Jimmy Dore and Joe Rogan dissect U.S. economic absurdity—$160B spent on bombs while 63% can’t cover a $1K emergency—and blame both parties for serving corporate interests, citing Nissan’s union-free plants and Democrats’ expansion of Trump’s military powers. They expose Clinton’s Uranium One ties ($500K from Kremlin-linked banks) and media bias under Bezos’ ownership, linking systemic corruption to tribalism. Rogan’s critique of neoliberalism extends to cultural shifts like MeToo and hormone blockers for kids, while Dore highlights the void left by sanitized late-night TV. Ultimately, they argue power and profit distort truth, from comedy to politics, leaving audiences hungry for raw honesty. [Automatically generated summary]
And I was like, this isn't even going out to anyone!
And if it was a nice day, and I had to do my radio shift, I would just come in and simulcast with the FM, because I was on AM, and simulcast with the FM station, because I wanted to go out in the quad.
I mean, I don't think you could do it and put ads on it, but you could do it as just a fun project, have your own radio show on a podcast where you just play songs.
Because right now, you know, it's like it happened a couple of months ago, it's still okay, and I'm recording in April, and I'm like, boy, April is like the wire.
Well, before anyone knew for sure what was going on, there was a couple of accusations and everybody was like, what is this?
Like, what is this really?
Is this real?
Is this someone doing a shakedown?
And then they started, just the fucking tsunami of accusations started piling in, which is really incredible when you think about how many years that guy was doing that.
I think it's kind of open season on men right now.
And it'll swing back around and it'll be normal again.
And it makes sense.
There's so many of these accusations that happen.
You know, after a while, they pile up, and then there's this, like, anti-male resentment, and then it'll swing back, and it'll normalize, and people are sort of reacting to the Aziz thing, and they say, well, that went a little too far.
And then the woman who was in charge of, the California woman who was a big Me Too supporter, she got busted.
Yeah, and I was, you know, I mean, my set went fine, but it wasn't, uh, I'm not on my game right now.
You know, I have to really start working it again, which I have started, and I'm going out, and it's, uh, it's my, I forgot, it's like, this is all I ever wanted to do in my life was stand-up comedy.
Now, it was the saddest thing when he died, of course.
He was my hero, and, you know, I didn't really know him.
I knew him tangentially, and it was weird to feel that kind of sadness for someone who you don't know personally.
And so that was a big deal to me, watching Bill Hicks.
It totally changed my life, and I tried to be like him, of course, like an idiot.
I tried to be like him, and you can't, right?
And then one time I was dating this girl, and it might be my wife, I don't know who told me this, but she said, Like, where you come from?
Because I come from the south side of Chicago, grew up poor, 12 kids, drinking powdered milk, you know, and having the shit beat out of me from the fucking morning till night, right?
Because I went to Catholic school, a tough neighborhood.
And she's like, you can't be angry like Bill Hicks, because you look like you come from privilege, money, and you're dressed well.
I always like to dress nice, because I grew up poor.
I always wanted to be...
And so that's when I had to pull back on the anger on stage, and I was like, if you watch my specials on Comedy Central, I'm very nice.
And doing the YouTube show is what let me connect with my anger, which is always what drives me.
And that is what has connected with people, and that's when I really started selling tickets and everything I wanted to get from comedy, in a sense, I got from this YouTube show.
So now I can go wherever I want and do a show, and just my fans will show up.
It's the greatest thing that ever happened in my life.
Well, you're very good on your YouTube show, and you're also very fair.
You know, one of the things that I really like about your show is you're obviously a left-leaning guy, but you're very balanced in your criticism of the left, in your criticism of criticism of the left.
Well, to me, it really started with Bill Clinton in 92, but it didn't get really ramped up until Barack Obama in, like, 2010, when it was clear...
That Barack Obama was a neoliberal corporatist who was going to do the bidding of the war machine and Wall Street and Big Pharma, which is why when the Democrats got control of government, they had the presidency, the Senate, filibuster-proof Senate for a few months, and they had the Congress and the House, and they didn't pass single-payer or even a public option.
What do we get?
We got a right-wing health care plan anyway, which is a giveaway to the pharma and health insurance companies that left out 28 million fucking people.
So I'm one of those guys who, if I want something, no matter what price I have to pay, physical, whatever, I'll pay it, and I'll get that thing I want, right?
He thought it was a tumor, but they since figured out it was just my own bones leaching of hormone that makes your body leach the chemicals that I need to make bone.
Talk about it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
I could not believe.
I'm like, what?
And then I just knew I had to do this special because I couldn't let all those motherfuckers who said I shouldn't move to L.A. and be a comedian.
I couldn't let them win.
It was about that.
It was about, I'm going to show everybody who doubted me and said I was crazy, I'm going to show them, I'm going to do this goddamn special, it's going to be fucking awesome, and then I kill myself.
And I went to, so my doctor sends me to this other doctor who vented the operation at USC, and I walk into the office, just like my doctor predicted, he's looking at my chart and he looks up and he goes, what?
I've only seen this in books, meaning what I have.
So, by the time we got to do the special eight months later, Dr. Sharp's treatment had kicked in, and they didn't know it was gonna fix it, but it fixed it.
So in, I don't know, Norway or Denmark, I don't know where, somewhere over there, they have a law that you have to let the cows out of the barn in the spring by this one day.
So when I went to this Chinese medicine doctor, it was back when I was feeling sick, and so I went to, somebody recommended, you should go to this Chinese medicine.
Yeah, it's because you don't have that big insulin crash.
When you're eating all that sugar and all that bread, your body's just fighting that shit off all the time, trying to process it, and then there's this big crash.
Mnuchin is one of my favorite evil characters of the 21st century.
When you see him...
With his wife, and his wife has gloves on, and they're holding the money, and she's smiling, and when she fucking tags, like, Gucci and Cartier and all these different, like, big-time companies in her Instagram posts, when she's stepping off of a fucking private jet, like, holy shit!
Look at that picture!
I love that picture!
First of all, the fact that she would fuck him, that's a crime.
