Mike Baker and Joe Rogan debate COVID-19 testing inconsistencies, hydroxychloroquine’s potential, and partisan media shifts post-November 2020 election, while critiquing Benghazi misdirection and cancel culture’s ideological extremes. They pivot to Cold War tensions with China—Xi Jinping’s crackdowns on Hong Kong (2019) and Uyghurs, plus unchecked U.S. citizen arrests—highlighting Western sanctions’ limited impact. Election chaos looms over mail-in ballots, fraud risks, and delayed results, with Rogan distrusting polls and Baker pushing controlled in-person voting. From MKUltra’s LSD experiments (1950s–60s) to remote viewing’s classified failures, they question unethical intelligence programs and China’s genetic soldier advancements, underscoring how misinformation and power struggles distort both science and society. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, those super-duper ones they have at the White House, they can get those in 20 minutes.
The ones we have here, you can get Well, the 10-minute one, see the antibody blood test will show you in 10 minutes whether or not you have, this is the FDA approved ones that we use here, they show you whether or not you have active antibodies, meaning a recent infection, you're probably currently fighting off the virus, or whether or not it's an old infection, so you had the virus and beat it, and then the nose swab will say definitively if you've got it in your system.
I mean, I'm worried because it's serious, and of course it's tragic to lose anybody, and we've lost over 150,000 people, but you've also got to keep this in context, right?
I mean, we've had pandemics before.
Pandemic just means it crossed international boundaries.
So...
There's an element here.
Two things can be true.
You can believe the science, which of course you should do.
You should pay attention to statistics and data and do the best things you can do.
But you can also look at it and go, we're kind of fucked because part of this problem is the coverage of it because of political reasons.
Not to jump right into the political thing, but I can't help but think that we wouldn't have quite as much confusion and we wouldn't have quite as much...
The angst that people are feeling.
If it weren't for the visceral hatred that exists out there on some sectors for the president, and again, I don't have a dog in the hunt, but I have a feeling like the tone of coverage will change in November if Biden wins.
And science doesn't change, right?
It's still the same fucking virus.
But I just have a feeling that we'll see a tone change.
Suddenly it'll be a little bit more about if Biden wins.
It'll be more about, yeah, let's look on the bright side.
Let's get this coverage sorted out.
Let's get the country working.
Let's do these things.
And, you know, again, you can believe both things.
You can believe that we're fucked because of the politics and you can also believe the science.
My friend got tested, turned out positive, and the doctor asked him what his political leanings are.
And he said, why?
And he said, well, I really believe in hydroxychloroquine, but a lot of people who are Democrats who don't like the president don't want to use it.
I'm like, that is hilarious.
And he goes, hydroxychloroquine, when used correctly, he said, particularly in the early stages of the virus, seems to be very effective.
Now, there's all these people that are coming out and saying it's not, and there's all these people that are coming out.
And I talked to my doctor about it, and I said, well, why do you think that it's – because the doctor that I use currently, he recommends it for people that are high-risk as a prophylactic.
That's the way Trump is supposedly taking it.
He's like, it's actually...
There's a study that shows that it's very effective.
A study from Italy that shows it's very effective as a prophylactic.
And he says, also, when you get it, you catch the virus, and then you get it quickly.
So if you can get hydroxychloroquine in you quickly.
But, you know, look, I'm a moron.
I don't know who the fuck to believe.
So I read all this shit.
I'm like, well, do I believe the doctor?
Do I believe all these other doctors that say it's bullshit?
Do I believe that whole team of doctors...
By the way, Andrew Schultz has a fucking hilarious video on hydrochloroquine.
Like, what is it?
He did one of those Instagram videos, so go check that out.
But it's one of those things where it's like, I wish the president didn't talk about it.
Because then we would know what the fuck it is.
Is it good?
Is it bad?
I mean, are people really not taking it just because the president...
Yeah, I don't think there's any doubt about that, right?
That's so crazy.
Yeah, and people don't know, like to your point, people don't know what to believe, right?
And it's one thing if the reporting or the dissemination of information is partisan during normal times, but you're talking about a public health crisis.
And you would think we'd set all of that bullshit aside.
I mean, if we can't come together as a country during a fucking public health crisis, what the hell's wrong?
And it's both sides.
Both sides are tossing hand grenades at each other.
Do you know that whole video where there's a bunch of doctors that keeps getting removed from YouTube and Facebook with a bunch of doctors talking about hydroxychloroquine and Z-packs and zinc?
Everybody's like, you need to listen to this lady.
Then it turns out the lady believes that the cause of impotence is spirits and she thinks there's alien DNA in vaccines.
Summer reported that a 2015 sermon that laid out a supposed Illuminati plan hatched by a witch to destroy the world using abortion, gay marriage, and children's toys, among other things...
Emanuel claimed that DNA from space aliens is currently being used in medicine.
She also offered prayers through her website to remove generational curses transmitted through placenta.
But he said, of hydroxychloroquine, I happen to think it works in early stages.
So that's the problem.
See, when he says that, and then the lady who believes in witchcraft says that, Then, like, maybe it does work, but the problem is a fucking lady who believes in alien DNA and witchcraft and generational curses transmitted through placenta.
Yeah, I mean, most of my kids, basically, now all we got around the house is Nerf guns, right?
And so, like, any time you walk...
Do you remember the Pink Panther where he'd walk around the house?
And then Kato would leap on him.
That's what it's like around my house now.
You're going to get popped in the air hole by a Nerf bullet at close range because you never know when they're going to sneak up on you and use these things.
But that's about all we got anymore.
We do have some Legos, so I hope she wasn't talking about Legos.
Listen, I'm not buying these polls, I'll tell you that.
I don't believe him.
Because first of all, who the fuck is answering polls?
I've always said that.
The dumbest people in the world are the ones who answer polls.
So out of the dumbest people in the world with nothing to do, most of them are picking Biden.
Or more of them are picking Biden.
But says who?
Says all of the media outlets that want Trump to lose?
How do we know?
How do we know if they're being accurate?
I mean, look, I believe there's a large group of people that are very uncomfortable with Donald Trump being the president.
I absolutely believe that.
I believe there's an also large group of people that are very uncomfortable with a man who seems to be mentally compromised winning the election and doing so by hiding.
I mean, the guy's never...
He was just at another thing the other day and he forgot where he was.
That VP is going to have a bucket of lube, and she's going to dunk it in there and stuff her hand up his ass, and she's going to be working him like we can at Bernie's.
There's no way that guy's going to be doing any talking.
For what it's worth, I mean, A, look, he did something kind of wacky.
I understand why he did it, because, you know, that's the world we live in.
But he's backed himself in the corner and said, okay, I'm going with gender and demographics rather than, you know, identifying the most qualified person.
But, you know, the Susan Rice, I will put out a...
I would be much more comfortable with Susan Rice than I would be with Harris, frankly, just given the work that she's done, the things that she's done, right?
On National Security Council, she was U.N. Ambassador, she was Assistant Secretary of State, she was, what, National Security Advisor for four years.
I wouldn't be surprised if he ends up picking her because he worked with her very closely for eight years.
And she doesn't have the name recognition, but I don't know that in this election cycle that's as important as it has been in the past.
She went out, the whole story was she went out after, wow, how many years?
Man, isn't that incredible?
Going on eight years ago, September 11, 2012. So shortly afterwards, she went on TV. She did a series of interviews right afterwards as sort of the face of the administration talking about this.
And she utilized a bunch of talking points that had been prepared by the intel community, right?
Led at the time by John Brennan and some others.
In that, that's where it famously blamed the video that came out and the protests in Cairo and then, oh my god, it escalated.
The bottom line is, if you don't believe that Joe Biden is likely going to be the president for four years, if he gets elected, right, for whatever reason, then the VP pick is incredibly important, more so than we've had in a long time.
And you want this to be a serious-minded individual.
If you want to hang that, if you'd rather see him pick somebody like Karen Bass or Tammy Duckworth or someone, rather than someone who's had the range of experience within government that Susan Rice has had.
Well, the real cause of the attack was we ignored...
You know, signs of increasing activity in Benghazi at the consulate that we had there.
