Philip DeFranco and Joe Rogan debate media’s rush for engagement, critiquing edited content’s unnatural pace while noting audiences now handle longer formats. DeFranco clarifies PewDiePie’s backlash stemmed from a misinterpreted Fiverr video, sparking intent vs. words tensions. They shift to wealth redistribution, tracing DeFranco’s moderation from counterculture roots to broader societal exposure, and clash over immigration—Rogan dismisses "white privilege" critiques while defending Syrian refugees’ dire conditions. Balancing safety and openness, they question cultural integration risks, like Paris or Germany’s refugee enclaves, and Rogan’s chaotic Trump comparisons. Concluding, DeFranco’s "liquor method" of discourse emerges as a key antidote to polarized, misinformed debates in today’s hyper-connected world. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, this is for my daily example of why I need to be patient.
I had an iPhone 6 Plus, the biggest storage.
I was really happy with it, and I was like, man, I need to get that iPhone 7. And the only one they had was the small one with the smallest storage, and it's a piece of garbage.
When you're looking at websites in particular, where you don't have to expand the screen to get the entire thing, you don't have to go back and forth to get the entire article.
And there's little tricks that people don't know, where it's like you double tap, not push in, but double tap, and all that shit that's on the top of the screen, it comes down for you.
Well, because it is a battle of attention and battle of eyes.
But I think people are seeing more and more, especially even the YouTube algorithm, podcasts.
I think that there is 100% always going to be an audience for longer form things.
My videos started out as, it was even in the little intro sequence, it started out as three to four minutes.
Let me talk about the world for three or four minutes.
My videos now are 10 to 18 minutes every day.
Granted, a lot more is happening every day under this new presidency and stuff like that, but there is an audience that wants more.
And so you had the Vine guys, but even, I mean, Vine's dead now, but those guys have now launched into longer form pieces where some of it is three to four, and then some are daily 10 to 18 minute pieces.
So I think there's always going to be an audience.
People are tuning in longer, more than ever, because the internet was tuned in for six seconds, 15 seconds, one minute, three to four, and it's just getting longer and longer.
You know, the main difference between, I think, the last time I came on here, which was about two years ago, and now, is back then I was kind of scared to share my opinion, right?
So I was just kind of repetition of...
Reddit stories that popped up, and things that popped up on websites of, like, this thing happened.
I feel like I was then, and now it's more of, because no one trusts anything, right?
Where we talk about right-wing or left-wing people being in their own bubbles, and, you know, we go in like, I know, I know the truth, but you might not, because you're just sticking to the stuff that you believe in, and then you see something from an outside source, and you go, well, that's bullshit.
I mean, BuzzFeed really, in my opinion, fucked themselves with the way that they released those documents that couldn't be completely confirmed, right?
With the whole, like, Trump and the prostitutes peeing on the bed stuff.
And they're like, we can't confirm it.
And neither can any of the other places that have gotten this information.
Can't confirm it.
But there is this piece of paper that says that it may have happened.
Yeah, but then everyone made it like, oh, he likes to pee on his face.
And it was like, what?
And they became this example of, as long as it's hilarious enough, I forget who said it, as long as it's hilarious enough, people will just roll with it.
I feel like if you heard that, though, and you're like, oh, it's like a coke-fueled businessman from the 80s, you'd be like, yeah, that probably happened.
Yeah, they're going to take the smallest things on TV, and I mean, the media does it at times, and they're going to expand on it and make it this crazy thing.
The same example with the urination story.
All of a sudden, I look to Facebook, all my left-leaning friends...
And I mean, the hard thing is the story, there's like eight stories every day.
I feel like because I haven't seen Kellyanne Conway on TV as much lately, it's less of the case.
And there was even, it felt like two days where Donald Trump didn't tweet, which was unprecedented.
But it's overloading.
Yeah, because there are a lot of people that'll ask me why didn't you cover a certain story and it's just I am one guy making like at that time a 16-minute show that I'm trying to explain things properly So how am I going to how am I going to get a point get across all the points?
Yeah, look at this in Forbes Trump's family cost his trips to cost taxpayers nearly as much in a month as Obama's cost in a whole year Yeah, the whole thing is very bizarre.
And what's really crazy is he was very critical of Obama, President Barack Obama's vacations, costing taxpayers millions of dollars.
I mean, but even like, you're throwing out your opinions now, and I think that it's important to have those people, but I think it's also then important to take the time to look into where the Fox News, the Breitbarts, the Donald, all those places, where they're coming from as far as where their opinions come from.
I mean, we've got two echo chambers on the left and on the right, and the sound of the both of them is deafening to the point where you can't make out what the fuck is going on.
Right, and I think that's why it's important to look at both, so you can kind of fucking shimmy it through a filter and see where these sources are coming from.
The kid that's being detained pushes the off-duty cop into a bush.
Then two minutes pass.
They slowly get closer to this hedge.
Another kid puts hands on the off-duty cop.
Another kid then shoulder-checks the cop over the hedge.
Then the kid who originally touched him.
God, it would be so much easier to have the video.
Then one of the other kids who had put hands on him punched the cop.
Another kid jumped over the hedge and they kind of surrounded him.
And at that point, the cop pulled out a gun and everyone kind of ran away.
And then it looks like the cop's trying to pull the kid over the hedge while holding the gun.
It goes off and then two kids are arrested.
He's not.
And it's a crazy video.
And so, with talking about a story like that, that becomes a little different than just talking about politics, because it's seeing something, not knowing fully how it started, so you're having to take the word of two people without having the evidence, and trying to get across the point.
My main points in the video, I don't like that the cop Didn't seem to de-escalate the situation, didn't continually announce that he was a police officer, didn't announce that he was- Did he announce it at all?
So there's this point in the video where a kid, I believe, says, I don't believe you're a cop, or how do I know you're a cop, or something like that.
