Adam Curry, the "Podfather," critiques Silicon Valley’s censorship—highlighting Hunter Biden’s laptop suppression in 2020 and January 6th’s media-framed violence—as part of a broader "information war" since the 1960s, where corporations and propagandists manipulate narratives. He argues ranked-choice voting distorts democracy, like favoring Elizabeth Warren over Eric Adams, while Rogan questions vaccine risks amid 170M doses, citing small adverse percentages but acknowledging Curry’s concerns about mRNA side effects and systemic suppression of alternative treatments. Curry’s decentralized podcasting (NoAgenda, Podcasting 2.0) thrives with 1-1.4M listeners via direct wallet payments, bypassing corporate platforms like Patreon or algorithm-driven outrage on Twitter. Their discussion reveals deep societal divisions—from transgender policies to immigration—where cultural norms clash, and tech’s profit-driven control reshapes free speech, suggesting organic alternatives will grow as people reject top-down censorship. [Automatically generated summary]
Joe Rogan, since you recertified me as the Podfather, my life has been so enriched since March of 2020. You have given me just an incredible new lease on professional life.
And, you know, people think that, well, you have to do something to combat misinformation and...
You know, we were talking the other day about Yuval Noah Harati, the author who wrote Sapiens.
He had a segment on his Instagram where he's talking about misinformation on the internet and about how when books first came out, the most popular books weren't books on Galileo.
And then countless people were killed because people were convinced that these How to Spot Witches books were good, and so they were going around trying to spot witches and kill them.
Right.
This was, at the invention of the printing press, this was like one of the first early uses of it.
I had not heard that, but when he said it, it was like, bing!
But, you know, according to the Netflix series, she brought the printing press into the country, and then they started printing gossip stuff, which people liked a lot more than anything else.
Someone sent me something about Elizabeth Bathory.
Do you know who she was?
No.
Elizabeth Bathory was supposedly this very evil woman who murdered a lot of young women.
And she was a royal.
And that she...
Yeah.
See, it says serial killer, but what this guy said to me, because apparently, well, the story was that she would find these young peasant women and murder them, and she would bathe in their blood in an attempt to try to regain her youth.
So they found out that she had done this, and then because she was a royal, she wasn't killed.
She was just sort of locked in a tower for the rest of her life, and she died under house arrest.
But someone sent me a link to a story, because we were talking about it on the podcast.
I forget which friend of mine sent it to me.
Where was disputing that and saying that she was framed thus to steal her land because she was a woman and this woman owned large swaths of land as a royal and they wanted to take over her land and the way they could take over her land was to say that she was a murderer and that she had been murdering young peasants and they framed her with this crime.
The older I get the more I realize how much history that I've learned or have read Could likely be completely full of shit.
There's always multiple ways of viewing a situation historically.
I think it's kind of in our brain, the idea that you can see something, I can see the same thing, and we interpret that differently, and I think that's truth, and you think that's something else's truth.
It's around the time of Hungary, Transylvania, so it sounds like vampire time period.
She's been credited with somewhere in the range of 650 deaths.
There was a lot of witnesses in the trial, but there was a theory about what you're saying, and then someone's trying to counter it, and that's what I was reading through right now.
Yeah, I don't know if this guy, what the guy said to me, the other thing is people love, even if a story's true, people love stories that point that it might not be true.
It's a great way to find out about revolutions that are happening all around the world and disasters and all kinds of other things.
But it's also a very poor way to communicate.
And when you're trying to get out complex, nuanced thoughts in 240 characters or 280 characters, whatever it is, it's just not an effective way to do that.
Maybe it's a good writing exercise.
It's good for comics who just want to tweet out a quick one line or a joke.
Of course it is a weird title, but that just shows you, because it all comes from the same places.
All the stuff is heated up everywhere, on Twitter, Facebook to some degree, but Twitter, I think, really is where it all stems from, and you've got blue checks who are journalists, and it's a very...
The censorship disturbs the shit out of me because there was political censorship that was very clear and they made a decision during the election to not release any of the Hunter Biden stuff.
So they censored the New York Post, which is really crazy because the New York Post is an enormous newspaper.
Why do you see it as weird if you know that people who are running these companies, and I'm not talking about Jack Dorsey, but there's a board, there's a lot of money involved, and there's antitrust, this government is involved with them, trying to fuck with them, so there's this give and take.
There's a lot of things.
Silicon Valley spends, outside of pharma, probably the most money on lobbying in D.C., And I think there's also a little bit of grandiosite there.
It's like, we're fucking Twitter.
We'll do what we think is right.
And that's what all of this canceling is, or censorship, is, well, that's not right.
You can't say that it came from a lab.
That's not right, because here are the people who said it's right.
It's technocrats.
It's a technocratic society, and it's coming from Silicon Valley all over government everywhere, really.
Zuby had a really good post this morning, like a 20-parter.
About all the things that really social media is a big part of, but how people will often choose, obviously, security over some liberty, how they would rather be – they'd rather have a little bit of – They'd rather not take a chance and be accepted by the group.
I mean, these are all very human behaviors.
And even without social media's direct intervention, the Internet has really created a beautiful place for propagandists to go to work.
And it's really, really sophisticated, some of this stuff.
And we don't even know, you don't catch most of it, but so much is being propagandized by corporations mainly, but also, you know, just look at the reporting.
If we can just touch the third rail, January 6th, you know, this is being rammed down our throats as an insurrection, the most dangerous thing that's ever happened since the Civil War.
That's our president who said that.
I mean, I have eyes.
I saw some of it.
You know, we haven't seen the 10,000 hours of video that's available.
But to say that that was a violent insurrection on par with the Civil War or the worst since 9-11 and we need a 9-11 type commission.
I mean, I'm not blind.
I watched it live.
I saw a lot of what was going on.
It just doesn't seem like...
There's a truth there between what most would say is, well, we're just walking in between the lines.
The thing that bothered me the most that I didn't hear much discussion at all that we've talked about a few times on here is the cops opening up the gates.
Like, what the fuck was that?
And taking selfies with people, like the MAGA-loving cops that thought it would be a good idea to open the gates and let the protesters through.
But again, we've only seen what we've seen, what has been presented to us.
So everyone has an agenda.
We don't really know every angle.
Like, I'm in the studio, and I saw your studio.
And I had no idea what it would really look like, because I'm just seeing a little piece of it.
And now I'm here, I'm like, oh, okay, here's the reality of what it really looks like.
It's a very different type of situation.
But we've gotten to this place where...
I'm a conspiracy therapist, right?
So I look at all different sides.
So there's one angle that must be discussed, and I think we're the guys to talk about, at least with you is the right place.
This could have been something similar to the Reichstag fire in Weimar, Germany, which kicked off kind of the whole Nazi Socialist Party by burning down the government building.
They blamed it on these other groups.
And then all of a sudden, you've got some political power.
