Joe Rogan and Kyle Kulinski debate how identity politics alienated voters, with Kulinski arguing for policy-focused unity over divisive symbolism like Clinton’s "I’m with her" slogan. They critique corporate PACs, Trump’s Saudi arms deal ($100B), and Flynn’s $500K Turkish lobbying, while questioning media obsession with Russia over domestic issues like wages and healthcare. Rogan explores stem cell therapy skepticism—FDA drug classification vs. Texas success—and parallels with Kratom’s public support despite FDA restrictions. They also clash on gender dysphoria treatments, with Rogan advocating 25-year-old waitlines for irreversible procedures, contrasting Jenner’s post-surgery regret. Ultimately, the conversation exposes systemic failures in politics and medicine, urging nuanced, evidence-based discourse over performative outrage or unchecked experimentation. [Automatically generated summary]
If you look like you're really serious, then people assume you're serious, and they don't know that I'm, you know, making dick jokes and all shit like that.
There's this thing that I do where, especially when I'm doing my show, oftentimes you do that half-assed move where I look like this, but then I might have basketball shorts on, or I might have sweatpants.
Well, whenever somebody tries to, you know, kind of like deify the Founding Fathers, I always think, well, yeah, they were brilliant on some things, but on the other hand, they wore powdered wigs and shat outhouses and had slaves.
Anyway, so they're in the middle of this conversation and Heather, who is a, she's a biologist, and she starts going over the biology of the differences between males and females that are just undeniable.
And these kids get up and they start yelling that this is bullshit and fuck you and power to the people, all this crazy shit, and then they tip over the sound system and They're the most hilarious, classical, liberal, progressive lefties.
Green hair, the guy has this poofy afro, and he's like, you know, we don't tolerate Nazis, man.
That stuff is the kind of stuff that I think turns people off to the left and almost provides a gateway to the right where all of a sudden people can buy into an even broader right-wing ideology because if you look at the left and that's your perception of the left is it's the people with the pink hair or the blue hair and they're just going around and their whole point is to de-platform people or censor people or scream about Ben Shapiro or whatever the case is.
Like...
My whole thing is, if you're on the left, and I think most lefties do this to be fair, put the identity politics aside, okay, and let's talk about the things that we actually already have a majority of the American people with us on.
So, you know, like a classic left-wing idea.
Let's have a living wage.
The minimum wage is not a living wage right now.
You could work full-time and not make enough money to survive.
Well, if you're on the left and you go out there and you talk about, we need to fight to try to get a living wage and make our government work for us, well then you get everybody to agree with you.
Even most Republicans agree with you.
And you can go down the list, whether it's legalizing marijuana, 60% of the American people are now with us.
Ending the wars, there was a poll that came out in 2013, so it's old, admittedly, but only 17% of the American people still wanted to be in the war in Afghanistan.
And we're still there today.
I'd imagine, if anything, that number probably dropped even further and everybody's like, what are we doing in Afghanistan?
What I was saying is about the left versus the right is that the real problem is anybody can be on either.
So you're going to get these people that are going to disrupt this Heather Hying, you know, lecture on biology from an informed scientific perspective and like, fuck this man, this is a patriarchy.
You're going to get that.
But you're also going to get people like yourself.
You're also going to get people that are aware of the issues and educated and are debating this in a very public way and trying to figure out what's the best possible solution to these things.
The problem is, anytime you have a group, whether it's Pick the group.
And as soon as anybody can join, you can't look at, like, the worst case scenarios, the green-haired dork that kicks over the microphone because they don't like the idea that Heather is speaking logically about biology.
Like, you know, you have to look at, like, the whole thing.
And, you know, the breakdown to me is, when you look at somebody like that, they're in the category of what I would call authoritarian left, because they want to control other people's actions, they want to shut down that speech and say, your ideas are so dangerous, I don't even want to hear it.
There's a whole other contingent of the left, which again, I would argue is probably the majority of the left, which is the libertarian left.
Which is people like me and many others who say, listen, live and let live on social issues.
Even though I don't agree with Steven Crowder or Ben Shapiro on anything, I'm never going to try to protest to get them to not speak their mind at a school.
It was like a quick, partisan, hacky point you made.
But since people already agree with you in the audience, they clap.
So it's harder to flesh out the ideas.
That's why, listen, I've always said, I'm not the biggest fan of debate.
So I've done a few debates, and people online like when I do debates, but I'm not the biggest fan of debates because I think it's like the WWE of intellectual pursuits.
Where you go in, this person's whole point is to defend this side of it, my job is to defend the other side of it, and it's like, okay, clash.
But it's like, okay, well then, when we come across an issue like the fucking 64 genders on Facebook or whatever it is, and I actually might agree, Am I now put in a position where I'm supposed to be like, no, I'm going to disagree because that's the format of the thing that we're doing.
Yeah, and I think that's actually very important for both sides to do.
Like, when there's something on your side that you disagree with, you should be honest about it.
Even saying that, that there's a side, that there's sides, that there's our side versus their side, I think we're so inherently tribal that we should resist any temptation whatsoever to form teams, especially about critical issues, like really important social issues, really important economic issues, really important civil rights issues.
These are just things we should just talk about without looking at them in terms of, oh, the left wants this, so I oppose it, or the right wants this, so I have to figure out ways to mock it.
We were talking about this before the podcast, that what I try to do is have conversations with everyone.
I try to have conversations with nutty people, like Alex Jones.
I try to have conversations with rational people, like Sam Harris.
I try to have conversations with all kinds of people, but Without fail, every time I have a left-wing person on, I'm some cuck left-wing, you know, and every time I have a right-wing person on, I'm some alt-right Nazi apologist.
It's like this weird inclination we have to try to label and categorize people, and I try to resist those labels as much as humanly possible.
Well, I feel like what you're really good at is you can have on people who disagree completely on stuff, but you'll kind of find a nugget of agreement in the conversation with that person, and then you can expand on that, and you can end up having a very nice conversation.
And you never really bring anybody on to try to, like, browbeat them and tell them that they're wrong on this issue or that issue.
There are times in life where arguments are necessary.
There's times in life where you're just faced with aggression or conflict and you have to do something about it.
You have to meet it head on.
There are times in life like that.
But whenever you can avoid that, do.
And I think a lot of what arguments are, and I've failed at this in my life many times, but a lot of what arguments are is The way you've reacted to the thoughts and the expression that another person has, and if you just reacted a different way or approached it in a different manner or took it into consideration a little bit more before you responded, I think the conversation could have gone another way.
And I think I'm learning how to do that more and more as I get better at podcasting, get better at conversations, learning how to just settle someone down and learning how to genuinely be a nice person.
So I don't want to insult anybody.
I don't want to be in a disagreement with someone.
And then I remember watching that clip, and it was so frustrating when you guys were going back and forth, because you would say, I think you were talking about the 9-11 thing, and you're like, I'm 100% not saying it was a conspiracy.
I'm saying it looked like the building came down in a controlled demolition.
Those are two very different things.
It's one thing to say, I believe it's a conspiracy.
It's another thing to say, the way it came down looked like it was a controlled demolition.
But he kept insisting and trying to tell you What you believe.
As you're sitting across from him and you're like, no, I don't believe that.
Yeah, not because of that, but because of something that he did.
He was involved in some sort of a scam with, uh, was it Amazon or Google?
eBay, that's right.
He was involved in some sort of a scam where he embedded cookies, he would go to his site, it made it look like when you were buying things online that you had gone through his site first, when in fact you hadn't, there was just a cookie that was embedded, something along those lines.
Whatever it was, it was illegal and he wound up going to jail.
So, and even his defense of that, it's like, I think there's something wrong there.
I don't know what that something is.
There's a spark plug that's not screwed in all the way.
And I do feel like there's very, very, very, very, very few upsides of Trump, in my opinion.
But one of the upsides of Trump is that he did kind of break the mold in terms of what was viewed as...
The right way to communicate as a politician.
Because before him you had all these very measured people who had the proper posture and they spoke with their thumb pointed down because they don't want to be too strong with their finger pointing at you like that.
And then he comes along and he's obviously shooting from the hip and he clearly has no filter and he's tripping over his words.
Tremendous, believe me, he's unnecessarily punchy and short with his sentences.
And I remember there was a report that came out that said he communicates, I think it was like a sixth or seventh grade level or something like that.
And everybody in the media was mocking it.
And I did a segment where I said...
You guys are mocking, and that's a terrible idea, because guess what?
The way he's speaking, even though it sounds stupid, it's gonna pierce through.
Like, you know how when some people talk, it's hard?
You have to focus to pay attention, to listen to where they're going with it, and it's hard?
And then there's other people who talk, and it's like, you just get it.
It's immediately right in your brain.
And it doesn't matter if you agree or disagree with the substance of what that person is saying, you know when somebody's an effective communicator.
And when he was out there on the campaign trail, and he was, for example, campaigning in the Rust Belt, where Hillary Clinton did not go, and he was like, ah, NAFTA, NAFTA's terrible, they shipped out all your jobs, it was unbelievably terrible, believe me, let me just tell you.
unidentified
What I'm gonna do, I'm gonna keep your jobs here, it's gonna be unbelievable, believe me.
