Oct. 30, 2019 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:19:49
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Boom! | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Hello, Kyle. | ||
| Hey, man. | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| What's going on, buddy? | ||
| Good to see you again. | ||
| Good to see you in your wonderful pink shirt. | ||
| Yeah, it's confident, right? | ||
| Pink and gray. | ||
| It's like you're confident. | ||
| You got a lot of shit going on. | ||
| Yeah, the lowdown on this, though, is I was supposed to get this dry-cleaned. | ||
| When I was in Tennessee for Politicon, which was just a few days ago, and then even when I got here, I was like, I gotta get this dry clean, go on Rogan's show. | ||
| Of course I didn't, but it doesn't look too wrinkly. | ||
| It looks good. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thanks, man. | |
| It looks very good. | ||
| Appreciate it. | ||
| So tell me what you were saying right when I walked in. | ||
| I said, hold this thought. | ||
| You were saying that Chelsea Manning is locked up and they're charging her $1,000 a day? | ||
| Yeah, Chelsea Manning is locked up right now because they wanted her to say more stuff against Julian Assange. | ||
| She's refusing to do it, and they're fining her. | ||
| I think it's over $1,000 a day. | ||
| Before that, we were talking about Snowden, and that shows you that they do not mess around when they feel like you're uncovering their BS. Yeah. | ||
| Now, what are they trying to get from Julian Assange? | ||
| Like, what do they have on him? | ||
| Well, Julian Assange, there's a couple reasons why they despise him. | ||
| But he has no political home right now, particularly because it used to be Democrats that defended him. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| But then he pissed off the Democrats because he leaked on the DNC and he showed what was going on with Hillary behind the scenes and how the primary was basically rigged against Bernie Sanders. | ||
| So Democrats used to like him, now Democrats hate him. | ||
| And Trump used to like him when he was getting this information on Hillary. | ||
| But they hate him as well because Trump has basically been convinced by the people around him in the White House that this guy is dangerous because this guy basically exposed U.S. war crimes. | ||
| That's why they're coming after him, because he released a video which showed that we were killing civilians. | ||
| And then we circled back around and did what's called a double tap where we killed the first responders. | ||
| And the idea at the time was, oh, it's OK. | ||
| We're going after Al Qaeda. | ||
| But come to find out that wasn't Al Qaeda. | ||
| They were innocent civilians. | ||
| And then they were the medics that came afterwards. | ||
| And so Julian Assange thought, hey, listen, this is not something we should be doing. | ||
| And the American people deserve to know about this. | ||
| This shouldn't be top secret. | ||
| This is a war crime. | ||
| And so he released that, and then that's why they were coming after him and throwing the book at him because, you know, just like with Mike Revell previously, Daniel Ellsberg actually is who I'm thinking of, just like with Daniel Ellsberg when he showed what we were doing in Vietnam and how we were killing civilians. | ||
| They do not want you to expose their war crimes. | ||
| They will throw the book at you and act like you're a spy, you're working for a foreign country, you're a traitor, because they want to keep that stuff under wraps because it really embarrasses them and it really shows what U.S. Empire is doing around the world. | ||
| That was that collateral murder video? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| What's really bizarre about this is how no one speaks out against it. | ||
| No one. | ||
| No one on the right, no one on the left. | ||
| It's just this thing now. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It doesn't have a home. | ||
| Yeah, well, unfortunately, what you see is it becomes very partisan. | ||
| So when Obama is doing drone strikes and killing 90% innocent people, unfortunately, partisan Democrats don't talk about it. | ||
| Now that Trump has increased drone strikes by 432% over Obama, with still a tremendously high civilian death rate, now, you know, maybe some Democrats will talk about it, but Republicans certainly don't talk about it. | ||
| 432% over Obama? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And Obama was a radical acceleration of the Bush administration's drone policy. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And Trump has increased it even more. | ||
| And see, that's the problem is, people get mad now that Trump is at the helm of this stuff, but all of these things now, it's precedent. | ||
| He's not doing anything that wasn't established beforehand. | ||
| Can I ask you this, though, when you say Trump is doing it, who is exactly making the call? | ||
| Do they bring this call to Trump and they say, hey, you know, we're going to bomb Yemen, we're going to do this with drones, and does he have to sign off on each individual attack? | ||
| That's a great question, and the short answer is, I don't know. | ||
| I wouldn't be surprised if Trump was directly involved in some of these instances. | ||
| I know that his first military raid as president that he approved ended up killing a nine-year-old American girl. | ||
| It was Anwar Al-Awlaki's daughter, I believe. | ||
| But I also do think that there is this, what you can call the deep state. | ||
| I know people think that's like a conspiratorial term, but it's really not. | ||
| All that's saying is that the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, these are people who are in these positions of power, and they're there throughout all these different administrations. | ||
| Yeah, Snowden talked about that. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So that's not conspiratorial. | ||
| And so when you have a kill list, and when you have people at the CIA, and the Pentagon, by the way, a lot of them are calling the shots. | ||
| And maybe they just need an okay every now and then from President Trump. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, I think that there's, it's not just one person making all the decisions. | ||
| I think that the President does play a role. | ||
| But I also think it's generals, I think it's people at the CIA. And I think it's this complex web of people who are all kind of involved in this thing that ends up being drastically negative. | ||
| Yeah, drastically negative, to put it mildly, right? | ||
| When you're talking about 90% civilian casualties with drone strikes, that's such a disturbing thing that this continues, that no one says, hey, this is grossly ineffective and horrific in its consequences, you know? | ||
| Yeah, what they do is, you know, they give everybody a false choice. | ||
| They make it seem like, hey, listen, man, if we're not doing these all-out ground invasions and we're not doing, like, war-war with boots on the ground, well, what do you want us to do? | ||
| Like, there are bad people out there. | ||
| We've got to go after these bad people. | ||
| So this is, like, the soft power option, if you will. | ||
| And my response to that has always been... | ||
| Yeah, but you do have to follow the Constitution, and the way our system is supposed to work is you can't have the President just declare war and just go and do it. | ||
| Congress has to approve war. | ||
| So if you wanted to do a drone war, okay, but you got to get a declaration of war, tell me exactly which countries you're going to be doing the bombing in, why you're doing the bombing in those countries, and get an approval through Congress. | ||
| So if you were to come to me and say, hey man, there's an Al-Qaeda cell that's very active in Pakistan or whatever, so we want to approve a drone war, Have Congress vote on it, see what happens, and then move from there. | ||
| But what we're doing now is, it's just baked into the cake that we violate U.S. law, we violate the Constitution, and we violate international law with all these bombings. | ||
| Because as of right now, we're bombing at least eight different countries, and we also have a shadow war going on in Africa. | ||
| We do? | ||
| We do, absolutely. | ||
| What's the shadow war in Africa? | ||
| So the Intercept reported on this, I don't know as much on this off the top of my head, but Jamie, if you wouldn't mind please pulling up an article from the Intercept. | ||
| There's a shadow war going on in Africa where we're building military bases all over Africa, and the idea is I think that we have these bases where the drones fly out of and they can go to the Middle East and they can bomb there. | ||
| Is this also in response to the fact that China is essentially moving into large parts of Africa to extract minerals and natural resources? | ||
| Yes, and this is actually super interesting because the China thing, they're doing this Belt and Road Initiative. | ||
| And basically, this is like their version of empire through debt. | ||
| Okay, so what they do is they'll go into, like they just made a deal with Iraq. | ||
| We spent trillions of dollars in Iraq, did an illegal and offensive war. | ||
| China swoops in and they go, hey, listen... | ||
| What we want to do is help you guys. | ||
| We want to build your infrastructure up. | ||
| We want to make your country beautiful. | ||
| So if you do a deal with us, we're going to build all the infrastructure with you. | ||
| We'll give you credit. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And then what happens? | ||
| They turn around and they say, okay, well then you can get a certain percentage of our oil sales or whatever it might be. | ||
| And it's funny because there's been this evolution when it comes to empires. | ||
| So it used to be back in the day, you just kind of... | ||
| Go up on somebody's shores and say, mine, I'm taking it, and you do it by force. | ||
| Then the U.S. evolved from that, and what the U.S. does is it's this cute little trick where we say, no, no, no, we're not going to control you directly. | ||
| What we will do is take somebody from your native land, prop them up as a dictator, And then they will allow U.S. corporate interests to go in there and kind of exploit the natural resources. | ||
| But it's intelligent because you're saying, no, no, we're not in there ourselves, like the British did in India, for example, where they just showed up and they're like, it's ours. | ||
| There was a British presence there very clearly. | ||
| We have people from their native lands take control, but we exploit stuff from them and extract stuff from them. | ||
| So China took that one step further, where it's like, okay, no, we're actually going to provide you with You know, material well-being. | ||
| We're going to give you a solid infrastructure. | ||
| And then it's like, you look at it more like a business deal than an expansion of empire. | ||
| And honestly, this is one of the weird benefits of having an authoritarian-like system like China does, is they can make a decision on a dime. | ||
| You could just have the Communist Party just go, yeah, we'll do this because this is the best way to do it. | ||
| And there can be no... | ||
| Nobody can fire back and say, I don't agree with that. | ||
| Let's stop it. | ||
| Here, the way Western democracies work, it's almost like... | ||
| You have this certain slowness that's built into the process because there's so many checks and balances. | ||
| And in many ways that's a good thing. | ||
| You want a system like that, but in many ways it provides a strategic disadvantage, at least when you're talking about imperialism. | ||
| So here's the article from The Intercept. | ||
| U.S. Special Operations numbers surge in Africa's shadow wars. | ||
| The most dramatic growth in deployment of American elite troops of any region of the globe over the past decade, according to newly released numbers, Africa. | ||
| It says, Never hear about it, never been a vote on it, they just do it. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It's scary. | ||
| It's scary the way that it works. | ||
| How you really do have a deep state, if you will, kind of making decisions, and the president just kind of goes along with it. | ||
| And we're all sitting around here acting like, hey man, maybe instead of doing that, we could actually, I don't know, use some of our tax dollars to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, which gets a grade of D+. But are they doing it because they see a threat? | ||
| Like exclusive, U.S. has more military operations in Africa than the Middle East. | ||
|
unidentified
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Whoa. | |
| Now, is it possible because they see a threat? | ||
| I think that's the rationalization that they use, but I think it has more to do with power and control. | ||
| And when you're the world's sole superpower, you don't want to cede that ground to anybody else. | ||
| And so the benefits that come along with that, in their mind, is they can rationalize jacking natural resources from all over the world by saying, no, listen, you'd rather have us in this position than you would Russia, than you would China. | ||
| So it's really like this... | ||
| The idea is, in their own minds, it's like, we're a benevolent superpower that's only doing this to keep the world order. | ||
| Well, Mike Baker tried to explain Huawei to me. | ||
| Mike Baker from the CIA. One of the things that he was explaining, he said, you have to realize that there is no such thing as... | ||
| Industry independent of government in China. | ||
| If you have something like Huawei, if you have a giant corporation, they are inexorably connected to the Chinese government. | ||
| And the moves they make are not necessarily designed for, you know, the infinite growth paradigm. | ||
| This idea that we have in the United States with corporations are beholding the stockholders or just trying to make money. | ||
| That's not what they're doing over there. | ||
| They have a long game. | ||
| And the long game involves information, it involves espionage, it involves stealing trade secrets and patents from other companies. | ||
| And so when they're selling them these modems, they've got built-in third party options. | ||
| So the third party, meaning China, can extract information. | ||
| So if someone has this modem and they're using this modem to send information to someone in Beirut, China can also get that information. | ||
| Yeah, they do a lot of cyber. | ||
| I mean, that's been a thing that's been known for a long time, that they'll jack patents and intellectual property, and they have this whole economy that's kind of thriving off technology that's made elsewhere. | ||
| That's certainly an issue. | ||
| But also, I would argue that it's probably the case with the U.S., too, that this kind of distinction between Corporations in the state is largely a veneer because you have such control of our political process because of big money from corporations flowing into the system. | ||
| So I think that a lot of these decisions that are made even when it comes to foreign policy are directly in relation to how it will impact those corporations. | ||
| Like the thing that I remember was a light bulb moment for me back in the day when I first learned about it was the banana wars. | ||
| Have you ever heard about this? | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| Back in the day, I think it was in the late 1800s, but don't quote me on that, we just went into South America and started toppling governments because we wanted to jack their bananas. | ||
| And it was literally for, I think, the Chiquita Banana Company that we did that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| Yeah, so when you look at that, you go, Okay, well that kind of distinction between corporation and government is not even really a thing here. | ||
| It's like this veneer that's in between the two, but really it's the powerful moneyed interests and the elites that kind of run everything and they're married at the hip, whether they're in the government or whether they're in corporations. | ||
| What year was this? | ||
| I think this was the late 1890s. | ||
| Again, I'm more than happy to be fact-checked on this, but I remember the first time I read about this, it had to be in college, the Banana Wars. | ||
| I was like, that's insane. | ||
| Kill people for bananas. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Well, how about when you go throughout history and you find out that a lot of the wars were over salt? | ||
| I didn't even know that. | ||
| Oh my god, they killed people for salt. | ||
| It was very important back in the day because they didn't have refrigerators. | ||
| So in order to preserve things and keep them from being infected by bacteria, they would pour salt all over their meat and salt all over their fish, and that's how they preserved things. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You could apparently preserve things for long periods of times when you completely cover them with salt. | ||
| Yeah, so I guess it's just always been a thing that it's like wars over resources. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Now there's a lot about oil, but like... | ||
| We're accustomed to the oil stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| We have been used to that for quite a while. | ||
| And it's interesting because what just happened with Syria and Trump, that was fascinating, is at first he said, oh, we're getting out of Syria, we're getting out of northern Syria. | ||
| Everybody went crazy and said, oh my God, what about the Kurds? | ||
| And then we come to find out like three or four days later that he's like, well, no, we're actually taking these troops from northern Syria to Moving them over into Western Iraq, and they're going to be doing the same thing that they've been doing from Western Iraq, and then Trump had the nerve to go out there and say, and we've secured the oil. | ||
| It's so tremendous. | ||
| We've secured the oil. | ||
| We're not going to make the same mistake like we made in Iraq again. | ||
| And this is something that he had been saying at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, going back for years. | ||
| Every year he'd give a speech. | ||
| And he actually said, like, we should have taken the oil. | ||
| We should have taken the oil in Iraq because we didn't want ISIS to have it. | ||
| And we should have it instead of ISIS. | ||
| And it's like he actually rips the mask off of everything we're doing because he has no filter. | ||
| And it's like, yeah, that was a big part of it. | ||
| But what he's just admitting in front of the world is international law means nothing. | ||
| We don't care about, you know, the proper process. | ||
| We don't care about – like, imagine for a second China did that to us. | ||
| They're like, no big deal or anything. | ||
| but we're just going to go into Texas and we're just going to jack all your oil But don't worry, because it's okay. | ||
| We're allowed to do that because we say we're allowed to do that. | ||
| We're like, what are you talking about? | ||
| But we're going to do that to a sovereign country, Syria, as we pretend like we care so deeply about Syrian civilians and that's why we're there to protect them? | ||
| Like, no, we're there to jack their oil. | ||
| That's what we're trying to do and control the region. | ||
| It's so disturbing when it's that transparent. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But is it better? | ||
| Well, that's what I was just about to say next is that some people make the argument that, well, at least there's no tap dancing bullshit. | ||
| Whereas with all the other presidents, they have this fake holier-than-thou attitude where they really can put a happy face on a disgusting thing like Empire. | ||
| Where Trump is, and I think it's fair to say, he's too stupid to really go through the tap dance. | ||
| And so people are like, hey, there it is. | ||
| It's like, it's right in front of our face. | ||
| But what's interesting about him is he says both things at the same time. | ||
| Like, he has the political instincts enough to know that people think war is generally bad. | ||
| So he always goes out there and he talks about how he thinks war is generally bad. | ||
| And we got to get our troops out of the Middle East. | ||
| I don't know why we're there. | ||
| It's so stupid to do in the first place. | ||
| But when you look at what he's actually doing, it doesn't match his rhetoric. | ||
| So I don't know if you remember this, but like a year or so ago, he tweeted... | ||
| We're getting out of Afghanistan finally after all these years. | ||
| We've been there for 18 years. | ||
| It was terrible. | ||
| We should have never been there in the first place. | ||
| And then we just didn't get out. | ||
| He said that, acted like we were going to do it, and then the generals behind the scenes were like, ha ha, that's a good one. | ||
| And we never got out. | ||
| And then he just stopped talking about it. | ||
| We're still there. | ||
| But he just says it. | ||
| He's like, oh, we're going to get out of Iraq. | ||
| Then he doesn't do it. | ||
| So what happens is he gets... | ||
| It's actually, politically, it comes across sometimes as a positive because nobody follows up with it and the media doesn't do their job and say, wait, we didn't actually get out of there. | ||
| So it comes across as a positive politically because he's still doing the head fakes towards non-intervention which people agree with, but it's business as usual behind the scenes. | ||
| How much time do you think he actually spends on any of these things? | ||
| And if he does spend time... | ||
| How does he have the time to do these interviews? | ||
| How does he have the time to tweet? | ||
| How does he have the time to watch Fox News? | ||
| I mean, I really want to know how much interaction he actually has with his cabinet. | ||
| How much interaction does he actually have with the generals? | ||
| How much interaction? | ||
| That's the dirty little secret, Joe, is that... | ||
| It can't be much. | ||
| It's not, because what he really does is... | ||
| He watches Fox News all day and tweets out their videos. | ||
| And he tweets all day. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| How can you be doing that and also doing what we think you should do? | ||
| Look, I don't have any time. | ||
| And all I do is do podcasts. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's right. | |
| So I watch him and I'm like, this doesn't make any fucking sense. | ||
| No. | ||
| So here's the thing. | ||
| And there was a story that was reported before he became president. | ||
| I think it was after he got the Republican nomination. | ||
| There was this interesting story that it wasn't discussed too much, but I thought it was fascinating because the Trump team apparently approached John Kasich, who's just like kind of a standard establishment Republican. | ||
| He was the governor of maybe in Ohio, but I'm not sure. | ||
| It was one of those states over there. | ||
| But anyway, it was Ohio. | ||