We ignored, at the time, advice, you know, and suggestions that we beef up our security out there.
And we allowed for a...
We didn't allow for, but we were not prepared for the attack that took place on September 11th in 2012. And immediately afterwards, the line from the administration was, shit, nobody could have seen this coming, right?
Because, you know, there was a spontaneous protest because of this...
It was an anti-Islamic movie.
It was a hateful video.
That's how they referred to it in their talking points.
A hateful video.
And then it spread from Cairo.
It spread all of a sudden.
Boom!
It popped up in Benghazi.
And we had this table.
And now, you know, then they tried to back it up a little bit by going, well, yes, some jihadist elements, you know, hijacked that, you know, legitimate protest over a hateful video in Benghazi.
And who could have seen that coming?
Bottom line was, they should have seen it coming.
So, yes, she should take some flack for that.
But I guess my point is...
We've got to compromise at some point.
Again, I'm still amazed at Okay, 2016, we had a choice between Clinton and Trump.
2020, we got a choice between Biden and Trump.
What the fuck's happened to our country?
We had 330-plus million people, and this is what we got.
And there's still a lot of game that gets played, a lot of theater and politics.
So, oh my God, have they ever run for president before?
And so that's what Harris has going for, right?
And I'm not saying she's not capable.
She's certainly capable.
But again, look...
Here's the thing.
I'm more comfortable with Republican policies related to foreign policy, related to national security concerns, related to the economy to some degree.
Republicans aren't fiscally conservative anymore.
I'm small government, but I'm more aligned with that.
The fact that I don't like...
The character or the behavior of Trump, right?
I mean, that I disagree with the fact that he gets out there, he doesn't have an edit button.
Doesn't mean I don't appreciate the things that the administration does in certain areas, like our China policy or other things.
So I think the Democrats make a mistake thinking, okay, well, people don't like Trump, so they're going to vote for this thing over here, right?
And if this thing is a hybrid between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, who, you know, got shafted once again in this, you know, this round of Democratic primaries.
And if they tilt hard left...
It doesn't mean just because you don't like Trump as an individual that suddenly you're okay with hard left policies.
I mean, how do you connect that to George Floyd's death?
How do you connect that to...
Why?
I just don't understand.
Why would you try to break into the courthouse?
They're trying to recreate what went wrong, what didn't work in Seattle, right?
That whole zone, autonomous zone.
Yeah.
That didn't work.
I mean, that was nonsense.
It was crazy.
You made a worse version of America in six blocks.
It's like one of those little tiny, little, you know, like if you took like a glass dome and you put like little animals in there and you let them eat each other alive.
I was like, we're going to create utopian glass.
They made a worse version of the United States.
They put up borders immediately.
They stopped people from coming in.
They had armed guards.
They wind up using police tags.
They didn't have cops, but they have people that act like cops and beat the fuck out of people for filming.
But over the years, and I know Republicans and Democrats who feel the same way who are in Portland and the surrounding area.
And they all feel like this place is slowly, you know, circling down the toilet because of local and state management, right?
And so what happened in Portland?
Not really a surprise.
You know, it's the same – the people that do this sort of activity, right, that, you know, have been referred to as Antifa or anarchists or whatever, They're the same sort of trustafarian, bottom-feeding folks in really any city in the world who engage in a WTO protest because it's cool to get out there and protest.
I don't understand the mentality, but if you try to figure out a motivation for them, you'll lose your mind because they really don't have one.
You could take 10 of those people out of Portland who are engaged in sort of the violent activity And ask them, well, why are you doing this?
And you'll get 10 different answers.
They really don't have.
It's not like that.
And the sad part about it is they hijacked very legitimate protests over really serious, important questions about how do we improve policing around the country?
How do we get to that point?
And I'll tell you, the most disappointing part about it is After the tragedy with George Floyd, if the focus had been on, okay, here's what we have to do.
We have to Seriously, not just lip service.
We have to improve the policing to solve this particular issue.
How do we do that?
Well, there's certain logistical things you can do.
You can improve your vetting and hiring of police candidates, right, of applicants for the job.
You can do that.
That's a protocol you can put in place.
You can improve the training.
That costs money.
So defunding the police is kind of fucked.
You can improve the training and make it continuous.
It's not just a one-time thing.
It's a continuous training on how to respond to situations.
It's like weapons training.
If you don't keep doing it, if you're not always practicing, it just doesn't work, right?
And then what can you do?
You can also improve disciplinary action.
Those are...
Concrete things that you can do.
They're not easy, right?
But it's not as heavy a lift as deciding in the aftermath of the George Floyd tragedy that what we're really going to do is we're going to remove racism from the hearts and minds of people.
This is not going to happen, right?
I'd like to think it would.
In theory, hey, great.
Get rid of racism.
You know, what this should have been was a protest about doing things that actually will impact meaningfully people's lives.
And it veered off because people wanted to feel self-righteous.
It veered off into, well, you have to prove how pure you are.
You have to remove racism, right?
Now, I know black people that object to white people.
I know white people that object to people not of their race.
I know Hispanics that don't like people of non-Hispanics.
Racism exists, sad to say, right?
And all mankind, it's a human element of nature.
Would you rather spin your wheels and act self-righteous and try to say, well, we're going to have this exercise where we remove racism from mankind, or would you rather say, in the aftermath of this, let's do the things that can actually make a difference?
And that's what we didn't do.
And then, legitimate protests over the anger and frustration about all this got further hijacked by, again, Antifa, anarchists, whatever you want to call it.
You know, Ben Shapiro and I had this conversation about the protests and this term Where they are large, mostly peaceful protests, and he had a hilarious point.
He said, O.J. Simpson had a mostly peaceful night the night he killed his wife.
It was only three minutes of the entire day that wasn't peaceful.
Like, that is a fucking great point.
But it is true in the protest that most of those people Want the world to be a better place.
The problem is the people that hijack that and are trying to light the federal buildings on fire and smash monuments, you know, particularly, I mean, like, they're going after Abraham Lincoln.
I mean, Jesus Christ.
Right, right.
He's the guy that freed the fucking slaves.
Like, what are we doing?
Are we going to erase history?
Yeah.
I would have loved if Abraham Lincoln could have had a time machine and gone to 2020 and understood what we know now about systemic racism.
However, he lived in the 1700s when he wrote with a fucking feather.
Well, and that's part of it, is trying to judge people of the past by current morals or current understanding, current thinking, is pretty absurd, right?
It doesn't justify past bad actions, but you know what?
This idea that you're going to erase history or remove history or not learn from it going forward, it discredits the ability of people to...
Have rational thought, right?
To understand and look at a context, look at something in context and say, okay, nowadays that's unacceptable.
But okay, I get why these things occurred.
It's tragic or it's regrettable, whatever.
But I mean, look, in the UK, they were attacking the statue of Churchill.
The idea that this guy is supposed to be a perfect person back then, look, history is supposed to be about the things that happened, the people that made a difference, and how we got to where we are today.
And Lincoln is a big part.
The 1865, the Emancipation Proclamation, that's a big part of how we are who we are today.
Look, it's horrible that the Early settlers brought over slaves from Africa.
It's horrible that slaves still exist today.
All these things are horrible.
They're horrible, but taking down statues of people that made a difference and made change.
Look, if you want to take down statues of Confederate generals and stuff like that, there's a good argument there.
It's a good argument that maybe we shouldn't have those or maybe we should have them somewhere.
You know, like the same place we have a statue of Genghis Khan.
But it doesn't mean there shouldn't be some recognition of this historical figure when you're talking about 2020. Well, I think, interestingly, and this doesn't, again, you know, The problem is nowadays, right?
You've got sort of the righteous mob on the left and the righteous mob on the right.
And the problem people make is they try to placate one side or the other thinking somehow they're going to be pure enough.
You're never pure enough for the self-righteous mob no matter where they are on the spectrum.
But, you know, a lot of the Confederate statues out there were put up in an effort to, and this sounds weird, but in an effort to try to unify the country again, right, in the aftermath of the Civil War.
And there was this element of saying, let's try to...
Look, it's awful that we have history that's filled with terrible acts and deeds.
But I don't think that removing statues of people who tried to make a difference, you know, within the context of their time, you know, with Lincoln 1865, with George Washington, 1700s.