I'm old enough, Joe, to remember when being for the Iraq War was a disqualifier in a Democratic primary.
I That's where I'm from.
That's why she lost to Barack Obama the first goddamn time she ran.
And all of a sudden, we're supposed to...
Now people, like Joy Behar says, that was a long time ago.
Forget about it.
Why don't you go tell that to a mother who's got a dead soldier?
Why don't you go tell them that they just died in an illegal war?
Why don't you go tell that to a couple hundred thousand Iraqis who are dead?
Get over it.
It was a long time ago.
You fuck...
Anyway, so I remember when that, also, the Bill Clinton was no friend to the working men.
In fact, he was this demise, starting of the demise of this country.
So, you know, Ronald Reagan scared the shit out of the Democrats so much that he decided to become like them.
And so what Bill Clinton did was he got in bed with Wall Street, the military industrial complex, big pharma, health insurance, and the Koch brothers.
He started a thing called the Democratic Leadership Council with Al Gore.
They had executives from the Koch brothers on the Democratic Leadership Council.
They completely turned their back on the working man.
And what happens when you have two parties that are in bed with management?
You get Donald Trump.
And that's exactly what happened.
They gutted welfare at the same time they explored the prison population, called black kids super predators, at the same time they did NAFTA. And then they deregulated Wall Street, which crashed the economy within 10 years.
That's what Democrats did.
Democrats did shit that Ronald Reagan could only fucking dream about in his wet dreams.
They couldn't pass NAFTA. George Bush couldn't pass NAFTA. It took Bill Clinton to do it.
Bill Clinton gave the cover to the other corporate Democrats to go along with it.
So that was the beginning of the end for the working class in America.
In fact, now, you know, I wouldn't vote for Hillary Clinton, and that's why a lot of people on the left came after me, and they still do.
Because of the WikiLeaks emails that Hillary Clinton had a thing called the Pied Piper strategy, which was, she told her minions in the press, please prop up Donald Trump.
Prop him up.
Why did she want Donald Trump to be propped up?
Because she wanted to run against Donald Trump, because she knew that she was so repulsive to most of the country, she needed someone who was more repulsive than her.
That's why you turn on Chris Hayes and he would show Donald Trump's empty podium for an hour instead of a Bernie Sanders.
And then he wags his finger at people with no money and no power for not voting for a corporatist warmonger like Hillary Clinton.
Why do you think the people in Michigan wouldn't vote for Hillary Clinton?
Maybe because she put half of them in fucking prison?
Maybe because she passed NAFTA and Barack Obama was trying to sell TPP at the top of his lungs at the same time she was trying to get working people to vote for her?
They know what the fuck was going on.
And that's why half the country doesn't vote.
But you're going to wag your finger at the people who actually do vote?
Who come out and vote their conscience?
And they don't fucking prop up evil?
You know what the voting for lesser of two evil gets you?
Well, there's also a really sneaky thing that happens where you have two parties, and one of them you think of as this conservative, warmongering party, which automatically makes the other party the enemy of that.
We have two pro-war parties, and there's not an opposition party.
They oppose Trump on the most ridiculous bullshit.
They just voted for an extra $160 billion to go to the war machine.
$160 billion.
Let's remember, Bernie Sanders wanted to pay for free college, which was somewhere around $65 billion.
And everybody said, he's fucking crazy.
How are you going to pay for that?
They just did that in a blink of an eye.
They passed $160 billion to a war machine that we don't have an enemy to fight.
You know, Russia spends $65 billion a year on their military.
They're a paper tiger.
We've got no fucking enemies out there.
We have to keep inventing them.
The last enemy they invented was ISIS. ISIS, I don't know, we're supposed to shit our pants over them, Joe, because they have kitchen knives.
They'll cut your head off with a kitchen knife.
That's what I'm supposed to be afraid of?
What the fuck?
It's amazing how they can keep us scared so they can keep perpetual war going.
This is an Orwellian nightmare, and the Democrats right now should be screaming about the Pentagon budget, but they're not screaming about it because they're complicit!
They're in it!
And that's what's wrong with this country.
That's why we can't have nice things.
So when they tell you that we're broke and we can't afford stuff, they don't mean we can't afford trillion-dollar wars, trillion-dollar bank bailouts, billion-dollar oil subsidies, and prison construction.
That's not what they mean.
They mean we can't afford shit like healthcare, or education, or roads, or bridges, or firemen, or libraries, or anything that makes your fucking life better.
Because whenever they need bombs, they got it.
Hey, we're broke for Social Security.
We're broke for Medicare.
How about for bombs?
Oh, we got bomb money.
We keep it right through our fucking drinking money.
Do you think that this right, though, the way the left is attacking Donald Trump from the right, as you say it, don't you think it's just because they see an opening there to criticize and to point out his vulnerabilities?
Well, I'll tell you, so 63% of the country can't afford a $1,000 emergency.
Half the country right now is either poor or low income.
50% of all wage earners earn less than $30,000 a year in the richest country in the world.
Jack Ma, who is the Jeff Bezos of Asia, he runs the Amazon of Asia, and he said, you know, the problem with the United States isn't making money, it's that you guys don't distribute it right.
As soon as they got into communism, or into capitalism rather, they did it in a very ruthless way.
I mean, you look at what, it's really kind of fucked up, like what's going on with some of the places where we buy our goods, like Foxconn, where they make iPhones, they have nets around the building to keep people from fucking jumping off.
But when Trump has been in office for only a year, he can't expect all those things to change, but his argument has been that those things are improving.
NAFTA was the crushing blow to the unions in this country.
And, you know...
Unions is one of the things that actually cushions the blow of the brutalities of a free market, right?
So you have unions, you have social programs, because capitalism fucks everybody, and so you have to have all these things in place to kind of cushion the blow of it.
And we got rid of them, right?
Bill Clinton gutted welfare at the same time he did NAFTA. I mean, and then he exploded the prison population.
But people that I know that were in unions, particularly some friends that I have that were in the auto union, were saying that it was getting completely bloated.
They were having two people doing a job that was only for one person, and there was all this...