| So he approached John Kasich and basically said to him behind the scenes, hey, listen, man. | ||
| If I end up winning this election, I want you to kind of like be my vice president, run the day-to-day at the White House, dot all the I's, cross all the T's, do all the work like that, and I want to go around the country and keep doing rallies and rile up everybody. | ||
| And get everybody to our side. | ||
| So basically, and this shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody. | ||
| What's that? | ||
| If you win, why do you have to rile everybody up? | ||
| Well, see, he's the first president to never stop campaigning. | ||
| He's always campaigning. | ||
| He's always doing rallies. | ||
| And there's a reason why he's doing that, Joe. | ||
| It's the only thing he loves on this earth. | ||
| It's that and watching Fox News that he loves. | ||
| So that's what he does with all of his time. | ||
| And everything else, yes, he's just... | ||
| See, this is the thing, Joe. | ||
| He took all these deeply establishment figures, Steve Mnuchin of Goldman Sachs, Stephen, I'm forgetting his name, Cohen something, Cohen, Cohen, another guy from Goldman Sachs. | ||
| He had all these just career insiders, brought them into his administration, whether it's with the economy or with foreign policy, John Bolton, deep neoconservative. | ||
| He said he believed in the opposite philosophy, but then he puts John Bolton in power because he wants the system to keep running as it is and run smoothly while he goes around and just... | ||
| You know, makes the name for himself and talks about how amazing and tremendous this country is and what an amazing job we're doing. | ||
| So it's funny because he has two different personas. | ||
| One of them is, I'm going to pretend to be the anti-establishment guy and rally people up nonstop and be a politician and be good at it. | ||
| And then the other thing is, behind the scenes, he's like, guys, just keep everything running and hold it together with duct tape if you have to before I get out of here. | ||
| At the same time, he's acting like the most anti-establishment president of all time when he's on the campaign trail. | ||
| He's also the most deeply pro-establishment candidate or president in terms of what he's actually doing. | ||
| So it's a fascinating dynamic that's going on right now. | ||
| It's a giant hustle. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| It's a giant hustle. | ||
| And listen, man, and other people on the left might disagree with me on this, but I think he's fucking brilliant at it. | ||
| I think he's brilliant at this part of it, where he really does have a way, like, he broke every single political rule that ever existed when he ran for president, and he won. | ||
| So what does that tell you? | ||
| That tells you that the rules are nonsense. | ||
| The problem is, who is he running against? | ||
| I don't think that would have worked if he was running against Obama. | ||
| I think Hillary is such a deeply flawed candidate, and so many people despised her, and during the Me Too era, her creepy fucking husband is just looming in the distance like Nosferatu. | ||
| I mean, how many women have come out and accused that guy of sexual assault and rape, and he's still hovering? | ||
| I mean, he's still around, and that's always going to haunt her. | ||
| She's connected to that guy forever. | ||
| On this topic, there's an amazing story. | ||
| So, during the election... | ||
| Remember when the story broke of Trump on video saying, I grab him by the pussy, I don't even wait, and everybody blew up, and all the mainstream media talking heads were like, oh my god, it's over. | ||
| He's gonna drop out. | ||
| It's over. | ||
| It's done. | ||
| What did Trump do with that next debate? | ||
| This was actually low-key political brilliance. | ||
| Instead of doing what every other politician would have done, which is basically kind of give in a little bit and be like, alright, you got me. | ||
| What he did, he leased a short apology video real quick, got out of the way, then the next night was a debate. | ||
| At the debate show, he brought like eight Bill Clinton accusers, put them in the audience, and then he goes out there on stage and when he's asked the question, the first thing he says is, listen, I'm not proud of what I said. | ||
| It wasn't a good thing what I said, but what I did was just words. | ||
| What Bill Clinton did was actions, folks. | ||
| It was actions. | ||
| So if you want to see who the real problem is, he's sitting right there in the audience. | ||
| And the brilliance of that move is, this is politics 101. Never really go on defense. | ||
| Your best defense is a really good offense. | ||
| So he made it a wash. | ||
| All of a sudden this issue, which was supposed to be, oh my god, it's the end of Donald Trump. | ||
| Now the whole conversation shifted to... | ||
| I mean, damn, there are a lot of accusations against Bill, aren't there? | ||
| So maybe this is a wash and we can just kind of move on from this topic completely. | ||
| That's all he had to do. | ||
| And you see with every single scandal that Trump's involved in, you see how incredibly pathetic and ineffectual and weak the Democrats are at marketing and strategizing, and you see how good he is because he is, no matter what it is, he's going to flip it. | ||
| He's going to flip it back on you. | ||
| So the new thing is the Ukraine thing. | ||
| I don't know how closely you've been following this. | ||
| But the Ukraine thing, he basically got caught on a phone call asking for dirt on his political opponents, Joe Biden. | ||
| He was talking to the president of Ukraine. | ||
| And he said it in so many words. | ||
| I mean, he said there was no quid pro quo. | ||
| But there doesn't have to be. | ||
| It's implied. | ||
| Everybody knows what you're asking for. | ||
| You're asking for dirt on your political opponent. | ||
| So everybody's melting down and going, oh my god, man, you can't do that. | ||
| This is violating every rule. | ||
| This is violating every norm. | ||
| This is not something any president should be doing, relying on a foreign power to get dirt on your political opponents. | ||
| What does Trump do? | ||
| Again, goes right back on the offense, and he goes out there and says, I have every right as president to investigate corruption, and Joe Biden is incredibly corrupt, and all I'm doing is I'm, you know, trying to figure out, why was Hunter Biden getting $50,000 from an energy company? | ||
| He doesn't know anything about energy! | ||
| Why is he getting this? | ||
| And so now, again, the conversation isn't, man, Trump shouldn't have been doing that. | ||
| The conversation is, okay, sure, maybe Trump shouldn't have been doing that, but goddamn, Joe Biden's son and Joe Biden's family is really corrupt, aren't they? | ||
| Well, how about the video where... | ||
| You saw the video where Trump released it, where it was Biden talking about... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The loan. | ||
| Like, explain that. | ||
| Okay, so this one, I'll give you what the Democrats say and I'll give you what the Republicans say. | ||
| The Democrats say, hey man, that's a misleading video because yes, it's true, Biden was holding a billion dollar subsidy over the head of Ukraine to fire a prosecutor, but Biden wanted to get rid of the corrupt prosecutor and bring in a non-corrupt prosecutor. | ||
| That's why he was doing what he did and holding that subsidy over their head. | ||
| And they say, the prosecutor that eventually came into place actually investigated the Biden family more. | ||
| So that's why the Democrats say you're kind of misleading by putting this out there. | ||
| The argument that Trump is making is, well, no, you're holding a billion dollar subsidy over the head of a foreign government and saying you have to listen to us and do X, Y, and Z. That's problematic in and of itself. | ||
| But furthermore, it's corruption anyway. | ||
| We know that the only reason Hunter Biden was getting paid $50,000 a month, and actually now people are saying it's not $50,000, it's $83,000 a month, is because his last name is Biden. | ||
| And so it's pay-to-play corruption. | ||
| $83,000 a month is a lot of fucking money. | ||
| And this is where I think, like, Democrats are silly, because they always find the weakest anti-Trump argument possible, and now they're put in a position where they have to try to say, like, oh, the Bidens did nothing wrong at all, and Trump is all bad. | ||
| And bottom line, nobody's gonna believe that the Bidens did nothing wrong when you're getting $83,000 a month, and you don't know anything about natural gas. | ||
| What was the justification for the $83,000? | ||
| I don't even know what they give as the justification. | ||
| I mean, the only thing I heard from, I think it was Ted Lieu, he's a Democratic congressman, was, you know, hey man, people sit on boards and there was nothing wrong there. | ||
| Which is really weak. | ||
| But here's the thing, and this is, again, why the Democrats drive me crazy, is like... | ||
| They picked the weakest of all anti-Trump arguments. | ||
| So they wanted to use this as like, oh, we're going to try to impeach him over this, and this is going to be the thing that we're going to hang our hat on. | ||
| And Nancy Pelosi even said, we're going to limit the scope of the impeachment investigation to only this, only the Ukraine phone call. | ||
| And then somebody like me, I'm sitting there and I'm pulling my hair out because I can actually give you like three or four super legitimate things that are impeachment worthy. | ||
| Not that I think it strategically makes sense, and we can get into that if you want to, but like the one that drives me crazy is... | ||
| Donald Trump has a hotel in Washington DC that he owns, okay? | ||
| He took $300,000 through that hotel from the Saudi government. | ||
| So they're funneling him money through his hotel in DC. And then Donald Trump turns around and gives a multi-billion dollar weapons deal to the Saudi government as they're committing a genocide in Yemen. | ||
| We know they're committing a genocide in Yemen. | ||
| We know that we're arming them. | ||
| And he gave them even more weapons because he got that money through his hotel. | ||
| For me, I'm looking at that and I'm going, oh my god, this scandal has everything. | ||
| It's got personal corruption. | ||
| It's got guns going to a vicious, genocidal country. | ||
| What was the money for? | ||
| The money in the hotel? | ||
| Okay, so what they did is they had these little retreats at the hotel, and Saudi Arabia would pay for U.S. veterans to go and stay at these hotels. | ||
| I don't know if it's tours of the capital or whatever it is, but they'd pay for these veteran groups to go to the hotel. | ||
| But then, of course, you look at it and you go... | ||
| I don't know, man, $300,000? | ||
| And the speculation is, well, of course they overpaid on purpose, but furthermore, even if they didn't, Jimmy Carter had to sell his peanut farm when he was president because the idea was, hey, we're not even saying you're doing anything corrupt, but just the fact that you have this personal private business, | ||
| it is theoretically possible that foreign governments want to give you money through your peanut farm So you have to sell it because just the existence of it enough is enough to say it violates the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which is just a fancy way of saying that the president can't be corrupt and take money from foreign governments. | ||
| And Trump is doing that. | ||
| He just is. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So this $300,000, though, this is for services rendered? | ||
| This is for hotel rooms? | ||
| What is this for? | ||
| Well, that's what they say is it's for, I guess, the meals in the hotel rooms and whatnot. | ||
| I hate to say it this way, but that's not a lot of money to someone like him. | ||
| Well, you know, but then what I always think about when people make that point is you have to flip it. | ||
| What would we be saying if it was the Clinton Foundation getting $300,000 from the Saudi government and then Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State approving a weapons deal to Saudi Arabia? | ||
| And the fact of the matter is, that actually is almost exactly like what happened with the Clinton Foundation because Bill Clinton was going around and giving speeches at all these, you know, Gulf dictatorships and then he was getting, you know, $500,000 a pop or whatever it was and then Hillary Clinton was approving weapons deals as Secretary of State. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I feel like that's a little bit more egregious because these speeches are worthless. | ||
| At least the hotel rooms, it's real. | ||
| It's real food. | ||
| It's meals. | ||
| That actually costs money. | ||
| These speeches are worthless. | ||
| In my opinion, those speeches are a transparent bribe. | ||
| So do you think, though, that a president should be able to have private businesses that foreign governments can pay him any amount of money? | ||
| No, I don't think so. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I don't. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| But I just don't think they're comparable. | ||
| Like, I think with the Clinton Foundation, I think the Clinton Foundation was egregiously gross. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, I think both of those things are egregiously gross, and I do think it influences him. | ||
| I think it sure influences him, because there's a deal. | ||
| Right? | ||
| They have a deal. | ||
| Even if it's only $300,000, which I know most people hear this, they're like, that's a lot of money. | ||
| It's a lot of money to me, but is it a lot of money to a billionaire? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I don't necessarily think it is. | ||
| And it's also a lot of money that goes through his organization, and it costs money to make that money. | ||
| So how much profit is that? | ||
| Out of $300,000, it's not that much profit. | ||
| With $500,000 a speech, that's one talk for one hour, and it costs nothing for him. | ||
| And he's making a half a million dollars, and he did it over and over and over and over and over again. | ||
| And it was all under the guise of the Clinton Foundation is doing this great charitable work all across the country and all across the world. | ||
| And that, to me, was more transparently disgusting. | ||
| Yeah, so I understand why you would say that, but I also think that there's a problem with it in principle. | ||
| So I would just nip it in the bud, no questions asked. | ||
| But beyond that, there's also other stuff, too. | ||
| I'm just giving you one example. | ||
| So there's the other thing, which, again, very few people spoke about or recognized, that during the campaign, Donald Trump registered eight new businesses in Saudi Arabia. | ||
| So, again, when you're running for president, it's a public service. | ||
| You're trying to serve your country. | ||
| And you shouldn't intertwine business with that in any way, shape, or form. | ||
| There's another one, I believe he has a hotel in Turkey. | ||
| And now, his argument, by the way, is... | ||
| No, it's okay because I transfer all this to my kids. | ||
| So while I'm president, my kids run my businesses and take care of it. | ||
| But I think that's just a total nonsense dodge because your family is still profiting from it. | ||
| And here's a crazy fact, Joe, and this one really just blew my mind. | ||
| With Trump in office, in one year, Jared and Ivanka made, I think it was $82 or $83 million in one year. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How? | |
| Through their businesses, and they say, oh, there's nothing to see here, there's no problem. | ||
| But then you dig into the specifics, and yet again, you see so many sketchy things, like Jared Kushner got, like, millions of dollars from Israeli banks. | ||
| Why? | ||
| And then this is the guy who they say, it's okay, he's going to broker a peace deal between Israel and Palestine. | ||
| One of the sides is giving him millions of dollars. | ||
| You think that's going to be a fair peace deal? | ||
| It's going to be the most lopsided peace deal in history. | ||
| And this is the problem is that, and again, for the Trump example, it's just that he kind of rips the mask off and shows you what everybody's doing. | ||
| But it's not like it didn't happen with Bill Clinton. | ||
| It's not like, like with Barack Obama, it was Wall Street appointed his entire administration. | ||
| I believe he got a list from Citigroup. | ||
| To, you know, put people in his cabinet. | ||
| And it's like, this is the way the system functions. | ||
| And my opinion is, you shouldn't be taking money from foreign governments. | ||
| You shouldn't be taking money from corporations. | ||
| Because you're going to be biased in favor of those countries. | ||
| Like, look at what happened with Jamal Khashoggi and Trump. | ||
| I mean, they killed... | ||
| A journalist. | ||
| They killed a journalist. | ||
| And they didn't even get a slap on the wrist. | ||
| It was nothing. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Again, because we're so intertwined with them with business relations and he is making money from them. | ||
| Where is that right now? | ||
| Where's what? | ||
| The Jamal Khashoggi thing? | ||
| As far as I know, it's dead in the water. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| But this, again, look at the difference between how they talk about stuff like this when it's a U.S. ally versus when it's not a U.S. ally. | ||
| When it's a U.S. ally like Saudi Arabia that does it, there's nothing to see here. | ||
| But if you get a similar story coming out of Iran, for example, who's not a U.S. ally, or they love to go after Maduro, and I'm not saying he's a good guy, but they go after Maduro because he's not a U.S. ally. | ||
| So they could harp away on all the negative things about him, but we're not having a conversation about Jamal Khashoggi. | ||
| We're not having a conversation about people being beheaded in the public square. | ||
| For stuff like sorcery, Joe. | ||
| They kill people in Saudi Arabia for sorcery and witchcraft and drug smuggling and apostasy. | ||
| If you don't think God is real and you say that in Saudi Arabia, they could kill you. | ||
| They could cut your head off in the public square. | ||
| Are they really killing people for sorcery? | ||
| Yes! | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yes! | ||
| They're killing people for sorcery! | ||
| It's crazy! | ||
| The Khashoggi thing is super disturbing because it seems like everybody's like, well, what are you going to do? | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| I know! | ||
| I mean, it would have been cleaner if they just made him have some sort of heart attack or an accident or something along those lines. | ||
| If there was plausible deniability in any way. | ||
| The way they did it, it's almost like this guy wanted them to do it a certain way. | ||
| He wanted them to chop this guy up and put him in bags and deliver him out of the country in suitcases and shit or whatever the fuck they did, however they got rid of him. | ||
| It's such a disturbing decision that they made. | ||
| Yeah, and they know they're going to get away with it, and again, this is what happens. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They have, right? | |
| It's been over a year. | ||
| They have. | ||
| They absolutely have. | ||
| When was the murder? | ||
| How long ago? | ||
| Last time I was on the podcast, we spoke about it, and last time I was on the podcast was a year ago, so it was over a year ago. | ||
| It's just, whatever. | ||
| Again, if they're our ally, that means... | ||
| I mean, they really do. | ||
| There's so much business that goes on between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia and the weapons deals and everything that... | ||
| Trump actually made this argument in the White House sitting next to the Saudi Crown Prince. | ||
| He's like, they're buying so many weapons. | ||
| It's so tremendous the weapons they're buying. | ||
| And he holds up the pictures of this from Raytheon. | ||
| This is what he's getting. | ||
| This is from Boeing. | ||
| This is what he's getting. | ||
| And it's like, oh my god. | ||
| Imagine for a second it's anybody... | ||
| Imagine it was a deal like that with Kim Jong-un. | ||
| He's like, we're selling Kim Jong-un these tremendous weapons. | ||
| Didn't he threaten us today? | ||
| Who I didn't see if Kim Jong-un did. | ||
| Didn't Kim Jong-un threaten us today? | ||
| I think they... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was waiting to show you this. | |
| Oh, we got here. | ||
| Saudi Arabia's anti-witchcraft unit breaks another spell. | ||
| What? | ||
| The unit established in 2009 is charged with apprehending sorcerers and reversing the detrimental effects of their spells in the Gulf country. | ||
| Let me see the picture. | ||
| Scroll up for the picture. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| That looks like Baghdad Bob. | ||
| You remember Baghdad Bob? | ||
| From? | ||
| From the Iraq war when Iraq was getting slaughtered. | ||
| He was like, everything's great. | ||
| Iraq's kicking ass. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you remember that guy? | |
| Yes, I do remember that. | ||
| He was like their Ministry of Propaganda guy. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's like Ahmad Shalabi, the guy who they wanted to be. | ||
| When the severed head of a wolf wrapped in women's lingerie turned up near the city of... | ||
| How do you say that? | ||
| Tabuk? | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| In northern Saudi Arabia this week, authorities knew they had another case of rich witchcraft on their hands. | ||
| A capital offense in the ultra-conservative desert kingdom. | ||
| Is that really what it is? | ||
| Is that conservative? | ||
| Boy, that term... | ||
| That term is, like, way too wide. | ||
| I think both are. | ||
| I think the idea, like, liberal, conservative, it casts such a wide net. | ||
| And then people like to get sneaky and use, no, I'm a classic liberal. | ||
| Oh, what is that? | ||
| What is that? | ||
| You're a fucking Republican. | ||
| And it's funny because there's actually, when you actually look at the textbook definition of a lot of these terms, they have multiple meanings. | ||
| So classical liberal, in some instances, means just like libertarian, because that's what it used to mean back in the day. | ||
| But in today's day and age, like you said, it could mean you're kind of right-leaning. | ||
| Yeah, it's more right of center. | ||
| Classical liberal is a very, it's a misleading term. | ||
| Like, classical liberal. | ||
| Classical liberal is, it's a British term, correct? | ||
| Well, I think it originally dates back to, it was a way of describing libertarianism. | ||
| That was what they used, because I think it referred to liberalizing the markets. | ||
| Let's look at the exact definition, because that's one of those words. | ||
