David Seaman exposes NSA surveillance under Obama, revealing metadata collection and whistleblower William Binney’s claim that associating with targets expands monitoring exponentially. Rogan critiques government hypocrisy—like Homeland Security freezing Bitcoin accounts while ignoring major banks—and compares it to Soviet-style control, citing Steve Wozniak’s warnings. They envision a future of radical transparency, crowdfunded innovation (e.g., Alex Gray’s Kickstarter), and decentralized production via 3D printing, where institutions like legacy media collapse under digital disruption. Ultimately, they argue systemic transparency could dismantle power abuses but warn charismatic leaders may still exploit public trust. [Automatically generated summary]
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But I just got back from the Global Future 2045 conference in New York where I got to meet Aubrey DeGrey and all these life extension people and Dr. Amit Goswami that had been on our podcast.
He was there as well.
And fascinating fucking shit.
So you got that where you look at something like Global Future 2045 where there's all these super geniuses trying to figure out what the future of human life is going to be like and whether or not we'll be able to extend life and download consciousness into computers and all this crazy shit.
And then at the same time, David Seaman, you got a lot of fuckery going on, man.
We're starting to learn how much surveillance is being, what's the word, launched on the American public on a daily basis.
Well, what's so scary is Obama's over in Europe right now.
And in Germany, they were really upset about these recent revelations.
And in Berlin, he gives a speech saying, you know, now let me be clear.
No one's reading through ordinary citizens' emails.
We're not rifling through ordinary people's emails.
And, you know, he says this on international TV.
And he either doesn't read the news or like does not understand what his own administration is doing because that is what that program does, which is why it caused such an uproar.
And similarly, 12 days ago, he said on national TV in the U.S., when this first broke, he said, no one's listening to your phone calls.
That's not what this program is about.
And that's the exact quote that people can look up.
And that leaked court order from Verizon Business Services is proof that actually all of our phone calls are being looked at.
And they say just the metadata, which means who you're calling, who's calling you, those phone numbers.
Also, the duration of the call and your location.
Like not even just what building we're in right now, but what floor of the building we're on.
That's how accurate this shit is.
And they have this on everybody.
And just based on that metadata alone, I could tell, you know, maybe not me, but an actual trained analyst could immediately tell if you're having an affair, if you've sought help for depression or anxiety by calling a psychiatrist's office, if you're having, you know, financial problems, you're contacting tax consultants and all this shit.
So within a few minutes from your metadata, they know far more about your life than the government possibly should know.
Especially if you have nothing to hide and you're not doing anything wrong.
It's just shocking that it was all going on and no one was speaking out about it until this one dude.
And he comes out with it and now he's on the run.
He's hiding.
I was looking on the front of USA Today and it was in my hotel and it said like some, you know, 65% of Americans think Edward Snowden should be put on trial.
Well actually the American people I think have been pretty good about knowing that they're being bullshitted right now.
Like it's something like two-thirds want to see a congressional investigation, not into Snowden, but into these programs and if they're targeting Americans.
And one thing I want to put out here before I forget about it is we keep the debate is like, well, should we do this to Americans?
And it's a given at this point that we are absolutely 100%, no doubt about it, doing this to people in Europe, people in Asia, our supposed trading partners.
We're spying on them.
And these are still human beings too.
I mean, they're not U.S. citizens, but should ordinary people who have no links to radicalism or terrorism, should they have their personal stuff rifled through by somebody who is an analyst at the NSA, basically a government employee.
These aren't people who have taken years of training and they've lost their ego in some kind of like a Razzel ghoul ceremony like in the dark night.
You know, they don't train on the ice and lose themselves in some greater cause.
They're just people who saw a fucking newspaper advertisement and applied for this job at Fort Meade, and now they have access to an unbelievable amount of information about ordinary people all over the world.
There are two theories, and I'll share both of them, and you can decide which one's true.
So we know with 100% certainty that they are looking at metadata of innocent people.
It appears to be all phone records within the United States.
And if they're doing that here, you can assume that they're pretty much doing it everywhere, because that's what the NSA does.
They're not even supposed to be doing this stuff on U.S. soil.
But they're not supposed to be doing it unless they have a specific foreign target within the United States.
All the stuff the NSA does made sense back during the Cold War.
So if you'd have a Soviet agent come to the U.S. and you suspect them of doing spy shit, you want to have a way to tap into their phone calls while they're in the United States.
So it made sense to do this kind of stuff back then.
It never made sense to turn it in on American citizens.
And that's why you're seeing whistleblowers now come out and say this is wrong.
This is not the way this program was set up, et cetera.
And yeah, so the two theories are definitely metadata.
And then the actual contents of your phone calls and emails, according to some people, is being logged in NSA servers no matter who you are.
You could be the most innocent person out there who's never even smoked a joint or looked at any kind of Alex Jones website.
And you're still having your emails and phone calls logged on a server somewhere.
And they're not accessed unless they have reason to suspect you of a crime and they get some kind of court approval.
And then they access all your phone conversations.
That's theory one.
And theory two is that they're actually not recording everything.
They're just recording the metadata.
And if you're on their target list, then they're recording all of your phone calls and emails.
But if not, they're only looking at the metadata.
And what's so scary about theory two, which is the more conservative theory, it's not as frightening as the other theory.
What's fucked up about it is that according to William Binney, the other NSA whistleblower, there are several of them, the way that you get targeted is once you're introduced to somebody else's community, you're now added to the target list.
So just to give you an example, in the past I've had conversations with journalists who I'm almost certain are on the NSA target list just because they cover really sensitive stuff.
So since I've had conversations with them by email and by phone, I'm now a part of their community and I'm added to the target list, which means that all of my phone calls are being logged in a server somewhere, the actual content.
So if they need to, they can listen to them in the future.
And by you talking to me right now, that makes you a part of my community and now you're on the target list.
And if you talk to somebody next week, they're on the target list and it just keeps going and going.
Well, you look at the justifications they're using are completely absurd.
They say, if your communications are only U.S. communications, we are definitely not intercepting them.
But, you know, if you have a lot of followers on Twitter, it's 100% certain that you've interacted with Twitter followers who are not living in the United States.
If you've ever received an email that's like a spam email, it's almost certain that that did not originate on a U.S. server.
It originated somewhere in Europe or Russia.
And, you know, when you visit websites, most of the shit you look at is not based in the U.S. So whenever you do those things.
Couldn't you like just forward your phone number to a home phone number and then direct your text messages through a website that you know isn't recording your information?
Like is there some kind of hack that you can hack yourself to a king phone?
What's so bad about this from an economic perspective is there are already companies that are positioning themselves as we're U.S. free.
You know, your data won't be stored in the U.S. It's like we're infected now with this out-of-control corrupt government.
And what sucks about that is we're the ones who make this shit happen.
Like cloud storage, innovative stuff like Facebook and Google, you know, content companies like YouTube and Stitcher and all this stuff.
This is what we're good at as a country.
And we export it all around the world.
And now we're like tainted goods because you can't trust us anymore.
Our government is too crazy.
Just for the same reason that a lot of companies don't want to do business in China because it would mean buying off a lot of people and dealing with a lot of bullshit.
Now the U.S. is becoming a place where great people, great innovation, but the government is too volatile and you can't trust it.
And that's terrible.
So that means that we're not going to be the ones who pull ahead over the next 50 years.
It's so fucked up because if you talk to people that, you know, normal folks in America that will exhibit some sort of patriotism, they have an idea of what America is.
Like everyone's idea of America, America is, you know, hey, this is a truly free country where a person is not tied down by their lineage.
They can make something out of themselves with a lot of success stories, a nation of free-thinking individuals.
We have all these like positive things that we attach to it.
But goddamn if we're not governed by a bunch of paranoid fucking weirdos.
Isn't that what happens when, like, if you have a paradigm that you've been operating under, and then all of a sudden that paradigm is just dissolving under you, like rising tide, and you know what's happening.
So what do you do?
You try to put a bunch of crazy laws in place to try to stop it.
You try to be able to check out it.
You fucking put the fear of God in everybody.
Check out all their emails.
Look at all their dick pics.
Look at all their phone calls they're making at 3 o'clock in the morning when they're drunk.
Well, what's crazy is the director of the NSA, Keith Alexander, General Keith Alexander, he was giving testimony before Congress.
And I think this was either earlier today or yesterday.
And at the end of his testimony, he didn't realize that the mic was still hot next to him.
And he leans over to one of his aides and says, I need to buy your boss a freaking beer, talking about the FBI guys who were testifying in support of this program.
