their resources.
Now Russia gets stronger.
Is that advantageous to us?
It depends, right?
It depends on our relationship with Russia and what we want out of it.
I want us to reduce our nuclear weapons pointed at each other and actually focus on where the real economic growth of the world is happening in Asia.
So this is a very Obama-like idea.
They pivot to Asia.
Is that Europe?
Is it a declining continent?
Empirically true.
If you look at their economic growth versus ours, 50% of global GDP will be in Asia by 2030, not that long ago, only five years.
If you look at the concern the American foreign policy elite has for Germany, for France, for frankly, these countries where, you know, they basically have chosen their social welfare state, fine, but they have not backed up their defense or ability to protect themselves.
We pay for French healthcare, you know, whether people like it or not.
Like we protect them so they can have their nice socialist beliefs or Germany or any of these economies.
If they had paid for their own military, it wouldn't be impossible.
It's impossible.
Look at the way it's very important.
I mean, look at their militaries and their inability.
They say this is such a compelling interest.
I'm like, well, fucking fight for it then.
Go ahead.
You won't do it.
And you think the average Frenchman will give up his health care to protect Ukraine?
No.
That's another reason why it's all complete bullshit.
But my point is we Americans don't for what's important.
And I think that that like changes, I think it changes your opinion emotionally.
Now, there are certain advantages to having this type of leverage on the world.
Of course.
Right.
Like, obviously, if these countries cannot defend themselves, they have nuclear weapons.
France is a nuclear weapons.
But if they cannot defend theirselves.
They can do it in a very dire situation.
But I'm saying in a situation like Ukraine, it's like 1 billion Euro to Ukraine.
It's like, piss off, bro.
You have nothing.
What military do you have?
That's a joke.
The ideological thing of like, how can we let this happen?
It's like, what do you mean?
I actually think it's kind of chauvinistic to say that we have the ability to conduct all of the affairs of the world.
Like rarely what's happened, that might have been true in 1991, in what's called the unipolar moment when the United States was the sole superpower.
That's just not the case.
Like we have a total return to multipolarity where you have the rise of China, of India, of, you know, even Russia continues to punch above its weight.
Japan, South Korea, North Korea, all of these countries.
This idea that I think is actually un-American is that we should be conducting all of the affairs of the world.
Instead, what we should return to is to lose some of our hubris and actually say, okay, what's actually important to us?
What are we going to do?
This is the line right here.
And this is traditional American foreign policy going back to the Monroe Doctrine.
The Monroe Doctrine was, you guys do whatever the fuck you want.
Just don't come over here to the Western hemisphere.
This is ours right over here.
And we acknowledged the great powers of Europe.
And from that point forward, even in the Cold War, we're like, look, it sucks that Hungary is communist, but what the fuck are we going to do?
They got nuclear.
Let's not go crazy.
We're bending over it.
Stop bending over.
No, no, no, it's not bending over because we're not taking anything.
But I like the idea.
This is what I like the idea.
I like the idea of extending our influence around the world as far as we want to go with it.
Okay.
But I don't want that influence to be like plays or whatever.
That's a great point.
I don't care about identity, politics, influence.
I care about geopolitical influence.
I care about pushing certain countries to agree with us on certain deals that are advantageous to us.
I want the best deal that we could possibly have for America with every single country in the world.
I don't care if you're a democracy.
I don't care if you're a dictatorship.
I don't care if you're pro-trans.
I don't care if you're anti-trans.
None of that personal shit I give a fuck about.
I just care about the money.
But I do want to exert that influence around the world because that influence benefits Americans.
And that's what I care the most about.
But that's, I think the problem is that right now we piss all this money and influence away.
For example, the United States, the blue.
Oh, can I say one thing real quick?
Go ahead.
I actually think that it reduces our global influence.
Yes, you're right.
When we're trying to push these identity politics issues to these other countries that resist it culturally.
Where back in the day, I think that we had so much gravitas with these other countries because they looked at the West, especially America, as this like beacon of hope.
Like when you're seeing a guy on a fucking horseback with a revolver going around and shooting, you're like, oh my God, America looks kind of cool.
Now, when you see some like neutered cuck telling you that like his four-year-old daughter is actually a boy, you're like, I don't know if I want to be American anymore.
Dude, you're at, well, first of all, you're nailing it.
I'll give you a perfect one on this.
Okay.
Our ambassador under Biden to Japan was Ram Emmanuel.
Ram Emmanuel inserts himself into a gay marriage debate in Japan because Japan was having a debate about gay marriage.
The Japanese Conservative Party is furious.
I go, oh, the U.S. Ambassador Japan has one fucking job.
How many Toyotas can we make an area?
That's the irony that Ram Emmanuel was just on Bill Maher show and he was and he said this sentence.
Tesla State Department Contract00:16:23
Yeah.
He goes, We need to get back into the education of the kids in schools.
He goes, he says this specifically because they were talking about like Chicago and all these like Dem cities that were like kind of struggling.
And it wasn't posed as like a lib suck.
It was like, what do you think about this?
You run a city.
And he goes, he says, he goes, we need to get into the classrooms and out of the bathrooms.
The irony.
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
He's petitioning for gay marriage.
I don't care what you guys do with your gays over there.
Matter of fact, if you've got some really talented gays over there and you want to kill them, let's bring them over here.
We do great shit with our gays.
Gays flourish in America, right?
It's just my point.
It's like Japan, third largest economy in the world.
They're all gay.
Our concern with Japan is one thing.
How do you do that?
Toyota, gay guy.
You know, Toyota, Panasonic, any of these.
Oh, they're good.
That's it.
That's all we should be fucking caring about.
Are they coming over here and saying, oh, you guys do this?
No, they don't give a shit.
Well, they don't have that influence.
But that's the influence.
And I think that's where it's like, we have to have some restriction.
I love our influence, especially through like cinema, a TV show.
I love the soft power.
I love it through social media.
I love that.
As long as it's not, as long as it's not taking away from our ability to have advantageous trade deals.
Yeah, absolutely.
So if you wanting to be American makes you want to be capitalist, makes you want to be an entrepreneur, makes you want to be a hustler, and that in some way gives you empathy for our culture.
And now we have some leverage in your country, that's awesome.
Awesome.
The second our American influence starts to make you feel uncomfortable, like it has in the Middle East.
Listen, democracy doesn't work in the Middle East.
Let them do what the fuck they want.
I agree.
Once they get addicted to money, democracy, it's not going to be democracy, but we're going to get everything that we want.
My point is just let them do whatever the fuck they want to do.
All right.
So like I've lived in Qatar or whatever.
It's like, yeah, it's like a literal monarchy, like an actual religious monarchy.
It works for them.
It's like, okay, I wouldn't want to live there.
I didn't like it there, to be honest.
But do whatever you want.
I don't.
That's all I really think.
That's how I feel about Japan, about any of these other countries, is it's all just about us coming together.
And this is the world order.
This was the point of this.
When did you have to leave, by the way?
Probably like 2:30.
Okay, we got some time.
We have other topics.
Okay, we got a lot that we got to talk about.
Okay, so that's Lynch.
We can stop this.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, that's Lynch.
Okay, let's go.
All right, guys, let's take a break for a second.
Unbeknownst to him, maybe, I don't even know if he knows that there's 28 million people employed by this TikTok.
It seems like TikTok does good for them.
It seems like it.
I think that's what they want us to communicate with this ad.
The only thing I care about is TikTok is paying me money to say this.
Yeah.
They're paying you money and you money and you money too.
It's good for our small business.
TikTok is supporting our small business.
Finally, TikTok.
We've been waiting for this.
But if you'd like to learn more about TikTok's contribution to the U.S. economy, and most importantly, Flagrant, you can go to TikTokEconomic Impact.com.
Did you know that?
Now you know.
First thing, just discussing Doge really quickly.
I think that there are very few Americans that would say that they do not support a reduction in waste and inefficiency.
Correct.
Especially when it comes to government institutions.
So this is a bipartisan measure that Americans are supportive of.
Doge has become incredibly partisan.
First, can you tell me why you think that is?
I think it is about wars of credibility, of institutions, and of process.
So something I think is...
What does that mean?
And speak to me emotionally.
Like, why, why does, I'm not talking about like politically why it has.
I'm talking about why the average person on Twitter feels compelled to be so critical of Doge.
Like, what do you think is being communicated to them?
And why are they having such a knee-jerk reaction to it, knowing that they do want to reduce government efficiency?
For them, it's about Elon's complete and total judgment over this.
They don't trust Elon.
I would say that's it.
And is that fair?
Yeah, I do think it's fair.
I do think it's fair.
Let's make that argument.
What's the steel man against?
The steel man against Doge is that you have a person who is unelected by the United States, who is a sole power over what gets cut, which violates the Constitution because the Constitution, the power of the purse is within Congress.
Congress gets to decide what programs get cut or not.
He is, according to them, illegally shutting off and doing these things and also at times has conflicts, major conflicts of interest in many of the decisions.
What is an example of those?
A perfect example is right now.
State Department was my friend Ryan Grimm, he works with us at Breaking Points, broke a story about there was originally going to be some State Department contract awarded to Tesla for, I forget the number, it was like maybe 4 million or something.
After Trump got elected, that contract went up to 400 million for Tesla's armed up cyber trucks.
And then they actually took the word Tesla off the website and changed it to electric vehicle.
Now, it's not great.
Can we all admit it's not great?
So this is good.
Before we move on, we got to appease people emotionally who see things like this and go, hey, this doesn't feel constitutional.
This feels manipulative.
We feel taken advantage of.
That's a pretty steel steel man.
Bethlehem steel.
So it's like, that's why I feel like there's a lot of gaslighting going on.
And as much as we all agree we want to reduce government efficiency, I mean, like Akash hilariously says it every single week here.
He's just like, fire them all.
Like, 98% of them can go.
So there is that feeling, but we have to give some credence to a situation like that.
And there might be more context to this.
There might be a more nuanced take to it.
I get it.
Maybe Elon could describe it.
Sure.
But on the surface, people acting reacting emotionally to it.
That does look like corruption in another way.
Yeah, I like the Charlemagne thing.
I heard your argument about this.
What was that?
Well, I thought it was interesting where you were like, hey, if you're a cop and you come to me and I'm like, yo, don't look in the basement.
You're like, there's some shit in the basement.
There's some shit in the basement.
100%.
But also just the idea of like government spending going to certain people.
Like this happens on like a municipal level where like the mayor is friends with the person that has the construction company and that construction company gets the rebuilding project for the local bridge.
And then he gets the kickback.
Now, we know that that's a form of corruption.
When we see this, it's okay for someone to look at it and be like, that kind of feels like the corruption you're trying to scrub out.
Now, he might make the best vehicle for that job.
It might be right to increase that spending.
But I also need some transparency there.
And you need to come out ahead of it, not wipe Tesla off the car.
You need to come out ahead of it and gain my trust as an American and go, hey, this was the original deal.
This amount was going to be spent over here.
We think that this is better for these reasons.
And that's why more money is spent there.
And I totally get why you think this looks like a favor handed over.
Like, stop.
The American people are done being lied to.
And when we see shit like that, we have such little trust.
It's almost like a girl who gets cheated on by every boyfriend.
They're not wrong.
They're correct.
The girl that gets cheated on by every boyfriend.
The second a dude is talking to a waitress and she's laughing, the knee-jerk reaction is, oh, that motherfucker's cheating too.
So that's what we feel like when we see that.
Yes, yes, you're right.
And I think it is important to talk about it in that way.
And that's where it comes back to process.
So, like you said, we've got Doge, which is kind of unilaterally deciding what and what is not, gets to be spent according to them.
And so, one of the interesting things I took away from your thing with Charlemagne, and if I were Charlemagne, what I would have said is, Andrew, it's fine to look, but they're not looking, they're actually acting.
And the acting is the part where I think a lot of the liberals are, I think, correctly upset.
I mean, let's be honest, like, if George Soros or whatever was deciding what is not getting spent, I mean, you would freak the fuck out.
You're okay with it.
You being not you, but like, let's say conservatives are more okay with it because you're God's new cuts.
Yeah, that's right.
But if it was George Schwarz is a perfect example, the right would rightfully, it'd be like, this is a constitutional crisis.
Yeah.
They're like, we need January 6th again.
You know what I mean?
Like, it would be wise.
So then maybe the best way to do this is have Doge look into it, share the findings transparently what they are doing, and then hand it over to Congress.
So the Congress to do it.
If you want to do this, like, and this is what you remember when I said process?
Yeah.
That is actually a huge part of it because the real problem that they have is the unilateral decision-making, the conflict of interest, possibly being over.
I mean, there have been a ton of shit like that, like the NLRB and other things.
I sound like Crystal right now.
She's got a list like 15 pages long of all this conflict of interest.
And you know what I have to say?
I go, yeah, you're right.
I was like, you know, empirically, this is not good.
Like when you look at it in that way.
And now, if he had sold all of his Tesla stock, if he had actually offloaded all of this and he was still doing it now, I would have a lot more trust in that.
And I think most people would too.
Absolutely.
And I think, I don't think that members of Congress and others should be allowed, anybody in the government should be allowed to be able to even have the appearance of corruption because of the way that corruption is now so embedrocked into our.
I was very hopeful for Doge, and then I feel like, honestly, they just kicked the wrong person out.
Yeah, not even just saying, I mean, obviously I'm biased toward him, but like his entire thing was, I'm going to use the Constitution, I'm going to do this in a way that is palatable, but it's going to be uncomfortable.
And he was upfront about all of that.
But Elon is just kind of like...
What shocked me about it is Trump's deference to Elon.
I think that's the part where maybe you guys can help me understand it because I don't, first of all, it drives me fucking crazy when Elon's in the cabinet room wearing a fucking t-shirt and hat and everybody else is in a situation.
He's scorny.
And he's standing in a room where, if you guys have ever been in the cabinet room, the president's chair is bigger than everybody else's chair.
No person ever is supposed to be higher than the president.
There's a rule, there's a famous scene in the West Wing.
It's like when the president stands, nobody sits.
And in my opinion, when the president sits, nobody should stand.
Why is Elon standing?
Why is he?
It just, to me, it's like, this is where the libs are correct, dude.
Like, there's some weird shit going on here.
I don't really get it.
I don't like it.
I can, I can see it.
Literally, it's my fault.
Like, from talking to Trump, if Trump feels like someone has information that he does not have, he becomes a listener.
Yeah, he's a differential.
You're right.
You're right.
The second he's like, you know, something I don't know.
And I think that's what makes him so much better than anybody that the Democrats had in terms of understanding the problems of everyday people.
Oh, sure.
Because unfortunately, I think, and the Republicans too.
Like, remember, he's not like a traditional Republican guy.
So it's like politicians in general, there is a snobbishness to them, this feeling of like, we know what you need.
Let us handle it.
And he's a type of person, just from that interaction we had, who's like, the second you have information he doesn't have, he gets quiet and he kind of keys in.
Even if it's what is the life of an everyday American?
Because I don't live that life.
Doesn't have to be what's the science behind blah, blah, blah.
You see this all the time when he's in the barbershop or whatever.
He's he's a genius because what he does is he'll take your problem and he'll turn it around into the campaign.
And he's like, that's what the great, the greats always do this, is that they take the question.
They listen to what people are struggling with.
They go to the essence.
No, but they don't lowers the bar for politicians that were like, well, unfortunately, this guy listens to us.
What they do is they take you seriously, but not literally.
