Dave Smith and Joe Rogan critique U.S. interventions—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya—exposing chaos like ISIS’s rise and Yemen’s slave auctions, while linking them to bin Laden’s strategy and Cold War CIA tactics. They warn COVID lockdowns set precedents for future authoritarianism, from climate policies to Phil Murphy’s emergency overreach, comparing it to Bush’s Patriot Act. Smith argues systemic corruption thrives on performative woke culture and student debt exploitation, while Rogan questions media bias, like the NYT’s Hunter Biden laptop suppression. Ultimately, they suggest blind patriotism and elite cover-ups fuel instability, urging personal resilience over simplistic political narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
I know very little about it, even though I've read a lot about it.
I'm still, I'm like, what is all this?
You know there's some fuckery going on, and you know there's a lot of special interests, and there's a lot of money, and there's a lot of shenanigans, but it's like, to really know how this stuff works, to really understand lobbyists, to really understand how bills get passed, to really understand Congress, to really understand the Senate, like, you got a deep dive for years.
Corrupt enough to give cover to the wildest conspiracy theory because they are already like you could say okay well Perhaps you know QAnon conspiracy theorists believe some really crazy shit, but then you just go but look at what happened with this Jeffrey Epstein guy I mean There really was this child sex trafficking ring that was covered up.
I mean, we have that woman on ABC News who was basically saying, I broke the story.
And my bosses told me no.
I think it was NBC. Was it NBC? Yeah.
We broke the story, but they wanted to protect access to the royal family.
So we would let a powerful multimillionaire or billionaire child sex trafficking ring leader skate because we wanted access to the royal family.
I mean, it's like, so if you had an honest press, you know, if they weren't Every bit as corrupt as those conspiracy theorists think they are.
You would think that the fact that, say, like a former president was on his flight logs would have led to a huge scandal where they would really want to get to the bottom of that.
You would think right now they'd still want to get to the bottom of that.
Like, hey, who else was involved in this?
Now, okay, he was on his plane.
We don't know that that means that Bill Clinton was involved in the worst aspects of it.
But you would think the press would at least want to find that out, and there's very little interest.
No, because if the press goes after Bill Clinton, then Hillary Clinton gets somehow connected to it, and then that could sink Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and that's bad for the people that hate Donald Trump.
And really committed to his weird ideology that he wants, you know, like to not just when things get back to normal, they can't get back to the regular normal.
It's got to be this more, you know, inclusive normal.
And so he's taken it upon himself that he's going to try to remake New York City in his progressive image while the city is going through the worst year it's been through in my lifetime.
Well, no, but I'm just saying that if you can win elections by playing to other people and also that, you know, some of those people kind of like the progressive rhetoric.
The highest earning 1% of New York City residents generated 43% of the city income taxes and 51% of the New York state income taxes collected from individuals living in the city as of 2016. That's crazy.
Well, and it's, I think that also happened, I think even more so in New York, because when the, you know, like New York, it's the same thing.
It's like, well, it's expensive.
You pay a ton for your rent or to own or whatever.
But, you know, it's like the best museums, the best nightlife, the best food, the best all these things.
But then all of a sudden, when the lockdowns hit, now people are like locked down in a one-bedroom apartment that they could get a house for, you know, anywhere else in the country.
And a lot of people started to re-question, why am I here?
No, it's very – a lot of people like to make this a simplistic calculation and it's an enormously complicated one because there's many different variables on both sides.
So how many lives were saved by locking down?
I think it's very debatable.
I don't really know that it's a – but I don't claim to know.
But then you'd also have to look just first, apples to apples, how many lives were cost from the lockdown.
And I've read stuff, I was reading the other day, it was in England, but I'm sure the same is true here, that cancer screenings have like plummeted over the last year.
So now there's going to be all types of preventable cancers that are going to, we won't know this for years if we can ever really trace it back.
But a whole bunch of people will die from that.
Depression has been way up.
Suicides seem to be going up.
There's all these different costs.
And then, of course, what is the human cost of destroying people's livelihoods?
And it's very, very hard to weigh these things out.
And as you pointed out, you'd have to weigh it versus The cost of lives without the lockdown, not necessarily with, but it's like with a lot of these other issues.
People like to make it a very simplistic, well, if you want to prevent the virus, you have to be for the solution.
Same with climate change.
If you want to prevent climate change, you've got to be for the Green New Deal.
But the truth is that the real answer is, well, what is this going to cost versus what is this going to cost and which one is worse, which sucks because you have to think.
It's really important to have lively debate on these things.
And one of the things that's going on now is people are trying to shut down debate.
They want you to agree with their side.
And this is something that social media has really reinforced, right?
Like social media echo chambers.
They want you to be on their side.
And if you're not on their side, they just hit you with a bunch of bullshit about why you shouldn't and why you're on the wrong side of history and why you're a bad person.
We were talking before the podcast about lists that people are making, about people who supported Donald Trump or people who voted for Donald Trump or people who worked in the administration.
They're making these lists and like literally blacklists.
Like they have no irony about suggesting these blacklists.
And meanwhile, Joe Biden is saying in his acceptance speech that, you know, well, now's the time to bring everybody together.
You know, like we all need to be one, yada, yada, which is kind of a nice thought.
But it's it's a little hard to take seriously when all of these people in your party and who have been supporting you.
I've been calling everybody else on the other side, you know, white supremacists, Nazis for the last four years, to now that you're claiming you won, say, hey, we all have to come together.
Meanwhile, other members of your party are saying, we've got to create lists of people.
I think with young people, she represents this idea that someone like her, young, hardworking, out there hustling, seriously progressive values, that you can get pretty far, and certainly in the public eye.
Yeah, well, everybody does when they're 30. You know Bridget Phetasy.
Bridget Phetasy read some of her writing that she wrote when she was 24. She's like, oh my god, I was basically AOC. She's like, I was such a lefty.
I was so delusional.
She goes, and now I'm just so much more of a realist.
My worry about this Biden thing is that people voted for Biden because they hate Trump.
They didn't vote for Biden because he's a leader that they respect and they want and they admire and that he's going to lead us out of it.
If Obama was calling for unity, if he was the guy that was the president and he was calling for unity, we've got to abandon all these ideas about division.
We're all together!
And he brought everybody together again.
That might work.
That might work.
People might recognize that this really intelligent guy with this message of unity should be listened to.
I mean, that happened in 2008. That's what Obama said when he won.
And there was a decent amount of unity.
I think he had an over 70% approval rating when he first came in.
I mean it wasn't certainly anything like the country is now.
But at the end of eight years of Obama, you had a Republican House, a Republican Senate, and Donald fucking Trump elected president.
So we had that, but it didn't matter because even with such a charismatic guy like Obama calling for unity and saying a lot of the right things, at least at first, The policies and what was actually happening in the country were really fucking over huge numbers of people.
And then also things that might have been somewhat out of Obama's control, but not completely out, is that the era of...
It was like the Obama recovery, which was the most cronious, corrupt recovery ever, and the woke lecturing all rose up at the same time in the Obama years.
I mean, not that we all have to agree on everything.
We don't have to all be one and all have the same attitude about everything.
But when you see what's going on in the country over this year, the culture war shit is really scary.
And people should be appropriately...
Concerned about that.
When you see what's going on in like, what's going on in Portland this year where you had like the fucking, you know, like militias facing off against each other.
You have like the Antifa versus the Proud Boys type shit.
The woke lecturing is almost like just the insult on top.
Like, if you're one of these people who lives in these towns...
You've seen for decades now, like, factories disappear, jobs get outsourced, the life expectancy has gone down, suicides have gone up.
You know, you're one of these, some guy in central Pennsylvania or all over the country, and what, you know, you probably lost your job, now you're working a shittier job.
You never really came back from where you were after 2008. Maybe you got a son who's addicted to opioids.
You got another son who like, you know, has never been the same since he got back from one of these stupid wars.
And then after all that, the people who sent you there are now lecturing you about your white privilege.
And then Donald Trump, all it really took was Donald Trump came in and said, you know what?
A real simple phrase that people can wrap their heads around and get behind.
But there's also that on the opposition to Trump's side.
Where they try to boil things down to...
Well, it was racism or it was white supremacy or something like that.
And you're like, there's a lot more going on here.
And I really think that if, like, these people on some level recognize that they've been screwed over by the establishment, forgotten by them, and that they are hated by the establishment, which is true.
Like, they're right about that.
And so they wanted someone to fight for them.
And I think Trump represents that to them.
I don't think he really was that from my perspective.
I think he's kind of a con artist.
But I do think that he tapped into something that's really powerful and that actually could get a lot worse if there's not some kind of, like, reconciling with it.
Maybe even sooner, because things go, you know, things move fast these days.
But I do think that, one of the things that's interesting with Biden and Kamala Harris is that a lot of these, like, Super progressive people are celebrating right now because Trump was out, you know, and so Trump was defeated.
And they feel like they helped get Biden and Kamala Harris in, which is they were certainly a portion of helping them.
And then Trump also is the one who is saying like, well, you know, Joe Biden, he's just a Trojan horse for AOC and Ilhan Omar.