There was all this real, wanton, purposeful waste.
And this was all designed into certain contracts.
This is a buddy of mine that was an auto worker in Detroit.
He said, we had shifts where there was supposed to be two people on the job, but everybody knew it was a real simple thing.
You work a machine.
So I would work four hours, and he would work four hours.
Or I would work a day, and he would work a day.
But we both punched in.
And it was just common, and there were several of those.
And he goes, and you were getting $100,000 a year, $200,000 a year for some jobs, just ridiculous amounts of money for jobs that really didn't warrant that kind of income.
And he said this was all negotiated into the contract.
He's like, it's a good thing to give fair wages and healthy wages and health insurance and all these different things.
He said, but it was unquestionably bloated, which opened the door to all these factories going to Mexico and all these other places.
First of all, it's kind of anti-logical to think that the union would say, no, we're not going to negotiate on this and go ahead and take our jobs, both of those jobs, to Mexico.
I was talking about this yesterday with Johan Hari who wrote a book on depression and one of the major causes being the way people live their lives without control, doing things they don't want to do.
And he was saying that somewhere in the neighborhood of 87% of the people are doing things they don't want to be doing most of the time.
For a job.
And I was making the argument that we've set up this structure that's just completely ridiculous and we've stuck with it because it's just the way we've always done things.
It would be like if Dave Chappelle, before he did Chappelle's show, decided to host a talk show and then completely stopped anything controversial and completely stopped having an opinion on anything.
And a couple times, one time I was on, and during the break, I sat there with Jay, and I said, I think it was the first time I was on, I said, hey, man.
Because I was like, what are the odds I want to be on the show again?
I'm like, I'm on once.
I think it was...
The Fear Factor days, which is like, in the early Fear Factor days, I was 100% convinced that show was canceled at any second now.
So I'm like, this is my one chance to get on the Jay Leno show.
Let me ask him some questions.
So he's like, do you like doing that joke?
And I go, yeah, yeah, it's not bad.
I go, hey man, let me ask you this.
I go, what was up with that Bill Hicks thing, right?
And his take on it was, you know, well, I wanted to do jokes for everybody.
I wanted to do comedy for everybody, and Bill just didn't believe in doing comedy for everybody.
I thought it was interesting.
I don't think he expected me to ask it to him.
I had him on the podcast, and he was fucking fantastic.
Because after he'd retired, he told some stories about doing stand-up for mob people, and about this guy fucking screaming at a priest, you fucking motherfucker, put the fucking...
And it was a hilarious thing to watch Jay Leno telling hilarious stories...
And I heard stories about Jay that he loved to watch hacky comedy.
And the reason why this stuck in my head was because I used to do that, too, with Todd Glass.
We would...
We would, if the worse the comedian, the better.
We'd have three specials lined up for a night.
We'd be like, fuck, this is going to be great!
And we found out after, I found out that Jay Leno used to do the same thing.
When he would see a comic that he didn't think, you know, he thought was horrible, he would hunt down a tape of it and then everyone would have to come over to his house and they'd watch it.
The fact that he said that Trump's mouth, but that he uses his mouth as Putin's cock holster, the fact that they said that on CBS, I was like, wow, this is what happens when you have to compete with the internet.
Who the fuck could have imagined ever in your wildest dream?
I get the McCarthyism thing, but the joke of a cockholster, the president's mouth being used as Putin's cockholster, that that would be on CBS. I get that you're applauding that he broke a boundary.
Well, I'm not applauding it.
I'm just saying it's fascinating that we've changed what's the bar, what you're allowed to do.
And because it's Trump, if they said that about Hillary Clinton, if he said, because look at all this Russia dossier memo shit that's coming out.
I mean, it turns out that a lot of this stuff is horseshit.
That's one thing, but they're talking about lots of other things, right?
And I say, you want to talk about collusion?
He opened up eight businesses in Saudi Arabia during the goddamn campaign.
There's your fucking collusion.
But nobody talks about that because Saudi Arabia is supposed to be on our side, even with a repressive theocracy that beheads people in the streets.
But we like them because of the petrodollar, which no one ever talks about the petrodollar.
It's dirty.
Well, that's what props up our dollar right now, the economy.
So what people don't know is that in the early 70s, Richard Nixon took our country off the gold standard, and we went on the petrodollar.
And what was that?
We promised Saudi Arabia the use of our military anywhere they wanted, as long as they would convert every dollar of oil that someone bought for them in American dollars.
So if you want to buy oil from Saudi Arabia, you first have to convert your currency into American dollars.
I mean, I think that what we're dealing with is an exposure of sexual assault, exposure of sexual harassment, sexual assault, particularly in the workplace.
You know, and this is a giant issue for people that have to work alongside men and women, and they develop these little communities inside these little boxes that we call offices, and things get really fucking weird.
And if you have a boss that's a piece of shit, And he's constantly harassing the women that work there, and it becomes a living hell with them.
There's stress, they're going through...
I mean, it is a crime.
You're doing something to those people that work there.
There's people who have associated the opposite sex with rejection and pain and frustration all of their life.
You look at a guy like Harvey Weinstein.
That is an ugly, fat guy, right?
Right?
There's no women who are lusting after him.
It was his power and his money that got him into a position where he could get some pussy.
And then having power over all these actresses and then hearing whether it's Uma Thurman or whatever famous actress, Salma Hayek, all these superstars.
We're fighting this guy off in hotel rooms.
I mean, it's fucking crazy.
I mean, he's a maniac, but he's a disgusting guy who has no shot at getting someone to appreciate him physically.
They might like his personality, but for someone to be physically attracted to him is almost impossible.
Right?
I mean, he's eating himself into this disgusting shape.
I don't remember the exact quote, but it was something along the lines of, we have to make a differentiation between sexual assault and men hitting on women.
What's really interesting is seeing how they're acting about this in France and in Europe.
I'll never forget, I was working at a comedy club and there was a girl there who was beautiful.
She flirted with me, and, well, I didn't know if she was flirting with me, because she was just beautiful.
And she talked to me, so I'm like, oh.
