Dave Smith critiques Shanna Swan’s findings on chemicals like phthalates and glyphosate shrinking testicles by 50–100% and slashing sperm counts by half in 50 years, questioning societal apathy despite the data. He warns of nuclear escalation in Ukraine, mocks mask-wearing hypocrisy (e.g., Tom Brady’s Super Bowl exemption), and compares COVID policies to prohibition’s violence surge, citing fentanyl risks and vaccine passport dangers as potential caste systems. Smith and Rogan agree systemic failures—endless wars (Yemen, Syria), corporate welfare, and drug criminalization—fuel extremism, advocating libertarian reforms like ending nonviolent prosecutions and Fed control. They also dissect media bias (e.g., Hunter Biden suppression vs. Trump-Russia hype) and celebrate comedy’s resilience, crediting Gas Digital Network for uncensored platforms while praising each other’s unconventional, idea-driven humor as a force for growth over victimhood. [Automatically generated summary]
It's making them have lower sperm counts, significantly lower sperm counts, like 50% lower sperm counts than they did 50 years ago, and on a straight downward trajectory, along with miscarriages.
Miscarriages are on the rise.
Sperm counts are on the way down.
It is crazy when you just see what we've done to us and weren't even aware of it until the early 2000s, like the first studies that she did.
She's an environmental endocrinologist, so she's a researcher that studies the effects of environmental toxins on human reproductive systems.
And isn't it crazy, right, that it's almost like just what we are as organisms, we could get this information, and you're still kind of like, yeah, it's nuts.
For sure, he understands there's room for a catastrophe.
There's room for a massive error that lets these things become sentient and just start gunning people down on the streets or starts using us as human batteries.
Well, the officially stated reason was that he was about to go genocidal on his own people.
But all of this has been – there was actually an investigation that the British Parliament held.
And they basically determined that there was no grounds to think that this guy who had been in control for decades was all of the sudden about to go genocidal on his people.
So I don't know what the number in Libya is.
The number in Yemen is probably going to be somewhere between 500,000 and a million.
I mean, so all in all, it's millions.
It's in the millions of people that we've killed in Muslim countries in northern Africa and the Middle East.
And I'm just talking 21st century, post 9-11, not even adding up the numbers before that.
It was one of the most beautiful moments in modern American history.
People really actually stood up and stopped a war from happening.
So instead, they just covertly funded the Al-Qaeda side of it.
Jimmy Dore broke this down when he was on your show, Perfectly.
Those guys who go like...
They tell the story of Syria, and it's like, you know, Mike Baker, who I love, but his version of the story in Syria is like, well, Assad started killing all of his own people, and so what are we going to do?
You know, like, that's the story that they want to tell you, right?
It's like, this guy's just so bad, he's killing all these people.
It's a caricature of it, but that's more or less it, right?
I love Mike Baker, by the way.
I do, too.
But the real story is that you go, okay, so if we're there, if the narrative is that we're there because Assad's killing his own people, and oh my god, I think he used a gas attack, or oh my god, I think he did this, and this is really dangerous.
Well, then why is it that General Wesley Clark, Is telling us on video that he saw plans to have regime change in Syria in 2003. Yeah, that was a dark video.
Why are there articles in 2007 about regime change?
Because he certainly wasn't killing his own people then.
And then as Jimmy Dore broke down perfectly, you realize that actually what happened Was that the CIA and the Saudis launched this Operation Timber Sycamore and they said that we are going to arm all of the anti-Assad rebels, largely consisting of Al Qaeda and ISIS, in an attempt to take him out, to have the next regime change, that this plan had been in the works for years.
And when confronted with that threat, Asad launched a brutal war against them.
Certainly killed a whole lot of people.
I mean, like, if there was ISIS in a town, he'd just kill everybody in the town.
Like, he didn't care.
But the story's not as simple as like, oh, he started killing his own people, and so now we have to overthrow him.
The story is, we tried to overthrow him, and in response, this war broke out, where something like 500,000 people died.
The difference between what's happening now and in the past is, first of all, there's so much video, right?
Where you can see a guy like Wesley Clark talk about that.
But also that you can see video of the events actually happening.
Like, we have video of Saddam Hussein being hung.
We have video of Gaddafi being captured by those rebels where they stick a knife up his ass.
That video is...
That is one of the most bizarre videos.
Gaddafi...
In shock, not even responding to the fact that someone just stuck a knife up his ass.
Just completely gripped with terror knowing that this is the end and that the rebels have captured and they're all screaming and yelling and fucking going crazy.
Like now it's like well you can get it from all these places and that there's good and bad that comes with that but they're also now flipping out and and you can see it like they're losing their grip on power and becoming more and more insane about it.
Can you imagine just like if you were like the head of CNN and you have to give a meeting in the morning and you're like, all right, so one more time, guys.
If a hot chick takes you out to a bar and starts asking you to tell her about how we're propaganda, that's James O'Keefe, alright?
So please don't just start babbling about how we do propaganda.
Yeah, and the fact that it's funny because you almost want to envision it in like there's this grand plan or this conspiracy, but then you realize he's just a dude, just being a dude, just trying to like wag his dick in front of this girl like, yeah, let me tell you what we do over at CNN. Here, you want another drink?
Yeah, we got that Trump guy out of there.
Yeah, it's pretty much all us.
Just bragging about it.
It reminds me of the Brian Williams thing where he told that lie about being under fire.
That Ron Paul 2008 campaign is what changed my life and sent me on this trajectory.
I guess I was a little bit interested just in the Bush years because it was like with the wars, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I was in New York during 9-11, and so that kind of affected me.
And I was kind of interested in that stuff.
And then when the economy crashed in 2008, I was kind of like, wait, what the hell is going on here?
And then there was Ron Paul, who was – his whole campaign was centered around, well, here's what's going on in the wars and here's what's going on with the economy.
And the first time I saw him, I just happened to be watching the Fox News debate with him and Giuliani.
And it was just this little unknown baby doctor, Republican congressman from Texas, like our Texas, who just got up there and just said, listen, they don't hate us because we're free.
They hate us because we've been bombing the crap out of them for like decades.
And here's why.
And then Giuliani was like, that's offensive that you would say that.
See, this is what the woke shit used to be in the George W. Bush years.
It wasn't like, oh, that was a microaggression or you're a racist.
It was the right wing version of that.
It was, you said something that doesn't support the troops and I'd like you to publicly apologize for that.
And Ron Paul went, mm-hmm.
No.
So here's what happens, okay?
You know how the CIA coined the term blowback?
This is what they meant by blowback.
They mean that our covert operations have unintended consequences.
And if we think that we can just overthrow governments that we don't like, like we did in 1953 with Iran and when we installed a dictator, and then when they overthrew that dictator, guess who they hate?
When I started getting into this stuff, I was doing stand-up and I was just managing to not have a day job.
I was just at the level where I could be broke But get by off comedy.
Like, Jay was taking me out on the road with him and stuff, and so I was doing enough gigs that I could just make my bills out.
And so I had a lot of free time.
You know what I mean?
I was like, okay, I got maybe an hour of work today.
And then I'll write a little bit or something.
And I just got obsessed with this shit.
And I had the internet.
And so I had that and, you know, like I so I just got obsessed with it and I found all these different thinkers, Murray Rothbard, Ron Paul, Tom Woods, Scott Horton, like all these really, really smart guys who are breaking all this shit down.
Out of all the people that I know, I mean, I don't know what happened to him when he was a child where too many people told him what to do, but he doesn't want to hear that shit.
I won't mention anything about the contents of it, but he sent me this video that was like the funniest, most wildly offensive shit, and I was like, wait, dude, you're not putting that out, right?
This year has been an incredible gift to would-be authoritarian regular people who now have been given public license to kind of like crack down on somebody for not following these rules.
Anyone who's ever lived in an apartment building in a city...
There's always one person in there who's just trying to enforce the rules on everybody else.
Oh, you put recycling in the wrong thing.
And it's like every one of those people in our society has been granted free reign.
Do you remember, I think you shared this video recently, but it was an old Noam Chomsky video where he was just talking about the effectiveness of calling someone a racist or a sexist or a Nazi or something like that.
And you go, as soon as you start defending yourself, you're now the guy saying, I'm not a racist.
You've already lost.
So this is why this shit persists so much because it's so effective.
It puts you in this binary position like, well, you can either agree that you are a racist or be the guy who's like, I'm not a racist.
I have black friends and I have this.
And you're like, you already sound like an asshole.
So it's the same with the COVID thing.
As soon as you start going down this line, you're like, well, you're not taking the harsh stance of caring about racism.
People that I am.
But it's bullshit.
And one of my favorite things, one of my favorite Joe Rogan moments ever was when the first UFC back.
It was such a Joe Rogan moment.
It was the first UFC back and everyone's like, oh, we're doing this.
So there's this kind of energy of like, oh my God, there's an event.
And you just at one point go, I think it was about how distanced you guys were.
And you were like, but this is stupid because we were all just together backstage.
And while we were walking through the restaurant, we were laughing about how silly it is.
I go, okay, now finally we sit down.
We're in our protected bubble.
We can take our mask off.
But when we were standing up three feet away, gotta wear that mask.
Super important.
We're all in a room together.
We're all in a room together, we're breathing the same air, and no one has a mask on while we're sitting down.
But when you get up to go to the bathroom, better put that mask on.
It's very important.
So we've developed these sort of patterns that we expect people to follow, and if you comply with those patterns, we know you're a good person.
And if you don't, the worst case scenario is what's happening in Canada.
Where, I mean, I'm sure you saw that one pastor who's screaming and yelling, get out, you Nazis!
Get out of my church!
It was on Passover, and this guy was freaking out because they were telling him you can't have a service because there's too many people there.
And then, I'm not sure if it was the same church or if it was another church, but there was a church video not long after that where there was 200 cops showed up, militarized violence.
Bulletproof vests, gas masks, the whole thing.
And you're like, what in the fuck?
You guys are going to people that are at church.
Like, they've taken the most authoritarian approach.
And for people that don't understand the difference between the United States and our politics and the freedoms that are provided to us by the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, by our Bill of Rights, by the Constitution...
Canada is very different.
First of all, they do not have a First Amendment.
They don't have a freedom of assembly.
They don't have the same rights that are bestowed upon them by their constitution.
We think of them as the same as us, but they're not.
Justin Trudeau and the government over there and the local governments, whether it's in Ontario or wherever it is, they have way more power over the people.
They enforce human rights laws.
And this is all the stuff that Jordan Peterson was freaking out about a long time ago.