| I hear people say that, and they go, well, that guy's Republican. | ||
| Why is he calling himself a classical liberal? | ||
| Yeah, that's my point. | ||
| And I don't like labels, period, because they're so amorphous. | ||
| And people can say, you can ask people, like, did you know, for example, in the Democratic primary in 2016, self-described conservative Democrats supported Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton, even though Bernie Sanders is literally further to the left than Hillary Clinton. | ||
| So again, that just shows people don't know labels. | ||
| When you say conservative Democrats, though, maybe they're just not into interventional foreign policy. | ||
| I mean, she's kind of a warmonger. | ||
| Right, and this gets back to the point of labels being so amorphous that... | ||
| Here it goes. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| Classical liberalism is a political ideology and a branch of liberalism which advocates civil liberties under the rule of law with an emphasis on economic freedom. | ||
| That's what I was referring to. | ||
| So that's sort of libertarian, right? | ||
| That's libertarianism, yes. | ||
| So that's like less rules, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Deregulate the marketplace. | ||
| Free market will take care of it. | ||
| Capitalism unfettered is the best kind of capitalism. | ||
| closely related to economic liberalism. | ||
| It developed in the early 19th century, building on the ideas from the previous century as a response to urbanization and the industrial revolution in Europe and the United States. | ||
| Notable individuals whose ideas contributed to classical liberalism include John Locke, John Baptista, John Baptista Say, I don't know who that is, Thomas Robert Malthus, and You know him. | ||
| Yeah, you know that guy. | ||
| Do I? Adam Smith? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, he's, like, viewed as, like, the godfather of, you know... | ||
| Free market thought in many ways. | ||
| I mean, there's other ones, don't get me wrong. | ||
| There's Milton Friedman, of course, and there's Hayek, and there's von Mises, but Adam Smith is definitely one that's cited a lot. | ||
| He's the one where everybody talks about the individual hand of the marketplace. | ||
| That's who they're citing when they talk about the free hand of the marketplace, or however the saying goes. | ||
| Look at this expression. | ||
| Book one of The Wealth of Nations, and on a belief in natural law, utilitarianism, And progress. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Natural law, utilitarianism, and progress? | ||
| Well, utilitarianism means doing the best for the largest number of people. | ||
| Yeah, but what does natural law mean? | ||
| Adam Smith in One Book of Wealth and Nations and on a belief in natural law. | ||
| Click on that, Jamie. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're going down a rabbit hole here. | |
| I just... | ||
| The Natural Law of Money? | ||
| From a book. | ||
| So I think what it's referring to is like supply and demand and how the way the marketplace works, there are natural laws as to how it works. | ||
| And the idea is it's always a negative thing when you try to tweak those laws. | ||
| It works best when you take a hands-off approach. | ||
| The problem with that – I mean there's a lot of problems with that. | ||
| But the problem with that clearly is that when there has been regulation for long periods of time and you just step back, you're going to have a massive period of chaos until things do settle. | ||
| If you do let the market decide, I would imagine there's going to be a period when the deregulation takes place. | ||
| There's going to be a lot of people that get fucked over. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I mean, we actually have quite a bit of evidence on this front because we've run this experiment like a thousand times in U.S. history alone, but as a general rule, whenever you do market deregulation and whenever you cut taxes for the very wealthy, there's what's called a boom-bust cycle, which means everything takes off, everything seems like it's wonderful, the good times seem like they're never going to end. | ||
| Remember the roaring 20s? | ||
| They called it the roaring 20s because it was like, oh my god, the market is soaring, everything's going so well, and then it was followed by the Great Depression. | ||
| And then you saw it again, actually, in the end of the Clinton years, because Clinton repealed Glass-Steagall, which was a very important piece of regulation. | ||
| And then under the Bush years as well, he further deregulated and cut taxes for the rich. | ||
| And what happened? | ||
| We had the subprime mortgage crisis and the Great Recession. | ||
| So, as a general rule, it's not like all regulation is good, full stop. | ||
| It depends what the regulation is. | ||
| To argue in favor of regulation of the marketplace is like arguing in favor of referees in a soccer game or whatever. | ||
| You need some amount of enforcement of things that make sense. | ||
| I love when libertarians argue like, would you want to have no FDA at all? | ||
| Looking after the drugs that are out there. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| And you could sell stuff that's cut with substances that could end up killing you. | ||
| I mean, this is actually what happened. | ||
| In Prohibition, during Prohibition, they used to make alcohol in bathtubs and cut it with substances that were very dangerous. | ||
| And so every now and then there would be a bad batch of alcohol and people would die because the way they made the alcohol had no regulation and no standards. | ||
| Like what happens today with drugs. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And that's... | ||
| I mean, we could talk about, I'm sure you saw what happened with that standoff between the Mexican military and the drug cartel. | ||
| Dude, they beat the government in a standoff, in a battle, and they ended up freeing El Chapo's son. | ||
| Well, did you see when the Sicario showed up and just started talking to the people in the Mexican military? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And the Mexican military was like, hey, we're just trying to stay alive here. | ||
| What do we got to do? | ||
| Like, let them go. | ||
| And they're like, okay. | ||
| Sounds good. | ||
| Listen, it's such a tough situation because the drug cartel was just going to start massacring people if they didn't release them. | ||
| So if you're the president of Mexico, if you're AMLO, what do you do? | ||
| I mean, if I'm in his position, I go, hey man, I can't have you doing a genocide in a village in Mexico. | ||
| And they're under-resourced. | ||
| There's not enough people. | ||
| And the Mexican cartel has an unstoppable amount of money. | ||
| Joe, the only way to defeat the cartels is to legalize, tax, and regulate drugs. | ||
| Because that's how you put them out of business. | ||
| They can't compete with legitimate businesses. | ||
| They can't compete. | ||
| Like, let's say we had all these growing operations in the U.S. and it was legal at a federal level in the United States. | ||
| What is somebody going to want to do? | ||
| Are they going to want to go to a back alley with a sketchy character to get some drugs? | ||
| Or are they going to want to go to Walgreens? | ||
| Well, I had the author of Hidden War on the podcast. | ||
| His name is John Norris. | ||
| And John Norris, he got a job initially as a game warden because, you know, he grew up in the outdoors and fishing and hunting and things like that, and he wanted to be a game warden. | ||
| Well, along the way, they started finding these Mexican grow-ops, these cartel grow-ops. | ||
| All over California. | ||
| And it got even worse, believe it or not, when they made marijuana legal, because now these grow-ups are just a misdemeanor. | ||
| It's no longer a felony. | ||
| So if you have 100 acres on public land that you've decided to take the water from this creek and send it down there and it kills a bunch of fish, it's just a misdemeanor for the guys growing the drugs. | ||
| So there's more doing it. | ||
| Yes, there's more doing it. | ||
| And now 80% of all the illegal marijuana that's being grown and sold in the United States, a rough estimate, is coming from these cartel grow-ops, and a lot of them are using these pesticides that are very fucking dangerous. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Right, yeah. | ||
| See, it's because they could just do it. | ||
| They could just set up shop and, you know, they go to the National Forest, they go to public lands, they hike in with, like, fucking tubes, like, hoses and shit on their back so they can revert these creeks or divert these creeks, rather. | ||
| And they set up these grow-ups and they bring guns and they fucking set up shop. | ||
| And so these guys, these game wardens became like a paramilitary operation. | ||
| They had to go in there with dogs. | ||
| That's scary. | ||
| Yes, and they had to get trained tactically, and these guys wound up being these people that had to take down members of the cartel. | ||
| That's super scary. | ||
| In the fucking woods. | ||
| Yeah, and I think that we have this weird gray area situation in the United States right now, where certain states have legalized it for recreational use, certain states have it for medical use, but at the federal level, it's still illegal. | ||
| Right, and if it became legal, then these cartel operations would have to go out of business. | ||
| Absolutely, yeah. | ||
| Wouldn't be valuable, they'd have to move on to something else. | ||
| And then that would open a whole other Pandora's box because what do you do? | ||
| Let's say you only legalize, tax, and regulate marijuana. | ||
| Well, then they might just move on to, there might be more cocaine or more whatever it might be. | ||
| That's what they're doing. | ||
| They're doing that with meth. | ||
| They figured out a way to grow meth with plants. | ||
| They figured out a way to make meth with plants. | ||
| This is a new thing. | ||
| They haven't been able to do this before. | ||
| Meth had always been done with, which is another thing we need to talk about, Sudafed. | ||
| What a good conversation that is. | ||
| Sudafedrine. | ||
| When you go to, in California at least, say if you've got a cold and you want to buy some strong over-the-counter cold meds, you have to give your driver's license. | ||
| And they only sell you a little bit. | ||
| The reason being is because people used to just buy everything off the shelf, throw it into a basket, bring it up to the counter, and they would use that stuff to make meth with. | ||
| Because it's one of the ingredients. | ||
| You can actually boil it all down. | ||
| I don't know the process, but you can make meth out of cold medication. | ||
| Well, these fucking guys have figured out how to do this shit with plants now. | ||
| That's what we were going to get to in a minute. | ||
| We'll get to that. | ||
| Go to that. | ||
| Plant-based meth is the next frontier of Afghanistan's drug trade. | ||
| Investigators have uncovered a burgeoning local trade in the production of methamphetamine using a mountain shrub. | ||
| See, like, now, let me ask you this question, because I'm a little torn on this next one, but I'm of the belief that if you, like, let's say you legalize lower-level uppers or amphetamines, okay? | ||
| So let's say you have a more benign version of all of these kinds of drugs that are legal and available. | ||
| Well, we do. | ||
| It's called Adderall. | ||
| No, no, no, but you still have to go to a doctor and get a prescription for that. | ||
| I'm talking about over-the-counter. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| So do you think that, because I think that would... | ||
| Not fully eliminate the market for the much harder stuff, but it would, I think, eliminate a majority of that market because if somebody goes and gets a more safer alternative, that might not be a strong, but you can go get a safer alternative or get a bunch of a safer alternative, then, yeah, why wouldn't you choose that over doing like Crocodile, the one that melts off your skin if you do it for like a year? | ||
| That's like a heroin one. | ||
| That's like a heroin one. | ||
| The speed ones are the ones that are interesting because they're productivity drugs. | ||
| And that brings us to Trump. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| This is so much fun. | ||
| There's a photograph of him. | ||
| It's a classic photograph because it's after... | ||
| I love Mexicans! | ||
| Yeah, he was talking shit about, you know, the wall and it's all rapists and murderers. | ||
| I think this was Cinco de Mayo, if I remember correctly. | ||
| So he's eating a taco bowl, and the bowl says, I mean, he says, I love Hispanics, I think. | ||
| And I remember watching that, looking at that photograph, going, is this motherfucker for real? | ||
| He really tweeted that? | ||
| I love Hispanics? | ||
| And he's eating a fucking taco bowl? | ||
| Well, the open desk drawer, somebody focused in on it, and they realized, this is like years later, they realized that it's all filled with Sudafed. | ||
| And Sudafed is, again, the active ingredient One of the ingredients in Sudafed is the active ingredient in meth. | ||
| And so apparently people take Sudafed. | ||
| And if you take that stuff, it gives you like a little bit of a buzz. | ||
| And if you take large doses of Sudafed, it's essentially like taking, like he's microdosing. | ||
| He's microdosing meth. | ||
| It's actually a little deeper than that, which makes it even funnier. | ||
| Deeper. | ||
| Yes, because there's a certain form of Sudafed that they sell in the United States, and then there's a UK version of Sudafed. | ||
| And the UK version of Sudafed has that ingredient to it, which is more of an upper, which kind of acts like an amphetamine. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| It says, The desk drawer full of Sudafed, including boxes in New York purchased in the UK, indicate that the legal limits of purchase are being circumvented, and that the then-candidate Trump was abusing Sudafed for its high, rather than its decongestant effect. | ||
| Okay, so there's that. | ||
| Now, I want to take it a step further because I don't know if you watched this video I sent you a while ago, but I was absolutely floored by the contrast between the speech Trump gave at CPAC this year and then the speech Trump gave at the UN this year. | ||
| The CPAC one, Joe, totally off script, bouncing off the walls, an hour and 30 minutes, hands moving all over the place. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So active, so engaging, making jokes, all this stuff. | ||
| Hilarious. | ||
| And then you go to the UN speech. | ||
| Joe, he's talking like this. | ||
| And he literally, he was so tired, he couldn't even say the word sovereignty. | ||
| He quit halfway through it. | ||
|
unidentified
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He was like, and that's why we need to protect sovereignty. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And so, if you want to pull that up, Jamie, if you want to watch some of it, you can see the contrast. | ||
| Well, I watched it on Pacman's show. | ||
| Pacman had, David Pacman had an episode where he was concentrating on this alleged drug use by Trump, and he showed the contrast of him sniffing at the debates with Hillary Clinton. | ||
| And he did a, yeah, this whole conglomeration of all of his sniffing moments. | ||
| This, uh... | ||
| And let me just say, in Trump's defense, if I was president, I'd be taking some shit too, because that's a tough job. | ||
| And also, don't lie, when he does a rally and he's high as balls on an upper, they're entertaining. | ||
| And I'm the first one on the left to admit, his Twitter feed, I feel bad sometimes because he genuinely makes me laugh. | ||
| I'll never forget the morning I woke up and I go on Twitter, which is part of my morning routine, and the first words I see are from the President of the United States. | ||
| And it says, Washed up psycho Bette Midler. | ||
| And I just saw that first part of the tweet and I broke down laughing. | ||
| It was the funniest thing ever. | ||
| Look, he makes me laugh all the time. | ||
| He's done a bunch of shit on his Twitter that he's just like, this motherfucker is crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| What was the ones that we were talking about recently that he did? | ||
| Was it a... | ||
| He tweeted something that was bullshit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't remember what he was saying was bullshit, but that he tweeted those words was pretty funny. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, his Trumpisms, like the little side things that he always does makes me laugh, like the all caps randomly, or sometimes he'll capitalize letters for no reason in the tweet. | ||
| Well, it was great when he was the fucking host of The Apprentice. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's when it was great. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It was like he was an entertaining character. | ||
| It's just, now that he's the president, it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is real? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, I mean, I'm curious what percentage of the population is like my mom who really values the idea of somebody kind of being buttoned down and presidential and very professional sounding. | ||
| Because that used to be the model and that used to help you in the 1980s and 1990s. | ||
| But I genuinely feel like in today's day and age, we've kind of evolved out of that. | ||
| And you're not going to get another Mitt Romney-style politician who's like a robot who's really on script. | ||
| You're going to get either a left-wing version or a right-wing version of somebody who's really kind of shooting from the hip and has no filter. | ||
| Because that no-filter-ism comes across as just so much more genuine, even if he sounds fucking crazy when he talks. | ||
| Even if he sounds fucking crazy. | ||
| I think that's also the same thing with news. | ||
| That's the same thing with news reporters. | ||
| That's why I'm here, Joe. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's why your show works, too. | ||
| You talk like you're talking right now. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And we would be going to dinner tonight, we would talk the same way. | ||
| That's right, yeah. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That doesn't exist anywhere else. | ||
| And you would see these people that are buttoned down, and then you'd find out behind closed doors they're freaks. | ||
| It leads everybody to wonder, what is real? | ||
| What is real? | ||
| Someone does talk real, and they're like, I'm pretty sure that is who that fucking guy is. | ||
| He's that way all the time. | ||
| That's why he's talking that way. | ||
| So with Trump, they're like, okay, at least I know what that is. | ||
| That's a crazy guy who's on speed, and he wants to make a lot of money, and he doesn't want to yell at Saudi Arabia because he's making money off of them. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| At least I know what that is. | ||
| With Clinton, especially her, you don't know what the fuck that is. | ||
| You get the sense that there's multiple layers of analysis. | ||
| And she said it, and this was released from WikiLeaks, there's a public position and a private position. | ||
| Well, when the whole Tulsi Gabbard thing, when she called Tulsi Gabbard a Russian asset, and I was like, what? | ||
| Like, what is this? | ||
| Joe, let me tell you something, man. | ||
| You gotta have fucking proof. | ||
| If you are a person who- That never stopped them. | ||
| But I know, but when you're saying something like that, that's such a fucking important thing to say. | ||
| Like, that's a very damning thing to say. | ||
| She's a major in the military right now. | ||
| She's in the military. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Right. | ||
| And they're like, yeah, well, she's a Russian asset. | ||
| She's done two tours of duty in the Middle East. | ||
| And you know why they say that, too, right? | ||
| Because Tulsi Gabbard has spoken strongly against intervention in Syria, war in Syria. | ||
| The argument goes, hey, Vladimir Putin and Russia are aligned with the Syrian government. | ||
| They're allies. | ||
| Therefore, if you're arguing against U.S. intervention in Syria, your argument benefits Putin. | ||
| That's how their argument goes. | ||
| And then they also say, and this turned out to be totally debunked and not true, oh, there's an army of Russian trolls that are trying to help Tulsi Gabbard win the election. | ||
| And, Joe, but this is the thing that they pull out. | ||
| For anybody who's on the left and anti-war, this is what they pull out. | ||
| I've been accused of it before. | ||
| I've been accused of being a Russian puppet and a Russian asset. | ||
| And it's like, no... | ||
| Are you controlled opposition? | ||
| Yeah, my controlled opposition. | ||
| And the funny thing is, Joe, they do this because they cannot actually have a conversation with me and... | ||
| Disagree with me when I talk about policy. | ||
| Right, of course. | ||
| So when I sit there and I explain, hey, here's why Medicare for All is the way to go, and here's why a public option is nonsense, and here's why our current system is terrible, they want to defend the status quo, but they cannot defend the status quo using arguments, so they have to just lump me off and put me to the side and say, well, he shouldn't even be allowed in the conversation because he's a Russian asset, and he's not serious. | ||
| But the thing is, the reason why their argument holds some weight at all is because of the IRA, the Internet Research Agency, and the work they've done that was exposed. | ||
| The Russian stuff, where they're making all of these different Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts, and they're using them to start... | ||
| To start wars, like essentially, to start arguments with people about anything and everything, to slander people, to support people, you know, to say, you know, as a black woman, I could never support Hillary Clinton, and then they make these arguments, and it's not really a black woman's account. | ||
| It's a Russian, and it's part of this Russian research agency that Renee DiResta exposed. | ||
| Have you ever paid attention to any of her work? | ||
| No, I haven't, but I'm very skeptical on this point because they always make it seem like if that didn't happen, that we'd all be hunky-dory holding hands and getting along. | ||
| They're not necessarily saying that. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But they are saying that this was effective. | ||
| And there's millions and millions of engagements and it flavors conversations. | ||
| And for a lot of people, and this is a giant percentage of people... | ||
| They do not have time to deeply research and understand these things thoroughly. | ||
| They don't. | ||
| No one does. | ||
