Joe Rogan and Dave Smith critique media outrage over trivial issues like Adele’s gender-neutral award show while ignoring real problems—economic collapse (400,000 small businesses lost), Yemen’s war (Obama-backed Saudi/UAE blockades causing cholera deaths), and COVID-19 policies disproven by studies. They argue authoritarianism thrives when dissent is silenced, even if flawed, and praise independent journalism over corporate bias. MMA dominates the conversation, with Brunson’s AI-assisted rise and Adesanya vs. Whittaker hyped as a clash of elite striking. The episode ends with Rogan calling Smith’s platform a "glorious accident," contrasting media chaos with UFC’s unfiltered, high-stakes entertainment. [Automatically generated summary]
You took the logical progression from being, you know, a stand-up comedian, an MMA analyst, to bringing down the entire regime in the United States of America.
For everything about your life, all aspects of your life, you'd be happier, your hormones would work better, your whole endocrine system would function more fluidly, your heart would work better, you'd feel better.
I think it's a reasonable request to say, hey listen, I don't fit into these norms, and I would like to not be mistreated for that.
That is a reasonable request.
To say that I demand that everybody else also does not fit into the norms, which the vast majority of human beings, like the vast, vast, vast majority, consider themselves to be one of these two genders.
It's, you know, it's like the reason, though, why all of this, like, woke insanity is so pushed by all of the big corporations and by the media and, like, all this stuff is because doesn't it just serve as the perfect distraction?
Like, while everything's crumbling and there's so many real things, like, the 20th century for the United States of America has been a disaster thus far.
Like, coming from being the most powerful country in the world, coming out of, say, like, the 90s to...
What is it?
2001 starts with 9-11, then like seven disastrous wars, the worst recession in 100 years or something like that.
Donald Trump gets elected.
There's COVID. There's the shutdowns, this whole thing.
It's like a disaster.
And they're like, what we really need to talk about, what we need to focus on, is that this woman said she loves being a woman the other day, and I find that very problematic.
If you're like one of these big corporations or some hedge fund manager or something, I'm just saying it's awfully convenient.
Well, that's the thing, though, is that it's like...
It's an interesting thing also because you have so much support, so many people love you, that now you have all these people out there and it's like, so what do you guys want to do here?
You really want to go to war?
You want to bring up everything everyone's ever said that was not the right thing to say?
But if you're asking me to, like, become something different because people are paying attention, like, well, I'm out.
Because that's not what I signed up for.
I signed up to just be myself.
But something happens to a lot of people when they get a lot of attention where they start to lean towards the things that get them the most attention or lean towards the things they feel like get them the most support or they start to react to the reactions of other people.
And then they become reactionaries.
They become different than who they really are.
And one of the things is they lose their ability to have a charitable take on things.
They lose their ability to be compassionate for other people, and they start looking at things very ideologically, very dogmatically, and they start falling into these traps.
And you'll see it with right-wing people, you see it with left-wing people, and they get Somehow or another, they feel like their emotions and outrage and yelling and being insulting, it enhances what they're saying.
It enhances their take on things.
And it doesn't.
It doesn't work.
You should be maturing.
It's okay to be outraged.
It's okay to insult people.
But it should have weight to it.
It should make sense.
And when you're doing it and it doesn't make sense, come on.
Do you not have a filter?
Are you having too many other people influence you?
It's so sad like it's like people are looking But that's also why it doesn't it's not very effective and it's not very popular like it's kind of popular with some casuals But it loses support because if people don't feel you're sincere if they don't you can be wrong But you have to be honest like you who are you like who I don't I want to know who you are I don't mind flawed people every fucking person I love dearly is flawed all of them I like flawed people I don't mind flaws, but I want to know what you're thinking.
Like, why are you thinking what you're thinking?
Are you thinking what you're thinking because you've thought it out?
Is it your opinion today and tomorrow you might come along and go, you know what?
I thought about what I said, and now I think differently because this, that, and the other.
And okay, good.
Now I like even more, because now I know I can trust you to course correct.
I can trust you to be honest about your missteps or why you're thinking a way that upon further consideration you revised your opinion.
