Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti critique corporate media’s access-driven bias, exposing Amazon’s exploitative labor policies—$9B lawsuits dismissed, bathroom breaks tracked, and workers fired via app—while questioning why billionaires like Bezos evade accountability. They link pandemic-era culture wars to elite distraction tactics, citing $500M National Guard spending post-January 6th and media’s dismissal of the lab leak theory despite McNeil’s ideological confession. Pre-Trump, they highlight mainstream outlets’ fear of unpopular truths, contrasting with independent journalists like Greenwald and Taibbi. Ultimately, their independent platform challenges systemic power imbalances, from monopolistic capitalism to unanswered UFO mysteries, arguing truth matters more than corporate or partisan loyalty. [Automatically generated summary]
We've been thinking about going independent for a while because it's just more consistent with our values.
The Hill takes money from all kinds of people that are very contrary to the things that we've been talking about.
But You know, it's scary.
I got kids, I got bills, health insurance, all this stuff.
And so I think especially during COVID when we couldn't actually directly interact with the audience in person, it's hard to know how real it is.
So when we talked to you and we were like, oh, we're thinking about it, we're kind of nervous, and you weren't just like, maybe, you were like, yes, do this.
It actually really did help us to make the move, so thank you.
It's really scary, and it's one of those things where, we were telling you this before, where you're like, you don't know If you're like, am I going to miss this?
You have these guys.
You have the support.
I don't have to deal with all this administrative stuff and set design and upload.
But honestly, we love it so much.
We wrapped, I think, our second show so we could finally...
I texted her.
I was like, this is amazing!
We're free!
We do it the way that we want.
We produce it the way that we want.
And just having all the, like, big stuff out of your mind in terms of, like, the pressures of corporate media.
Because, to be clear, like, The Hill never, like, directly censored us, right?
But, and you've talked about this, it's about these outside interests.
Like, there's interests that their company has that have nothing to do with us, but could impact their interests based upon what I say.
And I've told this story publicly now about what happened, but, like, we were doing a segment.
This basic segment.
I want to be very charitable.
And once again, to be clear, the Hill never said anything.
They said, don't say this or whatever.
But we're talking about the seniority system for Democrats in Congress.
And I was like, this creates really perverse incentives because you have all these really old people who run Congress, like Maxine Waters, who's like 80 years old.
Here's all I said.
Maxine Waters will be chairwoman of the Financial Services Committee till the day she dies.
That's it.
So I later find out her fucking press secretary called someone at the Hill and said, Sagar's issuing a death threat against Maxine Waters.
Sagar's issuing...
What do I want to say?
I want to say, go fuck yourself.
I'd be like, literally put me on the phone with them.
Go fuck yourself.
But here's the problem.
And once again, The Hill didn't say anything, but I have to know this in the back of my mind.
Hill reporters have to go and talk to Maxine Waters.
That's literally part of their job.
She's chairman of the Financial Services Committee.
She has a lot of access.
One of the most powerful people in Washington.
She does other shit with The Hill.
And so in the back of my mind, I'm like, can I say whatever the fuck I want about Maxine Waters?
I mean, they didn't tell me to say it.
But even if it's the back of my mind, I would be lying if I wasn't saying that That wasn't with me a little bit, right?
You're always thinking.
You're like, man, they're not going to fuck with me.
And there were things, too, like I didn't even want Because the whole ethos of our show is we're independent-minded, right?
We're not carrying water for anyone.
We have our views.
We're very upfront about those views, but we're not doing partisan cheerleading here.
We're not carrying water for any corporation or entity or anything like that.
And so even the appearance of the Hill's a corporate entity and they're taking money from these various places, that's their right to do.
Even the appearance that that would affect our coverage really, really bothered me.
And so I'll give you a perfect example.
Do you know about this case of Steven Donziger?
It's a crazy thing.
He's a lawyer who won a massive lawsuit against Chevron for the horrific things that they did in Ecuador and basically destroyed the whole area.
And he wins a $9 billion, I think it was, suit against them, largest in history.
They hit him.
They're trying to fight back against him.
They hit him with a contempt of court charge, which is a misdemeanor.
Which is nothing.
He's been under house arrest for now two years.
Completely unprecedented.
Show trial.
It's an insane situation.
And we were working on getting him booked to talk about this.
And meanwhile I'm seeing tweets that are saying, Crystal and Sagar aren't covering this because the Hill's taking money from the American Petroleum Institute.
But I hated that that was even a legitimate, by the way, question in people's minds.
So it was things like that.
And I have to say, like Sagar, I was worried there would be things that I really missed about having the corporate structure, like just that support system around.
We feel so free.
Doing the show is just an absolute pleasure.
We feel unencumbered.
It's actually even more of a relief and the audience has showed up for us even more than we ever could have expected.
The thing is, what they did by saying that you issued a death threat against them is literally that is everything that's wrong with politics and everything that's right about your show is that you guys are just present and honest and you see things and you talk about those things without biases.
And you have perspectives, but you don't have biases.
And the problem with these people is it's all bullshit.
And so by saying that, they know you didn't really issue a death threat.
And the crazy thing is- But they're playing a game.
This happened twice.
So this happened to another time.
So I was doing a lot of reporting around TikTok.
And I was noticing all of these former Republican lawmaker lobbyists are working now for TikTok because I heard they were paying top dollar rates.
So I do some investigation.
This is basic Google.
I went on Google and I was looking at who TikTok has been hiring.
And one of them, I'm not kidding you, is the former head or a part of the Department of Homeland Security Cybersecurity Division, who is now working for TikTok, the Chinese government.
I know you're MMA trained, but apparently I'm issuing death threats left and right.
But again, now once I have to think about this, I'm like, this is crazy.
And here's the other problem.
The Hill was taking ad dollars at the time from Huawei.
So Huawei, which is a Chinese telecom company, And I was thinking in the back of my mind, man, if TikTok was real smart, they'd buy some advertising at The Hill.
In some ways, it was really brought, you know, back from the dead by Trump because he increased traffic so much and subscriber numbers so much for the New York Times and Washington.
I mean, that's the irony of his whole attack on the media was the best thing that ever happened to the media.
But the overall model is in freefall and people are revolting.
I mean, that's really what with the success of your show with, you know, what what has happened with Breaking Points, our new show that has been totally wild is People don't want this spoon-fed narrative.
They don't want to have to think about, like, why is this paper covering these politicians in this incredibly fluffy way?
Because they're more interested in maintaining their access and maintaining their social status within that club than they are in actually getting the facts right in a way that can require sometimes courage, that can be uncomfortable sometimes with your social set.
And so I really do see it as kind of a watershed moment where some of the old models are dying and people are sick and tired of having their attention monetized.
They're sick and tired of being fed whatever the, like, safe mainstream narrative is.
And all they want is just someone who, look, may get it wrong sometimes, but is really just trying to figure out what the truth of the matter is.
Isn't it amazing that that lady, her doing that in front of the camera, and not knowing that they were even filming, and then someone takes it and releases it, everybody gets a chance to see.
That movie proves everything about what went wrong with America, with Hollywood, entertainment.
Vin Diesel begged to open that movie in China because all of their opening dollars come from China, Fast and Furious 9. First, I did a whole monologue about this, and I was like, do we really need nine?
There's a big article in the New York Times today about inside an Amazon warehouse.
And Amazon was the first to say Black Lives Matter and put that banner up on their page and everything.
And look, I support a lot of goals of that movement.
But you read through this article and you find out, first of all, The way they treat their largely black and brown warehouse workers, I mean, it's despicable.
They intentionally make sure they cannot move up the ladder.
That's part of their business policy is if you're an hourly worker, you're not going to get promoted, and they try to force you out after three years because they think you're getting lazy.
So this is the company that can, on the surface level, say Black Lives Matter because they think that's good for their profit maximization and their brand and their shareholder value.
At the same time, what they're actually doing in real life, wildly different than that.
Walmart, who I'm also not a fan of, they actually promote from within.
So most Walmart managers start out as hourly employees.
So at least they have a track up.
And again, I'm not a fan of Walmart, okay?
Amazon intentionally, and this is what the New York Times revealed, they intentionally have a system because Bezos said he believes that these human beings are lazy and that after, you know, that they're going to do the bare minimum.
Everyone's tracking your movement, steps, bathroom breaks as well.
So the warehouses are also very large.
So let's say you technically have a 20-minute break.
It might take you 10 minutes to actually walk to the break room and back so you actually have, what, like a two-minute break while you're in there.
And the whole thing around Amazon and why everyone should care is because Amazon, under the pandemic, exploded.
Their stock price went up from, I think, $1,000 or so to a couple, $3,000.
Bezos personally, his wealth increased by $70 billion.
Amazon is now the second largest employer in the United States.
And this is incredibly important because as more Amazon market adoption happens, they are basically going to become the employer of choice.
Whatever your grocery store or whatever was in your small town, these are the rural working class Americans.
This is their only job.
So when you have one company which has all of this overwhelming power over rural working Americans and even suburban Americans, because this is Amazon's strategy.
Dayton, Ohio is a good example.
Alec McGillis, he wrote a great book on Amazon, shout out to him, talked about how Dayton was like this Silicon Valley of America in the 1900s, you know, manufacturing, middle class jobs.
Now, Dayton's prized economic value comes from the fact that it's one day's drive from one third of the U.S. population.
So it's a great place for cardboard.
So everybody there is all just involved in creating cardboard and other Amazon information.
So the Amazonification, so to speak, or whatever, of America makes it so that, let's say 30 years ago, you grew up in your town, you may have to go to Walmart, H-E-B, I grew up here in Texas, Kroger as well, McDonald's, something like that.
Now, it's basically like McDonald's, Dairy Queen, and Amazon.
And when Amazon is the prime market employer, they are the sole determiner of market conditions, increasingly.
So it's Walmart and Amazon, which are number two.
And we're talking about millions of people.
Who are now working at this company.
So people are like, why do you guys talk so much about Amazon?
Because I can see the trends.
This company's not going anywhere.
Look, props to them.
I love Amazon.
I order a lot of stuff on Amazon.
But increasingly becoming aware of the price of what it takes to do overnight delivery to your house at 4 a.m.
am in the morning or increasingly becoming aware of the fact that they are basically on this mission to drive price down as much as possible and squeeze as much out of their workforce.
That is where it's trouble.
What was the furniture thing that we just covered?
I would like to click the button that's like, I'll pay a little bit more if you can promise me no driver had to shit in a bag in order to get this to me tomorrow.
Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos, did not want hourly workers to stick around for long, viewing a large disgruntled workforce as a threat, this other executive recalled, who worked at Amazon but then left.
Company data showed that most employers became less eager over time, he said, and Mr. Bezos believed people were inherently lazy.
What he would say is that our nature as humans is to expend as little energy as possible to get what we want or need.
That was embedded throughout the business, from the ease of instant ordering to the pervasive use of data to get the most out of employees, so guaranteed wage increases stop after three years, and Amazon provided incentives for low-skilled employees to leave.
So every year they would offer associates thousands of dollars to resign.
They made sure that any position, they gave people sort of the illusion of promotions being available, but then there'd be one promotion available for hundreds of people.
And they very seldom Higher or higher management from within their own ranks.
It's totally class stratified as basically the bottom line.
And of course, lower classes in America are disproportionately black and brown.
It's not like they're specifically targeting black and brown people.
But you have one class of people that they see as worthy of doing the grunt work and shitting in the bag, and one class of people that they think is worthy of actually having the more intellectual jobs and running the place.