So my favorite moment in a debate is when some lady in the 92 campaign asked Bill Clinton about the national debt.
And it's like, she didn't really know what she was talking about.
And he's like, she's talking about the economy.
He's like, we've had four years of trickle-down economics.
It hasn't worked.
You know, all this.
He didn't ask your second question about the national debt.
But the point is, is that he's like, she's talking about the economy.
Like, he can see the truth.
The truth behind it.
Exactly.
And that's what Trump, I think, is very good at.
That's what all the greats are very good at.
And yeah, I mean, continue.
Like, the Elon thing to me, I, and this will make me very unpopular.
I think it's becoming a problem.
I think that this liberal?
No, because right now, there's a narrative online, which is, in my opinion, cope, is that a lot of these liberals like cope as in, like they're coping, that they're coping uh, they're living into knockoff.
There's a cope right now from the right that all of these liberal gatherings are astro turfed, and you know what.
You're right, but the thing is that you actually have a lot of terms that okay, some people might not know.
Okay so um, an astroturf.
Astroturf means yeah, fake grass right so like, what it means is that a large is people are being paid to protest.
I do not think that's true.
I think that this has happened in the past.
This has happened in the past and it is an integral thing, but that's actually what a lot of liberals said about the Tea Party back in 2010.
They're like, the KOCH Brothers are paying for it.
I'm like yeah bro, but you can't just pay people to show up and be angry and you still got blown the out in the 2010 elections.
What i'm worried about is the perception perhaps correctly that Trump is not completely in control of his own presidency, and we do see some of that, like in terms of the priority.
The priority right now is not only with Doge.
It's like the media capture around this Elon as the force where I think it should be on Trump.
And Trump has, in my opinion, a 10 times better political understanding of America like, I think, if he his narrative of the election was about immigration and it was about the economy.
What I worry about right now for Trump is he's absorbing all of this pressure where Elon is, you know Slapshot, cutting this, bringing people back by his own admission.
I'm not making this up like he's like we fired people who are doing ebola.
We brought them back.
Right now, they just fired a bunch of people from NOAH, the National Oceanic Administration, which those are the guys who fly into the hurricane and be like it's a category four or whatever, and it's like dude.
I've seen politics in the past like the most dangerous thing a politician can do is misinterpret their mandate.
So the most recent example we have is 2004, George W Bush, the last Republican to win the popular vote.
Uh Republican, he wins that popular vote for one reason, keep us safe, yep.
Iraq 9-11.
you know what he does let's privatize social security oh he's like yeah the american people voted for me i want to privatize social security blown the out in the 2006 midterm election not only that katrina and what i'm worried about for trump is dude Even if it's not your fault, if there's a natural disaster and the Dems can point to Noah getting, you're about to get fucking crucified, dude.
Same with, you know, you know how lucky they are that crash happened in the first week of the Trump administration.
Can you imagine if that happened a year from now after some doge cuts or whatever with the FAA?
They would be destroyed.
So they will be restored.
I am very worried for them that they're hitching their entire political reputation.
And the most critical part of your presidency, the first hundred days, if all history of a presidency is almost certainly the first 18 months.
And of those 18 months, always the first 100 days.
We're about 307 days or whatever when we're talking right now.
It's not that much longer to go.
And in that first hundred days, Elon has been the number one story.
If I were Donald Trump or whatever, I would want my number one story to be historic or whatever executive action on inflation.
I'd be having inflation press conferences every single day and Tom Homan and mass deportation.
That's all I'm doing.
I'm just talking about Mexico.
I'm talking about shutting down the border.
I'm having Tom Homan on television every single day.
Not to say he isn't, but he's drawing away.
Take control of the narrative.
Elon has taken control.
I think it's brilliant now.
So I thought that for a time.
Tell me why.
Tell me why you think Elon has a shield.
Let Elon, because all these cuts are going to be difficult.
Yeah, but at the end of the day, everybody's still absorbing all of that energy.
But right now, everyone's looking at Elon doing it.
That's very true.
I actually thought that for a while.
I was like, maybe Elon is the whipping boy to sit there and absorb.
But I'm very worried that Trump and losing, this is why you were asking about Steve Bannon.
There's a reason, dude, I think Bannon is the smartest person in the MAGA movement.
And Bannon is a person.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, talk.
Talk that shit.
Absolutely.
Talk Tom.
100%.
He was MAGA before me.
Real quick, before I get off this, if I felt like these were Trump's ideas to cut these things and Elon is doing it, I would be on board with you.
Elon Musk Narrative Control00:03:16
These don't seem like Trump ideas.
It seemed like Elon.
No, no, no.
And that's why I don't agree.
Can I double-click on that quickly?
Because there's a very important audience here.
I like that.
I like that.
I love asking that.
Yeah.
We're talking tech.
Yeah, that's right.
You said that earlier.
I did say that earlier.
Yeah.
All right.
For all of our young listeners, back in the day, you had to click something twice in order to open it.
Now I think we still have it.
I said he meant that as liking it.
Well, I meant like expand.
He might be too young.
I know you have to.
I still got a dollar.
Let me like that.
Okay, go, go, open, open that.
This is why I was talking about Bannon.
There are multiple theories which intersect.
Like if you think of what am I thinking?
A Venn diagram.
Like the Venn diagram is that Elon is part of libertarian right.
Like cut the government to the end of cut the government.
Now, Bannon would say attack the administrative state to replace the administrative state, as in the government itself should be the power, the determination of the guy, of the path of the country, of business, of breaking up the centers of gravity that are non-governmental powers, Facebook, Google, et cetera.
Elon is somebody who's very against something like that, much more like an anarcho-capitalist.
And on top of that is like traditional conservatism, which agrees a little bit with this, but is also obsessed with like the religious right, constitution, et cetera.
So like right now, my fear is that MAGA, while it definitely agrees with administrative state here, is that they are losing the capacity to make their argument that, no, actually, and this is what Trump and JD, I think, believe, is that the government itself should have power over the direction of the country, should have the ability to tell social media companies, don't censor, as opposed to having a billionaire buy it.
Like that's a nice workaround.
But look, I mean, Zuck went on Rogan and said, oh, we're not going to fact-check anymore.
I did a post about Lyme disease.
It got fact-checked the next fucking day.
And it's still not down, right?
And, you know, there's no enforcing mechanism within that.
Only the government can fix that problem for me or for all Americans.
So that's where I would say it's like there's important theories of government, which are very at odds, right?
So there is that like Bannon group.
And again, I don't think Bannon actually cares about the country as much as he likes like rallying people up for attention.
Really?
I think he's a...
I'm surprised by that.
I think he's a really, I think he's an acute listener.
So I think he can like spot trends early.
And I think that he's a good enough communicator that he can fan the flame, fan the flames of those trends early.
And those things can grow to be bigger things.
Like the Nazi salute.
Exactly.
That's like a perfect example of like, he probably knew what he was doing.
And he didn't do it enough.
He definitely knew he was doing it.
Yeah, yeah.
So it's like to be honest.
But there's a perfect example.
Like he's not actually trying to like make it better.
Like if you really cared about American patriotism, you're not throwing up a Nazi salute because you would have some respect to all the Americans that died fighting the Nazi.
I think he hates liberals and he wants a media.
Exactly.
Exactly.
But again, I think it's just an attention-seeking thing.
And like, he's going to, it's dog whistling.
It's like, how can I throw both?
Now, I think there are ways.
That's why I don't take him like seriously as someone who actually cares about America and more someone who just cares about like causing ruckus and like getting some attention in the midst.
Now, what I would say is that it's very easy to pacify the base that he's riling up.
So anytime he riles some people up, you just need a headline to be like, Disney cuts all DEI programs.
AOC Class War Division00:09:29
And then they go, all right, well, exactly.
Anytime they start riling up, you just need a headline that goes, Doge to give back $5,000 to every single man.
And then they calm down.
It don't matter how many fucking nuts.
It's not even going to happen.
Of course.
But neither is anything that Bannon says.
Well, I don't think that's true.
I mean, like, what?
Like, what does he say?
What's going to be executed?
Well, what about mass deportation, dude?
Like, what about Trump literally ran on that?
He could do it if he wanted to.
Yeah, of course.
No, no, no.
I'm not.
Again, when I say like anything that Bannon says, of course, there are things that he's supportive of.
Like, I don't know, like, all, every single belief that he has or everything that he's ran on.
And I'm sure that certain things like deportation is not a specifically banned thing.
Like, no, there's a lot of support for it.
Yes.
What I'm trying to say is there are going to be these people that can rally the support of the disenfranchised.
And he's incredibly good at it.
He is good.
This is one of the things that, like, I don't want to get away from Doge right here, but this is one of the things I think the Dems really struggle with is that they could very easily win the next election if they made this a class issue.
Like, they just need to make it a class issue.
It's tough for them, though.
Yeah, because they're in the pockets of the rich, and all the people that are running the party are these Ivy League trust fund babies.
So if Ivy League trust fund babies are the people making the intellectual decisions for your party, you can't speak to the poor.
Now, like her or dislike her AOC, it doesn't matter your thought.
People fuck with her because they think she's trying to help.
You might disagree with how she's going to help, but she comes across as a working class girl that wants to help.
That's what Dems De Burns.
She outran Biden in her district.
She had a lot of, I interviewed, or on our show, not me, but our team, we interviewed a ton of AOC Trump voters and they were like, yeah, I trust them both to fight for the working class.
I thought it was actually fascinating.
So the Dems should look at that specifically and be like, oh, wow, she's locked in and people believe she wants to help them.
And they don't really, they've become disillusioned with these other figures.
In my opinion, they're probably in the pockets of the billionaire class a little bit too much.
So they can't make it about money, which they could make it about money so easily and regain the working class in a heartbeat.
They have to.
I'm not so sure about that.
Okay, maybe not.
But they'd have a better chance than making it about identity positions.
I agree with you.
Which they did make it about before.
And now it seems like they're even Ram Emmanuel is moving away.
Let's get out of the bathroom.
It's like, look, they say a lot of there are political realities that are huge problems for Democrats.
Number one, rich white people are now Dems, right?
The base of the Democratic Party.
It's more nuanced than that.
It's Ivy League educated Netflix.
I was about to get into that.
There are tons of rich white people that are like, yo, I'm over this shit.
It's the specifically Ivy League, like four-generation money.
Sheltered, sheltered.
They've never had a real job.
Of course.
Those are the people out there that are like telling you what you should feel and how you should vote.
And real working class people, like people who've actually had a real fucking job in their life, do not want some trust fund kid telling them what they should vote for.
Absolutely.
It's pretentious.
What I was going to get to is when I say rich white people, I mean a very specific class where one of the number one determiners of how you vote and party ID is four-year college degree.
So if you attend a four-year college degree institution, which also correlates very much with income, then you are much more likely to be a Democrat.
And that's why, you know, even rich-white is not exactly the right term because we all know blue-collar trucker millionaires down in Florida.
They're fucking Republican as shit, right?
But these guys did not go to college necessarily, and they have very different cultural attitudes.
I think I talked about this the last time I was here.
Charles Murray, one of my favorite books of all time, is called Coming Apart.
And it's exactly about how Americans with college degrees have concentrated themselves in something called super zip codes.
You know, the Whole Foods Index.
Like, if you have a Whole Foods, you're much more likely to vote for a Democrat.
If you have whatever, generic or Aldi, right?
You know, much more likely to vote Republican.
What's happened is that America is culturally separated, probably more than ever before.
Are we all watching White Lotus?
I am.
I love White Lotus.
That's actually a signifier of like, you're out of touch, right?
The most popular, the most popular show in the country is Walmart CIS, all right?
Or Landman.
Yeah, Landman.
Which, oh my God.
Okay, I love parts of Landman, but dude, what a fucking disaster.
We could talk about that.
But there's a perfect example.
It's like some people, it's elitist.
Yeah, I mean, I'm sorry.
I don't think women act that way.
Maybe that's just me.
I genuinely rational on the show or what's going on.
It's like a Billy Bob, major.
Dick sucks.
Dick sucks.
Why are we recycling when I could be sucking your dick?
Okay, I'm glad you feel like that.
This sounds like a great show.
No, yeah, it's not for some guy who's like, yeah, this is a women talk.
I was like, what the fuck is going on here?
Why is a 29-year-old playing a 17-year-old in panties?
What is happening?
Fire.
Anyway, most not fire.
Yeah, right.
Most popular show in the country.
So what the fuck do I want?
But like, my point is exactly about the cultural separation is why it's hard for Democrats.
And I think even for AOC, AOC and them may speak in the language of the identity politics and also hold class politics.
And what I really have come to believe is that we live in a cultural moment.
So there is a so previously 2020.
Well, I'm fascinated by that election, the highest turnout in modern history.
Equivalent turnout not seen since like decades.
And if we read about other high turnout elections in American history, it was in something called the Age of Acrimony.
That's a book I really recommend, which is acrimony is acrimonious would mean like tension, a fighting.
It's a very, it's a lacrimal, I think, means crying and laughing.
Acrimony would mean an acrimonious place would be all of us yelling at each other.
Sometimes they're smart, bro.
Age of acrimony.
Dumbass.
I know.
He's like, let's tell you what.
Google Suns.
Go, go, go.
All right.
Age of acrimony is the 1890s.
And unfortunately, that was also when?
The Gilded Age.
Now, why was America all up in arms at that time?
Bro, it wasn't just, it wasn't really about class.
That's when all the rich people really took advantage.
It was basically like, should black people have civil rights or not?
That was like the number one animating issue of the South.
There's an entire thing called Southern populism, which is basically just like whipping up poor white people against blacks so that you can prop up a new plantation class and rich people from the post-Civil War.
And even in the Northeast, like where we are here, that's how the robber barons and all of them came to power.
And they funded a lot of this culture warfare and benefited from it.
And it wasn't until Teddy Roosevelt in the progressive era started that we said, no, the real problem here is combination, is all of these standard oil trusts taking advantage of us.
And that was a complete reverse.
So it's a real way things.
Real quick, slow down.
So essentially what the southern populism was doing and the robber bands were doing was centrally saying, yo, your life was way better back when.
No, they had the population fighting over black civil rights.
No, that's what I'm saying.
So and the way they did it is said, hey, your life was way better when these black people didn't have all this rights.
Yeah, exactly.
Having all this rights and this upward mobility is taken away from you.
Bingo.
And then Roosevelt on some Bernie Sanders came in and was like, yo, it's not about black and white.
It's about these billionaire motherfuckers.
These guys can't do that.
That's what I'm saying.
The damn should be.
I agree, but it's very difficult because the problem is they're in the fucking pockets.
Well, not only pockets, it's not only are they controlled, but they speak in the language of exactly the population.
Gay people.
No, they speak gay.
And it is true.
They do speak that way.
Well, I mean, they're out of touch.
Everyone should go watch AOC's 2020 DNC speech.
He was like, for black, indigenous, for land acknowledgement, BIPOC.
BIPOC.
And I think I'm a mario.
I'm calling Tupac BIPOC.
You see him in the ballet recital.
That is BIPOC.
What is BIPOC?
Oh, Black, Indigenous People of Color.
Have you not heard of this, man?
Come on.
Well, because old school.
This is an old school actor.
Yeah, I have never heard about indigenous people of color.
That's right.
It keeps people like Akash and I out.
And Mexicans.
Oh, yeah.
I thought we were people.
It's not about color.
Huh?
I thought we were people of color.
No, it's black, indigenous people of colour.
I thought it was only colours.