There's definitely superficial evidence that shows that there may have been people who were instigators, agents provocateurs, who were, A, leading the charge, and that there may have been some cooperation on the other side just to get people in, just to get this whole thing going, just to really create this idea that...
If you take it to its logical conclusion that 70 million Americans are potentially domestic violent extremists, can be flipped in a heartbeat, you've got to keep your eye on them, and they're typically white and they're typically Republicans.
Well, we know that agent provocateurs are a real thing.
And we know that they exist throughout history.
It would be logical to assume that they're in action today and that they are manipulating events.
One thing to consider is, I think that the Capitol Hill, correct me if I'm wrong, I think I'm right, that was what led them to remove Trump from Twitter, correct?
My former neighbor, his wife, is an undercover detective, Austin police.
And also worked Capitol Hill Police for many, many years.
And so I had an opportunity to say, you know, after January 6th, what the hell?
And it was made very clear to me.
If there was a...
If they...
They've shot people throughout history.
Go look how many people were shot and killed by Capitol Hill police in the Capitol building for just doing crazy shit.
It's been bombed before.
It's literal bombs in the Capitol.
So this has happened.
These guys don't mess around.
If you are doing something that is really dangerous, they shoot to kill right away.
No questions asked.
They are badass.
So, that didn't happen.
And, of course, my neighbor didn't say, well, that was a false flag!
And I'm not saying that, but it's kind of odd that, well, obviously it wasn't bad enough for them to shoot on sight, or they had orders not to do that, because that is what they do.
So instead of voting for mayoral candidate, instead of just voting, I want this guy or this gal to be the mayor, you do number one pick, number two, number three, number four, number five, you go down the line.
And the last person's votes get removed and they get redistributed amongst the rest, but not number one, I think.
What?
Yes, they still haven't figured out exactly who the winner is.
In fact, I think that if we had ranked choice voting for the general election, which I believe is what the Democrats would like it to be, that's part of what House Bill 1 is, or HR 1, is to have ranked choice voting for the general election.
If that had happened in a previous election, we would have Elizabeth Warren as our president, probably.
You get mediocre people, I think, with that system.
New York City voters will be using the new ranked choice voting system for the June party primary elections for mayor, comptroller, public advocate, borough president, and city council.
Voters will be able to rank up to five candidates in order of preference, and ranked choice voting eliminates the runoff elections that used to occur in some states for citywide offices.
So they kind of do a runoff built into the election.
So if there's no one with more than 50%, which is very, very common in your typical election, then they start to move it around and move the votes from the loser to the second, third, and fourth choice.
And also you can game it that way.
So if you absolutely hate Eric Adams, then you're going to put your favorites in a different position knowing that...
When the loser loses their votes, your person will move up, maybe from three to two.
I mean, it's mathematics that I don't completely understand, but I know that they don't have results.
The mainstream media, even Twitter, is really for politicians.
It's for their input.
They're just taking that in and regurgitating it.
Meanwhile, Joe Rogan, Tim Pool, you know, Brett Weinstein, The No Agenda Show.
You just keep going on and on and on and on.
These are millions and millions of millions of people who have tuned out from a whole message and they're tuning into other things, maybe thinking for themselves.
Of course, being influenced, but at least there's diversity.
It's not just the news that is telling us the way it is, so that we only get the one side of Catherine the Great and not the other.
If you had the lab leak theory on Facebook a year ago, you get banned.
Your posts get deleted.
You cannot have that theory because that theory's not in line with either the CDC or the WHO. Now, it's the primary theory.
Now, most scientists who've looked at the evidence objectively since Trump is no longer in office, it's been now seven months, everybody's, their heart rate has dropped down enough and their anxiety has reached levels where they can actually look at the science.
And, you know, Jon Stewart's rant did wonders for that.
All of a sudden, we had this mask mandate removed within a second.
Like, next day.
And people were caught off guard.
Schools were freaking out.
We were not ready.
You didn't prepare us.
And the CDC has been very good at prepping everybody, all the institutions.
They get the pre-news.
We're going to do this.
It's coming out.
You hear a thing.
Oh, tomorrow CDC is making an announcement.
None of that.
It just happened.
It switched.
I'm still not sure exactly why, but that went away overnight.
And then, all of a sudden, we got all these other things.
We have ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine stories bubbling up.
But, you know, this example, the bat versus the lab, that just, all of a sudden, based upon a story written by a former New York...
Well, actually, it was a little worse than that.
The story was, turns out, three people were sick who were working in the lab.
And that's why now the lab theory is in play.
That, of course, is bullshit.
Because if we had a story that, oh, three people got sick in the lab, that means it must come from the lab, everyone would criticize it and say, no way, that's not possible, you're a conspiracy theorist full of shit.
But there, like a former New York Times columnist who's in, I think, his 70s now, he went through the whole thing and said, look, here's the absolute proof that we have to at least look at this.
There's more evidence here than there is for the bat or the pangolin.
And maybe there's a book or some stuff is coming out and opinions are changing.
And I think it's related to the pharmaceutical industry.
I mean, all I see is...
I just see fucking marketing everywhere.
So when this changed, and I know Jon Stewart, I know him back from before the Comedy Central, MTV Beach House.
I think he was sent in to soften the blow.
I really critically look at what he and Colbert did together, and they have worked together a lot.
And Colbert is a great actor.
I really think that...
Colbert was not surprised.
He knew that it was coming, and Jon Stewart had a message, and he delivered it, and it softened the blow.
And if he was going to burn some material, You know, that would be a good piece of material to burn because it's, you know, it's not going to be relevant very much longer.
I cannot imagine a world where Jon Stewart agrees with Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart get together and go, and Stewart goes, look, I wrote this incredible bit because I was contacted by the powers that be, and they want to soften the blow of the live leak thing, so they want me to do a comedic bit.
So I've created this comedic bit.
The problem with that theory is it's Occam's razor, right?
What's the most obvious scenario?
The most obvious scenario is, look, this is comedy just writing itself.
You have a coronavirus research lab, a level 4 lab, in the very city where this disease breaks out.
This is the very guy who won the Nobel Prize for Ivermectin.
YouTube removed a video of him discussing it, which is just crazy to think that some tech nerd from Silicon Valley has the insight and like, you know, the world doesn't need to hear this.
The world shouldn't be, shouldn't have access to this information.
That's insanity.
That to me is very creepy, that someone...
At YouTube made that decision, that you're going to take this man who won the Nobel Prize for Ivermectin and he's got this video.
I don't know the content of the video.
Do you know the content of the video that they removed?
All I'm trying to point out is that the media had its role there by ridiculing and mocking.
So that suppressed any information about any alternative drugs.
But the pharmaceutical industry, they make no money on this.
This is a generic drug.
It's pennies.
It's pennies to produce or less than that.
And it is my belief that we'll see a similar situation where either hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, or we'll start seeing maybe another Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert bit, and then we'll have Merck come out with the pill.