But if I think you're bullshitting me, if I think you're doing something because you're just trying to get attention, Fuck all the way off.
So I think you just hit on like exactly really the essence of why you're so big and the essence of why the corporate press hates you so much is that you have this connection with your audience where they know it's not like your audience Thinks you're right about everything.
They know you're not lying to them.
And that's a really important distinction.
It's not necessarily, like, you might be wrong about some stuff, and you often will admit, like, I got this wrong, or whatever.
You'll correct yourself in real time.
But they know you're not lying to them.
And people can smell that, like, on an instinctual level.
You watch CNN, and you know they're lying to you.
They're not even attempting to have an honest conversation.
They're not going to show you any of the data that is actually relevant.
They're not going to break it down in a meaningful way.
But I just think that somewhere along the lines in this country, now that we have the opportunity to, because of the internet and podcasts and things like this, and because Guys like Brian Stelter at CNN, these guys have been so, in the 21st century alone, so catastrophically wrong about so many important things, like so many, that nobody trusts them anymore.
They smell that this is phony, and they don't want that.
And I think what you...
I don't think intentionally, but I think just because it's your nature, what you kind of figured out is that people were really craving just an authentic conversation.
Where people can be flawed and people can just talk about, you know, things that matter and talk about them from a real perspective and just have a conversation.
I'm not putting on a show for you here.
I'm not going, hello everybody and welcome to the Joe Rogan podcast today and this blah blah blah.
Like, none of that.
Let's be human beings here and that Was really attractive to a lot of people.
And I mean, look, man, these guys, you know, listen, the amount of contempt I have for the corporate press, I cannot, like, overstate.
I mean, these are, in my opinion, and I think an opinion that's, like he said, not all opinions are equal.
Like, I think this opinion is better than his.
They are, objectively, the mouthpieces for war criminals.
That's what they do.
And the idea that they would have the nerve The nerve to accuse you of spreading disinformation.
As they've been pushing this war propaganda between Russia and Ukraine, what's so weird that I haven't seen come up is that Vladimir Putin had bounties On the heads of US soldiers in Afghanistan.
You guys just pushed war propaganda between the two countries which own 90% of the world's nuclear arsenal.
You pushed that based off a lie.
And you also said that the last president was installed by Vladimir Putin on some Russian conspiracy.
But why don't we hear about that that much?
Why is that?
Oh yeah, because that was a big fat lie.
Not to mention, you know, Assad is still in power in Syria, but whatever happened to the fact that he was gassing his own people?
Oh yeah, that was a big fat lie.
And we know that now because there's been like five whistleblowers from the OPCW. That have come out and explained that all of the evidence pointed toward that it wasn't Assad who gassed his own people.
And I mean, Libya, they said Gaddafi was about to go genocidal against his own people.
A study in the...
They did an investigation in the British Parliament determined that was a complete lie.
I mean, like, one after...
Obviously, everyone knows weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was a big, fat lie.
And these are lies where...
Hundreds of thousands of people have died as a result of the lies.
So not just spreading misinformation, misinformation with catastrophic consequences where like real human beings have had their lives ruined and then you would be behind that whole apparatus and have the nerve to accuse somebody else of spreading misinformation when they spread misinformation about you.
Specifically about me and they sent their doctor in here and all he could say when you confronted him on that was like Yeah, no, I guess they shouldn't have said that and then turns around goes back on CNN and goes yeah No, we never lied about that like people see that totally say that he that's actually kind of a Confusing thing you could look at that out of context and I think Sanjay Gupta is a good man what happened was He was talking to Don Lemon,
and Don Lemon said that it is true that these drugs are used in whatever, I'm paraphrasing, in a veterinary application.
And then he said, yes it is, and then he wanted to keep talking, so it's not a lie, but Don Lemon would talk over him.
He's doing the thing remotely, and if you've never experienced this before, what happens is you put an ear thing in, and it's like if Dave and I were in another city and we were doing a show remotely like on CNN, he would talk to me and there would be a slight delay, and then I would hear him and I would talk to him.
He had something about her, I didn't even know that she had said, that's so outrageous.