There's two different videos.
So it seems like maybe he announced it, but if I was him, right, this is hindsight, of course, I'd be constantly announcing that I am an off-duty police officer and I'm detaining this kid until the police show up, rather than potentially just some stranger grabbing a child.
And also, I don't agree, or if I was in his position and all of a sudden I started being attacked, I would 100% have pulled the gun out, but I wouldn't have fired it because they were already running away.
So you have to, especially someone that has a concealed weapon, someone that's an off-duty cop, you have to hold them to a higher standard.
My argument there, though, is if I was in that same position, I would have 100% as I was being attacked, especially if I have a weapon on me that all of a sudden I'm going to get worried that maybe it could be used against me as these kids are already attacking me, I would pull it out.
But so, like, talking about that story, it's trying to take in both sides of the argument, and then me separately giving my opinion.
And I did an event last night, and a kid said, you know, what do you say to people that disagree with you there, especially from, like, the Latino community, right?
Where, like, how a cop is going to treat me...
It's going to be different than how they treat us.
And I said, I think it's 100% fine for you to have a disagreement.
Tell me.
Talk to me.
Don't look at my opinion and go, this dude's a fucking asshole.
I hate this fucking guy.
Michael Che talks about in his special where he went through a weird thing, too.
Try and educate me.
Give me your point of view.
And that's why it's okay for people to go, like, he tried to give both sides.
Because I have far left, far right people that watch.
They don't always agree, but they know that I'm always going into it with the best of intentions and I'm not going to hide facts and I'm not going to hide my opinion.
Yeah, well, when you're seeing a video like that, you're not seeing what had to transpire before it got to the point where he's holding on to that kid.
Yeah, and so I think this might be from his explanation video, but in the first one, he's like...
Why the fuck did they do it?
Can I even include this?
And so then, that got a little traction.
And then people started going through his other videos, and they were like, he's dressed up, he's watching Hitler in this one.
Taken completely out of context of him saying that the YouTube Heroes program, which was a program where people can highlight videos, or not highlight them, but mark them down for deletion, because they're offensive, right?
And so people were like, oh, that's censorship, that's, you're talking about like, Obviously, hyperbole.
It's like, those are Nazis.
So he made that joke and that relation.
And then there was one, I want to say if it was on The Verge or Wired, but then they go even further and they're like, he used Leslie Jones' picture.
On Harambe, taken completely out of context because he was using, there's this Microsoft AI bot, like this chat bot, and you'd say, let me see Harambe as Jesus.
And either the AI was messed up or people had manipulated it, where it was putting Leslie Jones's face on it, and he was horrified by it.
And that was the whole joke, but they were saying that he was doing it.
If you try and use the bot today, a picture won't come up, because now they are aware that that's what was happening.
And so they took all these things and it was this crusade of, look guys, we're looking at this bad guy.
He's the biggest guy on YouTube.
He's the bad guy.
We're going to take him down.
So much taken out of context.
Some things are not defensible where I can't say it in the sense of, like you say that words don't have power based on intent, and I think there's a lot of truth in that.
It's not indicative of his overall, it's hard to call it a body of work, but let's call it a body of work.
His overall body of performance that's online, whatever you want to call it.
His talking.
It's not who he is.
So for them to call him a Nazi and say that PewDiePie has seven videos where he's done something about Nazis, like...
People, when they're doing these long-form spitball improvisation videos like that and you're interacting with people, you're gonna say all kinds of shit that in the moment is legitimate.
But if you chop it up and edit it and splice them all together and then make a five-minute montage of him saying Nazi, like he's obsessed with Nazis!
And many are touting it as this victory because he lost Google-preferred ads on YouTube, which I will say I don't know how he was still seen as family-friendly, because I'm not family-friendly on my show.
His past two years at the very least, not family friendly.
And then dropped by Maker.
He doesn't need his MCN, his company around him.
And the YouTube Red series is nothing.
He's still going to make millions of dollars.
He's grown.
It's a good thing.
I feel like now, if you have mainstream media trying to take a swing at you, It's some of the best promotion in the world.
The problem is so many people have written about it.
There was one article that was promoted and it said all these articles or all these people defending Felix with but context, that's a bullshit argument.
But do you feel, and you have a legitimate viewpoint on this, do you feel like there is some sort of resentment or anger or...
So people that are working against the folks that have become these new media stars, because, I mean, you essentially mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but you kind of run your own thing, right?
No, in a year, because I want to start my own larger news organization of people that are from the left and from the right can debate, like one of my favorites.
Oh, he turned it inside out and then just fucking hosed it down with bleach.
My brain will never be the same again.
It was awesome.
Scott, he's so interesting.
He's one of the most fascinating people I've ever talked to.
Because of his passion for things, like the way he describes space and astrophysics, it's not just that he's so knowledgeable, it's the intense passion in which he delivers that information that's so infectious.
I would be constantly looking at science blogs and reading all these scientific papers and paying attention to every single news released by NASA of new exoplanets that they've discovered.
Well, for sure, but the role of the schoolteacher is such an underappreciated and undervalued and Also, it's not just undervalued, underappreciated, but when done incorrectly, it's so fucking potentially damaging.
I mean, you could really screw a kid's head up.
I mean, I don't know.
Did any teacher ever say mean shit to you when you were a kid?
That, like, stung you and, like, stayed with you for years and years afterwards?
That was stuff that maybe pushed me more away from the religion.
I think later on it was probably my Spanish teacher who was just so disappointed any time I got anything wrong that it just made me scared and made me...
I didn't have any enthusiasm to all of a sudden learn a new language.
And so now I'm one of these dumb fucks that only knows one language.
I get scared when everyone talks about stuff in generalities, right?