And the pill will be a new version of one of these existing drugs with the compound, just twist it a little bit so they can patent it.
I mean, when I was seven, we moved to the Netherlands, and I had to have all kinds of vaccinations.
And that's when my Tourette started.
Now, I don't know if it's literally from that.
I mean, no one knew it at the time.
My dad has had some ticks later in life, so maybe it was in me genetically, and that was just going to come out.
So I've always been a little bit wary of vaccines in general, but my last ones were 2003. I went to Iraq, so, you know, you had the military put yellow fever or whatever in you.
But we had this global shutdown.
We had COVID. Trump is on his way to, you know, probably sweeping the election.
And whatever happens, whether you look at Event 201 and was it a pandemic, it doesn't really matter.
Fact is, the whole world was shut down.
And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, Trump says, Operation Warp Speed, bitches, we're going to have this shit in your arm by the end of the year, which is unbelievable.
That would have been the most insane thing.
Vaccines take 4, 5, 6, 7, maybe 10 years to develop.
But no, and we have new technology.
I think it's possible, and again, conspiracy therapists, that this whole idea of the Great Reset, if you just look at the World Economic Forum, what this asshole Klaus Schwab is prognosticating and how many big, the global banking system really, they wanted some kind of shutdown.
And the shutdown would make all small businesses irrelevant.
So even how it was named, like you're an essential worker.
Well, who was the essential worker?
Fast food, big box.
Not small restaurants, not small retailers, not your butcher, etc.
But do you think that that's a conspiracy or that was a decision made locally?
Because in California, there was a period of time, I think, when things shut down, but then I know most of the restaurants were allowed to serve takeout.
Why could you go to McDonald's and why could you not go there or you had to only do takeout in that manner?
People weren't handing it to you.
They're putting it in the back of your car.
All kinds of different rules and certainly just regular stuff.
You could go to Target, Walmart.
Those were kind of the big ones.
You couldn't really go anywhere else.
And we don't have the...
In Europe, not everyone has a big box store.
You know, there's one in a certain location, so a lot of people would go there.
I'm just looking at what the World Economic Forum publishes on their own website, and they talk about the Great Reset.
And this reset will eventually take us into protecting the Earth from climate change, but we first have to lock down and get ready for whatever comes our way.
And My own personal theory is that Trump maybe saw this.
When the shutdown came, there was no news of a vaccine.
It was shut down.
Vaccines could take four or five years.
I think he went to Pfizer, most likely, and said, you got some experimental shit?
Let's push it real hard.
Will it work?
Will it have adverse events?
Maybe 5%, 10%, maybe 30% of people will die.
Better than the whole world being shut down by a bunch of bankers.
Yes, for a long time, as a gene therapy, for individualized.
And in 2008, I think, there was a big conference put on by, I think, Goldman Sachs, and all the medical companies were there.
I just started No Agenda, so I was researching, and they had PowerPoint slides and everything on the website.
And all you saw was the future is vaccines because we're giving people medication before they're sick and you get them on a program and you get them on a schedule.
And if you recall around 2008-9, that time frame, there were vaccines coming out against smoking.
There would be a vaccine against cocaine abuse.
Oh yeah, none of it panned out, but that was kind of the promise of the mRNA technology.
We can change your DNA, or I'm saying things I have no business talking about, but you can change something so then all of a sudden you don't desire cocaine or you can remove that addictive feature.
And that's when I started paying attention.
It's like, you know, there's something going on.
And the mRNA, I mean, to roll that out, and you can look at many scientists and doctors who will say, that's not a one-size-fits-all solution.
That is meant to be completely tailored for Joe Rogan, we're going to change something in your body that needs fixing or whatever, not just, poof, it's good for everybody.
And I think even the inventor of the technology says it's not intended for this purpose.
Because I was thinking this, like when they're doing the vaccines, like if you're a 300 pound man or you're a 90 pound 16 year old, do they have the same dose?
And they licensed the technology in order to create this.
But those guys, they're paying people on TikTok.
It's called Team Halo to promote the vaccine.
It's been promoted everywhere.
And I think they're behind some of the discreditation of the Johnson& Johnson.
I mean, if you look at whatever information is available, as many people have had blood clots with every single vaccine, but Johnson& Johnson was the one that got singled out and shut down, and their competitor, coincidentally.
And I'm saying, I'm like, why, you know, like, this is really hard to get off, because, you know, the Jordan Peterson thing opened my eyes to it, and then Dr. Carl Hart.
Well, the true bennies, like what the pilots would take, they call it little yellow footballs, where you can fall asleep right away, sleep for three hours, get up and start flying again.
We are, of course, one of the two countries in the entire world that allows the pharmaceutical industry to advertise direct-to-consumer on television and say, Ask your doctor!
The Salk Institute reduced a study on the detrimental effects of the spike protein and related to COVID so that the spike protein itself is causing a deterioration, I believe, of blood vessels, right?
No, the question is, is the same thing applied to the vaccine?
And I think Brett Weinstein had an examination of their press release or what they published.
Versus what they amended they amended some aspect of it to try to like Make it seem a little bit more palatable or something.
I don't know what I don't know what they amended but the point being that these vaccines produce spike proteins and the Salk Institute is saying that spike proteins cause a deterioration of the blood vessels I think the thought is that the vaccines Produce it only locally and that it doesn't get everywhere.
Whereas if you have COVID, it goes through your entire body.
This is, I think, the hope.
Novel coronavirus spike protein plays additional role in the illness.
Salk researchers and collaborators show how the protein damages cells, confirming COVID-19 as a primarily vascular disease, which is really interesting.
This information was out there in 2020 as well, I can recall.
But even the fact that two smart guys like you and I can't really have a coherent story that we consider to be the truth just shows that...
Well, I put us pretty high on saying smart guys.
I'm sorry.
But, you know, shouldn't we know more?
Shouldn't it just be kind of established?
Well, it's not.
So we just don't really know everything.
And, you know, we're, to some degree, the world hopefully is learning that, hey, you know, you've got to learn to assess risk, your own personal risk.
You know, we do lots of things that are risky.
We do things that are risky that we don't know about or how you even, we talked about this in March 2020. Where are the people telling us how to beef up your immune system?
I would have thought that someone in the government would have said, hey, you know, it's not hard to tell people that what we need is vitamin D and exercise.
And they were showing things that Tucker Carlson said versus things that Alex Jones said.
And they were like, are these guys...
He said it in such a funny dismissive way.
He's like, are they bros?
Are they exchanging information?
But what he didn't show by doing this, by Pointing out the two things that Alex Jones talked about and Tucker Carlson talked about, both men were saying things that are logical.
They're both saying what you said earlier, like there was most likely agent provocateurs that at least had some part in that January 6th invasion of Capitol Hill.
That's not an outrageous thing to say.
So just by connecting him...
To Alex Jones, he's trying to dismiss Tucker Carlson, but what he's not dismissing is the actual veracity of the statements.