He's like, you've got to understand.
And he did understand from a perspective of being a Canadian.
It's very easy when you're dealing with Jordan Peterson when he's speaking out about the Bill C-16 or one of these things.
All right, well, they're just kind of making you call a trans person their preferred pronouns.
It's just kind of this small thing.
But you have these legal precedents that are set.
And then when the big thing comes, they already have the precedent to say, well, we don't have to respect your freedom to gather or your freedom of speech or any of this.
It's a very dangerous road to go down.
And even, look, even here in America, we...
The Constitution and the Bill of Rights and all of this is still just kind of an idea.
Like, you know, Governor Murphy, the governor of New Jersey, I don't know if you saw this, it was last April or May.
It was pretty early into the lockdown stuff when he was on Tucker Carlson's show.
So Tucker Carlson, again, feel however you feel about him.
He's good on some things.
He's bad on some things.
But he gave one of the lockdown governors a really tough interview at the height of it.
And very few people were doing that.
And he said to Governor Murphy, straight up, he goes, okay, so he talked about this thing that had just happened where I think like 15 Jewish people were arrested for going to synagogue.
And he goes, okay, so you just arrested these people for going to synagogue.
Where do you get that authority?
I mean this is a clearly constitutionally protected right.
Like you can read the First Amendment and no, you don't have the right to do this.
And Murphy just responds without any hesitation.
He responds, we weren't thinking about the Bill of Rights.
He goes, that's above my pay grade.
He goes, what we're thinking about is the health issue.
So he just told you straight up that like – Well, we repealed the Bill of Rights, at least for this moment.
And basically, that's what happened all around the country.
The United States of America went totalitarian in 2020. Now, you can believe it's justified because of the virus.
I'm not even arguing that.
But the fact is, I mean, like, the word totalitarian gets overused.
But how would you describe 2020 other than totalitarian?
When you have people watching their television to find out what they're allowed to do today from their governor.
Oh, my governor said I can have a funeral for my father.
Or my governor said we can go to work or we can go to church or we can.
Now he said we can't do that.
I mean, that is blatant totalitarianism.
And you could be really concerned about COVID.
Fine.
But are you telling me you're not also concerned about totalitarianism?
Like, take a look at the 20th century.
Hundreds of millions of people were killed by totalitarian governments.
But people that think they're on the right side don't ever think that's going to happen with their ideology.
Like, woke totalitarians never connect themselves to people like Stalin.
They never connect themselves to Marx.
They don't think of the fact that they want people to be completely compelled to follow their ideology with all the horrible examples in history of people being compelled to follow an ideology.
Forced!
Because it's one of those things that when the Patriot Act was put in place, some of the people that were sounding the alarms were saying, look, Obama is probably not going to do horrible things with this.
But what if the next person who gets elected president does?
These powers stay.
You don't get to take them back.
Well, hey, this president is kind of wacky.
We're going to pull some of these acts back.
We're going to rescind the Patriot Act, the Patriot Act II, because we don't trust this new president.
We're going to change the laws.
We're going to take away power from the government.
I mean, I just don't see how we're ever going to get past the fact that most of these people who become politicians are not the people that you would want to be in charge.
Most of them.
Most of them.
Like, if you're looking at Nancy Pelosi and you're like, yeah, I want her running everything.
I don't know what to say, if that's your perspective.
But for me, I go, oh, that's not ideal.
This is not this person who's very enlightened and calm and peaceful and really wants the world to be better.
No, this is some strange creature that exists out of politics that wears African garb and gets on her knees.
You remember that thing with her and Schumer where they put the fucking, the robes on and the hat on?
And so much of the corporate woke shit, all of that.
This is theater.
You are power brokers, and you're really counting on people being stupid, and unfortunately, I guess too many of them are, to really buy into the fact that this is some real display.
You are just using this in order to consolidate more power, because that's what drives these people.
And that's the thing that I really try to drive home, especially to left-wing people, about all the woke shit, is that you're like, just look, take a step back and look at what's happening here.
This is all being used to fool you.
Do you think it's a coincidence that JPMorgan Chase, they're building floats in the gay pride parade and the fact that Raytheon is putting out these press releases about how we're a very inclusive place for transgender people to work and all this.
It's like they're buying you off.
They're just trying to say, hey, if we throw you this token, then can we continue doing all the horrible shit that a good leftist should have a problem with?
You know what I mean?
I think Jordan Peterson and James Lindsay.
You had him on, right?
James Lindsay.
These guys, they do a great job of breaking down the academic roots of wokeism.
All this stuff about critical theory and the Frankfurt School and the postmodernists.
And they're right, I think, just about all of it.
But to me, the real interesting thing about what's actually going on now Why are they pushing all this shit all of a sudden?
And I think it's pretty obvious that they were like, well, this is the perfect tactic for them.
That they can, this is their way to buy off the left-wing resistance to them, placate them with nonsense that doesn't actually require them giving up any power, and pit the left-wingers and the right-wingers against each other to be fighting this culture war.
And what is the actual agenda here?
Where it's like, well, we have to stay in Afghanistan because of feminism.
But you know what happened when Occupy Wall Street was going down, one of the first things the government did is infiltrate Occupy, fill it up with government agents that started doing crazy shit.
So they start, you know, agent provocateurs.
So agent provocateurs will always enter into any, whenever there's something that's a problem for the government that is essentially peaceful, so there's no real way that they can break it up.
What they'll do is they'll infiltrate, and either they'll have these agent provocateurs start smashing windows and lighting things on fire, or they'll have them start making plans to do violence, and they'll recruit other people to do it, and then they arrest everybody.
Well, I mean, if you're trusting the people who we know do this shit in other countries to govern us here, why would you expect any better than that?
It's so funny when they expect the people who will just slaughter hundreds of thousands in third world countries to then run our welfare programs here.
So you think all of a sudden they want to take care of you?
It's like, would you let someone who's killed kids babysit your kid?
Because they go, well, he killed kids over there.
I mean, I'm sure he'll take care of my kids.
I wouldn't want those people anywhere around anyone's kids.
You know the weird thing about all this shit, Dave, is that I don't see any solution.
I don't see a path out of this.
And I also think that even when I talk to you, I know so little about this stuff in comparison to you.
And when I talk to you about it and I think of catching up, I'm like, oh my god, how much time would that take?
And then I think of the average person and how much time the average person actually has to pay attention to the way the world works and how much time they have to dedicate to making things better.
So someone who comes along with platitudes and someone who comes along with the right slogans and someone who comes along with the right vibe, whether it's...
You know, someone who looks the part like an AOC or someone, you know, someone along those lines.
People just will blindly follow them hoping that this is the right thing, A, and B, they know that by pledging allegiance to this person who other people have kind of agreed is the right choice, then they'll be included in the group of people that's doing the right thing, good people.
Whereas everybody else will be on the other tribe and so then it becomes this weird tribal divide which is a constant state in this country.
Where we have these ideologies and we were talking before about how it's never been more clear than ever that people on the far left and people on the far right are basically the same person.
They're these real maniacs who have Completely ignored nuance and adopted their ideology so wholly and are fighting against the other side so completely that they can't see the forest for the trees.
They're just committed to one side, this one thing they've committed to.
It's becoming obvious in the country that it's like things are spinning out.
Things are spinning out of control.
And I think pretty much everybody has to see at this point that like this country is in real trouble.
Like we're on like a suicide mission here.
This is a whole new place of unsustainability than we've been in the past.
And it's easy to see, right?
So you're absolutely right.
It's like the left wing and the right wing are like spinning out of control and getting crazier and crazier.
But to me, I think the real story of the 21st century in America How we went from the Clinton 90s to where we are today, you know, in such a good place as a country.
I mean, there were lots of problems, but we weren't on a national suicide like we are now.
But to me, the real story is that the center became the radicals.
And then there was nothing to glue the radicals back together.
They lost any leg to stand on to be like, OK, that's a little bit too radical.
That's a little bit too radical.
Come back in the middle.
So which was basically the message of CNN through the entire Trump years was like, look, look, look, we don't want to go crazy socialist and we definitely don't want to go crazy nationalist right wing.
Let's just meet in the middle with Hillary Clinton and Lindsey Graham and the adults in the room who have destroyed the entire country.
And I look at it like this, right?
Like, let's say, hypothetically, if you – let's say we lived in a society that you, Joe Rogan, would consider a pretty decent society.
Like, you know, I'd say what you want.
I don't even know exactly what that would be, but what you would be like, oh, this is a pretty normal society.
We don't fight stupid wars.
We're not all at each other's throats.
There's good health care, good education.
It's a reasonably what Joe Rogan wants society.
And so now you're the centrist.
Who supports the status quo?
Because you like the country.
You like what the government's doing.
You think this is all good.
And then some radicals came to you and made proposals.
Like, this is what I think we should do instead of this society that you have.
And let's say one was the most radical left-winger that you know today, and one was the most radical right-winger that you know today, saying all of their crazy shit.
And you have the left-wingers like, we should have the woke police and hate speech laws and all of this.
And the right-wingers like, we should be nationalist and we should build a wall and whatever it is.
And then there was someone else who represents the neoliberal neoconservative establishment order.
And they came to you and they said, well, here's what I think we should do.
I think we should attack seven countries in the Middle East and slaughter millions of innocent people.
I think we should spend ourselves $20 trillion into debt that we'll pass on to our children.
I think we should build up a huge prison industrial complex.
And put people in there for non-violent, victimless crimes.
I think we should tax people and then bail out big banks and big corporations with the money.
And you're just looking at these three people.
Would it be obvious who the radical is?
Would you look at the left-winger and the right-winger and say, well, that's really crazy, but this guy really has something to say.
I think there's an argument that that's the most radical shit you could propose.
So now those guys became the extremists, and now they have no leg to stand on to tell a radical leftist or a radical right-winger, well, you're being a little bit too radical.
Fuck you.
You're too radical.
Look at this whole goddamn system.
You inherited America and destroyed it.
So who are you?
And then, truthfully, Donald Trump, I think, signified the, yeah, fuck the whole establishment.
And then he did such a bad job with it that he handed them back one last out where Joe Biden could go, eh.
Isn't normal a little bit better than this?
Let's come back to normal.
But the problem is that normal is all of that extremist radical shit that destroyed the country.
I saw so many people on Twitter saying it's so wonderful to have normalcy restored at the White House.
You know he's going to bed at night at a normal time, and he's probably being loving to his wife.
And you're like, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But what are we doing as a country overseas?
What is happening with the country?
And it's crazy how there's always some new social event, some new thing that happens, whether it's I think?