I mean, you're talking about people that when they were doing this, they were the best example of humanity that you could find.
They were the best example of what we had.
I mean, when George Washington was the first president of the United States, I mean, you want to talk about a fucking radical undertaking, this crazy experiment in self-government while they escaped from the grasp of Europe.
I do know that they've been looking at how do we do Community-based policing.
How do we defund the police and yet still have something that resembles a response to the citizens' need for security?
I don't know what any of all that dribble means.
If you want to improve the policing, it's an investment, right?
It's not defunding.
But again, defunding and saying that and saying, this is what I'm for.
It's an easy fucking way to feel good and to placate people and then you don't do shit and then five years from now we have another incident because you didn't actually do the things that make policing better.
It gets even worse for the citizens because now the police don't have any faith at all in the government.
They're not respected.
They're not appreciated.
And you've seen this giant uptick in crime because their presence isn't there anymore.
I mean, it's really crazy, man.
It's like a movie.
I've never thought, if you went back to March when we shut down, I never thought I would be sitting here with you at the end of early August here, and we would be talking about this.
I would have never thought that this would have taken place, that we would have legitimate civil unrest in this country, people getting shot in the streets in protests.
You know, I know that there's a real concern in a lot of these cities that someone's going to try to recreate what happened in Seattle, recreate what happened in Portland, and they're worried about it.
The thing about it is it seems so organized.
It really does.
It doesn't seem that haphazard.
It seems organized.
How do these things get started?
Like, how do you get something as big as these Portland riots?
And sometimes what you see is what appears to be a grassroots movement or grassroots activity happening, just kind of swelling up from a couple of neighborhoods.
Yes, there was an element of that.
But you also see, like if you're talking about...
Talking about activist environmental groups as an example, you'll also see some commonality between some of these groups.
You'll see commonality in communications advice, in financing, in legal assistance and support from national groups, right?
And yet it's in their agenda.
It's to their advantage to make it appear as if it's a grassroots movement.
So that all stays in the background.
I'd argue that, you know, yes, some of this, and again, not to disappear down some rabbit hole where it's a George Soros-funded thing.
Yeah, but I mean, you know, are there some elements that help with communication support or transportation assistance or legal advice or whatever it may be?
Absolutely.
You know, these things, they don't.
Very rarely is there an actual, genuine, organic, grassroots movement that has no outside organizational support.
And also, again, look, we've talked about this in the past.
I'm not...
I'm not necessarily a conspiracy theorist, but sometimes, yeah, sometimes you got to follow the threads that you can pull on and sometimes it takes you down an interesting path and you think, okay, maybe there is something to this.
I think there's a problem, and here's one of the problems.
Most journalists are left-wing.
There's a giant number.
I don't know what the percentage of it is, but if you want to go with whether it's Newsweek or CNN or the New York Times or Washington Post or many, many, many, many of these papers and organizations lean left.
There's a dirty secret.
The dirty secret is Antifa acts as the thug enforcers of the left.
The people that do things like this, whether you approve of violence or disapprove of violence, what they're doing is they act as the people doing the dirty work that many people on the left think has to be done in order to enact real change.
Now, if you had the same thing in the right, imagine, my friend Tim Dillon said this, imagine if the Proud Boys were lighting Portland on fire.
Can you imagine if we had a Democratic president and the Proud Boys were trying to break into the courthouse and light Portland on fire?
People would go fucking crazy.
It would be terrifying if it was a different political ideology but the same exact actions.
So because these actions are done with the correct political ideology, under the guise of racial justice, under the guise of reforming our government, so then everybody's okay with people literally burning books.
And I think he knows what he's going to get, which is, again, what he got, which is a couple of days of, oh my God, hand-wringing, and I told you he's a dictator, and of course he's going to...
And then my favorite narrative of the left is, well, he's not going to leave.
If he loses in November, he's not going to leave.
That's my absolute favorite narrative from the left so far.
Well, if you repeat something often enough, then it gets to be true.
It was like when we had the chemical weapons issue in Iraq, remember?
We had one source, but if you report that, it gets into reporting channels, and then somebody else mentions it or refers to it, and then you've got two mentions.
And pretty soon people forget it only came from one source of information.
I tell you what, that would be brilliant because I used to say that at the agency, right?
We used to get boxed fairly regularly or polygraphed very regularly.
And I hated the polygraph, man.
My polygraph file was huge because I... I'm one of those – I'm a kind of a – I don't want to say I'm a Puritan, but I'm one of those Quaker people who feels guilty about everything, right?
I feel like if I took a pencil when I was a three-year-old, you know, my God, I got to confess it, right?
So I had a hell of a time during polygraphs, right?
And then I'd get irritated with the examiners, right?
One time I had one of the examiners say, you seem to know a lot of foreign people.
And I lost my mind, right?
And so I literally went after her and said, you know what job I do?
They're like, what do you mean I seem to know a lot of foreign people?
But I used to say all the time, I said, man, if they could just make a colander that would come down on your head and read your thoughts, I would be happier than a pig and shit because then I could have been out of this thing in five minutes.
I'm a good person, but I have dark thoughts sometimes.
Go ahead, take a look.
But I'll do that if you'll do that.
I don't want any lies!
The lies are the problem, the distortions of the truth.
Did you imagine the implosion of media if we had mind reading and we find out exactly what's going on in the New York Times, exactly what's going on in the Washington Post, exactly what's going on?
Whenever you see questionable stories, you're like, what the fuck is this?
I think that's one of the things we're dealing with now with all this activity.
People have more free time.
They don't have obligations because they can't work.
Because so many folks are fucked and they're out of work, that makes people more apt to be activists, more apt to get out there in the streets, and it creates actually more chaos because you're having more people involved in these things and they really don't have anything else to do with their time.
And when you're out there, you're screaming and you're fucking holding arms and you're saying, you know, we will overcome, you really think like you are doing something.
What drives me crazy is, I mean, you just do it, you can spend five minutes doing it, right?
Just go, while you're walking around, maybe not now because everybody's hiding in their hidey hole, but, you know, just the constant with the phone, right?
If people have five seconds of free time on their hands, they don't know what to do, so they get their phone and say, okay, well, you know, if nothing else, at least I look like everybody else staring at my phone.
But I think one of the interesting things with news dissemination is, You go back to, you know, the 50s, the 60s, 70s, we had a shared moment, right, every day, for the most part, right?
Everybody would sit down at whatever, 5 o'clock or 11 o'clock across the country, and you'd watch the news on one of three, basically three outlets, ABC, NBC, or CBS. And so for that moment, if you think about it, The vast majority of people who were paying attention to news were getting their news delivered from the same one of three sources.
There was a commonality there and they would process it differently based on their own experiences and beliefs but at least there was that point of commonality.
An outlet that simply told you what the fuck happened that day, right?
And here's your news.
I'm not going to have any opinion hours.
I'm not going to have any commentary.
We're not going to have a panel discuss it and tell us what it might mean.
We're just going to take the top events of the day and maybe two or three times a day, here's your news.
We're going to take the time to research.
And that was the other thing about having a newscast at 5 and a newscast at 11. You had all day long as a media business to check your facts, to get it right.
And you weren't playing beat the clock with every MOOC with a smartphone, who now thinks they're a blogger or a vlogger or whatever.
But I think that would actually be very successful because I think people do want They want the ability or the comfort of thinking, yeah, maybe this is legitimate.
I think the only people that are doing it like that are independents.
There's a few of them out there.
There's a few of them that are just calling it like they see it.
If you want political information, my sources are Kyle Kalinske, Jimmy Dore, and The Hill.
Those are the ones that I go to because they'll call out people on both sides and they show the problems.
The Hill's a particularly good show because you have Crystal who's on the left and Sagar who's on the right and they're honest and they're intelligent and they talk about things and they disagree but they're also friends and they've been on the podcast together.
But they'll tell you, here's the issues and this is why this is wrong and this is why this is corrupt and here's the influences and this is where you're being misled.
Even on the political side, even reporting on Capitol Hill, you can deliver the news.
You can say, you know, during the course of today, this is what happened, right?