I actually play Alex Jones in Sturgill Simpson's album.
Sturgill Simpson's and his most recent album, there's the opening segment, a guy gets in the car and he's spinning through the radio dials trying to find something to listen to.
And there's Alex Jones ranting and raving about the Illuminati, and that's me.
They're comparing these things in this really weird, disingenuous way to try to make it look like everything that Tucker Carlson's saying is insane because Alex Jones says something as well.
If Alex Jones says drink water and take vitamins...
And I say, drink water, take vitamins.
Am I Alex Jones?
Like, what does that mean?
The other thing that he said was the Capitol Hill thing.
Now, if there are government files, if you could read these government papers that actually do say that there were agent provocateurs that had something to do with the Capitol Hill attack, If Alex Jones says that and Tucker Carlson says that, but yet the fact remains that it's true, who gives a fuck?
And how are they making that connection?
That connection is so weird.
And the connection is just to try to discredit Tucker Carlson.
But this is your news.
That this is coming from America's trusted news source, and that this is the evidence that...
It's not like he's saying, you know, it's not like this Pizzagate type thing, or again, interdimensional child molesters, or something completely crazy.
What he's saying are things that aren't crazy to say at all.
Because he's saying, what Tucker Carlson said in this very small clip, he said, there are some risks, right?
Wasn't that the quote, I think?
And then Alex says, he talks about risks.
These are not outrageous things to say, but the fact that they've decided to do this and compare them in such a disingenuous way, it's really weird that that is something that the news would want to do.
I'm kind of cynical about this and I have always thought that advertising is equal censorship and the news is not there to bring you the news.
It is to sell advertising and certainly Tucker Carlson, for a while I thought he was really going to get kicked off because what you don't hear Only on Tucker Carlson, I don't know how that happened, is anyone criticizing the pharmaceutical industry.
The number one advertiser in all media is the pharmaceutical industry.
CNN can't criticize the vaccines because then they're advertising.
They get calls.
It's built on advertising.
And it's easier to discredit someone Because when you say this guy is a horrible person, advertisers run away from that shit.
It has no different than Twitter or YouTube.
It's not really about political opinions, but political opinions can leverage the advertiser relationship to get someone canceled.
That's the mechanism.
So this has become so good now.
What are they called?
Sleeping Giants and Media Matters and all these types of groups who organize.
I mean, I even see it on Podcast Index.
I'll get a whole thing.
Tim Dillon sucks.
You have to get him off.
He's a homophobe.
He's a racist.
He's a transphobe.
And then I'll see that five other guys who have podcasting 2.0 apps, they have the same note.
Okay, where this all comes from ultimately, I think, is again, the problem...
Money corrupt.
Money is the root of all evil.
And right now we're in a position where the global banking system, which is far removed from anything you and I can really understand, how credit works and how there's $400 trillion worth of paper that surrounds the bond markets, it's all just, it's an illusion.
In order to keep the control, we have to utilize this at every single moment.
We have to use it as a wedge for everything.
And all of these companies are nothing more than a part of that system.
The money flows through everything, and most of it's advertising base.
All of Silicon Valley is a hits business.
Instead of caring what their users want, they want hits.
So they'll acquire hits.
Oh, this YouTuber's great.
We're going to hook him up.
This podcast is great.
We're going to give him 60, 80, 100 million dollars.
No offense, but it's hits business.
They're buying hits, not doing anything more than that.
And if you don't play along, you're going to lose your income overnight.
So ESG, and this is now something that if you want to invest in a company, they will, on their investor relations page, they'll show you their ESG score.
ESG stands for environmental, social, corporate governance.
And this is where the woke culture comes from.
So they've created this kind of phony baloney rating system that says, well, if you—I'm exaggerating, but if you mention that you are, you know, have a green agenda and you believe in carbon credits and you might trade some credit somewhere, then you get a higher score and therefore you're more investable.
And it's very interesting to see how big investors like insurance company, institutional investors, they are steering away from anything that does not have the right ESG rating.
And so in order to have investors continue to be interested in the stock, which is important for the company, for its perception, certainly for the officers of the company and the shareholders, You have to move this along continuously.
And so it's very simple to see why doing a woke ad as Nike or as any other company and Pride Month is fantastic because you could – and Pride is easy.
Throw up some flags, show the right people, trends, whatever.
And you've got a high ESG score.
And so this is a control mechanism that is being used throughout all corporations worldwide.
And I don't even think it's stoppable.
People are just starting to figure out what's going on.
That's where all this is coming from.
Nike doesn't give a fuck about black people that way.
I don't believe it.
They care about their stock price.
Of course, individually, there's people who care.
There's no doubt about it.
But it's driven by ESG. It kind of started with DEI, the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion.
That has now moved over to...
And you can look it up, SASB, that's the Board of Standards and Statistics for Corporations, and they have this formula how you measure your ESG score and if you're really investable.
And it's funny because you'll see, like, Nike has a 75% score.
Tesla, which you'd think would be really good, 38%.
Because, you know, not woke enough or Elon, you know, says the wrong things.
So it's actually harder to invest, for an institution to invest in Tesla because of their low ESG score.
And they're using it as a method to maximize profits because people will support companies that are woke because it aligns with their own personal values.
Well, currently, if you are a CEO and you have a board and everyone has stock and all your C-suite people and your important people all have shares, and the way the mechanism works, all right, we have the Federal Reserve and interest rate is at zero, so big companies can go to any bank, literally, Federal Reserve is the bank, too, and say, I need $100 billion, and they're going to give it to me for almost 0%.
Because what we pay on credit card interest or something, that's not what banks pay.
They pay almost nothing.
So they get that free money, and then they buy back their stock.
Buying back their stock makes the price rise.
Everybody who has stock wins.
That has been going on for a long time.
That's the number one way of getting really rich in a public company.
Apple, you know, this was the thing when Trump had his repatriation of the money and also the corporate tax cut.
The main thing that was a problem, and I'm not sure how they dealt with it, was, well, you're getting all this, you're bringing this money into the country, or you're getting a tax break.
We don't want you just using it to buy your own shares.
Because you buy your own shares, you're only making yourself wealthy off of actually the backs of the American people because we didn't get that tax revenue.
And that's the system, how it's worked.
And now they're just expanding it into this mythical ESG. And, you know, it's based on how green you are, you know, net zero aspirations, reports, wokeness, social justice.
It's called the Credit Karma or whatever you want to call it.
It's not a FICO score.
It's not from the official FICO company that does your...
When you go to buy a house, there's a company that will really see what your credit rating is or two.
All these other things are kind of their own little scale.
And the way it works is...
If you sign up to us, your credit rating, which will probably be shit, let's say you have 600, just by signing up you get an Experian boost, 40 points!
You're a good person!
You installed the app!
Now, it's like, well for every video you stream on Netflix, we're going to give you extra boost.
Really?
Yeah, yeah.