And he said, don't forget that this is the same woman that said this just a couple months ago about unvaccinated people.
Like some ridiculous quote about unvaccinated people.
By the way, which many of them have had COVID. Many of these unvaccinated people like myself and like my friend Dave Smith, we've had COVID. And the CDC has finally come out and said that if you have had COVID, You have better protection from Delta by something like 6X. Which usually when the CDC comes out and says this, it's what anyone paying attention has known for a very long time.
I only open it like two or three times a day because there was a time, like yesterday or the day before, where every time I would open Twitter, and I don't look at my mentions at all, but it was all about me.
I think one of the things that's happened over this most recent cancellation, I've spent substantially less time online, and it made me feel better.
Not just because I'm not reading about me, like mean things people say about me, or supportive things people say about me, which is a lot of it.
It's been very nice.
I really do thank all the people that have been very supporting, very loving.
I really appreciate it.
But I just don't think it's good to even read stuff that's not about you.
I think what I should be reading is like fucking AP articles, like news articles.
I should be reading like real news.
That's what I should be reading.
That's kind of it.
Like all these hot takes, I mean, maybe I should dip my fucking toes in that pool every couple days or so, but the reality is, like, that's not good for your health.
Because these perspectives, they accelerate the culture war.
Because you see, like, this ridiculous perspective, like, people getting mad at Adele for saying she loves being a woman, and you get angry, like, for no reason, and you're like, what the fuck?!
But regardless of all of that, the thing that drives me crazy about the, you know, like when Dana White got confronted by that reporter who said, are you a doctor?
You know, are you a doctor?
It's like, look, Some people...
There's a fair argument to be made to say that, like, a virologist has an expertise in viruses that the rest of us don't have.
And that's fine.
It's a less strong argument when you're censoring all of the virologists who disagree with you.
But once you're talking about public policy...
Then everybody gets to be a part of this conversation.
You can't just – because you're now talking about – you may have a little expertise, but your expertise might be in viruses or if you're like an epidemiologist in the spread of viruses or an immunologist in the immune system or something like that.
But if you're talking about, okay, this policy will contain this virus, it's like, yeah, but are you also taking into account what effect that would have on the economy?
What effect that would have on the psychology of the people?
Are you all of these experts?
And now you're talking about, how about just the belief in liberty?
I mean, like, you're telling people because they didn't consume a pharmaceutical product, they're not allowed to leave their home?
I'm sorry.
Being a doctor does not give you, like, some expertise in that that I, as a regular free person, am not allowed to also have a say in.
And, like, my counter to that is, like, over, like...
Over my dead body?
Are you going to lock me in my house?
Like, give me liberty or give me death?
Am I not allowed to feel that way?
Wasn't that supposedly the spirit of this country?
So that stuff just like, this is a really evil authoritarian mindset that's on display there.
Not just that like, hey, I think it would be best if we did this, but that I believe I have this medical expertise that now gives me license To strip other people of their most basic freedoms.
Do you think it's like what we were talking about earlier, when it comes to different podcasters and YouTubers and the like, that once they start getting attention for a certain thing, they lean into it?
So I think there's multiple factors going on with a lot of different people.
So part of it is that, and I've experienced this a little bit when I've kind of been in little bits and pieces in the corporate press world, it's a very insulated bubble.
I was doing it several times a week, and we would do the show together and work together.
We never hung out or anything like that.
But she was always nothing but very nice to me, and I really liked working for her.
She was very nice.
I think she's wrong about a lot.
But so they hired me at her, she had a show called Unfiltered.
And I was one of the contributors on it.
And I think they had no idea what they were getting with me.
I think they were like, they were like, oh, Dave's like a stand-up comic and he makes jokes about politics.
So perfect.
He'll come in here and be funny.
And they, dude, I mean, they had, when it first started, they had a segment at the end of the show where every contributor got to bring their own topic.
You know, like, here's the topic I want to talk about, and this is what's going on in the news.
And they literally called me at one point, because, like, four days in a row, I had talked about the war in Yemen.
That was, like, all I wanted to talk about every single time.
