Cenk Uygur, founder of The Young Turks, built a 29-channel network from a $400K Indiegogo campaign in 2012, reaching 64M monthly views but relying on just 5K paying members. He critiques MSNBC’s "Team Democrat" scripted bias and CNN’s Pentagon-aligned reporting, contrasting them with online media’s transparency. Rogan and Uygur debate genetic enhancements—China’s potential superhuman experiments vs. digital wealth redistribution—and question future human identity as tech blurs biological boundaries. Ultimately, their discussion underscores how independent platforms must fight systemic corruption to preserve unfiltered truth in an era where money and ideology distort media integrity. [Automatically generated summary]
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That's O-N-N-I-T. And use the code word ROGAN. Cenk Uygur.
I've been a fan of your work for a long time, man, so it's great to have you on.
I really enjoy your show, I enjoy what you're doing, and I enjoy that there's this outlet now where you don't have to go through a million different steps and get approved by producers.
You just create your own show, it's relevant, it's interesting, it's engaging, people tune in, and then all of a sudden, boom, look at that, you're the number one news show on the internet.
So, initially for like three and a half minutes I was a lawyer, and I hated that.
Couldn't stand it.
So, a friend of mine suggested I take like a course on how to start your own TV show.
I was like, that's mental.
That's not...
You can't do that, right?
And so I went to a learning annex course in New York, and this lady just took our money and said, hey, schmucks, go to your local public access.
You can start any show you like, right?
That's it.
That was the whole thing.
And so I was like, okay, I still don't believe it.
I went to, first day at the law firm, I left early to go to orientation at a public access station, okay?
And I went there, and, you know, you've got to go through this whole process, get trained up, yada, yada.
First time I go on air, We did an hour-long show with me and my friends.
Half of it was on politics.
Half of it was on philosophy.
We had philosophical debates on God and all that stuff.
And everybody else was bored to tears.
I walked off the stage thinking, that's what I'm doing.
God, I love that!
I love that!
That's what I'm doing the rest of my life.
Wow.
I got started there, then barged my way into local radio, WRKO in Boston, WWRC in Washington, just weekends, fill in, whatever they'd give me.
I drive nine hours to Boston to do a weekend show, and then I went to Miami and got on TV, same thing, barged my way in, started in sales, worked my way up, somehow got on air, somehow became the supervising producer of their flagship show, and on air commentator.
That got sold.
That was Barry Diller's group.
And then I came out to LA and I started writing because my main job at the TV station had become head writer for the show.
And so then I wrote on three different pilots here in LA. And I remember when the straw that broke the camel's back on that was I was writing for Daisy Fuentes.
And they're like, okay, now you need to use Daisy's voice.
And I was like, I don't know what Daisy's fucking voice is.
I don't know that at all.
I've never met her and I don't want to be Daisy's voice.
So I was like, I got to get back into radio because that's the only place they let you do a talk show.
That's back in 02, right?
01 actually at that time.
And so I called up my old friends, one of them who was a program director at WRKO in Boston, who'd then gone to XM. He's like, Cenk, dude, you gotta go to Sirius right now.
They just opened the door.
Go, I'll put in a recommendation for you.
And basically, like, bars my way in there.
Started The Young Turks, what we know now as The Young Turks.
I started with Ben, who was the anchor at the station in Miami that I was working with.
And they literally didn't even know we were on the air for the first six months.
And then when they found out, they're like, oh shit, now we gotta pay you.
And then when they eventually hired a program director for talks, because we were their first talk show, they didn't even have a program director for that.
Then they hired one, and they're like, oh, right, right, these guys are on the air.
Okay, what should we do with them?
And he had me go into New York, and he sat me down and listened to some tapes.
Yeah, so on iTunes, we got a free audio podcast and a free video podcast that's like two out of the six segments we do every day so people can sample it.
It's not bad, actually.
It's already like probably more than a half an hour of content for free.
And then if you're hardcore and you like the show, then you just go to our website, tytnetwork.com, and it's a $10 membership.
And so then you get all of it.
You get the main show, you get all the network shows, you get everything.
So if I was on all those shows, my head would explode.
My head's about to explode as it is, running the network and being on the show, and then I... For three years, I did TV at the same time, which was just so crazy.
Like, it was just...
I was going to melt down.
My body was breaking down.
But, yeah...
All those channels, great hosts.
We got 30 people that are full-time, but then if you add all the hosts that are not full-time to it, then you're talking probably 50, 60 people.
You know, so my dad is a guy who, like, will focus on the positive for about a second and a half.
And then he'll be like, okay, yeah, but let me tell you all the things that are going wrong and yada yada.
So I've unfortunately internalized that.
I mean, it's got a good aspect to it and a bad aspect.
But so, like, I never take a moment to be like, yes!
Right?
A little bit when we did the Billion Views Party, we did that at YouTube Space, and I was like, dude...
Billion is kind of a hard number to deny, right?
In some ways, I'm humble because I think I've failed so much in my life that it's impossible not to be humble, right?
But in other ways, I'm a massive egomaniac.
But even when we started, if you told this egomaniac we're going to get a billion views, I'd be like, dude, come on, bounds of recent.
That's not going to happen.
That's crazy talk.
So then I soaked it in a little bit.
Yeah, and when the audience delivered and it was over $400,000, that was another moment like, just like you said, it wasn't the money as much, and the money was great, but it was more like, man, they really...
They believe in us, man.
And that comes with a responsibility.
As Spider-Man's uncle told him, with great power comes great responsibility.
That was before he let the crook get by and killed his uncle.
Well, what you're doing is what people have wanted to see for a while.
someone who has, it's an opinion straight from the source.
It's not filtered by the networks, by the executives, by all these people that have measured statistics and looked at numbers and decided this is the approach that would best suit them.
And, you know, we need to take the Fox girls and their skirt should be one inch shorter than it is right now.
We've shown that we can get an extra 1 million views a month if we have more leg.
You know, what you're doing is, this is, my name is Cenk Uygur.
This is my opinion.
boom I'm gonna put it out there and I don't give a fuck what you think And that is what everybody has always wanted because what you're getting when you listen to the nightly news, today on Wall Street, we learned you're getting a fake voice with a guy who's reading off a teleprompter with a gang of people that their objective is just about making money and about producing this program, this business, It's called the news.
And so their objective is not getting information out to people.
Their objective is not debating the hard facts.
It's not rabble rousing.
It's not telling people, like, we better wake up and fucking realize what's going on here.
It's none of that.
There's none of that.
But you come along, and that is exactly what you're doing.
And then people start going, hey, hey, look at this.
Look at this.
There's another thing going on over here.
This guy's got this thing, and he's using the internet.
Ooh, the internet.
Nobody can tell him what to do?
No, nobody's telling him what to do.
This is his opinion.
And then it takes off.
And that's a very important thing that, in my opinion, sort of embodies or personifies this time in our culture.
It's a very unique time.
And that ability that we have now to just freely express ourselves, and you could become one of those people.
I found out this guy the other day online, some science podcast that he has on YouTube, or some science show on YouTube.
Somebody told me, hey, you should check this out.
I looked at it.
Each video is like 17 million views, 6 million views.
I'm like, holy shit!
How many of those fucking guys are out there now?
You just find out about them, and already they have millions and millions and millions of subscribers.
There's never been a time like that.
There's never been a time like we're experiencing today.
Yeah, you know, I think our success is bigger than us.
Like, it's not about us, right?
Just like you said, it's about a certain period of time in the history of media that, in essence, what they've done is the mainstream media has handed us, like, 80% of the market just by their abject failure.
We also want to say fuck you to politicians that talk like that, too.
Do you think there's going to be a time where we get a guy who talks in a political speech like that, like you?
Like a guy who just, who comes along and says, you know what, ladies and gentlemen, the United States that we know today, this great nation, We're tired of that.
We're tired of these weird pauses.
We're tired of this weird theatrical presentation.
You know, we would like someone who's running for president, who's running for any office, Congress, whatever.
You could talk with a real engaging sense of the present and still be you.
You don't have to be this fucking strip club DJ. You know, alright, on the main stage!
That same voice is repeated throughout strip clubs all across America.
I did this recent thing where I was calling in a bunch of radio stations because of a Comedy Central special that I had that was coming out And when I'm calling in to talk to them, there was three or four stations where I'm like, okay, this fucking guy, I'm talking to the exact guy, he's just using a different voice, and now he's in Memphis, you know, and now he's in Dallas, and now he's in Ohio.
It's fucking crazy.
Like, they adopt that same fake voice.
We, you know, I think we need a change.
We certainly need a change in the way information is being broadcasted to people.
Well, I think that you saw that a lot in the early days of stand-up comedy.
There was a lot of guys who had the stand-up comedy way of talking.