When I talk about, and I'm guilty of it too, when I talk about like All mainstream media.
It's not everyone, you know?
Right.
But there are.
I stopped doing interviews with mainstream outlets several years ago because they made everything about, like, I would talk about all the really cool ventures that we're going into, how our space is changing things up, and it would always be turned into one comment that maybe was somewhat critical of, let's say, like, a studio.
And so the point has become, when the Wall Street Journal knocks on Felix's door after they didn't apparently approach him for the original story, and they're like, hey, we want to give you a platform to tell your story.
But then there's an argument that you leave it up because you show that you were wrong.
If it's on Twitter, you quote tweet it.
But that still doesn't fix it because as much as we talk about bubbles and separation, that tweet, that promotion of a thing is separate from everything else in the world.
Tweets are problematic anyway, because it's 140 characters, and it's very difficult to adequately explain some subjects in 140 characters.
But if you put out some information that's not true, like this PewDiePie thing, you absolutely should print a retraction, and you absolutely, if you have it still up on your website, the first thing you should say is, this is all taken out of context, and it's incorrect, and it does not represent who this guy is, and you should absolutely not have those writers do that again.
I mean, whether you fire them or whether you...
Who knows what they were asked to do?
This is another part of the problem.
Was this an independent thing that they decided to pursue on their own?
Did someone ask them to do it?
Was there someone who decided that this guy was a Nazi because maybe they tuned in at the very moment he was doing something?
And some people obviously are very, very sensitive to that kind of stuff.
That is part of the problem with doing something like you do, and it's certainly part of the problem with a podcast, is if you're talking for three hours and you take these little snippets of those three hours out of context, it paints a completely distorted perception of who the person is.
Right.
That's also a problem with language in general.
It really is a problem with, and it's certainly a problem, with words.
And that's one of the problems with these, quote, magic words that you're not supposed to say anymore, whatever those words are.
You know, you give the weight, give so much weight to these words that just taken alone on their own, they can get you in trouble.
Just saying, uttering the phrase as if it was a magic abracadabra can get you in trouble.
What they're doing is trying to find a way to control you and call you a bad person and be angry at you.
They could see that it was a mistake or if it wasn't a mistake, you just, look, if someone was a he for 30 fucking years and they became a she for a year and you still call them a he, I don't think you're a monster.
Okay?
I just don't.
We knew Bruce Jenner for his entire life.
Even saying Bruce Jenner now, you're not supposed to say it anymore.
When you go and look at the records for the fucking Olympics, it says Caitlyn Jenner now.
So I think that's what pushed so many people away.
And then the way that I try and...
Because I try to make it to no one's the villain in my head so that I can see where they're coming from.
I go, well, maybe that person, maybe they're not...
Because there are definitely professional victims and cry bullies out there.
Maybe there's someone that in their day-to-day life, someone says, you fucking tranny.
Maybe they say all this hateful stuff.
No, but that's not what you're saying.
No, I know, but then they take it out on the wrong person, right?
I try and see if, like, is this person being attacked so much that then they become this accidental monster, which is what has pushed me more towards the center.
Before I came to California, I was an ultra-liberal.
I had the most liberal ideas of like, yeah, if I'm a doctor and I'm making $3 million a year, I should give 70%.
When I started hearing about this new kind of Republican, I thought it was...
And I've seen a lot of people...
Well, no.
So, a lot of people have then talked about...
There's this weird thing where it's like, all of a sudden, you say new kind of Republican, and they go, oh, so you're talking about white supremacists under a whole different banner.
Yeah, so what I was talking about were people that, Republicans that don't give a fuck about gay people getting married, and they're like, I'm about...
I'm a Republican because, you know, small government, right?
And jobs, but if gay people get married, that's fine.
If it's a moral issue like that, I find myself more liberal.
And I all of a sudden became kind of excited about all these new people that didn't give a fuck.
And that was interesting to me.
But then you see a lot of other stuff that I don't know how to feel about.
When you're talking about people who troll online, go back to when you were a young liberal and you thought that if I was a doctor and I was making $3 million a year, of course I should be given 70% in taxes.
You don't have that, so you're looking at the people who do, and this part of you is like, give it away, man.
You don't deserve it.
Give it away.
That same mentality exists with trolls.
They don't have anything going on.
They're fucking losers for the most part.
So what do they want to do?
They want to burn it all down.
They want the whole thing burned down.
Go Trump!
Go Trump!
Half the reason why they want to say go Trump is because they want this clearly maniacal person to just throw a fucking monkey wrench into the gears and watch the whole system explode.
Part is going to be that they want to burn it down.
But I think it's just also there are a lot of people that don't have the concept of shit that we do online having potentially horrible ramifications in the real world.
I think that slowly we're getting closer to that where it's all the fucking same thing.
And if you do some crazy outlandish shit, you should know that a ton of people might see it.
It's why it's one of my favorite things to...
Screenshot and and and talk back to a few people that say stupid shit to me online Just because it's like you think that you're saying it in this like tiny room But the internet's fucking everybody in a room, right?
You know everyone like what you say has ramifications Well, not only that you shouldn't want to say it so you have to get to the root of the problem Like what why would someone want to be so evil?
Why would someone want to hurt someone's feelings so badly that you're mocking his I think there are a lot of people that just died I So that's a horrible emotional example.
So what I would say separately from that, if you're talking about trolling liberals or something like that, I think that there are people that want to burn the whole thing down, and then I think there are some people that literally have the mindset that it's just for laughs, right?
Well, you gotta go back in time to where their mother was raising them and take them away from the mom and bring them to a happy person and give them love and lots of hugs.
Yes, when they're maybe saying something they would see as evil things.
I'm not talking about the Patton Oswalt situation, because if you go after someone grieving over their wife, you're a fucking horrible monster, and hopefully you do understand that that has real-world ramifications.