I was like, this is the worst thing in the world, it's the biggest humanitarian crisis in the world, hundreds of thousands of people are dying, babies are, like, vomiting themselves to death, and it's all because America's supporting the Saudi-led war over there.
We could end this in a day with a phone call.
And then it'd be like, tomorrow, what do you want to talk about?
It'd be like, Well, the war in Yemen's still going on, and babies are dying, and we could end this with a phone call.
And they're like, the fourth day, they were like, you have to talk about something else.
You have to pick a different story.
And then the fifth day, I went in and I was like, the war in Syria is all America's fault, and babies are dying, and we could end this in a day.
And then, like, they stopped doing that segment where the contributors got to pick their story at the end.
I don't know if it was because of me.
I think it was because of me.
But I had some fun moments on there where I'd get to argue with all of them.
And then as it went on and on, I think it just wasn't helping her.
They started using me less and less.
And they did renew my contract.
I had a six-month contract, then they renewed me for another six months.
But then by the end, they just stopped letting me talk about war.
Like if war came up, I just wouldn't be on the panel anymore.
2017. And the topic was, what Brian Stelter's favorite topic is, was, you know, misinformation on the internet.
Because he's the guy, his job is to basically be the guy who covers the press.
So he's the beat reporter on, you know, the media.
And every week he comes in with, you know, his assessment on the corporate press and he goes, A-plus, doing great work, except Fox News.
Everyone else is doing great, but the real problem is there's this misinformation out there.
And there was a video at the time, and I believe it was like the number one watched video on YouTube of the week.
And it was a stupid video.
It was about how the Parkland shooting, that shooting in Florida at the high school there, was an inside job.
It didn't really happen.
It was all crisis actors and all this stuff.
It was stupid, just dumb conspiracy that's not true at all.
The shooting happened.
People died.
But he was going off and off about how dangerous this was and why people, you know, how do people believe this stuff?
And I was basically saying to him, like, the thing I'm trying to say now, like, it's like, well, have a little bit of self-reflection.
Ask yourself, why is it that people don't believe you guys?
And I was arguing with him.
I was like, look, there's so many real conspiracies that you guys won't cover that are really interesting, but you won't cover it at all here.
So then you leave, you seed that ground.
To somebody else.
And this was all fair, but I was talking to him about, like, why I used to listen to Alex Jones back in the day.
Like, what I found so interesting about him.
And I was like, well, back in the day, I found Alex Jones, and he's talking about all these things, like, you know, Operation Northwood and stuff like that.
And I was like, there's no way that's true.
That couldn't be real.
And then you go research it, and you're like, oh, it is real.
It was during the Kennedy administration, so in the early 60s.
JFK was president, I don't know, 62, maybe?
And basically, they had this plan, which was signed off by the Joint Chiefs, to have a false flag attack to shoot down an American plane and blame it on the Cubans as a pretext for war, to go to war with Cuba.
Imagine coming into office, when you're president, you don't really know how they run things, and you get in there and the Joint Chiefs of Staff pushes that onto your desk.
And you've got to think that if this is the attitude of the Joint Chiefs and various people behind the scenes in 1962, why are we supposed to assume that that somehow or another is better today?
And all of that, all of the kind of like deep state entrenched powers have only gotten more powerful and out of control since then.
I mean like this was very new.
Like the CIA was created in the 40s.
So you got to think at this point in time, this is a fairly new Yeah, like we didn't really like this.
This was new.
This was supposed the CIA when it was created was supposed to be basically like a newspaper for the president Like the idea was like they're gonna gather information and give it to the president So he has good information good intelligence about what's going on.
It wasn't gonna be like some paramilitary organization that goes and launches covert wars all around the world and This grew into this monstrosity that it is today and has been for decades.
But anyway, so I was making this point to Brian Stelter that it's like – and then I said on air at one point – I used the example.
I go, Obama signed into law in the National Defense Authorization Act of whatever year it was.
I think it was 2011. I might be wrong about the year.
But it was one of the NDAA acts that Obama signed into law had the provision that you could detain American citizens without charges and hold them indefinitely.