It was almost like an affected thing that everybody borrowed when they went to do stand-up comedy.
And then as...
People started getting better.
You sort of dropped that and became more of yourself.
But I think, in a great sense, politicians don't have that luxury of practice.
So they try to sort of connect with what they think is the most effective voice possible, and that voice is the voice that sort of, in their head, represents professionalism.
And he said, look, Cenk, part of the reason we give him the talking points and try to keep them on message and make them sound robotic is because you'd be surprised how stupid they are.
And he's like, and if we just let them talk, they will make terrible mistakes, and they will lose.
He literally said in that debate, like, he forgot, paused, paused, like, the most wonderful, awkward five seconds in any debate, and then, like, he said, oops.
Well, folks who don't know, when you're in a large audience like that and you're yelling into a microphone, you don't usually have a monitor or anything in your ear.
So you don't know how you sound.
When something's broadcast directly into a microphone, that microphone is going directly into the recording device.
And it's very different than what you're hearing when you're yelling.
So if a bunch of people are screaming like...
unidentified
And we're going to go straight to the White House!
Then they'll go to another room with other people and say the exact opposite, and they'll just keep going room to room saying things that don't match up.
But dude, like, hello, catch up to 2014, everything's on tape, and then you play the two tapes next to each other, and they look like assholes.
And that's because they're used to playing to just whoever's in the room.
Yeah, they're used to playing to just whoever's in the room, and they're not used to the repercussions of the truth getting out there.
Because it's unescapable.
And I personally think this lack of privacy comes with a lot of concerns.
A lot of people are worried.
A lot of people, they look at the future and they say, well, we're not going to have any privacy anymore.
Yeah, but ultimately I think that the truth, it's more beneficial that people have complete total transparency across the board than it is for people to engage in the same sort of corrupt activities that have turned this nation into this, it's basically a bought and sold system.
And there's no other way to get past that bought and sold system than ultimate complete total transparency.
And when you have that ultimate, complete, total transparency, which we're starting to see manifest itself in politics and in social media, this is kind of across the board.
It's a slow, steady progression to no secrets.
And I'm sorry, but that's just the way of the world.
It's going that way.
You could bemoan it.
You could scream at the top of your lungs, I'm moving to the woods.
I'm going to live off of fucking logs and I'm going to have my own well water.
You can do that, but everybody in the cities, everybody in the congested centers, population centers, they're not going to have secrets anymore.
It's just going to be.
Just like if someone was in China, you used to not be able to call them on the phone.
Well, you can now, because that's what happened.
And in the future, there's not going to be any secrets, man.
And so if you're running for politics, or if you're running for a political office, and you want to say shit like 47% of people aren't going to vote for me anyway, so fuck them.
People are going to know that that's your real attitude.
You're not going to be able to hide your attitude.
I think that's great because I don't believe that there's bad people out there, that it's only bad people that run for office, it's only bad people that can get into office, it's only bad people that run companies.
I think you allow bad people to run companies, bad people to run corporations because of the fact We're good to go.
So he does his apology that they're going to broadcast on CNN tonight.
And for the transcript that they released, the parts, the excerpts that I saw, he never apologized to black people.
He apologizes to the other NBA owners.
And he says, you know, once in 35 years I did a slip up and it's just one mistake.
Can they find a way to forgive that?
What he's saying is, I slipped up in letting you know how I actually think.
So he hates transparency.
And he's like, God damn it, they caught me once.
But he doesn't get that, no, no, no, it's your mentality that's the problem.
Because they're so used to being like, I own the Clippers, I'm a multi-millionaire, you don't get to know anything about me.
And I could be as racist as I like.
I could cover it up, etc.
So this new world is shaking them up.
And they can't get used to it.
They can't wrap their mind around it.
And he keeps thinking, like, why can't I just take that back?
And then everybody goes back to not realizing I'm a racist.
So that's part of it.
The other part is that we've got this split, right?
Where you have television and radio and all that that's super fake.
And then you have the new media, like your podcast, like what we do online with video, that's super real.
And it's a fascinating clash.
And old media hates us.
Like, they don't want to acknowledge we're real.
Like, even, like...
People that work in media, when they're covering it, like when we say, okay, we got this many views, et cetera, they're Google verified, go check with Google.
They're like, I don't know, I can't understand internet numbers.
The internet numbers are the only numbers that are real.
That's right.
If you look at numbers like the ratings for a television show, if anybody knows how television shows are ratings, it's voodoo.
It's crazy.
There's like, I don't know how many thousand boxes that are supposed to represent 300 plus million people.
But it's nonsense.
Those Nielsen ratings are fucking crazy.
Like, they really don't know.
Not only that, the reality of the difference between the Nielsen ratings and the ratings that they've pulled from digital boxes, from DVRs, it's a very different number.
It's a very different number.
And there's a lot of shows that would benefit from them releasing the numbers that are on DVRs, the numbers that are on satellite boxes and cable boxes.
But they can't really do that because they can't acknowledge, first of all, the fact that they keep track of what everybody's watching all the time.
And then also, the Nielsen system is like an established system that people have been benefiting from for a long time.
See, that's a huge advantage for us, though, because we can tell them exactly what they're doing wrong, and they can say, hey, Joe, Cenk, you're right, but they can't turn the ship around because they already make too much money doing what they do.
And yes, they're killing off their audience.
Yes, eventually they'll hit that iceberg and sink so quick, right?
But they can't stop doing what they're doing because their ship is too damn big, and they can't turn it around.
Yeah, I mean, of course, 99% of the population doesn't know how they get the radio ratings, and they send out these books, and you have to fill it out for three months.
What were you listening in 15-minute increments?
And everybody fills it out at the very end when they have to turn it in.
So they're like, okay, a month and a half ago at 2.15 p.m., I don't know.
I don't even remember what was the original thing, but I remember, oh, this is a cool show.
Oh, I like it.
Boom.
And then I started listening and paying attention.
And that's how you spread.
Whereas, you know, if it's Rush Limbo, Excellence in Broadcasting, or Sean Hannity, I mean, there's a whole fucking machine behind these things.
There's a whole...
I mean, it's a part...
The Sean Hannity thing is particularly disturbing to me because what he represents to me is, like, this sort of consolidated ignorance.
Like, this decision to be ignorant about things.
Like, we're on the right...
We're right wing and we're going to stick with the American flag behind me and God bless our troops and cut to commercial.
And this sort of agreement to not delve into the nuances of very difficult topics and to take a hard stance towards the right, I think that's one of the most damaging things about the whole paradigm of the right and the left.
Is this hardline, you know, almost religious acceptance of one side or the other.
And it was really personified with Hannity, a bunch of things, but recently by this Bundy Ranch incident.
This fucking crazy asshole in Nevada that these shitheads got behind.
This guy is fucking crazy.
He's crazy, and he says a bunch of nutty, racist shit, like black people were better off when they were slaves on the plantation, because now I go to Vegas, and I see them running around, and they're not going to school, and they're getting each other pregnant.
Like, what, what, what?
You fucking take...
Time off of your ranch, you drive through a bad neighborhood in Vegas, and you decide you've got a fucking synopsis of black people?
Like, holy shit, this is the guy you fucking people got behind?
A guy who's this nutty fuck who's letting his cows roam all over the place eating grass, he doesn't want to pay for it?
Like...
It's bizarre.
It's a very bizarre thing.
But they saw him, they saw this Bundy character as sort of this poster guy for America that's fed up with the intrusion of the federal government into our lives and the socialist Obama network.
And Hannity jumps on board with this.
And now he just looks like a complete fucking idiot when more and more of this information comes out about this guy.
I mean like literally a million times more than a welfare person.
And then imagine if the situation was reversed.
Like they decided they're not going to pay their taxes in Compton.
Reversed racially, right?
And...
Then they're like, oh, if the government comes here to collect the taxes, fees, whatever, all the black folks in Compton are going to grab their guns, and then they're going to point them at the federal government and make them back down.
What do you think Hannity's reaction to that would have been?
unidentified
Like, oh, new black potter party destroyed the country in Obama years!
How can they do this?
These are good, honest cops, and they don't respect authority, and all of these black people and their guns are dangerous, right?
And those people that did show up, you know, the real problem with any of those subjects is that people have this sort of knee-jerk side that they take, this knee-jerk reaction they take.
You see a bunch of cops with dogs, and they're telling this rancher.
You think of a rancher as a farmer.
You think of a farmer as America, the backbone of America, a guy who's farming.
But there's a lot going on here.
This is a big, fucking, long, complicated tale.
And you can't describe it in five minutes, and you can't break it down to a guy like Sean Hannity that has a billion other fucking things on his mind.
He just sees it as a category.
Oh, it's on the right, right support, white people.