It's a really abhorrent way of viewing human beings, essentially.
This is part of the kind of, again, rot of America that I also think is reflected with the John Cena thing, etc.
It's like, you're certainly more of a capitalist than I am, but you can't have a country where the only frickin' value is money.
This kind of shit drives me nuts, and I can't believe they actually report this.
When it says it's been alleged that Bezos has barked out questions like, are you lazy or just incompetent at employees, and referred to the publishing industry as...
A sickly gazelle.
First of all, how the fuck does that get printed?
It's been alleged that he's barked out questions.
Unless you have a video of him saying that, shut the fuck up.
This is the problem I have, though, because to what Crystal was referencing.
And again, look, I'm more capitalist than Crystal, but I look at what's happening with Bezos and with Amazon and this unionization drive, which there was a recent failed unionization drive at one of their warehouses in Bessemer, Alabama.
So Bezos reportedly got pissed that politicians were shitting on Amazon.
And so I think it was Representative Mark Pocan tweeted out, like, Amazon workers are peeing in bottles.
And Amazon's actual Twitter account was like, you don't believe the peeing in bottles story, do you?
And he was like, yeah, I do.
And then all of these former Amazon employees and current started reporting official, like, company guidance around peeing and shitting in bags.
See, you don't really believe in the thing.
And then they had to go and correct it.
And they were like, actually, it's true.
Some of our workers actually do pee in bottles.
And a lot of this comes down to this.
Jeff Bezos, his wealth increased by $70 billion.
And I've heard Scott Galloway say this, who's actually...
So they recruit people to be fake Amazon employees, and anytime someone tweets something like, you know, what we're talking about here, they'll come in and be like, I'm an Amazon employee, and my name's Bob, and I love it.
Ken Klippenstein, amazing journalist, who one of the reasons why he gets these stories is because he reaches down to the rank and file instead of the execs.
He had leaked to him The guidelines and the protocols of how to be an Amazon bot on Twitter, basically.
How to set up your handle, the types of things to say, what things not to engage with.
So I do have one more Amazon anecdote for you that Sagar was referencing.
So they've started, you know how Wayfair and other companies, they'll do like delivery and they'll assemble your shit for you, your furniture or whatever.
So Amazon's trying to compete with them and they're just taking the normal drivers.
They're not giving them any training in furniture assembly, like this isn't their specialty or whatever.
And they're just like, now do this also.
And they give them these specific time limits for how long it's supposed to take them to assemble these various pieces of furniture.
Now, you're maybe good at this stuff.
I'm definitely not that good at that stuff.
I don't think Sagar is pretty good.
So anyway, here's the allotments.
Amazon allotted 11 minutes and 15 seconds for two drivers to transport a 59-part ottoman to a customer's room of choice, unpack, and assemble it according to one schedule.
And this is like typical of the type of timing.
And it's not like there's no consequence if you don't meet that timeline.
If you don't meet that timeline routinely, you're fired.
So this is the type of demands that they put on workers that are just completely unrealistic.
It seems like when you start putting money as the most important thing above the health and the happiness of the people that work for you, what is the solution?
And is the problem...
Stockholders.
There's a problem in the fact that this is a public company, and so there's a lot of different people that get a chance to...
They have a say because the ultimate duty is to make sure that the company continues to make more money every year.
And this is something that Crystal and I definitely depart from a lot of my conservative friends on this, which is that if you really think about it, a union is a very inherently conservative organization.
It's a non-governmental institution of people who band together and then use their collective power in negotiation with management.
Now, the problem, though, right here with Amazon is Amazon is virulently anti-union.
They will basically do anything they possibly...
And this is basically an official Bezos policy.
Like, we will not negotiate on unions.
They threw everything they possibly could at the Bessemer election.
And look, I mean, they did win, and that's the reason why they raised their wage to like $15 an hour, or I think it's $17 an hour now.
And they're like, we have the best healthcare and all this is because it's basically like, you're gonna get this, but don't you goddamn dare unionize.
And it's not just Amazon.
Walmart, I think, just recently, they said they're going to give all of their employees a free Samsung phone, but it's like 729,000 employees.
And buried within the stuff is that you're going to be tracked when you get that phone.
Now the phone is with you, and that's the company phone.
And the company phone is going to collect all of this data, exactly as you're talking about.
You only have 15 seconds in order to go and get this and place it into the bin, which is the average time.
And, oh, you have sciatica?
Fuck you.
Oh, you have your leg is broken or like you're in a boot or something because you were injured on the job?
Fuck you.
I once read this Daily Beast story, which was horrific, where it aggregated like a FOIA thing of all of the suicide calls from Amazon warehouses.
So it's like, we got another one over here at the plant.
They're like, we got another one.
They're like, oh, you know, somebody just jumped.
They're like, oh, this guy's insane.
Now, look, a lot of people work in Amazon plans, so it's not like there's a lot of numbers and stuff here.
And I'm not just singling out Amazon because actually, like I was explaining, they're the top of the labor market.
The problem with our labor market is that our current workforce does not have enough power to negotiate with the shareholder class.
We solved this in the 1920s and 30s.
We had a whole fight about this in our politics around unions and worker power and wages.
I saw...
I saw a politician, I can't even remember who it was, talking about this with relation to Uber, where they're like, well, they can just go and they can leave if they can just leave and go work somewhere else.
But in many cases, like I'm explaining with Amazon, if you work in a town where the only thing you can do is work at the warehouse, you don't have a lot of power.
Right.
We have to go back to a scenario where workers have some power in negotiation.
Look, I think shareholder capitalism has grown amok.
We have a lot of problems.
That being said, there's a lot, obviously, to the engine of why we are the preeminent world economy and the preeminent society.
The problem is it's become unchecked.
Is that basically 1975, 1980s and so onward, the shareholder march, that's what led us to the China problem.
Wall Street and the shareholder class are the ones, they knew that it was going to screw working class jobs here in the US. They're the ones who pushed for more free trade with China.
And then the political class are the ones who said, not only is shit going to be cheaper, because that was the trade-off.
They're like, shit's going to be cheaper in America.
Congratulations, it's all cheaper.
We also lost our entire middle class, especially in the industrial Midwest.
But China's going to become more liberal and free and open.
And that was a total failure.
Instead, we have imported Chinese autocracy to our country.
Fucking John Cena, LeBron James, and James Harden are on the side of the CCP over their own citizens.
Shaq is the only guy who spoke up for Daryl Morey whenever it came to Shaq!
The Chinese understand us better than we do in some ways because they get that money's the weak spot.
And so you asked what the answer is.
I mean, look, it's not straightforward, but basically there's two pieces.
There's a policy piece that Sagar's talking about.
Giving workers, rebalancing the scales.
There used to be a balance on the scales where workers that had more power within the workplace.
You had fewer of these gigantic firms that just control the entire market.
So there's a policy piece here that's extraordinarily important.
There's also a societal choice.
Like, do we want to put We're good to go.
The whole structure of society is basically set up to cater to, frankly, people like us who are doing well and we want to have everything at our fingertips as cheap as possible, as soon as possible, every experience, etc., etc.
And it's become wildly unbalanced so that...
If not a majority, close to a majority of the population, it really is very hard to live.
Housing prices are going insanely up.
So the idea of a working class family affording a home anywhere in America is just wildly out of reach.
That's the one way that you can basically build wealth in America.
You have no choice in terms of employers, so if you hate Amazon or they fire you or whatever, you're fucked because there's nothing else in your town because everything else has been sucked out to China.
This is one of the reasons why the really skeptical people, the people that are very cynical about things, think that some of the lockdown was on purpose and that what people were trying to do Was trying to accentuate the power that these big corporations had.
But you know, before we play this, the thing about him is, yes, he's always progressive, but he was always willing to take shots and call out hypocrisy wherever he saw it.
So you knew what his ideology was, but he did not pull punches.
Yeah, but that was the other thing that was crazy, the differences between the way people on the right and the left were looking at those emails, the Fauci emails that got leaked.
So many people were saying, like, the fact that what hellscape world we live in, where anyone could look at those emails and think that Fauci is a villain, is so insane and shows you where we're at right now.
Hold the fuck on!
You've got emails where this guy is saying that masks don't work.
In February.
Yes, while he's been telling everybody you have to mask up.
You've got emails where he's saying, hey, is this coming from a lab?
And there was a scientist in the emails that was reaching out to him saying, when you examine this closely, there's aspects of this virus that seem to be engineered.
Then, when all the emails came out, deleted his Twitter account, and now he's moving to the And what's even worse, Joe, is he was actually the person who was the ringleader of the Nature magazine piece, I think it was March of 2020, saying that coronavirus definitively did not come from the lab.
So in January 31st, 2020, sends Fauci an email saying that the coronavirus genome is not consistent with evolutionary theory.
Because when you won't even say the name of a country because you're worried about offending China, and we're supposed to believe that these people are completely unbiased, I was like, I got scared.
What he expertly shows is if this is true, the lab leak hypothesis is true, Yes, the Chinese covered it up.
Guess what?
The Chinese are liars, and they covered up SARS, and they've covered up basically everything that's come out of their country for the last like 30 years.
That's not a shocker.
The shocker is Dr. Anthony Fauci, 2017, reverses the ban on gain-of-function research, directs this funding to EcoHealth Alliance, Dr. Peter Daszak, who then gives it to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for the study of novel bat coronaviruses.
And then when the pandemic turns around, we take Dr. Peter Daszak as the only American To join the World Health Organization's investigation team into whether coronavirus leaked from a lab.
And on 60 Minutes, I forget who was interviewing him, she goes, well, wait, so how did you verify it?
Did you just ask them?
And he goes, well, what else can we do?
Because he's also half British.
And that's how he goes, well, what else can we do?
Oh, we could read emails.
We could also see that Peter Daszak, as of two days ago, has been caught lying.
He said there were no live bats...
Inside of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Sky News Australia just revealed a 2017 video that bats were present inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the deputy director says, before this, China had no experience in BSL-4, that's the highest level safety for a laboratory, but we have been here, and I... I don't want to misquote him, but he said something along the lines of creating new viruses, synthesizing new viruses.
And what Fauci and Dr. Xi, who is the head of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, they're playing fucking games.
Fauci and Rand Paul, when Rand Paul was pressing him, he was like, we did not fund gain-of-function research.
He's trying to define it as explicitly what is on the record of him funding.
Every human being is flawed, and especially when you're in that kind of position of power and you have certain incentives, like, you have to ask questions about these things.
But there was another element, too.
And this was, frankly, an ingenious play by the media and the scientific community, is not only was it, oh, Trump and his band of wackos are the ones that are promoting this theory, but also that this theory is somehow racist.
And the moment that the lab leak theory was pegged as racist, that's when it really became toxic for anyone in the mainstream to ask questions about because you don't want to be pegged as like, oh, well, you're just pursuing this racist conspiracy theory.
And my thought has always been from the beginning, like, first of all, we just need the answer, like, neutrally to look at what actually happened here.
But second of all, if we're playing the which is more racist game, it seemed way worse to me when people were like, oh, Chinese people eat bats and that's disgusting and they're so weird and that's how we all got this pandemic.
That seemed to me way more problematic than the idea that a lab that, by the way, the USA is funding, that something leaked accidentally from that lab.
So that was really the thing that put this all off the table was this strategic weaponization of, you know, what is a very real problem of alleging racism.
It's the scientific community teamed up with them.