| They have jobs, and they have mortgages, and they have children, and they have hobbies, and they have friends, and they're doing all kinds of shit when they have their time off. | ||
| They don't have enough time to truly research. | ||
| Was Ted Cruz involved in the Kennedy assassination? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know what I mean? | |
| When you hear a rumor like that, those kind of crazy, ridiculous rumors, they just spread. | ||
| They just spread. | ||
| And they spread primarily because most people don't have the time to look into these things. | ||
| So if you have something... | ||
| Like the Internet Research Agency that's been shown to start a bunch of accounts. | ||
| Like they have Black Lives Matter accounts. | ||
| They have separatist, Texas separatist accounts where they want Texas to secede from the union and to start their own nation. | ||
| And then they have these pro-Muslim accounts. | ||
| And then they have all these different accounts. | ||
| and they've even organized meetings where they'll have like the pro-Texas account meeting across the street from this Muslim meeting, and they'll do it on purpose. | ||
| They'll do it just to try to get people to fight, and they have these two different Facebook pages that they're running, and they're running them with these propped up ideologies. | ||
| They're pretending that they're this. | ||
| They're pretending they're a Black Lives Matter organization. | ||
| Or they're pretending that they're Puerto Ricans for Trump. | ||
| But it's madness. | ||
| It's all just starting fights and causing these arguments. | ||
| And they're doing this to try to, even if it's 1% or 10%, If they can disrupt democracy by 4%, 5% here or there, it's incredibly effective. | ||
| If they can get a narrative going and they can sustain that narrative, a bullshit narrative, just through coming up with these fake things, it has an effect. | ||
| How much of an effect? | ||
| I don't know, but it's an effect. | ||
| If it's 1%, if it's 2%, if they can get a meme past people and you start spreading it through Facebook. | ||
| And a lot of them, she said, she looked over 100,000 memes and she's like, some of them were fucking hilarious. | ||
| And you're reading these and you're laughing and you realize, well, they're making these things to make people laugh and also to try to get a point across. | ||
| And that point is to, you know, to try to paint Hillary Clinton as a this or paint Joe Biden as a that or paint, you know, and what they're doing is they're Starting these groups, and these groups will argue against other groups, and people just kind of go along like sheep, and they don't even know who's behind the whole thing. | ||
| They really think this Black Lives Matter group is like African Americans that are tired of police brutality, but it's not. | ||
| It's these guys in Russia that are just starting shit. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| I hear you, but at the same time, the thing that has kind of shocked me is the degree to which this is relied upon and used as the scapegoat to not talk about sometimes things that are very real issues. | ||
| And I know because it's been done... | ||
| With Bernie Sanders, there was this Russian troll farm meme created of Bernie Sanders. | ||
| It's like, he's rainbow colored and he's doing a pose where he's showing his bicep or whatever. | ||
| And that was then used by mainstream media to say, why is Russia trying to prop up Bernie Sanders? | ||
| Why is he trying to prop up Bernie Sanders? | ||
| So they try to make it seem like, oh, Bernie's like a Russian puppet and a Russian asset. | ||
| And if you support him, well, you've just been duped to support him. | ||
| And so it's kind of used as this catch-all thing where it's like, If I try to bring up a real issue, they say, well, Russia wants you to talk about that. | ||
| Why are you talking about that? | ||
| See, this is three-dimensional chess, though. | ||
| This is part of the whole dispute. | ||
| Part of the whole dispute is you see something like that and then people say, why does Russia want Bernie Sanders to be president? | ||
| Why are they pumping up Bernie Sanders? | ||
| And then this becomes even a more confusing argument. | ||
| Like, if they do do something like that and they create these funny memes and try to prop up Bernie Sanders and then the argument comes in, like, why does Russia want Bernie Sanders to win? | ||
| Everything's getting convoluted. | ||
| Everything is muddy. | ||
| Nobody understands what the fuck is going on. | ||
| That's the point. | ||
| The point is to sow seeds of doubt and to sort of disrupt democracy. | ||
| The point is to do this very cheaply and easily through internet accounts. | ||
| This is the idea behind it. | ||
| And if you listen to Sam Harris's podcast with Diresta or the podcast that I did with her, and when she goes into depth about this, you know, understanding this and how much time she spent researching this IRA, this Internet Research Agency in Russia and all the work that they do. | ||
| We have people working 24 hours a day on this shit, and they're doing it specifically under the behest of the government to try to fuck with democracy. | ||
| I just think we have to be really careful, point taken, I just think we have to be really careful to make sure that that doesn't distract us from focusing on issues that really do matter, because oftentimes I've seen that's invoked to kind of shut up the talk about real issues. | ||
| And I'd also add on top of that as well, the dirty little secret that we never talk about in this country is that We actually are doing the exact same thing. | ||
| Oh, for sure! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| For sure! | ||
| And I remember that they created, like, a whole fake website or a whole fake app for Cuba. | ||
| It was supposed to be, like, Cuba's version of Twitter. | ||
| And it was just all U.S. created. | ||
| And it was all trying to control the narrative. | ||
| Yeah, I remember this story from about two years or so ago. | ||
| And what was it? | ||
| Like, oh, fuck America? | ||
| No, I'm not sure. | ||
| They were trying to do the opposite. | ||
| They were trying to say, like, ooh, doesn't communism suck? | ||
| Isn't it awesome to be subversive? | ||
| They were trying to get a grassroots uprising against the government there. | ||
| Also, they were doing it for Cuba. | ||
| Not doing it, oh, that's amazing. | ||
| They were doing it to try to, what they think is, you know, free Cuba. | ||
| U.S. secretly created Cuban Twitter to stir unrest and undermine government. | ||
| I mean, listen, this is a tool, right? | ||
| There's hundreds and hundreds of tools they use. | ||
| Isn't it sad that this is what, like, unfortunately in so many ways, this is what politics has become? | ||
| Because you and I can sit here and we can have a really good conversation about the minimum wage. | ||
| What are the pros and cons of it? | ||
| What do the polls say on the minimum wage? | ||
| You know, if we went down that path, how would it impact the broader economy? | ||
| We could have a conversation about... | ||
| We could have a conversation about healthcare. | ||
| We could have a conversation about foreign policy. | ||
| And you and I can bounce ideas off each other. | ||
| We could talk about market regulation. | ||
| All this stuff. | ||
| But, like, that's just not what dominates political culture in today's America. | ||
| Because you just have this dumbed-down conversation where the entire conversation is about stuff like this, or the entire conversation is about the individual cult of personality aspect of politics. | ||
| And that's just really upsetting to a guy like me because... | ||
| If we actually have that conversation on policy, I think there's so much more agreement in this country than people realize. | ||
| And oftentimes what I say is, if you and I sit here and have a conversation, we agree on something. | ||
| It's a pretty damn good bet that that's a solid position that a lot of people agree with. | ||
| But if two politicians in Washington, D.C. agree on something, look out. | ||
| Because oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes, they're agreeing to screw you. | ||
| And that's what just happened with, again, this was about a year or so ago, there was all these headlines, bipartisan consensus and agreement on a piece of legislation. | ||
| It was all like flowery, happy language. | ||
| They agreed to further deregulate Wall Street, which again is the thing that led to the subprime mortgage crisis in the Great Recession. | ||
| And this is what you get agreement on between Democrats and Republicans in Washington, D.C. Every now and then you'll get two good things like, you know, Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul coming together, Bernie Sanders and Mike Lee to agree. | ||
| War is bad and we shouldn't aid a genocide in Yemen. | ||
| Okay, that's wonderful. | ||
| We all agree with that. | ||
| But most of the time it's like, let's agree to further help out Wall Street. | ||
| Let's agree to further artificially prop up U.S. institutions. | ||
| Let's agree to Wall Street bailouts. | ||
| Let's agree to more funding for the military-industrial complex. | ||
| And it's like... | ||
| We would be so much better off if, and this is an idea that I've been pushing for a while now, imagine we had a law where every time we had to vote in a presidential election, the people got to vote directly on the top three issues impacting the country, and that became law. | ||
| So let's say in the next presidential election, one of the questions is, so it's a national direct ballot initiative law, and one of the questions could be, should marijuana be legal, taxed, and regulated at a federal level, yes or no? | ||
| And then the American people vote on it, and whatever we say, that becomes law. | ||
| So then it would be, you know, be like 65% in favor of it. | ||
| And so we'd win on that one. | ||
| And you can go down the list, and you can have the three most important issues. | ||
| And that's a way, Joe, I think, to circumvent the corruption in Washington, D.C. I mean, one way is you can fight to get money out of politics so there's not as much corruption. | ||
| I think that's honestly a longer and harder fight. | ||
| But if you do this national direct ballot initiative law, I really think that that could impact this country for the better. | ||
| And it's an idea, unfortunately, nobody's really talking about it yet. | ||
| It's not anything like Bernie's. | ||
| I'm with Bernie on so much of what he's talking about, and I love the guy. | ||
| But he hasn't spoken about this yet. | ||
| Tulsi hasn't spoken about this yet. | ||
| Andrew Yang hasn't spoken about this yet. | ||
| And again, these are brilliant people who have great ideas. | ||
| Have they discussed it ever, publicly? | ||
| They never brought it up. | ||
| They've never brought it up. | ||
| I actually brought it up in conversation to somebody in Bernie Sanders' campaign. | ||
| I brought it up in conversation with somebody in Tulsi's campaign. | ||
| And I do think that... | ||
| And I'm not saying that to go after them, because I do think that they're really smart and right on a lot of stuff. | ||
| And I think that in due time, they might see this position and really like it and maybe champion it. | ||
| But it kind of in the same way that Andrew Yang is now going around and his whole thing is universal basic income. | ||
| And he's kind of putting that into the mainstream of society. | ||
| Now we're seriously talking about it. | ||
| He's also doing it with drug decriminalization, which I respect him for. | ||
| He goes beyond everybody else and saying decriminalize all drugs. | ||
| So in the same way that he's popularizing these things and shifting the Overton window, I'm really looking forward to some politicians stepping up and popularizing this idea because it's such a simple idea. | ||
| It would be so easy to implement. | ||
| And Joe, think of the positive effects of this. | ||
| I mean, I remember there was a poll. | ||
| I think it's in the teens, like something like 16% of Americans still support the Iraq war, which means like everybody's against it. | ||
| Imagine if we got to directly vote on that. | ||
| We'd be out of Iraq tomorrow. | ||
| But do they understand the implications of pulling out of Iraq? | ||
| Better than the shitty politicians who are corrupt and bought by Raytheon and Boeing and Halliburton. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's what I would say. | ||
| There's got to be someone who could advise, someone who has an objective perspective on foreign policy, maybe someone who's in the military, who's got boots on the ground, who can tell you, okay, here's the problems with pulling out, and here's the pros of pulling out, and here's the cons. | ||
| And you Get an objective analysis of the situation so at least people are informed. | ||
| Instead of just having them vote on it based on public perception, have them vote on it based on something. | ||
| Here's what I'm afraid of. | ||
| When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. | ||
| And what history teaches us is that... | ||
| And this happened... | ||
| Endlessly in Vietnam. | ||
| Presidents came and went and they were like, you know, I don't know, I really don't think we should be doing this, and they would be talked into staying and increasing troop levels by the generals. | ||
| Now this is not taking a shot at the generals, this is just me saying that when that's your field of expertise, yeah, that's what you're gonna say. | ||
| Oh, just let us stay there another five months, let us stay there another year. | ||
| Joe, we're at the point now where nobody even bothers to define what victory would mean in Afghanistan, what victory would mean in Iraq. | ||
| Think about it. | ||
| What's the original reason we were given? | ||
| Oh, we've got to go into Afghanistan because we've got to get Al-Qaeda because Al-Qaeda attacked us. | ||
| Okay, that's understandable. | ||
| Osama bin Laden's dead. | ||
| He's been dead for so long. | ||
| There's only 100 Al-Qaeda members, according to our own intelligence agencies, still in Afghanistan. | ||
| Why are we there? | ||
| I think it has a lot more to do with the trillions of dollars of mineral wealth that's there. | ||
| Again, I think it has a lot more to do with... | ||
| The geopolitical power and the chessboard of us versus Russia. | ||
| I mean, the Soviet Union was there back in the 1980s, and we wanted to counter their influence in that region. | ||
| And again, with Iraq, oil had a lot to do with it as well. | ||
| The military-industrial complex, war is a racket, as Smedley Butler said. | ||
| You can make a lot of money going down this road. | ||
| That Smedley Butler, War is a Racket. | ||
| Scary. | ||
| I encourage anyone to read that. | ||
| That was from 1933, is that what it was? | ||
| It's old, and he was right. | ||
| And he was right back then. | ||
| Yeah, and look at Eisenhower. | ||
| And that he had these ideas of what war was for, and that really he was just really making things safe for the bankers. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And look at Eisenhower. | ||
| Eisenhower, a Republican president, when leaving office, warned everybody, look out for the military-industrial complex because people will want to do war because war is a business. | ||
| So you can actually become very wealthy if you're perpetually in a state of war. | ||
| I mean, look how much, again, the defense industry in this country, Raytheon, Boeing, Halliburton, there are jobs tied to the defense industry in every state in this country. | ||
| That makes it so hard, because even if you're nominally anti-war as a politician, you can still say, well, hey, listen, man, I agree, but I don't want the jobs in my district to go away. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that is an issue. | ||
| That's an issue. | ||
| Because if you're a politician, that's the last thing you ever want to do. | ||
| And have that against you when your opponent is, you know, saying, listen, this asshole pulled out, and this is why you lost all these jobs, and this is why the economy's in this shitter. | ||
| I'm going to bring those jobs back. | ||
| I'm going to reinvigorate the military. | ||
| I'm going to do the... | ||
| And there we go again. | ||
| And there you go again. | ||
| Anyway, so the argument in favor of a national direct ballot initiative law, like kind of a direct democracy law. | ||
| It's a great idea. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I love the idea, and I really do think that, even though I take your point, that it's not like the people are always right, but I would say they're way more likely to be right than a bunch of corrupt asshole politicians. | ||
| Right, but then you've got to wonder if the corrupt asshole politicians are going to make these propaganda campaigns to support whatever idea would suit them. | ||
| We've seen it many times before. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, you have that. | |
| Joe, that's a giant issue. | ||
| I mean, we've seen that when it comes to... | ||
| Because most of the time with these direct ballot initiative laws, at the state level, the side that is, in my opinion, better, wins. | ||
| But sometimes there's propaganda campaigns where they run these totally misleading ads about what's going to happen. | ||
| I know this happened in one of the states when it came to either recreational weed or legal weed. | ||
| They ran these misleading ads where they kind of flipped it and made people think, oh, if I vote yes on this, I'm legalizing weed. | ||
| But it was the other way around. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| How the fuck do they do that? | ||
| That's what I'm saying, is they have all these tricks up their sleeves. | ||
| Well, Ohio was the dirtiest one, right, Jamie? | ||
| What was the deal with Ohio where they were trying to make it legal? | ||
| When I was here, I don't remember the exact thing, but what I was hearing was that they had it tied up so that only, like, four businesses could do it for, like, forever or something like that. | ||
| I don't know if it was forever, forever, but, like, for a long, long time. | ||
| Imagine that, like, you could, it's legal, but you have to buy it from me. | ||
| You can't even grow it yourself. | ||
| Like, what? | ||
| Imagine if they did that with tomatoes. | ||
| Okay, we're gonna have tomatoes legal in Ohio, but you can only buy them from Bob. | ||
| Like, what the fuck? | ||
| It's a tomato. | ||
| It grows in the ground. | ||
| How can you stop people from... | ||
| If it's legal, it's legal. | ||
| You know, I mean, there's no laws against you growing anything that's legal. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| Well, there shouldn't be. | ||
| There probably are. | ||
| Are there? | ||
| Like, some weird rules and regulations on it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Some sneaky shit just designed for business. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And that's the thing. | ||
| That is just rank corruption. | ||
| You and I both know that the reason that came about is because whoever was in charge of the business that was getting that contract knew the person in government, probably funneled the money for his campaign. | ||
| And honestly, Joe, that's the root of all the problems. | ||
| The root of all the problems is the money in politics. | ||
| It's the corporations. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Paying the politicians. | ||
| It's the billionaires paying the politicians. | ||
| And if we can have this thing called clean elections, which just means that every election is publicly financed, then in a situation like that you would actually see elections run on competing ideas and philosophies and you wouldn't see elections run on competing special interests. | ||
| Because right now, you could say, okay, Democrats. | ||
| Who gives money to Democrats? | ||
| Unions give money to Democrats. | ||
| So that's an issue. | ||
| Some environmentalist groups give money to Democrats. | ||
| So I would argue those special interests are a little less scary. | ||
| But also, I mean, Wall Street and the military-industrial complex also gives to Democrats, not just to Republicans. | ||
| So you have these competing special interests going at it. | ||
| And really, you're just trying to determine which group of special interests is going to run the country for the next four years. | ||
| And it'd be so much better if we have... | ||
| To have debates with people who just actually flat out disagree with me. | ||
| If you had me and Ron Paul here and him and I argue about economics because he's a libertarian and I'm not. | ||
| I believe in social democracy. | ||
| It would be an awesome conversation. | ||
| We could actually disagree on the substance and really nail down where we disagree and why and let the people make their mind up. | ||
| Politics would be beautiful if that was the case. | ||
| But what's interesting is it's always going to be dependent upon a single individual personality that people find appealing. | ||
| I mean, that is tough. | ||
| This is where we are as a country. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And when someone gets chopped down, boy, they get chopped down, like Kamala Harris. | ||
| When Tulsi Gabbard took her out of the hamstrings, that's a wrap, baby. | ||
| Tulsi, we salute you for taking down Kamala. | ||
| I mean, dude, everybody was saying she's the one, she's going to run it. | ||
| I even thought she would have a stronger run than she did. | ||
| And she fell apart. | ||
| Tulsi made her fall apart. | ||
| It's fascinating. | ||
| She just shrunk into the shadows, like, oh! | ||
| Oh, and your little dog, too! | ||
| Just, you know? | ||
| Did you see the last debate? | ||
| Because that was like peak... | ||
| Okay, she's done now. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Because what was her main issue? | ||
| It was so hilarious to watch this. | ||
| Her main issue that she decided, I'm going to take a stand on this in the debate... | ||
| On Trump with Twitter. | ||
| ...was she was begging Elizabeth Warren, why don't you support banning Trump from Twitter? | ||
| I mean, we're talking about two different sets of rules. | ||
| The most powerful man in the world is violating the terms of service. | ||
| Why did she think that that was something to hang her hat on? | ||
| democratic strategist in Washington, D.C., and they think, okay, you have to outflank Elizabeth Warren on her left on some issue, so use this issue and try to make it seem like you're standing up for the little guy and you're standing up for rules being applied evenly. | ||
| That's such a dumb thing. | ||
| Joe, I know, man, because even to people who are on the left, that looks like you're just begging for the mods. | ||
| The real problem is she never did deny what Tulsi said, and she can't. | ||
| Oh, about her record and how terrible her record is. | ||
| The record was awful. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| What she did with schools is the most disgusting. | ||
| The truancy thing? | ||
| Yes, where she threatened single moms with jail if their kids didn't go to school. | ||