Now, it's not going to blow anybody's skirt up because it's not exciting and it's not titillating and it's not, you know, it doesn't fire you up to hate the other side.
But you could do it.
It's just, you know, again, talk about setting up, you know, field offices and that's an expensive business.
And to do it and to be completely unbiased, you're going to have a lot of people working for you.
Like, good luck keeping them all unbiased, especially today.
If you're getting some kid fresh out of college and he's 22 or she's, you know, getting her graduate degree, You're going to get kids that have gone through this system that we're trying to rectify.
The university system today is filled with woke politics.
They're indoctrinating kids.
A lot of these kids that are getting out, they have this idea in their head before their frontal lobe is even fully formed of what is good and what is bad and what is right and what is wrong and what you're supposed to do.
Yeah.
A lot of it is like it's really distorted and weird.
When you're confronted by a large majority of people that think one way, you will change and amend your thinking to fit in.
We don't like to be on the outside.
We don't like to be, you know, there's a few very strong-minded rebels out there in the world, but most people are conformists.
Most people just, they think they're rebellious, but they're rebellious along with a group of other people that think almost the exact same way, and those are the people they hang out with.
I got on the tube one time when I was living in London a few years back, and it wasn't the mullet craze, it was the goatee craze.
Every dude was wearing a goatee.
So I came back from, I forget where I was working overseas, but while I was out there, Before I went back to London, I thought, ah, fuck it, I'll grow a goatee.
That seems to be the thing to do.
So I grow a goatee.
I get back to London, and it literally was like the next day I was back there.
I get on the tube, and I walk into the car.
I'm standing there, and I look down the car, and every dude in that car had a goatee.
And I thought, holy fuck.
So I went home and shaved.
But I guess my point is that you're right.
You want to be, oh, I'm a rebel, but I'm only going to be a rebel with a bunch of other people.
You could be right about chemicals, and you could be right about science.
You could be right about things.
But when it comes to political things and sociological things, when it comes to matters of culture, there's opinions.
You know, and sometimes, you know, opinions vary, and there's a spectrum along with it, and there's some people that hold that opinion that are really fucking crazy, and there's other people that are very reasonable that hold a similar opinion, but they have a justification for it, and they have a rationalization for it, and they have thought behind it.
And this is, you know, one of the beautiful things about doing a podcast like this is when we're talking about, like, phones, like, leaving your phone.
For three hours, I don't touch that goddamn thing.
And I get to have a one-on-one conversation with someone where we're locked in with headsets, where your voice is as loud as my voice and it's in my head and we're looking at each other across the table.
It's a very unusual thing and it's been a massive education for me.
Massive.
To be able to talk to people like you and all the interesting and intelligent people that I get to talk to.
It's changed who I am as a human being in a big way.
I talk to you and then I talk to the folks that are interesting and intelligent.
I think the cancel culture thing and this idea that people want to think in absolutes, again, I go back to the same point all the time, which is like, be careful, everybody.
Just be careful, because you're never going to be pure enough, and then you start seeing everybody getting devoured.
Look, man, when I was in my early 20s, I was probably, well, I'm pretty liberal now, but I was probably even more liberal back then.
I just, I think that...
There's a certain amount that I really like about Republicans.
The value of hard work and discipline, family values, all those things particularly as I've become a father and become someone who makes money and understands where taxes go and understands fiscal waste.
I'm a fiscally conservative person, but I'm a socially very liberal person, and I find myself like a man without an island.
I drove up to the boys' Finnish swim team the other day, and I had all three of them, Scooter and Sluggo and Muggsy in the car, and I said, hey, let's stop.
I'll get you guys hungry.
Of course, because they're young, they're like, yeah, let's go to McDonald's.
So I asked Muggsy, the youngest, I said, what do you want?
He says, nuggets and that blue thing.
So I got up to the window and he says, can we help you?
And I said, yeah, I'll take 10-piece nuggets and that medium blue thing.
Which now is like the, you know, somebody sent me that, I'm sure, I don't know who even came up with this, but they said that sneezing in public is now the equivalent of shitting your pants in public.
The relationship with cats to people is so bizarre because they're basically, they just accept the fact that you're big enough that they can't eat you.
And I think these independent people, like I was talking about, like Kyle Kalinske and Jimmy Dore and The Hill, and these people that are doing it with politics, I think they've opened up the possibility that someone could do it with just general news.
Politics is a very attractive way for someone to get into the game because it's very click-baity.
You talk about all these issues.
You make a YouTube show.
It doesn't have a large boundary that you have to cross.
Financially, there's not a large price you have to pay before you can enter the game.
All you really need is a camera.
It sets up.
You have a background.
It doesn't have to be any particular kind of an interesting background.
And with most software tools for video editing, you can do a lot of shit.
I would like someone to do the same goddamn thing with a regular news show, but the problem is if you funded it, like if I said, hey, we're going to do the JRE News Network.
We're going to treat news the way I treat everything in life.
I don't know, so I ask questions and I want to know what the real truth is.
And sometimes I'm wrong, but if I'm wrong, I'll correct myself.
If we just did a JRE News Channel...
Then you'd have to hire a bunch of fucking people.
And then who knows if they're going to share my philosophy and take on things.
They're probably not going to.
So someone's going to have to organically come up with a version of it.
And then there's the problem there.
Like, what's their sources?
Are you going to send journalists out in the field?
You know, and who are these journalists?
And what's their qualifications?
And how much do they understand about which subject they're covering?
I mean, it just never happened because of some of the reasons you're talking about.
It's just like with intelligence reporting, right?
Once you get the raw intelligence off the street, you can have an asset tell you something, and that moment It's just raw intelligence.
It doesn't have a right or a left or whatever.
It hasn't been through the spin cycle.
But once that intelligence gets reported back to headquarters, and then it starts getting its way through the analysts, and then it makes its way to others outside of the agency, if we're talking about the agency, and it starts getting to the NSC. By the time it finishes getting through all those different cycles, yeah, there's a spin to it, right?
And you've lost that.
So to your point, yeah, you're absolutely right.
You put reporters out in the field, they're going to have a bias as to who they talk to, right?
And those people are going to have a bias.
And then it's going to get back to the editors, and they're going to work on it.
So again, I realize that we're not talking 100% objectivity, but...
And I think the only way that's gonna emerge is it's gonna emerge independently.
You can't get this with funding.
You can't create that sort of a thing with a lot of money behind it and a bunch of different people with vested interests and biases.
You're not gonna create that.
It's going to have to emerge independently.
And I don't know how.
I don't know how.
But that's almost what you need.
It's almost like you need individual shows that cover individual subjects.
Like you need an unbiased environmental show that tells you, hey, this is what we really know currently about fracking.
This is what we really know, and this is how we know it, and these are the people we're talking to, and you have a whole fucking show just dedicated to the dangers, pros and cons of fracking.
And then have the same thing for coal, and the same thing for solar, and the same thing for current nuclear technology, which might be the most promising thing that we have, but everybody's fucking terrified of it.
Did you get a chance to look at that chaos book that I told you about?
Yeah.
Tom O'Neill, who is a friend of my good friend, Greg Fitzsimmons, wrote an insane book that took him 20 years about Manson and the CIA and LSD. What did you think about all that?
Well, you've touched on some, or Tom touched on some really interesting things.
What I liked about his book, and I went through it, I read it, is that...
He's actually, I think, very honest about the shortcomings of what he ended up doing and the research that he went through and where he couldn't draw connections.
So I give him a lot of credit.
I think it's well worth the read.
It's a hell of a personal story that it took him this fucking long to make his way through with a variety of reasons.
It is that, but it's also a fantastic Account of all the things that happened with the Manson family and all those people that were alive back then, about how this guy kept getting out of jail, and they kept arresting him, and they kept saying, this is above my pay grade, and they would let him out.
Yeah, and that's, for me, that's the strangest part about the whole story, right?
I mean, you know, this idea that, you know, was Manson, you know, a lab rat for the CIA and, you know, how How far down that rabbit hole do you want to go?
Well, O'Neill is pretty clear about that, right?
It's not a particularly solid connection.
It's a tenuous connection, I think he called it, between one of what used to be a contractor, a researcher for that old chestnut MK Ultra.