And so, you know, at the end of the day, what he said, that's nothing wrong.
Of course, the FBI and the NSA collaborate.
That's what they do.
They're intelligence agencies and law enforcement agents, or in the case of the FBI, you know what I'm saying.
They're the same shit.
And so nothing he said there was wrong.
That actually shows that he's a human being and goes out to drink beer every now and then.
It isn't this, you know, a computer.
So nothing he said was wrong, but just that single line that he didn't want the world to hear and the world heard has been analyzed to death online.
It hit the front page of Reddit.
People are in conspiracy land now.
And if you think like, you know, this guy, he didn't want that line of conversation to hit the wrong people.
What about every single text message you've ever sent?
Every single website you've ever sent.
It's kind of, it's richly ironic, right?
It's showing that this is not a good system.
Even if you have nothing to hide, maybe you don't want your future employer to see every porn website you've been to, every medical condition you've looked up, and every deleted text message from the woman you're seeing.
It's just not their fucking place to see that in the first place.
And then, why extend that power to a government agent who is just somebody who applied for a job and happens to have a clean record?
That's all an NSA analyst is.
Again, they're not people who have detached themselves from the ego and they're driven only by love of country.
I would hope that's what most of them are there for.
But we don't know that.
People are people, and that's why we have a constitution.
That's why we have the Bill of Rights, is to prevent this from happening in the first place.
And I think, unfortunately, the reality of our times is that things are moving in the direction of a complete elimination of all boundaries between people and information.
I just don't know if there's any way to stop it.
And when you find out that the people with the you can't say like the ability to like what the government is doing, they have to do in secretly, in secrecy, because no one is going to allow it.
No one is going to say, like, yeah, I fully support you listening to every fucking email to stop the occasional.
Are you chewing icy motherfucker?
To stop the occasional terror.
I mean, think about how many terrorism, how many terrorist activities, how many people die of terrorism, as opposed to how many people die just from drinking alcohol or smoking cigarettes.
The government doesn't try to ever get you to stop doing those things, but way more people die from them than are ever going to probably die from terrorism.
I mean, 400,000 people every year die from cigarettes, and you never hear the government talking about how cigarettes are the enemy.
What they're doing is they're trying to keep people scared.
And by trying to keep people scared, they can continue to govern things the way they're doing it.
So the way to be able to check out all your email and keep everybody back on their heels is to say, we have to protect you from terrorism.
We're trying to stop terrorism.
And the way to stop terrorism is you got to check everything.
Yeah, or that you smoke marijuana and you happen to live in a conservative state and you're a congressman who plans on investigating the NSA, they can just give you a little heads up.
Maybe think twice before you say anything on that oversight committee.
And I'm not saying this stuff is happening, but I guess my whole issue is why wouldn't it happen?
If they've been this dishonest about the extent to which they're spying on people and now they're like, oh, we're transparent.
Yeah, after a whistleblower goes to Hong Kong at the risk of his life and reveals these documents, then you're transparent.
And then there's a credibility problem.
It's the difference between you calling the IRS and being like, look, I'm a little bit behind on my taxes.
Difference between that and them being like, what is this account and the payments?
You know, what is this all about?
It's a huge difference.
Same with anything.
It's like going to your girlfriend and saying you fucked up about something versus her finding out and then you have to explain yourself.
And that's what the government is doing now.
And the two arguments they're making are, to anyone who's reasonably intelligent, are not acceptable.
They say, this is nothing new.
This is all routine.
This is no big deal.
Well, then why are you treating this guy as if he's blown the cover off something huge?
If this is no big deal, why did Senator Lindsey Graham say that he will go to the ends of the earth to track this guy down?
You know, why are they treating him as if he's such a threat to national security if we all knew that all of our shit was being looked at anyway?
Like, just to give you a nightmare scenario, 2016, let's say we get a president, what's his fucking name?
President Santorum or President Rick Perry, somebody like that.
And because they feel like this is a good way to gain support from the conservative base, they go on a morality platform, which has happened before in the United States.
Look at prohibition.
They go on a morality platform.
They say, look, the U.S. is falling behind China and all these other countries.
The reason why is that we're soft.
You know, we're a bunch of druggies and a bunch of alcoholics.
So from here on out, we're not just going to continue to keep marijuana criminalized.
We're going to super criminalize it and just eradicate it from the United States.
And so what they do in that case is even though it wasn't illegal four years ago to send emails to your friends talking about the medical marijuana clinic that you go to in California, even though that's totally fine in 2013, in 2016, it's no longer legal to talk about those things and to promote that ideology.
And all you have to do is do a keyword search in their database and find everybody who is sympathetic to marijuana reform and make their lives a little bit more difficult.
Maybe hit them with audits or trumped up charges or anything.
You're living in a place where unelected people are people who have been elected and then corrupted are making decisions for you and there's nothing you can do about it.
And you don't even know the decisions are being made until it impacts you personally.
Yeah, and this is really a pattern that has repeated itself over and over again throughout human history.
And it's really exactly what the founding fathers of this country were trying to prevent when they crafted the Constitution.
They were trying to protect against this continual cycle of people getting to power and then abusing that power.
It just, it happens.
It's always happened.
It's the way humans do it.
And slowly but surely they've chipped away at it with things like NDAA or the Patriot Act.
And they do it while nothing's happening.
They're not like they're doing it while bombs are blowing up overhead and we need to declare martial law and figure out what's going on and lock everything down.
It's not like that at all.
They're just recognizing the tide coming in and they're scrambling and they're trying to find all sorts of new ways to get at data.
But in the meantime, though, their data is being compromised.
It's funny you said the tide's coming in because one of the best theories I've seen so far on why they're doing all this stuff was published in the Guardian newspaper the other day.
And the theory that this one guy proposed is that the government strongly believes that economic and possibly energy unrest, so the price of fuel, as well as people's wages and their savings, All of that stuff is going to be an upheaval in the near future, and the reason why is climate change.
If you think about New York City, if just the tide levels rise by a couple feet, you're talking about the New York Stock Exchange flooding out and that market being closed for a couple weeks to the minimum and total financial chaos.
Not to mention all the people who lose their lives in the flooding.
So if you realize how serious climate change is and that half the country, the sort of Fox News view is just to mock it and pretend like it's bullshit.
This is happening and apparently the government is concerned about the unrest that will come from just one major catastrophe, that people will start to protest the government.
They'll say, you didn't do your job.
You should have known about this beforehand.
And there will be just absolute upheaval.
So what pisses me off about this is if that's the reason why the government is storing all of our emails is so that they can pick out all the influencers within protest groups in the future.
If that's what this is all about, it's fucking absolutely disgusting that they're using their considerable resources and technology to make sure that protests don't take off in the U.S. instead of using that talent and technology to prevent these things from happening in the first place.
Let's tackle climate change.
Let's figure out how we don't have a drought in the future.
You're dealing with a bunch of compartmentalized people.
And so if you're attacking their specific thing, whether it's the IRS or whether it's the NSA, if you're going after their specific department, they're not going to think, you know what, we need to just put a man on the moon.
They're not thinking like that.
They're thinking we have to protect our organization.
And that's what it's toxic because it's corporation thinking.
Well, there's a lack of privacy that is just overwhelmingly apparent when you look at the future.
If you extrapolate the future, the lack of privacy is the thing that people dread the most over the last few years, whether it's someone hacking into your email or someone spying on your phone calls or the fact that it now is completely a reality.
That was something that people were really worried about for a long time.
As it gets more and more invasive, as technology permeates your life more and more, it's going to.
It's going to reach some point where we have neural chips, where we have a headpiece that we wear.
I really believe, I know people give me shit about this, and they think it's a very utopian way of looking at the world, but I truly believe that this new age that we're entering into, this age of complete openness, is going to force people to be accountable.
It's going to change behavior.
And even the people that govern, they're going to govern differently.
They're going to have to.
They're going to want to.
You're not going to want to feel the repercussions from all these people that you're doing something wrong.
You're going to feel bad.
You're going to change.
It's not a good life to be suppressing and bullying and dominating people and using dirty tactics like reading their emails to control your political agenda and to intimidate your opponents.
It's evil.
And it's not good for you either.
The person who does it, it's shit for you.
You're going to get cancer.
You're going to freak out.
The negative energy that you're putting out there in the world, that's not a free ride.
You can't be some global fucking asshole that's poisoning third world countries for profit.
You can't be that guy and sleep like a baby and wake up with a smile.