| And she joked around about it at these meetings. | ||
| She joked around about it in conferences. | ||
| You know, about how she cleaned it up and she just had cops knocking on the door. | ||
| You know, it was disturbing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What was even worse is there was somebody who was found not guilty on something. | ||
| They were wrongfully imprisoned, found not guilty on something when it came back up. | ||
| And then Kamala Harris didn't let him out and kept him in on the technicality and said, oh, your paperwork wasn't filed in the proper time frame or whatever it was. | ||
| She did it on purpose herself. | ||
| She did it herself. | ||
| Yes, this is the story that broke. | ||
| And why did she do that? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| But this is one of the things that Tulsi was shining a spotlight on. | ||
| One of the things that Tulsi said was they used them for cheap labor for the state of California. | ||
| And she didn't deny any of that. | ||
| Because her record is abysmal on this stuff. | ||
| I mean, there's no defending it. | ||
| It's amazing that she got to this prominent position without any of that being exposed. | ||
| And Tulsi exposed it. | ||
| Just like, click, turn the lights on. | ||
| Well, look at the Steve Mnuchin thing. | ||
| This is one that we've known for a while. | ||
| So Steve Mnuchin was part of Goldman Sachs. | ||
| He was also the head of One West Bank here in California. | ||
| And what happened was, during the subprime mortgage crisis and the Great Recession, they were illegally foreclosing on people early and kicking them out of their homes in violation of the law. | ||
| And so Kamala Harris, you know, it was recommended by her own office, you gotta prosecute this guy. | ||
| Look at what he's doing. | ||
| She didn't do it. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because he's a big Democratic donor and he was giving money to Democrats at the time. | ||
| Now, by the way, just in case anybody thinks, oh, this is just a partisan issue and only the Democrats are bad... | ||
| Steve Mnuchin is in the Trump administration. | ||
| He picked him. | ||
| He's hilarious. | ||
| So it's a big club and you ain't in it, is the point to steal from George Carlin. | ||
| Remember when his wife was taking all these fucking Instagram photos with all the shit she had on private jets and stuff? | ||
| They look like Bond villains, bro! | ||
| She had gloves on! | ||
| They're Bond villains! | ||
| She's got gloves on! | ||
| Holding money with the gloves! | ||
| Who the fuck wears those gloves that go down to your elbows? | ||
| Bond villains! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| She's holding up money. | ||
| She probably feels dirty holding up ones. | ||
| Ew. | ||
| But the fact that she's wearing those goddamn gloves, like, oh my god. | ||
| And the fact that she looks like she should be fucking a football player or something. | ||
| She doesn't look like she should be fucking that guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's got a gazillion dollars, so that's why. | |
| Kind of hilarious, right? | ||
| When you look at the disparity in beauty? | ||
| Well, Joe, these are the assholes who really run the economy. | ||
| Goldman Sachs really runs the economy. | ||
| Goldman Sachs, it was proven that they committed fraud at a massive level. | ||
| What they would do is... | ||
| I'm going to order us a coffee if you'd like one. | ||
| There's something wrong with our coffee machine. | ||
| So anyway, Steve Mnuchin and Goldman Sachs, it was found that in the lead-up to the subprime mortgage crisis and the Great Recession, here's what they would do, Joe. | ||
| They would sell to unsuspecting clients these packages, these packages of subprime mortgages, but they were rated AAA. And they would sell them these packages saying, hey man, listen, this is a great long-term investment. | ||
| It's safe. | ||
| You're going to make a lot of money. | ||
| At the same time Goldman Sachs was doing that, They would turn around and bet on those packages that they just sold as if they were awesome. | ||
| They would bet on those packages to fail. | ||
| So that's fraud. | ||
| They were making money in two different ways. | ||
| I'm going to sell you the package and make money, okay? | ||
| And then on the other hand, I'm going to bet on this same package I just sold you to fail. | ||
| That's like a car salesman saying, oh, I'm going to sell you this car and this car works wonderfully. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Everything's good. | |
| It's an amazing car. | ||
| Amazing car. | ||
| Tremendous car. | ||
| The most unbelievable car. | ||
| The greatest car the world's ever known. | ||
| It's the perfect car, really. | ||
| You got the fingers down. | ||
| Salesman doing that, Joe. | ||
| And then the salesman also betting his buddy that that car is going to break down before it gets out of the lot. | ||
| So these are criminals, Joe. | ||
| And the thing is, it's Democrats and Republicans who are propping them up. | ||
| The Wall Street bailout costs $14 trillion. | ||
| Why is it we could spend money on that, but we can't have an infrastructure deal that gives our country an A-plus infrastructure? | ||
| I want us to have the number one infrastructure in the world. | ||
| You had Elon Musk on not too long ago. | ||
| He's working on this thing called the Hyperloop. | ||
| The Hyperloop is supposed to be the future of travel where you kind of get in a pod and it's vacuum powered and you can go from New York to LA in like three hours or whatever it is on the ground. | ||
| Why don't we have that everywhere in this country? | ||
| Why don't we have bridges that are fixed? | ||
| Why don't we have awesome roads? | ||
| Why can't we go to airports and feel national pride and say this airport's absolutely beautiful? | ||
| Some are beautiful. | ||
| Detroit actually has an amazing airport. | ||
| Did you know that? | ||
| I had no idea, no. | ||
| Dude, it's like an airport from the future. | ||
| Detroit has these fucking interior trams. | ||
| Like, you're inside and a train is above you flying by. | ||
| You're like, whoa! | ||
| Whoa, that is kind of crazy. | ||
| Santino and I are like, this shit's from the future. | ||
| That is kind of crazy. | ||
| I had no idea about that, no. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I came from... | ||
| LaGuardia in New York is not great. | ||
| Oh, that's the worst. | ||
| I came from JFK, though, thank you. | ||
| LaGuardia's number one worst, and number two is LAX. LAX is number two shittiest airport in the country. | ||
| Yeah, LAX is pretty bad. | ||
| Well, it's even worse now that they told the Uber guys that everyone has to meet you at, like, a lot. | ||
| So people are like, well, fuck Uber, so now everybody's parking in the lots. | ||
| Now good luck trying to find a parking spot in the lots. | ||
| Dude, it's a disaster. | ||
| I was flying at a Terminal 2 the other day. | ||
| I had to park in Terminal 6. Yeah, I almost missed my flight. | ||
| I had to walk a half an hour. | ||
| I was running. | ||
| I had to run to the... | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| Yeah, it's so bad. | ||
| All of them are blocked up. | ||
| They have like no more parking spot signs on all of these different lots. | ||
| This is so outdated, man. | ||
| Airports in general. | ||
| It's time to evolve to the next thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Because we're all sick of that. | ||
| It's a whole day to travel somewhere. | ||
| Even if it's just a two or three hour flight. | ||
| Yeah, but if you go to Burbank, it's still smooth as glass. | ||
| I've never been to that airport. | ||
| It's one of the higher end. | ||
| No, it's not higher end. | ||
| It's fucking Southwest. | ||
| No one goes. | ||
| Well, we were saying they should have a fly at your own risk airlines. | ||
| And actually, I'm stealing a joke from Bill Marcus. | ||
| He came up with that a while ago. | ||
| Because when we were coming through TSA, I left Nashville to come here because I was at Politicon there. | ||
| And we had to wait on this line for TSA. And it was just never ending. | ||
| And it's like if they just opened up a line and said, Hey, man, listen, plane might get blown up, but go right ahead. | ||
| I would have taken that option at the time. | ||
| Do you have TSA pre and clear? | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| Because I don't fly too much. | ||
| I fly to come see you, and that's it. | ||
| Oh, that's it? | ||
| Well, you've got to get clear. | ||
| Clear is the bomb diggity. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You don't have to have ID. Well, there was a line for the pre-check, too! | |
| But clear is not pre-check. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| That's different. | ||
| Clear, you pay for it. | ||
| And you just put your fingers on the little screen. | ||
| It pulls up a picture. | ||
| Oh, here's Kyle. | ||
| And then you go, gone through. | ||
| When will Joe Rogan get a private jet is my question. | ||
| Like flat out own one. | ||
| That seems like. | ||
| There's a problem with insulation, right? | ||
| As a celebrity, period. | ||
| If you're a famous person, you already have a problem being insulated from regular folks. | ||
| You don't have the same sort of financial problems regular people have. | ||
| And then you insulate yourself further when people are always trying to get pictures with you and talk to you and they don't let you just be yourself. | ||
| You can't just hang. | ||
| So you cross over this weird little area. | ||
| Soon as you cross over fully, now I have a staff drive me around and I have a private jet. | ||
| Who the fuck are you? | ||
| Yeah, you're no longer a man of the people. | ||
| However, if anybody could pull it off, I think you could if you had a private jet. | ||
| Everybody would be like, oh cool, Joe has a private jet. | ||
| But if some other famous schmuck did it, people would be like, fuck that guy. | ||
| I do think you could pull it off. | ||
| And also, let's be honest, private jets are so fucking cool if you had a private jet. | ||
| That'd be so cool. | ||
| What about the environment man? | ||
| You can't say anything about the environment man if you have a private jet. | ||
| I think that, and people always try to do this when it comes to the environment, like, oh, well, what have you done? | ||
| Are you using a plastic straw? | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| That's like a Kamala thing, you know? | ||
| But, like, at the same time, there's some insane fact, like, I think it's 76% of global emissions are emitted by, like, 100 companies. | ||
| So, really, it's not people that are the problems, it's the companies, and they need to be regulated, and we can fix that moving forward. | ||
| That's a giant, giant percentage of the problem. | ||
| The little individual steps that people do to minimize their impact on the carbon emissions and the carbon footprint, it's very small in comparison to corporations. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| It's very small. | ||
| It's like pissing in the ocean. | ||
| You're not going to accomplish anything that way. | ||
| Yeah, but it's all these gotcha points that people want to point to when it comes to things like plastic straws and this and that. | ||
| You know what the real issue is? | ||
| It's not plastic straws. | ||
| The real issue is how we handle waste. | ||
| That's the real issue. | ||
| How the fuck are the straws getting in the ocean in the first place? | ||
| That is kind of crazy. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| What's that garbage patch thing? | ||
| I haven't read about this in years, but there's like a freaking giant... | ||
| Boyan Slott, who's been on the podcast before, who's a very young guy. | ||
| I think he's only 21 years old, right? | ||
| Is he about 20 or 21? | ||
| He's very young. | ||
| And he came up with a machine that is collecting garbage from this garbage patch. | ||
| The garbage patch is larger than the state of Texas now. | ||
| It's enormous. | ||
| It's in the middle of the fucking ocean. | ||
| And it's a soup of particles and particulates and all these little half-dissolved pieces of plastic that are just swashing. | ||
| And you see a lot of it on the surface, but much of it is actually below the surface. | ||
| And, you know, fish are eating it and they're filling their bellies and birds eat it. | ||
| And it's just absolutely disgusting. | ||
| Alright, we got some coffees here. | ||
| This is turmeric coffee. | ||
| Thanks, brother. | ||
| Does it work now? | ||
| It's good. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Let's see if I like turmeric. | ||
| Is that how you say turmeric? | ||
| Yeah, it's actually got an R in it. | ||
| Most people don't know. | ||
| Because I would have said turmeric. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| Me too, until they installed this fucking machine here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Pretty good, right? | |
| That is very good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That is very good. | ||
| Little hot, but very good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what's going on here, Jamie? | ||
| What is this? | ||
| Is this an illustration of the garbage patch? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I don't know if this is their new machine, but the Interceptor, I believe is what I've seen in a couple tweets here. | ||
| They have one currently on the way to the Dominican Republic. | ||
| Well, if you go to his Boyan's Instagram, he's got photographs and videos of the thing in action. | ||
| And it's like this giant sort of net collection device. | ||
| Is this a different one? | ||
| Is this a different machine? | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is a new one. | |
| This is from his Twitter. | ||
| Oh, it is from his Twitter? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| Oh, okay. | ||
| His Instagram, though, has actual photographs instead of animation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I mean, this has it, too. | |
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Yeah, so that's how it works. | ||
| It's got like this thing and it just scoops them all up. | ||
| And the idea is that they're going to be able to recycle all of this plastic, which is excellent. | ||
| Yeah, I think we're at the point now that it's almost like we have no option but to rely on technology. | ||
| Like we have to develop technology to try to course correct here. | ||
| Because my buddy was saying that, especially when it comes to climate change, it's like we're so far beyond the point where any casual person thinks we are that something has to be done that's beyond just like, well, cut off all emissions and that's it. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| And that's a scary thought because then we really are – and you've made this point before on the podcast. | ||
| We're relying on like the smartest people to save us at the last minute. | ||
| Yeah, I mean that is – It's terrifying. | ||
| That's terrifying. | ||
| It is terrifying. | ||
| But the smartest people have figured out how to make all this shit that we're throwing in the ocean in the first place. | ||
| And they also need the guy who created the nuclear weapon. | ||
| Yes, yeah. | ||
| You said that, and I learned this from you, he said, I am become death or something like that. | ||
| Well, yes, yeah. | ||
| When he saw the very first, when Oppenheimer saw the very first explosion, the test explosion, he said, I am become death, destroyer of worlds. | ||
| It's a quote from the Bhagavad Gita. | ||
| I mean, that is a fucking terrifying thing to say when you're watching the very first atomic bomb. | ||
| We have the ability to destroy the world. | ||
| Oh, many times over now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't think we're ready for that. | ||
| No, it's where we were talking about earlier today that Kim Jong-un threatened us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I didn't see anything. | |
| Yeah, it was on CNN. I didn't see that either, but allow me to say this, Joe, and I might get some shit for this, but I don't care. | ||
| This is the one very narrow area where I'd give Trump credit because there's this part of Trump where it's just anti-Obamaism in its most raw form. | ||
| Whatever Obama did, I want to do the opposite. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so Obama, well Trump said he said it to him, so I don't know if he actually did, but Obama really wasn't able to get much movement with North Korea, and so Trump felt like, well if I can get some sort of peace deal it would be tremendous, and it'd be amazing, and I would one-up Obama. | ||
| And so Trump has actually directly against John Bolton and Mike Pompeo and Gina Haspel and all of his foreign policy advisors who are terrible neocons who never met a war they didn't like. | ||
| Trump has actually gone against them a little bit and pushed more in a direction of trying to get peace. | ||
| And by the way, the South Koreans are actually leading the way on that, and they deserve a tremendous amount of credit. | ||
| And they like the idea that we're not escalating with them. | ||
| So this is a very rare area, a narrow area, where I want to give them credit. | ||
| But the thing that drives me crazy, Joe, is I feel like the media, and the Democrats too, and definitely the Republicans, establishment Republicans... | ||
| They're trying to push him in a more hawkish direction, which makes no sense because it's like here we all admit, oh my god, this guy's kind of thin-skinned and he's kind of crazy and he kind of, you know, flies off the handle and we don't really trust him with a nuclear weapon, but you want him to be more hawkish and more aggressive with Kim Jong-un and more standoffish? | ||
| Like, they got mad when he announced we're going to stop our military exercises, which are, you know, very antagonistic and done right by North Korea and is done to let them know, like... | ||
| We'll fuck you up. | ||
| That's the whole point of it, is to let them know. | ||
| And Trump's like, well, I don't think they're a good thing. | ||
| I think they work against peace, so we probably should stop that. | ||
| And then he got a bunch of shit because the media was like, well, what did you extract from them by stopping those drills? | ||
| What did you get from them as a result of it? | ||
| And it's like... | ||
| You don't need to get anything from them. | ||
| North Korea, and this is going to blow some people's minds, they are not in any way, shape, or form an offensive threat against the United States. | ||
| There is a 0% chance that they would, unprovoked, offensively, launch an attack against LA, or New York, or Nebraska, or anywhere. | ||
| In fact, we know, and it's admitted as much, when you go to the Pentagon, They know he's actually strategically just acting in a defensive way and he wants nuclear weapons as a deterrent to U.S. aggression because this is exactly what happened with Libya where we told Gaddafi after he saw what we did to Saddam Hussein and then we told Gaddafi like give up your nukes and he was like Take him. | ||
| You have him. | ||
| And then what happened? | ||
| We still toppled him anyway. | ||
| Well, it was the next regime, right? | ||
| No, it was Gaddafi. | ||
| Yeah, but I mean, it wasn't... | ||
| Oh, you're saying it was Obama and it wasn't... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| It was Obama. | ||
| But still, the point is... | ||
| But the rebels took over, right? | ||
| Oh, the beautiful rebels. | ||
| The point is... | ||
| We didn't have anything to do with that, right? | ||
| You can't trust the word of the U.S. because we'll just flip it. | ||
| Did the rebels do it with U.S. aid? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, and by the way, just like in Syria, like we have now, they're jihadists. | ||
| Right, that was the famous Clinton speech. | ||
| We came, we saw, he died. | ||
| She's had an interview laughing about it. | ||
| That was fucking spooky. | ||
| That's one of the dark secrets of U.S. foreign policy, is that we have repeatedly armed jihadists to further our own political goals. | ||
| And that happened with Reagan. | ||
| Back because we wanted to arm the Mujahideen, because they were fighting in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, so we wanted to arm jihadists then, and of course that became the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. | ||
| And so that's why, I don't know if you ever saw this, but there are newspapers from the UK, The Independent, the newspaper The Independent, calling Osama bin Laden a freedom fighter. | ||
| At the time. | ||
| When was this? | ||
| This was in the 1980s when they had, or maybe early 1990s, when they had pushed back the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. | ||
| There were headlines calling him, you know, a freedom fighter. | ||
| When he was the head of the Mujahideen. | ||
| When he was the head of the Mujahideen. | ||
| Wasn't that where they restructured the idea of jihad? | ||
| That a jihad was initially supposed to be a battle against your own personal vices. | ||
| This was how it was interpreted. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's interpreted in different ways throughout the Muslim world. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Anti-Soviet warrior puts his army on the road to peace. | ||
| Okay, that's what I meant. | ||
| Not freedom fighter. | ||
| Puts army on the road to peace. | ||
| Peace fighter. | ||
| What did you think about Trump's reaction to Baghdadi getting caught? | ||
| Classic Trump. | ||
| But the way he did it, he was crying and whimpering. | ||
| Like, why would he say that? | ||
| Well, he was also trying to do a dick measuring contest with Obama. | ||
| Did you see the speech afterwards? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| He was like, listen, I heard they had problems when it came to Osama Bin Laden, but we handled this. | ||
| We handled it so beautifully, so amazingly. | ||
| And the funniest part is, apparently when it actually happened, he was on the golf course. | ||
| And so after the fact, they decided, oh, we got to have one of those situation room photos like Obama did when Osama Bin Laden was killed. | ||
| And so they staged the photo. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They look staged as fuck. | ||
| They put all the wires there and some of them are not plugged in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That photo was taken an hour and a half after it happened, apparently. | |
| Like, come on, bro! | ||
| How do they know that for sure? | ||
| You can pull the metadata out of the photo and find out what it was taken. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, the cameraman, he could have not set the camera right, but he should have done that. | |
| Oh my god, pull the picture up. | ||
| Let me see the picture. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's so funny. | |
| The picture's so well lit. | ||
| That's what's fucked up about it. | ||