Well, basically, they got the luckiest fucking break of their lives that Trump was president because they teamed up with the media and they made it so that it was racist to question.
Even recently, the lead New York Times reporter on COVID tweeted and then deleted.
Are we ever going?
Someday we will acknowledge the racist origins of the lab leak theory.
New York Times reporter was in charge of COVID. Right.
This is still in their brains.
They have brain worms because of Trump.
And I was telling Crystal, because of Trump, 35% of this popular, you could have smoking gun proof.
Their lab leak theory was true.
35% of the population, hardcore Democrats who watch MSNBC, they'll never believe it.
They'll always say that it's racist.
And here's the problem, which this is the same problem with all Trump stuff.
If this is true, we should be having a national conversation around gain-of-function research.
We should have a Wuhan Commission around gain-of-function research.
Instead, they want to do a January 6th commission in order to reconstruct the events of a day where we all fucking know what happened.
Okay?
It's over.
We know.
I'm not saying it wasn't terrible.
But that is not what the driving conversation—what is it?
It's June 15th.
Why are we still talking about January 6th?
We should be talking right now.
Did U.S. government funds explicitly directed towards novel coronavirus research, which led to the worst pandemic in a century and cost the global economy trillions of dollars?
And as Josh is the first one to point out, the response from the scientific community has been we need more gain-of-function research, $1.2 billion to the global VIROM project.
And so once again, the scientific community wanted all of this covered up.
They teamed up with the media to protect their funding resources.
Because what people forget, Fauci is actually the king of funding.
The National Institute of Infectious Disease, I believe, that's NIAD, that's what he's in charge of.
They are the primary funding authority.
For huge amounts of the scientific community.
We had Dr. Brett Weinstein on our show, and he was explaining this to us, which is that if you're inside of that research system, you need access to those dollars to keep your lab afloat.
My dad is a professor at Texas A&M, and so I know a little bit about funding and the way that you keep your tenure positions in a lot of these universities is you have to continually bring funding in.
So both my parents are professors there, and so a lot of the professorial game Is getting money from granting institutions.
Now, in the science community, it's from the National Science Foundation, it's from the National Institute, or whatever, Fauci is the head of the National Institute of Health.
They have to keep the dollars flowing.
So if you admit this is gain-of-function research, you start asking questions, the NIH and Fauci can fucking cut you off.
Like, this is a whole business.
It's a multi-billion dollar.
I mean, it's an industry because it's about research.
And look, the core theme of our show is like, follow the money, right?
So follow the money.
Where's the money lead?
At least Fauci, Peter Daszak.
And it's like, look, I don't want to sound crazy, but this is basically like a global conspiracy in terms of the Chinese government.
It's a total cover-up of the Chinese government, the US government, the guy who was on the fucking TV, and we were all supposed to trust this entire time, and it turns out he's the guy who reversed the ban in the first place in order to take advantage of the chaos under Trump, and I know it's so complicated, and regular people...
This is what bothers me most about the mainstream media.
People want to live their lives and they want answers.
And increasingly, they know they are being lied to, but they do not have the time because it's our job in order to explain all this about Peter Daszak and the World Health Organization, what is gain-of-function research, how Washington actually works, the global funding structures, etc.
People are being lied to.
They have been completely lied to on the story.
I do think this is the biggest failure since Iraq WMD. I think this is WMD 2.0.
Well, and there's a couple things that are really important about it.
I mean, number one, just knowing how the pandemic started so we can avoid it in the future.
That would be a good thing.
But number two, it really does reveal the brokenness of the media and the way that they were complicit here, the way that they actually bought the lies because they were viewing everything through this culture war lens.
Rather than just looking for and searching for the facts.
So they looked at, okay, I know Dr. Fauci.
I've been talking to him for years.
I have this relationship with him and I trust him.
And on the other side, we have these crazy kooks.
So I'm not even going to dig any further.
I'm just going to assume that what these people are saying is correct.
And again, you layer on the charge of racism and it makes a very potent brew.
So it shows the way that these facts Failures and vulnerabilities within the media can lead to wildly misleading the entire population for a year on what, I mean, you'd have to say this was one of the most important questions of the entire year, and they just were absolutely complicit in a total cover-up where you couldn't even talk about it.
This is the thing that I hated around this whole pandemic is like, and Trump definitely made all of this worse with the culture war and like the whole like the anti mask stance and all this.
You have people who built up identities around whatever their pandemic era choices were.
And then the media fed this, like, you know, the left media was like, the people who are, if you're having a hard time right now, the people to blame are those, like, crazy right-wing, like, your neighbor, your friend, your uncle down the street who has views that are different from yours.
And if you're listening to right-wing media, it's like the real villain are these people that are wearing double masks, et cetera, et cetera.
And it just feeds this...
This partisan hatred, this sectarian-like hatred between these two camps.
And then it makes it impossible to get to the facts of things like lab leak because everybody's just feeding it through these stupid cultural lens.
And meanwhile, the people like we were talking about before who profited and benefited off of all of this misery and pain and suffering They don't they face no scrutiny.
They get off scot-free because the media is so interested in the political class are so interested in making us all hate each other and blame each other for the things that are going wrong in the country.
For Democrats, number one was Trump supporters, and I think white supremacy was probably like number two or three.
And for Republicans, it was immigration.
So again, like those people and liberals, right?
So it was...
Rather than thinking about the people who actually have power, who got wildly rich off of your suffering this year, it's like the media has conditioned everyone to just hate each other and think that your neighbor, your friend, your mom, whoever in your life that holds different views from you, be they liberal or conservative, that they're the real problem.
They're the real threat.
Think about that language, the real threat.
It's not...
War or peace or climate change or anything like, or a natural disaster.
It's your neighbor.
And that situation cannot persist in America.
I mean, that doesn't lead to anywhere good at all if you actually think that that is the scariest thing to your life and, like, the future for your kids.
And it allows the political class to just do nothing.
And one of the reasons why I think it's important because it highlights the reasons why a guy like Donald Trump is so fucking dangerous is because a guy can incite a bunch of morons to do something really fucking stupid.
And now that he's silenced off of social media and now that, you know, that actually did happen.
If it was a real commission, I would believe you, Joe.
But knowing how these things work, I know that this commission would be some sort of bullshit, like the Benghazi report before it or many of these others.
The way that the politics works around it, it will dominate the news cycle.
And here's the thing, though.
Washington actually is a zero-sum game.
Like, when I'm talking about mutual exclusivity, it actually is.
Senate floor time is the most precious thing in D.C. So whatever the driving conversation of the D.C. is that day, it is actually detracting from somewhere else because these people take vacations literally every other day, the August recess is coming up, all of this.
So when we focus on—I mean, look, the presidency— Like, the presidency is really about 100 days, and after that, you're, like, running for the midterms, and after that, you're running for re-election.
In terms of the last, what, I think, like, 75, 80 years of the American presidency, the vast majority of major legislation moves in the first couple of months of the administration, and that's it.
You're totally dead.
And so for the fact that January 6th continues to dominate American politics, I agree with you.
It's completely important.
And if it was a real commission, yes.
But I know that there are these titanic other issues moving within American politics and that are getting zero attention.
Lab leak is actually number one.
Maybe somebody should go and ask a Democratic senator whether they believe in the lab leak theory or not.
This is the mutual exclusivity.
Is because the CNN reporter must ask this because he needs to give his bosses something to air on the nightly news that day, which is part of the editorial agenda.
The Fox News reporter has to do the same thing.
And it comes together to mask all of these incredibly important issues.
So it's it really is a tragedy because it's like you said, I don't want to downplay Jan 6. I actually think it was terrible.
And it does show like the power of, you know, of a demagogue, like of a charlatan whenever you become president.
But Whenever we're focusing on that at the expense of everything else, and maybe we should even ask, why are these people all like, why are you willing to storm the Capitol for Trump?
Here's why I really agree with you, is January 6th was like a case study in all that's gone wrong in the country.
And you're absolutely right.
I think what you said is really profound about this is a thing that happened and now you're very likely to see similar repeats, similar type of, whether it's on the right or the left or whatever.
And you just know that the sort of partisan commission that will come out of Washington, we know what the answer will be.
The answer will be, number one, Republicans are bad and Donald Trump is bad.
They will do, if you were going to really get to the root of what's going on, It would implicate too many Democrats as well who've been happy to play this game of mutual demonization and existential politics that only lead to these sort of horrific outcomes.
And again, that doesn't take agency away from any of the people who did this shit, who are morons and deserve whatever punishment is appropriate.
The problem is, what this will lead to is, number one, Donald Trump's bad.
Okay, we get that.
We all know that and we have our feelings about it.
Number two, this justifies us taking more surveillance power, creeping into your life more, demonizing the other side, quote unquote, even more.
And so, 100%.
I mean, actually, you could think about our show and what we do every day.
As trying to get to the roots of how you end up in a fucking terrible place like January 6th.
Do I think that our political class is going to do it?
No, of course not.
Of course not, because it implicates too many of them.
So they'll just search for the partisan answer.
They'll search for the answer that hands them more power and hands the sort of surveillance state and police state more power.
We're already seeing that.
Joe Biden just made a big announcement about all of that.
What was the announcement?
So he announced, and I haven't had a chance to read through all the details, but there's a new big initiative to essentially use the powers that we deployed against Islamic terrorists now against the domestic population.
So treating sort of domestic extremism in the same way that we treat it.
And this is what I want to underscore, is that When you allow this to happen in the hands of these, like, monsters, is that they will use it not to any—what you're talking about is a good-faith effort to be like, this is fucking crazy.
And I actually read a profile of one of the guys—I hate to laugh about this, but some of the people who died on January 6th had heart attacks, and it was because it was, like, the most exciting day of their lives, like, while they were storming the Capitol.
I read a profile of one of these guys— People were storming the Capitol.
They were so excited.
There were like four people who had heart attacks.
And the union, I think he was part of a union, and he had a good warehouse job.
And a lot of that left in the mid-2000s.
And he started blaming the elites, no, of course, right, for taking away that job.
And Trump spoke to him in a way that nobody had spoken to him before.
This was Trump's power.
It was giving cultural power to largely, downwardly mobile Americans.
You know, I used to really believe in a lot of the policy issues around why Trump was elected, around trade and all that.
But to be honest, it was pure, unadeliterated culture.
And that actually made me really sad because I was driving before the election around Reno, Nevada.
It was a very rural part of the country.
And right on the side of the road, there was this farmer or ranch or something.
He had a big house.
He had a Massive sign.
It was like 20, 30 feet.
And it just said, Trump, colon, fuck your feelings.
And I really realized, I was like, that was the core appeal, is that Trump gave the power to 75 million people.
Remember, he won 10 million more votes than he did last time around, to people who just fucking hate the liberal elite so much.
And the mainstream democratic elite, not the same as the progressive ideology.
I want to be very clear there.
The like woke capitalism, exactly what you're talking about.
They feel so dismissed, disgust, like the disgust like emanates from Washington, from New York, from Hollywood, from everywhere, through every organ of our culture, that in Trump, they were able to say, fuck you.
That was their one.
That's all they have left.
They don't have anything else left.
And so and I don't want to downplay once again, but like, You have to ask this question, like, how did this Obama guy storm the Capitol and then die of a heart attack because it was one of the most exciting days of his life?
Is he an idiot?
Yeah, maybe.
But, like, this manifests itself all in very dangerous conditions.
And so that's when I see all of these games.
Like, I remember post-January 6th, we were talking about, we need to do what we did in Iraq here in D.C. I'm like, no!