You got the end of the World War II. You got the Cold War.
It's the late 40s.
You've got the Soviet Union that is heavily invested in a variety of experiments.
Mind control, brainwashing was sort of the term of the culture, right?
And brainwashing was a big issue.
Not a big issue, but it captured people's imagination back then.
So the late 40s, early 50s, it was Korean War.
Yeah, we had an existential threat, right?
We had nukes pointed at each other.
We had drills in schools, kids hiding under desks.
I mean, what the fuck?
So with the fear that the Chinese or the Soviets were going to develop mind control abilities...
Was pervasive.
And you talk about it now and everybody rolls their eyes and goes, oh my god.
But you're absolutely right that you have to understand the context with which then Alan Dulles, who was at the time the director of the CIA... By the way, the guy who Kennedy fired and wound up being a part of the Warren Commission after Kennedy was murdered, which was very strange.
Yeah.
Oh, I like that.
I like where that could go.
So anyway, we got Alan Dulles, who in 53...
Early in 1953 says, all right, we have to understand what the Soviets are doing, particularly the Soviets.
But we also had, you know, again, I'm sure some folks listening know all this, but a lot of folks probably don't.
We had POWs returning, American POWs returning from Korea.
That was a big issue, right, because some of them came back, again, quote-unquote brainwashed, you know, and some of them didn't want to return because, you know, again...
Brainwashing, mind control that perhaps the Chinese had developed these techniques.
So initially the idea was defensive.
How do we protect ourselves against this new threat within this Cold War, against these enemies who appear to be devoting great deal of resources against this?
Well, so initially it started out as a defensive effort.
MKUltra was the umbrella name for a whole bunch, over 140 sub-projects underneath MKUltra.
And it was all based around chemical substances, use of chemicals, use of drugs, behavioral issues with human beings, creating false memories, Deleting memory, influencing the behavior, again, of individuals.
There were a variety of projects that fell under this MKUltra, and it was, again, starting out as a defensive issue, but then quickly became sort of an offense.
How do we become the leader in all of this?
Which is typical, right?
It's typical in how things develop.
It's like cyber warfare.
You know, initially it's defensive, and now you think, okay, now we've got to figure out how to make it work on our behalf.
And where this went off the rails, in a handful of ways, in many ways, Was testing on unwitting subjects, things such as LSD and a variety of other substances.
Yeah, whoops.
And those subjects, unwitting subjects, ranged everything from in federal prisons to state mental hospitals.
And that's where Manson comes in and a variety of other people.
I would recommend people dig in.
Don't settle on just one account.
And one of the things that people should also do if they want to read about this is read any testimony that came out of the CIA. And there was some testimony.
There were documents written by the Inspector General back in...
And this time period was about 53...
Through, at least officially acknowledged, 1964. And then the program was wrapped up.
Supposedly there were still...
Federal programs, military programs, others that were still looking into issues related to the use of chemical substances for everything again from interrogation to behavioral adjustment and a lot of these things were funded Through cutouts.
So you'd set up, again, this is early 50s, mid-50s, early 60s, set up financing vehicles through, say, what appear to be Non-threatening grant programs, you know, from research institutes.
So you'd loop in academic institutions or researchers.
And MKUltra had, at least acknowledged anyway, over 80 academic institutions and others that were either wittingly or unwittingly working on their behalf in various research programs.
So, yeah, this Midnight Climax program, basically, they'd kit out a safe house as a brothel, and they would have the hookers slip LSD or whatever substance to the Johns.
Behind a mirror, you'd have a supposed researcher, right?
I mean, this is where it got weird.
Sitting there having a drink and watching the hooker and the John have sex, and then they'd be analyzing the impact of the LSD on them in terms of their ability to talk.
Okay, so this was clearly, you know, clearly was off the rails, right?
And they had a...
One of the guys that was involved in this...
He was with what used to be called the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.
A guy named White, George White, was involved in the San Francisco cat house.
And according to the stories, he'd sit there with a martini in his hand and watch the couple have sex.
And he would have prepped the hooker to say, okay, after sex, now this appears to be the best time to get them talking.
So ask them about their job and let's see if they'll talk about their job.
The idea being, could we influence...
And trap potential assets overseas for operational reasons.
Was there some use for operational purposes?
But basically it was just George getting his rocks off, watching couples having sex.
Very, very strange shit.
But you're right in that...
And so again, this went on until 64. MKUltra, interestingly enough, not to spend too much time on it, but Richard Helms was the director.
At the time, in the early 70s, and he and a guy named Gottlieb, Sidney Gottlieb, who was the head of technical services at the agency, they agreed that the smart thing to do in 73 before Richard Helms left and Gottlieb left the agency was to destroy all the records.
So they purged all the records of MKUltra that they thought existed.
This was investigated in the Church Committee back in 75. And then 76, I think it was, they found a bunch of financial records, you know, that had not been purged because they'd been kept, you know, audits of, and again, you're talking about like 149 subprojects of MK Alter.
So you can imagine each subproject has its own Accounting and you got to turn in your receipts for the LSD that you bought or the hooker you paid off or whatever, you know, so here's my receipt.
Can I have my $12 or whatever you paid for a hooker back then?
And so probably not 12 bucks.
But they found some financial records.
And so that became then a matter of another investigation up on the Hill.
And Stansfield-Turner, the time the CIA director testified at that point, And that's why I brought my laptop, is because Stansfield Turner's testimony is actually pretty interesting, as far as MKUltra goes.
And he talks about, we've attempted to group the activities covered by the 149 subprojects into categories under descriptive headings.
Wouldn't you?
In broad outline, at least, this presents the contents of these files.
The headings of the categories of all these various projects that ran under MKUltra, and this gives you a pretty good quick sense of what they were doing at the time.
Research into the effects of behavioral drugs and alcohol.
There were 17 sub-projects probably not involving human testing.
This is a testimony from the director of the CIA, Stansfield-Turner.
14 sub-projects definitely involving tests on human volunteers.
Nineteen subprojects, probably including tests on human volunteers.
While not known, some of these subprojects may have included tests on unwitting subjects as well.
Studies of human behavior, sleep research, behavioral changes during psychotherapy, motivational studies, studies of defectors, assessment and training techniques, polygraph research, funding mechanisms for MKUltra external research activities, research on drugs, toxins, and biologicals in human tissue, activities whose subjectives cannot be determined from available documentation.
Anyway, it goes on.
But it gives you a sense of what the hell was happening during this period of time.
But again, this doesn't justify it.
Obviously, it doesn't.
But you're absolutely right that to have a full understanding of this, you have to look at the context of where we were at that time.
And where we were was smack dab in the height and elevation of the Cold War.
Knowing that our adversaries, our existential threats, were engaged in this sort of behavior.
Now, George White was not really a researcher or anything.
He was just sitting behind a mirror watching some people, you know, get off.
So, clearly...
And all the unwitting subjects involved.
I mean, but look, they were slipping LSD to agency employees without telling them.
It's not that long ago, but we have to think about it in terms of the same way we thought about Abraham Lincoln.
In the context of the times, this wasn't such a horrendous thing to do.
They didn't know any better.
Really, they didn't know what these substances would do to people, and there wasn't a lot of ways to find out.
You know, the Harvard LSD studies that they did that they believe in part were responsible for the Unabomber, There's a lot of other shit that was responsible for the Unabomber, including particularly his childhood.
But they did a lot of these studies because they didn't know.
I mean, it's one way to find out.
I mean, how do you get responsible human subjects?
How do you get people to do...
Well, there's not a lot of ways other than just test people.
And unfortunately, yeah, what this ended up being was, you know, like using the most marginalized people out there, you know, like sex workers or prisoners or whatever.
Right.
Or Johns.
And oftentimes, you know, Johns or just, you know, but that whole thing.
But where Tom O'Neill's book is, you know, is really interesting in a couple of ways is if you jump.
So MK Alter kind of finished up in 64 officially, right?
That's when, you know, the inspector general came out from the agency and said, you got to know, you can't.
You can't do this.
They had a new inspector general, and they looked and said, this is clearly not where we are supposed to be.