No, it's only BIPOC.
It's not us.
What's a black, indigenous person of color?
No, it's saying black and indigenous people of color.
As in, like, it's a specific, it's a way to keep people like us out, like the Asians and the Mexicans.
A white pastor.
It's a divisional.
It's like a division of BIPOC.
That's why.
Black and black.
So this is interesting.
What this is, this is a mirror image of what you just described with the Robert Barrons with the Southern populism.
Yes, yes.
It's just flipping.
That was his whole point.
Acrimonious.
BIPOC is an acrimonious of black.
Okay, I got that shit now.
So that's genius.
I guess you're just flipping it, and it does feel good.
It does satisfy you in that moment.
You're like, I don't have something.
They're the reason why I don't have it.
But they're unable to execute the task at hand, which is really, hey, there's a lot of people who got a lot of money.
They could be fucking Indian.
They could be white.
They could be Jewish.
They could be whatever the fuck they are.
And in order for you to get some money, they're going to have to have a little less of that money and influence, potentially.
Yeah, even if that's wrong, if they run on that, it is so much more digestible.
And they need credibility.
Now, where do you get the credit from?
That's the problem is that I think that AOC and a lot of these other people are so, you know, these statements in the past.
NBA League Mold Shift00:05:03
This is what fucked Kamala.
Kamala has been so fucked from those 2019 press conferences.
We need a pro-healthcare for all illegal immigrants.
I'm like, yeah, why don't we just start with Healthcare for America?
So the second, you need to start here.
Yeah, no, but that's interesting because the second AOC runs for president, they're going to run the BIPOC.
It's easy.
It'll be everywhere.
Because you know what?
That will affect Sargo government.
This is where you're kind of fucked in a primary system where you have to appease the most extreme votes because they'll come out in the Democratic primary support.
Yeah, and then as soon as you run generally, people are going to be like, look what this bitch said.
That's why I think the next Democrat has to come from fucking notebooks.
Oh, yeah.
I want to know what you guys think.
Stephen A. Real quick, Miles had a very interesting take from, what was it, Colin Cowherd?
Yeah.
Basically, he said, picture LeBron.
You say you think about LeBron, no, like great passing, great disc, great that.
Picture MJ, ultimate winner.
Picture this guy.
Now he goes, now picture Jason Tatum.
Nothing.
And then you had a point from Gilbert Arenas that you were talking about earlier, where he said, the league just won't give him, they just won't get behind him.
Might be misquoting Gilbert, but it seemed like he was trying to say the league won't get behind Jason Tatum despite him having all the intangibles.
Yeah, like he got the skills, he got the ring.
Yeah, but I think he's just not likable.
There's nothing like you don't like this guy.
He is, I think I said this to you.
Oh, yeah, this is the post-game when he selled it, when he won the championship, finally.
Yeah, he didn't play great, and then his speech is just like copying everybody else's.
Yeah, and I think everybody was like, Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're just light skin.
You're just light skinned.
So, I agree with everything you're saying, but the league does seem to get behind the guy who was suspended for shooting people because he's exciting.
So, they don't really care about if you break the law anymore.
I guess not.
I think we don't care.
And Edward's got a bunch of baby mamas he's trying to abort.
Like, the guys who are taking over the league, they don't exactly fit the mold of what the league would get behind.
Yes, say whatever you want about Michael Jordan and like gambling.
Nobody knew any of that shit.
They kept it out of the news.
He was the face of the league, and also he was never in trouble about anything.
LeBron, LeBron, never model citizen, all things considered Steph Curry, model citizen.
Jason Tatum is a model citizen.
Yeah, why not give him the league?
Because I think the league reflects what we want to support.
So, they're doing the wrestling thing now.
David Stern would be like, I'm going with who's the most professional and who's going to be, you know, match the character of the league.
Whereas Adam Silver is like, What do the people fuck?
Luca needs to go to the Lakers.
All right, we'll push that first.
Yeah, yeah, that trade might not get pushed through back in the day.
We were just talking about that one.
100%.
What is Tatum?
Stupid fucking idiot, dude.
Maybe what is Tatum exceptional at?
He's very well-rounded.
He's a great scorer, good defender.
Well-rounded.
He's good.
He's like, He's an unstoppable scorer.
But that's what I'm saying.
Yeah.
Oh, if you say he's an unstoppable scorer, then maybe you go.
I just don't feel like he has something in his game that's just so out of this world, the way like all the other people you named.
I think what Alex is saying rings true, which is like we relate to disruptive play.
So Steph Curry was disruptive.
Allen Iverson was disruptive.
LeBron.
And Edwards is disruptive.
LeBron, like, weirdly, I think LeBron was so disruptive, to be honest, because of his passing ability, too.
If he was just like a guy who's dunking on you, same with Luca.
Exactly.
Yes.
Yeah.
But I also think if I think we're forgetting.
Also, Luca's white.
I'll be honest with you.
Like, if Luca's not white, his style of play, I don't know how marketable he is.
I think he's less marketable.
But if he was black, he would be in better shape.
Yeah, he was down.
TB Duncan's leaping.
100%.
He be leaping.
He be LeBron.
But do you know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
He's kind of like slow and plodding.
It's easier to get behind that for a white guy.
You don't expect athletics.
I mean, do we look at Luca as Tim Duncan if he's black?
Yeah.
Isn't that interesting?
Yeah.
Yeah, no, both talk shit.
Actually, Tim Duncan would talk.
I guess his shit talk was funny, but he'd be like, nice try.
Have you ever heard Kevin Garnett talk about Tim Duncan would talk shit?
He'd be like, almost got me.
Like little shit.
There you go.
That's good efforts.
No, I will say Tim Duncan's in the post and it's a little bit more boring style of play.
Like Luca's doing step back threes.
So the game has definitely changed.
But in terms of being like, he's not very flash and excitement.
He's really using speed and the ability to slow down.
And he's using his body weight to score.
And I'm trying to find a black player that's like that.
Harden.
Huh?
Harden.
Nah, Harden athleticism and just fucking.
I think as Hardin got a little older and didn't take care of him.
I'm saying in the heyday of Harden.
I hate making that argument, but you have to calculate race in the somewhat.
Hannity Debate Moves00:13:09
And he's not like excited.
Like, I don't want to shit on Luca, but he's not like, oh my God.
When you watch Steph, oh my God, yeah, fun, but not like Steph.
But I will say, also, I think the reason David Stern cared more about character is the United States is more puritanical and cared more about character.
And now, like, now we don't give a fuck if you gamble and you fuck girls.
And Trump has shown us if you are funny and engaging, we'll get behind you.
Yeah.
In this day and age.
So I think the league is like, all right, Jason Tatum, you're a model citizen, but you're not as funny and engaging as these other guys.
And that's who the people are getting behind.
So that's who we're getting behind.
So I'm just saying.
And Jordan's gambling issue.
I feel like the only issue is that he didn't do steak.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because if he did steak, like if he used like the leader in global betting in U.S. social casinos.
Oh my gosh.
He would love a social casino.
That's the only reason LeBron's better.
It's wait.
No, I'm not.
I am not in his head.
You almost got me.
Now, I know that Jordan did like to take some time on his own.
And I'm sure at that time, Steak would have like an anti-social casino.
But right now, they are the leader in U.S. social casinos.
And you can bet on top sports and political events and use the promo code Flagrant and you're going to get your welcome bonus.
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Let's get back to the show.
I want to know what you guys think.
Stephen A. Do you think he has a chance?
No.
I think he has a chance.
He wants it.
He's real.
He's coming on the show.
He wants it bad.
He's coming on the show.
He wants it bad, but no chance.
Okay.
No, he's a great communicator.
Like, he has the communication skills and he has the star power because you do need the star power.
He has like that centrist, like, he's relatable because every all the men that like, let's say, voted for Trump on masculinity will see that in him.
I totally agree.
100%.
Yeah.
But like, he doesn't have like the emasculated, this is going to drive fucking Democrats crazy.
But like they do have this deep insecurity about looking emasculated.
Like I said that thing on fucking on Brilliant Idiots where I was like, I don't know, like a guy who identifies as a Democrat over 5'9 and that fucking riled up.
I've never seen so many people.
And I think it was just emblematic of this feeling like people going, they think we're what they think we're bitches.
Yeah, that's right.
And so deep down they have that's so funny because Al pretends he's 5'11 to be 5'5.
5'5.
Yeah, you gotta listen to that.
But it is, but that here's the thing: that wasn't always the case.
Don't get fucked up.
Yeah, you're laughing a little too hard.
But think about it.
Here's List.
Yo.
Insult.
The conservatives, the conservatives, when I was growing up, got no pussy.
They got no pussy.
They had gay relationships on the side.
They weren't getting anything.
They still do.
They crashing grinders.
But Eli got 17 kids.
Whereas he just had another one.
Exactly.
Yeah, you guys see that?
Bill Clinton was getting head in the Oval Office.
Right?
Like, Democrats were the ones that were actually cracking cheats.
They were winning the culture award.
1000%.
Yeah.
So that is Democrats.
That is kind of flipped because the Democrats now have to be so concerned.
Now, Stephen A doesn't have that.
Stephen A's out there like, yo, Latina's got big asses and I like Latinas.
I don't think he has no chance.
Yeah.
I just don't think that.
He doesn't have the same baggage, dude.
Like, whoever comes next, it has to be out of nowhere.
1 million percent because he didn't vote for Iraq.
Like, you have to have somebody who has got credibility.
Or you have to have somebody who doesn't give a fuck.
Like, okay.
The amount of package Trump had.
But yeah, but it's not a good idea.
Let me take away no chance.
Yeah, he has a chance.
He has a chance.
I need to see some, I need to see some credibility.
Like, I think what worked for Trump, even if it doesn't even make sense, but we could bridge the gap.
Like, the cognitive dissonance in our brain evaporated when we're like, well, he's made these deals.
He likes making deals.
He could make deals abroad.
I need to see Stephen A.
I need to believe that Stephen A could talk to Putin, talk to Kim Jong, and make some deals go through.
And I understand what I'm saying.
That's interesting.
Sounds crazy.
But a lot of.
No, I understand that.
What I think could help him in the primary is I think he can't beat whoever the Republican.
Absolutely.
So in a primary, he's good at arguing.
Yes.
He doesn't give a fuck.
Dude, he goes on Hannity actually.
He's arguing whatever Republican doesn't give a fuck.
I like that.
And then maybe in the election, the general, you say, I don't know if he can do politics, diplomatic shit, whatever.
Watching him on Hannity, he's got another thing on.
All politicians need this.
You need a love of the game, dude.
And Stephen has the love of the game.
I mean, think about it.
Like, you want to give up your wife and your children's future to be in a secret service bubble.
Like, do you know how narcissistic you have to be to actually pursue this?
Like, you have to be kind of fucking crazy.
I won't do another podcast a week.
That's what I'm saying.
I want to go to my daughter's gymnastics, bro.
And that's normal.
Normal people do.
I wouldn't do it.
But having spent some time around these people, like the burning needs, attention, just like you need a black hole inside your chest that can never be filled.
And when you read all these guys, Clinton, you're like, oh, he had four stepfathers.
They used to beat the shit out of his mom.
And what did he need?
He needed affirmation from women, from people.
So he's always running.
Freshman year, he runs for president.
JFK, same thing.
He's like, watch out, his insanity at home and all this.
He needs women the way that his father needed women.
He needed the love of the people as the second son.
He's the first son.
His dad wanted the oldest.
Didn't you always say that?
Yeah, no, that was JFK.
No, you're right.
I thought Joe Clinton just said that.
No, no, Clinton too.
He talks so well.
He has a lot.
You're so smart that it's takes us a second to catch up.
You had four dads.
Oh, Clinton had four dads.
Okay, that was close to Scott.
I think to Kennedy.
I'm not still on Clinton.
No, I'm saying these guys have if we're being honest with Trump too.
Like Trump's entire desire is what?
Please his father and his mother, right?
It's like that is that Oedipal need is like deep.
Yeah, yeah.
What about John Stewart?
I think Stephen has that.
What about Jon Stewart?
Oh, I wouldn't, yeah.
But I would love it.
I think he's brilliant, and I think he's a great critic.
I don't know if he has that.
I don't know if he has that same love of the game.
And I mean, again, we have to think about what are you giving up?
John's giving up every human being.
You will give up everything forever.
John is a great communicator, but I don't think that he has that same desire to play.
I mean, politics is also a coalitional sport.
You have to say something and then meet with somebody who totally disagrees with you and then go on a stage and be like, we're the best friends ever, right?
Like that requires kind of some self-hatred and like some weird shit to do like and absorb all of that.
And I think John is almost too honest and like too good of a guy.
And that's why I run for him.
That's why he has our trust.
He has a level of trust that we need, but you're right.
He might not have that deep black hole that is needed to go out there and give everything.
Are you saying he couldn't win or you're saying he would never run?
He might not want to win.
Maybe either.
I mean, and actually, I don't know, man.
The Democratic nom yes.
You have to put, yeah, yeah, that's different.
But like, and actually, even then, I'm still not quite sure.
Like, what you need, you need a fighter.
Like, look at the liberal energy right now.
I mean, frankly, like, I kind of make fun of them because they're like, these guys are going viral and from town halls.
They're like, get up there and get yourself arrested in the Department of Education.
I'm like, bro, what the fuck is that going to do?
What are we doing, Dude?
Does that make you feel bad that he like lifted his voice in octave?
Like, he didn't even know he was doing that.
He raised his voice.
That's the problem.
That's true.
No, no, seriously.
And I know, obviously, you're going to have some bias, but like, they have to.
And yes, I am very biased.
They have to adjust.
But I speak about this purely culturally.
Like, they have to address that issue so that they can become more relatable.
And I think Stephen A addresses that At Stephen A and thinks of like an emasculated yeah, he's not a big shot.
I'm just like, you're not there's a clip I know you've seen.
This is where Jon Stewart, I don't think, wants to, but he would win.
Tucker Carlson got his 2004 got his high voice out, talking all this ranting raven.
Yeah, and I know that's your boy.
I don't like him, but uh, then John just goes, Tucker, you wear a bow tie.
Done.
I do.
That's the shit Trump does when Trump is in a debate and he just gets you.
Oh, John, by occupation, yes, will do that.
A lot of these when John wants to, when he remember when he destroyed, was it Jim Kramer?
Yeah, oh my god, that's Riley.
Most like devastating takedown.
Kramer was like uncomfortable.
Yeah, he was like almost crying.
He became a joke.
He is, I mean, well, yeah, he's a joke, but still, like, it was like the moment where everyone realized, oh, wow, this guy.
Exactly.
I mean, look, I like John.
I think he could do well.
Stephen, to me, reads what the liberal base wants.
Another, oh, by the way, when I said the Democratic base, I didn't get to finish.
It's also old black people.
Like elderly black people are the absolute like most loyal people to the Democratic Party.
Remember, they showed up for Jim Clyburn and Joe Biden.
They saved Joe Biden's ass in South Carolina.
They're the people who gave Obama the presidency after he won in the Iowa caucuses, basically put him on the path to victory.
So I think Stephen embodies their like want to fight.
And like the fight is the same thing for Trump.
Like Trump animated the Republican base and all of these working class whites who are like, he's standing up for us against these corrupt Ivy League fucks who I fucking hate.
So his mere existence, his occupation of the Oval Office is enough for me to see these people scream to tire to go out to the streets.
It's the Eric Cartman licking Scott Peterson's tears, you know, from South Park, where he's like, oh, Scott, I'm licking your tears.