The voice is a little off, but the mannerisms are excellent.
How about the fucking thing he did recently where he said that he would have gone into the school when the school shooting was going on and he would have run in there even if he didn't have a gun?
Imagine if he was there, like if Trump just happened to be there giving a speech at the school when a school shooting started, and he didn't do anything.
Well, in the book, in fact, the guy uses someone to shield him from a shooter.
And that's what keeps that guy from ever becoming president, so it keeps him from pressing the button.
Because the guy was going to become president, and he was going to launch a nuclear assault, a nuclear war, and this guy that was Christopher Walken's character.
Was Christopher Walken?
Was, right?
I think so.
He realized by touching this guy's hand this guy was going to do this.
And so there was like some scenario that took place where someone was trying to shoot him and he used someone else to shield him from the bullet and that's what prevented him from ever becoming president.
I don't know, but especially with comedy, and you've pointed this out, if you go back and look at old comedy, it's just a different world they were living in.
If you take the conversation we're having and you somehow get it back to 1950, people would look at us like, Just the fact that we casually curse and, you know, the concepts we're talking about, they'd be like, this is unbelievably impolite.
He, like, moved his hips in a way that they thought was too sexual, so they're like, we can't show this because there are kids that exist in the world.
I think it was Lenny Bruce who had all these different lawsuits against him because...
So, in a way, he's like...
He kind of paved the way for people like us...
Where you, especially because you're in comedy too, but even just for the internet where we have this, you know, this free open platform where we talk about whatever, I feel like we wouldn't even be able to get away with talking, you know, mentioning the sexual stuff or cursing if it wasn't for guys like that who paved the way because people were getting arrested for doing a stand-up set and cursing.
Even in what I do, political commentary, I'll make points and it'll be a point that eight people made before me while I think I'm some fucking genius over here.
When I started out in Boston doing stand-up, we're obviously right next to New Hampshire, and New Hampshire's state motto on their license plate is, live free or die.
And I said, yeah, those plates are made by prisoners.
And there's some, just because you brought up prisons, there's a pivot here, but There's some creepy stuff going on in terms of the labor that they're getting from prisoners.
Hey, maybe give me a month off, or a year off, or whatever.
Maybe if you're not a dangerous criminal, maybe you did something stupid, some petty theft or something like that, and look, I'll go out there and fire the fire, but you gotta give me some sort of a break off my sentence.
The way we do prisons in general in the U.S. is really weird because...
So I feel like there's like the Norwegian way of doing stuff and the Scandinavian way of doing stuff where they gear everything towards rehabilitation to get them back into society and functioning.
And in the US, I feel like we don't gear it towards rehabilitation, we gear it towards punishment.
We're going to punish you.
And, you know, I think there are fair critiques of the Norwegian system, like, you know, in Scandinavia.
Who's the guy?
Anders Breivik, he killed all these kids.
And he was complaining because he's like, I only have a PS2 and you guys need to give me, like, a newer video game system.
So you can look at that and go, listen, man, you guys are being too fucking liberal.
Fuck that guy.
He had, like, two rooms that were his cell and he could walk in a fucking courtyard and shit.
So I think there are genuine criticisms of that.
But at the same time, what's fascinating is...
They have a significantly lower recidivism rate than we do.
So here, if you go to prison, it's very likely that you're going to end up back in prison.
In those places, if you go to prison, you know, especially if it's like a lower level crime, they rehabilitate you and you get out and you're a functioning member of society.
So we can learn something from them.
In my mind, I think there should be...
Some sort of a middle ground like I think prison should be used yes in some instances people need fucking punishment in some instances of course but we need to mix that in many instances with a healthy dose of rehabilitation as well so we are I don't know functioning like an actual society as opposed to jailing more people in this country than any other country in the world Yeah, I don't necessarily think that punishment by itself helps anybody.
I mean, if you take a guy and you lock him in a cell, and he's in that little tiny cell until his body stops working and he dies, is that helping anybody?
But my whole thing on the death penalty is I've always thought the idea of it in principle is something I get.
Like you could point out all those people who did those horrific things and like there's no hope of them rehabilitating and they're total monsters.
And I say...
Philosophically, I have no problem getting rid of those people because you're just eliminating a problem.
But in my mind, the reason why I'm not in favor of the death penalty is because 4% of the time we get the wrong people.
So if you have a system where you're guaranteed to kill the wrong people some percentage of the time, then what we're saying is, well, we're gonna let the state murder people 4% of the time, and that's something I just can't have my tax dollars going towards.
Well, I guess the idea is if you have them locked up and you have people like the Innocence Project working on trying to overturn cases where there was a wrong conviction, then eventually you can right the wrong of getting those wrong people 4% of the time.
But it's finite if you say, no, we're going to put you on...
On death row and you're gonna die in eight years or whatever it is, then, you know, sometimes you can't finish the case in time, overturn it, and...
So that's my whole thing about the death.
Like, I agree philosophically, and that's something many people to my left have come after me for, and said, no, you're wrong, you should be against the death penalty in principle.
But I say no.
I get it theoretically and philosophically, but it's just that when you actually implement it, there are pragmatic problems.
Like, you're gonna kill the wrong fucking people, and I'm not okay with that.
I'm thinking of William Macy, the guy from Shameless.
I'm all fucked up.
Yeah, well, we were talking about something before the podcast, and I think this is really the future, whether it's in our lifetimes or our children's lifetimes.
But I think that they're going to be able to read minds.
I think we're not far away from that.
We're going to really be able to know.
The actual contents of your thoughts.
Whether or not you really did murder a bunch of kids and bury them in your backyard.
We're gonna know.
And until then, we're dealing with a bunch of really big fucking problems.
One of the biggest problems is people's memories.
People's memories are so bad.
They're so bad.
So when you have eyewitness testimony and you can convict people wrongly, which happens every day, And they think they're right.
They think they really do believe they're right.
They really believe it.
That's a fucking problem, man.
That's just a giant problem, is the human memory is incredibly flawed.
And when someone's life is on the line, and you're going to convict a guy who didn't do anything, he just looks kind of like what you remember this person who murdered that guy looks like.
Well, that's where a lot of the things get overturned is because they have DNA evidence that overrides whatever the testimony was of the people at the time.
And speaking of technology advancing, there's many scary aspects to it, but the elephant in the room to me is the fact that look at what the NSA is already doing.
They're already spying on absolutely everybody in the country.
They collect all of our metadata and store it at some multi-billion dollar facility in Utah.
And then there's no doubt that all this technology is going to be used against us.
It's like, I mean, it doesn't make any sense that he thought that he could get away with that, but the real problem with that guy is that guy was an interesting politician.
He really did have some really good points, a lot like Wiener.
But like, so I like to, when I talk, I like to have just bullet points of what I want to talk about and just a loose outline and then I'll riff off of it.
And what happened was, all the lines that I thought would get a laugh did not get a laugh, but all my throwaway lines got good laughs.
So I was amazed by that, and then also I was amazed at the fucking rush of getting a room to hang on your every word and to genuinely laugh at what you're saying.
You're doing a show then, more than you're connecting with people, whereas you're going to come to the Comedy Store tonight, that's an intimate place.
That's 150 people.
That's tight, little small room, and that's like you're there.
You're there with the people.
It's different.
That's a rush, too, though.
It's a different rush.
It's all a rush, but...
Your responsibility to the material and the delivery sort of overrides the rush, because you can't really get caught up and go, wow, this is amazing, because you have to be thinking about the timing, you have to be tuned in to exactly what you're thinking about.
You can't be thinking about, oh, this is getting a lot of great laughs.
You have to honestly be thinking about the actual subjects.
Because people fucking know what you're thinking about, man.
And it's really strange because you could have somebody who's well-versed in going through a script, but there's still something that's missing from what they're saying.
And I feel like that's one of the many reasons why this podcast is very popular, because you get people on here and you just have a conversation and you're...
You two are really connecting, and then you're also really connecting with the people who are watching, because you're just having a conversation, it's like you're at a bar, and everybody's just kind of talking, and it's not like people come here and they're like, let me now go to my point that I was going to make on this and this, because that's when people start to yawn, and that's actually why I think a lot of the...
The older shows, like, you know, not to shit on the late night hosts.
But that's why I feel like that's kind of dying out, and there's this giant rise of the internet.
Because that's all very segmented and structured, and you have to go in and out real fast.
And there's nothing human about it.
It's almost like it's celebrities telling you, we're on this different level, and you're going to watch us be on this different level.
Because, I don't know, I feel like there's an energy that you get from the audience where you kind of try more to do those punchy one-liners as opposed to just flowing.
So I feel like one of the reasons why my show got popular over time is because...
I'm sucking my own dick and this sounds so gross, but...
But I actually predicted pretty early on when it was clear Hillary was going to get the nomination.
I was sounding the alarms and I was saying, listen, Hillary versus Trump is a worst case scenario because Hillary Clinton is the status quo.
She is the establishment.
She is business as usual.
She doesn't have a message.
She doesn't have a vision.
All she's doing is spewing platitudes and cliches, break down the barriers, stronger together...