Yeah, they don't want Obama, we got a black president.
Fuck yeah, run with it.
It's this really complex issue that they just shuffle in, and it kind of highlights why that system sucks.
I mean, it's one of the best stories, one of the best recent stories to highlight why this right-left paradigm on television really sucks.
So one of my big surprises when I got into the talk show world was how stupid Sean Hannity is.
And honestly, because when I went in, I thought, okay, look, if I make it on TV and I might have to debate somebody like Sean Hannity, I've got to really come correct, right?
I've got to make sure that I've got all my information, etc.
And then as I heard him throughout the years, I'd be like, Wait, wait.
Those two thoughts were not connected.
There was no logical nexus, right?
And then I realized, oh my god, he's just going from one talking point to another.
He's another news actor, but he's paid to be conservative Republican propaganda news actor.
He's just reading the shit.
He never makes logical sense.
It's like you could be Republican or you could be a conservative like Ron Paul.
And so he's bright in that sense, unlike Hannity, I think.
So the guys on the right, they are riding a certain gravy train, right?
Whether it's the conservative talk guys or the Fox News guys.
And you can't get off that gravy train because I remember when we were first starting out, sent my – our tape, the Young Turks tape to a station in Minnesota and – And the guy's like, I loved it, the program director.
I'm like, oh, great.
So what are you thinking?
What time slot?
And he's like, no, no, no time slot.
I said, why?
He said, everyone we have here is conservative on the air.
If I put you on the air, my audience will hate you and then they will hate me.
So if you want to be on this station, you have to be conservative.
So if those guys had a genuine change of opinion, well, they'd lose their jobs.
Because they couldn't be on that station anymore.
You see what I'm saying?
So if you're a local guy in Minnesota doing conservative talk, you have to keep doing conservative talk.
Otherwise, you can't feed your family.
There is no liberal talk station, especially back then.
Now there's a couple left around.
So that's one reason why they stay on the team that they're in, and they're not interested in listening to your ideas.
Now, when I was at MSNBC, as I found out, it turns out they were Team Democrat.
And it's one thing to be conservative or to be progressive.
I think that's totally fine.
The Nation is a progressive magazine.
That's who they are, right?
We're progressive.
That's who we are.
But we're not on Team Democrat.
So if a Democrat is not doing something progressive, we're going to call him out.
To me, that's obvious.
I don't even...
I had trouble comprehending that other people didn't think that way, right?
So, I mean, I don't know if you ever heard the story, but, like, the reason I left MSNBC is I got a speech from the head of the network, Phil Griffin, who said, hey, look, man, I'd love to be an outsider.
Outsiders wear leather jackets, they ride motorcycles, they're super cool, but...
And look, if you didn't have the luxury that I had, think about if you're in one of the other host positions.
There is no fallback.
The fallback is a cliff.
You're either going to get paid really well, you're going to be a star, they treat you so well when you're there, car rides everywhere, first class everywhere, etc.
The Oberman thing was an interesting thing, because I don't know Keith Oberman.
I've heard he's difficult in a lot of ways, but it's fascinating to see him go from being this fireball, anti-government crusader, this sort of like, I mean, he kind of, in a classic sense, sort of an Edward R. Murrow character, and then now he's talking about baseball.
It's weird.
Like, I watch him on ESPN, and I'm waiting for these fiery political statements, these big, strong monologues that he used to create.
And they realized that there was a racket to be had in Team Democrat, right?
But at least Obermann, even the score, it was like, okay, now you have MSNBC doing democratic talking points, and I'm not taking anything away from Obermann.
Right, that's why he's, and he loves sports, that's genuine, right?
So he's just doing sports, and he's, look, a great example, it was Ashley Banfield, Back when MSNBC was conservative, before the Obermann special comments and stuff around the Iraq War, exactly as the Iraq War was happening, she did this speech at a college in Kansas and said, this is crazy, the Iraq War.
We shouldn't do this.
Explain why, really eloquent, really smart.
MSNBC said, yeah, you're off there.
And they literally moved her into a closet.
And so they say, we're not going to let you out of your contract.
You're not allowed to say that.
And they moved our office into a closet.
That sent a message to everybody, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up.
And so if you don't play team ball, that's the fate that waits you.
And so Keith has kind of been banished into the closet of sports.
So, like, if you're on TV, Rachel Maddow gave me a great speech before I ever got on TV, warning me about TV. Really?
Because we used to work together at Air America, and then she was really helpful and stuff at MSNBC. And she's like, just, it'll get into your head.
Don't let it get into your head, man.
Because you take one too many limo rides, you'll have one too many people telling you how great you are, And then you lose track of what reality is.
And so a guy like Obermann, who's been on TV for so long and so successful for so long, he spins into an orbit where he thinks he can't do anything wrong.
And the ego becomes so gigantic that it can't be punctured.
So if he were to go online, it would get punctured, right?
There's a lot of compliments online, but there's a lot of criticism, right?
I think that I find great benefit in that criticism.
I mean, I know that some of it's completely unfounded, and some of it is just 100% douchebags that are just assholes, and you go to their Twitter page, and you'll see just them just shitting on one person after another, just random people that they don't know, celebrities, commenters, people that have blogs, whatever, and just hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.
There's folks like that.
There's also folks that will say something that you don't want to hear, but you should hear it.
And you take that into consideration, and it'll make you better.
It really will.
And the Obermans or the people that don't want to engage in that, your ego's going to take a beating, but your fucking ego should take a beating.
Your ego's a dangerous thing, and if it grows too much, it can create a canopy that doesn't let all the other things grow underneath it.
And sometimes there's a thing that you're doing when you're discussing an issue where someone might have a criticism on it.
And it's one of the things that I like about doing this show is that this show is three hours long.
And one of the things in having a three-hour conversation is that you get to really thoroughly discuss a point.
Because you could take snippets out of a lot of things.
There was a thing they did on Real Sports the other day about Fallon Fox.
Do you know who Fallon Fox is?
She's a woman who used to be a man who decided to get a sex change and then fight in women's MMA. And me, as a martial arts expert, I was like, I do not agree with that at all.
Because there's certain undeniable advantages of the human frame, of the male frame, when it comes to combat sports.
When it comes to being a woman or being transgender, I'm 100% in support of it.
You should be able to do whatever you want, man.
If you want to marry your desk, I'm for it.
If you want to live with cats in the woods, I don't give a fuck.
Just don't hurt anybody.
I couldn't care less.
And if you decide that you identify as a woman, you want to be a woman, I'm 100% in support of that.
I couldn't imagine what it's like to be that person and have these feelings and have them rejected by society.
I'm fully in sympathy and support of it.
Real sports uses one five-second thing of me saying, first of all, it's not a woman.
It's not.
She has a Y chromosome.
I mean, I will call her a woman, but when science finds her body a thousand years from now, they're going to go, oh, that was a man.
When it comes to combat sports, when it comes to social interaction, when it comes to culture, when it comes to how you treat people, I'm fully in support of transgenders.
But...
As a person who's a professional mixed martial arts commentator and who's lived my entire life training in martial arts, I'm very aware of the distinct advantages of the male frame.
It's just that simple.
There's a reason why we don't let men fight women.
She didn't disclose the fact that she used to be a man.
Anyway, real sports takes five seconds of that and throws it out there.
That's the difference between a podcast and a television show.
In a television show, that five seconds becomes a three-hour discussion where you go over all the aspects of The emotional, the damage that you must get being a child wanting to be a woman and being a man and all the different realities of what makes you a person and whether it's learned experience or whether it's genetics or all these subtle variations and trying to put yourself into that mindset.
There's so much to be said on so many different subjects, but when you're on a fucking television show, you don't get a chance.
When you're doing one of those seven-minute things on Red Eye on Fox, And it's like, what's your take on global warming?
Real?
Not real?
Cenk?
And you're like, well, the statistics say, who's making the statistics?
We'll be right back with commercials.
You're not getting to talk about things enough.
There's too much information.
There's too many subtle variations in thought that need to be sort of explored when you delve into any sort of subject.
And I think that...
When we're talking about this whole right-left paradigm and this whole team Democrat thing that you faced when you were on MSNBC or the team Republican that Sean Hannity is a part of, that sort of embodies the whole problem with television that really doesn't exist in the same form on the internet.
You're going to have people that agree and disagree on the internet, but In a format like this, you get to really cover a subject and really sort of let down your guard and explore all the variables that TV doesn't let you do.
Look, I miss our radio show so much because me, Ben, and Jill Pike at the time, we'd come in and we'd do a three-hour show and we'd just have the time of our lives.
Like they cake it on you and then you feel like one of these like- Shepard Smith- Yeah, if you feel like you're in the Capitol, you know, in Hunger Games, like, you know, they put on this makeup and you go out there and you entertain the masses, whatever.