| It's like they hired fucking Annie Leibovitz to come in and light the room. | ||
| It's so funny. | ||
| The way it's lit. | ||
| One picture he's looking at the camera, I think, too. | ||
| Is he? | ||
| He's a character, man. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Go full screen on that, please. | ||
| They can zoom in on the wire, you see one of those not plugged in. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of them aren't plugged in. | ||
| But I mean, also, isn't it interesting, too, that they're still using, like, they're using wires? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I guess because they have to for security. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A better connection, too. | |
| Yeah? | ||
| If you're watching video. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So is that HDMI? Like, what are they connected to? | ||
| Cat5, just for Ethernet, yeah. | ||
| I mean, those could be different, but that's what it should be. | ||
| Yeah, like, look how well that's lit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it doesn't even look like they're all really there. | ||
| It looks fake. | ||
| It does look kind of weird, that's for sure. | ||
| But it's funny that, like, at a moment like that, his thought process was like, I have to try to make this as, you know, as amazing as it is, but he feels like he has to go above and beyond to do so, that it can't just be on its own, like, okay, you got the head of ISIS. Congrats. | ||
| Look at Mike Pence. | ||
| He's thinking about writing a book, right there. | ||
| No, actually, okay, I think that Mike Pence is actually one of the most loyal Trump people. | ||
| Who's least likely to abandon him. | ||
| Yeah, but I mean, when Trump is out of office and has a heart attack from all the meth, I think Mike Pence is going to be the guy that writes the book. | ||
| You think so? | ||
| I am. | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| There's something about this guy. | ||
| So Mike Pence, a lot of people don't know this about Mike Pence, but he credits his career to Rush Limbaugh because he became a talk radio host and he was so inspired by Rush Limbaugh. | ||
| Mike Pence was a radio host? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, look at the difference between him and Obama. | ||
| That's so funny. | ||
| Obama's clearly watching something go down. | ||
| Yeah, that's pretty funny. | ||
| But, yeah, I think he's going to be super loyal to Trump even after. | ||
| The other thing that's interesting about the Trump era is, even though he knows how to do relentless offense and not stop attacking Democrats and not stop making his case, what you're finding now is that even the other Republicans are struggling to keep up. | ||
| As much as Trump wants to defend himself, other Republicans are now shying away from doing it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, they feel the walls are closing in. | ||
| They do, but what's interesting is... | ||
| Like, I think there's basically a 0% chance he'll get impeached in the sense that he actually gets out of office. | ||
| You think he'll get impeached, but you don't think he'll be removed from office? | ||
| I think, I actually don't even know if he'll get impeached, so I don't even know if it could get through the House, but there is a chance it gets through the House, I'll put that at 50-50, so he can get impeached through the House, but he needs, you need 20 Republican votes in the Senate to get him out of office, and that's not happening. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's just not happening. | ||
| It's not possible. | ||
| Not for this. | ||
| What's that? | ||
| I would argue probably not for 99.9% of things. | ||
| Maybe there's some unforeseen scenario that I can't think of at the moment that for some reason would make them flip on him, but he can almost do anything and get away with it. | ||
| What's fascinating is how Democrats are so invested in the idea of him being removed that they're saying it as if it was a fact. | ||
| Well, yeah, because we have... | ||
| It's like narrative wars. | ||
| You have the one side, they have their narrative about how he's guilty on all these things, and it's not even an open question anymore. | ||
| He should be impeached. | ||
| He should have been impeached a year ago. | ||
| And then there's the other side of it, which is just like, at least coming from Trump himself, I did nothing wrong, nothing wrong at all, ever. | ||
| Everything is wonderful, and this is all fake news. | ||
| And we constantly live in a state of like a tug of war between the two realities. | ||
| And yeah, I mean, what's amazing to me is watching the media agree with the establishment Democrat narrative when it's not going to come to fruition. | ||
| If you're spending all your time talking about how he's going to get out of office, he's going to be impeached, that's just a pipe dream. | ||
| Do you remember, what the fuck's the guy's name, the GQ guy who had the basement show, the resistance? | ||
| Oh, Keith Olbermann. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| The most insufferable dude on the planet, man. | ||
| So self-righteous, so smug. | ||
| See, that's the problem in the Trump era is that Trump's a dingbat and everybody knows it, but he's not pretending to be holier than thou. | ||
| Whereas a guy like Keith Olbermann is pretending to be holier than thou. | ||
| And he puts on this, you know, this smug act and he starts yelling at everybody and it's like, you know that you don't even want to be yelling right now. | ||
| Reel it in a little bit, man. | ||
| Pump your brakes, dawg. | ||
| Pump your brakes. | ||
| You know you don't want to be doing that. | ||
| But his last broadcast, he was saying that he- My job is done! | ||
| His work is done, and that it's days before Trump gets removed from office, and that was at least two years ago, right? | ||
| And that's the other thing, is that there's so much- Wasn't it? | ||
| When was his last show? | ||
| Keith Olbermann's last... | ||
| It was a while ago. | ||
| It was in a basement with like a cardboard backdrop. | ||
| It's just like a fucking Ikea table. | ||
| And he had some notes. | ||
| And that's why, Joe, I think that my show is growing is because, you know, it's so easy to be anti-Trump, but you have to be anti-Trump with intelligent reasons. | ||
| And so my arguments against him are always policy-based. | ||
| Like... | ||
| There it is. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Olbermann retires from... | ||
| 2017. It's almost exactly two years. | ||
|
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|
Almost... | |
| They don't understand how much of a self-own this is and how this actually pushes people to the right. | ||
| But whenever you say something's going to happen that has not happened, I mean, goddamn, with something as important as removing the president from office, boy, you gotta be right about that. | ||
| There will be no day of reckoning on that, and I promise you. | ||
| And I know that because, remember the whole Russiagate thing? | ||
| The first time I was on the podcast, I did a rant about the Russiagate thing where I predicted they're not gonna get him on collusion. | ||
| It's not gonna happen. | ||
| It's not gonna happen. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I was right. | ||
| Jimmy Dore was right. | ||
| Some others were right. | ||
| I swear to God, the day after we were proven right, there was no... | ||
| In my opinion, you are the most reasonable of all political reporters. | ||
| You make the most sense to me. | ||
| I've never watched one of your shows where I'm like, this guy's out of his fucking mind. | ||
| I really appreciate you saying that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's true. | |
| You're a normal person. | ||
| And you call things the way you see them and you're informed. | ||
| And that is so rare, man. | ||
| And even the fact that you're able to give props to Trump's ridiculous shit and say that it's funny. | ||
| We all know it's funny. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But sometimes you're not supposed to say it's funny. | ||
| But the people with the sticks up their asses, they're only hurting themselves when they don't admit that. | ||
|
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|
Right. | |
| When, no matter what it is, they're like, I'm so offended! | ||
| He had some recently where we were laughing really hard. | ||
| It wasn't the Jussie Smollett thing. | ||
| It was something after that. | ||
| It was something after that. | ||
| By the way, I watched Alien Covenant the other day. | ||
| I didn't know that Jussie Smollett, he was in that. | ||
| The Chappelle bit on that is so funny. | ||
| Oh my god, it was amazing. | ||
| So funny. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| That dude has to live with that forever. | ||
| When you get taken down by Dave motherfucking Chappelle, this is one of the top three comedians of all time dedicated 10 minutes to you. | ||
| And they're trying to act like... | ||
| There's this movement now to try to act like, oh, he's only accepted now by conservatives. | ||
| But that's just not true. | ||
| Oh, with Chappelle? | ||
| With Dave Chappelle. | ||
| Isn't that hilarious? | ||
| Because they're trying to make that a thing, but it's just not. | ||
| It's just not true. | ||
| It's nonsense. | ||
| Well, this is the problem with woke culture. | ||
| It's... | ||
| It's reductionist and it's delusional. | ||
| It's not real. | ||
| And they're trying to push this narrative as if they're echo chambers, whether it's their blogs or their Twitter groups where they have these banned groups where they ban people that haven't even interacted with them. | ||
| And they're interacting with people in this bubble and they believe that this is how the world thinks. | ||
| That's how you get something like that Rotten Tomatoes review of Dave Chappelle's where it got 0% by 5 woke critics. | ||
| Then they release it to the general public. | ||
| It gets 99%. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| And it's also this spring back effect where people know you're fucking with them. | ||
| And then they go, oh, okay. | ||
| Well, you guys are assholes. | ||
| So the people that are saying that Dave Chappelle's special is bad, they become the enemy. | ||
| So Dave becomes the hero. | ||
| And then even if you didn't like it, you're going to say you loved it. | ||
| Yeah, and the other thing is, they act like he's always been politically incorrect. | ||
| Look at Chappelle's show, which was, you know, I was in high school, we all watched the Chappelle's show, and I thought it was like the most brilliant thing ever. | ||
| And the idea that he ever crosses some sort of a line... | ||
| That's Dave Chappelle! | ||
| The whole point is to cross the line! | ||
| That's the whole point of it! | ||
| He's a perpetual line stepper since day one. | ||
| That's why he's so funny. | ||
| What did you say, Jamie? | ||
| The Greenland thing? | ||
|
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|
Where you wanted to buy Greenland? | |
| Oh, that was it! | ||
| That's right! | ||
| Where he put the Trump hotel in the middle of Greenland. | ||
| I promise I'm not going to do this. | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| I know. | ||
| First of all, the buying the Greenland thing is a great move if global warming is real. | ||
| If that becomes a part of the United States, then you can go up there. | ||
| You don't have to worry about it. | ||
| Well, they say, I think that they want rights, not to Greenland, but also there's a movement in the Arctic. | ||
| Right there. | ||
| I promise not to do this to Greenland. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| That shit is hilarious. | ||
| That is pretty funny. | ||
| But you've got to click on it, though, Jamie, so you can get... | ||
|
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|
I couldn't... | |
| I just found a picture real quick. | ||
| Joe, they want to do, like, oil drilling now in the Arctic and shit. | ||
| He doesn't say Trump in that photo. | ||
| You know how Twitter is. | ||
| They only give you, like, three quarters of the picture. | ||
| Yeah, they want to do oil drilling. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, I mean, I just... | ||
| The whole global warming is terrifying to me. | ||
| The whole climate change thing is terrifying to me. | ||
| But what's more terrifying, I think, than anything... | ||
| That is a hilarious picture. | ||
| That is funny. | ||
| What's more terrifying than anything is that some people are resisting it, and it's become politicized, and some people are just buying whole hog into anything that gets said that supports climate change or supports the concept of climate change. | ||
| And that we've gotten into this thing where it's an ideologically based sort of subject. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Can I try to frame it in a way that I hope I can convince some conservatives watching this? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because I would love to have the chance to do that. | ||
| So what I would say to them is, first of all, there's a lot of issues that you care about that this will impact. | ||
| So there was a report that came out about a year ago which found that basically large swaths of the Middle East will be uninhabitable at a certain point because it would just be too hot for human beings to live there. | ||
| Well, we were talking about that yesterday. | ||
| They have Saudi Arabia in summer, where a lot of people from Saudi Arabia come over to L.A. during the summer because our summer ain't shit compared to theirs. | ||
| And that's the thing is, you think there's a refugee crisis when it comes to what's happening in South America. | ||
| You think there's a refugee crisis in Europe when it came to what happened in Syria and Iraq. | ||
| You ain't seen nothing yet. | ||
| So if you're somebody who fancies yourself against immigration or a hardliner on immigration or against helping refugees or whatever it might be, just think about what happens when you multiply what's happening now by a thousand. | ||
| Because that's what's going to happen at some point. | ||
| It's just a matter of when. | ||
| And the other point I would make to them is this. | ||
| People like to make fun of the Green New Deal and try to pick it apart. | ||
| Green New Deal and only define it as basically a new New Deal. | ||
| So the New Deal, FDR, you know, put that into place. | ||
| This was trying to fight back against the Great Depression, try to get people employed, try to fix the country, right? | ||
| And FDR kept getting reelected because FDR was beloved by the entire country because he was fighting for regular working people. | ||
| That was his thing. | ||
| And that's when the Republicans were like, geez, we really should have term limits because we can't beat this guy. | ||
| What if when we talk about the Green New Deal, we're highlighting the fact that, yes, we're going to move towards renewable and green technology. | ||
| Yes, that's going to be a large part of what we're doing, but the whole point, guys, is millions and millions of jobs created for regular people. | ||
| The whole point is to improve this country, to fix this country, to try to make it so that our infrastructure is better than the rest of the world. | ||
| What if instead of looking at this as like, oh my god, this is going to be such a drain on the economy and what's going to happen to the deficit? | ||
| How about you look at this like an economic opportunity? | ||
| Because what's going to happen in the future, Joe? | ||
| There's inevitable patents that are waiting to be had for all these green and renewable technologies. | ||
| We could lead the world on that front, or we could lag behind Russia. | ||
| We could lag behind China. | ||
| We could lag behind everybody else and be stuck in what would effectively be a stone age. | ||
| So how would they encourage this... | ||
| Industry to flourish. | ||
| Would it be subsidies? | ||
| What do you do to get these industries to innovate and to pump a shitload of money into green technology? | ||
| It has to do with government contracts. | ||
| It has to do with, I mean, first and foremost, before we even do the right thing, you have to stop doing the wrong thing, which is stop giving $4 billion a year every year as a subsidy to ExxonMobil. | ||
| And they hilariously say, oh, they need this money because it's for research and development. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| They don't need it for research and development. | ||
| They're one of the most profitable corporations on the planet. | ||
| They could do their own research and development. | ||
| So stop subsidizing fossil fuels. | ||
| And then, yes, what we need to do is invest in a variety of different things that show a little bit of promise. | ||
| Some things won't work. | ||
| Some things will work. | ||
| And then we move forward from there. | ||
| And so that's where you could get the hyperloop all around this country. | ||
| What if all this stuff was built and brought about because we did a massive investment in a Green New Deal? | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Then everybody would talk about how it's a wonderful thing and how we're finally leading the world and in our rightful place. | ||
| I find it hilarious that guys like Trump and guys like Joe Biden, by the way, love to say, like, there's nothing this country can't do. | ||
| And then in the next sentence, they go on to tell you a thousand things that they think we can't do and that we shouldn't do and we shouldn't even try. | ||
| Well, what technologies have you heard, if any, that... | ||
| Are being even proposed to mitigate global warming or climate change? | ||
| Is there anything? | ||
| There's the classic ones that I think are more effective than people give it credit for. | ||
| Like solar is one that's effective that people, I don't think it gets its due. | ||
| But then there's other things like thorium. | ||
| Now, let me just say, I'm not talking about a thorium car because there was a car that was proposed and it apparently was total bullshit. | ||
| They couldn't make a thorium car work. | ||
| What is thorium? | ||
| Thorium is basically, the way it's been described to me is nuclear energy without the downside of like it could melt down and destroy everything. | ||
| That's the way it's been described to me. | ||
| So a nuclear-powered car. | ||
| No, not a car. | ||
| We're talking about power for the energy grid. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why not? | |
| Why not a nuclear powered car? | ||
| Well, the thorium story that everybody got pissed over was because they were trying to make it seem like it was right around the corner or they had the plans and it just wasn't and those people were full of shit. | ||
| But that doesn't mean thorium is bad and totally off the table. | ||
| It just means that that specific car they were talking about was nonsense. | ||
| But if you have thorium reactors, it's basically like meltdown proof nuclear facility. | ||
| That's how it's been described. | ||
| Now, I'm an idiot. | ||
| I have no idea how far off we are from actually developing that. | ||
| But I do know that we need to invest in this and other things that show Potential! | ||
| I mean, that's the only way to move forward. | ||
| The nuclear thing is very interesting, right? | ||
| Because a lot of the technology that's a problem today, like what happened in Fukushima, is old nuclear technology. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well... | |
| Old technology that they can't really shut down. | ||
| But they've mitigated a lot of those issues, apparently. | ||
| When you talk to people that are pro-nuclear, when they talk about the future of nuclear power, they're like, look, we have systems that have all this redundancy in place. | ||
| You can shut them down. | ||
| They're much safer than the things that they constructed essentially in the 70s and the 60s. | ||
| I'm skeptical on that point. | ||
| And I'm skeptical because at every step of the way, they told us that. | ||
| So with Fukushima, before it happened, they said, oh, don't worry, it would never happen here. | ||
| And then what happened was, of course, you had the earthquake, and then you had the tsunami. | ||
| And they were like, oh, we didn't build the seawall high enough. | ||
| That's like an engineering 101 mistake. | ||
| And now you're going to tell me you have everything figured out on that front? | ||
| So I'm a little skeptical when it comes to nuclear for obvious reasons. | ||
| Chernobyl, was it Three Mile Island, Five Mile Island, whatever it's called. | ||
| And then Fukushima. | ||
| But I do think that that doesn't mean I would ban all nuclear today. | ||
| But it does mean I think there are better ways moving forward that are cleaner, that are safer. | ||
| And solar is a big one, particularly in places like Los Angeles. | ||
| But with solar, you also need batteries. | ||
| And the battery technology apparently is not as good as would need to be in place in order to power an entire city like L.A. Even though we have sun almost every day of the year. | ||
| You know, like bright sun, very few clouds almost every day of the year. | ||
| It's so nice. | ||
| It's very nice. | ||
| I love it, right? | ||
| I know. | ||
| You come over here, you're like, ooh. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I'm like, because now in New York, it's, you know, you're finally getting cold. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cold. | |
| Oh, shitty. | ||
| I'm going there on Thursday. | ||
| I'm excited. | ||
| Dude, you'll notice this too, and you've been there before, but you don't even realize it's impacting your mood until you come here in October, November, December, January. | ||
| I noticed when I lived here, when I first lived here, when I first moved here from New York. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was amazing. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Me and my friend Gary were like, look at this. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| Look outside. | ||
| It's fucking so sunny. | ||
| It's fucking January, man. | ||
| It's fucking January. | ||
| I don't think I have seasonal depression, but I definitely have a worse mood in the winter and in the late fall. | ||
| Oh yeah, that is seasonal depression. | ||
| That's less depressed than you could be, but it's definitely not as up as you would be if it was nice out. | ||
| The sun just gives you energy. | ||
| You want to do stuff. | ||
| You want to be productive. | ||
| But you also get spoiled. | ||
| It's like the equivalent of being a weather-based trust fund baby. | ||
| That's a great point. | ||
| That's a great point. | ||
| It's like you always have money so you don't worry about money. | ||
| Well, if you grew up poor and you felt the sting of poverty and you didn't know where your next meal was coming from and you had to work really hard, then when you make some money, you feel great. | ||