And Obama noticed that provision himself because he added a signing statement to it that said, my administration does not plan on doing this.
And at one point I said, this was on air, at one point I said to Brian Stelter, I go, now listen, the fact that people don't trust the media and that there's all these conspiracies in plain sight that aren't reported on, this manifests itself in silly things, sometimes like some video saying the Parkland...
You know, school shooting was crisis actors and didn't happen.
And he corrected me, quite outraged, and said, it's not just silly.
It's not just silly.
It's dangerous.
And I said to him, I go, what's much more dangerous is the president of the United States signing into law the right to detain American citizens without charges and hold them indefinitely and a media who doesn't cover it.
And, you know, it's much more dangerous as weapons of mass destruction are being created by Saddam Hussein that leads us into war with Iraq.
And I just don't understand.
It's almost like I don't know if those guys are, like, being intentionally dishonest, but I don't understand how you couldn't think that through and realize it.
That the trust in media has completely collapsed, their viewership has completely collapsed, and now they're furious that you, you know, they're like on some show on CNN, talking about how dangerous you are, and this show on CNN, you probably have Easily 20 times more people listening to your show than theirs.
And so my guess, even back to what you were saying before, my suspicion is that it's part that people are very insulated in their world, and they kind of have this thing where it's like, Well, everyone agrees with this, because everyone they talk to agrees with this.
And then within those circles, within New York and L.A., they're not even getting out there and talking to firefighters in Staten Island.
You know what I mean?
They're in the Upper West Side or something.
And so there's that.
And then I think there's also a lot of these...
Like these games, the corporate press game, the politics game, like all of these, the bureaucrat game, they tend to be a magnet and then they tend to be an area where very dishonest, narcissistic people, like they're drawn in and they rise up.
Those are the people who are like drawn in and those are the people who are rewarded by those systems.
So you get a lot of those people.
And then on top of that, I think there is some blatant, flat out, lying, corrupt people who are straight up in bed with big corporate interests who are there to do their bidding and know exactly what they're doing.
Like they might be maybe working with intelligence agencies or they might be working with whatever, pharmaceutical companies or things like that and they have an agenda and they are just lying.
Now I'm not saying that's everybody, but I'm saying those people exist as well.
That people like It's—there are people there—I mean, you see these think tanks that, like, are funded by weapons companies that push for every single military—like, every single military intervention.
Now, I refuse to believe that this is all just the fact that, like, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin really believe it's a noble cause to fund a think tank that wants to push for military intervention.
I think there's corruption there.
I mean, I don't think that's too, you know, crazy of a reach.
And there's no one behind them pulling their strings.
When Crystal and Sagar went live, that was a very important moment.
Because it wasn't like The Hill was holding them back.
And I think Rising on the Hill, the show they do now, is excellent.
It's still very good.
I love it a lot.
I still watch it.
I think they do a really good job.
The Hill is a really...
As far as structures, I mean, it's kind of a corporate structure that disseminates the news.
It's very good.
It's probably the best one.
Outside of these independents.
But to be an independent in today's day, it's hard.
It's a sneaky thing.
You have to find your way through the Salmon River and climb up the net.
You've got to get through somehow.
You've got to climb up the ladder.
It's hard.
It's not an easy thing to do, and that's one of the reasons why I try to boost their signal, like Matt Taibbi or Glenn Greenwald or anybody that's a legitimate, independent journalist that I think is doing really good work.
You've got to highlight these people.
This is what we need to be paying attention to.
And guys who work for big companies, like Josh Rogan, who's legit as fuck, who works for The Washington Post.
One of the things I find really interesting right is like in the push to I guess the push is to Shut you up is more or less that from the Surgeon General to Brian Stelter to all of the people who are like, you know Whatever the all the the artists and all this stuff who are like, you know, whatever want you de-platformed or something like that It's like okay, so even theoretically let's say they got you and Which they're not going to.
But even theoretically, if they did, it's like, is that really the problem?
What do you do with your audience?
Do they think if you just stopped doing this, if you just quit tomorrow, then everybody who listens to you would just go, okay, I guess we'll just listen to Brian Stelter now.