Doing identity politics non-stop, which is nothing but pandering and not talking about policy substance.
And then, like we touched on earlier, you had Donald Trump, who...
I disagree with him on virtually everything, but the guy knows how to fucking play to a crowd, knows how to tell people what they want to hear.
So when he's in front of a blue-collar audience, he's out there ripping the trade deals and saying, I'm going to keep your jobs in the country and it's going to be amazing.
And that's something that landed.
And then when you have Hillary so dumb as to not...
A campaign in, what, Michigan and some Ohio, I think she went to, but some of the Rust Belt states.
Well, the reason he ended up winning is because of the Rust Belt.
So, and my whole point was, Trump is a populist, and admittedly, when push came to shove now that he's elected, a fake populist, because he has Goldman Sachs throughout his administration and he's serving Wall Street, but a fake populist We'll always beat a status quo politician.
Right.
Because people are sick and tired of business as usual, and they feel like, well, I'm getting shafted now, and she's coming along telling me I'm going to keep everything the same.
Why the fuck would I be happy and excited to vote for her?
When the whole Comey thing with the FBI, when there was a video that came out where he explained what the charges were and what they had found about the emails, and then she explained the version of it.
She's just not honest.
Then it was the whole gay marriage thing.
She didn't support gay marriage till 2013. That's fucking crazy.
That's crazy.
And then, here's the other thing.
She's a woman.
There's a lot of sexists.
There's a lot of people that didn't want a woman to be president, period.
Especially not a woman that could point to all these flaws.
Poor health, liar, dishonest, in bed with Wall Street, gets paid by The banks, hundreds of thousand dollars, won't release the transcripts, Clinton Foundation seems kind of shady.
There's so many different things that were against her.
Nobody knows less about politics than Democratic strategists in Washington, D.C. Because as of right now, what they're trying to do is they're trying to fight back against their base.
So their base, it's people like me, and what we want...
I'm very clear about what I want.
It's not hard to please people like me who are on the left.
We want a living wage...
We want Medicare for All, which, you know, every other modern nation has one version or another of a single-payer healthcare system.
We just want to be like the rest of the modern world.
We want free college.
Again, Slovenia has fucking free college.
We can't afford to do free college when we just spent seven fucking trillion dollars on the Iraq war.
We want to end the wars.
So I have very clear policy goals that I want.
And guess what?
Bernie Sanders came along, spoke about those issues.
He went from being this obscure senator from fucking Vermont, which has a population of 12 people, to getting 47% of the vote in a race against a political juggernaut, a behemoth that had the entire Democratic Party machine behind her.
A hundred percent, yes, and that's what we learned, and that's why Julian Assange went from being viewed as, oh my god, this guy's great, that's how the left used to view him, and now many people, democratic partisans, are like, ah, fuck this guy!
And I was just talking to you about this before the podcast.
I was watching CNN before he came here for about an hour and 30 minutes.
Non-stop Russia coverage.
Non-stop fucking Russia coverage.
And then guess what?
Now when Donald Trump goes out there and he's a fake news CNN, everybody's gonna go, yeah, you know what?
All they do is fucking talk about Russia all day long, so maybe the guy has a point.
So the institutions that we have and the establishment as it is, it opens up the door for a demagogue and a liar and a fake populist like Trump to come in there and exploit it!
So, if you give people a choice between a broken system that's fucking them over, where half of workers in America make $30,000 a year or less, you give people an option between keep everything as is, or take a fucking human bowling ball and throw it at the establishment, they're gonna say, okay, fuck it, we'll roll the dice on this Trump guy.
And then meanwhile, look at his agenda and everything that he's done since he's got elected.
It's the opposite of his populist rhetoric on the campaign trail.
His fucking tax bill had a 33% favorability rating, and they were bragging about it when they passed it.
This is a bill that cuts corporate taxes from 35% to 21% at a time when corporations are already paying a historically low percentage of the tax burden, and it raises taxes on everybody that makes $75,000 a year or less over a 10-year period.
I mean...
You couldn't get a piece of legislation that spits in the face of working people more than that, but the saddest thing is this guy is so comically easy to beat, but the Democrats can't get their shit together because they're fighting back against the grassroots who care about the issues because they're in bed with corporations.
The Democrats are in bed with corporations just like the Republicans are.
So if you got this corrupt party establishment and they're trying to tamper down the wing of the party that can actually win Well then guess what?
You're gonna keep losing to these monsters, these comic book villains on the right.
So one of the most important things is when you look at a politician who's running, thing number one is check.
Do they take corporate PAC money?
If the answer is yes, fuck them.
Not interested.
If you don't take corporate PAC money, that means, okay, at least I know you're being honest and you're being open, and when you talk, I can believe you.
The problem comes along is that successful politicians, someone who could actually possibly win, they do take corporate PAC money, but they're a better alternative than, say, you know, Pence.
If Pence decides to be president, then you go, okay, we've got to choose the lesser of two evils.
You get into that weird position where, yeah, she's kind of corrupt, but look, it's gonna be historic, she's a woman, she's infinitely more qualified than him, and...
Yeah, the lesser evilism thing is a big issue because that's the game that's played on the American people, and I think Americans know that it's being played on them, you know?
Like, if you look at the opinion polls on Congress, Congress oscillates between a 14% approval rating and a 21% approval rating in what's supposed to be a democracy.
So in other words, you vote these people in, and then two weeks later you go ask people, hey, what do you think of the Congress you just voted in?
And like 14% of them are like, I think they're good.
Everybody else is like, fuck them.
So we all know that there's a problem here, and the root of the problem is the corruption of the system and the corporate money flooding our politics.
And then the politicians get in there, and all they do is represent the corporations, and they don't represent the people.
So to your point, yeah, in order to rise up through this system, That's why the establishment loved Hillary Clinton.
Because she played by the rules in this corrupt system.
Did you know that her and Bill, through their entire career, they raised over $3 billion in private donations?
No, everybody loves her on fucking Wall Street and in Washington, D.C. But, and again, just to go back to the Bernie Sanders point, now we're seeing more politicians coming up that are in his model, where they say, I'm not going to take any corporate PAC money.
I don't even want a super PAC if I run for president.
And then what happens is, people know at the end of the day, I can trust that person, even if I don't agree with that person.
And that's why Bernie Sanders is the most popular politician in the country by a mile and a half.
He's the most popular by a long shot, and the reason is, there are even many people on the right who look at him and go, you know what, I don't agree with him on abortion, I don't agree with him on this or that, but I trust the guy, and I think he's fighting for me.
My friend Aaron Snyder had a podcast the other day with a gentleman who's 78 years old who goes on backpack solo elk hunts and he rides mountain bikes and exercises and does all this shit.
There are people out there that are his age that take care of their body.
The problem with Bernie, 76, his head sits somewhere in the middle of his sternum.
I was retarded when I was 35. I'm retarded now and I'm 30. I was so fucking stupid when I was 35. How can you allow people to be 35 years old and run for president?
No, but what I love about Roe is that he doesn't do the fake bullshit identity politics of like, I'm not white, therefore, you know, I'm great.
In fact, he's one of the very few politicians who regularly speaks up about people in the middle of the country who got their fucking factory jobs outsourced because corporations wanted to make more money, and he's against all these trade deals and stuff.
I hate the pandering where they try to, that's the thing, like when they bring up the personal stories and they're like pretending to care about some random dude in Kentucky.
With old people, that was like, someone said it best, and it's one of my favorite quotes about Trump, that he is what a poor person imagines a rich person would be like.
So when you don't grow up with much, then you're like, I'm gonna fucking get a lot, and then I'm gonna show off that I have a lot, so you know I got this shit.
Well, working for yourself is a little difficult, though, right?
Like, not having a steady paycheck where you have to...
And you were also involved in the YouTube demonetization wave that hit after that PewDiePie cocksucker decided it was a good idea to use the N-word On video game streams.
So in the rap songs, yeah, of course I did it in the rap songs, but also just being an awkward young white boy from New Rochelle and having a lot of black friends growing up, and we just threw it around like nobody's business.
I mean, there obviously are people who are, you know, like Jack Nicholson, for example, is way more famous than you, but like, there's not many people.
So, the fear factor thing was, I had done a lot of stuff after NewsRadio that didn't work.
Not a lot of stuff, but a few pilot scripts that I had gotten, a few meetings that I had with people that were kind of goofy.
There was a lot of like...
And I loved working with my cast, my friends from NewsRadio.
They were great.
But I had also worked with a bunch of actors who were actors.
It's not a job that lends itself to authenticity.
It's a job that lends itself to conformity, because you're always auditioning for things, so you want everybody to like you, so you sort of pattern your likes and dislikes, your behavior patterns, your opinions.
You lick your finger, you put it in the air, where's the wind blowing?
I'm going that way, because that's the safest way to make a living.
And so I felt like at the very least it would give me some material, and it was a generous amount of money.
And it was money that I was like, okay, if I do this and I keep doing this, I don't have to do other things.
Like, I can be free.
And that...
Having that ability to say no to things and to have fuck you money and to just not worry about how to pay your bills.