What hasn't happened yet, which I do expect, if you watch this type of product on Netflix, will give you even more boosts.
Pay this bill on time, and we're going to up your score.
So it's a game.
It's a complete game just to get more and more credit.
It's not teaching you to save.
It's teaching you how to behave well to get more credit or more higher credit rating.
When we give you this app, you download the app, and we're going to right away give you a credit line.
So they're not giving you anything else than an opportunity to borrow money.
And then you're on the hook.
And it's gamified.
And you can pay it off, of course, but people don't.
It's like, well, maybe if it's consolidation.
Bring all your credit cards into our app and we'll give you one low fee and we'll consolidate everything.
And then they're just going to keep...
You know, giving you opportunities to want to buy stuff.
And Facebook and Twitter and other places on the internet are talking to the credit karma people.
And, you know, they're saying, well, hey, you know, this guy, he could probably, bless you, this guy could probably, you know, Joe could probably buy this brand new phone if we tell him that he can get a little more credit by being a good person, paying certain bills or other behaviors.
No, the producers, we call our listeners producers, they totally influence me because if we're not entertaining or informative or whatever it is they don't like, they don't send money or they send less money or lower amounts and then we hurt.
Dave Weiner and I, you know, 18 years ago, the whole idea was all you needed was a place to put an MP3 file and this weird text file, which was called a feed, an RSS feed.
And as long as you had that, anyone with an application or an app who could subscribe and say, okay, you know, this podcast lives over here.
I'm going to put that URL into my box.
Then you had a direct connection with publisher to end user.
Now, as that started to grow, you needed, you know, you got hosting companies, which make it easier for you.
And then we got into the situation where, you know, people got tired of saying, you know, where do I find that podcast?
So we needed an index or a directory.
I think at the time.
I discover, but, oh, I'm looking for this podcast.
You know, Megyn Kelly.
Type it in, boom, it shows up.
I don't have to do a Google search and find the podcast page and click on the...
Remember that?
Click on the orange RSS icon and paste it into your application.
He has his producer, Ben, who sits next to him, and he puts sunglasses on and goes on to these fucking wild, crazy rants, and YouTube demonetizes somewhere in the neighborhood of half of his podcasts.
Now, if you were a person that wanted to maximize your profit, you would say, hey, what am I talking about that makes you demonetize me?
Well, you know what?
Every time you bring up ivermectin, we have a real problem with that, and we'd like you to not bring that up.
Okay, that's off the list.
I want to make that money.
What else?
What are the other subjects?
Oh, well, you're talking about censorship in social media, and that makes us look bad.
We don't like that, so stop talking shit about YouTube.
That you don't have a situation where there's a comparable platform that does the same kind of numbers but doesn't censor as much and then these shows become more popular there and they earn more money.
If you look at the numbers of Coke and Pepsi, I don't know who does better or what, but the point being that there's a competition there.
There's no competition when it comes to YouTube.
It's just YouTube.
I mean, you have your Vimeos, you have your...
But they're so far beyond...
Like, what YouTube has been able to do is really extraordinary.
I mean, they've figured out the way to make the perfect user platform where user-created content is uploaded as a video, and it's just...
It's really kind of nuts if you think about it.
Like, if this didn't exist, and you said, what are the odds that one company is the primary company where you can upload a video?
You'd be like, that's not possible.
Everybody has a phone.
Phones are all making videos.
It's so easy to set up a little tripod and put your phone on it and start talking about cars or physical fitness or whatever the fuck you want to talk about.
The idea that one company would have a complete monopoly on that, not only that, but do a great job of keeping it from being labeled as a monopoly.
I mean, they really are a monopoly, but for no good reason.
It's not like they're trying to stop other people from doing it.
You started the same way where we go and it's not controlled by anybody.
It's kind of incompatible with the advertising model, which is why podcasting, they say $1 billion in ad revenue.
I don't believe it.
I mean, it seems like there's no big A-level advertising names in there.
It doesn't matter.
So 95% of people doing a podcast do it not for advertising revenue.
They do it just because they want to speak their mind, say what they want to say.
A lot of them will, if they use any other platform, even if they're using YouTube, I don't want to monetize because I want to have a longer chance to say what I can say.
We're moving away.
After, I mean, we had a whole slew of cancel events take place all around the election.
And just after that, we saw people in droves going to alternative social networks like Mastodon, the Fediverse.
You know, people are like, fuck that shit, we're going over here.
And then it starts to build, and people get in arguments and build different versions, and then it becomes even more sophisticated, and shit falls off.
I was lucky enough to meet all of them before Maurice and Robin passed away.
I mean, what an accident-prone death family.
Barry's the only one left.
It's like, how lonely is that fucking guy?
Well, Andy Gibb, who wasn't really part of the Bee Gees, he was kind of a fourth member, he died, I believe, of an overdose or heart attack, drug-related, something like that.
Maurice and Robin, I think, died...
Maurice might have died on the operating table.
He was having some procedure done, and Robin died of just cancer.
It was a fucked-up shit.
And Barry's the last guy, and his hair's thinning out, and it's just like, fuck...
Do you remember when he did that thing with Barbra Streisand at her Malibu home?
Saturday Night Fever plagued them because people, they were pigeonholed a bunch of disco dorks where if you look at their last couple of albums, when Big success all over, except America, really.
Like, if you're a handsome person, or a beautiful woman, there's a lot of times where people will look at you and dismiss anything that you have to say.
So this is, and I believe 100% in the law, and there's obvious people who are at fault here who made these deals and used this information incorrectly, but the law is the law.
But the response, the public outcry, or lack of it, will be very different, I predict, and I don't want to equate these things, but I think the damage he's done to women is pretty fucking severe.
Derek Chauvin may get off on a technicality somewhere down the road.
The sooner we all agree, Tina and I often say, you know, as convinced as we are X, Y, and Z... Those people over there, they're just as fucking convinced about that, and we can't fault them for that.
They're not bad or evil or wrong.
In America, in our country, we used to always say, no religion or politics.
Human discourse just needs some limitations and, you know, social media has broken down a lot of walls and people are careless and don't think about how many people read or see what your intimate thoughts are or your snap judgment or your thought at that moment.
There's also this real issue that we're facing today that people And I think a lot of it was exacerbated by the Trump administration, by the Trump presidency, that people can't accept if you have a different perspective on politics than they do.
That you can't hang out with those people.
Whereas it used to be you could have conservative friends and liberal friends and you would joke around with each other about your differences of opinions.
You can't have that anymore.
I still have a lot of liberal friends and I still have a lot of conservative friends and I don't have a problem navigating those waters and I can have rational conversations with my conservative friends and I could even bring up things to my liberal friends that maybe As a liberal, they don't see things the way I see things.
Particularly the need for the military, Second Amendment rights, things like that.
And then there's just human nature issues.
There's a lot of social issues that I agree with across the board in terms of liberals.