And force them against each other.
There's so many people now that are on edge.
After the Capitol Hill attack, rightly so, Jesus Christ, the fact that we got that close to these fucking maniacs literally almost killing representatives.
As crazy as it gets, a guy with war paint on and a fucking buffalo helmet.
Is shirtless, standing on the floor of the Senate.
We're so like living in the 24 hour cycle, you know, of like what just happened or what just happened.
I mean, like stories like like the accusation that Donald Trump was colluding with a hostile foreign power is like, what?
That's years ago.
You know what I mean?
Like, that's not even like we're talking about what happened on the 6th of January when they, you know, but if you just zoom out a little bit more.
And you're like, okay, but what really happened here?
And why were the right-wingers willing to go with Donald Trump?
And why are they willing to storm the Capitol?
And even if it's just a few hundred storming, the rest of them at least protesting, and tens of millions don't believe the election was legitimate at all.
And why do they have such little faith in all of these institutions?
And I think, again, you could zoom back very far, but just keeping it in the last 20 years, it's like, well, look at everything.
Look at what everything was.
They fought all of these wars that everyone knows are bullshit.
They've robbed the American people and just given all the money to huge corporations, the big banks.
We have just incredible levels of corruption.
I mean, just like baked into the cake now, where we have this society where there's like...
Crazy low interest rates and crazy high government spending.
So all of the new wealth – I mean Bernie Sanders nails it when he talks about this, although I don't think he looks at those as the reasons.
But it's like all of the new wealth coming in disproportionately goes to the top.
The whole system is completely skewed toward the already powerful because you have low interest rates.
So now you have a whole speculating economy.
Everyone's got to get in investments and stocks and bonds and try to make money that way.
And so, of course, the Wall Street speculators make crazy profits.
And then if they fail, they get bailed out.
And you have record high government spending.
So the politically connected are getting all this fucking money.
So regular people are just more and more starting to realize, like, hey, this whole system is bullshit.
And fuck it.
I don't believe it anymore.
And I think it...
Bubbled over to a point on both sides, on the left and the right.
And I know that a lot of people, it's easy to just kind of laugh that off or whatever, but this really is, I'm not saying it has to be like my exact perfect, you know, like you have to agree with me on everything, but the clear solution to all of this is liberty.
It is all of this shit.
Is a deviation from what America was really supposed to be, which is basically the Declaration and the Bill of Rights, which are still pretty damn good.
And if we just followed them, we'd be in a much better place.
I'll tell you, with the police stuff, look, you're never going to have a perfect system and there's 300 million people and there'll be incidents and problems and police brutality.
Things will happen.
But what Justin Amash put forward in Congress, what Rand Paul's put forward in the Senate is basically pretty damn good.
End the war on drugs.
End qualified immunity.
End civil asset forfeiture.
End the no-knock raids and particularly raids over bullshit.
Like, there should never be a SWAT raid unless someone is in imminent danger.
I mean, okay, there's a hostage situation or something like that, but my God, a SWAT raid over suspicion of drug possession?
This shit is insane, which is what Breonna Taylor died from, right?
Just end all of this shit.
Those five policies right there What's the immunity one?
Qualified immunity basically means that police officers in certain situations, not all situations, but basically are immune from being sued the way other people could be sued.
So if you are a police officer and you do something that anybody else would have a lawsuit against you for, they're protected under qualified immunity.
And I've got to say, honestly, I think that perhaps the guilty verdict in this case against Derek Chauvin will make another cop think twice if they're in a situation like that, which I think that...
It's certainly a good thing.
But just to your other question about the bigger stuff with just the government in general, like what's the answer to not making people want to storm the Capitol?
I really think that, and I just mean this from almost like a medical perspective, like this is why the country's going to die and this is the only thing that could solve the problem, is some type of decentralization, limiting of the power of the federal government The reason why people are so worked up about every presidential election is just because the federal government has too much damn power.
And whoever is the president is now like half the country has to live under Biden's rule right now and they hate that.
And the other half of the country would have had to live under another four years of Donald Trump and they hate that.
And so I think the answer is just to reduce the size and power of the federal government, make it not that consequential who the president is, make more decisions on local levels, on community levels, on state levels, everything before you get to the federal government.
And just on a practical level, the federal government doesn't do a good job at any of it.
So to me, this is the thing.
But I would say that like the big issues that – and this is why like I'm real all in on the Libertarian Party and I know people laugh off the Libertarian Party sometimes and not all of the candidates they've put out have been great and not all of the messaging has been that great either.
But the Democrats and the Republicans are like rotten to their core.
They're just completely corrupt parties that do nothing but rape the American people and are in complete agreement over all the things that I just laid out that are the worst things that our government does.
And what we need is basically a movement in America to say, hey, look, we're going to end the COVID regime.
Well, if you look at, so, I mean, there's many different forms, but if you just look at, over the last year, the COVID stimulus bills, right?
You know how you'd always be like, oh, you know, the money they're giving you doesn't really add up to the whole bill?
You'd be like, okay, so it's a $2 trillion bill, and like $130 billion of it is checks to people.
What else is all the other shit in that bill?
How come the bill was 2,000 pages long?
And basically, all it is is giveaways to, you know, politically connected big business.
It's all over the place.
And there's bailouts for the airline industries, for communication industries, the banks, the Federal Reserve, you know, easy money that they give to the banks.
I think you're making some really good points, and I think a really good one is ending the war on drugs.
Ending the war on drugs and not incarcerating people for the rest of their lives for nonviolent drug offenses would change a lot in this country.
First of all, the whole prison industrial complex, this system that's put in place Where there's money to be made by putting people in jail.
And whether it's private, these are private prisons, or whether they're the state-run prisons or the federally-run prisons, it's still the same thing.
There's a business involved.
You could split hairs about that.
We incarcerate more people than anyone, by a long shot.
Well, China probably kills more people, but they just make people disappear.
But we incarcerate an insane amount of people.
An insane amount of people who aren't hurting anybody.
And that does need to end because then that changes the relationship that people have to the government.
It changes the relationship people have to the police.
If you're doing something and there's a law that's in place that is supposed to protect you from putting something into your body and protect you from someone selling you something that you want to put into your body, regardless of whether you should or shouldn't, we can make a clear argument that there's already enough stuff that you could buy at any store right now that'll kill you.
We got some whiskey right here.
I like whiskey.
Love it.
Drink a lot of it, it'll kill you.
Drink a lot of it, you'll have liver failure, you'll get cancer, or you'll literally drink yourself to death.
Pills everywhere you go.
Every fucking pharmacy has enough pills to kill you.
It's silly.
To put these laws in the hands of people where they can decide to lock you in a cage because you do something that you want to do and they don't want you to do it.
I mean, you're absolutely right about all of that.
And to me, and this is the essence of why I'm a libertarian and why I believe in this shit.
It's not...
To me, it's just as simple as, are we slaves or are we free men?
Which one are we?
Because if I can't choose what I can put in my own body, then I'm a slave to somebody else.
And I don't mean chattel slavery or in the same sense, but you are not a free person if you can't make a decision about what you put in your body.
And so, obviously, directly, like you just said, the most immoral thing about it is the idea of throwing a human being in a cage like an animal For the crime of putting something in their body.
But then on top of that, when you talk about the relationship between people and cops, the effect of the war on drugs has...
I mean, look, just like under prohibition, when the gang culture rose up and the murder rate skyrocketed, and then when we repealed prohibition, the murder rate went back down.
And then the gang members moved into prostitution and gambling, the other prohibitions.
the dark corners of prohibited activities that there is a large demand for because then there's money to be made there.
And whatever you do about the laws on drugs, the demand is not going away.
And so now you're going to have gang violence in all the inner cities.
Now you're going to have gang shipping drugs through the border and stuff like that.
You get all of this violence comes in that doesn't need to be there.
And there would be nothing that America could do to turn around the crime problem in the inner cities throughout this country than to just end all of the prohibitions.
Just be like there's no more money to be made here for you guys.
And now let what happens in California and in other places let legitimate businesses come in and do it.
I'm not saying it's perfect but it's a lot better than having high murder rates and high incarceration rates.
Well, it'd be really fascinating to see how they would manage trying to legitimize things like heroin and cocaine and things that have been sold by the cartels forever.
What we're doing right now is the same thing, again, as you're saying during alcohol prohibition that propped up the mob, we propped up the cartels.
And it's a really dangerous scenario because it's like, oh, it's out of sight, out of sight, out of mind.
It's right over there, but it's right over there.
But there's this fucking gigantic industry in providing us with stuff that we've decided is illegal.
And so the people that are providing it to us are some of the most dangerous fucking well-funded people on the planet Earth, and they can drive here.
We're in Austin, Texas.
They can drive here from Mexico.
It's not far.
And it's wild, man.
I have friends that are in the military that have worked the border recently, and they go, dude, it's crazy down there now.
Because Biden is in office...
There's a lot of messaging going on that it's like it's okay.
And also, it's really tragic and very complicated.
But even when you do these things that do sound kind of humanitarian and nice, so Biden will do a thing where he's like, hey, well, look, we're not going to, you know, if you're on the other side of the border, if you have like a young kid with you, We're gonna bring you in.
We're not just gonna leave you there on the other side.
It's like, okay, that sounds nice.
But now what did you just incentivize?
Everyone got to bring a young kid with you.
If you're making this journey, make sure you bring a young kid.
And there's something truly fucked up about incentivizing more young kids to make this horrible journey.
So there's lots of problems there.
And so this is why I say like just the cleanest, easiest answer is to end the war on drugs.
And look, the American taxpayer right now, you are – you're subsidizing the enforcement of the war on drugs, right?
You got to pay for that with your tax dollars.
You got to pay for the DEA and the FBI and all the local police departments and all their fancy gear and all the SWAT rates.
Taxpayers got to pay for that.
Then the taxpayers got to pay to subsidize immigration with all of the like – Welfare that immigrants can receive, and there's lots of welfare programs they can't receive, but they definitely get, like, their kids go to school, they go to hospitals, they get to this, right?
So you've got to subsidize the immigrants, you have to subsidize the war on drugs, then you have to subsidize the war on immigration, like ICE and all of those people, and we're paying for every side of this ridiculous policy when we could just go, make the drugs legal.
And that's that.
Heroin is never going to be as socially normalized as weed is, because it kills people.
He does heroin recreationally, and he's a brilliant guy.
What he's essentially saying is, like, heroin's wonderful.
He just sniffs it.