| But if you always had money, you're spoiled You don't realize it So somebody who always lived in LA and never traveled They're just like, this is just what it is They don't appreciate it They don't appreciate it They don't appreciate it and they're soft They don't understand what weather is They don't understand They don't have a real relationship with nature And I think when a snowstorm comes You have a relationship with nature And also there's more of a community bond With the people around you Because you're all in it together I mean, you really have to rely on people That's very true. | ||
| If your car gets stuck on the side of the road, you've got to help each other. | ||
| Like, it's different. | ||
| It's a different feel. | ||
| Even in a place like New York City, there's a bond that happens when everyone's collectively dealing with some shit, particularly some nature shit. | ||
| Yeah, I've heard you say that you think, you know, my Northeastern people are harder. | ||
| They're harder people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, but it's also, they're the children of more direct and recent immigrants, and the atmosphere that those immigrants have created, right? | ||
| Like, my parents were second generation, right? | ||
| My grandparents were first generation. | ||
| They came over from Italy and Ireland. | ||
| That's me too. | ||
| My grandma on my mom's side, Italian. | ||
| So all those people, they came over. | ||
| They were fucking savages, basically. | ||
| They hopped on a boat. | ||
| They didn't even have a video to look at, these fucking people. | ||
| No, they can't YouTube it or Google it. | ||
| They just took a crazy chance in hopping on a boat and coming over here from Europe, right? | ||
| They land on the shores, and they live in these immigrant communities. | ||
| You know, they're all walking down the street to buy bread from this guy and sauce from that guy, and they're all... | ||
| They're all eating Italian food because they're all Italian. | ||
| They're living in these Italian neighborhoods. | ||
| And everybody's like fucking struggling, hardcore. | ||
| And they have this hard-ass attitude of the kind of people that would be willing to take a boat ride across the country. | ||
| One of the things you realize when you go to Italy versus Italians in America, Italians in Italy are more relaxed. | ||
| Well, it's all in Europe, from what I've heard, because I've actually been to Canada, and I've been to U.S. territory, Puerto Rico. | ||
| I've never been to Europe yet, okay? | ||
| And I've heard, it's like, it's a totally different culture. | ||
| In the middle of the day, they'll just drop everything they're doing, and everybody goes and eats and takes a nap and relaxes a little bit. | ||
| Dude, Italy is so relaxing. | ||
| The food is sensational, and the weather never sucks. | ||
| I like the idea of that, but if you actually put me in that environment, I'm so used to going, going, going, going, going all the time that I might actually be like, this is weird and crazy. | ||
| Yeah, you hate it. | ||
| You'd go crazy. | ||
| Which is weird because I love the idea. | ||
| I think, for example, the U.S. is the only developed country in the world that doesn't have paid vacation time by law. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Like, in other countries, you might get, like, a month off in August or whatever, and you do whatever you want, and you're paid. | ||
| Here, we don't have that. | ||
| I definitely support an idea like that, but I do wonder how I'd react to that, like, big chunk of the middle of the day missing, you don't work during that middle of the day. | ||
| I do wonder how I'd react to... | ||
| I think a four-day workweek is probably a good idea, though. | ||
| I like that idea. | ||
| It is a great idea. | ||
| Three days off, four days on is the right move. | ||
| Bernie, if you're listening... | ||
| I hope Bernie's listening. | ||
| You think he's listening? | ||
| He had a heart attack recently. | ||
| He's taking a nap right now himself. | ||
| Okay, but we have to say though, and this is incredible, right before I came in here, I looked and there's a new poll that came out of New Hampshire, a CNN poll nonetheless. | ||
| He's now Is he? | ||
| But that's because he's from Vermont. | ||
| No, no, no, but he was down before. | ||
| Oh, yeah? | ||
| And he's leading now. | ||
| And furthermore, an Emerson poll came out. | ||
| He went up five points post heart attack. | ||
| Five points he went up. | ||
| Post heart attack? | ||
| Post heart attack. | ||
| They feel bad for him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Who are they polling? | ||
| People in hospitals? | ||
| No, I'm telling you, man. | ||
| I'm telling you. | ||
| You know how you always say about adversity? | ||
| Like, oh, if you overcome adversity. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He's like the prime example of that. | ||
| Because I know people in his campaign, and they were telling me that literally the day of, by the end of the day, he was like, okay, I'm feeling much better. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| That sounds like wishful thinking. | ||
| I mean, that's what they were telling me was happening. | ||
| Kyle, I love you. | ||
| You're a great guy. | ||
| That sounds like wishful thinking. | ||
| And I love Bernie, and I had him in here, and I really enjoyed talking to him, and thanks to you, because you set that up. | ||
| But when you have a fucking heart attack, your body's telling you something. | ||
| Your body's telling you, hey, man. | ||
| You need to stop redlining this engine. | ||
| They're making him roll back some events a little bit, and he's reeled it in a solid 15%. | ||
| They need to get him on steroids. | ||
| Imagine him getting jacked. | ||
| Get him on the juice. | ||
| Get him on the shit Trump's on. | ||
| Steroids and some form of amphetamine. | ||
| He's already doing a thousand rallies a day. | ||
| It'd be hilarious. | ||
| He should have vitamin drips all day long. | ||
| They should give him a vitamin drip in the morning, a vitamin drip in the afternoon. | ||
| Just change his fucking diet. | ||
| I don't know what he's eating, but it doesn't look like he's eating the right stuff. | ||
| I think now he's on a very regimented thing. | ||
| Yeah, got a nutritionist. | ||
| Not for nothing. | ||
| Blood work. | ||
| Did you see the debate right after the heart attack? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Because he looked so much better. | ||
| He did. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's like he knocked something loose. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I didn't know I was being held back, Joe. | ||
| I had a bum artery. | ||
| Yeah, he really did have a bum artery, right? | ||
| He got a stent put in it. | ||
| But the thing that's so amazing is that he's, and Killer Mike, who you also had on the podcast, who I absolutely love, he said it best. | ||
| He said, this is the only candidate in my lifetime who's taking Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s philosophy and trying to run it across the finish line. | ||
| Yeah, Mike loves him, and I love Mike. | ||
| So, I mean, I think the whole thing about him that worries people is just his health and his age. | ||
| And then there's people that want to label him as a wacky socialist. | ||
| But when he explains his positions outside of that whole debate environment where you only have 30 seconds to scream... | ||
| Right. | ||
| And there's a difference, Joe, between socialism and social democracy. | ||
| And social democracy is Scandinavia. | ||
| That's all it is. | ||
| So it's saying, hey, we're not totally scrapping capitalism. | ||
| We're not going to have everything government-run. | ||
| All we're saying is, let's catch up to the rest of the developed world when it comes to single-payer health care. | ||
| So everybody gets health care. | ||
| Everybody gets college. | ||
| We're going to abolish student loan debt. | ||
| We're going to have fair wages for everybody. | ||
| So nobody's working full-time and living in poverty. | ||
| And when you explain this, like you just said, when you explain this to everybody, they're like, I can't believe I thought I ever disliked this guy. | ||
| Well, all those things are as fucking reasonable as you can get. | ||
| And if you're gonna have a community, which is essentially what a country is, right? | ||
| We're a community. | ||
| We've gotta take care of each other. | ||
| What's the best way to take care of each other? | ||
| Well, let's support each other so that if something comes up, some sort of a catastrophic health crisis, you're covered. | ||
| We cover you. | ||
| We love you. | ||
| We are a community. | ||
| If you have a heart attack, if you've got a this, you got a that, you need a leg fixed, whatever the fuck it is, you're covered for that. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, maybe we shouldn't cripple you with debt when you're 17 years old and you don't understand what the fuck you're doing and we get you involved in this ridiculous system where you can never get Out of it, even if you go bankrupt, you still owe that money forever. | ||
| We're at a point right now in this country where people who have Social Security, they're on Social Security, they're getting money from their Social Security taken out because they owe student loans. | ||
| If that's not the most desperate and gross fucking feeling in the world. | ||
| Disgusting. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| And we have some weird, creepy coalition. | ||
| I mean, there's some creepy agreement that they have with these financial institutions and these educational institutions where they're essentially financially imprisoning young kids at an early age. | ||
| And people say, whoa, you shouldn't make that decision. | ||
| You shouldn't make that decision and put yourself in debt like that. | ||
| Okay, that's great. | ||
| But that's a very unscientific issue. | ||
| Because you're talking about someone whose brain isn't even fully formed. | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| Your frontal lobe, you're not even a fucking real human until you're 25 years old. | ||
| So let me, I want to address, because I can, some people are going to hear what I just said about, you know, Medicare for All, single-payer healthcare, and they're going to say, yeah, but how are we going to pay for it? | ||
| Because that's the common one that people bring up. | ||
| Now let me address that, because that's a really important question. | ||
| And usually when you actually substantively address it, people go, oh, okay, that makes a lot more sense. | ||
| How are they going to pay it? | ||
| So, very simply put, the way the system works right now, it costs more than if we had Medicare for All. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Because we have an unnecessary for-profit middleman that essentially acts like a mafia. | ||
| So what we're saying is, I'm going to remove that mafia from around your neck, and you're going to... | ||
| It's basically... | ||
| What is that mafia you're referring to? | ||
| That mafia is the for-profit health insurance company. | ||
| So they have to take their cut as the middleman between you and your doctor. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| If we just remove that, have the government at no profit margin be the single insurer, that's what a single payer means, they're the single insurer, then we actually end up saving $5 trillion over the course of 10 years. | ||
| And that's not Kyle Kalinske talking, that's a detailed study from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. | ||
| Now, that's a liberal fucking place. | ||
| So what do you do when you have all these insurance companies? | ||
| Like, what happens to those insurance companies? | ||
| What happens to all those jobs? | ||
| What happens to all that money? | ||
| The insurance companies go away. | ||
| Go away. | ||
| You mean the businesses go under. | ||
| So you kill those businesses. | ||
| If I say, you're not allowed to cut your lawn, okay, unless... | ||
| Let's say the guy wants to charge you $100. | ||
| I say, no, Joe. | ||
| I'm going to be the one who pays the person who cuts your lawn. | ||
| You have to give me $200. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So if somebody came along and said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. | ||
| Hey, middleman guy, we're going to get rid of you. | ||
| And Joe, you want to cut your lawn? | ||
| Give that guy $100 and you're all set. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Wouldn't you say, well, that makes sense. | ||
| The middleman guy, he can piss off. | ||
| Because that's the way I look at it. | ||
| The reality is when people argue for choice in health insurance, look at it like this. | ||
| Would you say, hey man, don't take away my choice when it comes to picking my firefighter? | ||
| People are like, what do you mean? | ||
| No, the way it works is there's a fire, and you get help. | ||
| End of discussion. | ||
| They will come. | ||
| You don't say, whoa, whoa, whoa, I want to pick my fire department. | ||
| Well, this is the same thing with healthcare. | ||
| You're going to be able to pick your doctor, that's perfectly fine, but the idea of you'll have your choice between insurance companies, that's like saying, do you want the Irish mafia ripping you off, or the Italian mafia ripping you off, or the Jewish mafia ripping you off? | ||
| Go ahead, I'm giving you choice. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| In some areas, the idea of choice is fundamentally absurd. | ||
| It's like saying, well, let's shut off the road system instead of being public. | ||
| Let's have it privately run. | ||
| And you could make a left on that road, make a left on that road, or make a right on that road. | ||
| Don't take away my choice of road. | ||
| I want to pay for that one or that one or that one. | ||
| No! | ||
| It's all there. | ||
| It's all free at the point of service. | ||
| And this is the whole idea of having a public utility. | ||
| This is the whole idea of having something that's off the table in a civilized society. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And again, what the studies show is, it actually saves money. | ||
| So the real question people should be asking is, how can we afford to keep having the system that we have right now? | ||
| Because we pay more than the rest of the developed world, and we have 30,000 to 45,000 Americans that die every year because they don't have access to basic healthcare, and we have 500,000 people who go bankrupt as a result of medical bills. | ||
| So what you're saying is that it would abolish insurance companies, essentially? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-mm. | |
| So there is one caveat to that, and that caveat is what's called supplemental health insurance. | ||
| So what that means is, if there's something that Joe Rogan likes that's a medical procedure that isn't scientifically proven yet, but it's still something that you like, there would be private health insurance companies that sell you supplemental insurance, which means on top of everything that you already have through Medicare for All. | ||
| So if you were getting like stem cell therapy or something like that? | ||
| Well, in an ideal Medicare for All system, and Bernie, believe me, has gone... | ||
| So far above and beyond any criticism. | ||
| I mean, his thing is airtight. | ||
| It gives dental, it gives vision, it gives everything. | ||
| I wouldn't be surprised if under that Medicare for All bill, the stem cells thing is covered. | ||
| But, let's say something like homeopathy, which is like the water... | ||
| Horseshit. | ||
| Horseshit. | ||
| Total horseshit. | ||
| You want to cover that by insurance? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no. | |
| No, Medicare for All would not cover that because it's so speculative. | ||
| So private horseshit insurance? | ||
| Private horseshit insurance. | ||
| Or plastic surgery, things of that nature. | ||
| But that's an important point. | ||
| Is that real? | ||
| They have private insurance for plastic surgery? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no. | |
| I'm saying it would be theoretically legal for it under a Medicare for All system because it's supplemental. | ||
| How could you have insurance for plastic surgery? | ||
| Like, you know, I decided my ears are too big. | ||
| So maybe the market... | ||
| Maybe the market wouldn't be there, but it would be legally possible is the point. | ||
| So it doesn't fully ban private insurance, but it does ban what's called duplicative care. | ||
| So you can't say, hey, I'm an insurance company. | ||
| I'm going to come in and offer you something that's already covered in full by the single-payer system. | ||
| And the reason why that's there is... | ||
| We don't want you getting ripped off by some charlatan. | ||
| I see what you're saying. | ||
| But it would essentially gut the health insurance industry. | ||
| It would make it so that you no longer have health insurance company CEOs making tens of millions of dollars off the backs of people while people die because they can't get health insurance. | ||
| Yes, it would. | ||
| And that's a good thing. | ||
| That's a positive thing. | ||
| It's a good thing for us, but as a sale, like to sell that. | ||
| Well, the thing is... | ||
| We have this issue where we have like a status quo bias where people think like well because it works how it works right now therefore the idea of addressing it and changing it seems like so overwhelming that we just kind of default to how we have it now. | ||
| But the problem is we know as a matter of fact That the way we do it now is the most batshit crazy way you could possibly do it, because they research this stuff all the time, they study this stuff all the time, and every single time they look at it, the US comes dead last in the developed world when it comes to healthcare. | ||
| So we finished, there was a recent study from the Commonwealth Fund, they found that they studied 11 different countries, the US is 11th out of 11 when it comes to healthcare. | ||
| So every other country that does the single-payer system, which we were talking about, and there's different versions of it. | ||
| There's multi-payer. | ||
| There's single-payer. | ||
| There's public funding of private insurance, public funding of public insurance. | ||
| But bottom line is, any other way you do it is better than the way we do it right now. | ||
| And just to be clear, because some people say, well, what about Obamacare? | ||
| What was Obamacare? | ||
| Obamacare was originally a Heritage Foundation plan, which is a right-wing think tank. | ||
| So that was basically Mitt Romney's health care bill, Newt Gingrich's health care bill. | ||
| And the whole idea of that was, we're going to force people to buy private insurance. | ||
| And I don't like that idea at all. | ||
| I dislike that mess. | ||
| I've been very critical of Obamacare. | ||
| I think there's a good case to make that it was a step in the right direction because anything was better than the system that we had at the time. | ||
| But I would say that was just a little step on the path to what we should have, which is a Medicare for All system, where health care is a right and not a privilege. | ||
| We catch up to the rest of the developed world. | ||
| And again, we should go above and beyond the rest of the world. | ||
| Because like in Canada, I don't think they have dental covered by it. | ||
| They don't. | ||
| But Bernie's bill does provide dental. | ||
| So, you know, I think that this is one of those issues where when it's fully explained to people, it's kind of a no-brainer, and you can get people to realize, like, no, no, no, the system is totally screwing you right now, and we can fix it. | ||
| Do you think he has a chance? | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| Bernie Sanders? | ||
| You really do? | ||
| Okay, well, let me ask you this. | ||
| Even post-heart attack? | ||
| Absolutely, I do. | ||
| Now, let me ask you this. | ||
| Who of the Democrats do you foresee really beating him? | ||
| Beating Trump? | ||
| No, no, no, beating Bernie in the primary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm... | |
| Well, it's a good question, right? | ||
| It's a very good question. | ||
| He's got a lot of support, for sure. | ||
| But Elizabeth Warren seems to have a lot of support right now, too. | ||
| Okay, so that's your answer, right, Elizabeth Warren? | ||
| Yeah, I would say, well, Joe Biden's fucked. | ||
| He's too old. | ||
| But old in the wrong way. | ||
| His communication skills have eroded. | ||
| He flubs his words. | ||
| He looks exhausted. | ||
| He looks like he's just waiting for them to shut the door so he can take a big deep breath and just sink into the couch. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Oh, I know exactly what you're saying. | ||
| Sometimes I feel bad because it appears like he genuinely has cognitive decline. | ||
| Oh, he does. | ||
| So I don't like to make fun of it, but then when he goes out there in the debate and he starts like angrily ranting and he says, you know, we got to play the record player at night, make sure the kids hear words. | ||
| It's like, that made less than no sense, man. | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| You got to wrap it up. | ||
| Did you know that his people are actually, they have a plan. | ||
| It's called like a limited exposure or limited visibility campaign where Joe, they are literally like hiding him from the public as much as possible. | ||
| Well, they have to. | ||
| They have to. | ||
| Because he's still close to the lead, right? | ||
| Oh, in some polls he's still leading. | ||
| That is hilarious. | ||
| But see, and here's the thing, and this is what I was going to get to in relation to Bernie. | ||
| I call the support for Biden default support. | ||
| So default support is people who don't necessarily follow politics that closely, but they might be a registered Democrat, and they're asked, hey, who do you support in the 2020 election? | ||
| I don't know who's running. | ||
| Oh, Biden? | ||
| Oh, I know Biden. | ||
| He was the VP of Obama. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah, Biden, why not? | ||
| That's the kind of support I think Joe Biden has, where that is very, very likely to kind of dwindle away. | ||
| And we're seeing it right now because when you look at the fundraising numbers... | ||
| Bernie is breaking all records when it comes to individual donations, even outraising Trump. | ||
| And Trump's a beast on the campaign trail. | ||
| He's nothing to mess around with on the campaign trail. | ||
| But he's even outraising Trump when it comes to individual donations. | ||
| His ground game is airtight. | ||
| He's got people everywhere making phone calls, knocking on doors, getting involved. | ||
| And so he has basically an endless well of small individual donor support and an army of people on the ground, whereas Joe Biden is doing so bad that he went back on his pledge like, oh, I won't take super PAC money. | ||
| Now he's saying, well, if somebody were to make a super pack and it were to help me out, what do you want me to tell you? | ||