He's a Trojan horse for socialism, which is actually complete bullshit.
Joe Biden, if anything, is a Trojan horse for Dick Cheney.
Joe Biden is a Trojan horse for the establishment, war hawks, Big banks, corporate elite, tech giants.
It's a really important question that people might want to, like...
Even people who really hate Donald Trump.
And you can really hate Donald Trump, that's fine.
But you might wonder why it is that the establishment hates him so much.
And my guess is that it's not for the same reasons that your left-wing friend hates Donald Trump.
Like, I don't buy for a fucking second that the CIA and the Republican establishment Hated Donald Trump because he said mean things about Mexicans.
I just don't buy that for a fucking second.
These are people who will slaughter brown people in third world countries and lose no sleep over it.
I don't buy that's why they hated him.
I think what they hated about Donald Trump was that he was a wild man who would blurt out things.
And he'd blurt out a lot of crazy shit, but then he'd also blurt out the truth.
And that was something that nobody...
You're not supposed to say that.
When Donald Trump was running in 2016, you know, he stood on the Republican primary debate stage in South Carolina, Republicans in South Carolina, and looked at Jeb Bush in the eyes and said, your brother lied us into war in Iraq.
And everyone was like, what the fuck?
Like, you can't say that at the Republican South Carolina and all the pundits, all the media class.
They were like Trump's finish now because you can't.
These are the people who fought the war in Iraq.
And these are the most pro-military people around.
And the next day, at the primary, Donald Trump took 60%.
And all the other Republicans, all 12 of them, split the other 40%.
Well, by the way, when that happened, I remember just screaming about this on my podcast.
I was just like, the response was right there, and it took him like four days, but eventually he did get it right, where he was just like, yeah, they died in a war that Hillary Clinton supported.
The president, who is counting on support from the military members and their families, suggests that for a second time in a week that they might have spread the coronavirus at the White House.
And then there were all these people in the media speculating, and they were like, well, the New York Times wouldn't do this unless this was a really high-level person.
It was basically like, wink, wink, this might be Pence, this might be, you know, Jared Kushner, this could be anybody saying this shit.
And then it turns out, it's like, Oh, this was like some guy who was once a chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security.
Now, I'm not saying that's nothing, but it's not at all what you were kind of making people think.
So I think it's a very shady way to do journalism.
And that's one of the things that I think is like...
One of the bright spots of the Trump administration, one of the best things that he was able to draw out was how agenda-driven the corporate press is.
And you can agree with their agenda on hating Donald Trump, maybe that's how you feel, but it's still something to...
Everybody knows now that they are agenda-driven.
They're not here like, we just give you the information.
Yeah, but I think as a journalist though, I think It's very you're it's real slippery when you do things like that like like those quotes losers and suckers Unless you know who said it unless they're willing to go on record and say I heard him say it Then you don't necessarily have a story.
What were the what was the and particularly if he denies it?
So if I were to just say, oh, Joe told me this thing last month, and you go, I never said that, you can't just run with it and quote that you said it, because you have no way of knowing.
I understand their position, that they're coming from this place where they feel like they can do a lot of good.
They can change opinions, and they feel like the country's going in a bad direction.
And they felt like with Donald Trump, this country's sliding into this horrible fascist state, and they want to do everything they can to prevent it, and they have the green light from all the other people that are there.
But all this stuff, these lessons that have been learned in the past about why it's so important to be totally honest and unbiased in terms of disseminating information, You have to kind of do that.
And then other people are supposed to take that information that you've disseminated unbiased and have these perspectives and debate both sides.
That's what's supposed to happen.
The problem is when you get this distorted perception from the media that's very biased and that is not objective at all.
It's like you're trying to lean towards a very particular conclusion that they think is right.
They think it's a good thing.
But when you do that, then you don't have a...
Who is the Walter Cronkite?
Who is the unbiased journalist?
Who's the one that we trust for information?
It used to be the New York Times.
The New York Times used to be brutally honest about basically everything.
And now you read something in the New York Times like we did, and we go, oh, it's the New York Times, though.
I mean, it's definitely been, like, exposed in the last 10 years.
But I think that, truthfully, I think it's kind of a silver lining that at least people are starting to be aware of that.
People are starting to go, like, okay, I know that these institutions are not to be trusted.
Because, truthfully speaking, they got, you know...
It's like I was saying to you before we started, where it's like for all the shit that people give Alex Jones, he got all of the biggest stories right over the last 20 years.
And I'm not saying he didn't get anything wrong, but really, really big things like should we go to war in Iraq?
Should we bail out bankers?
Should all of this?
He called these as lies and corruption right away.
And the New York Times was selling all of these.
I mean, they sold the war in Iraq.
And so it's, to me...
It's not the worst thing in the world if people at least recognize that these institutions are completely compromised.
And I agree with you that there is a role for objective journalism, but I would at least accept if they were like, hey listen, we think, like what you just said, we think we have this platform and we need to use this to get Donald Trump not elected.
At least be honest with it.
Don't bullshit me and tell me we're just doing objective news and every single story is about how Donald Trump is, you know, needs to...
Well, the New York Times may not, but I'm speaking in the corporate press in general.
They'll say, well, there's fake news out on the internet.
And even the New York Times has done stories about how Social media companies need to do more to, you know, combat fake news on the internet and things like that.
I mean, it starts with that and then they'll use that as an example, but then usually they also go to other things like, look, this New York Post story about Hunter Biden's laptop was called fake news from the day it came out to the point that not only would all of the corporate press not report on it, But that social media companies were banning the link and Twitter froze the New York Post's Twitter account.
Well, look, it's basically been verified that this was Hunter Biden's laptop.
I mean, within any reasonable standard for a journalist to verify something, I mean, number one, the Bidens didn't deny it.
Like, nobody actually came out and denied that this was.
They had his signature at the repair shop, which they matched up to his signature.
They've had other people on the email chains confirm that these were emails between them and Hunter Biden.
So it's been pretty reasonably kind of verified that this was Hunter Biden.
Now, I don't know about the crazier accusations that were made there.
I mean, Rudy Giuliani said that there were pictures of underage girls and stuff like that.
I don't know if that's true or not.
But Rudy Giuliani did turn it over to the Delaware police.
That is true because the Delaware, a spokesman for the attorney general, said that they received the laptop and that they sent it to the FBI.
Now, I don't know why they would – he would turn this over claiming this stuff was on there and then they would send this to the FBI if there wasn't something.
But I don't know.
But what you do know, right, is that this was a story where they had these emails about Hunter Biden who is very clearly a swamp creature who was selling his father's name to rake in money from foreign companies.
Now, truth be told, that's a kind of run-of-the-mill scandal as far as politics go.
It's normal.
Every senator's kid, family, wife, they all do stuff like this all the time.
It's a corrupt swamp, you know?
But it's a story nonetheless.
It may not be the – but to just make the conscious decision – That we are a few weeks out from a presidential election.
This can harm Biden.
And therefore, we're not mentioning it.
We're not covering it.
We're not trying to debunk this to a bunch of people.
We are trying to make sure people never get their eyes on this.
They felt the heat from 2016, from the Hillary Clinton email debate, you know, whether or not she should have deleted those emails, and the fact that Comey then opens up the investigation again in the middle of the campaign, and that was basically what a lot, even though she won the popular vote, a lot of people felt like that was a bad move.
And so this year they said, we're going to do everything we can to get rid of Donald Trump.
Again, they become activists instead of just journalists.
Well, what he claimed was that – and they're saying Joe Biden, that he couldn't prove Joe Biden was – it's a very confusing title – because he claimed that he had met with Joe Biden and Joe Biden was aware of all the dealings that Hunter was doing.
Fox News has reviewed emails from, look at that name, Bobulinski, related to the venture, and they don't show that the elder Biden had business dealings.
Yeah, but see, that's weird.
We could say that Jamie is my business associate, right?
And if I'm involved in some shady shit...
And Jamie doesn't know about it, and Jamie and I are emailing back and forth, and they get into Jamie's emails, and they say, ex-Joe Rogan's business associate doesn't show any association.
You know, like, when all those celebrities got their fucking iClouds leaked, all those pictures hit the internet instantly, and you could find them all over the place.
These emails have, like, barely been seen by, I feel like, anybody.
Well, these emails were – I believe he turned these over to the FBI. So I don't know where they would leak from.
Not to say that they couldn't leak.
But I think the point of this article is that what he claimed – what this Bobulinski guy claimed was that Joe Biden himself was very involved in all the business deals that Hunter and him were doing and that his emails couldn't prove that.
Because they, you know, the thing was they said they had these references to like the big guy and stuff like that, but that they couldn't prove that Joe Biden knew about this.
But he's claiming, whether this is true or not, he's claiming that he's met Joe Biden several times and they've talked about it and Joe Biden was well aware of what Hunter Biden was doing and where he was making his money from.
Again, I think it's a kind of run-of-the-mill political scandal, that aspect of it.
The bigger thing is that this goes on all over the place.
I mean, all over the fucking place.
The conflicts of interest, the corruption.
You see where Obama spoke after he was president.