I've thought a lot about this, about why these consulting companies are working with the government to spy on American citizens.
And they're even building similar systems for Middle Eastern countries where, you know, at least here we can tell ourselves that Obama will never use this against us and that there are these supposed safeguards in place, which really...
Well, that's what people do.
We don't like to think that it could happen here.
But let me just play this out.
The same companies that built that shit over here and maintain it are building similar systems in the Middle East.
And those countries are corrupt monarchies that have no qualms about using it to do exactly what I said, to figure out who the protesters are, to pull them out of their homes and torture them until they stop protesting.
And it's appalling to me that American companies are involved in this.
And I kept thinking, how is this possible?
Because I know some people who work in the defense field and stuff of that nature, those kinds of companies.
And I'm like, they're not bad people.
And I think what it is, is this unconsciousness.
You have people who are around that guy, Edward Snowden's age, around my age, who are making more money than they should be making, $200,000 a year.
And just these assholes wearing khakis flying all over the world.
And they're in a position of privilege, you know, airport lounges, attractive women.
They make more than most people that age make.
And they have access to extraordinary power.
And they're doing this because they've been told that that's what you're supposed to do.
After college, you should be successful.
You want to make a lot of money, have a nice girlfriend, do these things.
And so you're just in this little pool, this isolated pool of other people who are doing the same thing as you.
And so you're like, well, my friend Tom, he's making $215,000 a year.
So I have to do a good job on this NSA project to make sure I make $240,000 next year and can take my girlfriend to some nice place in the Hamptons for a week.
And these people are not the ones ruling the world.
They're just the pawns for the 65-year-old, 70-year-old dudes who actually run these defense companies.
And why are they doing this stuff?
They have more money than God.
They don't need to continue doing the same things over and over again.
I think they're doing it because it becomes competitive at that point.
They want to get invited to next year's Bilderberg and jerk each other off or whatever it is they do with these things.
They want to be in the club.
And if you stop, if you're no longer a part of the process, you kind of fall out of the club.
And that's what it's about.
It's unconsciousness.
People feel like there's no other way.
Like, that's the way you should live your life is to gain more and more influence until you die.
I mean, we're able to adapt to strange situations and we're able to rise and fall to incredible heights and depths.
I mean, we're fucking weird, man.
we're not standard.
You know, there's not like a normal human.
Like, the way humans vary, like, in behavior and personality and capabilities, it's not like anything in the animal kingdom.
A tiger is a fucking tiger, is a fucking tiger.
You know, you could feed one, and if you're lucky, he associates you with being a good thing because you feed him.
But if one day he decides to go Siegfried and Roy on you, that's his choice, okay?
There's nothing you can do about that.
Humans are so different.
There's so much variability, and it's weird.
There's so many variables.
To make a good human is incredibly difficult.
And until we concentrate on making good people, until we concentrate on the impoverished people in this country, this world even, I mean, until we look at the weakest link of humanity, if we really do look at humanity, we want to pretend we're humane.
We really do look at it collectively.
The thing you have to do is you've got to stop all these bad spots.
If you have a foundation and the foundation is all fucked up with worms and termites and shit, you got to cut that out and rebuild it.
If you don't have a good foundation, you're fucked.
If you look at any society, look at the weakest link.
The weakest link is its biggest problem.
And the weakest link in this country is completely ignored.
Poor people are like, fuck you, get your own, figure it out, fuck yourself.
There's so little money being put into it.
have to pay for school.
You know, when it comes to colleges, Try getting a grant.
Okay, you got a grant.
Congratulations.
Not try to get in a job once you get out of there.
Massive struggle to try to get out of that situation.
And no resources put to trying to solve it, like social engineering as a culture.
Like, let's look at our brothers and sisters and say, how can we help them?
How can we make sure that these babies aren't growing in these incredibly toxic environments?
They're going to be damaged human beings that go out to inflict more bullshit on society.
All of that can be avoided if you cut it off at the path.
All of that can be avoided.
It sounds so cliche, but with love and understanding.
Like, if we treated it that way and realize that we're not going to fucking be in this thing forever.
And we now, for the first time ever, all have access to the right amount of information where we should be able to sort this out.
We should all be able to understand what the fuck is really going on with human behavior, what's really going on with the way corporations can act as an individual, but yet no one inside the corporation feels anything that the individual is doing that's horrible.
When they feel that way, they become a whistleblower.
And then the media says that they're a traitor and a narcissist.
This guy has turned down, by the way, the guy Snowden, has turned down every single major TV interview that has been thrown his way, which is pretty much all of them.
So if he's a narcissist, why is he turning down all the press?
He's clearly, and why would he destroy his life?
That makes no sense.
Clearly, that's bullshit.
But that's what happens is when you're in a corporation or in an organization, you see that the stuff around you is not functioning the way it should, that person's a whistleblower if they choose to step up.
And instead of us being as a society, like, holy shit, that person did a heroic thing.
They're for sure getting a big-ass book deal and are going to get laid for the rest of their lives because of what they've done for this country.
Instead of that being the paradigm where we reward those people, it's like traitor.
Like Thomas Drake, the other NSA whistleblower, there are actually several of them.
Thomas Drake, his life over the past few years sounds like a movie, and it probably will be a movie someday soon.
He was a senior executive at the NSA or a senior official there and saw what was going on, saw that it was deeply un-American and unconstitutional and became a whistleblower.
And they went after him with everything they had, charged him under the Espionage Act.
And now he ended up not going to prison.
He was very fortunate in that respect, not to go to prison.
But now he works at an Apple store as an hourly retail rep, just at a fucking Apple store telling people about the new iPhone.
And this is a guy who was privy to the government's most sophisticated technological secrets.
And now he's telling people how to refresh their mail.
I'm saying it's a great gig, but if you're one of the smartest people in the country to the point where the NSA recruits you, these are not stupid people.
Because other intelligence agencies don't want that person around when really, if you're not doing anything wrong and you're a big company or a big government agency, you should want to recruit people like that to show them off.
You know, look, we hired this guy, so we're above board.
We're not doing anything illegal, but they don't do that.
And you're absolutely right that it's a real travesty, and it's sad that we all look at America as like one thing.
But if you see at the root of it, like the people that are running it, the disdain that they have for the privacy of the American people is the rights of it.
For the rights.
And they want to chip away at them.
And even a guy like Obama, which is, I was, man, when Obama won, I was so fucking happy.
When he first became president, I was like, oh my God, like we really have broken through the clouds.
Yeah, I was in Union Square at the time with my girlfriend in New York.
There was like mist in the air.
I'm not making this up.
There was actually mist in the air.
There was just a sea of people cheering him on with this big TV screen.
And I voted for him in 2008.
And I was definitely a part of that, you know, the Kool-Aid drinking club of hope and change.
And yes, we can.
He said, yes, we can.
It doesn't mean that he actually would.
And I bought into it completely.
And that's part of the reason why I've become such a critic is covering these stories over the past year and a half, you see that his great speeches have almost no correlation to what he is actually doing after the TV turns off and he goes back to running his administration.
And that's what really makes my blood boil.
You just were talking about Obama before my phone dies.
I really want to read this.
This is from MSN News.
It's not from some right-wing site Glenn Beck, or something like that.
So he's planning a trip to Africa, and they're saying it might be the most expensive presidential trip ever.
This is a quote from MSN News.
The trip, which begins June 26th, could cost $60 million to $100 million and could be one of the most expensive presidential trips in United States history, one unnamed source told the Washington Post.
The higher estimated cost of this month's trip is partially due to elaborate security provisions.
Let me just read the actual stats.
Resources will reportedly include hundreds of U.S. Secret Service agents and a Navy aircraft carrier with a fully staffed medical trauma center.
Military cargo planes will transport 56 support vehicles, including 14 limousines and three trucks loaded with sheets of bulletproof glass to cover the windows of the hotels where the first family will stay.
And my question is, is that a reasonable use of money?
14 limousines?
Why can't we just have two or three?
And this guy's a president of a constitutional republic, or is he the emperor of some high-tech dystopian society that spies on the whole world and deploys drones to countries that we don't like to kill people on the basis of this secret information we're obtaining through their email?
And you start to wonder, like, we've strayed pretty far from the farmers in the 13 colonies who were like, we need a form of government that's going to resist future power grabs.
We're in a totally different world from what they envisioned.
If they were living in the same time, they'd have probably similar behavior.
You know, that's the thing that people have to realize is that there's so many steps removed from the person in charge of the country or the person in charge of the Army even and the brutalization that happens on the ground.