I knew when I lived in New Rochelle, it was actually when I got my first development deal.
And when I got my first development deal, there was this physical weight that lifted off of me where I didn't have to worry, how am I going to pay my rent next month?
How am I going to pay my gas?
I went from that to having some money.
And the feeling that I got was like, okay, this is valuable.
This isn't some bullshit idea.
I'm not saying that being rich makes you happy.
It's not.
But having resources is a valuable thing and having the resources to not have to do something you don't want to do and where you can pursue what you want to do, that's valuable as well.
So it's funny you bring that up because I covered this study that came out a few weeks ago on my show and apparently researchers found out that When you hit a certain level of happiness when you hit $75,000 a year.
Because I think they figured out that that's where people can generally pay the bills and be okay.
And then they said, if you make up to $95,000, you do see a noticeable increase in happiness when you jump from $75,000 to $95,000.
So that's when people pretty much across the board are like, okay, I'm good.
And then everything after that...
You're playing with house money.
So they say, you know, the difference between making $95,000 a year and a million dollars a year, even though there's a big material difference there, in terms of how much it buys your happiness, there's a tapering effect when you hit that $95,000 threshold.
I think also the amount of work that you have to do to make a million dollars a year significantly stresses you out.
You don't have time to do things that you love, like say if you have some hobbies that you really enjoy, you feel like, I gotta leave those alone for a while, I gotta pursue my career and go after my career and really make it happen.
It's hard to balance that.
Life, comfort, appreciation for just your existence here, and trying to make a living.
And sometimes people get that way wrong, and they go all in on making a living, and then you become some fucking Harvey Weinstein guy, who's just all about just vices, and just filling your life up with things that try to make you happy, because you've got $500 million in the bank, and you're constantly working, and you just...
It's not a good example.
Harvey Weinstein's not a good example, because Yeah, fucking people in the ass and whatnot.
Allegedly.
The better example would be someone who works so they have a heart attack and then realizes they never had any fun and now their health has deteriorated so radically that they can't have fun and then they can't work and they can't even do what they do and then they have to sort of reboot their life.
I mean, I just think it's very important to enjoy your time here.
So, going back to the point you made about the rat race of life and people who get, like, obsessed with work and stuff like that, here's an interesting fact that I, nobody talks about it, I don't know why people don't think it's a bigger deal, but did you know that the United States is the only developed country that doesn't have paid time off by law?
Every other modern country, so you go to Europe, for example, they have- That's why we win, bro.
That's why we have people who are hopped up on pills and shit.
In fact, whenever people bring that point up, they go, oh, we can't raise the minimum wage because of reasons and stuff and things, I always bring up Australia.
Do you think that's people just taking advantage of poor people?
Do they really believe this is a stepping stone position that no one who's making minimum wage should ever consider this something they're going to do forever?
I don't think it's bad individuals who are trying to take advantage of people.
I think the problem is the system.
And the only reason why we don't have a system like Australia does with their minimum wage is because corporations have bought the government.
So if you look at the polls, 80% of people want to raise the minimum wage.
But we don't get that.
And we don't get that because there's a tremendous amount of money being poured into our government from the likes of corporations that don't want to raise the minimum wage.
So that's the only constituent group that has all the power, and they happen to be the only constituent group against having a living wage.
So I think that's the general dynamic behind it.
I do think that there are some small businesses where they're like, listen, I genuinely don't have the money to do this.
You know what I mean?
So, for those cases, yes, we can have a separate conversation about those instances, but if you're a fucking giant corporation, don't bullshit us and tell us you can't afford to pay somebody a living wage.
Because in the case of, like, Walmart, for example, they don't pay their people a living wage, and then they dump all of their workers onto the Medicaid rolls and onto the social safety net, so taxpayers end up paying billions of dollars to support them.
Meanwhile, the people who are part of Walmart are running out the back door with all the fucking money.
But if you're part of a big bank or you're part of a fucking hedge fund that made the decisions that ended up crashing the fucking economy, not only do you not get fired, they say, in order to retain the talent of these people, we're gonna have to pay them bonuses with the taxpayer money that just bailed out the corporation that they bankrupted!
I don't know what would have happened if we let the banks fail.
I don't know how catastrophic that would have been to our economy, but it's arguable.
It was a debatable point.
It's not a debatable point to give those fucking people millions of dollars of the taxpayers' money that's gone to the bailouts so that they can get that bonus that's in their contract.
They never come out and say, okay, what we're going to do is a bailout of the people who are hurt by this.
They always go, well, what we have to do is we have to give it to the companies that just made the decisions that fucked everything up in the first place and sit down and shut up.
And this goes back to why Trump seemed appealing to so many people, is because you have, you know, somebody who seems like a measured guy and a smart guy, and he said he was going to change the game, but then he also fucking bails out Wall Street.
And people look at that and they go, okay, you know what?
Yeah, I definitely think there was something like that.
There was also that he didn't seem like one of them.
He seemed like something different.
Like, let's try something different.
This is a new thing.
The old thing is not working.
This whole person who talks like this, who gives these speeches in front of large groups of people, I'm going to promise you change, and hope, and dignity, and whatever else.
Well, apparently, there is a reporter that literally named the pharmacy, the Dwayne Reed pharmacy where Trump had his prescription filled, where he used to be on one form of amphetamine.
What is it about some people who can't have a little bit of something and experience the upsides of it without getting totally hooked by it?
Because that's something, I feel like that's something that I can do, like I could try something and then I can experience the upsides of it and not, you know what I mean?
So, for example, I brought you—you said you already have a bunch of—but Kratom, I wanted you to try Kratom.
Kratom's something that I have, and I always feel like it's almost like caffeine to me.
I feel like it allows me to control my consciousness better.
So if I want to make a decision to do something, I feel like if I have Kratom in me, I can focus on it more, I can be more creative, and it's just upsides of it.
I don't want to psychoanalyze, but I feel like, from my own personal view, if I feel bad about something, if I smoke pot and then all of a sudden I remember something I did two years ago, I'm like, why did I do that?
What the fuck was that about?
I think that's an opportunity for psychic growth.
It gives me an opportunity to examine my own thoughts and try to figure out what...
Who you are at any given time is a bunch of different factors, right?
It's what's going on in your career, what's going on in your personal life, where's your health at, how stressed out, how many of these factors are outside of your control, what's the state of your success in life and all these various things, and then all those things together.
That's who you are at any given time, and it fluctuates, it moves, it goes back and forth.
And if you catch yourself at a good time and you smoke pot, you feel great.
And if you catch yourself at a point where maybe you're examining these things, like, sometimes you'll think about these various factors and you get very uncomfortable.
And when you were in a state just an hour ago where you were super comfortable about your life, now all of a sudden you don't feel good.
Like, what is that?
Well, it's probably there's some sort of subconscious thoughts and ideas that you've ignored.
And I think Ignoring those things is probably unhealthy and even though that feeling of Paranoia or whatever you want to call it.
I call it ruthless introspective thinking.
That feeling is probably healthy because it's making you examine things that you're probably pushing to the dark regions of your consciousness.
They make you uncomfortable, so you push them aside.
And I think they're better off explored and dealt with.
So I feel, I've always felt like substances that either up my mood and make me feel like I want to be very proactive and creative and busy and talkative, fine with taking something like that.
Fine with taking the opposite.
Something that relaxes me and makes me feel just at ease and calm.
But I've always, so with my limited experience with weed, because I've only smoked weed honestly maybe 8 to 12 times in my life.
But anyway, so I've always had an issue with psychoactive substances where, so I've never tried, and all the drugs you talk about on a regular basis, like psilocybin and stuff like that, I've always been scared of them, and I always feel like The drugs that will make me see things that aren't there, hallucinogenics, I'm just scared of them because I feel like I'll take that trip and not come back.
You know what I mean?
This is why I'm bringing it up to you because I know you disagree with that and I'm curious what you think about why I'm scared of those because with my experience with weed, most of the times I smoked it, It really was like a paranoid type...
Yes, 100% that happened, but I feel like I already have a hyperactive mind, and the path my mind will go down when I smoke weed, you know, suddenly I'm thinking about, I don't know, fucking naked Vikings, and it's like, well, how the fuck am I thinking about all this shit?
And then I'm sitting in class, convinced my eyes are probably bloodshot red.
In my mind, everybody in the room knows I'm high, and they're like, thinking like, this asshole's high.
I'm scared to death of the teacher.
So anyway, but there was a few times where I smoked weed and I had a positive experience, but it was like, all it was was just giggling non-stop with my friends to the point where we'd laugh, laugh, laugh, and then I remember one of us literally asking, hey, why the fuck are we laughing?
And somebody said, I don't know, and then we kept laughing.
I don't think it's a bad thing, but one of the reasons why you don't remember what you were laughing, and there's a real issue with short-term memory in marijuana.
You know, it's one of the reasons why I prefer marijuana with nootropics.
I like the combination of the two.
I think they balance each other out, because the nootropics accentuate your memory, and then on top of that, the marijuana sort of fucks with your memory a little bit.
There's real issues.
I mean, marijuana, it's not 100% innocuous in terms of your, like, psychic stability.