There's going to be the whole, like, let's destroy each other war.
I'm just going to try and be the asshole...
That's in the middle with leanings here and there that tries to go like, hey, maybe we fucking calm down.
It's not the best thing for my career because I would have a far larger audience if I pandered to just one side because I alienate people daily by having left views and then right views.
It can be under the veil of, I hate snowflakes, but there's hypocrisy in that a little bit, in the sense of every time she's screaming, she does seem like a snowflake on some of the topics.
No, but she, like you were saying, whether you consider it performance art, whether you consider it anything, she plays one side, and it has been a very massive, successful rise.
I think that, but what I want to do for the long term...
I mean, you have people that are really passionate, but then there are a lot of threads where it's like people having conversations that don't normally disagree with each other.
Well, I'm saying this, the whole reason why I said it in the first place is more of a compliment than anything.
I think it's a great thing that you're very, like, here's a perfect example.
The way you handled the Milo Yiannopoulos thing.
I think you're very fair, and I think it's great that you're neither left nor right, but rather reasonable.
You know, you're reasonable and considered, and I think that's one of your strengths.
I don't think you'd have a bigger audience if you just went all right.
I think you'd be a big ol' phony, unless you became Felina and then you got some tits and put on a nice little dress and then you could wear like sleeveless shirts, you know, because right now if you wear sleeveless shirts, you're a douchebag because you're a male, right?
If you're a man and you show your arms, you're a piece of shit.
Shoving things up her vagina when she was little like what well so that's that's where right that's where when you say like I'm reasonable with a Milo thing well because you have to take into context other other people right is it is it a hit job but also what you said earlier where people are human beings and and look like let's talk it out so Milo said some some things that even he said he apologized for others he said was misconstrued but And then there's the George Takei thing, which is different, but still the same.
So they did a hit piece on George Takei, essentially, to sort of show that George Takei Well, he was talking about his own personal experiences when he was very young with a camp counselor who did some sexually inappropriate things to him.
But he was talking about them in a very positive way, that he enjoyed it, and people were saying, George Takei is promoting sex amongst 13-year-olds as being okay.
No, he's talking about his own personal experience and being honest about it.
Well, and then the way that ends up becoming a comparison is that because it ends up being this weird argument of numbers, of lines in the sand, where he said, I said 13 because that's when I had my first experience.
Then we talked about the age of...
I'm trying to remember.
He talked about the age of 14, which was, I think, when you were...
So that was a conversation he had with you with the priest situation.
And then people were pointing out that his mindset changed.
And my argument there was, what you're talking about, to me, even if he, at any point before, before he acknowledged it, to me, it sounded like he was a victim.
But then that creates the argument, too, of...
If someone's a victim early in life, what does that excuse later on?
Now, I'm not making the argument that Milo then went on to do and became a Sandusky, right?
He was having a conversation, and it's words.
But at what point do we excuse things?
And that's a conversation I like to have, where it's not damning.
I don't want to go in on a victim, but also at the same time, I'm going, it's fucking weird.
It's a me, and I think it's completely wrong if you have an adult...
That's trying to fuck a 13-year-old.
I think that's completely wrong.
And I feel like you always have to put people in their shoes, where if I was a parent and I'm dropping my kid off to fucking middle school and I find out some 25-year-old is fucking my son, I'm going to go to jail, but that's going to be a fucking dead person.
And when people get outraged back at him, and if somehow or another sticks, like this pedophile stuff...
You can't be upset.
This is the game that you just started to play.
If you get knocked the fuck out, if you're Mike Tyson and all of a sudden you get knocked out, are we supposed to feel bad for you?
You've been knocking people out your whole career.
He's a merchant of outrage.
If it's valid, if the outrage is valid, and I think it's valid, I think that what they're saying about what he was saying is absolutely valid.
If he says that there can be incredibly positive relationships between very young men, or very young boys, rather, and older gay men, and that this could keep men from suicide— hit the brakes stop no it's fucking illegal for a reason and you could potentially be encouraging someone who's fence sitting right now thinking about fucking kids to hop right over to the other side and start doing it because it was positive for Milo It does become a conversation.
But it's also he said that he was gay at the time.
He knew he was gay and he was the sexual predator.
And every situation has its own variables, right?
And in his...
Look, he's clearly a damaged guy, okay?
And I like him.
He's clearly a damaged guy.
But the way he lashes out and the way he gets attention...
I don't like the left's reaction to him.
I like that far less than I like what he's saying.
I feel like with a guy like Milo, he's not doing any real violent things.
He's not doing any real damage.
And what you should do is confront him with words.
Debate him.
Pick apart his arguments about feminism, about transgender people, about gay rights, because he's got some crazy thoughts about gay people, and he's gay.
He thinks that it's a choice, and he thinks that it's offensive, and if he could have a pill to not be gay, he would take it in a heartbeat.
I think when you have someone like Milo or anyone else, the number one thing shouldn't be, let me silence that person, right?
Because that's just going to, one, bolster them, validate them, let them talk.
So when you see situations like Berkeley, where I did see, I had people that sent me videos, and there was a protest in the beginning that it was just people being outspoken, and then there was the fucking crazy chaos of people, I know that you've talked about it before, of the people getting sprayed in the face with fucking pepper spray, people beating in the streets.
Obviously, I hate those people.
What I really, really hate is the people that aren't doing that, that are like, yeah, that's what we should be doing, that aren't doing it.
Like, are you fucking crazy?
You think this is a positive?
You think this bolsters your argument that we're going to go against what we don't agree that they're saying with fucking violence?
Well, I think there's a giant problem with groups of humans.
When groups of humans get together, I mean, the phrase mob mentality exists for a reason.
You don't say mob mentality.
People go, why, whatever do you mean, Philly D? What is a mob mentality?