You know, and Obama is very, very far removed from the brutalization that happens.
In fact, the weird new kind of brutalization that happens where everyone's removed except the people that get hit.
That's what's so strange about drones.
The idea that someone could be nowhere near where this is happening and do something that causes someone to stop living and that it happens on a regular basis.
It's the ultimate detachment from reality.
And it's an excellent technological solution as far as saving troops and all that stuff.
If you looked at it that way, if you wanted to be pragmatic on the side of Americans, but it's not that effective.
It kills a lot of people that it's not supposed to kill.
So that's why I keep saying that because that's a real possibility is you get somebody like that in the Oval Office and they have all these toys and they use it in the worst ways possible.
And all you'll hear about it is Aaron Burnett on CNN saying some radical terrorists were killed last night and they happen to be in the United States.
And most Americans will go, well, good.
I want to be safe.
I don't want those people here anyways.
And you don't look into the fact that, well, what have they actually done?
They did nothing.
They were just on the wrong list and they planned on attending some protest and now they're vaporized.
I'm not saying that's going to happen tomorrow, but I'm saying we've 100% laid the legal groundwork for that to happen.
Yeah, I mean, the whole us versus them shit, I think, is way harder to pull off today, though, because the cops realize that they're not the Bill de Berg group.
They're not chilling with Obama, you know, eating caviar on a nuclear submarine.
And it's not too late for him to do the right thing.
He's a second-term president.
if he were to go through with just 15% of the stuff he promised on the campaign trail, you start to rein in these things that he was supposed to have done, then it's not too late to change things.
But I'm not saying that's going to happen.
I think he has already, he has shown us his cards.
And whatever remaining shred of respect I had for the guy, I lost it after watching that press conference on June 7th or 8th, where he lied to the American people.
He said, we're not listening to your phone calls.
That's not what this program is about.
A, that's lawyer speak because the metadata tells you so much about people.
And B, it appears that you actually are listening to phone calls in a lot of cases.
So either you don't know what your own administration is doing, which is possible, in which case you need to fucking fire those people and have an independent investigation into why they're doing something against your wishes, or you do know about this, and it's a total 180 from everything you said on the campaign trail.
Like people always say to me, they're like, well, Bush started these programs.
I don't see why you're giving Obama such a hard time.
And I go, that's right, but Obama didn't say I'm going to be, you know, aggressively continuing the same path as Bush.
Young people got out to vote because he said, enough.
You know, America needs a clean slate.
We're not doing this post-9-11 craziness anymore.
We're going to have the rule of law.
I'm a constitutional law scholar, all that stuff.
And then we find out that secretly the program has actually been expanding and bringing all these new companies on board to harvest our data.
And I think that's when I lost that final shred of respect because I'd already been covering like NDAA and the growth of the TSA and all these things that I disagree with.
And then you're like, wait a second, why are you doing this?
Now there's no shadow of a doubt.
You either don't know what your own government is doing, in which case you're bad at your job, or you do know and you're being dishonest with Americans.
And that's possible also, because if the NSA is doing what we now know they're doing, what if they're like, look, we know you have all these plans to do A, B, and C for the country, but we have these really kind of embarrassing phone calls between you and whoever his but enough to compromise him and or just maybe just seduce him with that level of well have you have you ever tried to do anything where you have to involve a bunch of people that also get to make decisions yeah it becomes a dick-swinging contract that
It's real easy to get caught up in the hustle of how you're living and to not have the ability to step back and take a deep breath and look at the whole thing collectively.
And what Obama and all these other guys are doing is just playing into the direction that it's been going.
going and been going forever, but only going right now, at least, on the level that they can achieve.
It has to be someone at the highest levels of government that can store all the data of all the phone calls all over the world.
But that's just now.
I feel like what they can do now by listening to every phone call and reading every text, you're going to be able to do in 100 years from now, five years from now, whatever it is, 10 years from now.
I don't think there's any room in this world for secrets.
Once we find something that works for us, you keep doing it until it's been totally exploited and no longer works for you, and then you move on to the next thing.
The number of things that we need money to acquire is actually decreasing every year.
So, I think a lot of people in this kind of like post-recession America feel like they don't have as much as they should have, which is 100% justified.
People got fucked.
But the fact of the matter is, to go on YouTube on your iPad and instantly view the best cooking instructional videos in the world or the best yoga videos, any topic you want to know about, probably the best brain surgery videos, all those topics are free.
Whereas 10 or 15 years ago, it would cost you thousands of dollars for an Encyclopedia Britannica subscription, and that would only contain a fraction of the information on YouTube.
The best podcasts in the world, like yours, are free.
People are accessing them, paying nothing for this content that to get it in, you know, 15 years ago, this kind of content would probably be a premium cable channel, and you would pay $15 or $20 a month for it.
So all these things are just becoming free.
That's the whole internet business model.
And it's going to get to the point where you just don't need to pay for most of the things in your life.
So college will fade away.
You'll just self-educate online and meet up once a week with other like-minded people.
But when I get really stupid high and I'm just alone thinking, that's what I think of.
I think of, I feel like we are just a few months away.
It seems like, I know maybe it's years, but I feel like we are just a few months away from everybody hitting some new level of understanding each other.
But I think that, and this is very easy for me to say, obviously, I recognize this 100%.
So I apologize before I even say it.
But I think that with desperation comes innovation.
And I think when you're in a situation where you don't know what the fuck to do, your mind will scramble and you will try to figure out a better way to live your life, whether it's start your own business, whether it's, you know, do something innovative, do something, come up with an idea.
But through desperation, many incredible ideas have been started.
And so many great people have stories where they talk about rock bottom.
They were fucking eating ketchup sandwiches in their shitty one-bedroom apartment, and then they went fucking crazy and created a business.
Whatever it is that takes you to figure out how to find your place in the world, understand this.
It's difficult.
It's going to be puzzling along the way.
You're going to not know whether you go left or right, whether you should sacrifice your morals for performance or for success.
There's going to be moments where You don't know what to do and what not to do, but you can get through it.
Other people have.
Other people have been poor and then not been poor anymore.
Other people have been miserable and then figured out a way to be happy.
Other people have been lonely and figured out a way to be loved and to be worth being loved, you know, which is like step one.
It's possible, but it's not fucking easy.
And the government's not helping.
That's the problem.
We don't have any real leaders.
What we have is a bunch of people that decide what we can't do.
They're preventing innovation because you talked about that desperation, how it breeds people to come up with the right solution.
That's actually happening.
You look at all the innovation in terms of people like this Federal Reserve stuff is bullshit.
It doesn't make sense anymore for us to do things in this way.
So you have Bitcoin is created a few years ago and other digital currencies.
And the government, instead of stepping back, which is what The Economist magazine in an editorial said that the government should do is just leave this alone, let it grow for a little while.
This could be the next, you know, in the same way that America made a lot of money off the internet in the 90s.
Digital currency could be the next boom, or at least one of them.
And instead of allowing this thing to grow and see what comes out of it, they're already cracking down big time.
There are so many laws on the books in terms of financial stuff that if you're not one of the big three banks, they can throw anything at you until you run out of money.
So in the Bitcoin example, they went after Homeland Security, which this is not a terrorist thing.
So I'm not really sure why it's their concern anyway.
But a bunch of nerds trading digital currency is not a threat to the United States.
And Homeland Security froze the account that was one of the big exchanges accounts in the United States.
Their Wells Fargo account, they froze it, which is like just freezing part of that network to get money in and out of Bitcoin.
So Bitcoin is still fine because there are other providers who don't have as much of a U.S. footprint.
But the fact that they're even doing that shit means that they are concerned about it.
And instead, they should be doing the opposite.
It should be like, we're going to give grants, government grants, to startups that are exploring digital currency because this could be the future of the world.
And I'd rather see America be the ones to create it instead of it being created in Europe or as the case is with Bitcoin being created in Japan.
We're losing out on this one.
We're losing out with stem cells where, you know, under Bush, we got all this retarded stuff about not exploring stem cells.
And so other countries just were like, we'll do it.
And now if you're a wealthy American and you want to get some kind of stem cell operation, from what I understand, you have to fly to one of these other countries.
U.S. jobs, you know, it's fucked up just because our government is acting in this regressive way instead of what we're supposed to be about, which is entrepreneurship.
I almost forgot we were on TV or on the internet or something, whenever we are.