He doesn't do a lot of it, but he's like, this idea of what heroin is, it's been greatly exaggerated because of the fact that it's illegal, because of the fact that it's got a stigma attached to it, or because people shoot it up.
But it was the guy who was talking about the test with the rats.
And so basically there was this one test that they had with a rat.
And it was like in the 70s, I think.
And this became like the gold standard.
So it was basically they had a rat alone in a cage and two water bottles.
And one of them had cocaine in it.
And the rat just went to the cocaine one and then took it until he died.
And they were like, oh my god, it's addictive.
You have it once.
You're going to die.
And then they started looking at it and they go, well, you know, this is a pretty miserable situation for a rat to be in.
Like, his life is miserable.
He's alone in this cage.
So what if we give him, like, mates and all these toys and lots of food and then put the two water bottles together?
And he just had a little bit and then goes back to the water.
And it's fine.
And there's something really profound about that.
That the real problem there is not the substance.
The real problem is all the other conditions around you that would lead to you just being like, fuck it, this high is better than anything else I have in my life and I'm just going to do this until I die.
That's a great way of looking at it because I think that's exactly what's going on with most people when it comes to drug addiction and depression.
I think most people, when they're going to a job that they hate and they're stuck in traffic and then they're stuck in a cubicle and then they're suppressed at work, they have bosses that are assholes, they're constantly being watched and under review, they're under these fluorescent lights doing...
Mindless, stupid shit all day, and then they're exhausted.
They're filling themselves up with terrible food.
They get home, they're exhausted, they're watching television, they're falling asleep, and they're getting back up in the morning and doing it all over again, and when they can, they do drugs.
And the drugs may be the only thing that makes them feel good.
They get, for the weekend, you know, they pick up a package, do a bump with their friends, have a couple of drinks, and talk at the bar, and now they feel great.
And then on their way home, they get arrested.
Cop pulls him over.
You got any drugs on you?
What?
Huh?
Checks his pocket.
What the fuck is this?
Boom!
Slams his head off the car.
Handcuffs him.
Stuffs him in the back of a squad car.
Throws him into a cell with some guy who beats the shit out of him.
And now he loses his job because he's got this felony on his record.
His life is all messed up.
He loses his job now.
His marriage is on the rocks.
It's like one thing after another.
And these things, like these policies, have these huge ripple effects outward, you know?
I heard people saying the other day, George Floyd ate his stash, and that's why he was flipping out when the cop came, which I don't know if that's actually factually true or not, but a lot of people were saying that that's what happened, is that he ate his stash when the cops were coming.
Well, if that is true, that's again, it's because they're fucking illegal.
Yeah, but that's one of the problems with kids today, where they're getting, whether it's MDMA or a lot of other, even Coke, they're buying Coke, and it's coming laced with fentanyl because it's cheaper.
To be frank, like, Ron Paul's just too good of a person to quite have that thing.
If he just had, like, a touch of Trump, like, just a little pinch of Donald Trump to, like, really go at people, I think maybe that would have, the confrontational nature would have gotten him more attention.
And a lot of us libertarians, the hardcore libertarians, were really disappointed in his presidential run in 2016. We really hoped he would kind of pick up the mantle and run with it, and it just didn't work out.
There are a lot of people who want me to run, and I just want somebody who will just say what needs to be said and talk that liberty shit the way it should be talked.
But what we're looking at are the Democrats and Republicans, it's going to be Harris running against, I don't know, maybe DeSantis.
Listen, I watched the guy talk for 30 seconds and I was sold.
Don't listen to me.
But I just think it's hilarious.
It's really fascinating how people have broken off into these camps.
Like there's Camp Florida and Camp Texas and people are just abandoning.
California, rats on a sinking ship and abandoning New York.
And then whenever you think that New York is going to turn around, then you hear they're going to do something crazy, like make the taxes even higher, or tax rich people even more than they're taxing them now, which I think there's some nutty statistic about the amount of taxes in New York City that come from wealthy people, that it's a small percentage that pays more than 50% of the taxes.
It's something crazy because New York is one of the biggest melting pots in our country where everybody's kind of together, walking around the streets, being on the subway.
It's one of the cool things about New York City.
But it's also one of the craziest divisions of wealth when you look at people that are really barely getting by versus people that are buying $40 million apartments.
It's wild shit.
The financial people...
I was talking to...
Who was it?
It was a comic who was there in the late 90s and is there now.
I mean, just like the people voting with their feats, flooding out of these areas, and not look at that as just conclusive.
Like, well, these policies are bad, and these are better.
I mean, it's like the commies built the wall in Berlin.
To stop people from flooding out, because it was disproving their whole experiment.
I mean, they couldn't sit there and watch everybody flooding out of, you know, communist countries into the democratic countries and sit there and go, no, our system is really way better for the people.
So they had to build a wall to stop them from leaving.
And right now, you're almost watching that.
It's unbelievable.
If you read the New York Times or you turn on CNN or something like that, and they'll be sitting there telling you how responsible Cuomo and Newsom are and how reckless Florida and Texas have been.
And then you're watching people flood from those cities into the other one and you're like well okay but isn't that kind of conclusive proof that just like it's a complete rejection of this lockdown shit like this did not work well the lockdown the theory proved to be inaccurate right the theory was and it made sense we have to protect people from the spread of this deadly virus right here we are in march of last year we got to stop this deadly virus from spreading how do we do that Well,
step one, we have to keep people from going outside and mingling because that's going to stop the spread.
So we keep people inside.
So then a couple things happen.
One, we find out this virus is not nearly as deadly as we were worried it was going to be.
And there was no adjustment made.
And then two, we find out when you keep people inside, the virus spreads.
And people do have to go outside to get food.
They do have to go outside to work.
And then also, there's a reality about immune systems.
Immune systems are kind of like your cardiovascular system.
They get stronger when you exercise them.
And when your immune system is, you're shut inside, you don't come into contact with anything.
Like you're literally in your house all day just watching television, soaking in fear porn.
You're not healthy.
You're not exercising because all the gyms are shut down.
You're going to get sicker.
And so the places where everybody was locked down, it turned out, like, that didn't help at all.
The only thing that it did is make the economy way worse there.
And then they doubled down on it, and then people tried to revolt.
People got angry at it, and they doubled down further.
And then you saw the politicians get busted for doing things that were contrary to what they were telling people to do.
And then people got more and more resentful, and then people left even more, and then here we are one year later.
But what's fascinating about it is that because the way the United States is set up, because we do have different ideologies, different philosophies, and different schools of government, like the way we decide to govern our states is different, you can see, oh, look how they're doing it in Florida.
Look at that.
Florida's actually doing pretty good.
And then you go, wow, they're going to kill people.
Now they're just...
Florida's open.
This is so irresponsible.
But then you look at the result.
And no one is saying...
You don't see anyone on television, on CNN, or on any of these shows that are supposed to be objective news, saying, you know what?
We were wrong.
Look at what's happened in Florida.
Even though they're wide open, it's actually shown that their levels of COVID are lower, their death rates are lower, and they're doing great.
And you would think, if we were being reasonable, right, if you were advocating for lockdowns, You're advocating for destroying people's businesses, suspending basic human liberty.
Obviously, everyone knows there's going to be all types of disastrous effects of keeping people at home, ruining jobs, all of this, right?
We're asking you to give up life.
This is a pretty big ask and really a demand.
Well, you would think the onus was on you to show, not that this helps a little bit, but there has to be some drastic, like very clear, look, the states that are locked down are doing like 10 times better than the states that are opened up.
And as soon as that was obviously not the case, It should have, if we were just dealing an honest debate, destroyed the entire lockdown argument.
And all of the predictions that have been completely wrong, like what you were just saying, and they never, you know, I remember people saying, Sweden, by the summer, by last summer, there'd be hundreds of thousands dead in Sweden.
And then by the time the summer hit, there were like 6,000 COVID deaths.
And you're like, anyone gonna take that back?
Just go, hey, we got it wrong.
Which is fine, you know, people get things wrong.
Just a month ago, or whenever it was that Texas opened up, Fauci said cases are gonna spike now.
Yeah, and this is one of the reasons why I called you, one of the reasons why I wanted you to come here to do the podcast, because I've heard you talking about COVID passports, about vaccine passports, and I share your deep concern about this idea.
Because this is not something that they're just going to keep with COVID vaccines.
If there's a way that they can get you to show your papers and to show whether you have an app on your phone, whether you're, you know, whatever it is that you have to have in order to be able to freely travel around the United States, they're going to keep that fucking thing.
Well, and I said, just like I said before, if you're just looking at the bigger picture of it, you're like, look, this is, and I think objectively, The country went totalitarian for about a year.
Now, not every single part of it was as totalitarian as the rest.
But according to governors, out of their own words, they suspended the Bill of Rights.
And we've been in a year living under that.
Like, how long do you think we can go in living in a totalitarian society before that's just what our society is?
And there's not really a memory of the old normal, or at least that seems like the old times.
That's not who we are anymore.
We're already dangerously close to that position.
And now we have this opportunity where it's like, hey, Joe Biden says that everyone who wants to take the vaccine will be able to take it, I think, by June, he said.
Everyone who wants it will be able to take it.
And that's a perfect little opportunity point to go, okay, so we break out of it now.
Now we break out of it.
Now you can make a sound argument that if the vaccine's available for everybody, the people who want it can take it, and the people who don't are choosing to take the risk.
And now we go back to normal life.
And at the same time, they're proposing this vaccine passport, which really, if you look at the proposals, isn't a passport, it's an app.
Right?
With your medical history, your data can be tracked, your location can be traced, all of these things.
But what they're talking about doing now, when we have this fork in the road, we could go back to being a free country.
Not as free as some of us would like, but at least the way we used to have it, right?
Or we can go to what is being proposed and talked about, which is a national caste system.
Where there's one group of people who have basic freedoms and rights and one group of people who do not.
They don't have the freedom to travel.
They don't have the freedom to go to events, maybe not to work.
Ideas have been floated out about grocery stores.
That's a national caste system.
And also just, you know...
Throwing away the idea that you have any type of medical privacy from the government.
It's being done in collusion between big businesses and governments.
And this is already happening.
It's being done in New York City.
It's being done in other countries.
And there were reports in the Washington Post and CNN about the Biden administration meeting with these big businesses to say, you know what?
It's not really good enough to do a local level or a state level thing.
We need to have one national standard.
So you're talking about a national caste system.
And if we embrace that, man, I don't mean to be hyperbolic, but I think this whole thing is fucked.
I really think this whole country, we are not going to come out of this.
If we embrace the idea of now, this is an idea straight out of the Chinese social credit system.