| Because he raised $9 million in the last quarter. | ||
| Bernie raised $30 million. | ||
| And Joe raised $9 million. | ||
| You are so Bernie happy. | ||
| Look at you. | ||
| I love politics. | ||
| I love talking about politics and explaining everything. | ||
| I know you do. | ||
| But you're so Bernie happy. | ||
| Well, yeah, because Joe, he's an amazing candidate who's just trying to get the U.S. to have social democracy, and he's a guy who I know, because his record shows it, he's going to fight for all of us. | ||
| Even if you don't agree with him, and even if you dislike him, I understand that. | ||
| You might be somebody who's right-leaning, he's too far left for you. | ||
| But what everybody has to say, and they know it's true, is that he's incredibly honest, and he's actually going to fight for you every step of the way. | ||
| No, I think you're right. | ||
| And talking to him, he's a very sincere guy. | ||
| And I think... | ||
| A lot of his policies I agree with. | ||
| I really, really agree with this whole – the exoneration of student loan debt. | ||
| That to me is a giant factor in a lot of poor decision-making that a lot of young people make because they're fucked because they have this massive debt hanging over their head. | ||
| It's a huge source of stress and I think it's a rigged system. | ||
| I think it's dirty. | ||
| It's a dirty system. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The Medicare for All, I think, is a wonderful idea. | ||
| As long as you can seek, you know, very talented orthopedic surgeons, if you've got some money and you need to get something fixed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Always pick your doctor. | |
| You can always pick your doctor. | ||
| You know, because you've got to—there's a certain incentive, right, that I think that certain doctors have towards excellence, right? | ||
| And a lot of that incentive is financial. | ||
| And they're— The doctors that are the very best in certain particular fields, they want to charge more money for their services. | ||
| And I think that that should be okay. | ||
| That's one of the things that helps make people more enthusiastic about excellence. | ||
| It's financial reward. | ||
| It's a part of human nature. | ||
| No, absolutely. | ||
| And that's one of the things that people despise about the concept of socialism, is that it's going to somehow or another by making sure that no one makes any more money than anybody else, which is like the most extreme... | ||
| Well, that's like authoritarian communism. | ||
| Yes, yes, yes. | ||
| But I don't agree with that at all. | ||
| I don't either. | ||
| And people who I talk to who are my friends on the left, they don't agree with that at all. | ||
| And one of the things that we get most annoyed with is when there's a conflation, people will look at the former Soviet Union. | ||
| People will look at Venezuela. | ||
| people will look at Cuba and they'll go, "Hey, well, that's what you want." And that's what they say to us. | ||
| And whenever we respond, "No, man, we're talking about social democracy. | ||
| We're talking about what they have in Scandinavia." There's usually no substantive rebuttal to that other than to say, and what's funny, Joe, is they will take credit for those systems in some ways. | ||
| So it depends. | ||
| If you talk to Ben Shapiro on one day, he might say, "No, no, no, Joe. | ||
| Those systems are so good because they're capitalist to an extent." Okay? | ||
| And if I fire back at Ben and I go, okay, Ben, then let's implement that style of capitalism, he'll switch it and say, no, no, no, there's socialists, so we can't do that. | ||
| Which is it? | ||
| We have a giant problem in this country with this whole right-left shit. | ||
| And this is what I was trying to say earlier when we were talking about the concept of classical liberals, because most people don't even know what the fuck that means. | ||
| The idea behind it... | ||
| I just think that to have groups of people that think in certain ways, the problem with ideologies, whether it's left-leaning or right-leaning, is it makes you automatically predisposed to ignore or to refute the concepts that are on the other side. | ||
| I totally agree. | ||
| And so many of us share these ideas across the board. | ||
| Right. | ||
| committed to one concept. | ||
| Like, one of the things that you do see this about climate change, people on the right are more inclined to deny the negative effects of climate change because it's part of the right wing ideology. | ||
| This is something we see today. | ||
| We need to get, so you're right, but also I would just advise people don't get too lost in the noise because we can think that that's something that's overwhelming and we can't And we can also think that, you know, for example, the whole Russiagate thing on the Democratic side, that became such a fundamentalist religion and you couldn't deviate from the line at all. | ||
| Well, it became something that was exciting. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| So they wanted it to be true, and people would believe it and argue for it, even though the things weren't adding up, and I was trying to point out where it's wrong. | ||
| But what I would say is, at the end of the day, people should actually be... | ||
| Relatively happy about the fact that I think the strongest divide in the country is not right versus left. | ||
| The strongest divide in the country, I've called it populist versus elitist. | ||
| So you have elitists in the Democratic Party, you have elitists in the Republican Party, and you have the people. | ||
| And the people, we're so much more in agreement than people give us credit for. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| I have a thing that I go down, and I did this in some of my events at Politicon as well, but people would be surprised, man. | ||
| 80% of the country wants to raise the minimum wage. | ||
| 58% of the country wants to have free college. | ||
| Like I said, only 16% or so of the American people want to be involved in Iraq and Afghanistan and these terrible foreign wars. | ||
| 62% of the country wants to legalize marijuana. | ||
| I could sit here and ring off issue after issue. | ||
| It's over 80% of the American people that want to get the money out of the political system and clean up the corruption. | ||
| Do you think that this country... | ||
| It has room for other parties. | ||
| We're so ingrained in this idea of left versus right, Democrat versus Republican. | ||
| And this is the choices that we've always had with the occasional independent, the occasional, you know, Ross Perot jumps into the race and throws a monkey wrench into everything. | ||
| But other than that, or maybe to a minor extent, Gary Johnson. | ||
| But do you think there's room for other parties at this juncture? | ||
| So that's a great question. | ||
| And what I would say is, first, let me give my personal take on it. | ||
| My personal take is I 100% want that to be the case because I prefer, in many ways, aspects of a parliamentary system to our system. | ||
| And I like the idea of having multiple parties. | ||
| I like the idea of having more choice. | ||
| So I want that to be true. | ||
| And when I was one of the co-founders of Justice Democrats, when we launched it, we had to have those difficult conversations about how exactly do we go about trying to get these ideas implemented. | ||
| And basically, we came to the conclusion that as much as we want it to be true, as much as we'd like to start a third party and have it work and take off, there is such a gigantic systemic bias against that happening that you really do have ultimately the choice of Republican or Democrat. | ||
| So then the idea becomes, okay. | ||
| It's a reform movement now. | ||
| We have to try to reform the Democratic Party. | ||
| And there are people on the right who can try to reform the Republican Party. | ||
| Like, if you're somebody on the right and you agree more with Ron Paul and you're more libertarian, you want to end the wars, you want to legalize drugs, I hope those people take over the Republican Party. | ||
| And you have people who are against corporate welfare and whatnot in that party. | ||
| So what we really need to do is, because it's just the nature of our system, because there's such a bias against third parties, what we really need to do is harness all that energy to fix things and just try to take over the existing infrastructure. | ||
| Because you're not going to build a counter infrastructure because there's so much name recognition. | ||
| It's like saying there's Democrat and there's Republican. | ||
| Yeah, technically we could start up RC Cola and see if we could get a significant market share, but you're not going to do it. | ||
| You're not going to do it. | ||
| It's not going to work. | ||
| So really, and again, I don't want this to be the answer, but just factually speaking, it is the answer that we have to try to overtake the corrupt elements within the system and bring about change that way, because that's the only way I think it will really work. | ||
| Well, the only way it's going to really work is if what you were talking about with voting on very specific issues, because If you – most of the things that are problems are not benefiting people. | ||
| They're benefiting the people that are in positions of power and positions where they can influence the way policy is dictated because they've contributed to campaigns and because they've got this sort of revolving door thing going on with universities where mathematics professors and economic professors sort of dictate policy or advise. | ||
| And then they get jobs in banks and then you've got this whole weird thing going on with people in the government, right? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I mean, that was exposed in what was that? | ||
| The Inside Job. | ||
| Inside Job, sure. | ||
| Which is a fantastic documentary for people to understand the collapse. | ||
| But it's not benefiting us. | ||
| All these things that happen and all this corruption that takes place and all this influence, it never benefits us. | ||
| It's exactly right. | ||
| But that's what's weird about it. | ||
| And if we got a chance to vote on most of these ideas instead of voting on politicians and then the politicians implement these ideas to benefit themselves and benefit the special interest groups that got them into place, then things would be much better. | ||
| Okay, you have no idea how happy I am that you just said that because, Jamie, it's official, I sold Joe Rogan on my idea. | ||
| Oh, it's a great idea. | ||
| On my direct democracy law. | ||
| It's a great idea right off the bat. | ||
| I loved it. | ||
| Because I trust, and I have no problem saying this, some people will come after me for it, I don't care, but I trust, if somebody's watching this and they're right-leaning and they have their opinions and whatnot, I actually trust that person more on the issues... | ||
| Then I trust Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi. | ||
| And I'm somebody, I'm on the left. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I do not agree with these nominally on-the-left politicians, these Democratic politicians, because I think they're elitist, and I think they're corrupt, and I don't think they're looking out for our best interests, but I think that somebody who disagrees with me ideologically, who might be watching this right now, they have more common sense, and they're not bought. | ||
| Right, they're not bought. | ||
| That's the big thing. | ||
| They're not bought. | ||
| There's so much more agreement than we think. | ||
| And so if you actually give people that option where you say, no, no, no, you're going to directly vote on this, then I think we're going to see, honestly, I think over 80% of the time, the more reasonable position we'll win. | ||
| Every now and then you'll get one that for whatever reason there might be misinformation or whatever and it's overwhelming and then they'll lose. | ||
| But getting it right 80% of the time is a hell of a lot better than what we have right now, which is amazing, Joe, because Congress routinely polls around 20% favorability. | ||
| This is a body that we could just elect them and then you poll a month later, hey, what do you think of Congress? | ||
| Everybody's like, I hate them. | ||
| They're terrible. | ||
| How can that be? | ||
| It's because we all know we're voting for the lesser of two evils every time we go to the polls. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Direct democracy. | ||
| Direct democracy. | ||
| Every presidential election, take the three biggest issues. | ||
| We all vote on it, along with who we want the president. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why only three? | |
| Well, that's just arbitrary. | ||
| We could say five, whatever it might be. | ||
| But I think that it's good. | ||
| Between three and five, I think, makes the most sense because it's something where everybody will pay attention to it and we could talk about it a lot, you know what I mean? | ||
| That seems like a very realistic system of reform. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look at you. | |
| You're excited. | ||
| That's what I'm saying, man. | ||
| I think it's a good idea, and I think that would really nip in the bud a lot of corruption. | ||
| It goes right around it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It goes right around it. | ||
| Now, I also think that at the same time, you do have to try to get a constitutional amendment to get money out of politics so that we kind of get to the root of the corruption. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I also think that this direct democracy idea is a great idea because you do get to go right around the corruption, and you can actually kind of circumvent a lot of the problems that are brought about as a result of it. | ||
| What a difficult task that is, though, to get the money out of politics because it's so big. | ||
| It's such a giant part of how all this shit gets done. | ||
| And once a system gets entangled and, like, deeply rooted... | ||
| That's right. | ||
| But the system of it is actually kind of new. | ||
| It has a really fascinating backstory as to how this came about. | ||
| So there were a series of court decisions. | ||
| There was one in the late 1970s. | ||
| Was that Buckley v. | ||
| Vallejo, or was that... | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| There were like three or four court decisions over the years, starting in the late 1970s, that kind of culminated with Citizens United in the modern era and McCutcheon in the modern era. | ||
| And what people do is they wrongly think like Citizens United and McCutcheon were the biggest problem. | ||
| But no, they actually shot a dead horse because the previous court cases set the precedent of money equaling speech. | ||
| This is the legal theory that's now operating around the country is that money equals speech. | ||
| So if you're an outside group and you want to spend on an election, hey man, it's your free speech. | ||
| If you're a billionaire and you want to dump $50 million into an election to say keep my taxes as low as possible, that's free speech and you have every right to do that. | ||
| So that's the legal theory that we now operate under and that has basically legalized bribery. | ||
| You can't give money directly to a politician and say I want you to do X because that's called a quid pro quo. | ||
| That's direct bribery. | ||
| But all you have to do is add a little bit of nuance and don't say it directly and have it implied and you're good. | ||
| This is the Ukraine thing with Trump. | ||
| This is essentially exactly what you're talking about. | ||
| That is kind of like the Ukraine thing except Trump was just trying to get dirt on his opponent in the election. | ||
| But the quid pro quo... | ||
| Yeah, that's always been Weasley. | ||
| Whether it's Trump saying it or whether it's other politicians saying it, when they act like, hey, there was no quid pro quo. | ||
| Yeah, but we all know why ExxonMobil gives millions of dollars, lobbies Congress to the tune of millions of dollars. | ||
| It's because they want that $4 billion subsidy. | ||
| Everybody knows that. | ||
| Yeah, it doesn't have to be stated clearly. | ||
| We're not idiots. | ||
| Everybody gets that. | ||
| And so that's like the Weasley last resort to say, no quid pro quo. | ||
| Please, get out of here. | ||
| So anyway, but there's an argument that really busts up this idea that money equals speech. | ||
| That I absolutely love. | ||
| And it's, okay, well, if money equals speech, then murder for hire would have to be legal. | ||
| Because I'm not saying... | ||
| I'm not giving you money to murder somebody. | ||
| I'm just using my speech to say, I don't have a problem with murder. | ||
| You're allowed to do that. | ||
| You should be able to get any kind of drug you want. | ||
| You should be able to get any kind of prostitute you want. | ||
| And the dodge will always be... | ||
| I'm not paying for services, no, because money equals speech. | ||
| I'm just saying... | ||
| I'm just saying murder's okay. | ||
| I'm just saying... | ||
| You know, I want a hooker or whatever it might be. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| But this is the logic of that ruling actually applied. | ||
| I see what you're saying. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Oh, money equals speech? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Does it equal speech in these ways? | ||
| Oh, it doesn't. | ||
| Oh, it only equals it when it comes to politics. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Do you have aspirations of running for office someday? | ||
| I don't really. | ||
| Really is a weird word. | ||
| Well, okay. | ||
| I'll explain what that means. | ||
| I've learned to never say never. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Because I'm not... | ||
| It's just, you can be wrong. | ||
| So maybe when I'm 42 years old, I get the urge and I say, you know what? | ||
| I want to run for office. | ||
| But right now, you enjoy talking about it quite a bit. | ||
| And how old are you? | ||
| I am 31. That's very young to be as immersed in politics as you are, and for as long as you've been. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| How long have you been doing this? | ||
| 2012. I started doing it, I think, late 2012, full-time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's seven fucking years, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a long time. | ||
| I'm an old young guy. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's an interesting way of putting it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, but I mean... | ||
| I love this aspect of it. | ||
| Joe, here's the thing. | ||
| In my heart of hearts, I'm more... | ||
| Like, you're a comedian? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I'm more like... | ||
| I like hanging out with guys like you and fucking around and joking around and... | ||
| I don't like, like, if I were to ever officially jump into politics, I know what it's like, man. | ||
| I know the first thing they do is because they've already done it to me. | ||
| Oh, dig up his old tweets, see what he was saying. | ||
| Ah, ah, look, he said that thing, that thing is wrong, and then it's all, this whole circus, I don't have the patience for that. | ||
| I don't give a fuck. | ||
| If they come after me, I'll be like, shut the fuck up. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| It's old. | ||
| Who gives a shit? | ||
| So, you know, it's just a whole other world. | ||
| It's a whole other ballgame. | ||
| And being an outsider and being able to call a spade a spade... | ||
| Because I got news for you. | ||
| They don't... | ||
| The system does not like people like me. | ||
| The system does not like people like Bernie. | ||
| They don't like people like Tulsi. | ||
| They don't like these kinds of people. | ||
| Well, they don't like people like Trump either, and he's the president. | ||
| Well, exactly. | ||
| And again, this gets back to the whole populist versus elitist thing. | ||
| I think Trump was probably the most effective, what I would call a fake populist of all time, is that he was giving this image of a populist, this image that he's going to fight for the working man, and then as we already described earlier, You know, the status quo just kind of continued chugging along as it is. | ||
| Look at his tax bill. | ||
| It's the most establishment, pro-establishment bill of all time. | ||
| So he's an amazing populist, but I would say it's a fake populist because his policies differ from that. | ||
| But you're right. | ||
| They don't like people who have no filter. | ||
| They don't like people who really, like, I actually think your average American would be much better at running the government than any of these schmucks who are there right now who are massively wealthy and massively corrupt. | ||
| As long as they didn't also become corrupt. | ||
| Yeah, and that's the important point about why you need systemic reform, is that any normal person can become a part of the problem because the system will beat you down. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's just the nature of the way it works. | ||
| But no, I don't want to run for office because I like what I'm doing. | ||
| You enjoy just commenting on it, and also you enjoy doing it on your own time. | ||
| You do it whenever you want to. | ||
| I make my own schedule. | ||
| Don't get me wrong, I pump stuff out like crazy. | ||
| Yes, you do. | ||
| But you also don't have an overlord. | ||
| No boss. | ||
| I can't have a boss. | ||
| I don't have that personality that meshes with it. | ||
| I just don't. | ||
| It's like trying to tame a zebra. | ||
| You can't do it. | ||
| You can tame a horse, you can't tame a zebra. | ||
| That's a good point. | ||
| You can't tame a zebra. | ||
| So I don't want to do it. | ||
| I know that some people want me to do it, but I don't like the idea of it. | ||
| Well, I always enjoy talking to you, man, and we should probably do these more often. | ||
| Thanks, man. | ||
| Because I learn a lot of shit from you, too. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It fills in blanks, and like I said, I think you're the most reasonable guy that's doing this in terms of doing political commentary on YouTube and on the internet. | ||
| I really appreciate that. | ||
| That means a lot coming from you. | ||
| Let's do it more often, my friend. | ||
| Sure, man. | ||
| Just gotta force me on a plane. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's it. | |
| I will force you on a plane. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Thanks, man. | ||
| Oh, tell everybody how they can get a hold of you, your Instagram and Twitter. | ||
| I don't have an Instagram. | ||
| I might have a Twitter. | ||
| I'm like Trump, only Twitter. | ||
| At Kyle Kalinsky on Twitter, and it's Secular Talk on YouTube. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks so much. | |
| Bye, everybody. | ||
| That was great. | ||
| Yeah, that was fun. |
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