I don't know.
So now I just put on my own.
I figured out, this is a hilarious conversation, but what foundation works best for me?
And so like five minutes before the show, I'll go in the bathroom and I'll put it on and it's not caked on.
That guy's hunting the whole country then, if that's the case.
I mean, he's going to hunt a hundred million people that are angry at him for wanting to shoot that rhino.
Yeah, that rhino story was a very fascinating story because if you talk to the conservation people, they'll say that rhino had to be removed from the herd anyway because it was a larger, older male and it was trying to kill the young males because it didn't want them breeding.
And it's actually dangerous for the population of the rhinos.
Like many things, that whole African hunting thing is a very confusing and complex issue.
I think we get carried away with the conservation mentality.
Here's what I mean by that.
Of course we need conservation, but then they'll be like, okay, well, that rhino is an older rhino, so he will attack the younger rhinos, so it's actually better to kill him so he doesn't do that.
But I'm like, wait a minute.
If we're trying to preserve how they actually live, that's what older rhinos do.
And we've decided that, I mean, at this point that I've been talking about a lot lately about zoos, about how terrible it is for the genetics of all these animals, for them to be isolated.
The idea is that you're preserving these animals, you can come see in them.
Oh, we've let these pandas breed.
Well, you know, here's the reality.
Pandas are supposed to breed, if they can, if they don't get eaten by tigers.
Because there's supposed to be tigers around the pandas, or whatever the fuck their natural predator is.
And there's supposed to be jaguars around the monkeys, and there's supposed to be lions around the giraffes.
I mean, that's just what happens in nature.
And when we have them all segregated in these apartments, and we slide food in a tray underneath the door, like, what the fuck are we doing here?
Yeah, it's a very fascinating topic because with Chris Ryan's book, Sex at Dawn, he goes into what sort of explores What started out as these tribes of small people, you know, or small groups of 50, 150 people that are all living together and, you know, exchanging sexual partners, it was very commonplace.
And as agriculture gets established and as these populations grow larger and larger, it becomes weirder and weirder and then it stops.
And then we start realizing that our sperm creates that kid and that kid's my kid and I don't want anybody else near my wife who made my kid.
And then male paternity line gets established and then You know, the dominance of the breed and real weird stuff with human beings when it comes to sexuality and monogamy.
But fascinating, too.
And, you know, it's more evidence of how contradictory our nature is and how strange we really are.
We're animals and we have a certain programming, you know.
Our DNA is like we're a computer with a program, but we're also like...
Animals like we want to fuck, we want to sometimes rip somebody's head off, and we have all these urges and we have these passions, but yet we're conscious of it all.
So we can step back and see the animal that we are and the robot that we are.
Yeah, it is mind-bending because it's unique to the actual life on this planet.
There's only one At all the animals on the planet, there might be other animals that are conscious, like dolphins and orcas, they might communicate with each other, they might have family groups and dialects and all that, but they don't alter their environment the way we do.
So we're conscious, we're aware, we communicate, we alter our environment, and we keep records.
You know, I don't know how much dolphins know about their great-great-great-grandfathers.
But we know a shitload.
And we'll quote Pythagoras, or we'll talk about Homer, and we'll discuss people that lived a thousand years ago as if we know exactly what they were like.
And that is very uniquely human.
So we sort of chart how retarded we used to be in comparison to how retarded we currently are and see this progress.
Yeah, and our nature is oftentimes very much at war with itself, and it's a hell of a balance to pull off.
So, yes, we're polygamists.
There's no question about that.
The flip side of that is, then why does almost every celebrity, and finally we lost George Clooney, so I can now, I think, say every celebrity, still get married?
Because if we were just polygamous, you'd be crazy to get married if you're a celebrity, if you're a guy, right?
You get 100 girls.
You get 1,000 girls.
Why would you get to stay?
Because there's also a part of our nature that wants to nest and that wants to have a one-on-one relationship.
So good luck trying to balance that out, and that's what we struggle with through our whole lives.
And then you've got our competitive nature and our nature where we cooperate, right?
And everybody makes the mistake of going on one side or another.
Like, there'll be a group that thinks, no, people are competitive.
They want to, you know, and you're crazy if you think that they're ever going to cooperate.
And then there's the guys who are like, hey, no, people hold their hands together and sing kumbaya.
And normally there'd be no war and all that stuff.
No, neither side is true.
No, we're sometimes incredibly competitive and want to rip each other's heads off, and sometimes we're incredibly cooperative, and we work together to create great things.
It's a balance.
So look, in a lot of ways, it's awesome, because if the world was black and white, it'd be too easy.
And I think that that conflict is sort of what fuels thinking.
I think that's the yin and yang of life.
You almost need conflict to sort of motivate you to work things out, motivate you to improve, motivate you to evolve and to change and to grow and to take into consideration all these different facets of life itself.
And I think that we all want everything to be this perfect goal.
You know, golden age of, you know, love and sharing and compassion.
But in order to really truly appreciate that, you kind of have to have some shit around too to compare it to.
It's almost like people that grow up rich, they'll never understand how beautiful it is to have enough money to not worry about money.
So true.
Yeah, it's like if you grow up in a family where...
Everyone's being driven around in limousines and there's money everywhere and you have servants.
It's got to be incredibly difficult to understand a true struggle.
Whereas if you grow up like you or like, I don't know what your childhood was like, but my childhood was very poor.
I appreciate every dollar I have.
I appreciate the freedom that it gives me in that I don't have to worry about money.
Because that weight of constantly worrying about your bills is one of the worst things that people have.
I cut a lot of people a lot of slack that do fucked up things for money that are broke.
Because I remember what it was like to feel that weight.
Like, God, I don't know how I'm going to pay my bills this month.
I don't know what next month's going to be.
What if I get sick?
I don't have health insurance.
I can't afford health insurance.
This happens.
What if that happens?
How do I take care of that?
How am I ever going to stop?
Where's my golden years going to come from?
Where's the retirement?
There's no fucking retirement for a lot of people.
It's a joke.
This idea that you're going to get to one point where you're going to settle down and everything's going to be great.
You work hard to the end of the day.
And the end of the day, it's Miller time.
And they look at life like there's a Miller time for life.
There's no fucking Miller time, man.
It's not happening.
You're going to get to a certain point and then you're going to go, now what?
I remember when I was a struggling talk show host on the radio, and I remember looking at a Snapple for like five straight minutes, but I mean like literally five minutes, and it was a dollar, and I'm like, I could just have water with my breakfast.
I don't need that Snapple because God, I really want that Snapple.
And I always remember that.
Like, a dollar meant extra enjoyment that day for me, and so I value it.
So that leads to an ironic conclusion.
I actually feel bad for people who grew up rich.
Like, that's kind of a funny thing to say.
Like, Russell Simmons is always talking about, oh, you should meditate and don't worry about money.
I'm like, yeah, Russell, but you got $300 million.
Yeah.
It's easy to say don't worry about money when you have $300 million, right?
It's harder for a person who's trying to pay their rent and figuring out where they're going to get food for their kids and stuff like that.
And I know that.
I know that feeling of being super stressed out about not having money and the effects of that.
But when you get a little bit, it feels a thousand times better because if you grew up rich, It's not your fault.
You just take it for granted because you never had any other contacts.
You have no idea how phenomenal it is to fly first class or business class or to get driven around in limos.
You take it as, well, that's normal.
So you can only go down.
If you lose that stuff, oh, then you're like, Oh my god!
My world has exploded!
How could anyone live like this?
But it's hard to go up.
And it's hard to have that context.
Look, I think I'm the luckiest guy a lot because I grew up middle class.
So I had enough that I can get an education and I didn't have to sell drugs.
I didn't have to do any crazy shit to get money.
So my dad provided that for me.
But I grew up middle class enough that I value money and I And it means the world's...
So anybody who says that money isn't important doesn't know what they're talking about.
Hasn't been poor enough to understand that yes, money's fucking important.
I totally agree with you about being unfortunate if you grow up rich.
I really do.
I think that especially if you grow up rich with ignorant parents and parents that don't sort of explain to you in great detail how fortunate you are to be in a situation and the importance of I'm appreciating the struggle but I have this weird relationship with money and it's gotten weirder and weirder over the last few years where it's gonna sound really crazy and it sounds crazy even to me but I objectively look at humans and I look at what
we're doing and I look at this sort of system that we set up and we think it's just this is the way people operate you exchange money for goods and this is our society is based on money and it's all about trying to earn money But I look at it and I go, well, that's just a creation.
That's just a man-made creation.
And what else is going on?
Well, what else is going on is there's this slow but inevitable sort of dissolving of the boundaries between human beings and information.