One of the interesting things about Kratom, and why I think it's kind of similar to weed and how people use it, even though the feeling is different when they take it, Many people take it because they were addicted to opioids, and it helps them get off the pills, and on Kratom, if you have too much of it, you just throw it up.
If you have too many opioids, you can die from an overdose.
And this is one of the reasons why the FDA is cracking down on it, because they're fucking bought by Big Pharma, and they don't want anything that's gonna compete with their fucking profits.
So people take it for, because they had an addiction to pills, people take it for PTSD, they take it for depression, they take it for anxiety, they take it for recreational reasons, they take it to wake up in a smaller dose, they take it to sleep in a bigger dose.
Well, that's why it's a very misleading thing that the FDA did.
Because what they're trying to do is find a backdoor way to be like, sorry, you guys can't have it because it's an opioid and it's dangerous and it's this and it's that.
But they're glossing over the most important point, which is the one that we were talking about, which is if you take too much Kratom, you just throw up.
That's not the case with opioids.
That's why people overdose all the fucking time.
And actually the bigger problem is that when people get addicted to opioids, and then because of the crackdown now, they're not prescribing as many opioids, then those same people go to the black market and they get fucking heroin.
And then when they get heroin on the black market, oftentimes it's laced with fentanyl, which is a fucking elephant tranquilizer, which then kills them.
He doesn't right now because he blew his ACL out and he has to have ACL reconstructive surgery.
I mean, look, jujitsu is rough on the body.
I've had two knee reconstructions, one from Taekwondo, one from Jiu Jitsu, but then I had a third operation from Jiu Jitsu as well, so two knee surgeries from Jiu Jitsu, and I've had some significant back problems too.
Everybody gets them, just there's no way around it if you're training hard.
Well, there was a study that came out a few years ago that said when you took the blood of young mice and put them into old mice, yeah, different thing, but same concept.
Yeah, that's something that erroneously was attributed to Peter Thiel, that Peter Thiel was doing that, apparently he said he wasn't, but there's a startup in Silicon Valley that does that, that offers, and guys are going there, and so like a guy would go there and some 25-year-old kid who does CrossFit every day would give up a couple of pints of blood and they'd shoot it into your system and then you'd go out there and fuck the shit out of your It can't be that simple, right?
Somebody contacted me on Twitter and told me that this story might be a distortion, even though it's sort of in the historical record.
They might have actually been trying to steal her land, so they might have fabricated some of these charges.
But one of the ancient stories of Elizabeth Bathory was that she was this incredibly evil woman that as she got older, she would torture and kill young peasant women and bathe in their blood because she wanted to regain her youth.
And she was jealous of these evil women.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I don't know if it's real, though.
This person who said that it was a hoax made me go, oh, okay, I could see that happening, too.
You know, where someone wanted to steal from her, so they concocted some charges.
The evidence is very solid that there's some regenerative properties of stem cells.
The problem is we don't have enough evidence of what the potential downsides could be and whether or not there's a very specific protocol that ensures safety.
Now, Dr. Neil Reardon is on top of all that stuff, and his books We used to have him sitting around here, but I think we put him in our little library.
His books detail all of the various studies that have shown efficacy and all the different benefits that they have.
And for a lot of people, like Mel Gibson's dad, who was 92 when he went in there, now he's almost 100. And Mel Gibson's dad was fucked.
I mean, he couldn't walk.
He was all jacked up, and it straightened him right out.
So, not to get all conspiratorial, but it may be...
Maybe, I have no idea, but maybe the reason why it's not already here is because there's some pre-existing treatment for stuff like that that they don't want to scrap.
And then the FDA also wanted to categorize some stem cell preparations as a drug because you have to do something to the stem cells and then in the process of We're cultivating them.
There's some sort of a method that they do that they believe categorizes it as a drug.
I'm obviously a moron, so I'm not the right person to talk to about this.
I feel like in many instances, not in every instance, but in many instances, you have the pre-existing treatments that are already in place, and pharmaceutical companies make a lot of money from having those treatments already in place.
So if you try to upend the apple cart, overturn the apple cart, I mean, this gets back to the whole Kratom point.
There's a reason why.
If this is something that's basically a cure for addiction to opioids, why the fuck are we not pushing it like crazy?
And the reason is...
They don't want to stop making money off the fucking opioids.
Now this is a good example of what I think is the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction because I have pain patients who contact me all the time and they talk about how since there's new federal regulations over the pills, what's happening is many doctors are afraid to prescribe them at all, even when it's a legitimate pain issue.
And so people contact me and they go, I don't know what to do because I need my pills because I have severe pain problem and I've had it for an extended period of time and nobody wants to give me the pills anymore.
And they feel like they're forced to go on the black market now.
So, but it's still- thankfully it's still- it- there's still leeway.
The last time the FDA really tried to crack down on it and make it a schedule one drug, the fucking bowels of hell opened up on their face because they opened up a comments section- a comments period.
And like 99.9% of the comments were like, fuck you, this saved my life, you guys are fucking criminals, how dare you do this?
And then they had to back off because the comments were just so overwhelming.
So now they're trying to slowly do it again, and what's happening is they just referenced, oh, there were 44 cases of somebody who overdosed from Kratom.
Exactly, so there were a few cases of salmonella-tainted kratom, and so the idea, there's another way they try to go, oh, we gotta get rid of it, because there's some salmonella cases.
If you look at it objectively, you would have to say, listen, this substance, which is legal and has been legal for a very long time, is actually more dangerous than many of these ones that are illegal.
And we learn from alcohol prohibition how terrible an idea it is to just ban the substance.
Because what happened during Prohibition?
The Mafia got incredibly powerful because they're the ones selling the alcohol, they're the ones making the money, and then when you have a dispute and your product is on the black market, you know how you solve that dispute?
With fucking guns in the street.
You know how you solve the dispute if it's legal?
You go to court wearing suits and ties and you figure it out like adults.
So this is another issue where if the Democrats decided, let's not be fucking corrupt idiots and let's actually fight for something, do you have any idea how big of a blue tsunami there would be in the next election if every Democrat came out there and said, one of the things we're for is legalizing marijuana.
We're going to fight for that and we're not going to take no for an answer.
See, this is one of the things that's so frustrating to me, doing what I do, and one of the reasons why I think shows like ours have blown up is because we're willing to say the most obvious things that everybody's thinking, but the system is dragging like fucking 50 years behind what we're talking about.
Well, you could never do the show that you do, or this kind of show, if you had like real serious advertisers and a real serious network.
And producers and executives, if you had a bunch of executives that were above you and, you know, fill in the blanks, CNBC or whatever, and their job depended upon you not saying something fucked up that was going to get the advertisers to crack down on their program, you wouldn't be able to do it.
Be partisan, be in favor of the Democrats, and support the Democratic establishment.
The whole idea of Fox News is, be partisan, support the Republicans, support the establishment.
If somebody comes along and they go, you know what?
Your whole fucking game is bullshit.
Both the parties are corrupt.
Nobody's fighting for the people.
You're ignoring the fact that only 14% of the American people even support Congress.
You're ignoring the fact that 60% of people want to legalize marijuana.
If you go and talk about real issues, that's when they step up and they go, listen, we can't have you because, you know, hey, you curse too much or this isn't palatable and it's always people above you.
Who feel like they should be able to control your content, but they don't understand the reason why the content is popular in the first place is because you're not fucking being controlled.
When you keep something small and close to the chest, I feel like that's when you can mold it and make it your own.
When it becomes a giant big operation and 43 hands are in it, well then all of a sudden it feels like it's stale and detached and not connected to anything real that people can relate to.
No, I've been involved in that kind of stuff before.
I know what happens.
There's too many cooks in the kitchen, everything gets fucked up, and everybody's also trying to justify their position, which is almost unnecessary.
I mean, there's so many positions.
When you work on a television set and you see how many people are just standing around, you go, oh, why are there so many jobs?
Why are there so many people working?
Well, a lot of it is like they've kind of created these jobs to justify their position.
And then when there's meetings, those people all have an idea that they want to change.
Change this or tweak that and so they can say that was my idea and that justifies the role well It was my idea to tell Kyle that he's got to stop doing this and start doing that and we got Kyle to wear a suit and he Pushed back, but I was right.
I was right You know like there's all that kind of shit that happens on these goddamn TV sets and it ruins the the individual idea like a person's There's no way you're going to get a real, unique, individual point of view if you have so many people tweaking and adjusting and restricting and demanding that a person behave a certain way or dress a certain way or stay to a certain topic.
You have to keep within these very clearly defined parameters.
But one of the reasons why that was a disaster was because Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake decided to pull Janet's booby out on TV. Oh, and so they cracked down and started being very PC. Oh, and everything.
They were terrified of everything.
But that's...
Also, you have a bunch of people, again, that aren't comedians, they don't know what's funny, and they're trying to impose their idea of what's funny and what's not.
You have a lot of that on television now.
You have a lot of these people that aren't necessarily comedians, but they might be like super progressive, social justice warrior types, and now they're trying to push that kind of comedy as being what everybody likes.
And then that shit gets to...