Well, I think there was a lot of things happening, but it was the Leslie Jones thing.
It was the Leslie Jones things because she was in Ghostbusters and he had said some mean shit about her and called her ugly or something like that and maybe some racial stuff.
And then there was a bunch of people who also tweeted at her.
And then apparently the accusation for removing him from Twitter, the accusation was that there was a bunch of other accounts that either him or the same IP address was using.
The problem here is that there's no, like, sanity or nuance.
So it's almost like if she said the wrong thing, then we have to treat that...
Like, as if there's no difference between if you said...
I don't think it was a racial issue, I just think it was an issue about humanity and how evil men can be, is what she said.
So if you said that, or if you said, I don't think the Holocaust ever happened, or if you said, I believe the Holocaust happened and I wish it would happen again.
When a prominent person like Whoopi Goldberg has a misstep and then corrects herself and apologizes, then we all get to understand things.
The correct way to handle that is to leave her on the air and have more discussions about it.
Maybe have Barry Weiss come on, or maybe have another Jewish scholar come on.
Have someone come on and say, well, this is why this was offensive to other people, and I'm sure she would be apologetic.
She's not a bad person.
She's not a bad person by any stretch of the imagination.
She's trying to express herself, but her perspective, which was, it's personally oriented on being a woman who's experienced racism towards black people.
So she's looking at it like these are white people, and then the Germans are white people too.
But where you would look at them and go, but they're all white, so how could this be a racial issue?
The other thing that's interesting is that it's like, do you consider Jewish people to be a separate race?
Because if not, if you say Jews are white, then technically...
You could argue that Whoopi Goldberg was correct, even though the Nazis believed they were a different race and the Jews believed they were a different race.
If you think they're all white, you go, they were both wrong.
So it wasn't technically a race issue.
But again, this is...
To me, I go, if the Nazis' ideology was completely motivated by genetic racialism...
So, yeah, I would say the answer there is that yes, at least the perpetrators of the Holocaust were saying that they were doing this, you know, to clean out and create the Aryan nation descendants from Atlas or whatever their weird ideology was.
But I do think that, you know, even talking about like the Milo thing and with a lot of these other guys, One of the things that I really hate and I wish we could fix in America, and I think to be successful, to be a thriving country going forward, we almost need to grapple with this.
And this isn't like laws or policy.
This is just kind of a spirit of liberty and tolerance that we need in this country where...
For me personally, if there's a person, you know, sometimes you have these people who are, like, very contrarian kind of provocateurs, and they might, let's say they say four things, and one of them is, like, kind of interesting, and one of them is, like, blows your mind, and you're like, that is such a good point, like, such a phenomenally good point, and I never thought about things that way.
And then they say one thing that you think is dead wrong, and then they say one thing that is wildly offensive and wrong.
Now, what the woke police and the cancel mobs will focus on is the one thing that they said that was wildly offensive and wrong, and therefore they should be canceled for that.
But to me, I'm like, I like that guy.
He says every now and then he'll say something that's really thoughtful and makes me think about things in a different way.
And then when he gets something wrong, I can disagree with him.
I don't want to cancel people because they occasionally get things wrong.
I think that a lot of times those types Are the ones who will hit on a really important truth.
And you see, even what you were talking about before when you were talking about- Don't you think there's value also in correcting them and finding out what their mistakes were?
Because if they have said something that's wildly incorrect and then someone comes along and says, hey, this is why you're wrong, like with the Whoopi Goldberg thing, this is literally about race.
They were trying to create a master race.
That was their plan.
It had been so stated.
Read Mein Kampf.
Listen to Hitler's speeches.
He was trying to create a master race.
It was race.
Just because we're talking about melanin, We're talking about origins of original ancestries.
You can't just say it's not about race.
But the way to deal with that is not to suspend Whippy Goldberg.
Whippy Goldberg shouldn't be suspended.
She's not a bad person.
She's like anybody that's on TV spitting out hot takes with four people talking over each other.
You're going to say some dumb shit.
They're all talking over each other.
First of all, there's a reason why I have headphones on, so the people know.
Because when Dave and I are talking, especially if there's a third person here, it's very easy to talk over each other.