We get like $400,000 or something like that for a speech in front of bankers.
And he was the guy who presided over the bank bailout.
And then you get out and it's like, oh, here's four.
The bankers really just wanted to hear Barack Obama speak.
Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton, I believe, the ballpark numbers, they left the White House, their net worth was around $4 million, and then it was well over $100 million by 2016. So they made a lot of money after the White House.
Yeah, but do you know how insanely difficult it is to prove, first of all, to prove that there's voter fraud and then to prove there's enough voter fraud where they could overturn it?
It's a question of how widespread it is, because there's always voter fraud, which is another secret that they don't fucking like to tell, but there's always fucking some degree of voter fraud.
I also find it really, really odd that we overhauled the way we do voting in this country, and that now it's almost an entirely different process, where both candidates are getting way more votes than they would normally get, And it's just very weird.
There were a lot of things that were weird about this election, like the actual logistics of it.
It doesn't seem like if we can bank online, we should be able to vote online.
And doesn't it seem like if you could use like Apple Pay or Samsung Pay or something like that and go buy something, you know, you use your fingerprint.
Like they had the day of the elections, they were supposed to, where I'm from in Columbus, Franklin County, they were supposed to have like registration via iPads or something.
The whole thing that it's like – so the system is that we have to basically – like 10,000 votes in Wisconsin is going to determine which half of the country is furious and which half is like elated because they get to rule over the other half now.
And then hopefully in four years they can be happy and you're miserable because they get to rule over you now.
It's so bizarre.
Democracy in general is a very bizarre process.
To have it in a country this big, with this powerful of a government, it makes it insane.
Like, we're going to determine the course of history based off what a few votes in swing states determine.
Just guessing, but I'd say the majority of people just vote their team and just don't even really look into it that much.
Democracy was never...
Democracy was kind of considered like a joke before World War I. The idea of...
I mean, there weren't too many, like, functioning democracies.
And that...
I think that all changed with, like, Woodrow Wilson.
We're going to make the world safe for democracy.
We're going to overthrow all of these monarchs in Europe, which Europe was mostly monarchs at the time.
And that ended.
And then, after that, you had the rise of, like...
Lenin and Hitler and later Stalin and, you know, things that were much worse than the monarchies that they replaced.
But just in pure philosophy, like the idea that if 51% of people vote for something or somebody, that then it's completely morally legitimate for them to rule over the other 49% is completely absurd.
Well, I mean, look, I think the alternative to all of this is liberty, which is the best answer, which is just basically that whether it's a democratic process or not, that the government should be so much more reduced, the power should be so much more reduced than what it is now, that it's not that consequential.
I mean, look, this is the major source of the culture war to begin with, even before the social media stuff and before the woke lecturing.
The major source is that the government is so powerful that you have to fight for your side to be in control of it.
Otherwise, you're ruled over by the side who you hate.
And it's – this is in less – the only way forward that would solve this problem, that would defuse the culture war, is accepting some type of libertarianism.
And what I just mean by that is just some – whatever exactly it is, something that says, OK, listen, you have these cultural views in Portland and you have these cultural views in Alabama.
You're not going to remake each other.
You guys can live the way you want to live and you guys can live the way you want to live.
And you can peacefully coexist.
The idea that you have to have this five, six trillion dollar a year beast that's controlled by one side or another that hate each other is just going to keep this thing going and getting hotter and hotter.
Well, you know, I don't know exactly, but I know that whenever he would make a move...
To try to end one of these wars, the press would go nuts circling him.
I mean, they always were, but they'd dial it up to, like, 11. And then he'd have people within his administration undermining him at every turn.
At every turn.
I remember back, I was a contributor on an Essie Cup show.
She's got a show on CNN. I was a contributor there for, like, a year.
And there was one time where it was...
Donald Trump came out and said that...
We're getting out of Syria.
And he goes, look, our only goal in Syria is to defeat ISIS. That's all we care about.
And they're almost defeated.
As soon as they're defeated, we're getting out completely out of Syria.
Syria.
And then about a week later, McMasters put out this statement where he was saying, "These are our goals in Syria." And one of them was regime change to overthrow Bashar al-Assad.
And then he gets fired like a week after that.
And their take at CNN was kind of like, "Well, isn't this great that at least one of the adults in the room is like, 'No, no, no, Donald Trump.
This is what we're doing in Syria.
We're having another regime change.
And I was like losing my shit.
Like, wait, hold on.
However you feel about this, he's the commander-in-chief.
The secretary of state doesn't get to decide, no, we're fighting a war.
The tricky thing with Trump is that if it wasn't for these character flaws or these qualities that are partly, you know, have these character flaws, he'd never be the president.
But anyone who was a decent gentleman or, like, didn't have those qualities would never have gotten to where he was.
He got to where he was because he was willing to say, like, he got to where he was in large part because he had a quality that Bernie Sanders didn't have about him.
Bernie Sanders is entirely too nice of a guy to lead a revolution.
He would always say, we're leading a revolution.
And then you'd have Joe Biden, who's the epitome of the system that you want to revolt against.
And he'd go, look, Joe's a very decent guy.
He's my friend.
I'm not going to say anything bad about him.
And you're like, well, you're probably not going to lead a fucking revolution if you're not willing to lob some insults.
Like, I'm not saying you have to lob bullets, but like...
But I wonder if, like, in the middle of that, when you're insulting people, you're perpetuating, you're keeping going this sort of system that's been in place for so long, where you run...
You talk about your merits.
You shit on the flaws of your opponent.
He does the same to you.
Whoever lands the most blows wins.
I mean, this is highlighted by the way Kamala Harris has sort of talked about her debate with Biden, right?
When she was on Colbert, she's like, it was a debate!
It was a debate!
But it's like...
That's the only way to do it?
Is the only way to do it to shit on the other person?
Well, okay, what I love about Bernie Sanders is that he voted against the war in Iraq, as I just said.
He was great in the Senate about the war in Yemen and trying to bring that to an end, which is just this god-awful nightmare that's still going on, that Obama started and Trump continued.
I mean, what's happening in Yemen is like one of the biggest tragedies in my lifetime.
Well, explain it to people. explain it to people.
What Obama administration said to placate the Saudis.
Basically, the Saudis were pissed off about a lot of things.
And they're a big business partner with us.
And so they were pissed off about the war in Iraq.
The Saudis didn't want the war in Iraq.
They kind of foresaw what would happen, that it would give Iran control of the region and it would be a nightmare.
But the Cheneyites really wanted the war in Iraq.
Israel really wanted the war in Iraq.
And the neocons won and they got the war.
And so they were already pissed off about that.
And then they were really pissed off that Obama made the Iran deal with Iran.
And so to placate, which I believe was the direct quote, to placate the Saudis, Obama decided to back them in this war against Yemen.
And they put a full blockade around the country, which was already the poorest country in the Middle East.
And this led to just...
I mean, the UN said it was the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.
This was before COVID, but I think it's still probably up there.
There were well over a million cases of cholera, which is basically, I mean, curable with, I think, liquids.
Like, I think Gatorade could solve cholera.
I don't know.
You might need antibiotics or something like that.
But it was children and old people just dying in massive numbers.
I still don't think they know the exact numbers.
It's going to be somewhere on the scale of what the war in Iraq was.
Hundreds of thousands of people dead.
And Bernie Sanders really led the effort to try to end it in the Senate, and he did a great job on that.
Like, phenomenal.
He also has a great—he had a great bill proposed to decriminalize marijuana on a federal level, which I think would be phenomenal.
And so there were several things, like those would probably be the ones I'd pick that I thought were really great about Bernie Sanders.
So I think running on issues, probably one of my big criticisms of him is that he doesn't really lead with those issues.
Like he didn't, those aren't the things he talked about a lot on the campaign trail, but he was excellent on all of those.
So I think you could run.
He could run on his principles, you know?
But I think you have to at some point have a little bit of a killer instinct to become the alpha monkey, to become the leader of this country.
And I thought that Bernie Sanders could have won the whole election.
With the tone that he started in the primary, and he didn't.
And I think that Bernie Sanders, like, look, the corporate press completely came down to try to ruin it for him.
Who knows what the DNC did this time?
I mean, it was exposed in 2016. Who knows what they were doing behind the scenes?
I think it felt like with Bernie, even though there's talk that they couldn't control him, right?
There's also talk that he couldn't win, because there are certain key states that he's never going to win.
Because even though that message resonated with a lot of people, including me, what resonated with me is, first of all, absolving people of student debt.
I know a lot of people that are wrapped up in student debt, and I think it's One of the best examples, first of all, you have essentially children, right?
You have someone who's 17, 18 years old, they're going into school, and they're taking on enormous debt.
And they don't, I think you could make the real argument that they don't have the intellectual capacity to understand the ramifications of this.
Maybe some do, maybe some don't.
But when you're talking about people that are in debt hundreds of thousands of dollars by the time they get out of school, and then they get out of school and they get a job that pays $40,000 a year.
Do the math.
How long before you catch up?
You never catch up.
There's people to this day that are getting Social Security, that are getting their Social Security docked.