There's a lot of things where I'm like, you have to take into consideration the fact that when you see, like, have you seen what's happening in Hollywood with the WeSpa?
This is well organized, well funded, well directed.
When you see the true Antifa with everything black, that's to be taken very, very seriously.
I see no difference between black or brown shirts.
Antifa is to be taken fucking seriously, and the reason that we're not taking it seriously is baffling to me, unless they are working on behalf of some political force.
Look it up.
Antifa has been around for a long time worldwide, not just the United States.
What I was going to say is you're looking at sloppy people.
You're looking at fat people.
You're looking at social outcasts who've decided to stand up for this cause and beat up people who disagree with them.
And they're bullies.
They're ganging up on people.
They're doing it in a very distasteful way.
It is almost as if, now this is where I'll put on my tinfoil hat.
If I wanted to engineer social unrest in this country, I would allow sloppy, stupid people to attack people that are standing up for something that is very difficult to argue.
Here's what's very difficult to argue.
We're not arguing trans people, their rights.
Of course you have rights as a trans person.
Of course you have the right to identify with whatever gender you choose.
The problem is exposing your genitals to children.
Now that was a core part of this story, was 9-year-old and 11-year-old girls that had to stare at a penis.
And people were like, what's the difference?
Is it okay to stare at a vagina?
It's not okay to stare at a penis?
The difference is, and I'm not saying that this person is guilty of this, we know that men have, throughout history, preyed on children.
Pedophiles have preyed on young girls and young boys, and it's mostly been men, right?
We know that women are very nervous about their children being around men who look at their children sexually.
Mm-hmm.
I'm saying that this is one of the reasons why we don't want men naked.
If we have just like a universal sex bathroom, and everyone at a spa could just, men and women would all be naked together.
Look, our society, it sounds rational, but our society is not engineered that way.
We're not engineered, we did not grow up in a way where you just see people's penises and vaginas all day long from strangers.
It's not, if we did, Maybe if we lived in some sort of tribe where this is a custom, where everybody just walks around naked, we would be accustomed to this and it'd be normal.
The problem was, I was kind of freaked out, but what I saw is that changed over time, and it just went away, and it was no longer appropriate, and we had male and female.
So if you went to a place to lift weights and there were showers, all the men and the women all got in there together and so you got to see everyone naked.
And particularly in Europe, the Muslim integration into these countries has really, really turned back the clock on all kinds of gender and sexual freedom.
You cannot walk as a same-sex couple down certain streets of Amsterdam or Rotterdam or any other major city because you will be spit on, whistled at, or maybe even assaulted.
The Netherlands has a long history, colonial history, with Indonesia and also to a degree with Turkey.
And there was a whole wave of Turkish guest workers that were brought in in around the 70s.
And they've integrated now 40 years later.
And, you know, there's a whole third generation.
And it's really very Dutch.
Which has changed.
But all these other refugees but immigrants from real Middle Eastern countries that have completely incompatible cultures with ours, their view on women.
You sell this in France, you know, the whole idea of headgear, hijab versus the burqa, etc., etc.
So those are cultural decisions.
You know, do we want, as the French would say, pillboxes walking down our streets?
Because that's what they say when they see a burqa.
My thought is that when you see the kind of people that were representing the idea that this person should be able to have their penis out in front of little girls, that you saw these sloppy people.
My problem is when people who, like, have strong beliefs against things like this, against things like a person with a penis being able to be in a bathroom with little girls, you're going to get violence.
What if it's the lady's job to stand there and protest because she's been paid by some religious group, political group, whatever group it is, and what if the people in the black, what if they're paid by someone to go there and attack them?
And the bail money goes to the person who was incarcerated, interestingly enough, so you kind of get a double whammy there.
Well, this is district attorneys.
While we weren't looking in general, Joe, you and I, but certainly our parents, We were all busy making careers and being good people and working forward and making the world great.
And a lot of mediocre people kind of slipped into places in politics and school boards.
Stuff that we weren't interested in running for.
I'm not interested in...
That's the problem, right?
Let someone else do that.
I think that's our fault.
It's our parents' fault.
We're kind of Gen X. I'm Gen X with boomer tendencies.
I fall right in 64, so you're definitely Gen X. It's logical that these young...
This is Gen Y, Gen Z. We have given them a bum rap, man.
They're born in the 90s.
Most of them.
You can see it.
90s.
We had the Gulf War.
It was kind of a weird time.
All kinds of financial shit.
Bill Clinton.
Blowjobs became okay because that wasn't actually sex.
That was something else.
So they've learned all this.
Then we had 9-11, which was...
Imagine...
You're 10, and this happened.
My own daughter was born in 1990. This was fucking traumatic for everybody, but especially for children.
I can be an influencer, and I can be like Jake Paul, and I can be like, you know, name it.
And I can be a fitness model and make money.
And yeah, of course, and that's full circle, except if you piss outside of the boat there, cancel, demonetize, you're done, your dream is over, forget about it, no career, go back to gig work.
It's very destructive, and it's easy for us to see it, I think.
It doesn't seem like any leaders in government or even academics give a shit.
Well, this is why this is interesting to me when I watch these organizations, because these people are united in this community.
And they might be a community of losers, but this is a community of people that have an idea.
And this idea is that anybody that doesn't want this person with a penis to be in that girl's locker room because the person with a penis identifies as a woman, anybody who doesn't want that to happen is evil and a transphobe and we've got to stop them.
So they all get together and they think they're right.
That's why they're acting like bullies.
They're all surrounding this one woman.
Men feel like it's okay to throw water in her face publicly, push her with a skateboard, chase her across the street, film the whole thing.
Everyone's filming everything, right?
They're all shaming people and filming people and having these arguments.
And this is maybe the only way that they feel united.
They feel like they belong to something.
They feel like they're a part of something bigger than themselves.
And they want to change culture, whether it's right or wrong.
The problem is they're getting these sound bites.
They're getting these conversations in these little 140, 280 character bursts on Twitter where they're arguing with each other about points.
I mean, if I'm influenced by any one person in my thinking, George Carlin really, really put me in a headspace of, you know, it's a big fucking club and you ain't in it.
I've seen him do the one, he did it in D.C. It was one of his famous rants, and he said, look, I'm still working on this, and he actually started over, because he was reading it, getting it exactly right.
But my point is that it affirms that we don't have a script, and we're just ranting.
I've had conversations with people about podcasts where they don't exactly know how this works, and they go, okay, so when you get together, say if you and Adam Curry are going to do a podcast, Do you guys talk about what you're going to talk about in advance?
I'm like, we don't have a fucking clue.
We literally, we don't think about it.
I mean, there's a few things that I wanted to bring up today.
Above all things, you are just a beautiful, open communicator.
That's what you get from Joe Rogan.
I mean, you can feel that.
It's like, oh my god, this guy's giving and taking, and if you're open to it, and I think all people with some intelligence, most people you have on are pretty fucking smart.