I think it was Joy Reid who was talking about debathification.
And if anybody wants to know, so I don't want to go too deep around a rabbit hole, but the only reason I'm in politics is because of my opposition to the Iraq War.
And I grew up not far from here in College Station, which was Very pro-Iraq war, and I thought I was losing my fucking mind as a teenager.
De-Bathification was the policy where we basically unemployed in a single day all of the people who used to work for the Saddam regime in Iraq.
Oh, they also happened to be the situation where you had to be a Ba'ath Party member if you wanted to take out the trash or the military, the police, all of that.
So the country fell to shit in six months, and that's how the insurgency happened.
And it was amazing to me watching Joy Reid and many others talking about Iraq and war on terror style policy saying that we need to do that to our own population.
That is the ultimate agenda.
We see John Brennan and all these CIA guys saying the same thing.
Yes, there we go.
That we need more counter-terrorism strategies.
More dangerous than we've seen in Al-Qaeda.
And the urgent, most terrorist...
Like, this language?
I know what this language means.
It means billions more dollars to the CIA, to a new creation of some fake, like, National Domestic Terror Center, which will be a fancy new building in McLean, Virginia, so that people can spy on you.
And then once that happens, you think they're gonna give that up?
The funding never dries up.
It has to keep coming.
Or people lose their jobs.
And once you work for the federal government, it just continues to like march on and on and on.
So we both identified this very soon.
I even saw, I don't want to attribute the quote directly to him, but I saw some suggestion somewhere about like, these are the type of people we would drone strike in Iraq, some former military.
I'm like, dude!
What is happening here?
This is crazy!
This is totally crazy!
And yet, I mean, look, it hasn't happened yet, but, like, there were a lot of discussions about a new domestic war on terror law, and you don't even really need a new war on terror law.
All you need to do is to redefine what domestic terrorism means.
The FBI can do basically whatever the fuck it wants.
Like, I have read...
Some of these affidavits of the Islamic terrorism.
This shit is scary.
They're like, I mean, they can ride up the line of entrapment where they're like, hey, do you want to bomb something?
People are searching out places like Breaking Points.
They're searching for—because, you know, most people in their normal lives, they don't experience it as like, oh my god, this person across town is like the real threat to me.
They don't experience that isn't the reality of their daily lives.
And so I do think that there's an innate hunger for a different way of approaching this.
And this is the perfect example of like with the domestic surveillance, you know, when it was the war on terror, you had a lot of progressives who were very like clear about civil libertarian, like they stood up for the principle, they really knew where they stood.
And now that we're talking about the domestic terrorism, well, suddenly they've totally flipped.
But they were there, and the reason they had to stay is because Congress was like, well, there's a QAnon forum where they say maybe real inauguration day is March.
So all of these National Guardsmen, yeah, they have to stay until March.
And then the permanent fencing was up there for a long time.
Even today, you cannot enter the Capitol building, which this is our nation's Capitol.
It used to be a very open and free place, which I always thought was amazing.
You see these tourists walking through, and I think it's important.
It's the people's house.
And it was there for months and months.
We're talking about we probably spent the official numbers haven't been released, probably like one point five billion on that deployment of National Guardsmen to Washington, D.C., turning it into a green zone, into a militarized zone for what?
And again, for what the image of the world that we broadcast from Biden's inauguration was a lockdown city, afraid of its own shadow, as you said, over a bunch of Yahoo's who stormed You have a hundred more cops on that day with riot shields.
It looks completely and totally different.
And what happened?
The National Guard and all those guys, they got billions more in the grants.
The Capitol Police, I think a few people were fired, but no real, you know...
Reckoning with that, they got millions more dollars, and we're all just supposed to move on.
It was the most shameful response that I have seen yet.
And then the domestic terrorism thing that you're seeing there.
It is money and power that concentrates, and then they use the justification of January 6th in order to blow up the budget for billions and billions more.
And then they'll use some...
And here's the thing.
They have to...
Not manufacture.
I don't want to use my words carefully, but the Herald Square thing is an example, what you were talking about with a 19-year-old, that they're going to go out there on these forums and start grooming kids and saying, hey, do you fucking hate, you know, like, do you hate brown people or something?
Well, you should buy this thing and buy a ticket to come to this convention.
The moment you buy the ticket, they're going to fucking nail you, right?
No president comes into office and says, I'm going to give some of these powers that I have that I think have gone too far, I'm going to give some of that up.
So today, it's Biden, and it's Democrats in charge, and so the focus is on white supremacists or people on the right.
Under Trump, he wanted to make Antifa classified as a domestic terror organization.
Now look, if people break the law in Antifa or they're violent or whatever, obviously they should be dealt with.
We don't need any new laws to do this.
So this isn't like, okay, we're only going to go after the ones on the right or the left.
If you're thinking this is going to benefit your political cause, you need to put that aside.
This has to be about...
You asked what we can do to push back.
It really has to be people who have actual principles, who apply them consistently, even when they think it might hurt, quote unquote, their team.
And that's where you just, you know, the media and the political class obviously goes in the complete opposite direction, where they flip-flop constantly, depending on what's convenient for them in that day.
And we're in a dangerous situation because The quote-unquote liberal outlets have spent the past four years elevating people like former heads of the CIA and former heads of the FBI and all of these people who want nothing more than to get the next surveillance contract, to continue to further the power of themselves and their buddies and the institutions that they always represented.
And those people are now seen as like liberal heroes.
So it does put us in a very vulnerable and dangerous situation.
If you're some sort of an outside agency that's trying to fuck with people and you want to get on forums or get on social media and incite people in one direction or the other.
And we don't know how many of the people that post on Facebook or how many of the people that post on Twitter are that.
There's a 2015 New Yorker profile on the internet research agency and all that stuff too.
But you have to have something to manipulate and for it to be real.
We're only fucked with because we've allowed our population to basically be ripped apart.
We are increasingly seeing this...
This is why I focus on the economics as well...
We are becoming a completely stratified society.
Like people are flocking to mega cities like Los Angeles.
Well, not now, but Austin is actually a very good example of a lot.
Arizona had a lot of incoming Florida as well, which is that you have the professional managerial class basically concentrating in these mega urban environments.
And this sounds crude, but like breeding with each other, having kids.
And again, there's nothing wrong with this.
People who go to college generally want to marry somebody else who went to college.
But then they want to move somewhere where other people also went to college.
And then you raise your kids in such a way that you all have the same values.
But this has now happened over 40 years or so.
And what has happened, Charles Murray, who he shall not be named, actually wrote an entire book about this called Coming Apart.
This was based upon 2010 data.
And you actually saw that zip codes were completely being ripped apart by education level.
And the more that this happens and the trend continues where more educated people marry other educated people and they increasingly become raised away from one another, then you're just going to hate each other.
And the people who got the short end of the stick are very normal, average people who are like, hey, I like living 10 miles away from my mom.
That's actually a good thing for society, because then if you need your kids to be watched, you could call your mom.
You don't have to call somebody, you know, random stranger, drop them off at daycare.
There's a lot of social family benefits that come from a lot of this, which actually make us a more cohesive society.
But our economy is basically ripping the country apart.
And that increasingly also makes it so that if you voted for Trump, you're much less likely to vote and live and near anyone who voted for Biden and vice versa.
This is the whole cyber suburban phenomena, which is that the more that people live and raise their kids in a bubble, then they're going to make it so that like where I live, for example, they don't know.
I don't think the people I live around, all the Black Lives Matter, gay pride flags, everything is, you know, all of the flags are in the windows and all of that.
I don't think they even know anybody who thinks differently.
And when they do, they hate them.
And what they don't recognize is that they have an immense cultural power that they are projecting onto the rest of the country.
And the rest of the country, they feel your hatred, but a lot of them just want to live their lives.
Eventually, though, the feeling of that hatred manifested the hatred back.
That was the Trump phenomenon.
And so the more that we continue to just be stratified by economic lines, it has all these horrific societal benefits.
Of a lot of these intelligence people.
Who do you think they are?
I know where they all live.
They live in the wealthiest suburbs.
The four wealthiest counties in America surround Washington, D.C. It's all bureaucrats.
It's people who work in defense contracting.
It's like Bethesda, Loudoun County, Fairfax, and all these people.
It becomes this business of hating one another, and it's just so incredibly profitable.
And, I mean, look, we try very, very hard, but we're dropping a bucket.
It's a privilege to be here, one of the largest platforms in the world.
And if that's what we can get out, the message is we cannot live this way.
We cannot live in such a way where you don't even know somebody who thinks differently than you.
And then, look, we're tribal people.
We're tribal.
It's built into our DNA. Hating one another actually is quite natural.
And that is why a lot of people exploit that for dangerous purposes.
But you can't live in a cohesive country that way, especially America.
We're a very young country.
We're not united by blood.
We're not united by generally like common culture.
Like I'm, you know, my parents are from India and I identify fully as an American citizen.
It's because of the ethos of who we are.
Like I read tales about the Civil War.
I almost cry like thinking about I'm not related to any of these people.
But I'm like, this is this is part of who we were.
Like Union, you know, troops dying and fighting to free slaves.
When I think about that, I feel a deep connection with it in our history, but we're losing that because we're increasingly losing any connection to one another.
So there was a study that just came out recently that I actually think is incredibly important.
I don't know if you know the economist Thomas Piketty, but he's done some of the sort of like seminal work, not just here in the U.S., but across Western European democracies as well on class and income inequality and like the way that these societies are coming apart.
And what he found, and, you know, I think this very much is some of the points that you've been making, Joe, is, like, in places where these tribal culture war politics are put at the center, the economics and just, like, trying to get people the basics of a decent life, it completely falls by the wayside.
Because you look at the numbers over the past year.
You look at the fact that you have these billionaires who got wealthier and wealthier and wealthier.
And regular people got so fucked.
Either you were forced onto the front lines and your health completely disregarded and getting sick and overwhelming numbers and all of that, or you lost your job completely, right?
That was the reality for most working class Americans.
So you look at that and you're like, where's the backlash?
Where's the political response?
Where's the balancing of the scale so that at least you got a fighting shot if you're a working class person in this country?
And the answer is, and this is what his research over 21 different Western democracies showed, the answer is, culture war is so good at distracting people and pitting them against each other versus focusing on any of those concerns.
That's a bonanza for political class.
It's a bonanza for financial elites.
That's a bonanza for the Jeff Bezoses and the Walmarts of the world.
Because then all you have to do to be on the right side of those culture wars, you know, you throw up a Black Lives Matter banner.
Even as you're screwing over your black and brown, it doesn't matter.
You said the right words.
It means for our political class, Nancy Pelosi, all she has to do is like Neil and Kente Clark.
But I mean, from their recommendation algorithm, it basically, as I understand it, which is that they track almost every minute thing that you do within the app, like how fast that you take to swipe up, and they are able to build a hyper-personalized algorithm specifically to you.
And the reason why is this takes out all the bullshit from Facebook and Twitter, and it boils it down to what social media's job actually is, keeping you on that app as long as humanly possible.
And I saw recently TikTok actually surpassed Instagram.
In terms of time on app here in the United States, where we have tens of millions of people who are spending more time there than on Instagram.
You're taking money out of Zuckerberg's pocket whenever you do that.
And now you're giving it to, I forget his name, the ByteDance CEO. Now you're giving money to the ByteDance guy because that is the best.