Right.
But I wasn't going to make a move at her, because I'm considering every comedian who comes in this club makes a move on this girl, because she's the prettiest girl around.
Yeah, I didn't want to have that reputation of that guy.
And plus, there's plenty of women in the audience.
Yeah.
There's plenty of women.
So I would tell her, I remember the first night we were together, I was like, hey, I know you're going to say you want me to go home, but you're going to worry that I'm too tired to drive and that I might get in an accident, so you don't have to say that, I'll just stay.
But also, you don't really know someone's personality for a long time.
I mean, that's part of the problem.
The problem is people have physical needs, and they get attracted to each other, and the next thing you know, look, there's been many times in my life where I wind up having sex with somebody who turned out to be crazy.
And then, you know, you're one, two dates in, and you're like, yeah, she seems cool, and next thing you know, you're hanging out, and a week or two later, and she does something completely fucking insane, and then the crazy just starts leaking out of her pores, and you're like, oh, well, now what have I done?
I've entangled myself with some person who knows where I live and expects me to call them every day and we're going to get together and I have to figure out a way to back out of this.
And then you try to back out of it and they get fucking angry at you.
This is back in the old days when people would actually call you up angry too.
Bitch, you're 40. But it was helpful to me because he broke up the family dynamic, and he talked about how people act, and I come from a big family, 12 kids, and that, you know, how it's, like, it all balances out.
So, imagine being a father, and you went after your dream, and you gave it everything you can.
Now you can impart that to your kid, and your kid just absorbs it, being around you.
Now you didn't do that, you have all that...
On your resentment or whatever you feel because you didn't live what your life you were supposed to, and then you can't pass that off, and your kid absorbs that, too.
It was going to be so hard to make it, and the odds are stacked against you.
You're seeing everybody else drop off like flies.
You see guys can't get gigs.
They wind up quitting.
They get a day job.
They work less and less, and the next thing you know, they just completely stop doing stand-up.
It's so common.
And so when I would see, when I have relationships and I'd see those signs where girls are just demanding more and more of my time, why do you have to go up tonight?
I'm like, I have to go up four or five nights a week.
Well, not only that, to this day, like, my agent called me to schedule something in New York for November, and I said, I can't.
And I said, I'm doing my special in April.
I don't know if I'm going to have an hour by November.
I assume I will, but I don't know.
I go, I'm not going to fuck people over at some big fucking theater and not have an hour yet.
I go, I'm going to do my best.
But May, June, July, August, September, October, November, seven months.
Most likely, I'll have a new hour.
Most likely.
But what if I only have a half hour?
What if I only have a half hour and I fucking bomb?
What if I do a half an hour of good comedy, but not the best, and then have nothing?
I can't take that risk!
Like, when I'm ready, I'll call ya.
So, when April rolls around, after I'm done and I chuck everything aside, I'm on a fucking rampage for like three, four months of just doing 10, 15 minute spots, writing a bunch of new shit, and trying to piece together an hour.
Then, it's going to take me a month or two to try to sort that hour out.
Try to figure out where everything goes and what the punchlines are.
Listening to recordings, writing things down, burning the midnight oil late at night.
I don't know if I can do it.
I mean, I'm assuming I can do it, but once I chuck my act aside, once the act that you saw that you thought was funny, that fucking thing's going in the toilet.
So I'm going to do my own special and put it on my own thing, because I don't know where that even, like that Hulu special, it lives on Hulu somewhere.
I was happier when my whole life was ahead of me, and when I first started hanging out at Largo and doing sets at the Improv and meeting all my heroes in comedy, to me, that was...
Ahead of your time.
Now it's like I feel pressure to stay where I'm at or be successful.
I don't know what it is I feel, but I feel like I'm working too hard and I'm not able to enjoy what I've accomplished.
And that's why I've been trying to, like I told you, you showed me that tank.
I've been trying to figure out how to stop my thoughts.
But I don't know why, it seems like there's some sort of internal conflict between you getting angry and ranting and talking about things that are very important to you and then going on stage and doing stand-up.
I don't think that they should be mutually exclusive.
Just got to find out a way to make that rant funny, and then, you know, find perspectives that are relatable, where you go into this rant, but then bring it to these people in a digestible way, you know?
So Trump excites the lizard brain of a certain kind of neoliberal, and Olbermann's certainly one of those guys.
He pretends all the problems in our country started on January 2017, and that's certainly not it.
Like, he was great.
He could deconstruct what was wrong with Hillary Clinton back in 2008 when she was running against Barack Obama.
And he could deconstruct what was wrong with the Iraq war and what was wrong with Bush and Cheney.
But I don't know, somehow, all of a sudden now, it's like, again, Trump excites his lizard brain, and all his critical thinking skills go out the window, and he pretends that Trump is the problem and not a symptom of the problem.
Well, it was like a scene in a movie when he was doing that.
It looked like he was doing a show in the basement somewhere with this weird background.
It was called The Resistance.
This is The Resistance.
But he was also, he didn't, wasn't making connections.
Like, was that really pretty conservative girl, Tammy Lauren, is that her name?
She did a thing where she was covered in the American flag and he was talking about how hypocritical it is to be standing there holding and draping yourself in the American flag and then Donald Trump Jr. posts a picture of Tammy Lauren right next to him doing the same thing and Donald Trump Jr. says it must be painful to be so stupid.
Well, I don't even understand how he could have not known he took that picture to be saying that.
He's a great broadcaster, and you always hear stories about his idiosyncrasies like he's a prick to work with and stuff, and you go, well, fuck, what are you going to do?
They were in the middle of some meeting in the Senate, and they were deciding something incredibly important, and they busted McCain playing poker on Syria.
It's like there's a way to oppose Trump, and it's not the way you're doing it.
In fact, the way they're doing it enhances Trump.
It makes him more powerful.
You keep coming at him that, oh, his guy with the battered wife, he gives a...
Meanwhile, they're spending $160 billion more on bombs that nobody wants.
Meanwhile, half the country's poor or low-income, 63% of Americans can't afford a $1,000 emergency in the richest country the face of the earth has ever seen.