No, people know what happens.
Giant groups of people face something called diffusion of responsibility.
And that means when chaotic events are going on, they don't take responsibility for their own action because they're a part of this gigantic chaotic movement.
And I've personally, and this is just Totally unfounded.
I'm definitely not a scientist.
I think it came from war.
And I think people are used to large-scale tribal war, and I think it's been going on for so long, and the atrocities that are required for you to survive in war, like, you know, with battle axes and shit, Braveheart style.
I think once that breaks out, you lock into this massive mind sink with all the people around you, and you just accept this violent chaos.
And I think that happens on campuses, when people...
Everyone is involved in this hurricane of chaos, and you just get swept up in this mob mentality.
And it's a really dangerous thing.
You know, like, I'm sure you saw the girl that got maced in the face that had the mate Bitcoin Great Again hat, and they hit her over the head with a stick.
I think if you listen to the audio before all of it happens, outside of that clip, she's literally saying, I'm actually surprised things are pretty calm here.
Because sometimes things go out of hand, and then 20 seconds later, pepper spray to the face.
So, I mean, obviously we're talking about different kinds of severity, but there are people on both sides, and it's important to acknowledge that, that want to burn the whole fucking thing down, whether it be a person or an argument.
I'm very much of the belief that we have, rather than...
More and more people are talking about generalities, where it's the left versus the right.
I feel like a lot of the conversation, a lot of the stories end up being about these far left and far right people that are fucking Pac-manning their way to the middle and just slowly absorbing more and more people.
Into their opinion.
And what's scary is if they ever do get to the center, right?
Yeah, I feel like everyone was was either like burning bridges or Coming out to their friends in a way of like our friends and family as Trump supporters because there are a lot of people that were scared.
Yeah Well, I think that he represents a lot of very dangerous things You know and he in a lot of people's eyes.
This is the death of responsibility.
You can get away with more things.
And then also these all the different business ties and different entanglements and all the different things.
And and also, you know, he's just the way he communicates that like people don't feel like it's statesmanly and it's not it's not representative of what they would like to think of as someone who is the president of the United States.
They want to think about someone who's incredibly noble and well-spoken and the best representative that we can have, you know, like forget about Obama's policies.
Okay, just forget.
But him as a human being standing in front of that podium talking as the president was a joy, in that he was very measured and very calm, and I think that he's also very articulate and very well-educated, and that thing that he represented when he was up there, that thing, the president, ta-da, ta-da, that figurehead that he represented, he did such an amazing job of representing that, because he was exceptional.
He's an exceptional man.
He's exceptionally smart.
He's exceptionally well-read.
The way he communicates is smooth.
Even the way he's responded to criticism was very well measured.
Although he did fuck up when he was joking around about Trump back in the day.
Well, there's been people that have been controlling the system, people that were deeply entrenched in the left and deeply entrenched in the right for so long, and he's the first businessman that has been...
He's been a participant in our system.
He's been essentially paying these guys off for years and years, and now here he is.
Like, he talked pretty openly, which I thought was hilarious, about Hillary and Bill coming to his wedding, and that the reason why they did it is because he paid them.
You know, I mean, he paid them, I think it was more than $100,000 for them to come to his wedding.
I mean, let's be real about what the Clinton Foundation is, whether or not it did good work.
It's a goddamn pay-to-play operation, and one of the things they got, besides the donations, which I'm sure did go to charitable causes, they got paid to speak.
They didn't just get paid to speak a little.
They got paid to speak hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they did it over and over and over again, both Bill and Hillary.
And there's a reason why, for the same reason why Trump won't release his taxes, Hillary won't release the transcripts of those speeches that she gave to the banks, because they would be horrific.
If they weren't horrific, she would release them.
It would be really simple.
No, I said some great things about income equality and how we all need to support impoverished communities.
Fuck you, you did.
Because if you did, you would release that.
And everybody would go, oh, even though Hillary's worth millions of dollars, she's super fair.
It's a system that they've figured out how to find loopholes, and they've created legislation over the years that have allowed them to skirt through these weird sort of fucking avenues of legality, and they get to this point where they're making insane amounts of money as a public servant.
I mean, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton have earned hundreds of fucking millions of dollars, and Doing what?
Do you have a business?
Are you selling laptops?
What are you doing?
Do you have a new car that you're selling?
Where are you making all this fucking money?
Oh, just talking!
How weird!
You're making hundreds of millions of dollars talking when you used to be the president.
Who's paying you?
Oh, this is weird.
The people that are paying you are the people that benefited from you being in the...
He's not guilty of getting paid hundreds of millions of dollars to talk and to give his influence as a person who's serving, whether it's the Senate or someone who's a president.
I used to joke about, I mean, I still do it from time to time, that I would want to be president, but when you see these dudes become president, they look like one month in, they look like they're in a race they didn't train for.
It's shaking You know, we're having an earthquake and the earthquake is gonna fuck up all those shitty buildings all the the ones without the strong foundation They're gonna they're gonna be wrecked and we're gonna have to condemn them and tear them down and start fresh and See I don't like it.
I don't like how this is going.
I would have hoped that we got a savior.
I would have hoped that someone stepped in that was a really reasonable person, but I don't think a reasonable person even can get traction.
I think our system is so fucked up that we almost might benefit from some crazy asshole coming in here and doing what he's doing.
I mean, things are a bit chaotic, or are chaotic now, but we live in Disneyland compared to most of the world, and I think that's important for people to remember.
But the problem is those people that are over there in non-Disneyland, they're just like you or I. They just got a shitty roll of the dice.
That's what's fucked.
And that's what's fucked up about this whole refugee thing, you know, this idea that somehow or another, if someone's a Muslim, you can keep them from coming into this country.
Like, man, I know a lot of Muslims and they're nice people.