This is what they're proposing.
We do.
By the way, China already has the COVID passport.
This is what China does.
That's it.
No sense of, like, you have a right to do this or you have a right to not do that.
And come on, you think they're going to take that power and then this will only ever be used for the COVID vaccine?
It's also, logically, it doesn't seem to make sense.
If the vaccine is available to everybody who wants it and everybody who wants it gets vaccinated, who are we protecting?
If these folks are out there that aren't vaccinated that are supposedly these super spreaders, and that's what we're supposed to stop, right?
The idea is that these people aren't vaccinated, they're dangerous, and you're not being a good citizen because you have been vaccinated.
So what we're going to do is we're going to keep you from doing all the things that you want to do, and we're going to allow those other people that have been vaccinated to have those freedoms.
But aren't those people who have been vaccinated and have those freedoms, aren't they, they're not vulnerable, right?
So what happened was there were these reports that were out that said that the Biden administration was consulting with these big businesses on how to do it.
There was a big uproar about it.
And then when she was asked, she was like, no, no, no, we're not going to do that.
And ultimately, I think that's quite possibly what ends up happening.
Like, I think oftentimes they put out these feelers to kind of see what the people are willing to take.
And then there's all these other arguments, you know, like just the practicality of it.
I mean, look, if you say you have to show a driver's license before you vote, people will lose their minds about how this is racist because poor people and black people disproportionately tend to not have driver's licenses.
So what is an app on a smartphone?
I mean, how do you think that's going to work in practice if you're saying you need that to do these basic things?
So there's all types of these problems of how you would implement it.
But it's still worth noting that they floated this out.
There are these people in our government who would go Chinese fascist on us.
And I guess they could say it's because of the Capitol riot thing or something like that, but this stuff is pretty creepy, man.
And if it was so honest what they were doing, then how come it had to be a covert thing that Yahoo News was just able to get their hands on the other day?
Like, why is this being done in secrecy?
And there's a lot, I will tell you that, you know, again, it's like, like I was saying before, like, however you feel about COVID, you could still be really worried about the totalitarianism.
Like, you could even think the totalitarianism was justified.
And still be really worried about it.
Like, if you were on a boat and, like, a snake jumped on your boat and someone shot it, you know?
And then, like, there's a big hole in your boat now.
Like, you could be like, no, he had to because there was this venomous snake.
But you'd still be like, okay, but we got to worry about that hole now.
Like, that's still a problem, even if we needed to do it, you know?
So it's like you could be against, like, or you could be for the thing and still recognize that it's a concern.
So you could be against, like, the Capitol riot and all that.
But don't you find it a little bit creepy that they're all just openly going like, oh, you know what we really need now is to turn George Bush and Dick Cheney's war on terror inward and focus on the domestic terrorists.
Like, how'd that work out when we were fighting them in the Middle East?
You know, we killed a lot more people than just terrorists, right?
Well, what's ironic is that they've created this sort of division with the divide on social media by making social media so censored and left-wing heavy.
Because, you know, I tried to send a friend of mine a video the other day on Twitter through a direct message, and it was blocked.
I was asking him if this was accurate, and it was a doctor who was talking about ivermectin.
And ivermectin, which is a treatment for COVID, and this doctor was saying that ivermectin is 99% effective in treating COVID, but that you don't hear about it because you can't fund vaccines when there's an effective treatment.
I don't know if this guy's right or wrong, so I'm asking questions.
And what effect does this have where it's like, Okay, so you kick all the right-wingers off social media, right?
And then you start kind of like punishing all the not even right-wingers, but just not left-wingers off of there.
He's like, so what's the end of this here now?
So now none of us are talking to each other, even in a shitty medium like Twitter.
Is the answer just that none of us talk to each other?
We all only just talk to our own groups?
And so many of these things, and this is another big thing, I think a big story of the last year, has been how much the social media censorship has been cranked up.
I started noticing, I had a private Facebook group For people who were paying subscribers to my podcast.
Not Legion of Skanks.
Part of the problem, which is my political podcast.
And so we had a little community there.
And for years, it was just fun.
A lot of shit talking.
People say crazy things.
It's mostly libertarian, but some left-wingers, some right-wingers.
And then all of a sudden this year...
I, because I was the moderator of the group, I start getting messages over and over again.
This has been removed because it's false content.
This has been flagged.
This has been this and that.
It was all COVID stuff.
And it was all the stuff that was skeptical of the official COVID narrative.
And a lot of it turned out to be right, you know?
It was like doctors being like, yeah, no, you don't need to wipe down your groceries.
You can't get this from touching your groceries.
Don't worry about that.
It was them talking about how the ventilators were killing people.
At the time, that was a conspiracy theory.
At the time, they were like, no, no, no.
Cuomo was saying we need more ventilators.
Then there's doctors like the ventilators are killing people.
Now, there were also doctors who got it wrong.
But a lot of them got it right and their videos would be removed.
And ultimately, they ended up shutting down the group, just shutting it down.
So they kicked all of us off.
I mean, I'm not kicked off Facebook, but I was only on it for that group at this point.
So I don't really use it anymore.
But you're like, okay, so now you want to, okay, you take down all these videos.
But, you know, like five of those were right.
Not all of them were, but five of them were.
And they were right when it was really important to be right.
And you ended up censoring this whole shit.
And so, like, how, isn't that dangerous?
We're gonna pick the one official science and this is the only science that can be spoken Well, it took until I mean here.
But I had talked to all these nutritionists and endocrinologists and all these...
Scientists are saying it's a critical aspect of your immune system.
You need to supplement with vitamin D and that 84% of the people in the ICU with COVID were insufficient in vitamin D and only 4% had sufficient levels of vitamin D. It's a really significant aspect of the way your body fights COVID. And the best way to get it is actually being outside.
Supplement vitamin D is good, but getting it outside from sunlight is better.
It's the best way.
And you never heard any of this.
And if you tried to say this, people would try to say that you're some sort of a COVID denier or that you're doing something that endangers people by downplaying the effects of the virus.
No, we're talking about ways you can mitigate it.
We're talking about ways you can boost your immune system.
Well, a lot of them couldn't work, and a lot of them couldn't get their drug.
A lot of them, their drug was going on stage and making people laugh.
There's a lot of really depressed people in the world of stand-up comedy, and going on stage and making people laugh was their one happy moment of the day.
Or, you know, if they lived in New York City and they did multiple sets, multiple happy moments in the day.
And it's going to be going for years and years and years and we'll never be able to completely trace what goes back to that.
Well, I say it like this, right?
When I go, so what was like...
You know, the cost of the George W. Bush disastrous administration.
And you could just look at it in terms of like, okay, well, the war in Iraq cost $2 trillion and Afghanistan was another trillion dollars.
And then there's like, okay, that's a real tangible cost.
But then you're also like, all right, well, they had to bring interest rates down and keep them really low in order to finance the wars to keep them on the credit card so we wouldn't pay a lot of interest on it, wouldn't have to tax people.
Just kind of put it on the credit card.
And then when interest rates were really down, this sucked a whole lot of people into buying homes that otherwise wouldn't have bought homes who couldn't really afford them.
But at 1% interest rate, maybe they could afford them.
So they'd get in there and then the interest rates tick back up and they all got foreclosed on and this brought down the whole economy.
And you're like, what is the cost of the George W. Bush administration?
It's like, well, it's Trump.
It's Antifa.
It's, like, everything, all of this goes back to being a cost of that.
So what is the cost of all of this going to end up being?
And the cost of ruining a business could be the cost of ruining multiple marriages, multiple families.
If you're working in a restaurant and you're a chef and then the owners of the restaurant tell you we can't keep afloat and you're like, oh my god, how am I going to feed my family?
How am I going to pay my bills?
How am I going to keep a roof over my head?
Am I going to be homeless?
Where can I work as a chef if I can't work?
There's nowhere to work for a whole year.
And we thought this was going to be 14 days.
And then the rage.
My friends that are chefs in Los Angeles, when they would come out here to Texas and see restaurants open, the rage they would feel.
They were so angry.
They were so angry.
They're like, why can't we do this?
Why can't we do this?
But you could.
You're just in the wrong state.
And it's interesting to see how different states handled it.
And we'd like to think that These irresponsible states are killing people, but they're not.
These states that are more interested in giving people freedom to make decisions and keep their businesses open.
I met with the governor, and I talked to him about it, and his position very clearly was, you've got to let people work.
Like, he was like, right away, you know, he goes, I know you're a liberal, you know, he said to me, he goes, he goes, and I know that's for social issues.
And he goes, but when it comes to business, he goes, you have to let people work.
But there's no, but this is like an interesting thing to me throughout the whole, like, lockdown.
Is that it's not even something that a liberal...
There's no reason a liberal shouldn't get that.
There's something very strange to me, and so much of it, I think, in America today is that everyone's reactionary.
So everyone's reacting against what...
So the whole Democrats, the whole left half of America was reacting against Trump.
You know, like anything Trump did, they were going to be against that.
And then the whole right half is like reacting against CNN and the media and all that stuff.
Whatever they say, you're going to be against that.
And you almost wonder, like, what if Donald Trump...
out at the beginning of covid and said we have to lock down you got to wear your mask i'm putting my mask on right now we got to be every set real you know that then what would the reaction have been it's quite possible the reaction would have been like he's an authoritarian
he's being draconian like we don't need to do any of this because if you just think about it in in an abstract like the idea that i'm gonna wear a mask and be distant and be cautious and follow the government orders is that really more of a left-wing thing than a right-wing thing to do In my mind, it almost seems like the right-winger would be the conservative.
We want to be careful.
We don't want to be risky.
And the left winger would be the person who's like, hey, there's more to life than just, you know, staying alive.
I want to go see a show.
I want to hang with my friends.
I'll take a little bit of risk.
I'm comfortable with that.
The more kind of artistic vision.
So why would a liberal or a leftist not be able to understand that?
Like, yeah, if someone loses their job, that has a big effect on their life.
Yeah, there's a thing that people do on the left today, what we consider, because I think what is the left and the right, it shifts and it goes back and forth.
Because it's not real.
A lot of it is just like, what's the current ideology?
What does your tribe subscribe to?
But there's a thing that people do where they say there's things that are more important than the economy.
There's a whole lot more, and a lot of it is lives, and a lot of it is your future.
Like, if you're a person who's worked for 30 years, and you built a restaurant, and you've been showing up and busting your ass, and you have, you know, 20, 30 employees, and everybody works with you, and it's like a family.