And whether that information is the secrets about the NSA or that information is, you know, things that are on the internet, emails, photographs...
There's the the trend is To have ultimate access to all information for everyone.
And I think that we're going to come to a bottleneck.
And the bottleneck is going to be that what is money exactly?
Well, at this point in time, it's just ones and zeros.
Money now is broken down to we don't have a gold standard anymore.
Our money is based entirely on information.
It's information in a database somewhere.
Well, there's going to be a point in time where we have to decide as a civilization That the only way to continue to move forward with our innovation, to continue to move forward with technology, we're going to have to dissolve the boundary between human beings and the information that is money.
Money is not going to be worth anything anymore.
We're going to have to come up with some new way in order to transfer wealth or to determine wealth or to determine reward for effort or for whatever you're doing.
Because if If we're just basing it on what we're basing it on now, it's inevitable that it comes to this point where you're not going to be able to protect your money.
You're not going to be able to store it.
It's not going to be anywhere.
And if it's just ones and zeros, everyone's going to have access to it.
The distribution of it is going to get very weird.
I think we're calling it hacked now, but I think the trend seems to be to no secrets.
No secrets, complete transparency.
I think the ultimate hive mind state, you know, that is talked about in sort of Eastern mysticism that we're all one...
I think we are all one, and I think we're going to achieve that through technology.
And I think that's something that no one saw coming.
I think that the hive mind is going to come through something that this cellular mind invents.
And then there's going to be some sort of a connection between all the people all the time.
And we're experiencing that now by being able to access the database of human knowledge on your cell phone.
To be able to ask Siri what the answer to a question is, you know, ask Google, and boom, you get answers.
That's unprecedented in human history.
But that, to me, is just like...
That's like one of those old school-y photographs where they have to throw the cape over and everybody stands still for a minute and poof!
They press that button and the thing flashes and everybody has to stand still and then you get this weird black and white image which was magic in 1850 or whenever the fuck the camera was invented.
I think that that's this step that you've gotten to now where I have thousands of photos on my phone.
Thousands!
And I take them instantly.
I can press a button, it goes grrrr, and it'll take a series of pictures in a row.
That's madness in comparison to that big stupid cape.
Well, I think that the access to information that we enjoy today, by being able to Google search something, by being able to go to your phone and find the information, It's going to get closer than that.
It's going to be something where it's a chip that you put in your body and it interfaces with your mind.
There's going to be something, whether it's nanotechnology, whatever it is, they're going to continue to innovate, they're going to continue to expand on technology, and the trend is that there is no boundary at one point, at this zero point, there's going to be no boundary between human beings and information.
And money is just information.
It's all it is.
It's information on a database somewhere.
There's going to be a bottleneck where we have to decide how we manage that database, how we manage the access to that information.
Because if the ultimate trend of this technology is to erode all these boundaries and to have us all communicating in sync, You're not going to be able to have anything restricted.
You're not going to have anything that is outside of the access to everyone.
And money is that thing.
So we're going to come to a point in time where we're going to have to evolve as a culture, as a race, as a species.
And part of that evolution is to restructure our ideas of wealth.
Restructure our ideals of the distribution of wealth, what it means to have wealth.
What we're talking about now I grew up poor, you know, you grew up middle class, and now I appreciate money and you appreciate money.
That ain't gonna even be an issue a thousand years from now, because it'll have been dissolved by technology.
First of all, fascinating, and I like your vision of, like, I don't know if you're neo there in melting the matrix, okay, but it's...
So money is a tool, right?
And so in your ultimate vision, I don't know how that tool is then applied.
So in our current society, we make this huge mistake of thinking that it's the end.
But it's not the end goal.
It's only a tool.
If you think it's the end goal, you're going to make yourself miserable.
Right.
Because then there's never enough of it.
And the point of the money was to make you happy.
But if you've replaced happiness with the end goal of money, there's no winning that fight.
Right?
So it would be really interesting to see how that paradigm would be in your transcendental world.
And there's this great, fascinating circle there because...
Everybody being one is something that I largely believe in as well.
And it's what almost everybody that thinks it through once they get past religion gets to.
So whether it's the Taoist that you're referring to in Eastern philosophy, it's the transcendentalist here in the US, the Ralph Waldo Emerson's, Henry David Thoreau's.
It's the Sufis in Muslim tradition.
They all come to the same conclusion.
We're all one.
It's not necessarily a God above us.
It's that we're all united in some way that we can't tell in the physical space that we're in.
In the physical space that we're in, we all seem divided.
Like, you're right there and I'm right here.
But if you break it down on a cellular level, you realize that that's actually not necessarily the case because everything is not stable.
It revolves.
And so the difference between the air and my hand is not nearly as distinct as we think it is.
But what would be interesting is if the oldest...
You know, philosophy we have, the Daoist philosophy of everyone being one and united at some point, met with the future where everything is united in its zeros and ones, and zero is non-existence and one is existence, and we are all one, right?
In the vision that you have.
And I think that you might be right.
But that's really hard for our minds to grasp.
Like, then what happens to money?
What happens to individualism?
What happens to all those things that are so important to us now?
And how is that part of our nature now but is not necessarily part of our eternal nature?
I think that everything works to ultimately become more and more complex.
Our society becomes more and more complex.
Our technology becomes more and more complex.
Our language, our understanding of each other becomes more and more complex.
And when I look at what human beings used to be and what we are now, and then I just take myself out of the situation that I've become so accustomed to, you know, modern life in 2014 with, you know, the language being noises that come out of your mouth and typing on a keyboard.
And I sort of extrapolate.
Like, where is this going to go?
Where is it ultimately going to go?
That's where I came up with this idea of the money bottleneck.
Because I really think that money is ultimately...
Just that.
It's just information.
And our idea that we have to exchange money in the way that we do now in order to stay alive, that's not true because there was times and there's cultures right now where they don't have money.
Nor do I. But I think when I'm looking at the complexity, I view these people that are living in this sort of a barter situation as a step along the way.
And money simplified the entire process of exchanging goods and it simplified everything.
Well, let's just agree upon coins that equal this and we'll have a bank of these things.
But then somewhere along the line, that bank became a fucking hard drive somewhere.
So, okay, on that note, I've talked to, like, I don't know, countless financial experts on the show, because Whether it was part of the TV show or the online show, I mean, over the course of the last 12 years that I've been doing The Young Turks, I've talked to guys who've written books about the Fed, guys who are in the Fed, just everybody.
First of all, let me just state, no one knows what the Fed is.
Like, you get me the top financial expert on the Fed, I will break him down in a matter of maximum six questions, okay, to the point where he will say, oh...
Yeah, no, I don't really know how that works.
No one knows.
They know as much as I do.
They know, okay, all right, this is what the Fed kind of roughly does, but where's the money?
Who prints it?
And then once it's printed, why do they give it to the banks?
Why does it have to be given to the banks?
Why can't it be given to the American people?
Who controls the Fed?
I mean, look, some of those things have simple answers, but when you start going deeper down into that Rabbit hole?
No.
Like, no one knows.
And it's really scary.
And by the way, it is almost...
In my mind, it's indisputable that we will have a massive global meltdown, economic meltdown.
It wants maximum expansion and wants to destroy everything in its path.
And I don't mean like in some like environmental way or they'll destroy things.
I mean, no, no, like destroy the competition so that there's no one left so they make money easier, right?
And okay, I get that and I understand the need for corporations.
But you've got to rewrite one line of code there.
You can't let public corporations...
Run amok the way that we have.
Here's what I mean.
Just a little bit more specific.
If you're a public corporation and you're an executive of that public corporation, you don't even care what happens to that corporation.
All you care about is your short-term benefit as long as you're an executive in that corporation.
So you will do whatever it takes to make short-term money, including, especially if you're at a bank, a public bank, Take as much risk as humanly possible, because more risk equals more short-term reward.
That system is built to explode.
You will eventually take so much risk that the bank will collapse.
It happened in 2008, and they were barely able to piece it back together.
The next time that they want to do maximum risk, maximum risk, if you're a gambler, I'm a gambler, if you gamble, you know you take maximum risk for long enough, It's a fact.
It's a certainty that you will lose all of your money.
That's what they're going to do.
Because there's a wrong line of code in there where the executives of the public corporations don't care about the public corporations.
They don't care about the American democracy, the American people, etc.
Yeah, the representative democracy that we exist in right now, too, I think it's a terribly flawed system, and I don't think you need to represent people that can speak for themselves.
It seems to be that what we used to need and the way it used to be established was back when communication was incredibly difficult.
You couldn't just vote online.
You couldn't just talk online.
You couldn't just answer questions or Express your opinions on things.
But now you can.
And so to have this antiquated system representing us.
And then the fact that this transparency that we're seeing evolve before our eyes change rapidly on a day-to-day basis.