And I think if we have all this money to go to Afghanistan and put on these endless wars, the idea that we don't have enough money to provide a reasonably priced education.
I'm not saying it should be free.
Maybe it should cost a little bit because I think people work harder when they have to work for something.
But the idea that you should be hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt by the time you get out, and the reality of the economy is that Even before COVID, if you got out, the odds of you getting a job that's going to be able to even put a dent in that debt in your chosen field, they're not that good.
There are no student loan forgiveness programs specifically for senior citizens.
Elderly student loan borrowers are eligible for the same loan forgiveness programs as other borrowers.
Well, that's crazy.
It's crazy.
It's crazy if you're that old and you're on a fixed income and you really can't.
We don't physically work anymore.
If we're a community, and this is one of the things I think about the United States, the idea of a country.
We're supposed to be a community.
Even though we're broken off into these countries, and they're broken off into these cities, and we're broken off by ideologies, and we're separated by all these different lines in the sands that we draw.
At the end of the day, we're all contributing to this pool.
We're putting our tax dollars in, and we're deciding what's important and what's not.
For me, student loan forgiveness was a big thing.
Because I was like, we've got to stop this cycle of fucking people over economically when they're 18 years old.
Like, I agree with the spirit of everything you're saying.
And I think when I said it's a corrupt system, it's just that the fact that you have all of these parties involved, where you have, like, the government who's guaranteeing all of these student loans.
And then you have, for a while, I think now it's all done...
Straight from the federal government.
For a while you have these financial companies that are giving out the loans and then taking in the interest and profiting off of them.
And then you have these universities who are able to raise their tuition over and over.
And there's always a market for it because the loans are guaranteed by the government.
So now you have all of these people just raking in money and the politicians get to brag about all these kids going to college.
And then...
Who's fucked is the 17, 18-year-old who was told their whole life that, oh, just take the loan out.
Whatever you got to do because this will lead you to a better life.
And then the jobs aren't there for them.
But the problem, if you want to break this cycle, the problem is the government guaranteeing the loans to begin with.
Because this is why college inflates faster than almost any other price in the market.
And so I would just think even if we are going to forgive the loans that are out there now, what you need to do is stop the loans, cut them off, and let the prices of college come back to something that's more reasonable like they were in like our parents' generation where you could work a summer job and pay off your college.
Well, I don't know if that's necessarily the case, but some of it's going to be useless.
useless, but let's not concentrate on that because you're supposed to be expanding your horizons and there's social growth, being outside of your family for the first time.
The Closed-Minded Campus, the Stifling of Ideas in American Universities.
But it's one of those things where it's like, what is most appealing to young kids?
Compassion.
What happens to people when they get older?
Realism.
What happens to people when they get older and then they're worried about their physical health?
Then conservatism.
That's one of the reasons why conservatism and even libertarianism.
When you think about it, when you do this sort of like real narrow-minded view of what that means to people, for a lot of people it means cruelty.
It means a lack of compassion.
It means this like blind faith in capitalism and competition.
And that's one of the things that freaks out young people.
Because young people, as they enter into the world and they start learning things and they leave their parents, a lot of times, first of all, they feel suppressed by their parents.
They feel like their parents who...
Probably work really hard in order to get them to go to school, you know, to be able to afford their school.
We'll probably work really hard in order just to keep the family together just in terms of the amount of money you have to have to have a house and two cars and live in America and pay your taxes and send your kids to college.
Like, goddamn, you got to work.
You fucking have to work.
And so if you're a kid, and you're just living off your parents, and then you're hearing all this hardcore shit, like, you know, your parents want you to be successful, and you're like, Jesus Christ, leave me alone!
And then you get to school, and you drop acid, and you learn about Marxism, and you learn about socialism, and you're like, we can all just get together.
We can just pool all our money together, and we're going to be fine.
You know, there was a discussion.
Who was it that was...
Was it on this show?
I think it was.
I was talking to somebody and they were talking about the early days of the United States.
And then the early days of the United States with wheat production.
The initial ideas were that they were going to pool all the food together.
Well, and that is one of the, like, my position is basically that the government shouldn't do any of this shit, and we don't have the money for any of it, and we shouldn't rob it from people.
But it is a strong argument from, like, an AOC type.
Where they'll be like, oh, well, we don't have this money, and she can go, yeah, but every time you right-wingers want a war, you always find the money for it.
But the other thing about, you know, which I guess just concerns me a little bit about...
Abolishing student debt or forgiving student debt is that – well, number one, the first thing I said is that it's like, well, OK, if we don't get the system fixed, then we're going to forgive this debt and then keep perpetuating more people in debt.
So something still needs to be done there.
But the problem is also that like – when you say forgive debt or you have the taxpayer pick any of this stuff up, It's just coming from other people.
I'd be all for that if there was a reasonable solution.
I think so.
But I think basically the solution is to just get the government out of the business of higher education.
If there are institutions of higher education that are providing enough value for people, like you come here, you're going to be way better in life in that scene, then people are going to want to send their kids there.
Yeah, I mean, there are other countries that do that, and okay, fair enough.
I mean, I don't know enough about the Canadian university system, but I'll tell you this, they have just as big a problem with what you were talking about before with the woke shit, maybe even more so.
But do you ever wonder, even from their perspective, which is hard to get into, but if you're out there and you're like, okay, Black Lives Matter and the hardcore woke 20-year-old, and they're like, I'm against this system because this system is white supremacy, right?
And then you realize that All of Hollywood agrees with you.
And all of academia agrees with you.
And, like, JPMorgan Chase is running, like, a Black Lives Matter ad.
And Kamala Harris, the vice president-elect, agrees with you.
And you go, how against the system are you really?
If the entire system is supporting what you're doing and why, if the whole system is based on white supremacy and you're here to call that out, why would the system not be reacting to crush you?
But I think it's more than just profiting off of it.
Like, my theory on it is that this is...
The ultimate divide and conquer and protect yourself strategy.
So you see how much that look, they don't want true economic leftism.
That's what Bernie Sanders represented.
And you saw how much the corporate press freaked out when it looked like he might have a shot at winning.
They were calling the supporters Nazis and shit like that.
that.
Like they were giving him the Trump treatment.
The Jewish guy who's the closest to ever being president any Jew's ever been is all of a sudden represents a Nazi takeover.
But they freaked out.
And all the stuff you were saying about having the other candidates drop out and that Bernie Sanders was unacceptable to them.
They don't like that brand of left wing ideology.
They love the woke shit because the woke shit allows them to give up nothing.
But like J.P. Morgan Chase is like, fine, we'll send our white execs to diversity training.
Good deal.
Now, are we cool with the left now?
Like, that's fine.
We'll hang a Black Lives Matter flag up.
No problem.
They're fine with gestures.
But Bernie Sanders is like, I want your money.
I want your shit.
I want your profits.
No more making profits.
Like, Bernie Sanders is, you know, if some, like, social justice warrior is like, you know, we have a problem with microaggressions and toxic masculinity, the JPMorgan Chase is like, no problem.
That's great.
And Bernie Sanders is like, there shouldn't be billionaires.
And they're like, ugh!
I don't know about that guy.
That guy seems like he could be trouble.
You know what I mean?
So they don't like the economic populace stuff because they've got a nice little system worked out here where they're raping the country.
The fucking big bank system that they have worked out right now is that the Federal Reserve prints money out of thin air, lends it to them at 0% interest, and they lend it out to the rest of us at interest.
So they just get money for free and then lend it out and collect the interest.
It's a sweet-ass fucking deal.
If I were them, I'd want to talk about microaggressions too.
I'd be like, you know what the real problem in our society is?
They consciously, like, recognize these trends and say, we've got to get on board with this, and this will help us, because we'll be one of the good guys.
We'll be a company that's very difficult to criticize.
It became the number one focus because if it bleeds, it leads.
These are the really exciting things that people are going to tune into, and it's going to help our revenue stream.
So our idea is that the reason why they're showing us the news is these are the most significant stories.
They're going to impact your life the most.
This is what's most important.
Not really the case.
What it really is is what's going to get the most attention.
What's the most important in terms of like what's going to get the most views, which is going to bring in the most advertising revenue.
And for people online that are writing stories, it's...
They don't call it clickbait for a reason.
They do, rather, call it clickbait for a reason.
The reason is they've got to trick you into clicking that thing because that's how they make their money.
So then they've tried subscription models.
And I subscribe to the Times and I subscribe to the Washington Post.
I subscribe to like four or five different publications.
And I felt like an obligation to do that.
I'm getting my news from them.
I feel like I should give them some money.
And that might be the only way these things ever survive, is that people get their news via subscription model.
But to this day, someone will send me a link, and I'll click the link, and they'll say, to subscribe, I'm like, oh, fuck you, and then I won't read it.
And then I'll Google it, I'll try to find it somewhere else.
Like, maybe Apple pay you five cents for this article.
Let me get a double click.
To make me subscribe every time.
I understand that there's journalists and they're doing amazing work and that they've worked for weeks on this expose and this has been the sole focus of their life and it's valuable.
And it's valuable to me.
It's valuable to the United States as a whole because this one person's Intellectual perspective on a very complex subject.