But interestingly, funding mechanisms that were used to, again, to dole out grants or to provide a cutout between government and research that was being done, did some of those continue to exist for other programs, other research?
And in 1967, You know, you have the Summer of Love, San Francisco, and Tom O'Neill writes about this, and it's very, very interesting.
But you had the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, which in part was running a couple of projects that were supposedly getting funding from The National Institute for Mental Health, which had previously been a funding mechanism also for MKUltra, you know, a few years in the past.
And Roger Smith was a guy who was getting his PhD in criminology.
He was working at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic and he was also Manson's parole officer.
And to your point, Manson was like a brook trout or a rainbow trout that is in some catch-and-release stream, right?
He was constantly arrested during the 67-68 period.
Remember, the killings happened in August of 69. And, you know, he kept getting released.
And he had been in prison, right?
In 67, early in that year, he'd been released from prison.
So he was on probation.
Any violation, certainly some of the things he was getting arrested for, should have sent him back to prison, but he wasn't.
So that to me is one of the most interesting parts of the book is this revolving door that Manson was in and eventually we all know what happened to him.
But yeah, working at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, that's where Manson would go along with some of his followers and they were part of a study and they were, I'm sure, getting their LSD from there.
But also, this guy, Jolly West, who was involved in MKUltra, also ended up having an office at the Haight-Asbury Free Medical Clinic.
Yeah, but I mean, again, I like the book because he does seem to be trying to let the facts of all his research lead the way rather than trying to prove a point that he comes up with at the beginning of his book.
Well, he also exposed the prosecutor, Bugliosi, and all the issues that was going on with him that led to him wanting to follow the narrative that they had laid out, that Manson was trying to incite a race war and ignore all the other indicators that there was some deeper connections.
He also seemed to have an unlimited supply of acid.
That was what's fascinating.
And he also seemed to employ the same techniques that apparently the CIA had employed when they had done experiments on prisoners, including the fact that he would, you know, force them into weird sexual situations and pretend to take LSD himself but not really participate and then, you know, influence them.
And he seemed to be doing things to them in terms of, like, trying to alter their behavior and getting them to do things that were outside the norm, including murder.
Yeah, I mean, did he see, yeah, did he have a sense from his time there at the clinic or dealing with, what's his name, Roger Smith, his parole officer, who, again, was also a criminology doctor, a doctoral candidate, I guess, and so was, you know, but look, Manson was...
You know, he was not a rocket scientist.
He was illiterate for the most part until he ended up in prison and maybe who knows.
And if you haven't heard the podcast, please listen to it with Tom O'Neill.
What number was that, Jamie?
Have any idea?
But it's just...
Do you think that...
Those times and the shift between the 50s and the 60s are maybe even a bigger cultural shift than we're experiencing now?
Because it seems like when the hippies came around and all the drugs and free love and all that crazy shit in Woodstock, it almost seemed like that is even more of a radical change in culture than we're experiencing today.
We're experiencing a lot of turmoil today, but so much of it you could attribute to the problems, the economic despair with COVID and the lockdown and then the George Floyd murder and the Black Lives Matter protests.
There's so many different tangible factors that you could point to.
Well, I think the pandemic is certainly a massive part of it, because if you think about it, and this in no way minimizes the importance of the protests and trying to get policing the way that everyone agrees it should be.
You know, if everybody was working and we didn't have the pandemic, right, I would argue we wouldn't have seen the protests in Portland.
We wouldn't have seen—there is this— Like we talked about earlier.
I mean, I remember—I'm old enough to remember, you know, somewhat as a kid, the race riots of the 60s.
It's just general upheaval, right?
And I remember, shit, I remember my older sister, you know, down in the basement painting protest signs with a bunch of her friends, and they were going to head downtown to a protest, you know?
And I had a brother, I had two brothers that were in the Vietnam War, and, you know, there was a lot of, you know, they were definitely at odds with each other, right?
You know, here's my sister protesting the war, there's one of my brothers flying F-4s in the war, another medic, and Yeah, so it was a very tumultuous time.
I don't think that's where we are now, so I agree with you.
I think it was more upheaval then.
But it's incredibly disappointing now.
I thought we were...
Maybe it's obviously naive to some degree, but I kind of thought we were further along than we are now, it seems.
And so, you know, it's...
Yeah, it's very disappointing and frustrating to see where we're kind of at at this moment in time.
And again, part of it's heightened by just the uber-partisanship of everything, but...
Yeah.
But I don't think we're there.
And I think the pandemic has given us all too much time to reflect on shit.
Also, everyone's so scared that we're projecting it onto other subjects.
And this fear and anxiety, it just accentuates or exacerbates all the other problems that we have.
First of all, there's the financial fear, which doesn't seem like there's a way out of it.
For a lot of people, for low-income people and people that are losing their jobs and people that are losing their businesses, there doesn't seem to be a light at the end of the tunnel.
And we're very fortunate in that we've been able to ride out that side of it, right, with the economy and all that.
But yeah, all the people – I mean look at the situation currently with just the unemployment and how quickly that took place, right?
We were riding high as far as the economy goes just a handful of months ago.
And now the number of people who are worried about, you know, do they have a roof over their head, you know, because maybe they're going to get evicted or, you know, what the fuck?
Now I can go back to work, but I can't because my workplace isn't open anymore.
The government can't continue to keep kicking cash out the door, right?
But it's not enough, but it's also, I mean, what the fuck's wrong with our politicians, right?
I mean, they're agonizing over this, right?
We've got, you know, how many trillions are we in debt?
And so...
Fine, but solve the problem now, right?
The pandemic, it's not going to last forever, right?
We're going to figure this out, and everyone's going to get back to hopefully some relative normalcy.
But in the short term, the fact that the Democrats and Republicans can't, you know...
Come together and resolve this.
They're bickering about, well, what do we do with the next bailout bill, or do we have one, or how much is it going to be a month?
And you got people legitimately standing at the door wondering whether they have to leave their apartment or not, or whether they'll have a place to come home to, or how are they going to feed their kids?
And you got these fucking idiot politicians who are just playing games with us, and it always happens, and They're paid.
They're paid.
And if there's no consequence to them, then shit doesn't happen.
I firmly believe that with Washington DC. Nothing happens in Washington unless the politicians personally feel as if there's some consequence to their situation, their position of power.
They're acting as if, you know, there won't be any consequence.
And so, you know, they're talking about, oh, we're going to be able to get this done before our August break.
What the fuck?
They're going to take an August break?
I mean, I was stunned by that today when I was talking to somebody in D.C. And they said, yeah, well, they're trying to rush this through before the...
Who takes a fucking break in, you know, in a pandemic?
So, but that's what I... Well, we got to go back and see our constituents.
I mean, your constituents would probably tell you to stay in D.C. and get something done.
But...
I don't know.
At the end of the day, it doesn't do any good to sit around and pitch and moan, but I think unless we have term limits and we have campaign finance reform, we're going to be talking about this forever.
We did an episode on Advanced Aeronautic Threat Identification Program, AATIP. Which was the Pentagon's admitted, you know, came out and said, yes, we have a program that we ran a program, it's no longer in existence, called AATIP, which was designed to identify unidentified aviation threats, basically.
So it's not talking about UFOs necessarily.
It could be a hostile, you know, prototype aircraft that, you know, what is that?
Harry Reid said he believed crashes of vehicles from other worlds had occurred and that retrieved materials had been studied secretly for decades.
Now, you know Bob Lazar.
Do you know the story of Bob Lazar?
Bob Lazar was in here and he said some things that were ridiculed but turned out to be absolutely true.
One of the things that he said was that there was this element, this element 115, and that they had figured out a way to stabilize this element in these other planets and that's what they used.
To propel these vehicles with a different kind of propulsion that manipulated gravity and it essentially had created some sort of a warp where they weren't subject to the same laws of physics with this propulsion system that we are with what we have which is just igniting fuel and pushing the explosion pushes the rocket into space.
Yeah, the way he described these vehicles in the 1980s and the early 1990s is exactly the way Fravor's vehicle worked.
Exactly the way the gimbal video worked.
These things, for whatever reason, they fly one way and then they turn sideways.
Like if you had a plate, the plate turns up and down.