I mean, there's new revelations that come, like the NSA spying thing.
Like, within a year, the whole world's attitude about email and transactions and doing things online completely changed.
Within a year, everyone assumes that everything that you put online, whether it's an email you send to a friend, whether it's a text message that you receive from a lover, all those things are public.
All those things, if not public now, very well may be public one day and at the very least are accessible by the government who may or may not use that to intimidate and or manipulate you.
So we've changed the way we think and then ultimately intimidate and or manipulate them.
Because just like technology, when technology first enters into the human arena, it becomes a tool of the wealthy and the privileged.
Like cell phones.
When you go to the old rapper videos, you see rappers with those giant, big, stupid brick cell phones.
They were letting you know that they are wealthy and privileged.
That's part of the whole rap culture.
But now, you can go to South America in the jungle and you'll see someone with a fucking iPhone.
I mean, it spreads.
And I think that that technology...
Is the spreading of that technology just indicative of this constant ripple effect of progress, of technological progress, rather?
And that this is ultimately going to happen with transparency as well.
What the government has the ability to do now with this NSA spy, this gent guy, he's got a fucking big mouth.
He likes to talk.
Let's find out what he's doing.
Let's get into his email, see if he's got some gay porn that we could blackmail him with or something.
And that, you know, Anna Kasparian had that exact same point.
We were on the podcast and we were sort of talking about transparency.
We were saying that at a certain point in time, everybody's going to look at everybody else's bullshit and it's not going to matter anymore because it's going to go away.
The same way, you know, during the Victorian era, they had fucking...
They were putting dresses over the legs of tables because they were...
Freaked out that people were going to be sexually aroused by table legs.
If you see someone's ankle, well, obviously, you're going to want to fuck that ankle.
I'm not sure how obvious that is, but if you cover everybody up, you know?
Isn't that crazy that we live in a world, it's 2014, we're talking about technology and how it's going to change the world and full transparency, and we've got a significant percentage of the world walking around with curtains on their heads.
Well, look, anything that wants to hold on to the past is going to fight education tooth and nail.
It's going to fight knowledge tooth and nail.
That's why the very first chapter of the Bible is, don't eat from the tree of knowledge.
That is the biggest sin you could ever...
In fact, we got expelled from heaven because we ate from the tree of knowledge.
That's what Adam and Eve did.
So if you've got your old way of doing things and it ain't right, well, the first thing you want people to make sure they don't do is find out what is right.
And I think ultimately that knowledge will transcend just simply being able to Google things and read things.
And it'll be some sort of, and scientists have speculated about this, not just a knucklehead like me, but scientists have speculated that what we're going to deal with in the probably near future, within the next hundred years, is instant access to information directly through some sort of a neural interface.
of tapping into something like that is that I'm going to be able to get into Jenk's mind too.
You're going to be able to get into mine, but I'm going to be able to get into yours.
We're all going to be able to get into each other's minds.
And then that's going to progress too, that ultimately that'll progress to some new level.
And I think that in a sense, I mean, there's a lot of people that they look at the utopian version of a modern technologically advanced society, like becoming, you know, this, the singularity is near type thing where we're going to reach some sort of a the singularity is near type thing where we're going to reach some sort of a I think, if any way, that is the way.
The way is not going to be necessarily through artificial intelligence, but through an artificial interface of intelligence, where we create something that allows us to instantly access each other.
And we truly dive into this, like joining a fucking World of Warcraft server, but the World of Warcraft server, instead of running around playing a game, we're going to be thinking in each other's minds.
Well, if that day comes, the first time that you go into other people's heads, there's going to be an initial period of time, five minutes, five days, five weeks, whatever it is, where you will run into darkness before you see the light.
Sure.
You're going to be like, oh my God, that dude is thinking the most fucked up things.
No, no, no.
He went there!
He went there!
Holy shit, right?
And then you're going to move on to the next mind, and you're going to think the same thing, and the next mind, and you're going to be amazed at the darkness of humanity, right?
But then eventually you'll realize, oh, we all think that, but then we also think all these wonderful things, and then it's like, you don't necessarily mean bad by it, right?
And then you'll get to the light of knowledge that knowing that we're all the same.
So that guy that – the first guy whose thoughts you read, who you thought was the most fucked up guy on earth, it turns out we're all just as fucked up.
Well, or it will just be the first steps to the next level that gets like the next generation.
Generation of human beings that grows up with that technology.
Like, I look at my kids now, and I look at the Internet, and I'm like, wow, what a weird world it is that these little children, they're growing up with no access or no knowledge of what it was like to exist in a world where there was no Internet.
Well, I think that the people that first experience this mind-meld technology, where we all read each other's minds, To them, it would be this crazy alien concept, but they're going to have to somehow or another reconcile it with the biological existence that we were born into and grew up with, and then all of a sudden, boom, connected to each other.
But the people that those people give birth to, they will grow up in a world where everyone reads everyone's mind from the jump, and that's when things will get really fucking weird, and that's when I think the money thing will become the bottleneck.
I love when America debates like, is this ethical and moral to do X, Y, or Z? Like, whatever you're debating, China's already in the middle of doing it.
The real problem is clinging to this biological idea of what a person is.
I was looking at a guy who was being interviewed, and he had been attacked by a shark.
And he had a carbon fiber arm and a carbon fiber leg.
And he could articulate his fingers, and he was standing there with no crutches, no anything.
He was wearing shorts on, and so from his knee down was this artificial leg, and it worked on an artificial hinge.
And he could walk around with no limp.
I mean, it was amazing.
It was perfectly measured to the size of his body.
And I'm looking at this guy, and this guy's happy to have this artificial hand, this artificial leg.
And I'm like, okay, what if it's two legs and two hands?
What if it's a whole body?
What if you're paralyzed, but they say, okay, you're paralyzed, but we can take your brain and we can put it in this artificial body and you can move around.
You're like, fuck yeah, give me an artificial body.
Well, you know, you won't be able to have sex anymore, but yeah, I understand, but I'll still be able to enjoy almost everything else that other people do.
Yes, you will.
Boom, you're in an artificial body.
Well, they say, well, look, we've got a problem.
Your brain is developing Alzheimer's, but here's the good news.
We can take your brain and we can download all the contents of it into this artificial brain And you can essentially live forever in this artificial body.
Whoa.
Now what the fuck are you then?
When you become a program that's inside something that a human being created.
But two robots that are already on their way to doing your vision to some degree.
I saw they were just demonstrating to Chuck Hagel like two weeks ago some defense department, the department within the Pentagon that creates everything, like the microwave, all that stuff, the internet.
So that department, they've created the robots, and now you can control the robots from a distance.
So the controller does this, the robot does this, right?
And so they already exist.
It's just a matter of perfecting them, right?
And then whatever's in your head, the robot does.
Yeah.
And then there's the robots that are the sex robots.
It's not just that we will evolve into something that we don't like.
It's like we won't even be an option.
And I really truly believe that that scenario that I took, that I depicted about the guy with one arm and one leg, that's happy to have that artificial arm and artificial leg, that's going to happen with a body.
It's going to happen with a whole body.
They're going to have, they already developed an artificial skin in a test tube that they combined with spider web, spider silk, that's bulletproof.
They've used artificial skin cells, or skin cells that they have somehow or another, through some scientific process that a moron like me will never be able to truly describe, but they've been able to at least, in theory, develop this bulletproof fucking skin.
Who's not going to get bulletproof skin?
Not only that, what is skin...
I mean, you see these poor people, like, there's a fucking Vegas commercial that they're airing these days with Wayne Newton.
It's, you know, getting people excited about Vegas, and Wayne Newton has this rubber face, man.
This poor fucker.
His face is pulled back and it's shot up with Botox and fillers.
Someone needs to tell him, just be an older man.
It's way better than what you're doing.
What you're doing, you're terrifying to look at.
But we're going to be able to just replace your fucking skin.
Forget about all this stretching this and pulling that and injecting into that.
How about we just take all that stupid shit off and just like we can give you an artificial hand, we'll give you a whole fucking, a whole organ, a whole skin organ that can't get cancer and it's fucking bulletproof.
Okay, so when the Chinese start making super babies that are super strong, like we talked about, and they have the spider skin that's bulletproof, and then they start messing with the mind, and the kid's smarter than the average kid.
Now, what are you going to do?
You're going to have your kids be dumber than those kids?
You're going to make the...
Decision, no, no, no.
I don't want the super babies.
Now or then the super babies will be 1%, then they'll be 10%, and then they'll be 30%.
And when they're 70%, you're still going to be in that percentage saying, oh, no, no, it's okay.
I'm happy that the other kids are smarter, stronger, have bulletproof skin, but mine won't.