Well, actually, three decades ago, 2001, is when George W. Bush signed permanent normal trade relations with China, which was basically we are not going to have to renew free trade relations with China, basically gave them unfettered access to our markets.
So that is when you can actually look at the Federal Reserve graph, US manufacturing jobs, drops off a cliff after 2001.
So then what happened in 2008?
We went bankrupt.
The Chinese, because they have a state-run economy, come up and they gobble up a huge portion of American manufacturing, of a lot of our companies which were cash-strapped, who needed cash injections.
The Chinese are like, oh, here, we're right here.
They're fake billionaires who are all propped up by the Chinese government.
Around 2010 is when you could see some of this happening.
Actually, weirdly enough, Obama produced a very good documentary on this called American Factory, which is on Netflix.
He's one of the only politicians that I think, I'm sure he got compromised once he got in there, but he's the only guy that when I hear him talk, I feel, I really genuinely feel you can tell a lot about a person by watching him talk.
And when I see Clinton talk, I'm like, how many people have you killed?
When I see Obama talk, I'm like, I think this is a guy that was an idealistic young man that entered into politics and slowly became intertwined in an unfixable system.
Our friend Matt Stoller calls him the Instagram president because his first trip after presidency, he's going hanging out with, like, billionaire Richard Branson, Gotta get paid.
So he's turning himself and his wife into this like Instagram.
So she's basically like trying to turn herself into the new Oprah.
And Obama is turning himself to this like weird amalgamation of like woke capitalism.
I saw this recent thing where it was like Obama implores Chicago business community to go against environmental activists who oppose his new library in Chicago.
And look like whatever he can do whatever he wants.
But I was just like, man, like, You think about the insurgent campaign of Barack Hussein.
I was inspired by Obama when I was a kid.
I mean, he had this crazy name and he beat Hillary.
I was like, this is fucking crazy.
I mean, this guy beat Hillary.
And then he got elected with one of the greatest and possibly...
We will probably not see a mandate like that in popular vote for a long time because of the culture war today.
I think we both have, which is that he basically allowed himself to get co-opted by the political system.
He did not realize that he actually had transcended above it.
And he could have been an FDR-like figure in terms of calling for, frankly, a much more transformative program.
But really...
What he leaned into was he was trusted the generals, right?
I think the greatest mistake that he ever made, 2009, David Petraeus and many of the other generals were like, because he had run on, I'm going to fight the good war.
And they were trying to get him to do a surge in Afghanistan, which he eventually agreed to.
And he was this new president.
And they basically leaked against him about all of his inclinations not to do it.
And so he went forward, but then he also put a two-year timeline on it.
So it was the worst of all worlds.
We had thousands of troops who were killed in Afghanistan for two years, and we had a two-year deadline where we were just going to pull them out.
He didn't have the courage in order to actually fulfill the electoral mandate that he ran on.
And you can draw a direct line between Obama and then the backlash to Obama is Trump.
Why?
Because when Wall Street collapsed, they bailed out all these guys.
They screwed over.
They didn't help regular homeowners.
They let the economy go to crap, didn't do what was necessary to make sure regular people were going to be OK. And so, yeah, eight years down the line, you get this huge backlash to that.
So I think that's one of the reasons.
I think he also just didn't understand the moment that he was living through.
I mean, right there, I think that that is truly a pivot point where Barack Obama's inaugurated.
You've got a majority in the House.
You've got a super majority in the Senate.
You've got a neoliberal system, you know, that sort of like Reagan era and Clinton era system that is breaking down here and around the world.
And the response to that was, let's do this like terrible health care program that's going to like modestly improve things, but mostly give away the store to the health insurance industry.
Let's bail out the banks and have zero accountability and not send a single banker to jail and let homeowners die on the vine.
Like, The moment called for a sort of more fundamental rethinking of the direction that we were heading in for the country and shoring up, making sure working class people were going to have a basic life of dignity.
And he failed to meet that moment.
And so now, you know, when I see him, I think I see a lot of cowardice.
Like, he just did an interview with a Jewish publication.
First of all, it was an email interview.
I always think those are total bullshit, where you can just send in your responses.
Someone else can draft him.
Okay, if the former president of the United States gave us an email interview, we would take it as well.
There were something like 12 questions that were asked.
He answered like five of them.
Anything that was remotely hot button.
They asked about Israel, of course.
They asked about Iran, of course.
Anything to do with those topics, he just did not respond.
And it made me think to myself, like, geez, There are—he may be the most popular politician in America right now, right?
A lot of people feel exactly like you do.
Like, this is a man who has moral clarity.
Like, this is someone who I look to as a leader.
And when have we needed that sort of moral leadership more— And instead you're just like building your brand and hanging out with Bruce Springsteen and avoiding anything that might be remotely controversial.
And I think about that with so many people who have that kind of cultural power and already wealthy and like everything is these safe moves and they're so fearful of damaging their brand.
I was a swimmer, and I always felt like the minute that you just surrender to it, Getting out or stopping or whatever is just not an option is actually the moment when a lot of the suffering stops because your brain is just like sealed the exits.
Do you know how fucking hard it is to win two presidential elections?
His name was Barack Hussein Obama.
This is actually what pissed me off about him, which is like he won white working class voters overwhelmingly in 08, and they stuck with him in 2012, then abandoned the Democrats for Trump in 2016. He's a huge part of that story, and yet he never is introspective about it.
It's always made me so angry.
I remember he did this interview with David Remnick right after Trump won, and he was like, maybe the country just wasn't ready for me.
That was one of the things that he was saying to Bruce Springsteen that I thought was really odd.
They were talking about reparations.
And that he was saying, I forget what his exact words were, but something about white people were not willing to accept the idea of having responsibility for reparations.
And, you know, it's an interesting subject, right?
Because if you really take it back to the corporations that actually did benefit from slavery, they still exist.
Some of them exist.
And there's certainly deep economic ties that you can track and you can go all the way back to slavery.
But then there's people like yourself and people like myself that are children of immigrants.
I'm a grandchild of immigrants.
You're a child of immigrants.
And this is what America really is supposed to be.
The most fascinating thing about America to me is that we are all children of immigrants.
I look at the problem, the slavery problem and the reparations problem, as a massive failure of the community of America.
And I think you look at these impoverished communities, you look at these places like whether it's Baltimore or the South Side of Chicago or these places that have a deep History of poverty and of gangs and crime and violence.
And then you look at what happened during the COVID pandemic, where all of a sudden there was these trillions of dollars that were allocated to these major corporations to make sure that they didn't fail.
And my perspective is, instead of thinking of corporations, let's think of it as problems.
Like what is one of the major problems in this country?
Well, one of the major problems in this country is people that are born into communities that are fucked.
And they don't have a fair shot.
They don't have a fair chance.
They're stuck in this situation where everyone around them is involved in some sort of crime, or they're deeply impoverished, or there's gang violence, and maybe there's no family around them, and maybe the only family is the gangs.
This is the problem with America, and if we don't address this, we're going to continue to pump out the same disenfranchised, angry people that don't feel like they're represented by the system, and we've done nothing about No, nothing about it.
Well, he could have, to your point about reparations, black homeownership was at the lowest level under Barack Obama's presidency, because it turns out black people dramatically lost their houses disproportionately.
Like, he was presided over the largest drop in black wealth in modern American history.
And he's out here talking about white grievance?
Now, look, I'm not saying there isn't white grievance, but Barack Obama was president of the United States with a massive democratic mandate, supermajority in the United States Senate, and then squandered it.
And this is what I mean, which is that, like, yes, Obama...
He's a smart man, and he does understand culture and all that.
But he absolves himself of many discrete choices that he made, which directly led to a lot of the problems that he's bitching about and blaming other people about.
What you're talking about, though, I mean, it really it really goes very deep because what you're talking about is it turns the American dream that ideal of like anyone can make it if you just try hard.
It turns it into really a cruel joke.
So if you're a person like that, sure, you may have one one off Barack Obama, who's just like such a genius that he's able to transcend those circumstances.
And then we hold those people up like, look, The system is working.
The meritocracy is working, et cetera, et cetera.
And so in this country, you have a lot of people who struggle every day, right, just to be able to afford an apartment and start a family, put food on the table, just the basics of life.
And they think it's their fault because of the failures of that basic promise, right?
Where, yeah, it turns into now rather than seeing the larger problems in the country and seeing where the blame really lies, I turn it inward to, oh, it's my fault.
I must not have done something.
I must not be smart enough.
I must not be good enough.
And that just compounds the sort of sickness of it.
- Uh huh. - And he's an amazing fighter and incredible.
Now, if that gentleman had to compete against someone like Jan Blachowicz, who's the light heavyweight champion, or Francis Ngannou, who's the heavyweight champion, he would have no fucking chance.
Because a guy like that is not going to be able to beat a guy like Francis Ngannou.
It's not fair.
If you have some kid who's born in poverty-stricken Baltimore and you expect that kid to do as well as someone who lives in Calabasas, California, who goes to private schools, you're out of your fucking mind.
And if you live inside your own bubble, like we were talking about, you don't know that these other people exist in this realm where this neighborhood, this community, where they can't get out.
If you're around a bunch of hardworking people that are dedicated, you tend to try to adopt their values, and that's what you admire.
When you're around a bunch of people that are going in and out of jail, and then you assume that's going to happen to you, and when it does happen to you, you actually get kind of support from the community, especially if you don't rat, if you don't tell the cops.
And the only way out is like what?
Are you going to be a rap star, or are you going to be a comedian, or are you going to be an athlete?
I lived in Kentucky, and I've done work in West Virginia.
And that's where my family's originally from, is West Virginia.
I mean, you see the same thing in Appalachia, you know, where you go in some of these towns in southern West Virginia that were coal mining towns, and that's basically gone and dead, and there's just...
There's nothing there, and it's not an accident.
Deep poverty.
It's not an accident.
That was the epicenter of the opioid crisis.
Like, people are just...
They're holding on to whatever helps them get through their day.
And that is the lie of the meritocracy, the idea that someone from there has an equal chance, they're going to make it, etc., etc.
And, you know, I don't think everyone should have the same, like, I'm not a communist here, but we're a wealthy country.
We make a choice to allow people to remain in poverty.
If you're a patriot, if you're a person who believes in exception, exceptional Americans, you believe in this concept that this is a unique place, wouldn't you want less losers?
If there's more people that are out there kicking ass, it's better for everybody.
They're farming homeless people is what they're doing.
And there's no incentive whatsoever to fix it and solve it.
If we could figure out as a country how to slowly but surely...
But there has to be an ethic, instead of looking at it tribally, instead of looking at it as like this culture war, looking at we're one giant fucking community, and what do we share in common?
We want our loved ones to be safe and happy.
We want everybody to have a good living.
We want everybody to be able to find their dream and pursue it, whatever their dream is, whatever their thing is.
And that's what we should be doing as a team.
If there was only four of us, we would look at it that way.
But when there's 400 million of us, we lose sight of things because there's a diffusion of responsibility.
There's a lot of people with a lot of moneyed interests whenever it comes to keeping this system architecture.
And again, this was saying about the confluence.
It's not intentional.
It all just like happens to come about in a certain way.
And then coming out of that is very fucking hard.
This is the problem where I was saying about the meritocracy, which is that the biggest mistake America made is we convinced our upper class that they earned it.
So it used to be that we actually had a pretty deep sense of like noblesse oblige amongst the elite in America.
You can look at Teddy Roosevelt, the Roosevelt family.