All this stuff that you say, like, I know that you're not, like, a cynical person, which is like really hard for people to believe if you listen to all the things you say.
I think Clinton was a high point for this country.
I really do.
You know, there was certainly a lot of fuckery going on during the Clinton administration.
And there was some, you know, it's not to say that people didn't die or there weren't operations that went on that I'm sure you or I wouldn't have approved of.
But other than that, it was a time of prosperity, and it seemed like a time where everything seemed like it was going to be okay.
And something happened during the Bush administration where everything went dark, and it didn't feel like it was going to be okay at all.
And my perception of America and the world itself changed radically from the 1990s to the 2000s.
It was a totally different world.
In the 1990s, the biggest dilemma was that they wanted to impeach Clinton because he got hit.
We've become exactly what we thought they were doing, spying on all their citizens, trying to prevent dissent because they lived in a shithole country and they didn't want freedom.
He was in an airport and these Spanish language reporters came up to him for their blog or whatever, and they were asking him about the NSA program and I think about just like the future of America.
And he talks about, I don't want to quote him exactly, but he talks about how America has kind of lost its way and how we're becoming more like Soviet Russia.
And for him to say that, because he's a super positive, like sweet dude, the co-founder of Apple, insanely rich, but still so down to earth that he'll talk to anybody.
Yeah, he's talking about a phone first, but he gets into it.
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Android phones overall.
A lot of third-party apps and things like that.
So that wasn't really great new establishment.
Other countries, when they got prisoners in a war, they tortured.
But we Americans did torture them.
We gave them good food and clothing and everything.
And I was so proud of my country.
And now I find out it's just the opposite.
And I just wish all these things I talk about the Constitution that made us so good as people, they're kind of nothing.
They all dissolved with the Patriot Act.
And there's just all these laws that say we can just sort of secretly call anything terrorism and do anything we want without all these rights of courts to get in and say they're doing the wrong things.
There's not even a free open court anymore.
And they read the Constitution.
I don't know how all this stuff got happened.
It's so clear.
That's exactly what the Constitution says.
Extremely clear in the Bill of Rights.
One thing after another after another that just got overturned.
And that's what a king does.
A king just goes out.
Has anyone rounded up, killed, put in secret prisoners?
When I was brought up, we were taught that communist Russia was the ones that were going to kill us and bomb our country and all this.
And communist Russia was so bad because they followed their people, they snooped on them, they arrested them, they put them in secret prisons, they disappeared them.
Because this is a guy who made it in America based on what we believe in.
And now he's in an airport.
He's middle-aged, and he's seeing that this revolution that he was a part of, the technology revolution, is being used against people instead of being used to help people out.
We have a real problem with the leadership of this world.
And when I say this world, I don't mean in any sort of New World Order sense.
I mean the leadership across the board, every single country, everywhere you go, every single leader of every single nation, we don't have a leadership that fits in with the psychedelic nature of 2013.
And when I say psychedelic nature, I don't even mean drugs.
I mean the idea behind psychedelics, when someone talks about having a psychedelic experience and, oh my God, it was like a psychedelic trip.
What they mean, besides the hallucination aspect, is that this trip has transcended them, has moved them into this new place, has made them step back and look at it.
It could be a near-death experience.
It could be the loss of a friend.
It could be a pet dying.
It could be a new, you getting fired and getting a new job.
There's many things in life.
You could see a starlit night and it's a psychedelic experience.
That is where we're going.
Where we're going is newer booms, newer woes, newer connections, newer understandings, newer uncoverings of hidden truths.
We're getting closer and closer to each other.
And what the government is doing is the exact opposite of that.
What they're trying to do is control, get people scared, control resources, dictate their rules on as many people as possible, make it so they can't be prosecuted for the same thing they actually prosecute people for, but never be called hypocritical, control all the resources.
What they're doing is non-psychedelic.
What they're doing is what the ego does when it's desperate, when it's sad, when you're trying to cover up for a lie, when you're trying to pretend you're something you're not.
You know, if you think you need complete control over other people, that's some kind of weird foil to get around the fact that you're going to be dead in 30 years.
So during that time, we have to figure out what is this?
What is this?
And what are we trying to do here?
And if what you're trying to do is control resources and dominate people and make as much money as possible, you are just as sad as some kid who's born in Ethiopia where there's no food.
You're just as sad as someone who is on an island that doesn't have any books.
It's all a miss.
It's all a miss.
And the psychedelic society of 2013, the transcendent experience of the internet, the ability to communicate with each other from long distances instantaneously, that's very psychedelic.
I was watching an interview with one of the engineers at Google who oversees YouTube.
And just the process of a YouTube video uploading and then propagating on all their cache servers is kind of psychedelic in the sense that within seconds of your video being uploaded, less than that, like immediately, it's on servers all over the planet.
Because when you go to a YouTube video, it's serving you the video from a server that's relatively close to you.
Maybe one in California or something.
Somebody in South America is getting a local version of their YouTube video.
And then all the data on the hits from each of those local servers is coming together.
And that's the YouTube view counter of how many hits the video has.
So it's actually coming from all these different data centers.
It's not one number.
It's a bunch of numbers that are being put together.
And just the way he explained it, I was like, this is fucking insane.
You know, like that somebody in their basement, somebody like the big famous video bloggers out there can put up their video and within seconds, it's literally all over the world.
And if that idea has any kind of value, it propagates within hours.
Like that Edward Snowden video was on the homepage of YouTube because so many people found it to be significant.
Yeah, well, the selective enforcement aspect of it is funny because what they're trying to do is they're trying to control judgment.
They're trying to control the will of the people.
They're trying to control the popular opinion.
They're trying to control human beings as a resource because all the power comes through the human beings.
It all flows from the money, from the taxes, from the votes, from the whatever, that you get into a position of power and you're the top of that pyramid, then you can enforce regulations and rules and change things and you can do things that people never want.
Like the NDAA.
When all of a sudden you have indefinite detention and people don't even get lawyers.
I have this kind of science fiction dystopian view that when the NDAA was signed, and you know I was vocal about this non-stop.
When that was signed, that was one of these branches or forks in history where we should have all come out.
We should have all came out and protested.
And people who had positions of power, you know, TV anchors and senators who were not compromised by their own parties, should have said, this is fucking bullshit.
Since when can you imprison American citizens without a trial on the basis of suspicion alone?
That's fundamentally un-American.
It makes North Korea look like on the same level as us to do that shit.
Why would we allow that?
This needs to be immediately fixed.
You know, like next week we need an amendment to fix whatever the fuck you did on New Year's Eve.
But instead, life just kind of went on as normal.
And it was like a Twilight Zone episode.
You know, I noticed this group of activists and journalists raised money and they went to New York to fight this shit in federal court.
And they could barely afford the legal and the travel costs.
And they're fighting the most powerful government on earth in court, which can keep throwing money at this forever.
And that's when I started to lose faith in this system because I'm like, why are they doing this?
You know, Obama had the signing statement saying that he signed it into law, but he doesn't like this provision.
He doesn't trust that provision.
Well, then why do you keep fighting for that right in court?
If you don't want that and you signed it away in your signing statement, then why do you keep fighting for it in federal court?
If you go to a Walmart and you slip on the floor because the floor is dirty and wet, you write a letter to the CEO, even though he wasn't personally there to mop that floor.
And the same way, Obama is the figurehead for this federal government in its current form.
So if we can't place the blame there, if we can't petition him to make things better, who can we petition?
That we have a human being that we spend hundreds of millions of dollars of our collective taxpayer money to fly that person somewhere else with 14 limousines and bulletproof glass everywhere.
It's like some kind of fetishization of a personality.
You know, it's one thing to have celebrities because at the end of the day, celebrities are chosen by us.
You know, that's what it comes down to is we choose who we want to focus an unhealthy amount of attention on, like the Kardashians.
Collectively, we choose that.
But how many people are actively choosing to pay for somebody like Obama?
Or by the way, President Bush took expensive vacations also.
Who exactly decided this kind of imperial system we have now where you're vesting so much power in that one person, and yet, like you said, this makes a lot of sense.
That person doesn't have all that much influence to actually change course.
So then why are we treating them like they're a god?
Sounds like, you know, sounds like hippie nonsense, but I really think just logically, if it's not mushrooms, we need something that brings us all together.
It might be ecstasy.
One of my most profound psychedelic experiences I ever had was on ecstasy, and I only did it once because the rebound of it was way too strong.
I think you're only supposed to take one the first time you do it or whatever.
But whatever.