The much more likely scenario will be that we will be, or I say we, the people that choose to go the route of innovation and to accept what technology is capable of, the ways that it's capable of advancing the mind, will treat everyone else the way we treat chimps.
They're not going to let them dominate the Earth.
They're going to confine them to zoos.
They're going to keep them locked up in certain places where they don't interfere with the new evolved race and species of people.
Yeah, well, we're realizing that we're vicious, we're aware that we're vicious, but we've spent millions and millions of years developing in a world filled with lions and tigers and bears, oh my.
I mean, that's the world that we live in, that's the reality of the world, and that's what our DNA has developed in.
And then all of a sudden we reach this point, whether it's 100 years or 300 years ago, whatever it is, we've reached this point where we started being aware of how crazy it is, our dominance over the rest of the species on this planet, But it's a fairly recent thing.
I mean, we talked about on the podcast many times, I have this thing about wolves, kind of obsessed with wolves, and also obsessed with this romanticized vision of wolves that most people have.
And the reason why this Little Red Riding Hood, you know, the reason why I was the big bad wolf...
Wolves used to fucking eat people on a regular basis and in Paris in the 1400s there was an instance where wolves had killed 40 people in Paris.
So the people that lived in Paris had to band together to fight this pack of wolves that had invaded Paris.
During World War I, the Russians and the Germans made a truce so that they could kill wolves because they were in Russia and when Germany and the German troops and the Russian troops would go on patrol, they would get killed by wolves.
They ran into a super pack.
people that were on patrol and they would kill them.
So these Russian soldiers and German soldiers would come upon these bodies that were ripped apart.
They would find like shoes and like some tattered clothes and the fucking femurs would be snapped in half.
They'd suck the marrow out.
Like they had a real goddamn problem.
So they had to make a truce to kill these fucking wolves.
They had to make a trip.
This is the world!
This is the real world that we live in.
This is not a world where the wolves rescue the baby and bring it back to the doorstep and wink at the family and then run off into the woods to be with nature and chirp around with butterflies and chipmunks.
No, it's a fucking vicious, horrible world of predators and prey.
And that's the world that we developed in.
And so we still have these cruel instincts because of that.
And we still have this...
This ability to sort of block off our ideas that we apply to humans that we love and sort of alienate humans that we don't love.
Decide that this is the enemy.
Make these separations with humans.
So of course we do it with animals.
Of course we do it with dolphins.
Of course we do it with almost everything we get a chance to do.
So, like, everybody tells it's impossible to get a constitutional amendment to get money out of politics and all that stuff.
Oh, except that every generation of Americans has gotten an amendment except us, right?
So it's not impossible, right?
Women got the right to vote when they couldn't vote in the first place.
That was impossible, right?
This is doable.
But when people ask me, they're like, dude, PACs are named like fluffy things, like a better tomorrow tomorrow, stuff like that, Americans for America, you know that whole thing.
Well, much like the internet has given people the ability to access information in a way that was never possible before, I think that the internet is also going to give people the ability to express influence in a way that's never been available before.
And a group of 300 million people, when you say the 1% that they have more money than X amount of people put together, and you take the wealthy 1% in this country and you combine their wealth with how many people...
That's all well and good, but they compete against each other.
And if you can get 300 million people in this country to recognize what a fucking shell game it really truly is, and then say, look, there's only one way to stop this shell game.
You've got to remove money from politics, and you have to have politicians that act For the people, which is what initially the whole idea of a representative government was supposed to be about.
It was supposed to be about having people that represent the rest of us so that everything remains fair, that we're allowed to prosper without being pulled down by the weight of an oppressive government like we were in Europe.
It's the whole reason why people came to America in the first place.
So what's amazing is that in our efforts to reclaim democracy, because it just doesn't exist on a national level anymore, just one quick thing about that.
Princeton just did a research study.
They went back to, I think, 1981 and studied 1,800 policy positions.
And they looked at public opinion and elite opinion and lobbyist opinion.
Public opinion had no effect.
No effect on what our so-called representatives did at the national level.
So there's two recent decisions, Citizens United and McCutcher, right?
So Citizens United is universally recognized as the thing that killed our democracy, but it isn't.
It actually shot a dead horse.
It took this system that was already super fucked and just put it up on steroids.
could spend money in politics, we were fucked.
And that's when the Princeton study starts in 1981.
And from then on, even back then, we had no effect.
When in fact, in the previous 50 years, we were correlated.
Our positions did matter.
Our government did represent us, right?
So, and then Citizens United, they just lifted all caps and they said, oh, if it's an independent expenditure, like Joe Rogan's running for Congress.
I'm I'm not giving to Joe Rogan.
I'm giving to the Joe Rogan PAC. Okay?
Or friends of Joe Rogan PAC. And then they can spend a gazillion dollars supporting you.
Guy just in, I think it's in Montana, set up a PAC. Raised all this money, left the PAC, started running for Congress, and that PAC then just gave him all the money.
I mean, it's a joke.
It's a fucking joke, right?
It's just a way of giving you the money through one thin layer of legal loophole.
And then in McCutcheon, they said...
Yeah, you know, at least then you couldn't give unlimited money to the parties and there were still some rules.
Nah, fuck those rules.
Okay.
Now, the old limit was $123,000 that you could give in any one cycle, right?
Not through the super PACs, but the individual campaigns.
They're like, ah, 123,000 is too little.
So now you can give unlimited money to the political parties.
So there's no limits.
You can do an independent expenditure.
You can do a superpacking.
You can give to the politicians.
There's tiny little things left, but they're just a joke.
There are veneer left there to pretend that there are limits when, in fact, it's limitless auction.
And so these guys have convinced themselves through a series of reading papers from American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation, these think tanks, venerable think tanks, that they're doing the right thing.
Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy say that giving unlimited money like this doesn't even lead to the appearance of corruption.
Fucking planet.
I mean, literally, there was a recent poll.
Ninety-six percent of Americans thinks that there's too much...
money has too much influence in politics.
They're in the Supreme Court's in the 4% who thinks, nope, nope, no, I don't see it.
Look, I think obviously those conversations happen from time to time, but usually it doesn't have to get to that conversation.
I think that the system creates the things that it wants.
In 1971, a guy named Lewis Powell writes a memo to the Chamber of Commerce and says, hey, corporations should basically go in and affect every part of our society.
We should spend a lot of money affecting education, affecting politics.
And affecting the Supreme Court.
Okay?
And Richard Nixon reads that, and as he's getting his ass handed to him by Ralph Nader, says, hmm, maybe there's a good long-term way of fighting back.
Takes Lewis Powell, who wrote that memo on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce, and puts him on the Supreme Court.
And then Powell is the one who's the deciding vote in Buckley v.
Vallejo and Bellotti that then spins us off into this nightmare that we're in now.
So it was simply Nixon getting money from businessmen.
Businessmen wanted Lewis Powell, who figured out how to For businessmen to take over the country, they wanted him on the Supreme Court.
Nixon does them that favor because that's where he gets his money.
It's just a self-repetuating system where, like Barack Obama, he thinks he's like a lovely guy, right?
He thinks he brought us change and he's, you know, oh, I got you 5% change.
You're still busting my ass over this.
What the fuck, right?
But in reality, what he doesn't know is that he loves the system.
This system made him President of the United States of America, the most powerful man on earth.
If he was a wrestler, his nickname would be the establishment, right?
So Obama does what is natural to him.
How has he gotten successful this whole time?
Take corporate donations, take donations from Goldman Sachs, and give a veneer of change so people are placated, and they keep the system going exactly as it is.
He thinks that's the right thing to do.
You know?
So, Justice Roberts worked for corporations before he was a judge, et cetera.
All these people, they grew up in an atmosphere and in a context, just like we were talking about with rich people.
It's the context you grew up in.
They always had money.
They didn't know.
These guys always grew up in a world where corporations were always right.
And if you argued with that, you're a villager.
You're a barbarian.
You're a simpleton.
You didn't understand.
You need corporations to run the world.
And you need...
If you're a sophisticated person, you would bow down to the Fed and the multinational corporations.
You're very unsophisticated if you don't realize that corporations are human beings and should be able to spend unlimited money in politics.
I mean, look at that.
That's the other thing, right?
They all think that corporations are human beings.
Yeah, the idea that you can do that and not address the diffusion of responsibility that comes when large groups act as a large group, the people inside that large group go, well, you know, I'm just a part of this company, you know, this business is business, and we're moving to Mexico.
Look, there's a woman that was part of an insurance company in California.
She was a high-level executive.
They raised the rates for one year 39% on individual insurance.
And she said, that's inhumane.
You can't do that.
People will lose their insurance and they'll die.
This was before Obamacare.
They said, oh, that's a really interesting opinion.
You're fired.