So if you take the position, hey, I think that we should always wear mass social distance because of the flu, of how it can kill babies and stuff like that, you can make all the same arguments for that.
And if you're making the argument against it, you're like, well, what do you fucking want babies to die?
And I don't think, especially when it comes to the exercise, some people are just not inclined to do that.
And that's their choice.
But when they want to compare, you know, the way you feel about something, like your nervousness or your anxiety about something versus other people.
I'm nervous for other people.
And I've said this openly, that I'm not nervous about it for myself.
Because I know too many people that have gotten it.
My family got it.
My whole family got COVID and I was with them and I never got it.
And I'm assuming, based on all of the research that's been done on the immune system and what you could do to boost your immune system and all those things that I've done and actively done for fucking forever, for most of my life, that that had an impact.
Look, the science is pretty clear that if you don't have major underlying health issues and you have a strong immune system, you have nothing to worry about with COVID. But if you say that, people will go fucking bananas and say, why aren't you vaccinated?
I know.
It's just...
It's really something.
It's unbelievable.
And it's...
You know, people have...
Like we were saying before, people have...
We've developed an emotional stock in this world view now.
And that's going to have to be broken if we're going to be okay.
But it's also, it's just so crazy, and this is just like how the government ends up working, where it's like, you know, you have Dr. Fauci out there for a while, like, no, don't wear a mask, that's ridiculous.
And I was listening to this doctor discuss what to be worried about and that you really shouldn't be concerned because it's a very small number of people and it's primarily women for some reason.
And they think it might have something to do with the birth control pill.
And this was all speculation, right?
They were just...
And he was saying, if you have weakness in one side of your body...
I was like, oh, Jesus Christ.
They were talking about all these different things.
You have trouble with your vision.
If you have severe headaches and nausea, I'm like, oh, Christ.
Oh, Jesus Christ.
And I'm just thinking, what would I be feeling right now if I had taken that shot and I'm here driving around listening to this guy talk about all these side effects?
And then, you know, Brett Weinstein and Heather Hying have a great podcast, the Dark Horse podcast.
And, you know, he's an evolutionary biologist.
And so she, they're brilliant people.
And they're talking about, she might be just a regular biologist.
I don't know what kind of biologist she is, but they're both brilliant.
And they were talking about this, the narrative about the vaccines, about whether or not the vaccines are safe.
And that this is not even something that you're allowed to have a discussion about.
And that is so strange.
There's nothing else where you can have a discussion about whether or not it's okay to get an injection of something into your body.
This is a really weird thing where you're supposed to...
It's almost like people don't want to think that maybe there could be something dangerous ever about not just a vaccine, but any kind of a drug that you get injected in your body.
So because of this, because this is so critical, they want you to play make-believe with them and say there's no risks.
like right you're putting social pressure on people you're putting social pressure on people and you're also virtue signaling in the most obvious of of social media ways like you're You're actually saying it like it's a virtue.
You're saying it like it's a good thing that people display the fact that they're being compliant and they're doing this.
Yeah, and you can have this thing where it's like you were saying this virtue signaling and this kind of like theatrical display of I get the vaccine, what a good person I am, I care about everyone.
But you're like, look, my daughter's a lot younger than your kids, but I'm like, yeah, I'm not injecting my daughter with something to fucking virtue signal.
I'm not doing that.
If there's something that she's of no risk, statistically has no risk from, I'm sorry, I'm not taking any experiment on her.
Trump had worked out a deal with the Taliban to leave, and he pushed it back to September.
But said that we will leave in September, on September 11th.
So Joe Biden, this is the thing, it's like being celebrated like, oh, it's great, he's ending the war.
It's like, well, no, that's not actually what he did.
What he's doing is extending the war.
And he's extending the war so that he can leave on September 11th for some type of ceremonial victory, I don't know, some symbolism of like, yeah, this was the great day that the great Joe Biden pulled the troops out.
And I got to be honest, I'm very skeptical that he's going to do that.
But we've had all of these dates where, you know, Joe Biden, when he was vice president, I think he promised we'd be out in 2014. And then Obama said, that's absolutely right.
We'll be out in 2014. And they just keep going and keep going.
You know, it's like, look, the military industrial complex is the biggest honeypot in the history of the world.
It's like a trillion dollars a year that gets spent maintaining this empire.
And like, yeah, there's people making all types of money off of it.
And those people have a lot of influence in Washington.
And so like, yeah, they want to keep making that money.
They want to keep the gravy train, you know, rolling.
And so I don't think it's even conspiratorial at all.
In fact, I think the more conspiratorial thing is to go into all of these other reasons why they would want to stay there.
But I think that the major driving force is that there is, as Dwight Eisenhower, like Mr. Military, Dwight Eisenhower said, we built up a huge industrial complex that makes money off the warfare machine.
Isn't it crazy when you look back at him giving that national address At a time when you had to watch it on television, there was no recording devices.
He did it at a time where the only way Americans could see that was you had to be sitting in front of the television, and he had a message, and that was what was really important for him to get out there.
I want you to beware of the military-industrial complex and its influence.
If it wasn't for COVID and the voting overhaul, and I'm not claiming like there was a bunch of fraud, I'm just saying that the voting by mail let a lot more people vote and it was a whole different way to do elections.
If he had his economy from January 2019 in November 2020 and they had the same way, we were doing voting the same way we always used to, I think he wins in a landslide.
He said that, but he's also, it's like on one hand, he's old and fat, but then on the other hand, he's Donald fucking Trump, so who the hell knows what he might do.
So here they are training in the morning, and he shows up, and George, who's just such a brilliant guy, so open-minded, he had been sparring with this guy in the past, and there he is.
There's Skarboski.
So look at him.
He's got a belly.
He doesn't have muscles.
If you looked at him, you're like, oh, this is the guy that just started training.
If you looked at him, if you didn't know, if I saw that guy, if I went to the gym and I saw that guy, I'd be like, oh, okay, this guy is probably trying to get in shape.
Right.
Probably never really trained before.
But then you watch him fuck these guys up.
They literally have no idea what to do with him.
And he's so efficient that he doesn't have to be sober.
He doesn't have to be in shape.
Back it up a little bit.
I just missed that one.
He's playing with these guys.
Also, we should point out that that guy's not a striker.
They're not on the same level as him.
He smokes cigarettes, he drinks whiskey, and he comes in and fucks everybody up.
If you watch his fights online, you can watch a bunch of his kickboxing matches.
I'm worried about how we pull ourselves back to some sort of homeostasis.
We bring ourselves back to some sort of calm place where we can agree to disagree, where we can have Republicans and Democrats, right-wing and left-wing people, sit and discuss ideas and not be at each other's throats.
I'm worried that social media has accentuated all this because we've gotten accustomed to silencing people, which I think is very dangerous.
It just reinforces these echo chambers that people live in every day and makes them think that they're right because these people do get silenced and deplatformed and so many people call for it.
It's disconcerting to me.
It's not smart.
It's not sustainable.
And a lot of people think it's setting us up for some sort of a civil war.
And when, you know, that sounds like completely hyperbolic, right?
But then you see that Capitol Hill attack and you go, Jesus Christ.
These are morons that are doing this, right?
These are really stupid people that did that Capitol Hill attack.
But what if things get worse and then people that are maybe a little smarter think it's a good idea to fight the left or fight the government or fight the powers that be?
Or maybe one too many people sees these attacks on churchgoers in Canada and it starts happening up there as well.
This kind of shit is just hard to pull out of when everything feels so...
It feels so volatile.
It feels so fragile.
Just the fabric of society, the fabric of civility seems so easy to tear right now.
Yeah, well, it's like, look, I mean, in the 20th century, we fought two world wars.
These were like advanced industrial countries that had people made out of the same stuff me and you are made out of that let it get to that level.
You're like, wouldn't you think, well, at some point, like rational minds have to, you know, have cooler tempers or figure this out.
It's like, no, no, no.
They just let it get to that point.
Tens of millions of people are slaughtered.
Then a few years, they did it again.
Like, you know, and there are genocides.
So...
Things can go really, really bad.
And we're at a very dangerous point right now.
Very, very dangerous.
We're flirting with absolute disaster.
But there are also really amazing parts of human history where incredible things were pulled off that you couldn't have imagined.
I mean, a good friend of mine is like a mentor of mine, Gene Epstein, who's a brilliant economist.
And he says this.
He used to say – I really love this.
He goes, you know, if you were sitting around in 1840 and you were like an abolitionist talking to another abolitionist and you said, hey, you know, I think in 25 years slavery across the West will be abolished.
You'd be like, that's insane.
There's been slavery since the dawn of time and it's like completely the foundational building block of all of these societies.
But it was.
At least blatant slavery in the West.
Incredible things can happen, and ideas are really powerful.
Thomas Paine just wrote pamphlets.
They changed the course of history.
What you're doing here, even putting that message out there, that it's like, hey, we have to stop trying to shut people up.
We have to stop like censoring people and banishing people and all of this.
We got to be able to have conversations.
We got to like be able to let someone, even if they're wrong, let someone try to think out loud.
Like this is really important.
Otherwise, we can't have a functioning society.
And I think that if enough people push that message, there are a lot of people who agree with that.
Like one of the things I hate, you know, is like the demand that you denounce people.
Yeah.
I hate the idea that you have to denounce someone if they have bad views.
Why can't I just tell you what I think?
Why do I have to denounce somebody else as a person for saying something I don't agree with?
Like that these big corporations can adopt woke ideology, at least on paper, and just say it.
And, you know, have their diversity training and have their inclusiveness and have these statements that they put out and go, all right, we did our job.
A certain group of people who are kind of like would-be authoritarians who are low status and not very bright.
People like that love wokeism because it's a real excuse where you don't have to know anything.
You don't have to know anything to go, I'm offended by Joe Rogan, and I think he is a racist, sexist, transphobe, whatever any of the other words are.
That's it.
You don't have to know anything.
You don't have to add anything.
You don't have to have built anything yourself.
I mean, to be outraged at a president for a war or a policy or something, you might have to crack a book.
You might have to actually know something.
You know, to just call something racist or sexist is very easy.
And then you get to immediately put yourself in this elevated status of moral superiority that other people don't have.
When you really have no, you haven't achieved anything.
I mean, you haven't done anything.
You know, you could like, you could call some guy a homophobe, but it's like, Maybe you should go help someone who came out to their parents and got kicked out of their home or something like that.
Go do something if you want this sense of moral superiority rather than just calling someone out.
So we've got to find a way one way or the other to break that.
Because their conclusions seem to be, first of all, it's all playing out exactly as they predicted.