All the benefits of this recovery has gone to the upper 1%.
People haven't had a raise.
You know, I just saw the AFL-CIO, you know, so like I was telling you, people give me shit because I wouldn't vote for Hillary Clinton, right?
And I just saw the...
The AFL-CIO tweeted out last week that the unions have helped give Democrats complete control of government four times in the last three decades, and they have done nothing to help unions.
And they're saying vote third party.
They got together with the teachers union and the postal union, and they're like, hey, lesser of evil voting isn't working.
We have to somehow come up with a third party.
So they're talking about it now.
So people who are wagging their finger at me, I go, hey, even the unions agree with me now that we've got to have a third party.
And if Bernie Sanders would have went with a third party instead of propping up that corporatist warmonger like he did, he could have really changed politics in America.
If Jill Stein and the Green Party would have got 10 or 15 percent of the vote or even 5 percent of the vote, it would have completely changed politics in America because now the Democrats, they wag their finger at their base and then they move to the right.
Like Hillary Clinton wagged her finger at the base and then picked Tim Kaine, who was to the right of her.
Right?
And so if Bernie Sanders would have went with the Greens and they would have made a showing, now they can't do that.
The problem is the Democrats are bought by the same people.
They're just a little, you know, and people go, why did the Democrats keep caving?
Why didn't they stand up against Trump for DACA? They're not caving.
They're standing up to you, the voter, and they're standing up to their donors.
Their donors don't want the government shut down for one minute, and that's what they're standing up for.
They could have stood up for the voters and stood up for DACA, but they didn't.
They stood up for their donors.
So it's not like they're spineless.
They appear spineless because it looks like they're not doing what they're supposed to or they're not, and they're not doing what they said they would do, which is stand up for the people, but they're secretly standing up for their donors.
They have a steel spine when it comes to their donors, which is why they just gave Trump $160 billion.
Can I make one last point about Donald Trump?
So this shows you how they're full of shit.
When you say Donald Trump is an existential threat to our country and a maniac and he has his finger on the button, and then you vote to give him $160 billion more in bombs, I think you're full of shit when you say he's an existential maniac.
If you say that this guy is unhinged and you can't be trusted, and then you vote to expand his warrantless wiretapping and spying powers on his own enemies in the country, that's what I know and you're full of shit.
Because if they really wanted to check Trump, they would check him on the military, the Pentagon budget, and his spying powers.
They've expanded all that stuff.
So if he's really a maniac, those motherfuckers are the most irresponsible people in the world giving him all this extra power for the Pentagon and spying.
But they'd know.
The only reason they hate Trump is because he ain't part of their fucking club.
Yeah, but getting it since 2016. The thing that always killed me about Hillary Clinton more when I would talk to super Democrats, like people that were just completely tribal, they're on the Democratic side no matter what, I'd go, you know, she didn't support gay marriage until 2013. She was the last one!
Well, the problem is, I think, when you're close to her, you find out all the dirty details, what's going on behind the scenes, and it's just a creepy, creepy organization.
It was because Trump, it was exactly what Hillary Clinton wanted, the Pied Piper strategy.
You can't even entertain not voting for Hillary Clinton because of this existential threat of Trump, and he's such an existential threat, we're going to vote to expand his spying powers and give him a below the military budget.
One of my big things is the reason why I have a show is because mainstream news media sucks so bad, and the reason why you have this show is because late-night talk shows suck so bad, right?
Look, this is a guy who is a real Bernie Sanders supporter.
Open Bernie Sanders supporter who worked for the DNC. The DNC absolutely rigged the primary against Bernie Sanders.
He was aware of this.
He was there while this was all going down.
So was Donna Brazile.
Everyone was aware of it.
The guy got fucking murdered, After he leaked information to WikiLeaks.
If you don't think that's a little weird, what are you looking at?
What delusional rose-colored glasses are you looking at your party from?
You think you're in some Julia Roberts movie from 1990?
This is real shit.
Some guy got killed.
He was 24 years old.
He was a young guy who was very optimistic and had this...
View of the world where he...
I mean, the guy fucking wore American flag pants and shirt.
There's a famous picture of him with a beer on.
He's a patriot in a lot of ways.
He wanted to be involved in the political process.
He was very idealistic.
He was probably shattered by finding out that the party that he was working for was corrupting the democratic process.
And because I've said this before, you know, I've been accused of helping Donald Trump win by really wacky people online.
Like, by pointing out all the flaws of Hillary Clinton.
Like, look, man, you can't ignore that shit because you want one side to win.
I've talked about all of his flaws, too.
There's a lot of flawed human beings who run for president, pretty much all of them.
I mean, it's very rare you have someone who's not flawed, extremely flawed, we're all flawed, but extremely flawed, who wants to be the fucking king of the world.
Well, you know, not to change subjects, but Barack Obama, everyone thinks is the greatest guy in the world, you know, in contrast to Donald Trump, because he was polite.
They used the Espionage Act to prosecute journalists.
Yes.
And that's a fact.
And everyone turned their head.
You know, Glenn Greenwald used to be a hero on the left until he started telling the truth about Barack Obama, and now he's a pariah.
So, to the people on, you know, Thomas Frank, I don't know if you know, you would love that guy if you ever met him.
He wrote that book called What's the Matter with Kansas, which is examining what's wrong with conservatives, and then he wrote a book called Listen Liberal.
Which came out, I think, two years ago.
And he is persona non grata on MSNBC, CNN. Nobody will talk to him, because he critiqued the left.
Listen, man, I'm not a fucking reputable person when it comes to my political ideologies.
I mean, I'm just not.
I'm not that well-read when it comes to politics.
I have my opinions on things.
But when it comes to things that are rock solid and clear, like that Seth Rich was murdered and people want to ignore it, I'm like, what the fuck do you think happened?
There has to be some sort of a disconnect here.
When a person is giving information to WikiLeaks that exposes corruption inside the very organization that's responsible for the fucking Democratic Party, and he gets murdered, and you're like, oh, the conspiracy theories.
No, he got murdered.