You know, Jamie's hometown of Columbus, Ohio, and these people are like, what the fuck are you feeding me?
He's a perfect example, too, because for the longest time, I was trying to tell people, for the longest time, like I had agents, former agents of mine, that would tell me, you've got to stop working with that guy.
He might not be the very best joke writer of all time, but in terms of being the funniest, I think he's the funniest person that's ever lived.
I've seen everybody.
I've seen almost everybody either live or on video.
I don't think anybody's ever been funnier than Joey.
I've seen Joey some nights at the Ice House or some nights at the Comedy Store hit levels of ridiculousness.
I don't think I've seen anybody in his whole thing.
I mean, he's a goddamn human cartoon.
His voice, his cartoon, the way he looks, the shit he says, the way he moves.
And forever, they were telling me that that guy's not funny, this is not good, this guy can't work, and he wasn't getting work other than character work in movies.
But then the internet came along, and then people got to know him on podcasts.
And you knew that everybody who was telling you that was working backwards from their conclusion.
That they had this idea in their mind of what somebody who's popular is supposed to be, and he didn't fit that mold because he's too rough around the edges and he curses too much and he talks about eating ass and all that shit.
And then you knew, no, I know innately, I look at this guy and he touches something in me, so I know this is going to connect with other people.
And I'm gonna direct it and produce it and the whole thing and just...
Have someone edit it and just put it together and just make the ultimate Joey Diaz comedy special so people could know and I'm we're gonna do a shitload of shows too because that's the other thing like When a comic has to do one show, ready?
Here, Kyle, this is your one moment to be funny.
And it's going to be seen forever.
It's like you smoking pot and realizing millions of people are talking.
Yeah, exactly.
That's sort of what it's like for a comic to do a special.
So you do one, you get it in the can, you feel loose, then you get that second one, you're like, oh, we got it.
And then you do the third one, you're like, now we really got it.
And then you do the fourth one.
That fourth one is generally like a real comedy show.
Well, the evolution of stuff is interesting, because it's almost impossible to start something and just get it.
Like, it requires a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of cultivation, a lot of attention, and, you know, it's that book, I forget who wrote it, but the idea of you have to do something for 10,000 hours or whatever the fuck it is.
What I say is even if, let's say you don't get there with whatever you're trying to do, you're definitely going to be better after those 10,000 hours.
And also, you might learn a lot about yourself and a lot about what you're capable of and a lot about dedication and discipline if you just stick with something.
And I've always said, you know, people like to shit on one-dimensional people and act like, you know, you're not supposed to do that.
You're supposed to be well-rounded and this and that.
But, you know, again, to bring up Tiger Woods, how the fuck do you think he got good at golf?
And he was able to find something that he got so fucking good at and create meaning in his life and also use that to develop different parts of your personality.
And it's...
I'm in favor of people doing whatever they think...
Suits their creative pursuits.
Don't feel bad if you're somebody whose all I do is this one fucking thing.
But there's so much that goes into it, and if you care enough to look at all the nuances of it and to really get into the specifics of it, then you can create something that has meaning to you and really can develop you as a person.
Yeah, the Shokunin definition said, like, the definition of tradesman isn't good enough, but there's more deeper meaning when you get into, like, the Japanese culture.
I actually think that this topic that we're talking about right now, this is one of the main reasons why Jordan Peterson got very popular.
Is because Jordan Peterson, he talks a lot about stuff that other people take for granted about self-improvement and like getting your own shit together.
And so that was like a market that was waiting to be served for so long where people wanted to have a little bit of direction and structure and framework as to how do I go about doing that.
Or if I said something I know that could be a bit, said something ridiculous, well, I'll have to go back and sort of mine it.
Yeah, I'll do that.
Or, you know, if some people say something that's really intense, like the David Goggins podcast, I plan on listening to that one again because it was so inspirational.
There's something about guys like him that are very, very valuable to us.
And I think people get real cynical about the idea of inspiration because there's so many ridiculous, like, not to single out girls because there's guys who do it too, but there's some funny shit about girls who just stick their butt out on Instagram and they have all these, like, motivational quotes.
Well, you know, Corin and I were talking about it before.
It's amazing how many Kim Kardashian clones exist now.
I mean, and even in her own family, I don't know all the names of them, but one of the younger ones, it's like she went to the plastic surgeon and she was like, I want to look like Kim.
Yeah, that's actually him with his boner, because he was this really frail, dorky guy, and he's got this image of this woman who just looks like a tank.
She has these giant muscle legs and big boobs, but not like ridiculous stripper boobs, but more like just super alpha DNA female boobs.
Did you hear about, I read an article about how somebody was like, I know I'm supposed to have a hand here, but it feels so fucking foreign that, and there's been multiple recorded cases of this, where they will shove their fucking hand in dry ice so that they can get it amputated, so that afterwards they can say, look, I'm free, I finally feel normal.
And they say that to them it feels like, if I had a fucking third hand just growing out of here, I'd feel like that shit doesn't belong.
Right.
There are some people where they feel like their hand doesn't fucking belong.
And what that shows is like the variation in human psychology is so fucking broad that it's scary because when you really digest that that exists, you also can understand how, well, there's monsters out there too who want to fucking massacre people and they dream about that shit and that's how they get their rocks off.
There's so many different paths that thoughts can go down, and there's so many different weird pathologies that the mind is capable of.
But the idea that you would think that you're supposed to be handicapped, and you're not handicapped, so you want to chop off a foot or something like that.
It's really...
I mean, it's not common.
I shouldn't say it's common, but it's definitely documented.
If somebody's transgender and they want the surgery, and let's say they're either in the military or they're in prison or something like that, is that something that you think should be provided for them or no?
But there's also people that identify with being a six-year-old girl.
I mean, there's been documented cases where people identify as being much younger than they are and they think they should be able to have sex with young kids.
As a white male, let's say I walk outside and I'm forced every time I go outside to wear a fucking wig and lipstick and high heels and a fucking dress.
The first point you made, which is, hey, maybe they were just born with the wrong programming, that they're born biologically male, but they really feel like they're a woman or vice versa.
So if that's the case, and it's basically like torture for them to not...
Be the other thing.
Well, then I kind of understand that, and I'm in favor of them being able to get that surgery.
Where they lose me, not transgender people, but where I get lost in this whole conversation is like the gender fluidity one.
Like, I was a male, now I'm a woman, and now I'm a man again, and then I'm a woman again, and then I'm a man again.
Well, isn't it what we were talking about earlier when we were talking about left-wing people versus right-wing people that in the term left-wing people, anybody can join.
And you're going to get people like the green-haired people that were...
Disrupting Heather Hying's speech because she was saying there's a difference between men and women.
You're going to get those nutty fuckers and then you're going to get people that are just reasonable people that happen to be progressive.
You're going to get that with gender fluidity.
You're going to get that with people that are transgender.
You're going to get that with people that are...
You're just going to get a wide variety.
It's very difficult to nail things down and decide.
But for everybody who looks at that and then gets turned off to that and says, you know what, I align more with the right wing because of that culture stuff, I get that feeling over the culture issues.
But again, the point that I would make to them is, just don't forget that...
Right.
and what we should implement in order to fix the country.
And on those issues, like we were talking about earlier, pretty reliably left-wing, and the polls show that the American people actually lean in that direction.
So if you focus on those issues, the economic issues, the substantive issues that change people's lives, lives, then, you know, I think that one can look at the culture issues as almost like a diversion because it really is a gateway to other ideas that I think are terrible.
So I think the idea of people on the left calling out that goofiness is a good thing so that you can redirect them and be like, "Well, this is what I actually stand for.
This is what people who are on the left and want to improve people's lives really want to fight for.
And that's where you get the gateway to the right, because people go, if that's what you're going to tell me represents the left, then go fuck yourself, because you're just not being, you're not telling the truth.
Well, I think when it comes to the transgender thing, too, you need to be open to All avenues of this discussion.
And one thing that I think we need to be open to, we need to think very carefully about why it is that someone needs surgery to be themselves.
Why it is that someone needs exogenous hormones that aren't native to their biology to be themselves.
Like someone who wants to take estrogen as born a male.
If you feel that you're a woman, or you feel that you're in the wrong body, Does it make sense that nature wants you to get surgery?
Does it make sense that nature wants you to take hormones that don't exist in your body?
This is a rational area of contention and discussion.
This is something that people should talk about.
Is forced to wear lipstick and high heels and makeup and walking down the street but that's not who you are, wouldn't that frustrate you?
Yes, it would.
But it doesn't necessarily conversely work where you are walking down the street without lipstick and high heels and makeup and you're saying, that's what I'm supposed to have.
Well, no, because that's not real.
Like, lipstick is something you choose to apply.
High heels are something you choose to wear.
No one's forcing you to not have those things on.
So you saying that those things are what you really are.
Well, no, you're adding those things to you.
What you really are is you.
No makeup, naked, wake up in the morning, take off your clothes.
That's who the fuck you really are.
If you say that you should have the right to wear makeup and the right to wear lip, of course.
You should have the right to get your face tattooed like a Maori.
You should have the right to do whatever the fuck you want.