He's like licking his tears.
I forget.
Scott Tennerman must die.
It's a great South Park episode.
I don't watch it.
They make fun of black women.
Bro.
Anyway, I just, that's that's what Trump is to me.
And like, this is part of the problem for the Democrats is when you have a group that is explicitly hatred of your leaders, of your call, of the cultural elite, of which you are one, no matter what you think, you have a huge messaging problem.
That's part of the reason why I think that Steven could be powerful, though, because he's committed to that in the same way.
And he gets some of the sports fans from the other side.
Dude, of course.
Yeah, think about his name ID forever.
Oh, so he's cool as shit.
Yeah.
You need a chairman.
You need cool.
No, you need cool lady.
And he's cool.
I agree.
Yeah, you went from no chance to like.
You see, listen, I'm a plastic bag in the wind.
He gave me two good points.
I was like, man, we're about to have our second black president.
The fact you said no chance makes me think she has a chance.
Remember that?
Netflix is dead.
But if it's alive, March 4th, you're going to want to specialize.
No, no.
Okay.
So, yeah, wow, that's really interesting.
And I think it solves a bunch of problems.
It saws the masculinity issue.
It solves centrist trust.
100%.
He's the outsider, so you don't have him saying a bunch of other shit on record.
He's like, hey, he's a good shit.
Yeah, Wow.
Wow.
And he does want it.
He wants it.
He said something.
And he's the fire.
When I see his eyes twinkle, when he's going at Sean Hannity, I'm like, this fucker loves the game.
And like, he's just like Trump.
All the greats that they live for those moments.
Like Clinton said, the most depressed he ever was when he had to leave the White House.
Like, that's who they are, dude.
Yeah, when he had to stop at a red light for the first time.
Like, that's what they live to.
You know what I mean?
But like, that's what it is.
Three years before that, every day he was going home to his daughter.
Yes.
Looking at him as he's having this cheating scandal.
He's got to talk to her.
He's got to go lie to the entire country.
He's the worst day of his life.
I have to leave all of that.
Yes.
I had to leave all of my first time in the room.
It's the most depressing.
Now I'm going to have to look my daughter in the eye.
Say I was going to get my dick sucked by the end.
That was fun.
That's fine.
He's like, I'd walk in a room.
They wouldn't play Hail to the Chief.
I didn't know what was going on.
That's insane.
That's who they are.
And listen, they're great.
You know, that's why we need them.
We need somebody else to absorb all this bullshit.
Yes.
The rest of us want to go to our daughter's gymnastics class.
You need some.
That's a great observation from obviously being years in politics and understanding the constitution of the person that's going to do the job.
Absolutely.
They do need that burning desire for approval and the need to fight.
Yeah, that is.
I think Steven has that.
And that's why when I look at, I don't, I and Kamala, of course, never had that.
No, she had the narcissism and all of that to pursue it, but she didn't have.
She wasn't a star.
She just was, she couldn't convey that.
She couldn't combine that, I guess, for great.
But I think she has the same issue.
She's got horrible baggage.
She's the bad maker.
Who else?
Is there anybody else in the other outsider that's interesting?
I would have made a case for Dean Phillips, the guy who ran against Biden in the primary, only because he has the Obama.
He has the same thing Obama had in 02.
So in 02, Obama, fucking nobody, literally gives a speech outside the state Senate against the Iraq war.
Obama Iraq War Speech00:06:06
Dean is the only establishment Democrat who can credibly say, I called out Biden's age before it was obvious to the world because he ran against Biden in the New Hampshire primary.
He's made some weird moves since then.
The other thing is, Dean is filthy rich, so that's that helps, right?
You can self-fund a campaign.
You can get your name ID out there.
But again, he's the same Obama thing of, I told the truth when it was uncomfortable.
He even didn't even run for Congress again.
Like he lost his political future and got blown out in the primary on a single message of we cannot win with Biden.
And he was empirically correct.
So I think Dean, I mean, I don't know if the Democrats will reward him in the same way, but Budijaj, I mean, he wants it.
He's desperate.
He has the need.
He has the black.
I like Buddha Jej.
But his problem is he's got the baggage, dude.
He's got that 2020 primary stage.
I do.
Raising my hands for illegal health care and all this.
It's like that stuff is just cancer.
Here's what I would say about him.
Here's what I'd say about Buddy Jage.
He will engage the other side.
And I think that is refreshing.
You have the appearance of engagement.
Have the appearance of.
On Fox News.
You know what?
You're right.
He loves the game too.
He loves to go on Fox.
He likes to combat with Sanders Smith or whatever.
He's smart.
He has the appearance of smart, but yes.
And that's important.
That's important.
Okay, let's talk about that.
The appearance of smart is more valuable than actual intellect when it comes to running for public office.
No question.
Michael Bloomberg is objectively smarter than everybody on that stage.
He could not communicate that intelligence in a way that was effective in convincing us.
Now, we loved him as mayor of New York.
Mayor of New York is the second most powerful position in the land.
Like, let's just be honest.
Like, you are the mayor of New York.
You're really the president.
Like, I don't really care.
You're really the president.
You're basically the president.
Like, Eric Adams is the president.
He's doing presidential things right now.
Keep it a buck.
This is the proof right here.
Right?
Mayor Adams, the entire state comes after him, right?
What's happening right now?
What happened to that?
What?
Nothing.
Yeah.
Charges dropped.
Because you're the real president.
This is a real president told a DOJ.
The real president told the second president to part of the Republic.
That really said when you're president of New York, when you're in the New Yorker position.
But when you're the mayor of New York, stop derailing the real point because you got to defend New York.
Go to the real point.
He forgot it.
He forgot his real point.
You're carrying the migrants.
I actually do think it would be nice to have like shit libs stand up for their city because there is like this weird because you guys notice this, I'm sure, too.
What's a shitlib?
Just like somebody who's uh no, not can't.
No, Shitlib to me is like the classic, the pink hair, the pussy hat.
Like that, but for me, it's like there is something annoying.
We should call them the coffee party.
Because they're the barista equivalent.
The tea party and a coffee party.
You're all coming back.
I mean, doesn't it annoy you when some guy in like Alabama is like, man, crime in New York is out of control.
And you're like, dude, shut the fuck up.
Every time I go in Rogan, I have to tell him.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
New York is still dangerous.
It's always been dangerous.
Yeah.
I mean, it's also not that dangerous.
I mean, like, empirically, it's just like not worse for sure for them.
Yeah, fair enough.
If you live in a suburb, sure.
Anyway, the city is dangerous for anybody who lives in a suburb.
But that's what I'm saying.
Like, the delta is minimal.
Yeah, absolutely.
I totally agree.
My point is just, I do think there would be something people need to stand up for America's cities.
Because I think what's unfortunate right now is that a lot of Republicans have like psyop themselves, especially younger guys.
Like they don't want to come move to a city anymore.
And I'm like, no, like the city is the greatest place that you should move to.
That's where commerce connection.
That's where you're going to meet everybody.
You're young.
You can meet your wife.
Whatever.
Like, that's where you can get shit done.
You can go out.
You can have a good time.
You want to move to the suburbs.
This is where shit happens.
This is where you can.
Yeah.
This is where you can be.
That's why I moved here.
You guys all do the right thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, it's a like I want somebody to stand up.
And this is like almost a liberal, but like, I want someone to stand up for fucking America's cities.
I want like Chicago.
I'm doing it who you are.
You just called me a cop.
No, no.
I'm saying it's a good thing.
I think liberals can do it in a more credible way.
Instead of being like, actually, crime statistics is like, no, bitch, like, don't be a pussy.
It's fucking awesome.
But here's the issue.
Don't they get identified as city elites and who can't relate to the people who are not?
Yeah, we are elite.
We're elite.
Why are we afraid of being elite?
That's not the attack.
We think we're better.
We do.
And when you move here, we don't even consider you from here.
We treat everybody who moves to New York like an immigrant.
We go, then you go, I'm from New York.
We go, well, when did you move here?
And they go, oh, seven years ago.
Yeah, you're from Montana.
We are elite.
But that pisses off the rest of the country.
Until they move here, and they want to be from here.
I would be pissed off if I live where y'all live too.
I travel the country.
I know what it's like.
We are elite, and it's good that we're elite.
I agree.
There needs to be this confidence movement again.
That's what I'm saying.
100%.
Get the migrants out.
When I'm talking about migrants, I mean everybody from Maine.
Everybody from Google.
Everybody from Pennsylvania.
Exactly.
Mark is cool.
Come on.
My gosh is cool.
I'm going to HMB.
I got to HBC.
You know, the problem with the coffee party, though, is self-loathing is intrinsic to their existence.
That's exactly what I mean.
They cannot exist without hating themselves and everything about them.
Yes.
So I have to hate New York City even though I live here.
I have to hate America even though I live here because I hate myself English.
Can I ask you a question about that?
Does it come from, and I'm curious about this.
Does it come from actual self-hatred or does it come from a need to be liked and accepted and the feeling of if I shit on my existence, these minorities might accept me?
Aren't those kind of one and the same?
Doesn't one feed into the other?
Again, I don't know chicken or the egg, but I don't think that they're doing it just because they hate themselves.
They might hate themselves, but they desperately care about the approval.
Because people who hate themselves, they just kill themselves.
And it's like, you know, solid.
NYC Hate Self Reflection00:14:31
No, I'm not saying that.
Suicide hotline.
No, no, no.
They shouldn't do that.
I'm not saying you should do that.
But if you just have this pure hatred for self.
Yeah, yeah.
But don't you feel like sometimes there's like this like need of approval.
The appearance of self-loathing.
Yeah.
It is diametrically opposed to stand up for a big city when you're like your whole existence appears to be shit on everything that is of my existence.
I also think it might be education.
Like there's this guilt that is like ingrained in you in the college system, right?
Like America's bad.
You know, it's like the existence of the country is bad.
Like the things that we do are awful.
And there's like this thing that gets embedded within you.
Whereas like a working class kids or whatever built with much more patriotism, both in the home and probably just around like the way that they think about things.
They're like, yeah, we do that stuff.
It's a great place.
The easiest way to deal with privilege is to apologize for it and not actually do anything great.
Great, great.
It's just to apologize.
It's the great.
Yeah.
Whereas people like, I didn't grow up poor by any stretch, but I feel like I worked up.
I started a comedy, blah, blah, blah.
So I don't feel like I have to apologize for this.
Yes.
If I, my kids, God willing, I'm successful I want it, they might feel a little bit apologetic.
I didn't earn this.
So you know what?
Instead of actually like going on doing community service, why don't I just apologize all the time for my existence?
And I think that's a lot of times why those guys are the loudest ones in the Democratic Party and they've taken control of the narrative.
Well, a lot of it is also about like this need for control.
Like that's where I think the if you were talking about how the right wasn't cool in the mid-2000s, like because they were trying to tell people what to do.
But like the modern right has basically become a socially libertarian right.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't think he likes when I say this, but I've for years I've been like, I think Dave Portnoy is one of the most important political figures in the country.
He would love this.
No, he would not.
I don't think he likes it because I think what I always say is like barstool republicanism is the new basically wave of conservatism in America, which is you do what you want to do, but don't fucking tell me how to speak, right?
Because I think Dave would love that.
I don't know.
I'm not sure.
Republican and Democrats.
Well, that's what I'm saying.
He doesn't want it to say Republican, but if he's like, they are Republican.
Cultural influence.
Yes.
I think that he would really appreciate it.
You're right.
That guy can be pressed.
He's like, the thing about Portnoy, barstool, whatever, is it's about saying fuck you to the man.
And like in the 2000s, the man was George W. Bush in the church trying to tell us or two people or whatever not to get married.
Now it's, oh, you don't know, BIPOC, you fucking racist.
Or like, you're not just race.
You're not just, you can't just be not be racist.
You have to be anti-racist.
You have to read this stupid fucking book by this grifter, Abraham Kendi, and all this other nonsense, right?
And the America is very socially libertarian because we're not really religious anymore.
And so now we're like, oh, I'm going to live my life, like all the grill dad conservatism.
There's a lot of different words for it, but it's like, just fuck off and don't tell my kids about transgenderism or whatever at age seven.
And I think that like bar stool kind of the brand exemplifies what I'm saying, which is saying fuck you to the cultural elite.
Well, Americans in general love to say fuck you with a lot of people.
Of course, we are.
We literally are.
Yeah, we love where I'm.
And we also love, and this is something I hope Democrats start to understand: is we love abundance.
You have to sell us on abundance.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think that's one thing that the Democrats haven't done.
Oh, you would love the new Ezra Klein stuff.
They're writing a book about Eben.
Okay, so I want to talk to you this guy.
I would love to see Memory.
I'd love to go in and see.
His co-author is named Derek Thompson.
Fuck that guy.
Fuck him.
No, no, no.
He's got a great podcast.
Play it in the shelf.
It is a great book.
Yeah, it's a great podcast.
I love it.
He does not shout out other podcasts.
He's a liberal.
He's obviously liberal individuals.
They're Democrats.
But Capital D.
I think there's one thing like, and again, I get away from Republican Democrat.
It's like, let's just talk about culture because obviously things shift, right?
If the Republicans were the party of censorship and now they're the party of like libertarians, it's not really a Dem Republican thing.
It's just like which party is accessing the things that Americans need or care about.
And this idea of like, we're dreamers, right?
It's like in our DNA, we are risk-taking dreamers.
We need people who are talking shit and willing to take risks.
We're the frontier.
That's who we are.
Everybody in our family, if you go back a generation, left their entire existence to just try to make it here, right?
So when a Democrat is coming in, I need them to say some wild shit.
I want them to say, listen, there are all these developers in New York and they're trying to put these fucking buildings up.
So yeah, we're dead in that.
Matter of fact, we're going to take that land over there.
We're going to build 10,000 fucking units.
That shit is going to be cheap.
And now you can live in Manhattan for under $3,000.
Even if they don't do it, people are going to be able to do it.
Tell me.
Yeah, absolutely.
If Trump could say we're taking Greenland, you could say you're taking a little patch of land in Manhattan and building affordable housing.
Say some wild shit that makes people go, whoa, whoa, that kind of sounds fine.
I totally agree.
And don't make it, yeah, we're going to shoot every kid up with the fucking hormonal, whatever the fuck they don't actually say that, but that is the rhetoric.
But there's a tacit acceptance.
It's pretty wild, though.
There's an acceptance of it.
Then you have politicians who just make a bunch of bold claims that they never do.
Oh, welcome to America.
Then we go right back to losing trust in politicians.
Hey, you got to do some of it.
But the tax is here.
Trump is at least doing the shit that he's going to say.
Where's the wall?
If you like it or not, he's doing a man.
I actually am not like, that's my problem with Doge is I feel like the whole Doge thing is not really how it was sold.
What's the Democrat build the wall?
There's no wall, healthcare.
But the problem is, I go, okay, what about illegal immigrants?
They're like, oh, and I go, is it going to cover transgender women?
Is it going to cover?
It's like low-key, you almost got to stay away from healthcare because they're all in the pockets of healthcare.
Give me the Democrat build the wall.
If Democrats go, yo, eggs are a dollar.
Don't even tell me how you're going to do it.
Eggs are a dollar.
We subsidize corn.
We subsidize milk.
We subsidize all this other shit.
We're subsidizing chickens.
Eggs are a dollar.
And then have Republicans go, oh, well, we'll actually get a lot of people.
Press control.