Like, you can't, like, just because someone believes wacky shit, okay, whether they're Moonies or whether they're Mormons, whether, I know some really nice Mormons.
They're fucking great people.
If you said, should you get rid of them?
I'd say, no!
You don't listen to them.
You don't really get a planet when you die.
You don't have to wear the magic underwear, but they're nice folks.
I know people that believe nutty shit.
One of my best friends believes that the fucking government is spraying things out of the back of planes.
When you see those contrails in the sky, he thinks it's like, what does he call this?
Strategic aerosol injection?
It's an SAI program.
No, it's not!
But I love them!
You know, there's a lot of people that believe some ridiculous shit, and they need the opportunity, just like all of us do, to have peace and prosperity, and to have the opportunity to take in more information that may make you reconsider your belief system.
Yeah, I feel like when it comes to the immigration thing, there's people on two fronts, right?
There's one as far as general immigration, people coming through legally from countries, and then there's also the refugee program, right?
And so...
What I've seen is a lot of arguments of, okay, so you're saying that these people are displaced.
They're having to go through all these horrible things.
People are saying, why is that my problem?
Is it because America is the land of dreams and we should offer that because we're great?
Why should that, and then, once again, not my argument, but why is that taking precedent over me, who's, you know, I went to college, things haven't worked out, my life's fucking in shambles, I have people yelling that I have white privilege all the time, and the fucking, seems like the world's more and more against me every day.
Why, if, and in their head, like, all these people are at risk, right?
If things aren't going well, work harder, figure it out.
You're a white guy in America.
You're so lucky!
Are you finding shit to complain about?
Look, everybody has their own hand that they're dealt, right?
And some people are in impoverished fucking coal miner communities in West Virginia, and some people are born in Marin County with a fucking silver spoon in their mouth.
Granted, we're all aware of that.
But if you don't think that your opportunities are far greater because you live in America than they are if you're a Syrian refugee coming over here wrapped up in a fucking tent, you're crazy.
You're crazy.
And one of the things that makes this place so fucking special is that it's the land of opportunity.
As soon as you stop having it be the land of opportunity, you stop taking in those new people, you stop giving those people that opportunity, and then you make this place a different thing.
You make this place this secluded, isolated, you know, put the fence up, put the wall up, everybody in is in, everybody else could go fuck themselves.
That's not what it is.
You're changing what it is.
This is the land of opportunity.
This is a country that was founded entirely by immigrants who kill the natives.
Well, there's certainly good and bad to all forms of immigration, and there's certainly good and bad to cultural integration.
Cultural integration is where things get really problematic, especially for women.
For women and women that have dealt with all the horrific situations that have happened in all these European countries where Muslims have come in and the radical ones have wanted to enforce their ideas, the Sharia law ideas on the women in the area, and they see women walking around in miniskirts.
All that stuff is a real problem.
The integration of cultural norms and values into a Western society that has just a completely different idea of what's acceptable and not acceptable.
That's going to take some fucking time.
And if I was in that area, I'd get the fuck out of Dodge.
I would not want to be around if there's a culture war going on, where people are fighting and arguing over ideas that may or may not include your wife, your daughter, your mother.
If you get people that are coming, you have to have a no tolerance policy to anyone that's giving anyone a hard time Over accepted values in America, like the way women are allowed to dress or driving cars.
What if you come over from Saudi Arabia and you want to kill all the women that are driving cars?
You know, like what if you want to impart Sharia law on women that are committing adultery or doing any of the things that are just...
There's no law against a girl deciding to fuck a hundred guys in America.
If a girl decides to rent out a warehouse and go, hey, first hundred guys get to fuck me, come on in.
In another country, you could be put to death for that.
Well, there has to be some sort of a zero tolerance policy for subjecting other people to your ideas and beliefs in that way.
But also, every culture evolves.
I mean, Christians used to be a part of the Inquisition.
I mean, they were torturing people, and they're getting people to confess to horrific crimes that they never really did.
They did all sorts of things to people that were nonbelievers, and that was a normal part of life in some parts of the world a long time ago.
We have to assume that that kind of progress is not just isolated to Christians.
It's not just something that one belief system can sort of embody that sort of evolution.
This can be something that we experience in a lot of different Thank you.
A lot of different ideologies.
And then the opportunity to educate those people in a place where they're free might be the only way that's ever going to change.
In the echo chamber of the Middle East, where these people are growing up in these...
And obviously, you're talking about places with very few resources, really dangerous environments for everyone.
You know, if you're living in these incredibly impoverished Middle Eastern places where these people are fleeing.
I mean, you've seen the videos of Aleppo.
You've seen the stuff of the news.
I mean, it's...
Anything's better than that, right?
Anything's better than being in a bomb zone where things are just going off left and right and suicide bombings and missiles and chaos and death and Isis throwing people off the roof for being gay.
I mean, it's just horrific So those people that are living in that it's almost like their life is It can't get any worse.
They're in hell.
They're literally in an apocalypse right now.
If you look at a Mel Gibson movie, look at any kind of crazy Mad Max movie, how is that any different than Syria right now?
I mean, it's really not.
It's just, we know that one of the reasons why...
We don't consider this the apocalypse right now.
It's because it's not the apocalypse here in Woodland Hills.
But it's the apocalypse in Syria.
It's the apocalypse in pockets of the world where things are absolutely horrific.
And those areas, we're scared, those areas are going to come here and make us the apocalypse too.
We're at Disneyland and we're really pissed that some of the rides are closed and we're in line and we feel like other people are getting ahead.
But it's not that.
It doesn't compare.
But...
I have a bleeding heart in some capacities when you see those things and you're like, we have to help whoever we have to help.
But my goal is to always understand the guy that doesn't want to have to fucking move out of his neighborhood because all these people came in and the culture changed.