They feel that, and the unlimited, uncensored, non-timed performance is so counter to everything you do in broadcasting, in film, in comedy.
Dude, it's great that you get all this cool stuff, but it really ruins the market.
So when I built my desk after I gave you Drew and let him cut in line...
You know these things these these sound panels the company now sells them You know they I think they were created for you special and they even had like the previous one had JRE logos on it Yeah, this thing's like 600 bucks a pop now for it for a cough button Thanks Joe Rogan.
And so you go out into the outback in the middle of the night, and it's pitch black, and the guy's just driving, nothing's on, and then all of a sudden they'll stop.
It's like an open jeep.
Turn on a floodlight, boof!
And the kangaroo's like...
And they sit there, and the guy goes, boom, get him, falls down.
The kangaroo next to that one will go...
And they're completely stupid.
Then they hoist them up by their balls, by their testicles, because that's the strongest part, onto the side of the truck.
Well, the balance is perfect, because you can grab them, hang them upside down, and they break the left hind leg so it's not flapping in the wind, and they tie it back, and they're good to go.
And they are, I always thought kangaroos, Skippy, you know, this is cute.
Man, they are not cool.
They're stinky, they're nasty, they're ugly, and they will fuck you up real easy.
But 1990s, when Australians still had guns, and they were like, hey, mate, fucking Paul Hogan, they were like rough and tough.
He was like, God...
In the Outback, you know, we were with guides, and they literally set up like a manhole cover with a fire under it, and that was for throwing the goddamn steaks on.
I think we had lived tooth and claw for so long that it's in our DNA. We forgot about I think we had lived tooth and claw amongst predators and amongst neighboring warring tribes, and that shit is in us.
They are very privileged and entitled to be able to even do that and take action upon it for sure.
I understand.
The elites of the world, the Davos Club, I would say, the central bankers and politicians, I understand why they, and this goes back to before climate change, the population bomb.
They've always wanted to contain population.
And Prince Philip would say, well, most people are just useless eaters.
They're cannon fodder.
And to some degree in the world of how everything works, I can see their point from their point of view.
It's like, you're out there doing this shit.
You're useless.
We don't really need you.
How do we cull you?
Eugenics was a real thing all over the world, the United States.
The Georgia Guidestones still kind of show us that, hey, the population should really be 500 million people.
I think it's a lot less spooky or nefarious as just someone who said, hey, if the world goes to shit and everything blows up, these Guidestones will show you, A, how to tell time, how to tell direction, how to keep a calendar, and I have a couple other things here, which is, hey, don't let it grow by 500 million because it turns to shit and you'll do it all over again.
I think that's the basic idea of the Georgia Guidestones.
But, of course, technology has changed everything.
There's no reason why we can't make enough food for everybody.
We do all have to kind of be on the same playing field and participate in the system.
And I think that we've seen a class that is academic or that really doesn't participate directly in the labor force and production.
We've kind of lost that.
And technology is a part of that.
We are in some amazing times.
The world will never be the same.
You and I used to have the phone connected to the wall, and the TV had an antenna that came over the air.
This is an interesting thing about the free market, right?
People don't realize that at one point in time when you would call people, like if you wanted to call someone, if you lived in LA and you want to call someone in New York, you'd have to pay long distance charges.
I have the Radio Shack brick, which is even cooler, the black one.
And then, of course, it was at a certain point before BlackBerry, it was called RIM, RIM Mobile.
RIM had this system where you could get an HP digital assistant, you know, a little thing where you open it up and you had a calendar and you could add a little keyboard, you know, a piece of shit like that, plastic.
You could stick in a card and the card would then connect you to the RIM mobile network and you could send messages or emails to someone else who had that system.
And my buddy, my partner at the time, Ron Bloom, We were doing a sales call.
We're on the plane.
And we're poor, so we're both in coach.
He's there.
I'm back here.
But we're on the ground.
And you're like, beep-boop, beep-boop, sending messages back and forth.
And people are like, oh, that's fucking cool.
It's my buddy up there.
Beep-boop, beep-boop.
We're flying, right?
And this thing's still working while we're in the air because it had like a five-watt transmitter, some crazy shit like that.
unidentified
And the pilot comes on like, ladies and gentlemen, we're having some issues with the altimeter here.
Is it possible that everyone just makes sure that they have no cell phones or other systems that might be on by accident?
And we were so filled with promise and we really, you know, the world's going to be accessible and everything will be at your fingertips and we're all going to be able to interact and play with children from other lands.
The segregation is people will be traveling in groups that are mainstream or not mainstream.
And on the street, you won't recognize anyone any differently, but they will have different information or they will share things in different ways.
They will probably associate with each other in different venues.
And it's just going to be the mainstream versus the non-mainstream.
And it's my belief that the non-mainstream will be much bigger, much larger, but because it's decentralized and you don't have one superstar somewhere.
Whereas in the news you have your superstars.
And the mind-control trap that people get caught in, the outrage.
I'm outraged.
I saw something on Tucker Carlson.
I'm going to go on Twitter.
I'm going to post that.
Oh, fuck that guy.
And then Rachel Maddow sucks.
And then someone else is...
Someone else is tweeting back at you, all that shit.
That's just drugs.
That's drugs.
I may want to dip into it from time to time just to see what's going on, but I'm going to be over here with people who are more civilized and the systems are civilized.
The systems are not...
It's algoized and nudging me into arguments, etc.
That's what Mastodon is, the Fediverse.
There's no algo.
So you come to the end.
That's it.
If no one posts anything that you're following, you're not going to see something new.
You're done.
Move on.
Go do your email or something else.
That is what people will choose.
It will be the path of least resistance, ultimately.
And it is pure freedom, but with all things freedom, it just takes a little bit of extra effort.
But these curated social media networks where they do have things that are banned and do have things that will get you demonetized.
And the other thing is independent content creators like independent political correspondents or political journalists.
They're being ratioed.
They're doing something where they're limiting the amount of reach these people have, whereas they're accentuating the amount of reach that someone like CNN has or some large corporation has.
But some people I see as those sloppy people outside of that, on both sides, outside of that wee spa, like hitting each other over the head with skateboards.
No, this is very necessary that we see these things.
People who are big fans of movies and sports franchises like the NBA, they have to see that they're the bitch.
They're the bitch of some people and not just a corporation, but of a government.
I think it's really good that people see that.
It's fantastic.
Absolutely.
And the other thing I noticed is Hollywood no longer has influence.
Influencers have influenced.
It's the nut job on TikTok that influences.
It's the person on Instagram.
It's no longer John Legend and Christy Teigen.
The celebrities have no pull.
No one cares.
Award shows?
Dead.
No one cares.
No one's watching.
We're not interested in anything you have to say at all, at all, at all.
So it's done.
And they're flipping out too.
These are big shifts.
We did not just go through 15 months of COVID lockdown and, oh, we're okay.
Man, shit, we're going to figure it out.
We're going to see a lot of stuff has changed.