But that that's who you really are.
That that's somehow your true self.
There might be an underlying psychological issue there that's relevant.
And to discuss that puts you in this category of being transphobic or insensitive or right-wing.
I don't think that's accurate or fair.
Because I think this is a real weird issue.
It's very weird.
And I think the only people that truly understand it are the people that are going through it themselves.
The people that actually have it.
And we can call upon those people to explain it to us, but you get a broad spectrum of answers from those people as well.
And he makes a lot of really good points about, like, what is it that's happening in your life?
Sure.
Is it your situation with your relationship, your career, your life, your health?
All these different things need to be taken into consideration instead of just putting some duct tape over it in the term of these SSRIs and all these different psych medications that they're handing out just as easy as they're handing out OxyContin.
So let's say everybody has all their ducks in a row, and they're exercising, they're eating healthy, they're doing everything by the book, and if you look at it on paper, you're supposed to go, yes, that person should be healthy.
And what's, oh, what the fuck's her name?
Oh, Cara Santa Maria, who you've had on the podcast before, and she talks about how, listen, I was depressed, and they tried a whole bunch of different antidepressants, They finally got me on one that worked.
And then she says, like, listen, I want people to understand.
You need to look at this like treatment.
Look at it like, you know, hey, I've got a fucking disease and they've got to give me antibiotics in order to feel better.
The problem with that is real scientists and doctors disagree with that.
And I don't know if she exhausted every other possibility.
And Cara, she worships at the throne of science.
And she thinks that this is the way to handle it.
And she might be right.
It also might be possible that if she had rigorous exercise on a daily basis, cleaned up her diet, and did a bunch of other things, that maybe that would be just as effective, if not more.
But I think that automatically assuming that this blanket statement called depression, which could be, what does that even mean?
You're not happy with your station in life.
What does that mean?
You're not happy with your body.
What does that mean?
I don't know what it means.
I mean, you tell me that you have it, you know what it is when you have it, but how do you know that what you have is the same as what that guy has, or what she has, or what other people have?
We don't know.
But what we do know is, the human body reacts in very different ways when it's well fed, with nutrients, And when you exercise on a daily basis, you flood your body with the natural endorphins that come from that exercise.
When you surround yourself with a loving community, when you engage in things that are rewarding to you, all these things have a very positive effect on the way your mind works as well as the way your body feels.
The way your body feels has a positive result on the way your mind works.
To think of either one, of being independent of each other, I think is ignorant.
So if you're making the point that they're over-prescribed and people rely on them too much and it's part of the culture in a negative way, totally agree with you.
If we look at the example of, say, paranoid schizophrenia, where it's somebody who literally sees shit that's not there and it's a genuine psychological disorder where they need a very powerful drug like Seroquel or something like that.
Right, right.
So, in the case of transgenderism, what if it's more analogous to a mental state that's as real as that?
I don't know, but then this gets back to the point you made about the personal freedom angle of it, where they say, you know what, I'm going to do this and this is what I want to do.
I definitely think they should have personal freedom to do it, just like they think they should have personal freedom to get their fucking nose pierced and do whatever you want to do.
Well, it's certainly blurry, because it's the same thing.
It's the same thing in terms of you don't like your physical state, and you want someone to change it.
And if you say you would be happy if you had D cups, but you have A cups, and you're convinced this is the key to your happiness, how is that any different than a person, and you could get mad at me all you want, but we're talking about the physical state.
Like, how can you say that the only way to fix this, or how could you not offer that up as a possible avenue that these people can pursue it?
If there's any surgery that can help you and you want other people to pay for that surgery, just because it pertains to gender doesn't mean we have to automatically acquiesce.
I don't think that's rational.
And when it comes to breasts or other various elective surgeries, I strongly feel that people should pay for those themselves.
I'm just saying, if that is the case where, and by the way, I haven't read the science on this, but I'm sure there has been science on this, and they've answered the question as to whether or not doing that surgery is effective.
Suicide rates pre-post-transgender sexual reassignment operations.
I am pretty sure that it's very similar, that it doesn't change.
And then there's also...
Is it causation versus correlation, right?
Is it because they were depressed, because they were in the wrong body that led them down this road, and now here they are, and they just can't get past it?
Even after they have the surgery, they're still bummed out.
They're not accepted by society.
As a woman, even if they become a trans woman, they're still not accepted by society.
And could that be changed by us being more open-minded and loving and caring and accepting?
So a lot of people in the trans community were like, you know what, fuck her, because she was out there arguing, I forget, it was gay marriage was one of them.
That's true, but the National Center for Transgender Equality reported in 2014 that 40% of the people who identify as transgender have attempted suicide.
Speaking of people who would be a better example and a better face of the transgender movement, Brianna Westbrook is a candidate who's running for office.
And there's actually a special election today, and she's running for Congress.
And she's really inspirational.
I know about her because I founded Justice Democrats, which was a group that was going to primary corporate Democrats and run candidates who take no corporate PAC money.
And she's one of the candidates.
And what you find is, the people who are really respectful are the people who, like, she happens to be transgender, but she's not putting that front and center.
Well, going back to Heather Hying and Eric Weinstein, there was an article that I believe Brett Weinstein put up on his Twitter yesterday, or maybe it was Heather.
But they were discussing this real problem with kids who are really young where it becomes a trendy thing to think that they're in the wrong gender and then they get reinforcement from their very progressive friends who also get excited about this idea and then to intervene surgically or chemically when your body's still in development.
You're 13 or whatever the fuck you are.
You don't know what you are yet.
And you should be able to give yourself a chance to grow and develop.
But there's a lot of people that disagree, including people that are already transgender, that, in my mind, they're probably more supportive of it because they want more people to do it.
Like, Steven Crowder had this weird thing where he and Jared, that guy that he does his show with, went to this meeting and they were talking about, they just did this undercover film thing, where they were talking about their six-year-old.
Like, is that too young to transition him?
And they're like, no.
Matter of fact, studies show that it's a good time to do it.
And that you could transition back if he changes his mind.
And he was like, what the fuck are you talking about?
No, you can't.
You're using hormone blockers in a kid.
You're going to radically affect the way that kid develops as a grown adult.
Well, I think people should be allowed to have sex with each other when they like it.
Like, I think kids should be able to give each other the massage.
A 17-year-old boy and a 17-year-old girl should be able to make out, and they should be able to fuck if they want to.
I think it's our job to responsibly educate them about birth control and about consent and about...
And also, you know, there's...
Different styles of parenting.
Some people grow up in horrible households where the dad's misogynist, there's no mom, and this kid's gonna have a fucked up idea what women are.
Same could be said about women or girls who grow up with a hateful mother who hates men.
I mean, you have a lot of weird shit that you have to get over as you become an adult, as you move out of the nest and you become your own person, establish your own ideas based on your life experiences and education, what you've learned from all the other people that you've interacted I mean, it's not a hard, fast rule, but I think there's a big difference between that and voting on what happens with our future, what happens with war, what happens with...
There's so many things that a 16-year-old kid is just not ready for.
But anytime you have a system where you say, ah, well, you're an idiot so you can't vote, it's always inevitably just flipped back to be used against the poor in society.
And then, you know, I think there were charges of Bush use cocaine, and then Obama said he did a little bit of cocaine.
Yeah.
So what drives me fucking crazy is that you have these guys who did all these things, they know damn well that what they did at the time was just experimentation, there was nothing morally wrong about it, and now we have a system where we lock up fucking thousands of people, millions of people over the same shit?
Meanwhile, they became president when they did that?
Now, to Obama's credit, towards the end of his time in office, he started doing pardons and commutations of those sentences.
But the thing that drives me crazy, again, to get back to one of my main points here, is I hate the fucking incrementalism and gradualism moving towards the thing that we all know is the right answer.
We all know the right answer is to legalize it and fucking let every single non-violent drug offender out of prison and fucking apologize to him.
Not only that, the hypocritical nature of having all this coincide with the pharmaceutical industry selling opioids that are killing people at a radical rate.
I remember she passed away a while ago, but I would go to her place and look at her fucking medicine thing.
There were 70 different kinds of pills.
I was like, holy fuck, she's getting zonked out of her mind on a regular basis.
That's the whole point of it.
And I'm not even begrudging an older person who's like, fuck it, I'm checking out, let's just give me all the pills you want.
But my point is, if that's going to be the mentality for them, why the fuck would you lock up poor people for smoking weed or doing cocaine or whatever the case is?
Yeah, I don't think anybody could rationally argue that.
I mean, it just seems at this stage of the game, especially when it comes to things that are non-toxic or non-fatal, things like marijuana or kratom, there's no argument against it.
It doesn't make any sense.
Especially when you could go right down the street, you could go to the CVS and buy enough liquor to kill yourself instantly.
Yeah, there's a table over there with a big bottle of Gentleman's Jack, there's a couple of bottles of whiskey, there's some whiskey from some place in Bakersfield, and a big jug of wine.
Executive Billiards, if you walked out of Executive and take a right in White Plains, Nicky's was on the right-hand side, but I heard Nicky's burnt down.