They've boiled this down for weeks and weeks.
This is what we've learned about X. Those are important.
Someone would come along and go, hey man, do you know they're financed by this?
Do you know that this is a part of...
The reason why they keep bringing this up is there's a directive, that emails have been leaked, and it's been proven that these people are supposed to be doing what they're doing.
Finding out the cult master really doesn't speak to the alien behind the comet.
Yeah, but this is where we're at, right?
We're in this imperfect system that's the best system the world's ever known.
That's what's weird.
What's weird is, as good as this, like...
It's hard to say things are great because things are not great for everybody and they're certainly not as good as they could be, right?
So that said, we have to recognize that this system of this experiment in self-government is the best system that's ever been put in place as far as...
creativity artistic contribution the impact on culture innovation there's some beautiful things that are happening all around the world but there's some wild shit that has happened in America over a period of just 200 years it's pretty fucking crazy No, it's the fucking...
What if all this robbery, like student debt, and even the military-industrial complex, and even...
What if...
All of this activity has to go on in order to have this much thriving, in order to have this much economic prosperity, and this much freedom.
You gotta have fuckery.
You gotta have madness.
You gotta have lies.
You gotta have deception.
You gotta have special interest groups.
You gotta have people distorting other people's positions on things.
You gotta have empty pundits.
You gotta have puppets in various stages of media.
You have to have clickbait.
You have to have all these things.
Because if you don't have all these things, you don't have resistance.
You don't have an enemy.
You don't have a battle.
You don't have a competition to get Get these prominent ideas that you think are the most crucial in order to maintain this society and maybe even improve it.
They don't compete enough.
They have to be suppressed.
You have to choke people.
You gotta grab them.
You gotta shake them like bad babies.
Almost like you have to create this chaos.
It's almost like you have to create it in order for people to battle this chaos.
Well, yeah, I mean, I guess there is like a yin and yang to the fact that without corruption, there could never be like noble anti-corruption forces and without anything to fight against.
Donald Trump did, in back-to-back days in the last week before the election, five events at five different states where he did close to an hour at each one.
Right, and if you talk to drug specialists, I mean, I've had people on that explain that kicking Xanax is actually more difficult than kicking opiates.
And also, I think it's probably real important for a guy of his intellectual capacity to explain what it was like to be addicted to these things and try to get off of them.
I think a lot of us, especially it'd be easy for someone like me who's never been physically addicted to something where I had some serious withdrawals.
It's probably easy to dismiss that as mental weakness.
But when a guy who's as intelligent as him and has spent so much time talking about personal responsibility has a situation like this, it can shine some light in a very unique way.
Yeah, it's like I had to give blood, or I had to get blood tests once, like, a couple years ago, and it was like, you can't drink coffee before it, and it was, like, at noon.
And it was like, by the time I was out, I was like, holy shit, like, I'm really feeling...
Whatever it is that he takes, the energy that that guy has...
I remember...
Bill O'Reilly interviewed him.
It was like when he first became president.
And it was before Bill O'Reilly went down, so around when he first became president.
And he asked him, I remember one which was the greatest thing ever was he asked him, he was like, so do you ever look around the White House and just think to yourself like, man, this is like really incredible.
I'm the president of the United States.
And Trump was like, yeah, it's a nice house.
He just seems so unimpressed with the fact that...
And Bill O'Reilly asked him how much he sleeps a night.
And he said about three hours.
And he goes, does that mess with you?
And he goes, I always slept about three hours.
Like, he was always kind of being this guy.
He always loved—it was a big advantage.
The celebrity factor for Donald Trump was a big advantage in politics.
And a part of that was that, like, when he would get on those debate stages, you know, you got to think, like, in the primary debates with other Republicans, a lot of these guys like, you know, Marco Rubio or someone like that, he might have been groomed by the establishment.
But he hasn't been under these type of lights before.
He hasn't had 100 million people watching him before.
But Donald Trump stepped right in there like, this is exactly where I belong.
This is my home.
And was so comfortable.
Even someone like Jeb Bush, who's from the most powerful crime family in America.
But has he ever been in a spotlight like that before?
I've heard recently, I don't even know if it's speculation, but the drug he's taking is not Adderall or some meth thing, but he's taking Provigil, actually.
See, look up no benefit for cognitive performance on ProVigil.
I might be wrong.
I think there may be a slight uptick for a lot of people.
But for a lot of people, I think one of the things that holds them back is they're just not that healthy.
They don't have a lot of energy.
Healthy people that are really vibrant people that are in good shape, they have more energy for stuff, and that would make them think better.
Researchers have found that modafinil boosts higher order cognitive function without causing serious side effects.
Modafinil, which has been prescribed in the U.S. since 1998 to treat sleep related conditions such as narcolepsy and sleep apnea, heightens alertness as much as caffeine does.
And they need something to give them a little pick-me-up.
I talked to Tim Ferriss about it.
Tim Ferriss is into a lot of performance-enhancing things and a lot of biohacking type things.
And he said that he didn't want to put it in his book.
It was a four-hour body or the four-hour work.
I don't remember which one it was.
One of his books.
One of his sort of like how to beat the system type books.
Because he goes, I felt like people were just going to start eating it like candy.
And he goes, and I feel like there's always a biological...
There's no biological free rides.
There's always some sort of negative aspect, especially to abuse of something like that.
But when you're 74 and you eat nothing but french fries and you're out there kicking ass, you gotta go, like, how much time has this guy got left anyway?
Well, yeah, but some people are just freaks like that, you know?
It's true, like some people don't, you know what I mean?
They'll be like some people who are like, eat like shit and like still fucking, like some people just naturally have better cardio, even if they're not like running as much as somebody else, they just naturally have it better.
Some people can treat their bodies like shit and still function.
That I think that Joe Biden does something, you know, we'll have a national mask mandate or something, and then we'll do that for two months, and then he goes, we defeated the virus, and we did it because we finally got serious and listened to the science.
But, I gotta say, I'm not super optimistic that that's the way it's gonna go.
We were talking about governors realizing Oh, well, I mean, yeah, look, I mean, I think that what's what's happened over the last year in America is really like unprecedented.
I mean, the idea that Americans have now accepted to some degree that we could be in a state where we're sitting at home watching our governors on television to find out what we're allowed to do today.
Are we allowed to go to the park?
Can I see my grandmother?
Can I have my family over?
Can I go to work?
Like the most intimate, basic things that we all took for granted as freedoms.
Of course, the government could never tell you you can or can't do that.
And now the governors have taken this authority and there wasn't major pushback.
I mean, there was a little, but not so much that they couldn't get away with doing it.
And I don't know that they're just going to give up that authority now that they've seized it.
I mean, my thing, what I think about COVID ultimately, the effect that the lockdowns and all this will have, I I think it would be something like 9-11, where, you know, like, right after 9-11, you remember there was all that fear that there'd be another terrorist attack.
Like, oh my god, we're terrified this could happen again.
And that's kind of gone away.
People don't really live with a fear of another terrorist attack.
But the Department of Homeland Security is here to stay.
The TSA is here to stay.
The wars that we're fighting are seemingly here to stay.
The Patriot Act is here to stay.
All of these things.
Yes.
So my guess is that a lot of these things are going to be here to stay.
When you give the government control, it's very hard to get it back from them.
There's a lot of different ways that you could go down this line.
And the other big one, I would say, is climate change.
I mean, if you accept that COVID was this emergency so that we have to lock everyone in their houses and all this stuff...
Well, okay, you have a whole bunch of people who are arguing that climate change is an existential crisis that's going to, you know, make all things, the planet uninhabitable, excuse me, for all living things.
Well, then, by that logic, wouldn't that be worth locking people in their homes over?
And so it's very dangerous once you've set this precedent that the government can do this.
And they all look around at each other and realize, oh, we got away with this.
And by the way, that's not...
Even if you believe the lockdowns were the right thing to do for COVID, which I don't, but even if you believe that, you'd still have to be concerned about this, like, authoritarianism that we've kind of, like, ushered in over this last year.
It doesn't mean that that's not a danger anymore.
You know what I mean?
Like, even if you think chemotherapy is necessary to kill the cancer, you still have to worry about all the other, you know, like, effects of chemotherapy.
And so...
That, to me, is what's very dangerous about all of this.
Joe Biden ran on the idea that he's open to another round of lockdowns.
And I wonder if people realize, like, how devastating the last round of lockdowns were and how devastating it would be to do it again.
So yeah, so in some places it is still pretty locked down, and then in some places it's kind of quasi-locked down, not quite as much as it was back in March, April, May.
Yeah, people have been moving out like crazy and it's hard.
It was hard for a while to get like any numbers on it, but I know like stories I've heard people who work for moving companies saying like you can't book us to move.
We're completely booked up.
Like we're moving everybody and they're all going out of the city.
Like, when I got up in the morning after the shit hit the fan in L.A., and I saw this video of these cop cars, like, on the highway, just lit on fire one after the other, covered in spray paint, windows smashed in.
Recognizing that recent events, both here in Santa Monica and around the nation, have strained community police relations, Chief Renown has made the decision to step aside so the Santa Monica Police Department can continue to move forward.