There's no conspiracy.
It was a botched robbery.
Says who?
Says who?
How come his wallet was there?
How come his watch was there?
How come they didn't take his phone?
What the fuck are you talking about that I'm a conspiracy theorist when I just tell you the facts?
And this WikiLeaks thing with Julian Assange is the craziest shit ever when he said there's consequences to sharing information with us.
He's been so fucked, and it's because the CIA wants him so bad, and they control everybody, and now they have influence over Ecuador, and they're trying to fuck, they're trying to get a Halliburton guy to be their new, anyway.
If more stuff comes out, like the Seth Rich stuff, the amount of people, and this is where I leak any conspiracy theories, the amount of people connected to the Hillary Clinton organization, to the Clinton Foundation, to Bill Clinton, the amount of people that have been iced is stunning.
Some of them are bullshit and coincidental, and you know people, and they're in a weird job, and people get killed.
They say, oh no, she was only one of nine things that had to sign off.
There was all these other agencies that had to sign off on it, and this and that.
It's all bullshit.
That was all influence.
Someone gave your Clinton Foundation $142 million.
That's to buy influence, and a half a million dollars in the Bill Clinton's pocket directly.
It's because they like how he talks pretty English in Russia?
Are you fucking kidding me?
So it's all bullshit.
So people go, oh, it's debunked.
It's not debunked.
It's not fucking...
You tell me why they gave $142 million anonymously to a fucking Clinton foundation.
That is such bullshit.
They're so corrupt.
If you believe Trump is corrupt by doing deals with oligarchs, this is Dylan Radigan talking.
You also have to believe that Hillary Clinton did arms deals around the country while personally enriching herself, and Barack Obama is paid off by the...
Wall Street and the health insurance companies and Big Pharma, so we don't have a functioning money sector or a healthcare sector.
It's hard to believe one and not believe the other two.
That's what Dylan Rattigan says, and I believe that fucking guy.
He's an award-winning journalist, and he said, if you believe Trump is corrupt in this, and he goes, and it's easy to believe, it's all no fucking problem, but you also have to believe this.
You have to believe Hillary Clinton did arms deals all around the world, enriching herself to the tunes of millions of dollars.
The same thing with Barack Obama.
You can't believe one and not the other.
So my whole point is, when people try to pretend that Trump is the problem, they're missing the problem.
The problem is the neoliberal system that gave us Trump, that renders 63% of the population without enough funds to handle a $1,000 emergency in the richest country in the world.
That's the problem, Joe.
And that's what people are...
If you think it's Trump, Trump is a symptom of a bigger problem.
I don't even think that guy wants to be president.
Donald Trump says, grab him by the pussy, or Barack Obama says, I'm going to fix everything for you, and then he kicks your family out of your house, 5.1 million families out of their house, while making Wall Street whole.
And then when he comes back into public life after retiring, the first thing he does is give half a million dollar speeches to banks.
So they fucking put all that shit that they have to put into the sky to make it rain, which they've been doing forever, cloud seeding, but insanely expensive.
So do you see a problem with the richest guy in the world owning the political paper of note and being in bed with the CIA and he's on a Pentagon board?
One guy wrote something bad about Amazon in the Huffington Post.
He got disciplined.
There was a guy who was a writer for the Washington Post, wrote something in the Huffington Post that was critical of Amazon, and he got disciplined at the Washington Post for doing that.
So that's the world we live in.
And then we have the government.
If you ever try to tell about a crime inside the government, then the government will use the Espionage Act to crack down on you.
I've talked to someone who actually worked there, and they were saying that they get a countdown.
So say an order comes in.
They literally have a countdown on their tablet.
And the countdown says, you know, like, I don't know what the amount of time is, but you have to run and find that fucking product and get it in the box and get it shipped out inside a very small window of time.
He goes, so I'm literally running.
I go, you run?
He goes, yeah, you literally run, because if you don't meet your countdown, he goes, you can only, like, get away with that for a certain amount of times, then you get in real trouble.
But first of all, Jeff Bezos, because he owns the paper, he got the...
Trump was right when he said he's there to get the tax in his favor, because he was able to go around and hollow out economies of Main Street, little small towns all around, because he didn't have to pay taxes, the income tax, for Amazon.
And so the brick-and-mortar places did.
He closed them down by undercutting them, right?
And now he's opening up brick-and-mortar stores.
He closed out all the Barnes and Nobles and the Borders books, and now he's opening up Amazon bookstores.
Now, how many of those people use it for television?
This is my question, because I know that Amazon started to make, apparently, some very good shows, but I don't hear anybody talking about watching them.
Like, apparently, Billy Bob Thornton has a really good show on Amazon.
And I know there was that Jeffrey Tambor show that got tanked.
And there was people, and he's not transgender, and there was people on the show apparently that were very upset that a non-transgender person was playing a transgender person.
Because his wife yells at him, tells him what to do, and all this shit, and he gets things done this way.
And I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about?
He's now divorced.
I'm married.
Okay?
This is many years ago.
This guy was fucking miserable, but he was trying to tell me that it's a good thing to be married because when you're married, you have to answer to someone and that someone tells you what to do.
I go, what?
He was telling me that his wife calls him a fucking asshole and it makes him...
I go...
I go, no, my friends don't call me an asshole.
If one of my friends calls me a fucking asshole, I made a huge mistake.
Fucking throwing buckets of Gatorade on your head.
The whole thing was ridiculous, but it was literally, there's a misery loves company thing that happens.
So people who are married want you to be married, too.
Now, I'm not saying that's absolutely what's going on with people who are transgender, but they're most certainly in support of more people doing it.
And I don't know if that is why they would lean towards having six-year-olds take hormone blockers, but if you criticize that in any way, you are thought to be transphobic.
And this is a real issue today, where people are bringing this up over and over again.
I don't know why anyone would think that it's a good idea to take a six-year-old and put them on hormone blockers when they don't know what the fuck is going on with the world.
Their body is changing.
They're going through all this growth and development and for you to chemically hijack that for an ideology seems to me as an outsider to be fucking insane.