So, speaking of your crazy stories about at Executive Billiards and all the crazy characters you met there, my friend Coren and I, when we were in high school, we would go play poker at these basically underground spots in New Rochelle, and they were either...
Gambling should be fucking legal, because it's illegal, push it underground, now those guys run it, and then people get their fucking hands chopped off.
I've never seen a ghost there, but I've felt weird.
Like I said, I've gone into the main room when it's dark at night, and I've gone by myself, and I shit my pants.
I gotta get out of here.
But I definitely believe people were murdered there.
There used to be a tunnel that would go from the back of the comedy store all the way up to Crest Hill, which is a street above the comedy store that the comedy store used to own.
I think they bought the two of them together.
And it was like a tunnel where they'd take booze and dead people and shit and fucking scoot them up there and throw them in the back of a trunk.
I don't know.
It's a fun thing to talk about.
When you look at all those TV shows that haunted Hollywood, the comedy store is very high on the list.
But I don't, like, how the fuck do network executives approve shows where it's like the fucking Long Island Medium or some shit, and it's like they pretend to talk to the dead?
How the fuck are you gonna put that on daytime TV like it's not complete and utter horse shit?
Well, that was one of the problems that happened when I was doing that sci-fi show, the Joe Rogan Questions Everything show.
They wanted to make sure that I wasn't out to debunk a lot of the shows that they would have on their network.
And I go, look, I just want to find out what's going on.
I go, some of it's probably real.
I want it to be real.
Yeah.
That was an eye-opening experience.
Doing that show was very eye-opening because I realized what kind of people are really into these things.
They're just whimsical, hopeful people that don't have much going on.
They want it to be real that there's a 10-foot-tall furry man living in the forest or that aliens come down and suck people out of their beds and bring them through walls in the middle of the night and all that shit.
No, he thinks that most of what you see, according to him.
But see, Alex, he goes with the weather a little bit, too.
He thinks most of what you see is just condensation trails that happen when you have a jet engine and you have the cold air and condensation in the atmosphere.
That's what they are.
I mean, they're artificial clouds that are created by a jet engine passing through the air.
That's what they are.
You can do it over and over again.
You could do it right now.
The idea that they're spraying something and that something happens to have aluminum and barium in it, but it also looks exactly like a cloud.
No, that's moisture.
The reason why it looks like a cloud is because it's a fucking cloud.
And one of the things that I said on the chemtrail thing, I go, you want to talk about real chemtrails?
Here's the real chemtrail.
They're burning gasoline in the sky above your head every day to the tune of thousands of flights.
You're not concentrating on that.
Instead, you're concentrating on the natural reaction of jet engines and moisture in the air.
I don't get, because there's a thing that people do where it's almost like they're trying to find the worst possible fucking argument, and then that's the part of it that they get obsessed with.
And this goes back to the thing about Trump, where I told you on CNN, all they did for an hour and a fucking half was talk about Russia.
And it's like, I'm sitting there going, I just covered a story on my show last week about how the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a guy named Mick Mulvaney.
He took over $50,000 from the predatory payday loan industry.
Donald Trump at his inauguration took over a million dollars from the predatory payday loan industry.
They just scrapped the rules.
That we're supposed to clean up that industry.
And now they're letting them charge 950% interest.
Anybody who says he's not has no fucking idea what this guy's been into.
There's evidence he did deals with the mafia.
He has a hotel in Panama, which was laundering drug money.
So, do I think he's a criminal?
Yes.
Do I think he did money laundering?
Yes.
Would it be good if Mueller somehow got him on these things?
Of course it would be.
But the idea that he's a Manchurian candidate or he did treason is so ridiculous that it makes me, a guy who's massively anti-Trump, scoff and get really angry when people try to push that narrative.
And here's the thing.
It's an open legal question as to whether or not you can indict a sitting president.
Usually what has to happen is you have to impeach a sitting president.
Well, right now Congress is overwhelmingly Republican.
You know who's not gonna fucking impeach Donald Trump?
Even if they prove the worst case scenario that he's some sort of Manchurian candidate, the Republicans are not gonna fucking impeach him.
So at the end of the day, when the Democrats focus on this ad nauseum, the reason they're doing that is because it's something that...
They feel comfortable and safe talking about because they don't have to talk about Medicare for All or free college or a living wage or getting the corporate money out of politics or ending the fucking wars which they also support.
So they're not talking about real issues and they're focusing on the fake scandal and sensationalism because they think it will score them cheap points with the electorate and it won't and they think there's an endgame here and there's not.
So Flynn is a guy, he got, what's his face, Mueller went after Flynn, and it was proven that Flynn took $500,000 from the Turkish government, and in return for that, he pushed the Trump administration to not arm the Kurds who are fighting ISIS. And the reason why is because Turkey hates the Kurds, and they don't want us to arm the Kurds.
So in other words, Michael Flynn was doing the bidding of the Turkish government and pushing their influence in our government, and he didn't register as a foreign agent in the process.
So, exactly.
So he's doing the bidding of the Turkish government and not disclosing that.
And you have to register as a foreign agent if you're going to take that money and you're going to do that.
Well, that's the open question as to whether or not, at some point along the way, whether it's with Russia or with other countries, by the way, nobody talks about the fact that Trump registered eight new businesses in Saudi Arabia when he was on the campaign trail, and then he just gave them over a $100 billion weapons deal.
He also took $270,000 from top Saudi officials at his hotel when he was president-elect, and then again, he gave them over a $100 billion weapons deal.
The case of Israel, Jared Kushner...
Has, you know, millions of dollars from Israeli banks.
And then lo and behold, when Donald Trump was president-elect, they tried to push the UN to not condemn Israel over their illegal settlements.
So you have his entire administration is just a grab bag of corruption and foreign influence.
But it's foreign influence across the board, and it's influence also from corporations.
But again, people are not focusing on the corporations, and they're not focusing on the other countries that they're corrupt with, because they're hyper-focusing on the Russia thing.
And at the end of the day, they want to impeach Trump over Russia.
But, like I said, it's gonna be hard to prove, and then it's an open question if you can indict...
I don't think you can indict a sitting president, you have to impeach.
They're not gonna fucking impeach.
So really, this is Democrats sniffing their own farts and acting like they're doing something important when they're really not.
And the only there there, in my opinion, is money laundering.
He's a corrupt businessman, but he's not some sort of Putin puppet, because he's actually done many policies that are against Putin.
So, for example, he armed Ukrainian rebels who are fighting Russia right now.
You don't arm people who are fighting Russia if you're their fucking puppet.
You know, he also is bombing Syria, and we're staying indefinitely in Syria.
They just announced that recently.
You don't...
The Syrian government, that's one of Putin's top allies.
You're not going to permanently occupy their country and try to fight that government if you're in bed.
They're doing a NATO build-up on Russia's border right now.
So, if you're Putin's puppet, you don't have a military build-up on his border.
There was just a story the other day about how now the U.S., our military is sending our ships...
To the Black Sea.
Right on Russia's fucking border.
So it's military escalation.
And that's another part of this that pisses me off, is that if the Democrats really wanted to resist Trump, Resist that!
See, I don't want to send our fucking military to get into a standoff with Russia.
I don't want to bomb fucking Syria and permanently occupy it.
This is how the Democrats should be resisting.
They should be resisting Trump from a left-wing position and from an anti-interventionist position.
But instead, everything you hear from the Democrats is, he's under Putin's thumb and he needs to make sure that he's even harder on Putin and he does more sanctions against Putin and he escalates further with Russia.
Listen man, they're in nuclear armed power.
Do you wanna fucking get into a confrontation with a nuclear armed power?
We're sitting here living our lives just going about our business.
And we're- this is- I mean, this is crazy.
We're rolling the dice and we're playing a game of chicken with Vladimir Putin.
I think it's driven from the top down, from the establishment media down, from the Democrats down, because again, if you talk to regular people, They're fucking hurting.
Wages have been stagnant since 1980. There's 30 million people that don't have healthcare.
In Trump's first year in office, 3 million more people lost healthcare because he did all these executive orders that basically took a hatchet to Obamacare.
So you have all these people who are really hurting.
They care about their wages.
They care about, you know, not being saddled with over a trillion dollars in student loan debt.
This is the shit regular people care about.
So when they turn on CNN and they see Russia, Russia, Russia, even if you don't like Trump, I despise Trump with every fiber of my fucking being, but when I see this, I roll my fucking eyes.
And then they have the nerve to say, oh, Trump won't shut up about Russia.
You were talking about it all day, and he responded to it, and because he responds to it, you're like, oh, there he goes again with Russia.
He has a fucking chance, because if the Democrats run Kamala Harris, if they run Cory Booker, or any of the other corporatists, he can win, because he's gonna go right back into his tap dance about being a populist and helping people, and guess what?
In the first few years of his tax bill, regular people did get a tax cut.
So he's going to say, look at your tax bill.
I just gave you an extra thousand dollars this year.
Who do you want to vote for?
And so there is an argument that he's going to make to the people.
And if you don't have somebody like Bernie Sanders or Bernie Sanders talking about the issues that matter to people, well then of course he can fucking win again.
Listen, I was laughed at when I said, if it's Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, he can win.