Okay, so the machine will replace anyone with a conscience.
She had a conscience, and she was immediately replaced with someone who does not have a conscience.
Because if they had a conscience, they'd be replaced.
So we, like the media, the people who are at the top levels of the media today, on the old media, television, etc., they didn't get there by being the smartest, the most successful, the best investigative reporters.
No, no, they got there because they were the ones who were willing to play ball.
The system rewards people willing to perpetuate the system.
Okay.
Now, like we talked about a couple hours ago, that is now running into the wolf pack of the internet.
The internet also realizes that this is the first time maybe ever that people truly have had a voice and the ability to influence things like this.
It really didn't exist before.
You couldn't get on Reddit and just start a thread and that thread becomes a fucking revolution.
There was no access before.
You could start a protest, you could meet in Washington, D.C., and they would fucking turn the hydrants on you and sick dogs on you and shut that shit down.
Then the news would give a really distorted account of what actually happened.
For most Americans, that would be their version of the truth.
Kent State, perfect example.
They shot a bunch of kids that were protesting.
The National Guard comes in, shoots these fucking kids.
There was outrage because people got shot.
What was the official story that got broadcast on the news?
I mean, what was the story that most Americans...
It took years before people deciphered it and saw what was really going on.
I mean, that has been...
The media has had the ability to do that forever.
I mean, that's how they pulled off the Gulf of Tonkin when they got on TV and said that, you know, the North Vietnamese have shot American submarines and sunk them off the Gulf of Tonkin.
So, from time to time, people in the mainstream media will criticize like RT, or they're run by the Russian government, or Al Jazeera, or they're run by the government of Qatar.
So that has validity, right?
The flip side is, what's CNN run by?
So, think about this.
When's the last time you heard CNN say, the Pentagon is lying?
So, does anyone in America actually believe that the Pentagon has never told a lie?
Really, could anyone possibly believe that?
So, if the CNN never reports the truth, it just reports whatever the Pentagon is saying, Then how are they better than Pravda, let alone RT or Al Jazeera, right?
But in fact, they're more devious in a sense because they have the veneer of being a real media organization and journalists, etc.
But when you look past that veneer, they do a better job than Pravda at supporting the government.
Amber Lyon used to work for CNN. She did this detailed piece on Bahrain, and then they turned it into essentially an infomercial to get tourists to go to Bahrain.
The influence of money in politics is so deep and so intertwined that there's parts of it that people ignore.
And one of the ones that I bring up all the time is cigarettes.
That you've never heard a politician ever say, we have to make cigarettes illegal.
We have to stop cigarettes.
Cigarettes are killing...
Almost a half a million Americans prematurely every year.
They die in horrible, painful, agonizing deaths.
We need to stop this.
This is a plague.
If there was a terrorist that came to our country and killed a half a million people a year, it would be our number one priority to eliminate that terrorist.
But meanwhile, we have this public health problem.
You don't hear that ever.
You don't hear a peep out of these people with full knowledge.
Everyone has full knowledge of this.
But it's because the cigarette companies, the tobacco companies, have given them untold billions of dollars of influence.
So because of that, everybody shuts the fuck up when it comes to cigarettes.
I know you are, and I respect that very much, and I support that very much.
I think it's an amazing thing.
And I think that even without your Wolfpack, I think you're trying just by distributing information and by letting people know the actual roots of it and just sort of getting to points that are being ignored by these influenced networks because of the fact that you're not influenced by anything other than your own opinions and the facts that present themselves to you.
That's super important, man.
It's probably one of the most important things.
I think when history is written down in the future and we go over this era, this will be the era of the internet.
I really do believe that.
I believe that these decades, this 30, 40 years from the point of the first initial...
Introduction in the early 90s, when it really became a part of America, to where it eventually is going to go to.
I think this is going to be an incredible era of change and of influence in a way that I don't think has ever existed before.
We're a part of it.
We're in the middle of it right now, so I don't think we recognize it.
I think we do, kind of.
We talk about it because we literally are in it.
I mean, we are one of the people that's taking full advantage of this strange new time.
But I think, well, history looks back on it, man.
They're going to look back on it like, this is a crazy fucking time.
And then they invented the internet, and the whole class goes, oh.
Yeah, and so, you know, to bring it back to our conversation about darkness and light, so the Pentagon, that is this force of darkness for so many things, unfortunately, in the world, invented the internet, right?
I don't think anybody could have ever possibly saw this coming.
I think if they could pull it back, they probably would.
That is the number one biggest problem to govern is the ability that people have today to express themselves and exchange information and the access to that information being...
Almost completely permeated into our society.
It's almost everywhere.
You basically get the news on your fucking microwave now.
You want Verizon to have the ability and Comcast to have the ability to bring it down at my speed on the Internet and then pay more in order to speed it back up.
Great.
So give me $1,000 and I'll speed it back up for you, your FCC website.
Yeah, and then this net neutrality thing, to try to get rid of that is a very creepy precedent.
Because to give anybody in control, anybody with power and influence, the control of the distribution of information, that's the very thing that's endangering their power and control.
That distribution of information, that transparency.
You see these new shows that are being developed exclusively for the internet, like House of Cards on Netflix, and that's just the beginning.
That's the tip of the iceberg.
And I think shows like yours and all these various shows that are just popping up on the internet, they're going to replace everything you see on television, except big budget things like maybe Game of Thrones.
Those things will hang on, first of all, because they're awesome, and two, because it's really fucking expensive to make these gigantic, huge...
You know, shows where you have special effects and just incredible theatrical productions.
Those are going to be the most difficult to replace.
The Captain America movies, things along those lines.
If you were going to do a bunch of conspiracies, but you wanted to discredit the idea that conspiracies happen, you would create someone like Alex Jones who would say plausible things like 25%, 33% of it makes perfect sense.
And then on top of that, you would add reptilians.
So that people will go, oh, that's just crazy talk.
He might not be right and he might jump to conclusions too often and he might cite statistics that may or may not actually exist or be factual, but he's right a lot of the time and that's what's really fucking crazy.
He made a video a long time ago And it was 911, the road to tyranny.
And it wasn't just about 9-11.
What it was about, not just false flag operations, but it was about agent provocateurs that I really wasn't aware of.
I wasn't aware that they will use...
Hired people, whether they're, you know, call them government agents, call them soldiers, whatever.
They used people where they paid these people to infiltrate peaceful protests and start chaos.
Break windows, light fires, do all these things so that they would have the motivation or they would have the green light.
To send in the troops to stop all these protests.
Because the protests turned violent.
So they turned the protests violent.
And I was like, wow, that is crazy.
And then the expression, agent provocateur, I'd never heard of it at the time.
But he does a fantastic job of detailing it in his video.
And showing it, not just step by step along the way, videotaping these people that were wearing fucking, they were wearing ski masks, they were in military order boots.
I mean, military-issued boots.
He shows the photos of the bottoms of these boots.
He's like, these people are all wearing the same boots, ladies and gentlemen.
These boots are the same boots you will see on soldiers!
You'll see on police officers!
And he also detailed how they were all let off.
How they cordoned them off in a building, and instead of moving them in and arresting them, they had some sort of a negotiation.
So the foreign minister was talking to some of the generals or whoever it was that was going to do this.
And he said, we have a compound within Syria.
They do.
It's to protect a religious area within Syria that Turkey controls for some obscure reason, right?
He said, why don't we attack that and pretend the Syrians did it?
And then that will give us an opportunity to go into Syria right before the elections so that we'll rally the whole country to our side.
It's on tape.
That's why the Turkish government shut down YouTube and Twitter for a while.
Because the tapes, of course you're not going to see that on Turkish television, they're just as controlled by the Turkish government as any of these are, right?
And then they couldn't control Twitter and YouTube, and the Prime Minister started losing it, so he just shut down all of YouTube, because those tapes made it out there.
So that stuff definitely exists.
What drives me crazy about Alex, and if you've known him that long, of course I trust you that he's not an actual false flag operation.
But what drives me crazy about Alex is that then he'll start talking about how the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers want to kill off 90% of humanity, and I'm like, no, no, then you're going to stop.
So, the one thing I got out of that book was, well, he's right.
I mean, the symbols did get there for a reason.
There's symbols all around us.
They did mean something at some time to somebody.
So it's not an accident that there's an eye on the pyramid.
I don't know what it means, and I'm not sure that it's nefarious, and I'm positive it's not about the lizard people.
But, you know, at some point...
And look, the Masonic Lodges were probably good things.
You know what?
My guess, I have no idea, but my guess is that those are the people who were smart enough to get together and be like, yeah, religious bullshit, right?
We all agree.
Yeah, yeah, it's totally bullshit.
Okay, now let's come up with logical shit to actually run this place, because there are villagers out there believing nonsense.