The point is, it was profound, and it made me understand a lot about insecurities, mine and other people's, about love and about what's possible if you're warm.
You know, the warmth and friendliness and happiness, that shit is contagious.
And it spreads.
And good energy spreads just as easily as bad energy does.
But good energy is way better.
It's way better for you.
It feels better.
And it's possible for anyone to change in midstream.
It's possible for anyone to just start slowly adjusting their life into a more harmonious path.
And that includes all the people that are running shit.
And guess what?
Along the way, a lot of you motherfuckers are probably going to wind up getting busted doing something stupid.
You know, there's probably a lot of people right now that have like gambling problems or, you know, prostitution problems or, you know, X, fill in the blank.
That it's all going to come to light.
All of it's going to come to light.
There's no way to avoid it.
But I think ultimately it's the best thing for everybody that we are moving in a way, and this is very science fiction utopian, but we're moving in a way where we're going to merge consciousness.
That seems to me to be the only step that's at the end of this path.
If you look at what's going on, the complete lack of privacy that we now have in regards to the way we interface with the government.
The government can check your emails.
The government can check your text.
The government can check your Twitter.
And I think eventually you and I are going to have that same issue.
We're all going to be able to access all of each other's emails.
We're all going to be able to contact each other.
We're all going to be able to...
Well, the only thing that comes after that is some sort of a convergence of consciousness.
It's going to be, whether it's technologically created or whether it's biologically induced as the next step in evolution, whatever the fuck it is.
I honestly think the only thing that would get more than a few random weirdos to unplug is a cataclysmic disaster.
Something that wipes out cell phone signals, a massive solar flare that torches every satellite, makes us start from scratch, whatever it is, something that fries every fucking electrical system all over the globe.
And I was talking to this lesbian the other day, and she's like, yeah, I broke up with this girl that was in a relationship for a long time, and I went right to having dick, you know, for like a month, and then I went right back to lesbian.
I think Verizon uses powerful now in their ad campaign.
They should send you a royalty check.
So people take up other people's phrases.
People say powerful now because of what you say.
And on Reddit, this guy was complaining that his college roommate was one of those people who just absorbs all the social stuff around him and uses other people's phrases immediately.
They're all riding around in model teas and fucking, you know, I mean, just imagine what it would have been like to be around some people that just survived.
That's why I like to watch Boardwalk Empire because you're seeing, I mean, it's probably glamorized, obviously, but it's just entertaining as hell to see people in that time period.
I'm not saying I'd be cool with it, but look at the fact that when this iPhone dies, it's going to be picked apart by some child and somewhere in India, some trash heap for the precious metals inside it.
I think about how weird it is that all those people smoked constantly.
So even like the hottest girl you'd hook up with is somebody who's smoking a couple packs a day, has like lines all over their face from just non-stop smoking all the time.
It might be in a way because you relax a little bit and maybe you feel a little bit more positive energy and that counteracts all the cuntiness in the world.
What it does is it makes it a slower digestible thing.
Like it takes a longer time for your body to process it.
Whereas if you have just like a Venti Starbucks black, that goes like right in your bloodstream, son.
Yeah, when you have bulletproof coffee, if you have grass-fed butter and MCT oil, you're going to get a lot more calories, and it's a lot fatter, and it's all blended together.
And so it will take hours for your body to digest that as opposed to just the straight coffee.
So if you don't have an issue with cholesterol, I wouldn't think there's anything wrong with bulletproof coffee.
But if you do have an issue with cholesterol, you're dealing with, even though everybody says it's healthy cholesterol, we live in a strange world.
And some people have like real health problems with all sorts of things that for other folks would be no problem whatsoever.
So if you're thinking about taking, you know, bulletproof coffee, you know, look into it.
Find out where you're, you know, where your body's at, unless you know you're okay.
But if you're okay with high cholesterol foods or high calorie foods, the benefit of the bulletproof coffee recipe is that it takes a longer time for you to digest it.
So basically, it said all the benefits of coffee with a slower digestion period.
Cage-free is what you want because they're roaming around and they're eating grass.
If you can get a chicken that's eating grass, that's a chicken that's healthy.
But somewhere along the line, somebody figured out, well, we can make more money if we just stack them in like apartment complexes and shove all these chickens in these little boxes and force feed them.
And that's also a part of this whole big picture where people don't want to have to go hunting.
They don't want to have to go kill a bird.
They don't want to raise chickens.
They don't want to raise goats.
They want to be able to go to McDonald's.
And they want to be able to just give their money and get their food and be done with it.
And when you have that, then you're going to have this.
You're going to have a regular person is not going to be able to just produce for themselves or for a small group of people.
They're going to have to produce for thousands, maybe even millions.
And so when a company or a person or a business is producing all this food for millions of people and these millions of people can just pull into these stops with their cars, what you've got is madness.
You've got this massive disconnect from responsibility.
I think one of the most fun things to do is sit down with people that you're interested in, have like a nice solid dinner, even if it's just a burger or something.
But now you're in your car by yourself.
You know, you park because you don't want to be on the highway while you're trying to down this thing.
You park, you're in your car by yourself, just eating something like an animal.
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Like just trying to consume these shitty calories as quickly as possible so you can get on your way.
Toward the end, I saw a dull white flash on my right side, and I thought that somebody had opened the tank, but it was just like me, I guess, fantasizing about the tank being opened because I knew that it was around that time.
But other than that, there were no visuals at all.
All you have to do is put it in a folder and change the file extension from a folder to like a JPEG and call it something like sample.jpg and then when you try to click on it, nothing will happen because there'll be an error.
unidentified
And then when you want to look at your porn, it can switch it back to the folder.
Yeah, I'm glad you asked that because, like you said, I am a really positive person.
I'm not a cynic.
I'm not somebody who, when you hang out with me, I'm complaining about everything because I think 98% of human existence and probably like 99% of human existence in the United States is amazing.
You know, I have access to so much entertainment, so much cool shit to do constantly that there's no, if you're bored and you're over the age of 18, it's your own fault, you know?
But I was watching this lecture that Glenn Greenwald gave at Hampshire College and the videos on YouTube.
That's how I watched it.
It's like an hour-long lecture and then a Q ⁇ A session.
And Glenn Greenwald is the journalist who initially broke this NSA whistleblower story.
He published it in The Guardian.
And Glenn Greenwald has been all over civil rights for like years.
He used to be a lawyer, so he knows his stuff.
He's super thorough.
And you would think a guy like that would be really cynical by breaking all these terrible stories about abuses at Guantanamo and all this stuff.
But he said in his lecture, he was like, the one thing we have to keep in mind is even the most powerful institutions throughout human history are just composed of human beings like you and me.
And it's been shown throughout history, regardless of the civilization, that when enough human beings get together and decide that that institution is no longer functioning properly and either needs to be shut down or reformed in some way, that happens without exception, pretty much.
That can happen.
And we're talking about these agencies as if they're some monolithic thing.
It's just composed of people who go home at the end of the day and want to see their kids and they want to save up enough money to not work in a cubicle anymore one day.
And the people outside of that system just don't want to be spied on and they don't want to have this country turn into East Germany where people no longer do anything because they're afraid of the consequences.
Like you look at East Germany, no great art came out of that country when it was in lockdown.
No great inventions that I know of.
And why is that?
It's because everybody just wants to get by without attracting attention.
And that's not what the United States should be.
We're the total opposite of that.
You get as much attention as you want, and hopefully you'll do something valuable in the process.
But if you get a situation where the normal person is now afraid of what they're saying in their emails and phone calls, how many months does it take before, okay, first of all, the journalism dries up, then the protests dry up, and then the entrepreneurs dry up because they go, I could make this app that'll make it easier for you to pay for your food, but I'm a little bit worried about the government doing what they did to the Bitcoin guys.
So I'm just going to stay at my shitty job and not develop this incredible app that could be the next PayPal.
And then before you know it, the U.S. is no longer this innovative hub, and it's all just happening in Europe or in fucking New Zealand where Kim.com is.
And he's the one who's making all the money off of it because they trust him more than they trust American entrepreneurs.
And I'm wondering how much of that can be impressed upon the people that are in power.
So it doesn't have to be bad.
Like, you can actually run this in a good way, you fucks.
Like, someone can come along who has enough ideas of how this can be structured where it can be that people still get to make money and people still get to have order and people still get to have laws.
I was in Uruguay last year, fairly small South American country, I think right next to Brazil.
And I was there and their president is known as like one of the most, how do you put this, like one of the least selfish presidents in the world and still like the still the figurehead for a fairly successful country.