It's just taking into account his mindset.
Even you said, all of a sudden you're worried about your daughter, your wife, that there are people that have that mindset.
And we're human beings.
It's the easiest thing in the world to create an us-versus-them argument, especially if there's fear unto my family.
You have fear for yourself, but any time all of a sudden you have a family, it's next level.
Well, also I think people are worried about people coming over here and not integrating.
They're coming over here and then they start these communities where they all use the same language, they all use the same language.
The same written language on their signs, and then they develop these Chinatown type neighborhoods.
Not disparaging Chinatown in any way, but that's just as an example of ethnic communities that sort of stay isolated.
Like, there's places in Chinatown where you go and no one's speaking English.
They're all just running around speaking Chinese and they can't speak English, but they figured out a way to integrate.
There's also Latino communities in this country that are like that similarly as well.
And I think people are worried about that, like that spreading.
And they say that that has actually happened in parts of Paris, and it's happened in parts of Germany, where these people have come over from other countries as refugees, and they've established communities, and then they enforce their laws.
And that was something that Milo was going to do.
He was going to do some sort of a march, and he was going to do like some gay march through, I think it was Sweden.
I think he was going to go through the worst Muslim neighborhoods in Sweden, but they just decided it was far too dangerous.
And then right after they said that, some horrific...
Outbreak took place like by the way It's got a little violence going on there now that you didn't used to have right around but the growing pains like if you take people from a violent place and then you let them loose like there was this one horrific story about this guy from Iraq that came over some some refugee and he raped some boy in Germany and his Response where they asked him why he did is like I hadn't seen my wife in six months and I was having a sexual emergency Yeah,
so and wow, you know like what like there's things actually I don't think it was from Iraq I think it was from Afghanistan, but there's there's things that go on in other parts of the world that become I don't want to say the norm, but they do happen there, or they don't happen here.
That's where I think it's important, and I feel like general people don't have the time, where it's important to be as educated as possible, because if we're basing things off of the way things are generally becoming, or it seems like more and more, yes.
But if you're basing stuff off of outliers, I think that's where things are crazy, where you hear someone that was here illegally They keep talking about the same story over and over.
It was like, it was someone here illegally, there was a murder, right?
And it's like the same story, and I want to see the bigger picture, because yes, that's fucking horrifying in a bubble.
But what's the big thing?
If it leans more towards, holy shit, this is scary, then yeah.
But if you base something off of, like with guns, right?
If you base something off of one specific shooting that is, like if you look at the body count, the guns involved specifically, if it's an outlier, If it's representative of a bigger problem, then you feel you go after the bigger problem if you actually want to have an effect that's not just superficial, or that's not just a big stance.
And when they don't anymore, when people don't want to be safe, or they don't want their loved ones safe, then we have to figure out why.
Like, what's going on that you're willing to strap your kid full of dynamite and have him walk into a mall and blow people up?
And now you think he's a holy martyr.
I remember watching some documentary on suicide bombings, and they were raising these children to be suicide bombings, and they had these pictures of these kids, these holy images of these children with suicide vests on, on the wall that had already committed suicide.
And there was a sign in Islamic that said, today's Actually, Islam is not a language.
I mean, at one point in time, people were way worse, right?
At one point in time, there was...
Like, one of the things that really freaked me out was when they started finding all these scraping marks on the inside of Neanderthal heads that indicated that people were eating the Neanderthal brains.
And I was like, oh, Jesus.
And then there was an article recently about cannibalism, about how frequent cannibalism occurred back in the day.
And it was, you know, I mean, obviously that's not going on anymore, right?
Well, it used to be that you couldn't just show up in a new town, right?
You couldn't just pull your boat up into some dock somewhere and get out and do some tourist shopping.
Because if you pulled your boat up, that meant you were probably a bunch of rapists and murderers from some other place.
You're coming over with swords and bows and arrows and shooting everybody and killing them.
Taking all the gold.
Well, that's not the case anymore.
So things are much more reasonable in terms of foreign travel, in terms of international relations, things are much more reasonable.
You've got to think that if it continues to go in that direction...
We'll have a better world for our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren, but what steps have to be taken to make sure that the rest of the world's horrific conditions don't spill over to America?
Well, isn't one of the best ways to take those people out of those horrific conditions and introduce them to this beautiful, free concept, this concept of Self-government, this unique place where there isn't a caste system, where you can, if you play your cards right and you're fortunate and you get the right breaks and put in the right amount of work, you literally can go from being a poor person to being a very wealthy person.
person.
You can go from being unsuccessful with no job and no hope to being very successful and happy.
It's possible here.
And it's one of the few places in the world where you can build yourself up like that.
And I think that is an amazing opportunity that probably didn't exist in history.
It has to be a bad thing that unites us of where we become the we or the us versus the them, the other.
But the problem is there's, whether it be nationalism or religion or fucking anything, there's so many things that within our own create an easy us versus them mentality.
And, I mean, I'm a personal believer in that eventually we're just going to kill each other.
And that was just, and in my head, it was a mix of horror to then also them, because they cut to certain shots, because they're the shots that you remember of people running away from the debris, but then there was also shots of people just looking at it, and then some people just like, Walking at a steady pace before the second one hit and I was like wow like nothing for a second when I looked at the people that were there before the you saw like the people running in to help people I thought nothing can destroy us like that was that was kind of my mindset of this
horrible thing just happened and it was before the second one hit so it was like what's what's happening?
But, I mean, I think that's a good example, too.
I don't want that to ever happen again in a small or a big scale.
They were burning buildings down that had nothing to do with the riots.
I'm sure you saw there was a piece on these Korean business owners in Koreatown.
They were invaded during the riots because they're not the best proximity to where all the South Central shit was going down post-Rodney King.