A lot of stuff for good.
But the human aspect of, dude, I don't want any part of that.
You got to kind of hit the bottom like all drugs.
Like, wow.
In the Atlantic today, Flanagan, I forget her first name, she quit Twitter for 28 days.
It's a pretty interesting article how she had her son manage that, and she goes through all these withdrawal symptoms that she had during this 28 days.
Very smart, educated woman, writer, and, you know, so it's a drug, and we just have to recognize.
It should be labeled, really.
I'm fine with Twitter, but it should say, this could be dangerous to your health, mental health, a number of other things.
Just because of Podcasting 2.0, I was able to figure out that we probably have about a million to a million four people listening to each show, which is more than I actually thought.
right and if no well fuck and we also a lot goes into it you can't just do a fucking podcast a lot goes into this certainly for for where we are we have a newsletter that we that we publish it goes out the day before every show which is to say hey here's some stuff that's going on he'll be talking about tomorrow remember to support us we don't my wife is a semi-retired c-suite level marketing communications communications officer
She says for non-profits, always non-profits, Ronald McDonald House charities most recently.
She says the number one reason why people don't donate to a cause is because the cause didn't fucking ask them to.
And you've got to get yourself over that hump.
By the way, Roganites, as they're known, that's what they're called?
When someone donates, they say, I saw you on Rogan, so now...
They haven't left you.
They're joining our tribe.
People from our tribe see you.
We talked about that one of these times, where it's this crossover, man.
That's what's so beautiful.
There's people from...
I think that's one of the things you pioneered above all is getting other people on your show who had a podcast or inspired them to become a podcaster.
That's really a big part of the contribution that you have given to what podcasting is.
And people forget that.
And it's not appropriate for every type of format, but when it comes to ideas and just talking about shit no matter what the topic...
This crossover has just created this beautiful network of web of people who have heard about some...
I was on Michael Malice, you know, that came through Tom Woods.
You know, these are also all people with great followings who have very different opinions from what is being told in the mainstream.
Count that all up.
I think we're much bigger than, you know, the couple hundred thousand that most cable news stations have, except for some exceptions.
There's no agreement other than just we're all just cool to each other.
One of the things that I recognized in the comedy world early on was that there wasn't the right amount of camaraderie with comedians because...
They were thinking of each other as competition rather than thinking of each other as comrades or colleagues or just fellow participants in this rare art form.
I don't know how many professional comedians there are in the country, but there's less than a thousand.
And that spirit, when we started podcastindex.org, it's all free open source.
And 50 people now, more, 60 have shown up software developers who all have day jobs and they all have an idea.
One guy's creating an app and he thinks he can be successful with this app in one way.
Another guy is doing cells, statistics and data about podcasts and he's doing his own thing.
And so we're all kind of in this coopetition where we're developing the protocols and the features to be better and we all have our own little thing where we think we're going to be successful with it.
And all of a sudden there's like a developer conference and they do like a Zoom call with 25 people.
And I look at this like, holy fuck, here's at least a payroll of $25 million.
You couldn't find these people.
And they're more honest and more courteous to each other than in a corporate environment.
The problem with corporate environments is it encourages people to think about numbers instead of thinking about people.
That's the real problem.
We're talking about pharmaceutical companies.
It's not like they're all evil.
They're just people with families, and there's a diffusion of responsibility when you have a corporation that has hundreds of thousands of employees, and you're just one person making decisions and pushing buttons.
The driving force behind Bitcoin is a lot of these very same older millennials who said, okay, I just got fucked throughout my whole life.
This is my destiny.
My dollar purchasing power is devaluing by 10% a year just by inflation.
It's real and part of that is printing money.
So unless I get a raise of 10% a year, I'm not going to be able to buy a house.
So enter, and this is why the history of money is interesting, enter Bitcoin, which went from a white paper to a currency in El Salvador and Paraguay maybe coming next within 10 years.
This is a story.
Actual money in countries from an idea, and no one owns it.
It's completely decentralized.
You can't change it.
You can't fuck with it.
And I see young people putting money into this and thinking, I'll check in 10 years.
I'm not worried about what happens now.
And I was a non-believer.
People sent me all kinds of Bitcoins, like, whatever, Beanie Babies is what I thought.
And I had 65, and I sold them at $1,000.
Like, wow, this is fucking great!
I can't believe this scam!
Now we're today at like 34, 35. It'll probably go over 100 by the end of the year.
I mean, it's math.
If you really look at what it is and you apply financial math, it's a great hedge against any other fiat currency like the dollar or the euro, etc.
And there are a lot of smart kids out there who have seen this and are driving this.
And they're driving it with memes.
And Tim Dillon's a part of this.
Bitcoin 2021 in Miami was a big meme fest, but it worked.
It's crazy shit.
There's something big happening here that is, for obvious reasons, not really being discussed in the mainstream, and that's truly what the movement behind Bitcoin is.
What I tell people about podcasting is you can't make money in podcasting if you're trying to do podcasting to make money.
But if you want to do a good job, if you just want to make a great podcast and you just keep doing it, you probably will, I can't guarantee, you probably will make money though.
You must ask your listeners, or as we call them producers, to support you.
You must ask them.
And what I found works early on with no agenda.
If you say, support me with five bucks a month, you get a lot of people who send you five bucks a month.
If you say, make it a number meaningful to you, whatever you thought this show was worth, how much value was it, you get a lot of people who send you five bucks.
Some will send you 50, and some will send you 500. You will make more money if you let the price discovery over to the value if you let the person who has consumed that determine what it's worth to them.
Some people spend 50 bucks like it's 5 cents.
And they also listen to my show, our show.
Some people, I mean, we have crazy numbers sometimes.
My first gig was a hospital radio station when I was 15. It was a closed-circuit station.
That's where I got my chops, because I was a real professional.
And so it was one night a week.
And then my buddy and I did the show together.
We had to audition and go through.
I was 15. Like, oh, I can be this.
But what we do is we take these request forms out and hand them out to all the patients because they had three channels, the three government channels, and then number four, that was Radio Tulipa in the Tulip Hospital.
And we were so bored with this whole process of handing the shit out, but we said, why don't we take the kids down, because the studio was in the corner of like an auditorium, and we'll roll the beds down.
And they can sit there, they can watch us.
And I don't know what happened, but at a certain point, it was Iggy Pop's Lust for Life, and we're playing bumper beds with these kids, and they're tripping out, and it's like, fuck!
One thing that does give me hope about podcasting is that podcasts, this podcast, yours, many others, you can have people differing political persuasions.
Some of the things about the nefarious intent, whether or not these things are actual conspiracies or whether or not people are just taking advantages of situations and it could appear to be conspiracy.
I mean, maybe I'm naive, or maybe I'm just pointing out human nature is hard to figure out.
Well, the world's history is pretty violent and bloody, and there's war and violence and blood and all kinds of shit going on at this very moment, and we just don't think about it.