So he gives away like 80% of his salary to charity and his hobbies, instead of being obsessed with getting invited to stuff like Bilderberg, he gardens with his long-term girlfriend.
They plant flowers.
He drives an old VW Beetle, like one of the ones from the 70s.
And what's funny is his past is really like messed up.
He spent, I think, a decade in a well imprisoned as a political prisoner.
And he had been shot by police at some point and all this stuff.
But instead of becoming radical and becoming this like anti, you know, anti-wealth kind of South American radical who wants to seek to get revenge, he just became a total moderate.
And, you know, he gardens and he's the president.
People love him.
And he looks like what a South American dictator would look like.
You know, he's like this old, jovial white guy.
But instead of going down that path of just acquiring more and more power, he's like, fuck it.
Like we're going to have a free country.
And I think that's something that more and more world leaders could probably aspire to.
I watch this thing where they subtitle his speeches so you could see what he's actually saying.
Because I've always wondered, how could people go along with this raving lunatic and be like, yeah, yeah, we should put the Jews and the homosexuals in the ovens?
You know, this sounds good.
How could they go along with this?
The Germans are smart.
And if you look at the subtitles of his speeches, he's saying stuff like, you know, when one German needs help, another German should reach out because that's what we're about as a country is you help out another German who's down on his, you know, down on his luck and we move each other forward together.
All this shit that like, you can see why people would go along with it.
It wasn't craziness.
And then behind the scenes, he's doing all this really terrible shit.
Yeah, I guess where I'm going with this is you're 100% right that there are a handful of charismatic people that have a huge amount of influence on what direction we take.
I like to think that in this day and age that that's changing.
I really do.
I like to think that in this day and age, because we live in this new paradigm, and you and I have accepted it, because we have no vested interest in keeping the past, you know, we didn't have any control.
Neither you nor I had any control over the way the world worked a decade, two decades ago.
So we have no vested interest in keeping the thing the way it is now.
We recognize that the world is changing.
We recognize that society is changing.
People are fucking smarter, man.
They're smarter.
They're smarter and they're more aware and they're more tuned in and it's not as easy to fucking trick them.
You see it with entertainment.
You see it with talk shows.
You see it with the criticism of newspaper articles and books and blogs.
People are more tuned in now than they ever have been before.
Well, it's funny, financial newsletters used to be really big in the 90s where people would subscribe to some experts' stock picks and he would say, you know, I'm up 18% for the past year, you know, whatever.
And people would subscribe thinking, oh, if I just listen to what this guy says, I'll make 1,800% per year.
And I almost went to work for a company earlier this year that reached out to me.
And what they do is they've found a way to actually audit these people's results.
So they go, oh, okay, let's actually see what you've been buying and selling.
You didn't make 1,800% this year.
You made like 10%.
And so they publish all the results and people pay for access to that information.
And so what you're seeing is this one area that used to be really scammy is now moving closer and closer to total transparency where, you know, if you're the real thing and you're actually picking the right stocks, then you're going to gain more followers than you ever would have before because people see that you're the real thing.
And if you're bullshit, nobody's going to go down that road.
And I feel like it'd be great if we get that going for other areas other than stock newsletters.
Like, let's get it going for government agencies.
Let's get it going for anything.
Like, just show the people the actual numbers.
Let them decide for themselves if this is something that we want to do.
A lot of people are terrified about having to do that, having to rise to the occasion, having to recognize that we live in a completely new world and that there's a lot more competition because there's a lot more access to the game.
And that includes online gambling, online porn, online anything.
The idea of regulating human behavior is completely ridiculous if that human behavior doesn't hurt other people.
And if it's not, then it's about controlling resources.
And if it's about controlling resources, it becomes about why should one person be able to tell you what you can and can't do if you're not somehow or another imprisoning or doing something fucked up to other people.
If you're not, then there shouldn't be that law.
There's too many.
There's too much business in enforcing it.
There's too much business in manipulating words in order to control humans.
And that's what I think everybody's freaking out about when it comes to the NDAA or the Patriot Act.
Well, this Section 215 of the Patriot Act, they have a secret interpretation of it, and that's how the NSA is doing all this data collection, or at least that's the foundation for some of it, I believe.
And how ludicrous is that?
The Patriot Act is scary enough, what it actually says.
But then you have the government saying, oh, no, no, we have this secret interpretation in a lockbox that you can't actually look at, but our secret interpretation allows us to do A, B, and C. It'd be like if you signed a contract and then the guy doesn't pay you what had been agreed upon, and you take him to court and you sue him, and he's like, no, you can't sue me because I actually have a secret interpretation of your compensation on this contract.
You'd be like, that's totally fucking insane.
There's no basis in law for that.
But the government is doing this stuff.
And up until the past few weeks, people have not really been calling them out on it.
I mean, of course, some people have, but it hasn't gone mainstream in the way that it is now.
Even when you call yourself district manager, weird stuff happens.
You go from being an objective observer of what happened to, well, I can't return more than a certain percentage of shirts because it'll make my numbers look bad.
So you have somebody who's no longer acting out of total objective reality and they have a vested interest in some kind of outcome and you multiply that times a thousand and you get the National Security Agency.
But to go back to being positive, I think we're headed for a Star Trek future.
Like if you watch Star Trek Next Generation, not the new major motion pictures that are just action flicks, but that whole ideal view that hundreds of years from now, people have so much abundance in terms of energy and information that money is no longer the focus.
Because if you want to get an education, it'll be given to you because it won't cost us that much to do it.
I think it's going to start off just like printers were, where, you know, they were only black and white and you have to have a big office to have a laser print.
Remember it used to be like click, click, click, click, click, click.
It was like really slow to get like a one megabyte JPEG.
Now it's instantaneous.
There's going to come a time when everyone can just get what they want online.
You're going to be able to download the instructions and people are going to probably have some sort of a PayPal system or some sort of a donation system where they'll, hey, I invented this.
And they'll upload it and people donate a bunch of money to them to be able to use it.
And they'll find merit in it.
If they find merit in it and they have the resources, they'll upload the money to this person and that person will be able to benefit from it.
If you live in America, even today, if you have a truly great idea and you put it out on whatever these sites are, Indiegogo and Kickstarter, you can get the money you need to make your dream a reality.
Yeah, it takes away the power from the guy I got dinner with last night is a TV producer, and he's friends with the guy who produces Philip DeFranco's show.
You know, I mean, look, this podcast has never been advertised anywhere.
We haven't done anything.
All we've done is just keep doing it.
And in doing that, it's built a completely organic word of mouth.
I mean, I've talked to people about it if they asked me about it in interviews, but I've done nothing to try to promote this podcast as far as like commercially.
And it sort of just caught on on its own.
And I think, honestly, it'll be a slower road for someone who's not famous, but it's possible for like almost anybody today.
And I know you have a podcast now, and by you putting your ideas out there on the internet, you gained a lot of support when you were going to run for Congress, and then that support bled over to things that I came in contact with, and then you and I came in contact with each other, and you came on this show, and then you started going on a bunch of other shows, and then it all sort of webs out from each other.
You didn't have any important family that you came from.
You didn't have any, you know, privileged influence where you had a brother who was the president of the United States.
It's funny because the things that I thought used to be my weaknesses in this new environment are actually your biggest strengths.
I was kind of deeply insecure back when I was a journalist.
Now I'm a journalist again.
Because the congressional thing, I think that was a little delusional on my part to think that you can jump in there and hope to have any kind of chance to be taken seriously.
But now that I'm back to doing journalism, the things that I used to be really insecure about, that I wasn't working for a TV network and didn't have New York Times or NBC News after my name, those are actually your biggest strengths today because people go, oh, if this guy knows about something, he's not going to hold back.
He's going to do the research and put it out there.
And the other thing that I'm not afraid to do that I think more journalists should do is put things into perspective for people.
People are busy.
I sit there reading through this boring national security stuff and then I'm able to pick out what's important and tell people this matters.
And then sometimes people will tweet me something that seems like a really big deal and I'll debunk it.
I'm like, actually, it's problematic, but it probably doesn't matter because of A, B, and C. And people need that because there's no sense of perspective anymore.
You go to the homepage of Yahoo, and it's something about Obama, some huge meeting with Merkel in Germany.
And then the next line right next to it is Kim Kardashian's baby.
And then the line below that is the Duggar family or the Duggars, whatever they're called that have 19 kids, the reality TV whores.
It's them.