And these people were on the rooftops just trying to defend their stores and trying to stop looters from taking away everything they earned and everything they worked for their whole lives.
You know, those moments when things get chaotic, they do open up the door for people to reconsider how fortunate we are when things aren't chaotic.
We only open ourselves up after something horrible.
And because I think that we see horrible thing after horrible thing, We slowly get further and further away from being able to unite just because it's...
At least in our 24-7 news cycle, it seems like that's just the world we live in, right?
And the folks we run into, for the most part, like 99.9% of them are very pleasant.
And hi, how you doing?
What's up?
How are you?
Everything's good, you know?
And that's really how we're supposed to be thinking about the world.
This is...
This is our world, but now our world is extended to include Pakistan and North Korea and what is happening here and what's happening there.
Did you hear that King John Un's half-brother was killed with some toxic paint or something?
Like, fuck, man.
Why do I have to think about that guy?
I don't know that guy.
There's too many people!
There's too much!
And that can really give you this really bizarre, twisted sense of the state of the world.
If you just go out now and look at...
Bill Hicks used to have a joke about that, about watching CNN, and it was all about because Jane Fonda wouldn't fuck Ted Turner.
This was back when...
That you'd go outside and, you know, they'd be like, today on the news, AIDS, death, murder, pit bulls, guns, stabbings, and you go outside, you hear birds chirping, where the fuck's all this happening?
I forget what I was listening to, but it was a comparison to when people are thinking about the world, when they're thinking about the country, all of that is usually far, far different when they talk about their local community.
Because in our local community, we're like, oh, things are...
A lot of people think things are good.
Obviously, there are places where bad shit's happening.
But when we look at our own community, we're like, that's great.
And I do think that's a place where we start, right?
Make the local good and try and expand from there.
Because, yeah, when you look out and you look at specifically like Chicago...
We're talking about with Chicago and Syria and all these other things is just where you're dealing with the data from 7 billion people and that is Unfathomable.
Yeah, because otherwise you're gonna at some point just be completely wrong And I think it's probably a good idea for all of us, you and I included, to filter out some of the data that we're taking in.
It's just too much.
At this point in time, you can just be inundated with horrific news all day long if you so choose to.
But I think that's why people have to fight a good fight, right?
Not to be like, oh, we're heroes.
But I think that's why you have to have people that throw themselves out there that are going to get steamrolled by people that oppose on that specific day that viewpoint.
But you have to have those people.
Because otherwise, just the people that have that time, that want to see the world just fucking implode, right?
There are a lot of people that have that time.
So we have to, I think, be dedicated to have a conversation.
This is the last thing I want to ask you about, and this might come off a scene silly, but I think there might be some validity to it.
Do you think that this ability that you have, and that I have and all the people that come on this podcast or any podcast have, this new ability to express ideas and communicate, do you think that that is having an effect on On the way people view the world.
And that this open form of communication where, you know, you and I with...
We can communicate to millions of people having this conversation and then millions of people will talk to their friends and express their own opinions, whether they agree, disagree or maybe have some other things to add to it.
They express that to their friends at work and their friends, you know.
At home.
And these dialogues take on a life of their own.
And these ideas that we're expressing and that other people are expressing at work or at play, they're more potent now and they spread faster now than they ever have before.
And I think there's an evolution of ideas.
It's taking place now.
Good and bad.
That's where all the white privilege shit comes from and all the gender politics and all the weirdness.
All of it comes from these turbocharged ideas, these nuclear ideas now, where ideas spread to the point where words become taboo and use the wrong words.
Gender pronoun when you're talking about a trans person and you're the worst human ever and all these new things that are existing and I think these new things are because Dialogue and information is just it has a different weight to it now.
I think a lot of the reason why We have our positions and other people do is because it is that it is a it is a dialogue It is in a weird way an extended friend group, right?
So it's friends talking about things.
That's where people have I think the the best conversations as far as where we grow right if if I mean, they constantly come out with numbers of, you know, the trust in media, right?
Of just, like, they have an agenda, but if it's just people talking, right?
Just guys talking, that you don't feel like Joe's got this agenda that he wants to just shove down everyone's throat.
There are gonna be people that say that, but I think that's good.
It is...
There's always gonna be shit that then becomes this, like...
deal with the friends that confirm what I think.
But I think it's a very good thing.
It's the more human way to take in information and form an opinion and grow from it.
Yeah, it's like, Oh, this person has a different...
Yes, hopefully.
Hopefully you can have a different opinion, that you're not locked into something.
And so I think that everyone needs to focus on it.
With the not ever going to school for this sort of thing, I've never taken a journalism class.
I've talked about it in a video.
I focus on what I call the liquor method.
I listen, I question, I research, and I refute.
So I take in as many sources as I can, whether it be...
The Huffington Post and CNN or Fox News, Breitbart, Donald, anything.
I want to see where everyone's coming from, right?
Then I start throwing out questions.
You know, where does this come from?
What do they say?
Go down that rapid hole with research and then I'm armed with information.
That's why I think whether you have a Milo or you have fucking anybody, let people talk so you can learn, because information is ammo.
Right?
Information is something that you can take in, understand, but if it's a flawed argument, even if it's opinion-based, if it's a flawed argument, then you can use it.
And maybe it's not a flawed argument and you fucking learned something.
Right?
Maybe you thought you were right, you were wrong.
That's cool.
That's fine.
Flip-flop!
Have a different opinion!
So I'm for it.
All day.
I think you gotta grow.
I think there are people that wake up in the morning and wanna fucking burn the world, but I refuse to believe that that's the majority.
And I'm gonna start trying to deal with people I think that are sensible, that at the very least think they're sensible, weed out the ones that really aren't, ones tested, and just fucking go.
I think you're very well thought out, and when you consider things like the most recent Milo video, you're being very fair, and I think the world needs more of that.