And so when you think about what happened is that we convinced everybody that, as you're saying, Calabasas, buying your way into the college, that kid is like, I worked my fucking ass off and I got my ass.
And you're like, you're from Calabasas.
You don't even know.
About all of the things that got you to where you were and I'm not saying you didn't work very hard But there were a lot of structural things in place in order to make and then you move to New York City And you're like I'm working my fucking ass off in New York City and these poor pieces of shit down in West Virginia Why can't they just get a job?
Why don't they why doesn't their mom get them a tutor?
Why do they don't even know that that's so there are outside of the realm of the lived experience of millions of working people and the more that that happens and And remember, I think where are we at with college?
40%?
So we have like 25-30% of the population which actually genuinely believes that they, you know, earned their place to where they are.
Many cases they did, but with the help of a lot of the structures underneath them, and they feel zero obligation to their fellow American.
And not only that, now we have MSNBC, CNN and Fox turning these two groups against each other.
And there's a whole lot of money to be made, not just amongst the purveyors of the hate, but at the very top.
I always say about this, that gridlock in Washington is an in-kind donation to people who are the oligarchs, as in because the system is working so well for so much of the oligarchic elite.
It makes it so that the less that happens, business is good.
But business continues exactly the same way.
You can work the systems there on the edges, and you're going to continue making billions, billions and billions.
People are going to continue losing their place.
And you have the richest people in our country who genuinely hate.
Did you follow any of the studies around UBI? Yes.
The Stockton, California mayor, who actually now wants to see, but he was doing this experiment there and they came out with the results of like, I think the people in that town who participated in the trial, it wasn't a lot of money they got.
It was like 500 bucks a month.
And it was incredible how actually transformative that was for people.
It was like, one guy I remember they profiled, and this was extraordinarily moving to me.
He had a job he hated.
And he was so sort of close to the edge financially and didn't have any sort of like paid leave or whatever.
Basically, you miss a day and you either lose a paycheck or lose your job.
He was so close to the edge financially, he couldn't even take one day off to go and interview for another position.
So with just that $500, it was like, okay, I can buy myself a suit and I can go interview for a different job in an area that he actually had a skill set and he was able to get that job and to be able to move forward.
And it just makes you realize, like, the whole thing is dependent on people having zero choice, right, in terms of their employers.
They can't opt out.
Being so locked into this thing that they have zero breathing room.
So, you know, a lot of the critique of UBI is always like, oh, you give people money and they're just going to spend it on like booze or Cheetos or drugs and they'll be lazy, etc., etc.
And what the results have found is actually the polar opposite.
People are able, they actually get jobs at higher rates because they have the luxury and the flexibility to get the interview closed and get the skills that they need to be able to do that.
To pick and choose rather than just having to take this one thing that you might have a little bit of a luxury to wait.
And so one of the things that I find fascinating that's happening right now is you've probably seen the statistics about the number of people who are quitting their jobs, the number of jobs that are going unfilled, because people actually had this experience that was forced on them over the course of the pandemic of changing their lives around.
And it created an experience of, like, reassessing the values of, okay, number one, you know, if I'm in one of these frontline industries where my health was put at risk for frickin' $7.25, or even less than that if you're working for tips, Do I really like, do I want to go back to that?
So you have at the working class, you have massive shifts in terms of the type of work people are doing.
You have in the professional class, people moving.
You have people saying, listen, I actually liked being able to see my fucking kids during the week and remote working.
And if you want me to come back to the office, fuck you, I'm getting a different job.
I'm going in a different direction.
So you actually were in the midst of a huge worker, uncoordinated worker revolt where Where that leads, I don't think anyone could possibly say.
In fact, I think the whole ramifications of this coronavirus and what ultimately happens coming out of the pandemic, I don't think we have any idea.
But there are going to be massive ramifications for years and years to come, and we're starting to get a little taste of those reassessments and those value reassessments right now in some of the numbers that are coming out.
I see it as revenge, which is that we made a choice at the beginning, which is that Washington decided we had two choices.
We could push people into the unemployment system or what they did in Europe and what some politicians here, I think it was Josh Hawley, Bernie Sanders and a few others, put forward a proposal about payroll subsidy, basically making it so that...
Businesses could keep people on payroll, even during the lockdown.
And that way, when you come out of lockdown, your employees still work for you.
Well, we said, no, let them quit, file for unemployment.
The state system can distribute that and whatever.
So we separated people from their jobs.
When we made that choice, we fucked the business and we fucked the employees.
And we pushed them.
So we shut the business down.
We said, fuck you, basically not going to bail you out.
There was some success in this paycheck protection program.
But And I don't want to minimize that.
Some.
But not nearly what it should have been.
And many people had a lot of problems with unemployment.
They got, you know, things opened back up and then closed down.
So they were on unemployment, off unemployment, back on unemployment.
It was a total fucking mess.
And what has happened is now people are like, yeah, you know what?
Driving for Uber is kind of shitty.
They're like, I haven't done it in a year and maybe I'm not going to go back.
Or, actually, that job really kind of sucked.
Or, you know, I just don't want to do it anymore.
And so this great reassessment of work in America is happening because we were disconnected from it.
And in a way, I see the politicians are all freaking out about this right now.
This is like the number one conversation in D.C. How so?
Oh, well, because the conversation is around unemployment insurance.
Because the conversation is, should we continue to have the supplemental $300 a week of unemployment insurance going to people because it's discouraging people from work?
So the basic idea is that if unemployment might be higher than a wage at a normal job, then you're basically subsidizing unemployment and you're screwing over the business.
You could easily change it and make it so that the $300 a week became a hiring bonus or so that if you went and you got a job, this helps out the worker because they get the $300 a week extra from the government.
Plus, the business doesn't have to necessarily raise its wage to like $17 or whatever.
But if you did that, though, the hiring bonus, wouldn't the employer be able to hold that over the head of the employee that if you get fired, you lose your $300 as well?
But I worry about companies like Amazon that are doing those kind of weird, shitty practices.
Because here's my perspective.
Imagine, let's say they didn't go union.
And let's say they just had some sort of a meeting where they managed this situation in a much better way where they gave people more time and more money and they relaxed all their standards.
They had some sort of mediation where they came to a conclusion like, listen, we want you to feel better about this.
And then you looked at the real quantifiable numbers, and you recognized that there's a significant dip in profits.
Because part of the way you make the profit is you've got to squeeze blood out of a rock.
But I do want to address this because this is actually important.
So the Saudis did hack his phone, Joe, but apparently it's his girlfriend's brother who sold those texts to the National Enquirer.
How do you know that's true, though?
Because he admitted it came out in court.
Emails between Michael Sanchez, Lawrence Sanchez's brother, and the National Enquirer.
So this all came out in the court of law.
And this is a crazy story.
I actually did a whole monologue on this because it's how Bezos actually weaponized his ownership of the Washington Post to benefit his bottom line, which is he made it seem like the Saudis targeted him.
because he was Jamal Khashoggi's boss, when in reality, because he owns the Washington Post.
The reality is, Lauren Sanchez's brother, Michael, is a piece of shit who sold his sister's texts to the National Enquirer and then charged his sister $25,000 a month as a crisis PR manager in order to negotiate with the National Enquirer.
So he's getting paid from both sides here.
This was Brad Stone's book he just wrote about it and about Bezos, I think it's Amazon Unbound.
So what Bezos did, he did this masterful PR campaign where he's like, the Saudis are targeting me because I was Jamal Khashoggi's boss.
And he made it into this whole, like, moral fight when it was really like a family squabble.
Like if you're playing a numbers game, if you're used to 100 and then you get 200, now you're used to 200. If you're used to 200 and you get 300, you're used to 300. If you find out you get 1,000, you get that 1,000.
Then you have 1,000 and you're like, you know, I heard there's a guy who has 10,000.
Holy shit, how does he get 10,000?
Well, he worked extra hard and he fucked his employees with him.
See, I understand the motivation behind it because it's a natural human characteristic.
If you have, you want more, and if all you do is business, because he's a businessman, those guys are the most susceptible to this trait, this characteristic, rather.
This thing, this inclination.
This inclination is to continue to try to win this game.
All my money has been made by doing the same thing.
I just...
I don't think about...
I mean, I'm obviously aware of money, but when I do stuff, I just do...
I don't seek out only celebrities or do...
One of the things that we're talking about, the Howard Stern thing, and I'm, by the way, giant Howard Stern fan.
I think he's the number one reason why I can do what I do.
If it wasn't for him, he's the seed.
Like, Lenny Bruce is the seed that led to Richard Pryor, that led to Bill Hicks and Sam Kinison, that led to me, and Chris Rock and Chappelle and all these guys.
We all owe Lenny Bruce.
He was the first.
Howard Stern is the first in this genre.
He's the first guy that started talking about real shit and taking chances.
He got sued by the FCC. It's a totally different thing, what he experienced.
And he's not the same guy that he was then because he doesn't have to be because now he's worth a billion dollars.
But one of the things that they were doing in this meeting that was leaked He was saying, we've got to get celebrities.
We need an A celebrity and a B celebrity.
It's all about raise those numbers up, raise those numbers up.
I never think of that.
I don't care.
If I meet a guy at a gas station and he's cool, I'll go, what do you do?
And he's like, I make fucking flowers out of metal.
What I started doing was talking to my friends, and then I got a chance to talk to some interesting people, like Graham Hancock was one of the first guests, and I got a chance to talk to these people, and I'm like, oh, now that I get X amount of downloads, I can get these fucking cool people to talk to me.
Because I didn't have a way to get them to talk to me before.
The idea that I could get a guy like Randall Carlson to sit across from me for three hours with no phones, with no nothing, and talk to me about his theory about how the human race has been reset multiple times.
Because of asteroid impacts and explain it because there's a comet that comes into our neighborhood every X amount of thousands of years and it's trackable and it's also trackable by core samples.
When they do core samples they find all this nuclear glass that indicates impacts and this impacts coincides with the drop off of civilization.
Also the changing of the climate and the ice age is like, holy shit I can get a guy like that?
What if Epstein realized that Gates' ego is easy to stroke and that he's a nerd that never got laid and that he could maybe bring him around some beautiful young ladies and then say, you know what I can do for you?
We don't know what Epstein's exact affiliation with intelligence communities and Mossad and all that shit was, but let's assume he knew some people that knew how to manipulate folks.
If you're looking at a guy like Bill Gates, you ever see him dance?
If I saw that, and I'd be like, I can get Bill to a party and I can talk him into almost anything.
If I see that guy, if I could spend some time with him and bring him to a fucking island, filled with hotties, some of them which may or may not be 18. Look at him.
Look at him dance around.
Look at him.
Come on.
Listen, this is exactly what we're talking about.
I don't hate the guy.
I use Microsoft.
I type on a Windows laptop.
I don't have a problem with him.
I don't.
I see him as a human being.
And I see where he is as a human story.
It's an amazingly alien proposition to be a man who is worth $150 billion.
It's fucking bananas.
And then also to be this guy that has massive amounts of influence and massive amounts of eyes on him.
Well, let me just say this, because I think your point is bigger than just the healthcare system, right?
When you have it just be about profits, and profits are the only, like, what are you incentivizing?
You're not actually incentivizing health.
What you're incentivizing is people to have chronic illnesses that require a lot of treatment.
Oh, lo and behold, America has a lot of chronic illnesses that require repeated treatment.
You're actually incentivizing a system to keep people sick.
So it's not a surprise then when that's the result that you ultimately get.
And that's where, you know, this country, what I said earlier of like, the only value is money.