And so it fucks with your mind because you're like, are these things all equally important?
This is what's most important in the world today are these three stories.
And you need people who are not compromised by the system, who have no paycheck coming directly from a news organization to just say, yeah, this is really important.
People should pay attention to it.
Or this is bullshit.
It's just being hyped and it's not that big a deal.
Well, essentially, there's always going to be a need for junk food.
And there's going to be a need for intellectual junk food as well.
And much like actual food, if you offer people intellectual junk food, there's a certain group of us, and I lump me in there as well, that will self-sabotage.
And they will eat junk food.
And they will have a cheeseburger.
And they should really have a salad.
And they will watch intellectual junk food when maybe it would do them better to sit down and read a book or to watch Nova or to see a documentary.
There's sometimes you don't want to watch documentary.
You want to watch a bunch of assholes bid on storage space.
Well, one of the theories is that the gold was replaced over time with like tungsten bars or something because most people never have access to it anyway.
And governments – Governments swap their gold all the time.
So they're basically saying, since there's not much transparency, we don't know what's actually there.
And it could have been sold off 20 years ago to some European government.
I think the more fascinating story is let's take the government at face value and there's actually hundreds of billions of dollars of gold in this tiny little fort.
That's fucking incredible.
That's like something out of ancient times that we have that, you know?
The whole society that we live in is pretty preposterous.
But I think I really do ultimately have faith in the future.
And I didn't when I was younger.
I'm more optimistic now than ever before because I think that ultimately, although there will be some peaks and valleys and some happy and sad and some angry and some happy, the convergence, the convergence of information and the convergence of ideas is inevitable.
And I think it will all balance out because of that.
I think we're going to be forced, because of this new reality, this new digital reality, we're going to be forced into a new level of communication, a new level of understanding, and a new level of, you know, of like community.
That's what I think.
What the fuck do I know?
We could all be like on the way to enlightenment, all of us doing mushrooms, holding hands, chanting Om, and then we get hit by a meteor.
Whereas people that live in small towns, like you ever talk to somebody that grew up in the same town as you that didn't leave and they know all the same people and they remember everything that happened in high school.
And they start telling you some shit that you did and you're like, I did that?
And they remember things you don't.
Remember, you used to date Debbie Wilson?
You're like, fuck, I forgot about Debbie Wilson.
How the fuck do you remember Debbie Wilson?
Why?
Because they don't have as much information hitting them on a regular basis as you do, David Seaman, former congressional candidate, bad motherfucker on the internet.
Like, instead of like, fuck you, dickhead, who the fuck are you?
You know, instead of that, instead of like, I'll smack you.
It was like, oh, okay, you know, whatever.
Like, and how many times has that happened where that guy wound up getting stabbed or beat up or sent to the hospital or beat somebody else up or, you know, distracted himself from his fucking miserable, pathetic, crazy life because, you know, he manages to get himself involved in some sort of a conflict that was exciting.
Well, what he was saying was, and this is the first time I've ever had anybody explain it like this, was that when you are driving, you're going very fast.
And when you're going fast, you have to be able to make split-second decisions.
So you get locked into this very pure reptile state of mind where it's just about move, react, do this.
And when someone does something, like, fuck you, it just comes out.
And the reason why it comes out is because you're ramped up to react without thinking.
Whereas if you're walking casually, like down a nice trail in the woods and someone's coming the opposite direction, there would be no road rage.
They would be like, hey, what's up?
How you doing?
And it would be gone.
You'd move out of each other's way.
You wouldn't be locked into this reptilian frame of mind.
Our brains are not designed to go 70 miles an hour.
And what trips me out is that when you go on any flight, you have a guy sitting in the front of the plane who's making whatever, like $35,000 or $45,000 a year.
And he's sitting there, and he's had to train himself to move at 500 miles an hour and keep that shit together for the duration of the flight when his nervous system is designed to deal with him going at a max of like 12 miles an hour.
unidentified
And he's doing this and it's like completely routine because that's the world we live in.
And then people who fake people out like in football.
My favorite thing in football is when someone fakes somebody out and then spins around and gets away from them.
You know, it's like the escape is even more fascinating than the hits because it's like that you've got to be able to anticipate which way someone's moving.
And that's fast for people, but that ain't shit compared to cars.
When you're in a fucking car and you're flying down the highway, like you're on reptile 10.
You're in this weird frequency.
And that's why people wind up, fuck you, because they're all tense and freaked out.
You're not supposed to go that fast.
That's also why we have an issue with news.
Because you're not supposed to get all the news.
Okay?
You're supposed to get the shit that applies to your life.
You're not supposed to get everything that's happening with 7 billion people.
And it's supposed to be interactive, not just you sit in front of a screen and they tell you all this stuff and you just take it at face value versus a couple thousand years ago you're in front of a fire, you know, the campfire, and the guy who came back from the neighboring tribe tells you what's going on.
And then a discussion ensues where you kind of flesh out how credible is what this guy is saying?
How credible is this?
What does it mean for us?
And now we're seeing that re-emerge.
You know, social media, it's a conversation.
Stuff like this is a conversation.
And so it's no longer you're looking at a screen and you have to take everything Aaron Burnett is saying at face value.
You don't, you know, or any of these people, Piers Morgan, who are just shouting at the screen.
And in the year 2013, they think that still works.
And those conversations pale in comparison to the conversations that you will see with those people on the internet.
Anybody that's a guest on Piers Morgan, if they came on your show, you would have an hour plus, two hours, whatever the fuck you would have with them.
You would have way more of an understanding of who they really are coming off of your show than you ever would in these seven-minute chunks of conversation sandwiched in between commercial breaks and buttons.
You know, like, the first time I did your show, I was pretty squirrely because I'm used to doing, you know, like four or five minute TV or radio segments where they're like, all right, we're having you on to talk about NDAA.
Just lay it out for us.
And it's like, it's impossible to lay out the whole history and how it got to that point in four minutes.
So you're just trying to boil down a couple of good points, get it out there in a way that people will think about and hopefully Google the fucking shit on their own.
But you can't possibly dive in.
And then you get on a show like this, you're like, oh, I actually can just be myself.
Well, in the 70s, journalism was about you'd want to appear to be unbiased because that was equated with professionalism for some reason.
So we ended up being in Vietnam for far longer than we could have been because all these guys, they didn't want to insult their audience by giving them their opinions.
Like, oh, it's actually this is fucked up for us to have Americans coming back in body bags for some war that we don't need to be involved in.
They would never say that on the evening news.
Instead, they would just be very clinical about it.
But sometimes you need people who've done the research and then come out and say, this is why this is a big deal.
This is why you should be upset.
Or this is why you shouldn't care.
But they didn't do that at all at the height of network journalism.
And then until very recently, you've seen that creep into everything.
People who even work at really big blogs, you see they lose some of their voice because they're like, it's not my position to tell you what to think.
But really it is.
It's my position to tell you what I think and why I think that.
And then you can come along for the ride or you can go another direction.
But to not do that, I think is really dishonest.
And you read the New York Times, which is on your tablet, on your iPad, so it's competing with all this new stuff that's better.
And they have this weird shine of objectivity.
So they can't just tell you what they actually think.
It has to be, Mr. Obama is paying up to $100 million for his vacation.
And there's no notation like, we disagree with this.
People always send me his shit because he does this marketing tactic where he'll say, the NSA leak, we've got our own whistleblower.
It's coming out in 24 hours.
It's like, if you have this, why don't you just come out with it right now?
You've got to make people visit your website again and again over the next 24 hours.
Absolutely.
And then he actually comes out with it.
And it's never, I don't watch enough Glenn Beck to know if this is true, so I don't want to disparage the guy.
But as far as I've seen, his big blowout things that are supposed to change the world and everything will be different never end up delivering even a tenth on that promise.
There's the newest, latest, greatest Death Squad t-shirt, the best ever, for sure, by far.
Oh, yeah.
As soon as I saw it, I'm like, you hit it out of the park, kid.
It's badass.
The newest Death Squad version number three by Brian Redband.
And that will be out probably at the end of this week.
We'll do a podcast tomorrow with the lovely and talented Jason Silva, who I ran into at the G4 2045 conference.
We'll have a lot of crazy shit to talk about.
That dude was on fire.
He loves technology.
So he went fucking crazy when I talked to him last.
He's awesome.
So he'll be here tomorrow, tomorrow afternoon, and then maybe we'll do something this weekend, too.
I don't know what's going on.
I'm going crazy doing this TV show.
Trying to make it happen.
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