A statement announcing her retirement said, I'm pretty sure she told the cops to stand down.
If there is an incident that comes out where a cop killed a black guy...
even going to wait to figure out what happened here do an investigation was this an unjustified shooting was it justified it's just going to be the first knee-jerk reaction is like let's start you know burning stuff down just like very disturbing and incredibly destructive i say that as somebody who's like not a fan of policing in this country and think we do have major problems but i always right from the very beginning in minneapolis was like okay this is like completely
You can't support people destroying communities because they're pissed off about an unrelated thing.
And any more than you can support the U.S. You know, invading Iraq because they're pissed off about 9-11.
Like, you can't just be like, hey, this guy did something to me, so I'm going to go take it out on this guy.
And then people give you these, like, responses like, so you care more about looting than about human lives or something.
Do you remember when it first happened, when the protest first started and basically the media and even a whole bunch of epidemiologists and stuff were like, no, it's okay.
It's okay for the protest.
That to me was one of the craziest moments I've ever lived through.
And I've, like, all the time talk about how corrupt and how the corporate press are all liars and stuff and all that.
But to actually see that, that they would go, like, it was like...
Okay, it was like three months of this complete change of the American way of life, where it's like, listen, we all gotta do this.
You have to give up everything and stay home because we gotta control this disease.
And then, like, they were like, oh my god, there were 20-year-olds at the beach.
Oh my god, they're gonna spread it.
And then, like, two days later, it was like, no, this is totally fine.
And you're like, what the fuck?
What the fuck is going on?
How could you possibly rob everything from people, but then you decide that because they're protesting a cause that we agree, like, we agree with the cause, therefore this is okay.
And then there were things, you know, I heard a lot of these kind of, like, anecdotal stories, like, people would tell, but I mean, there were things where, like, you know, I heard this one story that always stuck with me about a guy whose wife was pregnant and she got sick and it looked like they might lose the baby and they wouldn't let him in the appointment with her.
They didn't lose the baby, thank God, and everything was fine.
She was going into a sonogram to maybe find out that they had lost the baby and they wouldn't let him be there to hold her hand through that.
And it's just like...
I don't know what – if you could put a value on that or whatever.
But that's quite a thing to ask someone not to be able to do.
And then to have epidemiologists go like, well, we think that this protesting is so important that you can go do it.
And you're like, so are you telling that guy that that wasn't important enough?
Like that wasn't important for him to be there with his wife?
I was talking to a guy who's a very intelligent guy, and we were talking about one of these recent studies, both COVID and UV light, and how it shows that it dies very quickly in sunlight.
And he goes, well, that's why there was no spread after the riots.
I go, did they stop when it went dark?
Like, what are you talking about?
There was a spread.
Like, there was an uptick.
It was going down, and then it came back up again.
I mean, it's all, like, within a week or two of the riots starting.
But the weirdest part about it then was that, so then they'd go like, okay, oh my god, some kids went to spring break, these evil killers, like how could these kids do this?
They don't care about grandma.
And then two days later we're protesting and that's totally fine.
We're not going to get COVID that way.
And then another day later it's like, oh wait, Trump had a rally?
Oh, I mean, this is going to spread COVID like crazy.
And it just got so bananas that it's like, dude, your agenda is showing.
It's just obvious way.
And you can maybe defend that agenda, but that's an agenda.
Yeah, but I think if you really wanted to make a change, then they couldn't have done a worse job of how they went about it.
And I understand it's a lot of different people, so it's not like any one person you can blame.
But, like, if you...
My buddy Scott Horton, who's a fucking genius, by the way, Scott Horton at the Libertarian Institute, and he...
Oh, I'm wearing a shirt.
Oh, look at you.
But he said, and I really love this, he said when Black Lives Matter first came out, he was like...
And he's like, as against police brutality as any human being on the planet.
He's been writing about this for decades.
And he's like, he goes, don't call it Black Lives Matter.
Call it accountability for killer cops and just run with that.
Like, just run with the narrative that, look, this is what we want and it's something you can't argue for.
Don't insert the racial thing.
It's going to get played in a million different ways.
It ends up, like, creating all these dynamics that aren't helpful to getting to the root of the problem, which is we want these five major policy reforms, you know?
We want to, you know...
Accountability for killer cops, end the war on drugs, end qualified immunity, end civil asset forfeiture.
Pick some really important things that would actually save lives and go hard at those.
But the problem is that then you have the way the movement goes, and then you have the rioting and stuff like that and the looting, and then this ends up turning a lot of people off who would maybe be sympathetic to you.
But don't you think that over and over again you see white cop, black victim, white cop, black victim.
Over and over and over again you see this narrative.
Whether or not it's representative of interactions with cops as a whole, it doesn't matter because those are the videos that go viral.
I think there's probably millions of interactions where nothing goes wrong at all, but those don't matter.
What matters is when they do go viral, so many times, Eric Gardner, this George Floyd case, so many times, white cop, black victim.
So you have to acknowledge the racial aspect of it.
I think just by saying it, justice against killer cops, or get rid of killer cops, you're not addressing the thing that is maybe most disturbing to many people, is that it keeps being a white cop and a black man.
But the question might be why those ones become such big stories and the other ones don't.
My point is that when you play up the racial aspect of it, What you end up doing is then you start having this conversation.
Okay, so about twice as many white people are unarmed.
White people are killed by cops every year than black people.
But black people aren't half the population of white people.
So black people are like 13% of the population.
So for them to be, you know, whatever it is, like 40% or something like that of the killings, it is disproportionate.
Then you have to take into account where the high crime neighborhoods are, how many interactions they're having with police.
Like, I understand there are these videos that go viral.
What happened to me, in my opinion, what happened to George Floyd was like horrific and people should go to jail over that shit.
I think what happened to Breonna Taylor was horrific and people should go to jail over that shit.
It's not clear to me at all that race was a factor in those cases.
I could be wrong about that.
I just haven't really seen any evidence to suggest that it was, but maybe it is.
I just think that you end up going down this road.
So one of the activists in Minneapolis said, Said this thing, and this is where like wokeism comes in to poison this shit from my perspective.
So he said they don't want to call it police brutality anymore.
They want to call it systemic racism.
Because this is just another form of systemic racism.
Forget the term police brutality.
And what ends up happening when you look at things that way is what you don't get rid of is police brutality.
What you end up getting rid of is Aunt Jemima.
It becomes a distraction of other issues rather than focusing on the major issues that you care about.
And I'm just saying, if you wanted to be effective, I think Black Lives Matter would be better off to share some of those videos of it happening to white people also and go, look, this isn't just black people's problem.
But the racial aspect of it, if you're a person who's a black person or any person of color and you see over and over again a white cop killing a black person, whether it's representative...
I mean, you're not going to think when you see those videos...
Oh, well, there's a million interactions and most of them are positive.
You're just going to know your experiences with cops and if cops have bullied you and fuck with you or maybe you've been a victim of police brutality yourself.
And then you're going to think of how many times there's been a white cop doing it to a black person.
And I think the number is not insignificant and it has to be addressed.
Yeah, look, I certainly understand why that would be a lot of people's perspective.
I get that completely.
I'm just saying that from the way I look at it is like I think that really for the first time that I've ever seen, I thought leading up to the George Floyd situation that right-wingers were really getting red-pilled on cops.
Like, they were actually getting really pissed off at the cops.
Because the cops were the ones enforcing these lockdowns.
And they were against it.
And there was a lot of, like, stuff where right-wingers would be like, can you believe these cops are actually doing this?
If they'll shut down...
You know, they were shutting down churches.
That's something that pisses right-wingers off.
And then when the George Floyd thing came out, I think pretty much everybody...
Not everybody, but the vast majority of the public was like, that is really horrible, what happened to that guy.
And I think there was a lot of energy that could have actually been used for real change.
And I think that what's happened since then has basically blown it.
Because you see what happens then when people see rioting and looting, who do they want?
They want the cops.
They want the cops back.
It's almost like that was proof.
It's almost like you're working to prove the right-wingers right about what they thought about the cops to begin with, which is that, well, if we don't have cops, this is what we have, just looting and rioting and violence.
Well, if you don't have cops and then you have civil unrest and then also you have a bunch of people that have no money because they've been locked down for all this time.
And then you have opportunity because you get sheriffs like the one in Santa Monica that tells everybody to stand down.
Then you have chaos.
Yeah, it's a recipe for disaster.
But it's also – it's real easy to break things.
It's not so easy to fix them.
It's not so easy to bring it all back together again the way it was 11 months ago.
One thing that I think people, the ones who really wanted Trump out, and I understand why a lot of them did, I think a lot of people just had Trump fatigue.
They're like, I just can't deal with this bullshit anymore.
I just can't.
But I think they should realize the possibility that we're never going to a pre-Trump world.
Like, never 100%, you know?
And I think we may never go to a pre-COVID world again, and we may never go to a pre-Black Lives Matter world again.
Like, we might get closer to that than we are now, but I don't know that we'll ever go back to that time completely, in the same way that we never went to a pre-9-11 world again.