There are some fields where maybe that makes sense.
But in a place like healthcare, where we're talking about people's health, We're in a place like education, where we're talking about people just learning and acquiring knowledge.
There's all these fears.
When I think about drug legalization, it's the same thing that I'm concerned about.
Are these just going to become another quiver in the air of big pharma?
There are these areas of life that there should be values other than just profit maximization.
This is where I think that the big realignment that's happening is around that.
Look, we had a system and we've recognized the power of American capitalism and profit in order to generate extraordinary things.
But we can't erase the government role in Operation Warp Speed and bringing the vaccines to bear.
And there's actually I forget what the terminology is called.
Where whenever so much government subsidy or whatever is involved, the government has the ability in order to waive vaccine IP protection and actually not necessarily seize it or whatever, but they march in right marching rights.
Right.
So they have the ability to come in and say, no, we're going to distribute it X way and do this, this and this.
That is what we've lost, which is that what we have lost is the recognition of the power of the government and the socialized benefits of a lot of this.
Infrastructure is another example.
Big fight happening right now.
The big one is around, how are you going to pay for it?
And deficit questions and all of that aside, a huge portion of the senators want user fees.
And what does that mean?
They want fucking gas taxes.
They want to tax regular working class Americans to pay for all these brand new roads.
Now, first of all, infrastructure is the one thing you probably should deficit finance, if there is such a thing, because it can explode economic benefits.
And, you know, all the benefits that come from that are massive.
But who is also the beneficiary of so much of this?
Amazon.
I mean, do you think better roads aren't going to help Amazon delivery times?
Should Amazon maybe not pay for some of this?
Should Walmart not pay for some of this?
Walmart's distribution system is West in class, right?
How do you think they fucking get there?
The American highway system.
But a lot of these senators and the Chamber of Commerce and all these other people are like, no.
And that's actually effectively a tax on the South because a lot of people drive here more than up North.
So we're talking about user fees, average working people, drivers and others.
They're going to pay for the new roads and then Amazon can offer you like three-hour delivery or two-hour delivery.
This is the problem that we have, which is that What they want, the current structure, is for people to pay for the stuff that everybody benefits them.
And increasingly, as they are benefiting from everything, they want to even continue to push down every single dollar towards people.
The gas tax thing, it makes me so angry because, first of all, the politically stupidest thing you can do is raise taxes on gas.
Nobody, people are going to freak out.
But really what it is, is that that is a tax on the poor.
And that is what we want to push down for everything.
And I just see this like all across the system.
Like we're pushing all of the costs down in the personal financial system and more like late fees and all of this.
And I understand like the problems in creating banks and all that.
But one of the things that we've discovered is that it's So much more expensive to be poor in America than it is...
It's like you get all this free shit apparently when you're rich or whenever you have money in your bank account.
Like, oh, then we're going to waive this fee or waive that.
But when you're poor, oh, you can't have a real bank.
You have to go pay a fee to get a money order or something.
All of these things just stack up and they become a structural inability in order for you to move up the ladder.
And you know what's interesting is apparently in that very first Supreme Court case that said, like, essentially you can't tax things that you haven't had a cash-out event, there were scholars at the time that predicted exactly...
The method that Elon and many others use to avoid.
So since he's taking a loan and living off the proceeds of the loan, he's not technically cashing out his shares.
And so there isn't a taxable event, quote unquote.
What I'm thinking about is a system that would have a regular wage earner, like earning 60K a year or whatever, paying higher taxes than someone who's a billionaire.
And you know, really, too, around the billionaire conversation, it always drives me crazy, we think of billionaires in America as Bezos, Elon, and all of those.
That's actually not how you become a billionaire.
We crunched the numbers for Forbes 2020. The number one predominant way that you become a billionaire in America today is private equity and hedge funds.
It's just financial engineering, trading money, making front-running trades in terms of the whole Robin Hood thing, Citadel, Ken Griffin.
That's how you make...
You don't...
Look, if we lived in a country where we made billions with Elon, I would be very, very happy because we're creating shit.
Even Bezos.
Look, a lot of Bezos hate.
Amazon is fucking incredible.
You know what's not incredible?
Silver Lake Capital Management, where you don't fucking do anything.
And you're basically just a leech on the American financial system driving up taxes or driving up the prices of stocks because you're front-running people's trades and you're making it so that you make.0003 dollars more per trade.
And if you do that at scale, you become a billionaire.
That's how you actually become a billionaire in America today.
So at the January 5th, the day before the January 6th thing happened, Mm-hmm.
So he like writes out, gets zero coverage because the riot happens and understandably people are paying attention to that.
But, you know, the hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in Washington over, you know, the past decade just from the private equity industry lobbying forces to make sure that they can avoid paying essentially any taxes on what they're doing.
And look, this isn't just about like, you know, eat the rich or attack the rich, et cetera, et cetera.
But we talk about the problems in the country coming apart and people sort of losing faith in every institution and the structures of government and the entire nation as a whole.
Like, this is a bedrock principle of fairness.
The sense that everybody's got skin in the game, that this is a more or less, you know, nobody expects anything to be 100% fair, 100%, but that this is more or less fair.
And then you look at, like, you know, Elon Musk's Secretary or the person who's like delivering this or security guard or whatever.
He's paying a higher tax rate than the billionaire.
That's fucked up.
And so when you have that realization throughout the public, it really does destroy just sort of the faith in the nation as a whole.
In the New York Times story, this made me so angry.
They quoted somebody from the IRS. You are three times more likely to be audited if you make less than $25,000 a year than you are if you're one of these private equity people.
The finances and the misery that comes from not being able to have confidence that you're going to be able to provide for your kids, that's a very real thing.
But I think just as real as that is this sense of, What am I even doing here?
The number one reason they didn't get married in 2018 was because of money.
People want to have kids.
This is a big debate as well around the fertility rate.
Our fertility rate is below replacement.
It's very, very low.
It continues to drop.
You had that fantastic testosterone book.
I'm so glad.
Or the sperm count book.
I'm glad that you did.
All of these confluence of events are making it so that we are really, we are basically failing our civilizational priority, which is replacing itself.
And so, again, though, you look at America, and you say, why are people not having kids?
Yes, there is some cultural drop-off in the people who don't necessarily want to have kids.
But people want to have around 2.2 kids when they're surveyed.
Like if you survey women and also like fathers and sorry, would be fathers, they want to have around 2.2, which is above replacement rate.
I think we're around 1.7 in terms of that.
What is the number one reason that people cite for not being able to have kids?
It's money, which is that it's either daycare or it's I don't have the ability to provide or it would be really expensive because I think I forget what average cost is per birth in America for the average.
like incur costs that you will.
I can't afford the diapers.
I can't afford in order to change my life.
Oh, that means I would have to leave my job.
That is where I'm saying, look guys, maybe the culture has changed a lot, but...
It sounds like money actually can fix a lot of our problems in terms of marriageability.
We actually could increase our marriage rate dramatically if we bait it so that people weren't mired in student debt or mired in personal finance or, frankly, just had the ability in order to provide for a basic family based maybe on one income.
Same thing whenever we have kids.
If you want people to have more kids, they want to.
People are crying out, being like, I want to have more children, but I cannot.
This is what they tell—I think it was the American Community Survey, which is like a branch of the Commerce Department, which does a lot of the census data.
And you can see so clearly, but guess what?
And this is my biggest departure from a lot of the Republicans.
I'm like, they're not proposing shit.
Like, they're not proposing, like, increasing— Quite the contrary.
Here's one of the most insanely depressing ideas that I've read about was people that have debt, student loan debt, and they're getting their Social Security docked.
And I think it comes from this sense of like, you know, people feel that things are very chaotic and Trump was a genuinely like terrifying experience for a lot of people.
It is pre-Trump.
And there's this sense, you know, as someone who is on the left, like throughout history, this was the standard left wing position.
I mean, you support free speech and censorship and these like McCarthyism and all this stuff has always targeted the left.
Go look at Cohen, Tell Pro, all this stuff.
And now you have this really rigid ideology that if you step out on a line even a little bit, you know, everyone's going to come for you and people are afraid to really say what they think.
And it really does pervade.
It pervades the media.
It just leaves people afraid.
It has consequences in terms of their career trajectory.
And it ultimately leads to things like, you know, ignoring the lab leak theory because someone somewhere was like, oh, it's racist.
You understand collaboration on the internet, which is that on YouTube, among podcasting and more, you have a scenario where when you go on each other's podcasts, when you do each other's shows and more, everybody collectively rises together and actually the wealth increases, the profile increases and more.
This is an old TV mentality because on TV with cable, You have to get locked in, right?
Like, if you're watching Fox and you're not watching CNN, CNN is losing.
If you're watching CNN, you're not watching MSNBC, MSNBC is losing.
That's old media, like, in terms of the scoops.
But this new media, independent environment, we have people, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, all these people with, I mean, technically, I guess, competing subscription products, but that's not how it works.
Which is maybe somebody who watches our show who doesn't necessarily become a premium member or whatever.
They really, really appreciate Glenn and they see them out.
They're monsters in the best way possible because they are not attached to any ideology in terms of what you're supposed to say, and Glenn particularly fights against it tooth and claw the moment he sees it.
He's so brave, and it's so important to have people like that out there because if you don't support them, if they go down, the whole thing goes down.
My former White House Presbyterian colleague, Jim Acosta, made millions of dollars with his books and his bullshit performances there in the Rose Garden.
And it's like he actually is presenting himself and profiting off of gaslighting millions of Americans into thinking that he somehow risked his life by behaving like an asshole while he was in the White House briefing room.
And then you have guys like Glenn and you have guys like Matt who wrote this whole thing about the financial power elite and, you know, with Goldman Sachs and then Glenn Greenwald who's literally being pursued by the Brazilian government and they have the audacity.
To say that they're misinformation purveyors or they're not real journalists.
I mean, that is what makes me so angry because the entire corporate media infrastructure is not about producing actual journalism, especially when the power elite is the Biden administration.
I don't know if you saw this.
Brian Stelter recently had the White House press secretary on his show on CNN. And he said, what are we getting wrong about the White House?
He invited the White House press secretary, the paid propagandist of the United States government, and his first, I think, first question, and I don't want to say too much, but one of his questions to her in his very limited airtime on cable news was, what does the press get wrong about the Biden administration?
So he invited her to correct his network and other media's coverage on his cable show.
It's they don't really have an opinion other than what is the orthodoxy.
What are they supposed to say?
What we're talking about with Glenn and with Matt and with you guys, one of the things that I love about you guys is that I know that you're telling me, whether you two disagree with each other or whether you agree, I know you're telling me what you really think about things.
So when you think about how crazy that has changed, I think social conservatism today is actually one of the best pieces I read on this.
Shout out to Matthew Walther.
It's called Rise of the Barstool Conservatives.
So if you were to ask me who I think like the most the biggest like right wing social icon in America right now, 25 years ago, I would have said like Franklin Graham or something like that.
I think he's Dave Portnoy.
I really think it is somebody like Portnoy who is anti-PC. The current social conservatism, or at least the way that I think things are moving forward, is anti-woke, anti-PC. And that is where I think the emerging fights are.
So, for example, around abortion or something.
It's not that Portnoy or whatever is not personally pro-life.
I think he's actually on the record that way.
But he's also probably not going to actively be hostile towards people who are pro-life.
This is where my politics change a little bit because I'm extraordinarily anti-PC, very against the anti-woke stuff, but I am much more – I would say, oh, I call myself centrist when it comes to economics because I know what the actual – Populist believes on economics.