And then that's the way it travels.
And then somehow or another, that's how it travels insanely fast.
It does something to manipulate gravity around it.
It sounds super weird.
But the fact that this guy talked about this in the early 90s, and then this is the exact video that the Pentagon refers to.
That you actually see these objects that they can't explain, that don't give off a heat signal, that move in this exact same way at spectacular rates of speed.
Well, that's why they set up ATIP to begin with, right?
So that they could have sort of a legitimate outlet and a place for this to go.
But yeah, Fravor himself talks about it.
Look, it's not in their best interest to get back on the carrier and say, by the way, we spotted an unidentified flying object.
But they did.
Yeah, and you're right.
So the natural tendency is to kind of look the other way or roll your eyes.
And that can act as a deterrent.
Yeah.
I don't know.
But I do think that it bears further investigation.
There's no doubt about that.
And I think that the AATIP program that the Pentagon was running You know, for the minimal cost of that compared to the cost of another air asset or, you know, platform of some sort, I think they should have kept it going, right?
And they should have normalized to some degree because it's in our national security interest to know, have the Russians or have others developed materials, right?
Or propulsions.
Everybody's working on new propulsion systems, right?
Everybody that has the ability and the resources.
So hypersonic crafter, that's just coming.
That's going to happen.
And whoever wins that particular race is going to be further up the food chain than everybody else.
So it's in our national interest to be exploring any legitimate or potentially legitimate sighting to understand what that is.
That doesn't mean you're chasing UFOs or sort of spacecraft from...
It just means...
You should know what the hell that is or what's out there.
So I'm a big proponent of that.
I'm just saying also you have to proceed with caution.
I mean, I feel like the new normal that we're experiencing right now in the pandemic, it really illuminated to me how easily human beings adapt to things.
We adapt to everything.
We really do.
We just accept it.
Well, this is the new thing.
We exist.
Like phones.
We accept the fact that we just always have a phone on us now.
And when you and I were growing up, there's no fucking phones.
Now, as we're having this conversation about you, Muggsy walked by, and he's eight years old, and He walks by and he stops and he listens for a second and he goes, Rogan?
And I said, yeah.
And he says, you're going to see Rogan?
And I said, yeah.
And he looks for a second and he goes, don't know who he is.
Well, that's the other thing is, again, the idea that we've had visitors from another planet, but they just got bored with us or something, I don't know, and decided, nah, fuck it, it's not worth it.
By the time we get, and I'm sure it happens with your kids too, by the time you get hip to whatever trend they got, I just said hip, to whatever trend the kids have, they're two trends down the road.
But the thing about the TikTok thing that's interesting, this is the tinfoil hat part, put that on again.
There's always been this talk that Facebook helped Trump win the election.
And they have been the least reluctant, the most reluctant, I should say, to censor Trump stuff.
And there's a lot of people that think that Mark Zuckerberg is in some way, or Facebook is in some way responsible for getting Trump elected because they benefit from all the interaction.
It's one of the last places where conservatives can freely discuss things, except the hydroxychloroquine thing.
They've taken that down.
But Facebook owns Instagram, and Instagram has Reels.
And if TikTok, if Trump comes in, Reels has not been released yet, correct?
I think it's early August, which is like any minute now, right?
No, I agree on that, but I think what's going to happen is I think they're going to orchestrate a deal.
Microsoft will take over.
At least the U.S., Canada, what, Australia?
New Zealand, you know, they'll take over those operations of TikTok.
I don't know why that would be particularly appealing to Microsoft unless they take the whole global community of TikTok users, right?
Which is whatever, 800 million, you know, I mean, there's got maybe 80 to 90 million or so in the U.S., But I think they want to get a deal done by September sometime.
I look at the technology, I look at the phones, and...
I'm not super excited about my kids having phones, but at the same time, then it becomes—it's less so during a pandemic—but it becomes a security issue in terms of I want to be able to track them and know where they are.
And short of microchipping the kids, you know, then the phone is a pretty good way to know where they are.
You just have to, as a parent, you just got to be on lockdown all the time with them, right?
Because it's just a— You know, it's a window into a lot of shit that you don't want kids of that age to be paying attention to.
Yeah, no, and that's, you know, again, obviously that brings us back around to TikTok a little bit, but...
Yeah.
It is interesting.
The relationship that we're in right now, people were having a conversation the other day about, are we in a Cold War already with China?
And the answer is yes.
I mean, we don't have nukes pointing at each other necessarily the way we did during the Soviet days.
But yeah, we're in a Cold War with China right now, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, right?
As long as we deal with it properly, right?
And, you know, developing better trade protocols, developing a better understanding of Of their agenda, their interests, that's a good thing, as long as we do it, again, properly.
We talk about Putin as, you know, setting himself up as president for life.
But Xi literally has set himself up as president for life.
Now, if the Chinese economy, you know, goes sideways in a big way, all bets are off, right?
And he may not be as stable as he's been thinking.
But he's spent years now...
Strengthening and building up the intel apparatus within China for his own purposes and further moving away from this idea that somehow China was going to have a rule of law.
That doesn't exist there.
I mean, look, they fucked over the people of Hong Kong.
Hardcore.
Could have cared less.
We were all – everybody was all upset and angsty and protesting about Hong Kong and, oh my God, we stand united with the Hong Kong protesters.
And then we got up our own asses because we're all rightly so worried about the pandemic and, oh, we got an election coming in November.
And while we're all looking that way, Xi saw an opportunity and just fucked them over.
Yeah, and it was going to be 2047. That was the playing field they had in Hong Kong up until 2047. What kind of goofy-ass deal did they negotiate where they gave it up in 97?
Well, yeah, I mean, they really didn't have an option, so they felt that they were negotiating as best they could.
There was a sense, I think, at the time that, look, we either do this and guarantee some runway for the people of Hong Kong with some pseudo-democracy, or, you know, China's just going to say, fuck you, get the hell out, and it's ours.
I don't think China would have done that, because, look, they...
They need Hong Kong as a legitimate financial capital, right?
But I think what's going to happen now, given what they've just recently done, is they're going to turn Hong Kong at best into a pass-through for hard currency, basically.
And you're going to see a lot of people moving out, not just expats and financial institutions.
You're going to see a lot of the more successful and educated Hong Kong citizens who are running businesses there, who have been running businesses there, saying, fuck it, it's not worth it.
And so, you know, I think the Chinese regime, I think, has probably fucked themselves over in a way, but it's just an indication of Xi's mindset.
He doesn't really care.
And it's just like their buildup of military capabilities in the South Pacific.
They're working in cyber activity.
They're continuing hoovering up intellectual property.
It's not going to stop them, you know?
I mean, now, it's better that we do make an effort.
It's better that we do, you know, put sanctions on them for a variety of reasons, including the Uyghurs.
Well, it depends on what happens in November, right?
I guarantee you that the Chinese government would like to see Biden win.
Really?
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
I mean, as would, you know, for their own reasons, I think...
People who subscribe to the Trump as Putin's puppet will scoff at this idea.
But look, the Russians, I think, would prefer to see Biden win as well, right?
I mean, they can get back to business as usual, probably ease up on the sanctions.
The hard left, anyway, has been very successful over the years at this Russian narrative.
And fine.
It worked for them.
You know, they'd spent three years in this, you know, pushing this particular narrative.
But I think overall, the Chinese, the Russians, they would prefer to see someone like Biden come in.
I think they feel like it would be a more collegial approach from the White House, less confrontational.
And I think that's just where we're at.
Look, I mean, you know...
Bill Gates.
Bob Gates used to be the director of the agency, and he worked for a couple of administrations.
And he said himself that Biden's never been on the right side of a foreign policy decision.
So that's one area where, again, going back to what we talked about earlier, is if he's going to choose a vice president, I'd rather he choose somebody who's got as much national security and foreign policy experience as possible.
Because I think that's one area where he's going to be lacking.
Even though he says, oh, I've worked in foreign policy all my life.
Doesn't mean anything.
Just because you were there doesn't mean you've got good judgment or, you know, anyway.
Until Trump talked about, you know, the problems with the post office and, you know, mail delivery and the idea that we're going to have mail-in ballots as opposed to absentee ballots, you know, before that...