We can't rid of the bank.
And then you go, you sound gay.
Eggs are a dollar.
I think tax the call this man.
I think tax the rich would be see.
I actually think his is better because it's tangible.
Like build the wall with something you can't do.
A dollar.
As opposed to taxing the riches is a it's it could be it's been too coded and it could be crying about it for years.
You're not going to tax the rich.
They're going to find a way to get out of it.
And also everybody's a really important cultural distinction.
Every poor American, not every, but most think they're going to be rich.
That's the problem.
So if you start saying something, I'm going to be rich one day.
You know what?
Eggs a dollar right now.
Say this in New York.
Yo, New York, we got to rule eggs are a dollar.
Just say it.
Whoever says that first win, if Stephen A. Smith goes, yo, eggs are a dollar.
Hey, listen, Stephen, call her.
It's that simple.
I need Democrats build a wall.
Give me five build-a-walls for Democrats.
Eggs are a dollar.
But you're touching the class problem, and I think part of the self-loathing is the social problem that they've been addressing for the last 10 years.
Bring that burden.
I think the internal self-loathing we're talking about from the left comes from this idea of, oh, we are elitist, so we need to bring ourselves down and we need to ingratiate ourselves with the disenfranchised, the trans, the BIPOCs, all that stuff.
When the real problem underlying all of it is the class issue that eggs are too expensive and that there's no affordable housing.
Well, I would say housing is number one.
I actually think what you were saying, I would mortgages or something like that.
I'd be like, all mortgages are 2% from now on.
JP Morgan, fuck you.
Done.
Yeah.
People would be like, what?
I'd be like, figure it out.
No, that's not possible.
Jamie Diamonds can be on CNBC.
Be like, well, actually, that's.
I want you to set your ass.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'm going to take all these eggs that are a dollar and I'm going to throw them into a fucking build.
Well, we had this.
We had this.
You remember the guy that was running?
Yo, the rent is too damn high.
I do have to do it.
One line.
The rent is too damn high.
He was forever.
People love that.
He was a celebrity.
He lost.
Well, he was part of that fringe party.
He became nationally famous.
He did not.
I didn't even live in New York.
I know about this.
He was a homeless guy.
Bitch Rand had almost won.
One line.
He lost really dead.
He's a homeless guy.
It doesn't matter.
But I'm just saying.
Of course, rent is too damn high.
You're homeless.
That makes sense.
The point of that.
But that's proof.
I think that's proof of the point.
Stephen A. says the rent is too damn high and also has some fucking policy and didn't sell.
And eggs, we're going to make them a dollar.
I love that building.
It can't just be rapping, but we have to make that catch.
The other thing about Trump.
And part of the reason they're going to be aware of that.
But like the guy from Squid Game that said he was going to give $1,000 to every person.
Oh, that's right.
Yeah.
Wait, which one?
I mean, not exactly.
Andrew Yang?
Andrew Yang.
The guy said he was going to give $1,000 on the Squid game.
I thought they were talking about the actual Squid Game in a new season.
And I was like, well, I don't remember.
They kind of did say that.
They were giving, they're going to split all the money.
Number 351 was running for president.
He said he was going to give $1,000.
He was never in Squid Games.
I don't think he was here.
Mark, stop fucking asking.
I don't think he's on here.
You know why he's bitter?
Because we wanted him on when he ran for New York and he did not have better.
I'm not better than he lost.
I'm not better.
And that's why Andrew would be on the bottom.
That's why he got killed on the screen.
Oh, of course he's come on now.
He needs it.
What I told Andrew Yang is: you cannot win.
You cannot become mayor of 351.
Oh, that was Andrew.
That was Andrew Yang.
You cannot become mayor of New York without coming on this podcast.
Okay.
It's a simple fact, right?
Okay.
Most people that voted for Eric Adams think is that I'm going to get Cuomo.
You got to get Cuomo.
Oh, is he running again?
Dude, he just announced yesterday.
You got to get him on.
Oh, yeah.
I would love that.
That would be fucking incredible.
Which one is the Cuomo?
Which Cuomo is?
Andrew.
Yeah.
So he's going from, see, that's the thing.
Governor of New York.
Chip Nipple Sauce Monkey.
Yeah, I call him a Chip Nipple Sauce Monkey.
I didn't call him a Chip Nipple Sauce Monkey.
But he does.
There's a COVID thing, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I forgot about that.
That's how powerful Mayor of New York is.
You go from governor to mayor.
That is an upgrade.
There you go.
I don't know who the governor of New York is.
I'm going to be completely hobo.
Come on.
You fucking.
Yeah, you know.
We have a woman running.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
This guy is.
You can't be telling me.
You know, the governor of New York.
I honestly, the last governor I knew was the blind guy.
That was the last governor of New York.
Adding Spitzer in New Jersey?
No, no, no, no.
There was a blind guy that went to the Yankees game.
Right?
What are you talking about?
Dinkins?
No, there was a blind guy that took over after somebody stopped and he was blind.
And they brought him to the Yankees game and gave him a fucking.
Who the fuck are you talking about?
What is his name?
David Patterson?
David Patterson.
David Patterson.
Oh, man.
Do that research.
Yeah, I thought you know shit.
I don't fucking live in New York, dude.
I don't think it's not the capital of the world.
Look at that hit.
It's the capital of the world.
That was the governor of New York.
No, he's Stevie Wonderblind.
He's vegan.
When was this?
Yeah, I remember this.
When was his term?
I have no idea.
Come on, man.
Just say backspace.
Yeah.
God damn.
All right.
He's fucking shooting.
What's going on?
Free Luigi.
We need Luigi back.
What the hell?
All right, guys, let's take a break for a second.
We have a limited time here.
So do you think that we got to something from Doach?
I think we did.
I think we fixed the Democrats.
Yeah, I also think, I honestly think a lot of Democrats should listen to this.
And if you're a Democrat or whatever out there, you should send it to people.
You know what's also funny?
I try to.
I mean, we have the conversation with Brilliants the other time.
We talked about it here.
What I realized is I got to go on more.
I was telling you this.
I have to go on many more left-leaning shows.
And I realized this even when I was doing some press for the pod, is that one, those conversations are so much better because there's a perception, I guess, of me.
And once they actually have a lot of people who are in the middle, they literally think you're mad.
And here's the thing.
People ask me that.
Of course.
I'm like, dude, I don't know what you're saying.
But I have empathy for them.
No, I have empathy, though, because I'm sure the way I think of anybody who I've only seen a headline of, and then I see like one little clip of.
But in my mind, we kind of work really hard to make sure that we have diversity in guests here.
Obviously, never a woman, but in terms of the male guests, right?
We have a lot of diversity.
But all that does is just reminds our base that we care about these different opinions and then we have these conversations, right?
I could be on a podcast with Charlemagne, who is literally riding so hard for the Democrats and comma.
It doesn't matter.
The only thing that matters is when you go into their territory and have those discussions, and then they get a different sense of you.
That's interesting.
And I think that's what works so well with John.
I think when John would go on Fox News, it's not about having the Fox News guys on his program.
He would go over there because you're going into the Lion's Den.
Yeah, you call the Lions in, but then they get a sense of you.
So it's something that I realized I'm going to make more of an effort and we should all do going on other pods.
I assume just having diversity of guests over here, all those people would listen.
They don't.
No.
It's our listeners.
So think about how much content is out there.
How much other shit do you have?
No, you're right.
You're 100% right.
You're 100% right.
Anyway, you were saying.
Oh, man.
I don't even fucking remember.
I'm trying to think about it.
How do you feel about Pat Ryan?
Do you think he'll have a chance to run it?
Pat Ryan?
Yeah.
Who am I?
I don't know.
He's a black guy, probably.
No, he's actually not.
Really?
Oh, the representatives?
Yeah.
No, dude, no.
He's talking a few times.
What about Newsom?
Oh, that's interesting.
I think he's got too much baggage.
French laundry is just so bad.
It's all good.
It's so bad.
He's got the same problem.
Can you explain that to everybody who doesn't know?
Oh, sorry.
He dined at the French, which is like one of the three-star Michelin restaurants.
I think it's Thomas Keller, right?
Yeah, he dined at the French laundry.
He was indoor dining when all of the rest of California had non-indoor dining.
During COVID, it was a huge scandal, rightfully.
It was ridiculous to shut down all these businesses.
I think shit like that, he reads to me as too elitist.
He's got too much of the baggage, and he's also trying too hard.
He just started his new podcast.
I'm like, ugh.
Like, he gives me the fucking ick, dude.
Yeah.
Like, you know, with the with how desperate he's contorting himself.
It's just too much.
That's why, again, I come back to my, it has to be an outside.
Also, it's not the way Trump broke the Republican Party has to come from outside.
It's like the state, the perception, the state could be flourishing, but the perception of the state from the outside is that it's struggling.
I mean, empirically, they lost, what, half a million people.
It's just true.
But even if even if they were doing really well, the perception is so important.
And not being able to control that perception, I guess what he shouldn't be doing is starting his own pod.
He should be going on Rogan.
Yes.
He should be going on any right-leaning pod that he possibly can.
He's afraid.
And that's the funny thing about it.
But that isn't Don Rogan.
I'm like, dude, he's not going to attack you.
Let's shut down.
He's going to fucking talk to you and try to understand.
He let Fetterman talk.
And that guy can barely fucking talk.
Epstein FBI Cover Up00:11:27
What the fuck?
And to be honest, I think if Fetterman didn't have that stroke, I think he would have a chance for the Democrats.
Maybe he was very talented.
And his clothing thing drives me fucking.
I know it drives you crazy, but it reads every man blue collar, not super cocky social.
To a Democrat, it reads a blue-collar Democrat.
It reads like, that's our guy.
I don't know.
Okay, he's like the costume of the Democratic.
I thought it was working.
I thought that exact thing until I saw him at the inauguration still wearing the sweatpants and the shorts.
And I was like, oh, you're just putting on an outfit so that working class people will think that's how I love them.
And now it lost all inauthentic, it lost all athleticity.
It felt so inauthentic.
I really believed it until that moment.
You knew the inauguration's happening.
You can rent a suit for $50.
Bro, he wore a suit when BB visited the Senate.
It's like, what the fuck?
You know, so it's like, you can't wear this suit.
I'm just saying.
It's true.
Imperial.
And you wore a suit when BB came to a state.
He's going to wear a fucking suit when the United States president is being inaugurated.
The conspiracy theorists are saying about the answer.
And he can wear the suit when he wants to.
Okay.
We have a very boring reveal about the Epstein list.
Yeah.
Right.
Can you explain, or any of you, anybody who knows here, I haven't really been keeping up to date on it.
Why was it underwhelming?
And what is the future of the Epstein list?
Well, it was all publicly available.
The rollout was a disaster.
Like, let's just, you know, like, discuss that, why it was disseminated in that way.
According to the people there, they would not expect it to be photographed immediately.
So let's, for people who haven't even seen all this, here's what happened: a bunch of conservative influencers or whatever were at the White House.
They were given binders to say the Epstein files on them.
They come out of the White House, they're photographed, and tweets start going around of them holding up binders to say the Epstein files.
People are like, hey, hold on a second.
Why are you giving this to some conservative journalist?
Like, this is supposed to be just posted online for everybody, right?
So, then they were defending it.
Uh, the other thing is, it starts to leak out that everything in there is already publicly available information.
The only new thing that came out of the Epstein files was a claim by the attorney general that the FBI is currently covering things up, but like, that's just a claim.
That's not a file, right?
So, there's redacted info, they actually redacted some stuff which is publicly available already, which is less fucking hilarious.
They're like, in some ways, there's actually less information in this.
And they also, the House Judiciary Committee, uh, GOP, posted a link being like, Here's the Epstein files, and it was a literal Rick roll, like they a link to Rick rolling.
And it was like, Dude, we're talking about children who were sex trafficked, like a dangerous pedophile.
Like, you're turning this into a meme.
Yeah, MOPOY is not a meme.
Nobody can make jokes about it.
If you're a professional comedian, if you're the House Judiciary, you're like, This is actually serious.
This is like real shit.
So, like, what does all this shit mean?
Like, I mean, first of all, I'm starting to doubt whether the Epstein file is real, like, whether it even exists.
Like, at this point, why would the FBI and I mean, they burned all the JFK stuff, they burned all the UFO stuff, or they've covered it up.
Like, is it even in physical format?
Can it be released?
But also, do we also, I think we need a lot of oh, we already know what a lot of what we need to know.
That the Israeli prime minister Eud Barack was like sleeping in this house multiple times, that Bill Clinton's flying on this guy's jet, that Bill Gates is asking this dude for marriage advice or whatever.
Why did Epstein have the connection to get Bill Gates a Nobel Prize?
I'm like, I think we know the only thing that needs to be declassified is some of the intelligence connection, which they admitted was part of the reason that they pushed through the 2007 plea deal with Epstein.
And so, anyway, my Epstein files is get Alex Acosta, who was the DOJ, the U.S. attorney, and then the Secretary of Labor, who resigned over this.
Let's sit him down.
We give him immunity.
And we're like, What actually happened?
Who called you from the CIA?
Because he gave a quote back at that time where he said, Somebody intelligence called me and told me nobody knows.
I mean, it could be CIA or ER.
Nobody knows.
What is the quote?
The intelligence told me to let it go.
That's right.
They said, Let it go with Epstein.
That's what he said.
That's what we give Alex Acosta immunity.
We go, Look, you have total immunity.
Just tell us what happened.
And Ghelane, we need to get Ghelane.
Same thing.
We're like, Look, you're already locked up for life, whatever.
And all of that.
You have immunity at this point from prosecution.
Tell us everything.
Is that possibility even being discussed?
No, I mean, I haven't heard it.
I'm saying this is my solution.
Yeah, first of all, it's a great solution.
Yeah.
I also think I'm not saying these people are going to be heroes.
I don't think there's any world where Ghelan's a hero, right?
Alex Acosta, there is a version where your entire identity doesn't become hiding child sex traffickers and allowing them to continue.
He's carrying this shit on his chest for 20 years.
It's costing the Secretary of Labor.
If he does it, if he goes out and does it and then somebody kills him afterwards, he'll at least die.
Yeah, he'll die hero.
Dude, I sat next to him on a plane.
I'm still ashamed of myself.
And you didn't ask?
Dude, it was like, it was like a night, 11:15 p.m. flight from Miami, and it was dead silent.
And I was just like, I'm like sitting there, like itching.
I was like, I was right.
Got to get him some drinks.
I got him.
Right now, I'm just like, oh, that was the tongue.
I didn't want to be the guy that was like, oh, excuse me.
I'm like, so, uh, and all the facts.
One of the great regrets of my life.
I don't know.
You don't want to know who's on the list?
No, I don't think I'm not sure the list as we understand it exists.
I think a lot of the list as yes, he wants to know.
The list, of course.
But I'm saying the list, we already know.
Leon Black, the head of Apollo Group, who had to resign, the most powerful private equity firm in the world.
Fucking Dershowitz, like who else?
Ehud Barak, Bill Clinton, Kevin Spacey, Ghelane Maxwell, every person who was ever at the Reed Hoffman, all of these folks.
It's like, it's out there.
It's public record.
And they all give us this, or Les Wexner.
Actually, that's another one.
We need to.
He needs to get immunity too.
We're like, Les, how old is he?
Fucking 90 years old or something.
We're like, just say it, dude.
Tell us what it were.
Why?
Why?
What the fuck was going on?
Yeah.