And these guys that were engineers that figured out these algorithms that put this all together, they realized as they were doing, holy shit, this does not go in a good direction.
I also think there's basically nothing we can do about that aspect of it.
I just think, like, this is here with us now, and this is the technology, and it's probably going to be impossible to put that toothpaste back in the tube.
But what you almost have to do, like, in some jujitsu sense, is, like, we've got to try to take that energy and turn it into a better...
I don't have the answers for that.
But you're not going to stop the technology from existing.
So we have to find a way to try to mitigate some of these bad qualities of people getting addicted to the likes and the feedback and the algorithm playing toward that.
But the thing that I didn't like in that movie, if I'm remembering correctly, because it was a while ago that I saw it, I liked the documentary a lot.
I thought it was good.
Didn't care for the acting.
I thought that was unnecessary.
I was like, I could just listen to these smart people and not have to see this family falling apart.
The problem is that when they start pushing the fake news narrative, that I really object to.
Like the idea that this is something that the corporate press really pushes to that the big concern about social media is you have all this fake news coming out there.
And I really think it's like, yeah, OK, you guys have no problem with fake news.
You just want your monopoly on it.
I mean, I'm sorry.
Over this last year, all the covid stuff, there's been a ton of fake news that has come out.
It's been more consequential than anything Alex Jones ever said or any of these guys who, by the way, got more right than you did.
Not saying he's right about everything, but he's been better than CNN.
Again, not to say he hasn't gotten some things wrong, too, but how about the war in Iraq?
Like, I'm sorry, that's still a bigger deal than anything else that, you know, CNN and the New York Times has absolutely no right to look down their nose at Alex Jones.
You got the war in Iraq wrong, and he got it right.
There's a million dead people over that.
Trillions of dollars.
Mothers of soldiers who have committed suicide still crying themselves to sleep at night.
Kirsten Matthews, a fellow for science and technology at Rice University Baker Institute.
I think the public is going to be concerned, and I am as well, that we're kind of just pushing forward with science without having a proper conversation about what we should or should not do.
Still, the scientists who conducted the research and some other bioethics, bioethicists, Defended the experiment.
Organ transplantation, said Juan Carlos Espuya Belmonte, a professor at the Gene Expression Laboratory of the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in La Jolla, California, and co-author of the cell study.
The demand for that is much higher than the supply.
I don't see this type of research being ethically problematic," said Insoo Hayoon.
Why are the people that have such amazing names, the people that are these scientists, a bioethicist at Case Western Reserve University at Harvard University?
It's aimed at lofty humanitarian goals.
All right, so it's about organ transplantation.
So they're trying to make part monkey, part human organ.
We were talking about social media, and we were talking about this weird place where we're at now where people are just calling people racist and sexist and homophobic and whatever, and these low-status people that are locking on to this woke ideology and using it as a weapon.
That's what you see when you see these Antifa kids in the street screaming at people at the taqueria to get the fuck out of New York.
I agree, but I'm just saying that it's like, look, man, these are kids who came up in a culture where...
There was not a strong culture of families and values where they were kind of – many of them were drugged from – put on any of these psychometric drugs, psychotropic, I should say, drugs from a young age.
They've been propagandized in their university system, in their universities that they went to and probably spent themselves $100,000 into debt.
They are in no position to get a job.
They have no – they probably live in their mom's basement and work at Starbucks and have $100,000 in debt.
How are you going to own a house?
How's it going for $600,000?
They have no prospects of getting married and taking care of a family or anything like this.
And they are taking advantage of this weird moment in time where people are recognizing that police brutality, which has existed forever, has these horrific effects on our culture.
And then even though the fucking verdict was correct, right?
Even though this guy gets convicted of all charges and everybody's kind of relieved that justice is served, they're still like, fuck you white people, get the fuck out of New York.
Because they were ready.
So they were all geared up for rioting and when the right verdict came down, they just took advantage of this weird vulnerability these people have because there's this strange moment and they have a megaphone and they're abusing power.
The power that was bestowed upon them by the moment in time.
But the problem – and like I certainly understand where – certainly from a black person's perspective.
I mean there has been state policies that have just fucked over black people from the beginning and before the beginning of our country.
And when things like this happen, even if there were other races of cops around, this Derek Chauvin guy is a white guy.
He's got a black guy on the ground, handcuffed, and he's got his knee on his neck and he keeps I don't know if there's people arguing with me, all this stuff.
No, the knee isn't on the neck, it's down a little bit.
So what, on the back of his lungs?
Okay, the guy died after this happened.
He's sitting there.
The guy was probably dead before he was off him.
He's certainly unconscious before he gets off of him.
Well, like what they did when the riots were going on in New York, when they were looting fucking Saks Fifth Avenue and smashing windows and all that stuff.
What I was getting at before was that what I'm worried, not worried about, but what I'm thinking about is going to happen.
Because communication through Twitter and this virtue signaling that you see and all this weird division.
One of the things that's going on is this is a very limited way of interacting.
It's very limited.
It's through text.
It's a limited amount of text.
It's hard to get context and to understand, you know, what a person is really thinking and feeling.
What I'm thinking is that we are at an adolescent stage of this kind of technology and the way it's going to interface with our lives.
And that, like a lot of these things that are being proposed, like Elon Musk's Neuralink, Elon Musk told me, he said, you're going to be able to talk without using words.
I think it's going to change because you're going to understand intent.
I think we're going to get to a point where we can get past the limitations of text-based language, like text being written out in a way where you can interpret it any way you want.
There's one of the things that happens on Twitter where someone will say something and then people will ask them to defend what they said by interpreting what they said in a wildly disproportionate way.
Like, they'll say, what you are doing is disregarding, you know, people of color who do this, or women, or gays, or trans, or you're putting, you know, non-binary people at risk, and like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!
I think that in the grand scheme of things, we're still in the infancy of this kind of technological revolution.
And I don't believe that anything is predetermined.
So I think that it could go in a really bad way that's bad for humanity, or it could go in a really beautiful way that's better than anything we could imagine.
And like I was saying with the COVID passport things, There are people who want to turn us into a state, you know, straight-up fascist authoritarian Chinese social credit model.
And then there are other people who want to do really beautiful shit and, you know, use the technology to fucking educate more people and spread good ideas and all of this other stuff.
When you're talking about the stuff you're talking about there that Elon Musk is talking about, it's really, really hard to possibly predict where all of that could go.
I don't think that biological human beings, in the sense of the way we are now, I don't think we're long for this world.
I really don't.
I think we got a couple hundred years at most, and I think a couple hundred years from now, there'll be people in caves, hanging out, holding out, still cooking meat over fire, longing for the old days.
But it's apparently far more complex than chess even.
And it has many more moves than chess.
And computers kick their ass at that too now.
And they started inventing moves.
And one of the ways they did it is by going through literally thousands and thousands of games and then postulating and figuring it out and calculating and putting all this data together and then figuring out how to kick everybody's ass.
Well, that's just the beginning.
Once they start being creative, there's also artificial intelligence.
We played this thing the other day with Brian Greene.
Was it Brian Greene that we played the music or was that Eric Weinstein?
I got an email from someone who, I mean, I have to look into this more, but he said that he played that for his dad, I think, who's in a Jimi Hendrix cover band.
So when you say created a virtual song, meaning not did one of their actual songs, but created something that they would make with their tendencies of how to play music?
Like, if they can write jokes, if they could write philosophy, then you're like, oh shit, there could be a computer program someday that figures out the meaning of life or something in a better way than we could ever figure it out.
Now, in particular, if you think about how many—like, there's a program that someone created, and they used my voice because there's so many hours of my voice.
And they show that they can have me say anything, things I've never said before.
But my thought was, what I was saying was like, If they can do that with just the hours and hours of conversations that I've had on podcasts, right?
And then they can do that with Tom Cruise's face with all the images they have and all the hours they have of him talking.
If they can just analyze the hundreds of years of human conversations, the words that people have written down, the conversations that people have that have been recorded, and get a sense of what it means to be a person.
Get a real nuanced sense in a way that a human being could never do because they can literally store and calculate through terabytes and terabytes of data.
They can put together an idea of what it means to be an actualized, intelligent, enlightened human being and literally create some artificial leader, like some person, some artificial virtual person That is better than anybody that exists because they have all the knowledge and they can find all the logical fallacies.
Dude, he does these things that he does that there's nothing...
You can make fun of a lot of different presidents, but Joe Biden does this thing that I've never seen another president do, where he gets tripped up and then gives up mid-thought.
Have you ever seen, there's a video of Clarence Thomas talking about Joe Biden back when Clarence Thomas was being interviewed when he was getting on the Supreme Court.
like he could put like he could hold us off but now he's lost like five steps so he's all of that with a little bit of scene like see I'll sprinkled in but now he's like tempered that with like we got to be kind we got to be good because that's the flavor of the moment yes the flavor of the day is inclusivity and you Well, like I said, it's that Donald Trump gave the establishment one more hand to play.
And even before 94, Joe Biden, when Ronald Reagan was ramping up the war on drugs, Joe Biden partnered with Strom Thurmond, the actual segregationist, to challenge Ronald Reagan from the right to say that he's too soft This ramp up of the war on drugs isn't enough.
And you've got to be locking more of these criminals up.
He bragged at one point that he wanted to give people life in jail for everything short of jaywalking.
That was like a line like that or something he said.
It was all the way leading up to the 94 crime bill, which he co-authored.
He was pushing fucking.
For the creation of the mass incarceration state.
Like, this is him.
And then for him to now partner up with a prosecutor from California who was throwing people in jail for pot, and for them to be like, you know, we really need to think about systemic racism.
You motherfucker!
You built this!
This is your doing!
And of course, on top of that, he was also one of the biggest champions of the war in Iraq.
And not only championed and voted for the war in Iraq, but went out and called out everybody who didn't vote for the war in Iraq as like, you're allowing another 9-11 to happen.
Because Saddam is weapons of mass destruction and all the neocon talking points of the mushroom cloud in New York City, all that stuff.
He pushed all of the worst policies that everyone was reacting against for the last decade.
The guy who was the guy who was rallying up a whole bunch of people, had a serious fucking plan, and had a whole lot of left-wing populist support, was deemed unacceptable.
And that was Bernie Sanders.
And there's a lot of things I don't like about Bernie Sanders, a lot of things I do like about him, but he was the guy, just undeniably.
Well, he was focusing, look, like I was saying before, all that stuff where JPMorgan Chase is like, oh yeah, let's focus on diversity training and all this.
Bernie Sanders had an economic leftist populist message that was like, no, no, no, I want to focus on billionaires.