There's certain events in our history that they change us forever, and this is most certainly one of those events.
But you probably could have said the same thing about the Spanish flu, although I don't think the government or the media was as sophisticated back then, and there was a lot more...
There's a lot more hardship in the world, period.
And then what happened right after the Spanish Flu was the Roaring Twenties, right?
That was immediately afterwards.
And then, of course, the Great Depression.
There's been a lot of ups and downs and hills and valleys back then.
But those people got through that and then stopped wearing masks.
So it's weird when you see the photos from the Spanish Flu.
I never knew that they were wearing masks, that people wore masks in public.
But when you look at these old black-and-white photos, it's really kind of interesting.
Like, you go, oh...
Look at that.
It's almost like, I know they're real pictures, but if they weren't, like, someone's, like, photoshopped masks on these people and pretended that there was a pandemic back then, that's what it looked like.
I feel like I also saw something that was like, this was not actual, they didn't wear a mask, but I couldn't, I don't know which was actually accurate.
How about, like, and this is one of the things that I hate about, like, wokeism in general, too, is that it lets everybody kind of, like, pretend they're, like, let everyone else know they're a good person, but you don't actually have to do shit.
No, but I'm just saying, like, maybe if he had had another debate where he could have handled it the way he did in that second one also, maybe if he had two performances like that, it would have helped him a little bit more.
If he just did that in the first without the bad one, without the interruptee one, That was just so hard to listen to.
I was like, God damn.
Because, you know, that was when there was talk about, like, Trump was tweeting that he wanted to come on here and have me and him and Biden talk for four hours.
And I was like, what would I do if he was doing that?
I would have to stop him.
I would have to say, hey man, sir, I understand you're the president, Mr. Trump.
You can't do that.
Because you've got to let the guy talk, and then don't say anything, and then you talk.
And that's one of my favorite things about this show is that you've almost proven—I think it's part of the reason why so many of those establishment types, like, resent you a lot for it—is that you've proven that their whole model is stupid.
Like, this model is stupid.
You have a show where people need time to unpack things and have a long conversation.
If you're talking about really serious, complex issues, the idea that we're debating who gets to have the nuclear football, but we've got to do it in this limited time, and you'll have 30 seconds each.
You're talking about more of like the scripted kind of like – I'm talking about me bringing things up with them.
Like if I said, sir, your job reform or job numbers have elevated, what do you attribute that to?
Like that kind of shit where they get to prepare.
If you have enough time to let these guys talk, just talk, and no pressure whatsoever on figuring out how to answer a sentence or a subject rather coherently – You're going to get a better understanding of who that person is.
Now with Trump, everybody thinks they already have a good understanding of who he is because he goes in these long, rambling, self-serving diatribes about subjects.
But just to see that, if you get him to calm down a little and see Biden and him talking through things, just let him talk.
And by the way, I think Trump, because Trump is kind of a master troll, I think he knew that Biden would never agree to it, and that's half the reason why he did it.
But Eisenhower's thing, I think, I could be wrong about this, but I believe that...
Trump, in the clip we played earlier, is the second president to ever use the term military-industrial complex.
I don't know.
I could be wrong about that, but I've never heard another president say the term military-industrial complex other than Eisenhower and his farewell address and Trump.
And it was particularly crazy coming from Eisenhower, who's the fucking general.
He's the guy who led the victory in World War II, which leads to this creation of really what we know as the military-industrial complex.
And even as he's going, he's like, listen, let me tell you something.
We've created something here that we've got to really worry about because we're not America anymore the way we've been.
Before this.
Now we have a whole industry that's pushing toward war.
And we gotta guard against this power.
And he specifically, he says, sought or unsought.
Which is a really interesting way to put it.
It's like, even if they're not trying to, there's kind of these natural forces of like, you're a weapons company, so what do you think?
You think we should have a bigger military budget or a smaller one?
Probably a bigger one, right?
And then it's like, so all of these forces.
And then the next president, after Eisenhower, is JFK. Some shit went down there, too.
So there's a lot of really kind of interesting history there, but let's just say we didn't listen to Eisenhower and we did not guard against power sought by the military-industrial complex.
It's such an interesting choice, too, because I guess he had the ability to say whatever he wanted in the nation's address, being the president.
It seems pretty clear that he didn't have to run that by anyone.
And you wonder, what do they have to run by now?
When you have the discussion where people say, oh, they always lie when they want to get into office, and then they get into office, they don't do shit.
They don't do any of the things they said they were going to do.
What happens when you get in there?
Is it like the Bill Hicks joke, where they show you an angle of the Kennedy assassination, and then you go, well, what's my agenda?
Is that it, or do they show you a real model of the world that you're not privy to if you're not the president?
Do they sit you down and talk about all the threats and the problems and how it all really works and ties together?
And it's, you know, I don't know, but it's also possible that it's kind of somewhere in between, where there's, maybe they're not, you know, showing you the Kennedy assassination film, like the great Bill Hicks joke, but, you know, look, I know that Donald Trump got in there and he ran on, we're ending all of these wars, and that's it.
Now, from a Trumpian perspective, it wasn't like a Ron Paul, like, these wars kill all these innocent people.
It was like a Trump, like, this is bad business.
We're wasting money on these wars, so we're ending them.
I think that at least from everything I've read that he really is trying to get out of Afghanistan and that he really is trying to work out a deal to end that war.
But look, I mean, there is, I will say though, to Trump's credit, he did avoid getting us in another war and there were some opportunities.
And he avoided, he flirted with it, certainly in Iran and really in Venezuela as well.
But he never got us into that war.
And there were definitely a lot of people around him who really wanted him to get into those wars.
And he did avoid that.
But, you know, like when he first came in and he was running on like ending all of these wars, the guy, the military guy who he made his national security advisor was Flynn.
Like, that was his guy who was going to come in and lead us out of these wars.
And what happened?
Immediately the NSA and the FBI targeted Flynn, got dirt on him, got him removed, and then they get somebody else in there.
So it might be also that they don't necessarily have to, like...
Threaten your family or show you the angle of JFK, but they could just be like, well, we're just going to remove all the people from your cabinet who we don't like, kind of get our people in there and keep the machine rolling.
I got a perfect little two-year-old, and, you know, I love my wife.
But really, that's the best you can do, is try to, like...
Get good people around you in your life.
Be good to them.
Create your own little world as much as you can.
And then I think that you, like, the best thing is to try to keep perspective that even with all the fucked up shit in the world, there's always been a ton of fucked up shit in the world.
And people have always, people have persevered through far worse than what we're going through right now.
I think that's kind of the best, you know, take to have.
Who are you around, the people you're around, be kind, be friendly, have a good time, be nice to each other, enjoy your time together, enjoy each other's company.
Yeah.
Just, you know, when you think about what you can do in terms of impacting the world or impacting the country, It's real, it's a cliche to say start with the people that are around you.
It really is cliche, but it is kind of true.
Because you do have a ripple effect on the way you treat people and the friendships you have and how it affects other people and the more good people that you're around, the more they affect other people.
There's really some kind of a ripple effect.
If we can get more people to adopt it, that's where mushroom legalization comes in.
I believe that was Condoleezza Rice who said that.
But Colin Powell went to the UN with drawings of Saddam Hussein's mobile WMD, like, fucking trucks or something, and he was like, this is where they go down here, and this is where they go down here.
It's just all made up nonsense, but just, like, really selling it, like, really.
I think that he was, you know, he was a part of the first Iraq war.
And I think that there's...
My guess is that there might be part of him who really wanted to go fucking take Saddam out.
As you could imagine, if you were leading a military invasion and some of your men were killed by this guy, even though not too many were killed, but I'm sure you'd have a personal thing.
And so I think that might have been part of it.
I think they all...
You know, you can't remove it from the context that George H.W. Bush's...
You know, presidency, they fought a war in Iraq.
And then W's in there, and now all of a sudden, basically, was handed a blank check for war.
Like, well, 9-11 just happened.
What do you want?
What war do you want?
You got it.
Because whatever one you decide, but make it a good one, you know?
We thought we were getting behind George W. Bush because we thought there was weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and he was going to go in there and take them out.
Yeah, but it's much easier when everybody's unified and behind a leader, it's much easier to be persuaded that he's doing this great thing for all of us.
And yeah, I think people were behind him for somewhat noble reasons.
Like, yeah, we're going to go get the guys who got us.
And by the end of George Bush's...
Nowadays, looking back at George Bush, it's hard for people who were young then or weren't alive then to even imagine that he was a really popular president.
Because by the end, he had given us two disastrous wars and the worst economy and Katrina.
But he was still, you know, like, I mean, they're all Muslims, you know.
But it was really crazy to think this dictator who ruled over this country with an iron fist is now sitting there with a judge, you know, like, telling him what to do.
Well, you say, like, well, you know, I don't necessarily agree that we're the police force of the world, but I do think that if anybody's going to do it, it's going to be the United States.
And this was, by the way, this whole thing we're talking about, overthrowing Gaddafi, destroying the country, leading to the open-air slave trade markets, this was all done under Obama's administration, with Hillary Clinton pushing for it, with Joe Biden as the vice president.