That's what I think.
So Alex Acosta is the key figure.
If we absolutely give him immunity, I don't even trust Ghelane, to be honest with you.
Yeah, fair.
She's too incentivized.
He's playing a lot.
Exactly.
So I think it's Acosta.
Acosta says what intelligence told him or whatever it is.
Maybe then you give immunity to Ghelane to just figure out exactly what's going on.
But I think that that would pacify the American curiosity.
Yeah, it should.
It might not satisfy us, but we'd at least go, okay.
We need to get Kash Patel on the show.
We need to green a get him.
But that's my thing.
I don't even know if Cash could, people say this.
I'm actually sure you're a UFO guy, too.
People are always like, oh, does the government have the truth about UFOs?
I'm like, yes, but not in the way that you think, man.
Like, there's no smoking.
It's way more boring.
It's just like, it's all within layers and a radar blip.
Bro, if you're into JFK stuff, too, like, you know this already.
You're like, look, we already have it.
Like, we know.
What is it?
What happened?
Well, we already know that the CIA assassinated or was complicit in an assassination plot against John F. Kennedy.
That's all on the record.
All of the official evidence, it doesn't matter.
We know about the Bay of Pigs, about the elements within the CIA who are upset about getting cut off.
The Bellis brothers, Drac Rue, all of it.
This is like, it's been proven.
It's been decades, right?
But we can lay out all of the holes in the official narrative.
Magic bullet, right?
Like, it's all bullshit.
But is there a file in the CIA that's like, we killed John F. Kennedy?
No, you won't.
What it is, is you will find a file talking about these Cuban elements or whatever who had access to stockpiles.
And maybe just like 9-11, where the FBI had knowledge or the CIA had knowledge of these people being in the country, but didn't do anything about it.
That it was more like, yeah, we were aware.
We didn't think they were going to do anything serious or whatever.
And then we're like, oh my God, we're going to cover this shit up immediately.
Like, that's kind of how it all went down.
So the information is there.
Like on Charlie Manson, read the chaos book.
It's there.
Like, we know.
What's the Charlie Manson?
That'll take me hours to explain.
But the Charles Manson chaos, highly recommend the book.
Tom O'Neill spent 20 years on it.
Charlie Manson was a CIA asset.
He was part of mind control experiments by the same guy who wiped Jack Ruby's mind.
Jolly Swift.
Jolly Swift.
Yeah, that's right.
He was the LSD CIA advisor on all of those brothel plans.
Jolly West.
Jolly West.
That's his name.
Jolly West.
Jolly West was the person feeding LSD to Charlie, the Manson family and all that.
Was part in an FBI plot to instigate a race war.
That's one of the things that they wrote on the Roman Polanski's Wall was trying to instigate this.
And it was all part of this crazy shit that was going on inside of the FBI at that time.
We know this.
We know all of this, even from the church committee onward.
But it's like people think that there's smoking guns.
It's just like, that's not how it works.
Like with MLK, with Manson, with JFK, UFO, et cetera.
Like it's all covered up and the real smoking gun stuff, those people are dead.
And I think the crazy part about the Manson stuff is that even on their deathbeds, they still won't tell the truth.
Who is that?
Who is that?
The cops involved, the FBI.
All of them.
There's been why do you think?
I don't know, man.
I don't know.
I genuinely don't know.
I think either the information, it's not that it would be too shocking.
It's just that don't let it ever be confirmed because only weirdos like me ever read the book and come on a show here and tell you about it, right?
It's like most people just moved on with their lives.
Like, yeah, whatever.
Manson, is he still alive?
You know, what's going on there?
Is it possible?
Watch the Taratino movie, you know?
It's like, that's it.
Is it possible that the like extreme conspiracy theories are, I don't know what the term for this would be, but they're developed by the people that are hiding the truth?
Oh, people think that.
Yeah, a lot of people.
What is that called?
I mean, like, disinformation.
So, so the idea is like get people.
Controlled opposition.
Yeah.
So, get people to think an even crazier thing happened.
Well, people say that the term conspiracy theorist.
Yeah, James A. is an opioid created as a psyop.
So, so, so, so, let's just say best case scenario.
This is just best kid.
I don't even know if it's the best case, but a scenario: uh, FBI is aware.
Yeah, choose not to intervene.
Really bad thing happens.
Leader of the FBI goes, Fuck, if people know that we were aware, this is on me.
The guy was only on the job for one week on 9-11.
Oh, weird.
Oh, he's like, Why would he have any incentive to cover that up, right?
So, we go, shit, if I don't cover this up, it's going to come down to all of us.
We're all going to lose our jobs.
And then you go to all your constituents, you go, Hey, guys, if we don't cover this shit up, this is on us.
So, let them think an even crazier thing happened, or we put that idea out there in the world because the truth is kind of boring in its ineptitude, which is oftentimes how conservative is.
That's exactly what happened.
That's what 9-11 was.
It was complete cluster.
We've had the information since 05.
Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower.
Everybody should read that book.
That book lays out exactly how the FBI and the CIA had everything they needed to stop 9-11, and it didn't happen because of bureaucratic clusterfuck.
It's like what we do with our girls.
Like, you know, we'll just be at a strip club and they'll be like, What are you talking about?
And then someone's like, No, you were cheating with a brothel with 40 different people.
We're like, I don't even know what the fuck you're talking about.
I didn't even come close to that.
Exactly.
So, you just need something crazier for them to fixate on, and then you'd be like, There's no way I was at a brothel.
I don't even know any of these people when in reality, you were just at a little Korean strip club in Hawaii.
So, you need to have a lot of first-hand knowledge about this.
I was just making hypotheticals.
Yeah, yeah, hypothetical.
This is a psyop right here.
Textbook psyop.
Okay, no, now your wife doesn't watch this show.
She watches all the time.
9-11 Bureaucratic Failure00:12:13
I love you, baby.
I'm a good guy.
Samanase, samanase, or whatever you say when you walk into a Japanese restaurant.
Honey mustard.
Honey mustard.
What are you thinking?
Simi Masen?
No, no, it's uh honey mustard.
We say honey mustard, but it's not that.
It's uh, when you walk into a Japanese restaurant, no, no, actually, they go uh because that would be a good day.
I was just there.
Fucking love Japan, by the way.
Really?
That's what got this watch.
Beautiful watch.
Vintage watch.
I like it.
You gotta go vintage.
It is.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, oh, sai masu.
That means good morning.
Oh, I go saimas.
He was off, bro.
No, mine is terrible.
No, no, no.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
He was saying samase.
We're not that.
Okay.
All right.
What else?
Now we're into this.
Now we're into this little sphere right here.
Oh, yeah, that's it.
Iras Shamase.
Iras Shamasu.
That's it.
Can you do the vocal thing?
Oh, do they have that?
But just guessing.
Yeah.
Boy.
That was kind of close to what I was saying.
It was close.
Yeah.
Oh, Shimas.
All right.
What else?
What else?
We can talk about Tate Brothers, but we'll leave that to the end.
I actually don't know a ton about the case.
I'll be honest.
No, it's one of those I intentionally, I never did the deep dive into the fucking human trafficking shit because when you get into their like, well, action around like that.
That I don't care about.
It's more this idea that like they're, they were trashing the West so much.
Yeah.
And now, at least for me, I'm a patriot.
I love America.
There's nothing I love more than America.
So when people shit on America, even Americans, I'm a little bit defensive.
Now, as Americans as they are, I want to protect.
They got to come back.
I don't like this idea that they're not allowed to be here just because they criticize it.
If you're an American, we got your back no matter what, and you have the freedom to say whatever the fuck you want to say.
But there is a part of me that's also like, I need a little bit of a, okay, America's not that bad.
Tuck that shit in a bit.
Hey, because when the going got tough, you got to go to the U.S. justice system is fucking nice.
Daddy's pretty cool.
No, dear bullshit.
Oh, the West has fallen.
It seems like the West is up.
It seems like we're up with open arms.
Well, stop using the West.
America, I will say.
Yo, that's what I'm talking about, bro.
You know what I mean?
Gets back to our Europe conversation.
Yeah.
What's the West?
We have different values.
We're America.
Can I just tell you something?
When I say the West, I just mean America.
Exactly.
Just say America.
I never met all of the people.
Just say it then.
Yeah.
The Islamic countries in Europe that I traveled to when I was in college, I'm not referring to them.
I'm referring to America only.
I do love going there for weekends.
I mean, it's beautiful.
It's a nice place.
It's great to visit.
You're wrong about the coffee.
100%.
You're wrong about coffee.
Bro, we are here in Soho.
This is one of the greatest places in the world for coffee, maybe outside of Tokyo.
And you think that the better coffee is in some shithole cafe with a dopio espresso in Milan or something?
No, no, no.
I didn't say the coffee's better.
You said the coffee sucks.
What I will say is that.
Well, it does because it's bitter.
They don't even do drip.
Like, America is built on the man drinking his fucking, you know, what is it, motor oil at 7-Eleven on his way to work.
These fuckers are sitting there with their goddamn wafer and their little ceramic drinking wine at like 10:30.
To be honest, that sounds awesome.
Yeah, because you don't fucking, they don't do anything.
This country is not awesome.
Yeah, but that's the point: America's built on 7-Eleven fucking coffee, man.
No, I will be.
On the guys in line with Red Bull.
Red Bull.
Don't tell me.
And 7-Eleven extra large at 5:30 a.m.
You know, those are the men who built this country.
No, I agree with you.
Everything around that is better.
But an espresso in a beautiful cafe in Europe is 10 times better.
It's a vacation.
It's not the same thing.
No, okay.
And first of all, again, we're in Soho.
Five of the places.
I literally was walking with the colours.
What's the machine that they use to make the coffee around here in Soho?
Wait, what are you talking about?
It's called a La Marzoca.
Yeah.
Definitely made in America.
That's if you're drinking espresso.
I'm drinking fucking drip coffee, which is an American and a South American thing.
Because what we want is like the pour over culture all of third wave from here.
No, no, they don't call it French for them.
I'm not drinking in fucking French press.
This is so crazy.
So you're talking about a French press.
I don't understand, bro.
But the food.
You guys literally live in the world.
Give them good money.
You live in the capital of one of the best coffee nations in the world.
Everyone push back Europe, Europe-wise.
The food quality, and I don't mean the cooking, but the quality of the ingredients is undeniably so much better in Europe.
Because in America, you're just allowed to do whatever.
This is actually, Morgan Morgan is doing like a lawsuit against it.
But like, I want to see the median food in Europe is better, but the high-end food in America, if you want the non-GMO food, our shit is better.
If you want the pasteurized beef, our stuff is better.
If you want the really good stuff, but you're right.
The median food of ingredients in Europe for the European American American European Entertainment Organic.
I'm not talking about organic.
I'm saying if you want to get all the ingredients in America, in America, where you're in the world.
The best restaurants in the world are here.
Yeah.
I agree with you.
It's a Simon Club.
That's Los Angeles.
It's New York only.
Los Angeles is not like a foodie destination.
Dude, no, I don't think that's true.
Any restaurant that's popped up at Los Angeles started in New York.
Unless it's a taco truck.
No.
Unless it's a taco.
I think the Asian food in Los Angeles might be better.
In San Francisco, it's a good idea.
And whose idea was it to bring that?
Oh, it's from New York.
Nah, bro.
Someone needs to start the fucking money.
Is there a Burmese restaurant in New York?
Yes, of course.
Are you sure?
Yes, because I used to go to it as a kid.
What is it?
Wait, shout it out, actually.
I don't know if it's still.
It's a Burma Superstar.
Shout out.
San Francisco.
It was on.
I'll tell you right now where it was.
It was on 7th Street between 3rd Avenue and 2nd Avenue.
And there's a beautiful Burmese restaurant we used to eat it once a week.
I would have it.
We would order in from Maryland.
All right, you went.
And Little Myanmar?
I don't know.
Is that the one for city elites over there?
It's awesome.
Come on.
Aren't you native New York?
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah.
I'm kind of.
They had the tree that you would attach the dollars to.
Yeah.
And it was to raise money for whatever war they had going on in Parma at the time.
And so you were actually funding Rohingya genocide.
I thought you could take the dollars.
I didn't understand what it was.
Okay.
What else?
Whatever.
Good food cities in America.
New York, New Orleans, Austin.
I think Philly's underrated.
Austin.
No, stop it with Austin.
Guys, skies, guys, guys, guys, guys.
It's Mexican food, bro.
Stop it.
We're fucking Texas.
It's a big story.
I just need Austin has great food.
Your Mexican food sucks here.
I'm not debating that.
And Los Angeles, too.
We're being honest.
I just want to, let's just point this out.
With the food, culture and awesome.
Yeah.
Austin has great food if you come from a place that doesn't have restaurants.
So you go there.
You come to Middle America.
Yeah.
Most people that move there from Middle America are like, holy shit, what's a sushi roll?
Like, they have no clue.
Now we're talking about the sushi room.
It's the most amazing.
But the idea, like, I don't like that we're like, we're putting Austin as this like food destination.
I understand.
It's not a sushi agriculture.
They're good.
Yeah, sushi.
Yeah, but they didn't start in Austin.
This is a perfect example of what we're saying.
No, I would defend Austin for the Tex-Max alone.
Like, just because we can agree.
You and I are from Texas.
Tex-Max is fucking Tex-Max is existing.
Nobody's saying the best.
That's why I would recommend Varbati, Texas.
I'm not putting it on a New York or LA.
That's what I'm saying.
I understand it's very exciting if you've never eaten at a restaurant and you go there and you're like, wow, this is really good food.
But nobody from New York or Los Angeles or Paris or London or Miami goes to Austin.
They're like, this is the greatest cuisine I've ever had in my life.
I don't know.
So like I was like, okay, like Vegas gets all of America's best restaurants in making it great food.
Were you actually impressed by the food scene in Paris?
I wasn't at all.
I did not think the food scene.
This is the thing I hate about European cities is that if they want just French food, fine.
In New York, like you just said, Burmese.
I can go to Curry Hill and have fucking South Indian food, North Indian food.
I had sushi last night or whatever here in New York.
I can eat anything.
Same in LA.
Like in Manhattan, not that good.
There's Bungalow was good.
Sema, even though I don't really like the chef, was pretty good.
But yeah.
Tamarind is phenomenal.
Go to Tamarind with the drinks.
Yeah, that's a good restaurant.
It's absolutely incredible.
Shout out to Tamarind.
But yeah, I mean, like, you know, if we're talking about like the best food, look, New York is the greatest city in the world.
There's not no question.
I don't know, man.
It might be Tokyo.
After I went to Tokyo, I think it might be Texas.
Listen, if you want to live in a loveless city where people walk around like Tesla robots, New York's social media.
Tokyo is a place in the world.
New York is the most loving northern place.
The most loving northern place in the world.
Wait, have you been to Tokyo?
Yes, I have.
Oh, it dude.
There's more.
I would love it, man.
Dude, extremes.
Bus is bipolar.
Yeah, that's right.
But the thing about Tokyo is not only is the median experience incredible all the time.
Their food, like if you look, best pizza is going to be in Tokyo.
Sorry, I know this is not just a good idea.
Okay, good.
You made this argument.
Good.
I went to the place you were in.
Best French food in the world.
Tokyo.
Best Italian food in the world.
Tokyo.
The Japanese, their culture is built around refinement.
So they're done making their shit.
And now they're like, okay, we're going to perfect everybody else.
And they do.
It's so good.
There's this Japanese DJ.