I don't think billionaires should exist.
And they were like, no, we're not letting this guy up.
And they circled the wagons and they got him.
They did it the first time and then they did it again in 2020. And so it was like, who's left?
They tried everyone.
They tried to throw everyone at the wall.
They pushed Kamala Harris.
She got a big push from the corporate press.
She got big money donating to her.
Hillary Clinton's campaign people all joined her campaign.
I mean, look, there were mistakes made, I think, in the campaign, and I think she could have said things a little bit different at times, but the fact that you had an active-duty military member, somebody who actually served, and not just like...
No, she deployed twice.
Really deployed to a medical unit in Iraq during the height of the fighting in Iraq.
Someone who really saw the costs of war.
Coming back and saying, we cannot fight these wars anymore.
That was powerful.
And then to think, right, that Hillary Clinton, the last nominee for the party, would turn around and call her a traitor.
I mean, Hillary Clinton should be launched to the moon for that.
She should not be allowed to exist in polite society for the nerve of you.
I mean, think about it.
Just in any moral society.
Hillary Clinton, by the way, has admitted it was a mistake.
To vote for the war in Iraq.
So you vote for a war, you send some, you know, brave young woman over there to watch her brothers and sisters die, have to deal with that, like in a medical unit in Iraq, literally holding people as they breathe their last, you know, gasp their last breath, and then she comes back?
You should be dropping down to your knees and apologizing to that person.
What's crazy is that this kind of conversation is so rare.
This kind of conversation where people are openly discussing the problems with the way these things are handled, the problems with the way the media displays the reality of these people that are running for governor—people that are running for government, rather—people that are running for president and who they really are.
It never gets exposed.
and that all you get is the propaganda, all you get is the parties politicizing of particular events that are flattering and ignoring all the aspects like Biden's pass or Kamala's pass or just push all that stuff aside.
It never gets highlighted, never gets discussed.
And then when you know that these are the people that you've chosen, then ignore everything negative about them, push everything positive about them, and then you have collusion with all of the media.
Well, particularly this time around, and I thought that Glenn Greenwald, when he was on your show, did a really great job of breaking this all down, but it's that there was a very conscious decision made by pretty much the entire corporate press that they were going to get Donald Trump out.
Like, really, you know, shining a light on powerful people's corruption.
Like, that's what real journalism is supposed to be.
But look, there's the other thing that's interesting about all the woke stuff, right, is that it's almost, to me, it's like a corporate plot, a corporate takeover of a left-wing cause But at the point now, it doesn't even resemble anything left-wing, and it just gets used against the left-wing, right?
So when you control the corporate press and you have big tech and you have all the big platforms, you get to decide what stories are ramped up and what aren't.
Matt Taibbi on his Substack wrote an article saying that Rachel Maddow is Bill O'Reilly.
And it's a crazy article.
And he's talking about how if you looked back at Rachel Maddow back in the day, in the early days of MSNBC, you would have never imagined her to be a propagandist.
You thought of her as this really intelligent, whip-smart, you know, gritty leftist who's out there fighting the good fight.
You could not have imagined her like just blindly repeating CIA talking points, which is essentially what she's done over the last year.
And, you know, it's interesting that those guys, all of them, right, like particularly Glenn Greenwald and Aaron Matei and Matt Taibbi, too.
But all of them, they didn't fall for the Trump Russia bullshit one bit and they hated Trump.
These are lefties.
They don't like Trump.
But they just know CIA bullshit when they see it.
And they're like, yeah, okay, the CIA is making this claim with absolutely no evidence to back it up, and all of the evidence that we've been shown completely contradicts this idea.
Now, I'm not just deciding that's real.
And yet, pretty much all of MSNBC just went, that's our narrative.
CNN went, that's our narrative.
A pretty big accusation that the sitting president of the United States is colluding with a hostile foreign power to undermine American democracy.
And some people still believe that COVID has like a 50% death rate.
If things are repeated, people believe that.
But the truth is that Donald Trump, who, by the way, personally, I think Donald Trump should be prosecuted for war crimes and spend the rest of his life in prison.
He was set up by the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI. Let me ask you this, because if you're really considering one day running for president, what do you think it's like?
I think, to me, I think the role of whoever runs for president on the Libertarian Party, what it's about is...
It's about not just spreading a message and introducing more people to the ideas of libertarianism and trying to convince people that this is the way to go, but I think what the Libertarian Party could really do with a presidential nominee is to set the agenda for what the Democrats and Republicans have to talk about now.
Like, you guys might want to talk about this, but guess what?
We're talking about this because we're just going to keep beating this drum and make such a compelling argument that if you're not talking about this, enough of the American people are going to realize, like, hey, how come you're not talking about this?
There has to be, like, what you need is a huge movement of people just simply demanding we're not taking this anymore.
Because just like we said before, when they poke out about the war in Syria or regulating the internet and there's enough resistance, they don't do it.
So what you need is enough people to just be focused.
Just, again, it doesn't have to be everything perfect, but, like, five issues, like, we are not fighting another stupid war, period.
No one's going to tolerate it.
None.
We're not putting people in jail for nonviolent crimes.
Period.
We won't tolerate one more person going into a cage for a nonviolent victimless crime.
And, you know, and whatever.
And corporate bailouts and corporate welfare and, you know, all the COVID lockdowns.
Like, if you get enough people and it's just overwhelming the consensus, whoever's in there, they're going to have a real tough time.
Well, it'd be nice if things turned around, right?
You know, you go back to World War II and you see how everything kind of turned around afterwards and the world got to be, you know, got to be a better place.
There's a lot that should have never been doing comedy anyway.
Yeah.
But it's like, you know, there's going to be puzzles and problems, and you've got to figure out how to solve those.
And when you look at your life, one of the more exciting things about life is when you don't know what's going to happen next, and you're really in this complete state of...
Possibilities.
You're at the launching pad, and it's frustrating, and it's scary, and it's really nerve-wracking for comics when you're first starting out.
There's different points where you're more vulnerable than other points, and to face a huge amount of adversity at your most vulnerable point is, I think, a lot worse than when you're a little bit stronger and ready to deal with it.
And I am...
I'm very grateful personally that I feel like I was at a point where – because I've seen people literally go crazy.
Like people's really lives have been ruined over this whole last year.
And I just feel like I was like, okay, it hit where like I was making – personally, like I was making enough money just from doing the podcasting and stuff like that and doing stuff that I could do uninterrupted completely the whole time through COVID.
I've also – I'm married and I have a kid.
So I'm kind of like – it was easier than like in my 20s where I would have been more isolated and cut off and stuff.
And so I'm lucky in a sense that for me personally, it was very easy for me to weather, personally, you know, the storm of like, oh, okay, the lockdown and stuff like this.
And the other thing about it is that and this is true in general in life.
Right.
With like a kind of a victim ideology or a victim narrative versus the narrative that you're talking about of conquering, you know, like adversity.
There is truth to both of them.
Like there are people who are really victims.
And there is also something to conquering adversity.
But in terms of which narrative is more helpful and useful, there is no question that this one is just death and this one can really help you get through something.
So no matter what, even if there's truth in both, it is always better to have the outlook that you're going to conquer this thing and no matter what's thrown at you, you're going to get past this.
I remember I had a real problem with that for a while when I was, like, younger in comedy.
I've been doing comedy for seven, eight years or something, and I get very jealous of other people who were getting things that I wasn't getting, and I really drive myself crazy thinking about this.
And then I remember having a moment where a really good friend of mine got a big thing, and I was like, damn it, he got that!
And I almost caught myself and was like, Oh man, I do not want to be this person.
I'm like the person now who's like not happy for someone I love for getting something good.
And I really, I had to make such a conscious effort and it was really, really hard for me to just be like, I am simply not allowing myself to do that.
I am just going to be happy and inspired by other people who are getting things, and I'm going to put all of that energy into trying to get what I want out of this career.
It's such an important thing to talk about because every single comic feels that.
They all feel that because it's such a competitive thing in that you're trying to get ahead.
Especially if you're trying to get on television and do other things outside of comedy and get chosen for things, or get chosen for specials, things along those lines.
It's really common.
I experienced it really early on, and I caught myself one time because I was only like 21 or 22. I'd only been doing comedy a couple years, but I remember wanting people who went on before me to bomb.
And I remember feeling that, like, oh my god, what a bitch I am.
I'm scared that they're going to do well.
And it was really, I wasn't very good.
It was terrible.
I was just starting out, so my comedy was very shaky.
So I wanted someone to do badly so I could come in and look like I was good.
And then I realized that while I was in the back of the comedy club waiting to go on, I'm like, oh my god, you bitch.
And I remember being hugely disappointed with myself and then never letting myself think like that again.
I remember thinking, you can never think like that again.
And if you don't take any risks, you don't fail and you never grow.
And that's just how life goes.
It's not an obvious formula.
It seems counterintuitive, like you don't want to feel the pain of it, but you have to.
You have to.
I remember the early days of the comedy store, some guys started getting TV shows and things, and you could see the anger and the jealousy of the other people.
They literally would hate them.
They would hate people who were doing well.
And some of them, a lot of them wound up...
There's always like...
Potential, but potential is like, what does it mean?
You can get a laugh every now and then.
The people that can actually formulate and act and figure out how to become a real comic, it's like, what is the percentage?
If you think about the people that you started out with, what are the percentages of them that actually wound up being professionals?
Well, dude, that means the fucking world to me, man.
Cause I've, I've been a huge fan of yours like forever, dude.
And like, I've, I've told you this before off podcast, but you're like, not just your whole podcast, but talking monkeys in space literally like had a profound impact on my standup career.
Like I was, I had just started when that special came out and I remember looking at it and being like, wow, so you can really do Anything.
Like, with stand-up.
Like, I wanted to talk about all of these more kind of deep ideas and have these longer, like, bits.
But I was like, I can't really do that.
You gotta just, like, tell jokes in stand-up.
And then I saw you have, like, all these, like, long, like, chunks about, like, ancient Egypt and all these different things.
And they were still hilarious the whole way through.
And I was like, oh, you can just do that.
And, like, your career really inspired me, man.
Like, the fact that you're just, like...
Like, imagine if you had told someone on paper in the 90s.
What you were going to do.
You had some agent and they were like, so you're going to act or you're going to write?
And you'd have been like, I'm going to kind of be like an MMA commentator, stand-up comedian who does a TV show but I'm the network and I'll talk to like a physicist and then we'll talk about politics and then we'll talk about hunting and then we'll talk about this and they'd be like...