But to talk about it, you run the risk of being thought of as being transphobic.
It's a very strange time to discuss things.
Because you can't have an opinion about it because, oh, you're a cisgendered white man with all sorts of privilege.
There's a time and a place to say that someone is talking down to people.
If they happen to be a man, that's fine.
But the problem with the term mansplaining is anytime a man is correct, if a woman is saying something that's incorrect and a man corrects her, he's mansplaining.
I think that what's going on with hashtag MeToo and a lot of things in this society is we're undergoing a radical cultural change, and it's brought about by information.
I think we are way more aware of each other's feelings, way more aware of what's okay, way more aware of what we're willing to tolerate and what we're not willing to tolerate.
And if you go back to the 1930s and the 1940s and watch old films where people would smack the shit out of women and rape them and do all kinds of crazy stuff, and it was thought to be normal.
Those are the heroes.
The heroes would backhand a woman right across the face.
So I think what those things represent, obviously it's fiction, right?
But what it also represents is what was acceptable culturally to witness in a film.
That is not acceptable culturally to witness in a film now, especially from the fucking hero of the show.
I think today we're more aware than ever before of how people feel, of how people think, of what's acceptable, what's not, and what was wrong with the way people used to behave.
Whereas it was just, we were operating on momentum in the 30s and 40s and 50s and 60s and 70s.
The internet came along and people were just sharing information at this unprecedented pace.
Jimi Hendrix, Australian girlfriend, Savage's new film, which shows Rockstar beating up her character.
Oh, okay.
All my side's inaccuracy has been criticized by Hendrix's friends, his former girlfriend, disgusted by scenes depicting domestic violence, never consulted her about her portrayal.
Okay, so that might not be true.
But there was another...
Someone had said that there was a situation where Jimi was in the other room and he hit his girlfriend.
Like someone was talking about it from a first-person perspective.
I don't know if that was the girlfriend.
The fascinating thing about Jimmy was that he had this gangster manager who had him kidnapped.
His manager had him kidnapped so that he could release him, so that he could rescue him, so that he could keep Jimmy on as a client.
And this is all that came from a really recent book that was one of the gangster guy's bodyguards, like one of the people that worked for him.
So he was afraid that Jimmy was going to get rid of him as a manager, so he engineered a kidnapping that he could solve, and then Jimmy would feel indebted and bring him on as his manager.
And this guy who wrote this book, I don't know how much of this is real and how much of it's bullshit, but thinks that they murdered Jimi Hendrix, and then right after that, the girlfriend of Jimi Hendrix was thrown off of a roof.
Yeah.
Really?
Yeah, and they said she committed suicide, but he says they threw her off a roof, and she knew about Jimmy's murder.
If somebody would have whispered in my ear when I was 18 years old, you know how I had a lot of anxiety as a kid, like, what am I going to do with my life?
I had no role models to do anything.
I grew up in this blue-collar neighborhood.
I didn't want to do anything anybody fucking did there.
You know, when I was on the road, I remember, like, even in El Tassel, Texas, I'd be working and I would do two shows and I would go home afterwards to the condo and I would listen to both shows.
Before I went to sleep.
Now, I know most guys didn't do that.
But I just had to do it.
And it was almost like I was embarrassed to let the other comics know I was listening to my set.
But it was just like that.
It's like, I don't want to be stuck here.
I have some place I want to be.
And I got to get there.
And if this helps me get there, I want to get there.
I want to figure out, how do I get to be like that guy?
How do I get to be like Jerry Seinfeld?
How do I get to be like Brian Regan?
How do I get to be like those people I want to be like?
And, you know, I just studied them, and I just...
So it's that whole thing of you have to have a desire to be somewhere that you're not.
But you gotta fucking, you gotta be concentrating on the work.
That's the thing, man.
And the more you concentrate on getting it better, and the more you tighten it up, and that's where the real happiness in performing is, is in doing a great job.
It's not in like the places that you go.
I still get nervous, like in some places I'll get nervous.
You know, like I did the theater at Madison Square Garden, that made me nervous.
I was like, holy shit, I'm performing at the fucking garden.
But then after the show was over, I was like, well, that was a show.
I always thought it was that Bill Hicks, it's hard to capture someone on film as a stand-up.
It's hard to capture that.
Like Dennis Miller's Black and White, that was, I think, the greatest example of capturing that.
But Bill, I just thought it was like, well, Bill's funny in person, but he doesn't transfer to TV that well, because his specials didn't come anywhere close to being how funny he was in real life.
But when you do that, then you're getting, you know, a bunch of different sets.
You find the right one.
And you do it at a comedy club where he's comfortable.
I think more people should do sets at comedy clubs and film specials at comedy clubs.
I have a couple of different theories for why, but one of the big ones is when you're at home, you're in a living room.
It's intimate.
Your couch, TV's just right there.
It's not fucking a million miles away on a giant, big-ass screen.
So it feels weird to watch something on, you know, the big-ass, giant place, 50,000 people, like Kevin Hart did his special.
I think that it's funny.
You know, obviously the material's great, great delivery and everything like that, but I think everything is enhanced more with an intimate environment.
One of my favorite specials that I did, I did at the Comedy Works in Denver.
Did you see Dave Chappelle's new Netflix special, the one that he did at the Comedy Store, Belly Room?
He did two of them.
He did one at a good-sized place in D.C., which I think was like a couple thousand people, and then he did another one at the Belly Room, which was like 70 people.
It's been a part of my life since I was a little kid, and so for me, it's very important when I'm watching this and explaining what's happening, like, physically.
That's what heightens everything, you know, when you're watching, and that's why I like to watch boxing, because those guys' stories are always these unbelievable, his mother abandoned him when he was 80, he walked Brazil for three years, and then he started boxing, like, holy fuck!
You know, so that's like, that's the, and it's a do or die, and it's one-on-one, and that's why I love boxing.
Well, it's what we were talking about earlier when we were talking about Jay Leno's new show, is that he's actually passionate about it.
When someone's passionate about something, it comes through.
When it's real, when it's genuine.