His name is Yosuki Yuki Matsu.
That was the guy whose Boiler Room set they were playing.
Boiler and set is amazing.
Oh, that was insane.
He's incredible.
And here's the thing.
The second I saw, and this shows me my prejudice.
The second I saw a thumbnail with a Japanese person DJings, I knew it was going to be the best DJ set I've ever heard.
There you go.
Because culturally, to put themselves out in front of people with something like that, they would not do it.
Unless it's five-star.
The best.
That's right.
Whereas every female model that turns 30 in America is like, I'll be a DJ too.
There's no like, oh, you could give shame to your family by going to do this.
So Japanese refinement, it is incredible, the best of best.
But for me, part of culture, like when I go visit these places, is I need to feel the love of people.
I need to feel the affection.
Like when I go to Mexico, Mexico is the greatest.
It's all outside of America.
It's great.
The love you feel.
Like in Italy, when you're in Italy, just the love, the fucking passion that you feel.
From Libya or something like that?
Like, you take a boat over here?
And I'm like, no, it's a U.S. passport, actually.
I'm like, I fucking own your restaurant.
She's just selling oranges on the street.
It's like, I'll take two of your limoncellos, man.
So, yeah, there is.
So, I appreciate the refinement, but in terms of like the actual cultural appreciation, like, I got chastised at an illegal bar for kissing my wife.
Whoa, the bartender was like, finger waving, stop that.
No, I love that, dude.
Why?
Because it's about decorum, man.
It's about we all act a certain way.
When you're on a subway, that's the most conservative shit.
I thought you were a libertarian.
Get out of my business.
I didn't say I'm a libertarian.
I say I appreciate I'm the most conservative guy.
Also, I want to give a couple quick shout-outs.
Grammatic, who did one of the songs for the special, and he's also done music for us throughout the tour.
He's absolutely incredible.
He just dropped an album.
So you guys can go check him out right now.
He's phenomenal.
Seriously, one of the most talented people I know in music.
So make sure we go fuck with Grammatic.
He did the closing song for the special, and it's fantastic.
So go check that, but also go check out his album.
And matter of fact, go check out some of his live shows.
I know he's got Red Rocks coming up.
So if you're in Colorado and you want to see a spectacle, go check him out.
Also, the Garbage Boys, Are You Garbage just put out a really cool piece on YouTube.
They were on this tour.
I think they call it the Route 66 tour, if I'm not mistaken.
And they put out this like great piece that encapsulates the tour.
It's also got scenes from the live shows that they were doing.
And yeah, it's just, it's really awesome.
I love what those guys are doing.
So make sure you go check that on their YouTube.
And also, our boy Chrissy D. Chrissy D has a new special out on Hulu.
So make sure you check out Chrissy's special.
Chrissy is absolutely hilarious.
So check out his special.
Check him out on tour as well.
And shout out the New York boys, man.
We're doing it.
We're doing things.
So love you guys.
Let's get back to the show.
I love it.
I know.
I love it when you're passionate about these things.
You're 100% wrong about European coffee.
But you are right about Japan in terms of you want that like strict culture.
Yes.
Garbage Boys Route 66 Tour00:06:34
And you want rules and everybody follows the rules.
I get that.
I like third world Lucy Goosey.
I get it.
I get it.
Look, it would never work here.
I'm just saying I appreciate it when I'm there.
And when you're on the subway and you're rammed up against somebody and nobody's saying a fucking word, you can hear a pin drop when people are polite to me.
I like that.
I love it.
When they're eyeballing.
I'm understanding how not Indian you are.
It's not fucking things that are coming.
These are the things I can't stand when I go to India.
Yeah, it all makes sense.
Straight home.
It all makes sense.
Sorry, India.
It drives me fucking crazy.
No, no.
You hear me in a taxi.
This guy's going through a red light.
He's like, only the biggest fool in out of Agra stops at the red lights.
Dad's like, why are you doing this?
He's like, only the biggest fool in Agra would stop at the red lights.
It's where the Taj Mahal is.
Yeah, Tyson.
I got to go to Indian.
No, you love it.
If you can get past the smell, you'll love it.
It's dynamic.
It's dynamic.
And that's why America has too.
We're a dynamic country.
I love what they're told what to do.
We don't want restrictions.
We don't want to.
Yeah, but when they all tell each other what to do, it's so pleasant to visit.
It's all clean and this orderly and they all stop at the walk.
How long were you?
Stop sign.
It was two weeks.
Two weeks.
I loved it.
I loved it for like the first time.
I could have stayed forever.
No, I could have stayed forever.
Again, he likes that.
He's a conservative.
No need.
They don't ban you.
They don't even allow Suda Fed in that country.
You know what?
Suda Fed.
They will confiscate your Suda Fed at the airport if you bring it into the world.
What about the declining birth rates?
Yeah, no, it's a huge problem.
Why?
Fuck.
And this is one of those things, too.
They have the greatest place.
It's the greatest place in the world to have children.
Like, they have daycare.
They have the incentives.
They have everything going for them.
Nobody's having kids.
Why do you think?
I have no idea.
I think what it is is vitality.
It's a vitality list.
And it's like the dying, like in America, and actually, there's only one Western primal urges.
They remove every primal urge, and the culture restricts it.
Back up your point, there's only one Western country in the world with an above replacement birth rate, Israel, even among secular Jews.
Really?
I don't know why.
Nobody knows why.
I think it's because they're at war and it's about national survival and like all of this.
America, we're low.
Korea, Japan, Sweden, Finland.
We all have, except America, like pretty generous social welfare.
We've got a year of paternity leave.
Doesn't make a when did the birth rate in America?
Bro, in Hungary, probably it's been a while.
Probably 1960.
I think it was the sexual revolution contraceptive.
But in terms of the current birth rate, what are we at right now?
Like 1.7 or something like that?
Maybe we're going gay marriage.
Where's our TFR?
We could finally get it for you guys.
My point is that you can throw all of the money, all of the social incentives that you want.
Hungry, they literally pay your mortgage if you have four children.
People just don't do it.
Like, it's like, there's something about it.
Oh, wow.
That's actually lower than I thought.
That's not good.
1.6.
Now we're coming back, though.
But what's Korea at?
Korea's like 0.9 or 0.8.
So bad.
South Korea.
Yeah.
0.78.
Disaster.
For people who don't know, that's the total.
It's the TFR is a total fertility rate, which means the replacement needs to be about 2.2 to grow as a civilization.
Japan loses 0.5% of its population every single year.
So it's a disaster, right?
They have no immigration.
Well, yeah, and they have zero immigration.
But that's the thing.
When you go there, it like makes sense.
They're all like they police each other.
It's part of their culture.
That's what makes it great.
As you describe it, you like that?
You want to be police?
There's something about it, which is so comforting.
Would you raise kids like that, though?
No, I probably wouldn't.
Thank you.
Dude, I'm American, right?
I've got this frontier shit inside of me.
And as much as I love the rules and all of that, when somebody tries to tell me what to do, I don't know.
I thought I started my own business just like you.
It's one of those where.
And you see those salary men walking around Japan.
But it's nice.
It's a nice place.
And they're going to do karaoke alone.
It's one of the saddest things you've ever seen.
I don't get that.
Well, they need outlets for their passion.
Like one person will buy themselves periods.
In their working outfit.
And they'll go and they'll sing fucking Bruno Mars until their fucking heart falls out of their chest.
That's so sick.
No, it's incredible.
There's elements of if the longer you stay in Tokyo, the more depressing it becomes.
And you start to see like the lovelessness of the culture.
When you first go there, it's the most culture shock you ever experienced.
I want to go back.
I want to go back with you guys.
You're going to have the best food you've ever had.
You're going to have the best massage you've ever had.
You're going to have the best of everything.
Anything.
Yeah, it's incredible.
But when you start to talk to the people there, especially the people who speak English and talk to the women, it is the most sexist place I've ever been in my entire life.
It is actually the most sexist developed country in the world.
It is, without a doubt.
It's like.
Hold on, hold on, hold on.
Well, here's the problem.
Women have no upward mobility in terms of, not jobs, in terms of their sexual identity.
So they stop sexually aging at like 13.
Old women can be cute.
They can't be elegant.
They can't be like beautiful or stunning.
Everything is cute.
See, they're just like, hee, hee, hee.
If you go into like the nicest stores over there to buy clothing, all the women's clothing are like skirts that come down to their ankle.
Now, I'm not saying women should be like revealing and slutty, but there's nothing that even wraps itself around that.
So the female identity is, I'm a 12-year-old little girl with my little cartoon makeup.
What do they call it?
Kawaii?
Kawachi?
I think that's like the term that they use for like cute.
Like everything's quite on.
Yeah.
So it's all about like cuteness.
It's all about waifus and shit like that.
Like, isn't that?
No, it's bifurcated.
It's like a barbell culture where it's like you either are extremely sexual or you're very conservative.
And even they exist in the same place.
But even in the extreme sexual, they're being young cartoons with big tits.
Yeah, it is weird.
It's this.
And then you see like the relationships.
You see people out eating together.
I'll see a couple out eating together and both of them are on their phones playing fruit ninja and not even looking at each other.
Is, I'm telling you, it is one of the most tragically sad places you'll ever go to, while at the same time, one of the most unique and brilliant and incredible.
So, there is a cost to that in the culture.
Absolutely.
And the cost to me is like the reason I like to travel.
I would never give any of it up.
Would I ever want that culture here?
But there's something I love about it for you.
Yeah, go dip in.
Yeah, to come in there and just be like, man, I'm so safe.
Dude, when you watch little six-year-olds go to walk by themselves to school in Tokyo with their backpacks on at night, you're like, this is fucking insane.
This would never happen.
Just seeing shit like that, you're like, what?
You never feel a danger at all.
See nothing.
Our boy Ben Uyeta got blacked out drunk there.
Streets of Tokyo.
Fell asleep, woke up, his shoes and socks put next to him.
Consumer Economy Phones00:15:55
Yeah.
Socks folded.
His sweater put behind his head as a pillow.
And people just walking around him to go to work in the morning.
It's beautiful the way that they care about each other.
In terms of like protection and respect.
Yes.
But everything is about respect.
It's all about respecting.
But no, there's a huge cost to it.
But the cost to me is that it's not a big thing.
The cost is high.
Dude, you go to Mexico and you feel the love in that culture, bro.
Like, it's just, it's like vibrating.
Like, that's true.
If you have a kid, the way that they, even when I was there with my wife, was pregnant, the excitement about her being pregnant, they want to tell you about their killing, and you're just like, ah, it's just, it's magnificent.
That's true.
It's amazing.
But the emotional volatility is also bipolar.
That is true.
That's the cost.
Bro, there's trade-offs for everything.
That's it.
That's all.
I do think more Americans should experience Japan.
I love that.
Agreed.
Because there's elements of it that we should.
Yeah.
We're like, hey, it's actually pretty nice to live in a city that's pretty fucking safe.
Amazing things can happen.
Commerce.
Like, you can walk around.
You can send your kid there.
Now a wife can work if she wants to.
She doesn't have to take, you know, have to worry about her kid not coming home at night or whatever.
We don't deal with that.
I mean, isn't that like the, I don't want to get into like fucking evolutionary biology, but like, isn't that the, isn't that what takes humans out of the chimpanzee realm?
It's like safety.
Oh, civilization.
Like, am I safe enough to develop ideas?
Absolutely.
Like, if you watch that chimp show, every second they're worried that the alpha is going to just start a fight to get it.
It's either violence or eating.
Like, that's all you worry about.
Your base instincts.
And then what's all most of the animal kingdom is.
Once those are satisfied, we start building skyscrapers.
Yeah.
So, okay, there is something.
Okay, okay.
What's your take on the economy?
Do you think Trump has been good for the economy, bad, or it's too early to tell?
Too soon to say, obviously.
There is a problem.
There's something called thermostatic public opinion, where the idea is like a thermostat.
You can push it up or push it down.
So the day, for example, that Trump took office, Democrats flipped from saying the economy was good to bad, and Republicans flicked from the economy is bad to good.
Because they're Biden's economy.
Yeah, but yeah, exactly.
So it's like, is it really about the economy or was it about something else?
It's like, this is why it's hard to say.
We have some data points.
We're talking about the SP or whatever before.
The problem right now is consumer sentiment is going down.
People are a little worried about tariffs.
We have issues.
Can you explain what consumer sentiment is?
Consumer sentiment is the confidence in the ability to purchase things either.
Consumer sentiment is like to purchase things either cheaply or the want to consume in the future.
It's actually an index that's based on my confidence that my, that I'll have the money in the future to buy.
And if I don't feel like I'll have to buy it.
It's not a future purchasing package.
Got it.
That's another part.
So if we're at all restrictive in our spending, it's an indicator that we don't have something.
And it's got it kind of.
America is a consumer-based economy.
We don't build anything.
70% of the GDP is literally just consumption.
That's all we do here.
We're very good at it.
So there's that home prices sky high in January.
That was a big reason that we had a correction in the market.
There was mortgage rates remain around like six, seven percent disaster.
Average home price is still like 400,000 in America, roughly a million in a metro area.
That's really bad.
Credit card data is an all-time high.
The gambling thing doesn't fucking help.
Like there's a lot of indicators there where this is why I think Trump won the election, a big reason.
And if people, here's the thing about the economy: Americans can deal with the economy being bad.
They understand that there's no magic fix, but they need to feel as if you're doing everything to make about it.
And this is a key point.
One of my favorite books is called Freedom from Fear, and it's a history of the Roosevelt administration.
Here's what conservatives even said this at the time.
Empirically, the New Deal didn't work.
Like, it did not work in terms of its immediate goals of making the economy better.
But you know what people felt?
Roosevelt is fighting for us.
And that was a no.
And that was it.
And he was a god for that.
He was a king, the last king of America.
So real quick, the New Deal, just so you can explain it.
There was a lot of government work projects.
The WPA, the CCC, these were all the work product administration.
The most critical example is like digging holes and then other people filling it.
But the idea is get people working.
Yeah, get people working.
Keynesianism, injecting money into the economy.
But the point was they were like, Roosevelt is fighting for us.
He's doing everything.
When the Supreme Court tells him, no, he does something else.
He's an ideas man.
He's telling Congress to do this, the rural electrification.
America did not physically, economically get all that much better, but it was about vigor.
That was another thing about JFK.
They used to say he had vigor.
Like he would constantly be flying around the country.
And even though he wasn't particularly good president in terms of getting anything done or passing any legislation, they were like this breath of fresh air.
That's what America needs.
That's where Biden's ultimate failure was.
If you think about his slide, it was about, nobody said you have a magic egg button or a gas button.
You're just like, you're not doing anything.
We don't think you're doing anything.
You're not doing anything.
Okay, one thing to that.
That's the danger that Trump has is with this Doe stuff is if we don't get to vigor, dealing with things on a daily basis.
America gives you about a nine-month runway.
If we look at Biden, he sank in October with Afghanistan.
It was really about a lot of other stuff.
Trump's got about eight more months to go.
You see that comment on Twitter all the time where it's like, Gulf of America.
And then the first comment will just be like, are eggs cheaper now?
I don't have a thousand.
That's right.
So to this, when I was looking at the market, and I know nothing about the fucking market, okay, but I have some money invested, obviously.
And my first reaction to someone telling me, hey, this market looks a little suspect, my first reaction was, man, Trump wouldn't let the market fail.
Now, what is he?
Can he do anything to keep it up?
No, a little bit.