You don't want to.
And when I hear your voice and my voice at the exact same level, it makes you aware of it, it locks you into the conversation, and you don't talk over each other as much.
They don't have that, so they talk over each other constantly.
So that creates like a kind of, there's an anxiety to express yourself and like you're under the gun and it's like they also have a time constraint because each segment is only, you know, whatever minutes long because they have to go to commercial.
It's not a great place to discuss things that are nuanced.
And they don't give each other the room and the space to talk about things.
They don't have the time.
They need more time.
There's a reason also why this show is three fucking hours long.
Because I feel like there's some things that every now and then you'll run into a subject that needs an hour and a half on its own.
And it needs no interruptions and we need to work things out and talk things through.
And even then I might have to revisit it a week from now.
Or I might have to talk about it a month from now.
You find out how much they have to say about something.
Anyone can come up with a soundbite or repeat a soundbite.
And a lot of times in those shows, people aren't even interested in having a discussion like that.
They're just trying to get their talking point off.
And then, you know, kind of...
Drown out anybody else.
But I do, to the point you were making, like, yeah, I think there's real value in those people then being confronted and then seeing how they respond to the thing.
But also, it's not...
What's important to know is that you don't know necessarily beforehand whether they're right or wrong about that point.
Because maybe they're confronted and then they have a really good counter-argument.
And then you go, oh, shit.
Actually, maybe you're right about that.
And so it's just like...
This whole thing is going to go in such a bad authoritarian direction, which we're already going in, if you want to say, we decide what the official narrative is, and anybody who goes against that is crushed or silenced or mocked or ridiculed or whatever, and then that's that.
Then we just go with what the official, you know, like what the regime decides the talking points of today are.
I mean, unless the regime is always right That is a disastrous path.
But there's a personality trait there that's very, like, a little passive.
Like, I don't want to rock the boat.
And if there is a time when, say, the establishment, let's just say is all pumping the same narrative about, I don't know, for the sake of argument, MRNA vaccines.
Who knows what it might be?
But if everyone's pumping the same narrative, there's a certain personality type who's going to be willing to stand up and say, I think you guys got this wrong.
I think there actually might be something much more to this.
And that's not always necessarily just like the smartest person there.
It's...
Oftentimes someone who has some intelligence but also has the personality to be a little bit confrontational, to be willing to say something outside the box.
And that's also the same type of personality often that will say, like if they get it wrong, We'll say a kind of fucked up thing and get it wrong.
But we need those people.
We need those people.
And like you said, you want them to be corrected when they get stuff wrong, but you don't want them to be silenced because when they get stuff right, it's often the most important thing ever that they got right.
Yeah, and if you have a business model, like The View, where it's just people giving their opinions, and you punish people for the opinions that you find to be wrong, you're fucking up your own business.
That's not the way to handle things.
I'm 100% in support of Whoopi Goldberg keeping her job and not being suspended and letting her express herself.
And she's obviously thought through, like, who the fuck is 100%?
Like, there's very few things that you can talk to me about where my opinion is rigid.
Yeah, there's things like genocide and infanticide.
Yeah, of course.
Of course.
But then when it comes to conversations where people are giving their opinions about things, I feel like you've got to allow people, I'm not the fucking producer of The View, but you've got to allow those women to express themselves, even when they talk shit about me.
Like, express yourself.
It's okay.
Like, I'm in support of that.
I'm in support of you criticizing me.
I don't think you should be silenced.
I don't think you should be suspended for saying that something incorrect about, like, the Holocaust.
I think someone should come along and correct you, and then you should correct yourself, and then we're good.
Okay, so if you had Dr. Gupta on your show and you had Dr. Malone on your show, both making completely contradictory arguments.
They see things in a completely different way.
If anybody who was a big fan of the episode with Dr. Malone was saying, I think you should have that episode with Dr. Gupta pulled off, I'd be like, that's insane.
Even if you agree with this side, that's insane that you shouldn't be able to hear from the other side and what their perspective is.
All it takes is a minimal amount of humility and a minimal belief in the free expression of ideas to say, no, what we want to do is have both of them.