They're extraordinarily – I mean taxing people who are rich is extraordinarily popular.
Florida, which just voted for Trump, why 3.2 percent higher than Barack Obama won that state, also voted overwhelmingly for a $15 minimum wage.
So, how the fuck does that happen?
Oh, I know why.
Because actual voters, whenever you take the culture part of it out, they're actually very much for paying higher wages, taxing the rich, rebalancing our financial system, making it so what I was talking about, people being able to get married and more.
It's the culture woke piece of it, which just drives everybody.
So actually, so one of the things around this, though, is that I personally, at least kind of how I view myself, is like a spokespeople for so many of the completely underrepresented in America.
We're in our great state, Texas, like where I'm from.
I always think about people.
So you saw the large Hispanic swing towards Trump here in South Texas.
Nobody speaks for somebody who is Latino, maybe third or fourth generation, who's skeptical of mass immigration, but who also is like pro-life, pro-15 dollar minimum wage, pro-Medicare for all, and pro-gun.
Nobody speaks for that person in American politics today.
And that is where I think the emerging future is.
I think that the future of any Republican Party, if they want to survive, given the inability to win the popular vote seven out of eight last presidential elections, is changing their stance on economics and becoming— What it is is embracing this anti-PC against the liberal intelligentsia and elite.
Now, this is all easier said than done because what's Crystal immediately going to say?
Yeah, because they're owned by the fucking billionaire class and because they're never going to give it up.
Tell them the Mitch McConnell thing about this tax leak story.
And not only that, if you were a billionaire, and this is not a slight on my friend Elon, but if you were a billionaire, like if I ever become a billionaire, I want to pay taxes.
I don't mind paying taxes.
I don't even think about it.
I don't care.
I mean, I think that you're supposed to pay.
If I could pay...
If I could pay 50% more and know that my money is going to educating people, you kind of do that with philanthropy, you kind of do that with charitable donations, but it's not the same.
Because all that stuff, you don't understand what's the administrative cost, how much is actually getting to people.
Well, not only that, do you understand that that is one of the premier conspiracy theories about the idea that the global elite wants to reduce the population by half?
He is involved in so many of the conspiracy theories.
He's involved in the massive vaccination.
All the nutbags are worried about massive vaccinations trying to depopulate the earth.
All the nutbags are worried that he's going to spray things into the sky and somehow or another it's going to come down and ruin our water supply and our food.
Who the fuck knows if it would?
Because it's an unprecedented experiment.
But even crazier.
All of this goes back to the Sumerian text.
And this is where it's really weird.
There's a guy named Zechariah Sitchin who wrote some incredibly controversial books.
And one of them was, I think it was called The Ninth Planet.
What is it called?
Anyway, Zachariah Sitchin was a guy who is a linguist and a scholar who took ancient cuneiform tablets from Sumer.
And his idea, out of all this stuff, and he wrote all these books about it, Was that there was another planet that's on an elliptical orbit that would come in and out of Earth every 3,600 years and they genetically manipulated lower primates to create human beings and they came here to mine gold because their atmosphere had deteriorated and they wanted to suspend reflective gold particles in their atmosphere and Earth has a very large amount of gold.
So they would come here and get gold and they would get people to mine this gold for them and make gold very valuable.
So if you go back to ancient civilization, why the fuck would gold be valuable?
When you're talking about people that barely had money for food, imagine giving someone a piece of gold and they give you a cow.
Why would you give someone a cow for a piece of gold?
Wouldn't you want metal that you could turn into, like, iron?
Something you could turn into weapons?
Something used for a tool?
What Zechariah Sitchin believed, and if you ever follow ancient Sumer, it's a very bizarre civilization.
Very bizarre in the fact that they had a detailed map of the solar system 6,000 plus years ago, including Pluto, with all the planets in the correct order, and they had these weird images of really tall, giant, human-like people with little monkey people sitting on their lap, like human beings with tails.
Strange shit, right?
And he believes, and most people don't agree with There's a whole website by other Sumerian scholars.
It's like sitchiniswrong.com.
You can go there and they break down and there's a disagreement about all this.
But anyway, he was saying that the reason why these aliens would come here Is because they wanted our gold.
And they wanted our gold to suspend particles into the atmosphere to protect us against the rays of the sun.
And that's what they were doing on their planet.
They were coming here to get our gold so they could suspend it into the sky to protect their planet.
This is what fucking Bill Gates is talking about.
He's literally talking about suspending particles in the sky to protect us against the rays of the sky.
But this is how bonkers it is.
Zachariah Sitchin wrote this book in the fucking 70s.
He wrote this book.
What was his book called?
Zachariah Sitchin.
He's a strange cat.
Me and my buddy Eddie Bravo used to get high as fucking read these books.
But just imagine, a guy that is genetically modifying crops, a guy that is spraying, wants to spray the sky, stratosphere-controlled perturbation experiment Scopex.
But go to Zechariah Sitchin.
Like, Zechariah Sitchin's Sumerian text translation.
It wasn't even proposed as a theory about or a possible solution to global warming until the 2000s.
It was somewhere in the 2000s and someone was talking about suspending reflective particles in the atmosphere.
But one of the things about gold that's a very unique reflective particle, gold is a crazy, crazy metal in that you can take a very small piece of gold.
See this coin?
This is a Navy Seal coin.
If you could take this coin and put it on this table, a coin of gold can cover the entire table.
If there's this much body of research on these various times and beings and places, etc., and this much conspiracy writing about it, surely some part of it is going to be like, oh my god, they predicted the thing.
I think this is the why I believe so much in your platform and why I'm frankly such a big fan is because I know that you're just bullshitting sometimes, but the power that you have to be able to elevate these types of conversations is incredibly important.
Hancock in particular, like you had Hancock on over a decade ago.
The archaeology community said he was totally full of shit.
Oh, guess what?
Half the stuff that he set out has actually turned out to be true.
And so your questioning of conventional wisdom has actually played a direct role in influencing our understanding.
Lab leak is another one.
Frankly, weirdly, the two most important people to UFO disclosure are yourself and Tom DeLonge, right?
That's actually a problem in some of these areas that are pushed down in the mainstream, is the people that stick with it are the ones who will embrace the wildest shit, and then that serves to continue to discard it.
One thing that he discussed that was really fantastic was that there are alloys and there's these samples of metals that if a company was to construct this metal, it would cost billions of dollars to do so.
And there is no known version of this alloy that exists on Earth.
And there's an actual alloy that they're testing and working on right now.
And through Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp and all these leaks and releases from the Pentagon, people are now understanding that not only is this a real phenomenon, but there's actual video footage that cannot be explained of things that show no visual propulsion system, no visible propulsion system, no heat signature.
And from the Tic Tac incident off the Nimitz in 2004, They have video of this thing taking off, going thousands of miles an hour in a way that any other known craft that we've ever constructed would just obliterate, just through the G-forces.
But, you know, physics, when he's older, he's 86. And so when he was coming up through college, like physics was a hotline of anywhere.
There were all kinds of developments there.
It was really considered the frontier.
Now that profession seems to have gotten kind of stale.
And actually, Osweid in a similar way where it's like you have to have this particular ideology and you have to pursue within string theory.
And if you're Looking at theories outside of that, then you're not going to progress in your career.
And there's this sort of groupthink mentality that's set in.
But that's part of why I find it really fascinating is because, like, this is defying what we – the basics of what we understand about how the universe works.
But I will say this, which is that it intersects...
I was a Pentagon correspondent once upon a time, and so what really pissed me off with this recent New York Times story, I did a big monologue on this, is that Pentagon has this forthcoming report.
So they got to pre-leak the report and have their journalists write it the way that they want.
And I know how they do it.
They do an embargo off the record and they say, here are the findings, which is the findings.
This is what the Times headline was, which was that the government finds no evidence of aliens, none.
And you're like, oh, shit, that's a crazy story.
And you read it in the first paragraph and also no evidence that it's not.
So, you read even deeper.
First of all, take this with a grain of salt.
The government says it's not a secret USA technology.
Okay, well, they're not going to admit it, even if it actually was, so I'll cast that one aside.
But the most important one to me was the government finds and dismisses the weather balloon theory.
Saying that crosswinds or whatever at the time, changing wind directions, dismisses the fact that the objects seen on the FLIR are weather balloons.
Weather balloon is the top explanation by the debunkers, by the professional debunkers.
So I'm like, wait, so the real headline is that the government has no fucking idea what this was, dismisses the main debunked theory around this.
And then this is where the military industrial complex part of this comes in.
But they're like, and maybe it's China or Russia, like intelligence officials worry that it's China and Russia.
Why?
Because they want to put it into a box, which they can explain and try to use it to get Congress maybe to fund like something else.
And to be clear, I've dismissed the PSYOP theory that, like, the government is disclosing all this as a PSYOP for funding.
Like, this is a coordinated campaign.
I think they were dragged kicking and screaming because of Bigelow, because of Harry Reid, Jeremy Corbell, and all the videos.
Like I said, Tom DeLonge, because by bringing Lou Elizondo and all that forward in the New York Times is what broke this open.
And that is what pisses me off, which is that the government is actually just not admitting the truth and the media is going along with it, which is that we have no fucking idea what's going on.
Yeah, the current ones are grainy because actually it's a miracle that we have video at all of something moving at nighttime in the middle of the fucking ocean.
Or at how high was Fravor?
Like 50,000?
I forget how high he was.
Whenever Fravor was up.
So it's like, okay, or whoever got that video, which I think was the guy who came up after him.
It's like, yeah, no shit.
It's grainy.
No shit.
It's like, that's what radar looks like when Whenever you're looking at heat signatures.
I mean, my theory is, why did everything ramp up after 1947?
Which is that we use the atomic bomb in 1945. They're like, hey, fuckheads.
Exactly.
They're like, wait, these fucking chimps can kill each other now.
And not just that, they could kill us.
Or they could kill planets.
And if you look at sci-fi, and I know I'm getting deep here, which is that the use of nuclear weapons is almost always how you know when humanity went ladder up in civilization.
And if you think about how much that changed, I would want to pay attention.
Well, all the things that Bob Lazar talked about in that Jeremy Corbell documentary, which is, by the way, my favorite documentary ever about UFOs and my absolute favorite conversation I've ever had with anyone who claims to have had an experience.
I talked to Travis Walton.
That was amazing.
But Bob Lazar was by far the most fascinating because...
A, he seems insanely sincere.
B, he knows so much about science, so much about propulsion.
And C, the things that he talked about in the 1980s proved to be true, including element 115. That was just like theoretical, right?
Until the 2000s, and then someone figured it out with a particle collider.
But he was talking about this was what they used, and that they had a stable version of this.
And you've got to think about what, and this is the other thing that he talked about, like if you brought a nuclear reactor to someone in the 1400s.
They would think it was witchcraft.
And this is what the kind of technology that whatever these things are, whether they're from the future, whether they're us from the future, or whether they're from another dimension, or whether they're from another planet, whatever the fuck it is, they have technology that is indistinguishable from magic.
And Bob Lazar allegedly, according to him, worked on trying and attempting to back-engineer this thing.
And when he describes his experience with it, he has been insanely consistent forever, since the 1980s.
Let me just tell you how happy I am that you two are independent.
I think you guys are fantastic.
I think your two together in your show is one of the most important things out there because it's a rare thing that's unmolested from the corporate media and from the ideologies on the left and the right.