Of course, of course.
But there's a part of me that goes, in my mind, he cares so much about how that would reflect on him that he would do everything in his power to maintain it.
Can he?
Who knows?
But that little feeling, like you were saying, about Roosevelt.
Oh, Roosevelt, yeah.
Is this feeling is like he wouldn't let, or he is trying to do it.
And that's really important to us.
Yes.
The idea that we're doing.
That's everything.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, that's very key, but that's what I'm saying.
My worry about Trump is this distraction.
And look, America, something's going to happen.
Like every presidency, 9-11, right?
Nine months into the Bush administration, 9-11, all of a sudden the whole narrative is different.
Under Biden, Afghanistan, it wasn't planned.
It just fucking happened.
Ukraine.
Trump won.
COVID literally changed everything.
You know, something will happen.
Katrina or whatever.
And those are the clarifying moments when the magnifying glass comes onto you.
And if the magnifying glass, if America doesn't like what it sees, they will turn on your ass so quick.
George H.W. Bush went 91% to losing the election in a span of 18 months.
Like you can just get blown the fuck out of the way.
So it's your reaction to that cataclysmic.
It's usually you.
When you say George W. Bush lost, you mean he went down the Republicans' laws in 2008.
No, in 1992, George H.W. Bush.
George H.W. Bush had a 90% approval rate in 1991, blown the fuck out in the 92 election.
Like again, 04.
Was it something happened or was it Ross Perot splitting?
Dude, it was just like there was an economic modest depression at the time.
People felt 12 years of trickle-down economics.
Like, I don't fucking trust you anymore.
Boom.
Safety was an issue too.
HW.
Yeah.
So HW.
Remember Clinton ran on that like, hey, we're going to the Cold War, whatever.
My point is just that America is very fickle.
It will turn on your ass very quickly.
Almost every president, the biggest danger, you read too much into your mandate and you do something that didn't people quite voted for.
And then you also under deliver on what you did.
And if you fall into that trap, even at a feelings level, you lose.
That's that's a great worry.
Yeah, that's Canada and Mexico.
Look, I'm very supportive of tariffs because I believe in American manufacturing.
But the problem is that it cannot be something that's ad hoc and haphazard.
It has to have a plan.
We need to feel as if, yes, the washing machine will cost more.
It's because my cousin is going to get a job at this factory that's going to be coming back to here.
And when we feel as if it's like, it's coming in and it's off and it's all capricious, as in like it's up to Trump's, like however he feels that day coming back and forth and the markets are swinging like this.
And I still don't have the plan yet.
That's when people start to and again, he's still got a lot of runway.
He's got runway, but you need to be careful.
Okay.
I'm worried about Doge.
I'm worried about the tariff stuff too.
We need plans.
Oh, that's what we need.
Recently, Bezos.
Yes.
Oh, the Post.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Came out and said that his op-ed section of the Post will now.
Oh, is that op-ed?
Yeah.
His op-ed section or his opinion section of the Post.
So the newspaper operates in itself, and there's also this section on the newspaper called the op-ed.
And the opinion part of a newspaper, and you could probably speak more to this, maybe describe it, probably be better.
Okay, so the opinion part of a newspaper is old school tradition.
And it's when guys like William Randolph Hearst and similar oligarchs owned these and they wanted to use their paper to express an opinion.
Now when you use the word oligarch, it's like triggering.
Oh, sorry.
But they actually were oligarchs.
No, I know.
When we think oligarch, we think like a Russian bad guy villain.
Just say he was a filthy, rich, politically connected person who had a magnate.
He was a magnate.
Perfect.
Okay.
That's who William Randolph Hearst was.
Yeah.
Okay.
So Bezos, what he has done is he wants the Washington Post.
And it's also, let me explain this about newspaper economics.
The op-ed section is always the most popular.
Like the most read thing in the Washington Post is not the news.
The news in and of itself has always been subsidized by consumed, not politically.
Yeah, that's right.
Exactly.
So for example, the news itself, people don't want to pay for it.
They want to pay for opinion.
They want to pay for classified ads.
The news has always been a secondary thing funded by something else.
The problem is here is that Bezos is showing us he doesn't actually care about his business because the Washington Post subscription base are people who what?
Their democracy dies in the darkness.
That's why 200,000 of them canceled their subscription whenever they didn't endorse Kamala.
They just lost 75,000 more by saying we're only going to support free markets.
So usually the op-ed section has differing opinions.
Yeah.
Right?
Ish.
The idea behind it.
Let's just talk about the fair idea behind it.
So it could be that your paper leans left, but in the op-ed, you would have right-wing writers, you have left-wing writers, different opinions on these subjects.
So the newspaper is like, here's what happened.
And then the op-ed is, here are opinions about what happened.
And these are potentially differing opinions.
Yeah.
That's right.
And Bezos just announces that the op-ed is now going to change from that to espousing free market ideas.
So essentially like pro-capitalism.
And then what else?
What is it?
Personal liberty?
And then personal liberty.
So he's basically saying our newspaper is going to take a specific point of view and share opinions that reflect that specific point of view.
Now, what you bring up is an ursing wrinkle.
I didn't mean pretty vague, though.
Say again?
Personal liberty, isn't it?
Well, no, here's the thing.
What it really means is calling it.
What he really means is let's fire all the woke people and let's get rid of the people who are Russia gators, which is what the Washington Post op-ed page has been for the last basically eight years.
And let's promote Bezos' agenda.
Yeah, exactly.
Which is free market.
Free market, but not antitrust.
You know, it's like that.
That's a little not too free enough.
The worst interpretation of it is essentially, I'm going to use this as a propaganda tool to protect my business endeavors and the endeavors of my colleagues, if you will, the other billionaire class.
Now, that's the worst interpretation of it.
It might be the truest interpretation.
Well, I think, let's take Bezos out of it.
Let's look at all of the biggest news companies.
That's what they are.
For example, do you know, like, look at Bloomberg News.
That's one of the most important things.
Its job is to do what?
It's to protect the Bloomberg terminal and the integrity of the U.S. market.
So this is really interesting because what I believe most of us have come to learn, and I've been incredibly naive about this, is that the billionaires, so the people with immense power in America, outside of controlling the narrative, can fluctuate in that power based on the narrative.
So the intelligent ones, like Bill Gates, MSNBC is Microsoft NBC.
What they do is they usually purchase or develop a media platform to protect their interests.
Bezos, as he rides to superstardom, purchases the Washington Post.
With that in mind, we would imagine.
I don't think he's going, hey, I just want the best ideas to be out there.
No, you got to protect the fact that you're a billionaire buying a $10 million yacht, which you have to take a bridge apart for.
Exactly.
So it's like a bridge that was built in 1500, you got to take it apart so it can go out.
Now I'm some poor guy that can't afford eggs, and I see you walking down the street.
I'm not going to Luigi Mangionu, but somebody else might want to do something like that.
But what's interesting is before that happened, nobody explicitly said that was the purpose.
Everybody operated in this idea like, hey, we have integrity and this is the news and this is the information.
The American people can decide what is true or false.
He straight up said, he's not straight up.
Can I just say this, though?
This is actually a return to normal, and I appreciate this.
Can you explain back in the old days?
Newspapers were partisan vehicles.
Like Alexander Hamilton ran the Post or whatever, and it was like, yeah, the Federalist Papers.
But actually, it's a little bit.
I thought it was the editor of the Post.
No, Alexander Hamilton was the founder of the Post.
Anyway.
I'm just going to do it.
All right.
Let me give you an example.
During the Civil War, you would have papers that are like the Kansas City Democrat and the Kansas City Republican.
And it was in the name.
They're a party paper.
And what they did is they ran news and op-eds that was like, we're fucking Democrats and fuck the other side.
That is the history of the American newspaper industry.
Now, what happened is basically you had...
Founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton Post.
The fuck else you think?
Washington Post.
What do I care about?
What do I care about?
All right.
I lose one post and it's the New York Post.
All right.
He wasn't an orphan.
There you go.
Okay.
So in the past, newspapers were explicitly partisan.
So I mentioned William Randolph Hearst.
William Randolph Hearst was like, I want to go into the Spanish-American War.
That's something I want.
And so he used his op-ed and his newsmen to push that agenda.
But he was very open about it.
He was like, this is my agenda.
This is what I want.
Later on, he wanted to keep America out of World War II.
He would run a lot of Lindbergh stuff.
Like, that's what his agenda was.
What happened is after World War II, we had this very weird moment where you had non-partisan media, which was still partisan, where you had, but the problem is the distribution.
So you had the big papers and the big networks, the big three channels, which all Americans were watching.
They had to appear nonpartisan.
And so corporations could sponsor them and reach as many people as possible.
And that's what created this idea of unbiased journalism.
No, biased journalism is the most authentic journalism that has always existed.
It's called the yellow journalism industry.
And it was born on the streets of a great American city here in New York.
You had the New York Herald, you had the New York Post, you had the New York Star, and they were all different competing both ideologies.
And it was one not only just for attention, but it was about pushing agendas.
These people were open.
People would love, for example, the guy who worked, who loved the Herald.
I'm blanking on his name.
They liked him.
He was not just an oligarch.
He was a society figure, a gilded age person.
People would support him.
And it was all, it was about picking teams.
And I think that's a good thing.
I think it's healthy because it removes the veneer.
The news was just as fake and partisan in 1960 as it was today.
It's actually worse, in my opinion.
And if you think about Vietnam, James Gordon Bennett, that's right.
An amazing figure.
But my point is, like, when Walter Cronkite was seen as nonpartisan, it was easier for us to push him into war in Vietnam.
And it shouldn't take Cronkite being like, the trust has been broken.
America cannot lose or win here in Vietnam.
It's like, no, we needed the grand debate instead of the manufactured consent, which is what pushed us into all of these bay of pigs.
I mean, this is what they were very conscious about it.
Cronkite Vietnam Trust00:05:59
There was this controlled op-ed page in the Washington Post, which was nonpartisan, even though, yeah, okay.
The guy who was running it, Catherine Graham's husband, is best friends with John F. Kennedy.
And it just turns out that Kennedy, one of the very first stops he makes on his inauguration night is to a bunch of Washington Post columnists who later become the chief proponents and defenders of Vietnam policy, which was Kennedy's policy to keep America in Vietnam.
But they were seen as nonpartisan.
It's like, no, we need to remove the nonpartisanship.
Partisanship is good, actually.
You just need to trust anyway.
What you're saying is it's good compared to the illusion of nonpartisan.
The illusion is so dangerous.
And that's what we...
Why is the illusion danger?
Because like I said, I mean, when all of America's news was telling us that the war in Vietnam was good and that we needed to go and find it, Americans believed that and they signed up to send their sons and daughters.
Dude, Iraq is the perfect example in 03.
I mean, we did not have, if we had what we had today, just based on the information, somebody like me, Glenn Greenwald, who was actually fighting this fight at the time, I'd be like, yo, yellow cake uranium, complete bullshit.
This is wrong.
The outcome of this would be a disaster.
America didn't even have an option on cable television.
And of course they support that.
They had Roger Ailes saying this is the real news.
The real news.
Did you read that book I recommend?
Dude, can't recommend it enough.
The loudest voice in the room.
Roger Ailes and how he understood.
He has a great quote, which is people don't want to be informed.
They want to feel informed.
He understood America.
He created Fox News.
He created Fox News.
That's right.
Him and Rupert Murnock.
But then don't you have way more echo chambers?
Yes, I think we're separation.
You know what, though?
It's like the printing press.
The printing press led to 30 years of war on the European continent and mass death.
It was still a good thing.
We have more information because, yes, it led to the Protestantism.
It led to civil war.
It led to all of these debates.
But at the end of the day, it was like the Catholic Church no longer controlling the minds of the serfdom.
It led to the Renaissance.
It led to ideas.
So look, the internet is the printing press.
We're returning to the mean.
Like, we have a new form of distribution.
We can debate.
How long have we been going here?
Like three hours?
We're sitting here and we're fucking talking and all this.
This would never air.
45 years ago, America was locked the fuck in to bullshit.
The echo chamber is already staunch.
And yeah, the thing is that echo chamber is 10 times worse than any echo chamber today.
Even the most echo-chambered Republican is still has access to liberal media.
Even the most echo-chambered liberal still has access and can go at any time they want to Ben Shapiro or whatever.
Somebody's out there.
45 years ago, there was no option.
So nothing.
You got to get a train soon.
Yes.
But just to button this, like being biased is at least more honest.
So it's an improvement on honesty.
Whereas before, the illusion of being unbiased takes a reader who thinks he's just getting the news.
Now at least I get to look at the Washington Post and I go, okay, this is going to be maybe a more right-wing perspective.
I can look at, give me a good left-wing Outpost, like actual left-wing Jacobin, sure.
The socialist newspaper.
The socialist newspaper.
It's called Jacko.
Jacobin.
So Jacobin.
If I want to get that take, I'll read the same story at Jack of Bill.
Yes, if I want to get the right thing, I'll read the Washington Post.
Or you can just listen to Breaking Points.
And you get both.
But no, but my point actually.
But did you guys notice how when I was talking about Ukraine?
I was like, hey, I have a real bias because I cannot tell you.
Honestly, Ukraine is probably one of my top issues, like foreign policy.
I cannot give you the real pro-Ukraine side with the same enthusiasm that I do.
I tried.
I tried to do the whole steel man thing.
But I have a, I'm just not going to do it.
Like, if you want to hear that, go to David Ignatius, go to Max Boot, go to Anne-Marie Slaughter, any of these people, these real neocons, liberal one, they believe in this shit.
Please go read them.
Don't just listen to me because you need all your information.
This is how you get.
I agree with you.
This aren't institutions.
Yes.
Understand what you're digesting.
If you tell me that food is healthy and then I eat it and I get some sort of disease, I stop trusting the people who are telling me it's healthy.
If you tell me something is not healthy, every cookie spot we go to, they go, yo, this is a thousand calories.
When I'm feeling shit afterwards, I'm like, you better give me that thousand.
Yes.
You know what I mean?
If I feel healthy after that cookie, then you're lying to me.
So, so, okay, at first, I was like, I was concerned about the bias in information.
As long as there are equal, I don't want to say equal, but as long as there is information that's accessible out there that shows the opposition and both are being honest about it, maybe this is a good thing.
Yeah, I agree.
This is great.
And I like the fact that you said that the original idea of this is the information comes from willing to sell more ads.
Dude, it's only a 50-year-old idea.
It's an aberration in America.
America has always been.
Dude, we had the California Democrat, the California Republican.
They're at war with their own state.
How should we govern gold policy?
Should we be in the Civil War?
Even in the Confederacy, they had different papers being like, we need to do this.
No, we don't need to do that.
Like, it's the bias and the dueling perspective.
That's how it's always been.
The 1950s was an asterisk in an otherwise like a country that has always been, we've always recognized that news and information in and of itself is not actually all that valuable.
As in X, Y, and Z happened.
People don't want to know that.
They want to go X, Y, and Z happened and what did it mean?
And that is what the newspaper and the information industry is all about.
So I'm still very optimistic because in the internet age, it's not just about declining trust in mainstream media.
It's about an explosion of a new possibility.
And there'll be a lot of bullshit out there, just like the invention of the printing press was mostly what?
Pornography, conspiracy theory, whatever.
It was starting wars.
It was chaotic.
But the net benefit was lack of control by singular institutions with their own agendas.
And I think the decentralization of this will be very chaotic and it will not necessarily be comfortable.