And if they can articulate it, it comes through.
And I think if you're not doing something you're passionate about, understand that from watching someone who is doing something like the Jay Leno show or anything along those lines.
When you see someone, you go, oh, that's that feeling.
That's that magic.
That's that thing where someone's like really excited about it.
Like it's legit.
Like it's in their bones.
And if it's not in your bones, man, you better find what is.
Because you're missing out on, you know, you're only getting to seven.
Life goes to ten.
And you're not ever hitting the high spots.
You know, you might be fine staying at seven forever.
No matter who you are, if you kill, if you're a stand-up and you kill, I don't care if you kill at Zany's, it's 150 people, or if you kill at Madison Square Garden, it's still killing.
It's 10. It's 10. You hit 10. You hit a joke and boom, and you hear the roar like, that's 10. And there's nothing, you know, my brother, I remember the first time I got a paid gig.
It was in Wheaton, or Wheeling, Illinois.
Anyway, it was $50, and I was telling him I had to drive 50 miles to go make $50 to do comedy, which to me was a victory, right?
You know, one time I remember, I have a big mouth and everything, and so when I started comedy, there was this girl, and she was pretty, and I guess I must have told people I'd like to get on, I can't wait to work the road with her so I can fuck her, right?
Yeah, it's going to be a weird time if we remove flirting and clumsy attempts at sex.
There's a lot of that stuff that turns out to be fun.
It's funny, too, that one thing that you could say to one person is highly offensive, and you could say it to another person is exactly what they wanted to hear.
It's like, and you really don't know until you say it.
We're talking about Hashtag Me Too, and he says, you know, the thing is that women don't have to hit on men.
Men are always the aggressor, right?
And so that causes a lot of problems, you know?
Like, I'll see a guy with his group of friends, and he'll slink over to try to talk to this girl, and he's nervous, and he says, hey, you want to dance?
And she'll shut him down, and he'll walk back over, and like, oh, that fucking bitch, you know?
And that's what's...
because he's got a saved face, and women don't know what that's like.
I mean, one of the things that you see from the same people, whether it's men or women, is people that are constantly shut down and ridiculed and mocked by the opposite sex become very bitter and angry.
You see it sometimes from unattractive women who have been shit on by men, and you see it from unattractive men who have been shit on by women.
They develop this animosity towards the opposite sex, and it's very unfortunate.
And a lot of it comes from that feeling that you just get from someone.
When you make it advance, you become vulnerable.
And look, if you're a guy, not a good-looking guy, and you take a chance at some girl, she's with her friends at a bar, she might mock you openly in front of her friends, and it's ruthlessly painful.
And she's just not attracted to you.
She wants to shut down any possibility that you might have in your head.
You go back over there.
And this happens time and time again.
You could easily develop animosity towards women, or develop a very bad association with the opposite sex.
You see that from women.
There's a lot of women that I know that have real issues with men, and they're very unattractive.
And they'll say really gross generalizing things about men.
They will make these gross...
Men are this, and men suck, and men aren't funny, and men aren't this, and men are that.
And then you look at them, and you're like, oh, well, you're obese.
You're unattractive and your experiences with men have probably largely been of rejection and bad things.
On top of all the realities of what men are capable of and the horrible things that men absolutely do.
No denying that.
But to have this gross generalization about an entire gender.
Based on what?
Well, a lot of it is based on their own life experiences.
Meanwhile, you go to some really attractive girl who's like, go to, you know, fill in the blank, some really attractive girl who's always had men hit on her.
She might be, oh, men are gross, men are disgusting, I'm just waiting for the right guy.
She's not...
Lumping all men into this group, but many women that are unattractive and have a hard time with men have the same response towards men that many unattractive men have towards women.
It's a real...
It's a fucking hard roll of the dice to be born in a way that's just without any...
Doing of your own, completely outside of your control.
You're just not sexually attractive to the opposite sex.
You know, I had a friend, and he was an unattractive guy, and I watched him go from being, sort of having these idealistic ideas about the one day, he had a girlfriend at the time, and it turned out his girlfriend was cheating on him, and then, you know, he had other girls, and they were trying to get his money, and then he just became this bitter fucking guy.
Like, over the time that I knew him, he just became a woman hater.
I mean, straight up woman hater.
He'd hit on girls, and they would turn him down, and be like, fucking dykes.
He'd just be angry.
Like angry at women.
He associated, and I watched it from afar, he associated women with negative feelings.
He associated them with rejection.
He associated them with callousness.
And I have a friend who's overweight and she feels like that about men sometimes.
Like men are shit and they're insulting and they're this and that.
Some.
Some are.
Yes.
Some people are terrible.
Some males and females are terrible.
But when you're picking, I'm on team penis and you're on team vagina, we've all lost.
Because you're crazy.
You're going to align yourself with 150 million people that you...
How many do you know?
Do you know 150 of those 150 million people?
Because that's a lot.
You probably don't even have an intimate relationship with 150 men.
So you're going to lump all 150 million into the same group that you're against and 150 million women into the group that you're with?
That's crazy.
We're humans.
We're supposed to be on team human.
And we're supposed to all figure out how to get along.
But along the way, we're trying to find mates and we're trying to find companionship.
The reality of that is it is a messy proposition.
And some people get left out.
And some people get shoved aside.
And some people get attacked.
And some people get diminished.
And some people feel terrible about the experience.
But my wife says about that show, because it was an honor when she's watching, she's like, you know, these women all got laid and it was all about them wanting to get laid and they had resiliency and they weren't snowflakes and they were...
Right.
And these women could fucking run in heels and, you know, all this...
Yeah, like, the whole thing is just like, oh, so this whole thing about this camaraderie and this union of women all together and fighting against odds.
And I think they came along at an amazing time, the time of social media, where it's just all about likes and butt pictures that have been doctored up by Photoshop.
The whole thing is really fascinating.
And then, you know, the father is like, well, I'm not getting enough attention as a guy.
Fuck it, I'm going to be a chick.
And then he gets amazing amounts of attention.
I mean, you could say that I'm being callous, but that's what happened.