So, again, just the idea that, like, oh, yay, Trump's gone and we've returned to normal.
All right.
But if normal is, you know, getting us into wars in Libya, in Syria, in Yemen, continuing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there's some pretty negative aspects to normal.
So let's play not even devil's advocate, but let's imagine.
What do you do if you don't help them overthrow Libya?
If you do decide this guy's an evil dictator and has been for decades?
You want to get them out, but what do you do?
Do you fund the people that are trying to get them out?
If that doesn't work, and what if it does work, and they get them out and they kill them like they did, how do you ensure that democracy gets instituted when it's never been successful anywhere else that we've overthrown?
Is there one place that we've overthrown that's like, look at them now.
That doesn't seem like it's going to be achieved in the Middle East.
I think the idea that we can do anything to ensure that there's a fair democratic process in Libya is just so beyond absurdity.
We're having trouble doing that here.
Washington, D.C. Washington has a huge crime problem.
These politicians can't even figure out crime in Washington, D.C. The idea that they're going to take on the crime problem in Libya is so beyond absurd.
I just think this country was never founded to be the policeman of the world.
We're not supposed to be an empire, even though we are.
It's empires crumble and die.
We need to entirely, particularly now when we have so many problems at home, entirely get out of the empire business.
We can try to spread good ideas, be a city on a hill, be like, hey guys, this is a better way to run society.
But the idea that we have to get into the internal politics of whether Libya has a dictator or a democracy.
Democracy is not necessarily any better of a situation.
If 60% of the people there want to kill the other 40%, Democracy ain't going to work out very well.
Basically that's the problem that since the end of the Bush administration, all through the Obama administration and into Trump, Is that now their big problem is, you know, Iran just has all this influence in the region.
What are we going to do about that?
It's like, well, maybe if you didn't fucking fight a war on behalf of Iran, then they wouldn't have so much influence.
So there are winners, like, to all of this stuff.
Honestly, you know who the big winner is?
The biggest winner of all of this?
As sad as this is, Osama bin Laden.
He got exactly what he wanted.
He drew America into these fucking conflicts.
This was literally his plan.
We could never destroy America, but we could lure America into the Middle East and make themselves, spend themselves into debt, you know, like unravel their whole, extend themselves way too far militarily.
Yeah, well, it's, I mean, I'm sure there are other examples of getting rid of a dictator, but usually it has to come from the people, kind of like, you know, like realizing they want something better.
And I don't know that he ever was really in charge.
It's a different culture, though.
Yeah, it's a very different culture.
It's a different circumstance.
And also, but look, like the thing you were saying, the problem with overthrowing a dictator is that, and it's something that people should consider in a lot of these situations, that things can be worse.
You know, like, I mean, maybe sometimes it couldn't be much worse.
I mean, it's like even when you think about like, you know, like the beef with Iran or something like that, and they'll be like, you know, like the CIA overthrew their government in 1953, and then in 1979, they overthrew that government and they've basically hated America ever since, you know?
And you're like, but 1953 to 1979, that's like Bill Clinton to now.
Like, I remember Bill Clinton's presidency.
I mean, like, you know, it's a while ago, but it's like, no, if someone like just some other government overthrew Bill Clinton, I'd still remember that right now.
I'd be like, yeah, these motherfuckers came in and like overthrew our government.
Did you ever hear the Albert Einstein quote, which I might butcher, but it was something like he said, he goes, I don't know what weapons will be used to fight World War III, but World War IV will certainly be fought with rocks and sticks.
Our version of what's possible is based entirely on what we've experienced.
I mean, just like we never remembered those photos of those people with masks on in 1918. You know, our version of reality pre-COVID has been forever altered now that we know that COVID exists.
And there's so many other things that could happen to us.
This is the thing, we're so fragile.
We always hear about these comets that are whizzing by and these asteroids that get really close to Earth.
One of those motherfuckers could slam into us.
And I've had some people on that have studied their whole life versions of these scenarios where civilization has been forced to repeat itself because of the fact that we were hit and that this has probably happened multiple times over the Ascension of human civilization and that it's one of the reasons why you have these ancient structures in Egypt that are very different in the way they're constructed versus the ones from Cleopatra's era
or versus the ones from like the time where they built the Great Pyramid of Giza.
And isn't there like, because I remember reading about this like a decade ago, so I might not know that much about it, but isn't there stuff about like the water erosion on the Sphinx or something like that where they can't Yeah.
because you're like this is from like way older yeah you're that great bit about it and uh yeah talking monkeys in space but that whole thing that's like yeah but but in all seriousness it does seem like there's pretty strong indications that civilization is much older than the official history books of like it starts in ancient yeah gram hancock has spent a giant chunk of his life talking about this and he brought in
uh dr robert shock who's a geologist from boston university and john anthony west who's a late great egyptologist i i've had on the podcast a couple times and they are all committed to this idea that it's very likely that what we see in egypt in terms of things that they can date to 2000 bc
This is just one era, and that there's likely multiple eras before that, and the big piece of evidence is the water erosion in the Temple of the Great Sphinx, because they know that they cut these stones out in order to create the Sphinx, but there's massive water erosion on these rocks,
and the last time there was significant rainfall in the Nile Valley was 9,000 B.C., So instead of 2500 BC, now it's 9000 BC. And then they have to think, well, this is thousands of years of rainfall that caused this erosion.
So we might be talking 10,000, 11,000 BC. So they don't really know when all this happened, but they do think that it coincides with The end of the Ice Age.
At the end of the Ice Age, there's a dramatic climate change that's somewhere around 12,000 years ago, which would put it around 10,000 BC. Somewhere around 12,000 years ago, this is where Randall Carlson and Graham Hancock and a bunch of others have really gotten into this Younger Dryas Impact Theory.
And that is somewhere between 12,000 and 10,000-ish years ago, and it might have been multiple occasions, we were hit.
And that this was essentially a restart of civilization in a lot of areas, and an end to the Ice Age in a lot of areas as well.
And Randall Carlson's work is fucking spectacular.
When he shows you these images that indicate massive melting of ice over a spectacular landscape in a really amazingly short period of time.
Like a couple days worth of water pouring through fucking trillions of gallons.
Permanently moving the landscape, changing it, moving stones.
And he has all these images.
And what's even crazier is he got this idea when he was looking at this one area on acid once.
And he was like, what happened here?
And he got this idea.
He's like, what is this?
And then he starts researching the end of the eye search.
And he starts researching common impacts.
And then they start finding all this corresponding evidence when they do core samples.
So he's doing core samples and they find all this iridium and all this nuclear glass, impact glass.
They find all this shit around the same area around 12,000 years ago.
And they're like, oh my god.
And so he starts, he's a brilliant guy and he could talk about this forever.
They think that it's highly likely that there was, not just here, but in many parts of the world, there was massive impacts that probably didn't kill everybody, but probably basically shut down all progress for who knows how many hundreds, if not thousands of years.
And then what you're seeing when you're looking at 2500 BC and all their amazing structures was the knowledge they had left.
And a lot of that was lost to the Library of Alexandria getting burnt down.
So the stuff that they built later is spectacular, but they had been building pretty amazing shit for most likely thousands of years before we thought they were.
Well, Douglas Murray, who I had on the podcast, said that when civilizations start crumbling, that's when people get obsessed with gender.
And I said, really?
And he goes, yeah.
He goes, it's in ancient Rome and ancient Greece.
There's a lot of transvestites and a lot of people swapping genders.
It's almost like a dissolving of all classifications and barriers and all the things that we took for granted as society.
When society really starts falling apart, they start questioning every last fiber of what it means to be a person and what it means to fit into the culture.
And so like everyone's – no one's given – I hadn't seen one tough interview with one of these governors.
Like every time they came on some news show, it was just like, oh my god, you're saving all these lives and you're wonderful and thank you for all of this.
And then they have their press conferences.
They take some questions.
But it wasn't – Tucker.
Just starts grilling this guy.
And he asked him at one point, he goes, okay, so recently there was like a church service that you shut down and you arrested four Jewish people for being at temple at the church.
And he goes, what right do you have to do that?
He goes, I mean, in the Bill of Rights, it's very clearly defined that the right to religious, you know, expression is, you know, so he's like, so where do you get the authority to shut down a place of worship?
And he goes, well, you know, we weren't thinking about the Bill of Rights when we did this.
We're just trying to keep people safe.
And then he goes, he was like, yeah, but where do you get the authority?
There was like an anti-lynching bill, and they would blast people for being like, so-and-so was against the, so-and-so, like Rand Paul, he was one of the ones, he voted against the anti-lynching bill, and you're like, okay, wait, first of all...
And then it turns out that Rand Paul's problem was that this, like, he goes, this, like, really broadly defines what a hate crime is.
And now it seems that, like, if someone were to, like, get in a bar fight, you could, like, give them, like, 20 years under, like, some hate crime legislation.
He's like, let's slow down on that.
That seems a little crazy.
And then they're like, you're just Thor lynching.
And it's like, wait.
This is really weird, dude.
You can't just name a Bill something and then say if you're for it.