9 out of 10 people, that's not statistically accurate, but I'm sure a lot of people would have said, the fucking postal system, they can't deliver the mail.
But now, because Trump comes out and says, it's going, oh my god, I love the postal system, and he's trying to destroy the postal system.
Look, and I've ordered hydroxychloroquine through the mail, and it hasn't arrived.
So what am I to think?
It's the touch of death.
But can you imagine if we have an election where you do this and then you don't know the results for five or six or seven days because they're still counting ballots, right?
The beauty of the elections in the past have been, by the end of the night, you got a winner, right?
And now, if you don't know, and you can't tell me that, and it's not, you know, I'm just saying, the realities are, you got to be pragmatic.
You want to go with all, you know, mail ballots or whatever?
Hey, Just be aware of the fact that you could have a lot of problems, a lot of disqualified ballots because of a variety of reasons, a lot of lost ballots.
And so if what you want to do is sow chaos and dissent and further this divide, then yeah, that's a pretty good way to do it.
Or you can figure out how to fucking get everybody to the ballots, to the polling booths, and make that happen.
Just fucking do it.
And if you want to have voting booths where people wear masks and hazmat suits, fine.
But figure out a way to get people to the voting booth.
I don't think that the mail-in thing could be wrought with fraud, like the White House, like Trump.
It could be lots of fraud.
I think it's just pragmatics as You could have a lot of logistical problems with that.
I think if Congress would do its job, they would just say, you know what?
The elections are coming.
They're going to be right on time.
And you're going to go to your voting polling places and we're going to put in place special times for elderly citizens to vote if they want to have a super safe environment.
They can only vote just like you do at Costco.
Costco in our area had like 7 to 9 a.m.
was only for people over 60, right?
Fine.
If Costco can do that shit, I'm pretty sure we could do that with voting booths.
Her idea was that guns are for bad people and you have a gun in the house, you're more likely to shoot each other and you don't need that in your life.
And I think a lot of those friends that I have who have wives like that, they look at me like I'm a caveman.
Like, oh, this dickhead, he likes to shoot elk with a bow and arrow, and he's always shooting guns, and he says he's a liberal, but I don't even believe him.
And I'm like, look...
This is the same reason why I know how to fight.
Self-defense is fucking important.
Like, if some shit goes down, how many goddamn videos have you seen where two people are in a fight and neither one of them knows how to fight at all?
Because if your life's dependent on it and saving your family's life and you realize at that moment that you were wrong, you could get a gun safe, okay?
So if you're going to do that, then don't get one.
I'm a big believer in that.
Just don't buy one unless you're going to practice.
And you're going to constantly work that mechanism.
But, you know, I've taken a handful of concealed carry courses.
In the past, and a couple of times, just out of curiosity to see what they're doing.
And the training is, or the courses are...
Not that good.
And they spend a fair amount of time on the legal issues, right?
Because that's a big...
Carrying a weapon is a pain in the ass, right?
It's a real pain in the ass.
And it's fraught with potential problems.
And you see difficulties because people don't understand the ramifications of it.
They don't understand that it's...
You know, it's not fun.
It's a big responsibility.
It's huge.
But you're right.
Typical training, depending on where you're at in certain places, it's very difficult to go out regularly, get to the range once a week, which is what you should be doing.
Yeah, please find a place where you can go, please, and learn.
And even if you don't shoot, and you make sure you understand how to tell if there's not a round in the chamber, understand dry firing, even if you're just going to dry fire.
I have friends that are competitive shooters that if they don't shoot every day, they dry fire for 30 minutes every day.
Once again, kind of like what we talked about with MKUltra, the idea being initially it was a defensive concern over what are our enemies doing, right?
And so the concepts behind remote viewing, much like the concepts behind understanding behavioral conditioning or false memories, creating new memories, It started because we were concerned about what the enemy was up to, and the enemy being the Soviets in the old days and the Chinese.
Well, guys like Sidney Gottlieb, who was the head of that operation, and guys like George White knows.
I'm sure they couched what they were doing because they knew.
Once it veered off into those whole unwitting testing and all the rest of the shit they were doing, you know that they knew.
They were aware.
Sidney Gottlieb was a very complex individual, right?
But he knew what he was doing.
But that ability to couch it in terms of...
You know, we're fighting an existential threat, so we're doing this for national security.
I mean, I think it can kind of make it easier for a person to overlook sort of the questions, the ethical questions, because you're doing it for patriotic reasons, but you've got nukes pointed at you from the other side, and you legitimately feel like, okay, we're going to do this.
Anyway, I'm not sure where I was going with that.
But yeah, the idea of super soldier, fascinating stuff.
I'm worried about genetic manipulation, because I'm worried that we're not going to do it, but they're going to do it first.
And that, like, the idea of a super soldier, like using CRISPR or some of these gene editing tools, that that actually could be real.
I mean, like, in a place like China, where you don't get to decide what you do for a living, they really could recruit a large number of people and sort of develop soldiers in that regard.
Yeah, and I think, and here's where it's interesting is because, you know, again, people listening or there'll be some folks listening going, well, you know, come on, fucking ethical.
Of course the U.S. government's doing it.
But we are fundamentally different.
Yes, MKUltra, since we were talking about it, yeah, that was a horrendous, you know, situation.
All by itself, an indication of how we're different, right, from the Russians or from the Chinese.
You think the Chinese are going to hold some, you know, in their committee hearings, you know, they're going to call to the carpet the PLA intel operators and say, well, what have you been doing?
Oh, my God, this is terrible.
Or the Russians are going to do that?
Putin's going to call the FSB and throw them out there in a committee hearing?
No, bullshit.
So when people...
Want to talk about how the US is engaging?
Well, okay, yeah, we've been off the rails at times.
We do tend to try to self-correct whichever administration's in charge.
But more importantly, we do have, and I hope we maintain it, we have had a track record of transparency.
A very good friend of mine who was a homicide detective in the UK's Met Police, he works with me now in my business, Diligence, Diligence USA, for all your information and security needs.
He never talked about a psychic ever being brought in, and he handled a lot of cases.
I guess the government had to find out whether or not MKUltra, like when they were doing that, like, let's see.
There's only one way to find out.
If you don't believe in it at all, but it turns out to be true, and there are a few people that have developed techniques.
Look, hypnosis is real.
Hypnosis is weird.
Maybe there's something to this shit.
Maybe if you just follow the right techniques and get yourself in the right mindset, you have access to information that's not available any other way.
And hypnosis, again, was part of the MKUltra sub-projects, right?
And it's because there was concern that the enemy had this research or that they were making headway.
And so, again, a lot of things that develop initially, it's because it's a defensive response, because we learn something about what some hostile entity is doing.
And then you have to move immediately to, okay, well, do we need this for offensive purposes?
Because if they're doing it, Do we need to have that capability?
And I'd always argue, certainly when you go into the realm of cyber warfare, yeah, you better have that capability, you know, both sides.
Well, that's where things like that neural link technology is very interesting, because if somehow or another you really can communicate with someone who's not there without using any words, Which is what Elon said to me.
He goes, you're going to be able to talk without using words.
Well, if you can do that at a distance, like if you can literally guide someone, like say if you got someone who's on a mission in Afghanistan, and you are watching on a satellite, and you can guide them without giving them any noise, without saying anything to them.
And you can give them all the data, whether it's through augmented reality, like glasses or something like that.
All these people out of work in production companies and all the independent contractors who don't have jobs because nothing's filming and nobody knows how to film and they don't want to take on the insurance.
So it's hit that industry hard.
I know everybody's like, oh my God, it's hit the entertainment industry hard.
I think what a lot of they're doing is quarantining people, testing them and quarantining them, forcing them to stay on set, quarantining them in a hotel they've rented out, things along those lines.
I know Tyler Perry has been real successful at doing that, but he's smart.
He's got his own studios, he's got his own setup, and he just has everybody locked down at the place where they're filming.
Yeah, but I mean, all those people that don't have that option, right?
I mean, they're just like, I know a lot of folks that are, you know, working as, you know, camera operators or sound men or just, you know, anything in the business, and they're just, yeah, they're fucked.