What would be really awesome is if they were both there together.
But the thing is, there's this opinion today where you have to have this thought process that's accepted by a group of people that have deemed this to be the most appropriate or the only opinion that you can have.
And anything that varies from that, even if it turns out to be incorrect, there's never a course correction.
Like, for instance.
The idea of the lab leak, and this is the thing that I brought up in that video where I was talking about misinformation.
If you brought up the lab leak eight months ago, eight months ago you'd be removed from social media.
They'd be like, you're a piece of shit.
You wouldn't be able to post on Facebook.
Now, it's on the cover of Newsweek.
These things that used to be deemed incorrect are now discussed openly and often.
No, you're right, and that's, like, a really crucially important point that you made.
And, you know, we've had, over the last, what is it, almost two years now, right, of COVID, since March of 2020, this, it's really hard I think for any of us to really express or understand what a profound change has happened to our society.
I mean, this is, you know, it's like a friend of mine, someone I really admire very much, Jeff Deist, who's the president of the Mises Institute, which is the greatest institute in the world.
Can I spell that?
M-I-S-E-S. What is that?
Ludwig von Mises, the greatest economist who ever lived.
Great classical liberal economist who revolutionized, like, the way people think about economics.
And they're, like, this great institution.
They really, like, kept his work and the work of Murray Rothbard, who's...
Like probably the greatest, the greatest libertarian philosopher in history.
They're basically what taught me everything I know is the Mises Institute and I love all those guys.
So Jeff Dice is the president of it and he said, he was on my podcast, Part of the Problem, available wherever you get podcasts.
And he said, which I really liked, he was like, you know, This really stuck with me.
He goes, when you're living through a revolution, you don't necessarily know, oh, the revolution started today.
And now I'm in the revolution.
And this is five days into the revolution.
You know, it's not till like years later that you look back at it and go, oh, I guess that was a revolution.
Now, I don't know if that's exactly how you would describe the COVID regime.
But in many ways, I think it's changed life more than A traditional revolution would.
You know, like if a regime was overthrown by a coup and someone else took power, it certainly wouldn't necessarily upend every single social norm down to like showing your face in public or shaking hands or what you're allowed to do or what the rise of COVID has done has been...
It's really, like, unbelievably profound.
It's changed everything about our society.
And the idea that while this is all happening, you're not allowed to, like, question it, to think about, like, I'm not sure this is the right decision, I think maybe this is wrong, I think maybe we should do this, that all throughout it, these voices have been silenced off of social media, and they've been really demonized in a very aggressive way.
And so many of them have turned out to be right.
Not all of them were, but the official narrative coming from the regime has been wrong so much.
I mean, you know, they talk about spreading COVID disinformation.
The entire establishment talking points have been disinformation from the beginning.
Down to the biggest one.
I mean, lockdowns.
They just had this.
I'm sure you saw this huge Johns Hopkins study that basically their conclusion was that lockdowns did next to nothing to mitigate COVID deaths and caused far more deaths.
And if you talk to objective virologists, like people that understand respiratory viruses, and if you got them alone, like, you got that professor alone, he could say, I really agree with you.
They would say the same thing.
They would tell you the same thing, like, this is going to spread.
You're not going to be able to stop this.
This is not something that you can mitigate that easily.
I mean, double check me maybe on that number, Jamie, but I believe it was 50% childhood obesity has gone up.
Now, this is going to be four generations before you fix the damage that's caused by that.
And at the time, when you were opposed to lockdowns, as someone who was opposed to it, at the time, I remember hearing this, you were selfish, you didn't care if grandma died, you just wanted to get a haircut, like all these things, the way people would just be like, completely demonized.
When, at the time, we were just making the argument that you're like, first off, you're ushering in totalitarianism, and you're destroying the lives of tens of millions of Americans.
I don't think people saw that part, the ushering in totalitarianism.
I don't think they equated that because they didn't equate the government being able to mandate your behavior in terms of like whether your business could be open or what have you.
They didn't equate that with totalitarianism.
They thought it was like a temporary restriction upon your freedoms that is for the greater good of everyone and that's how it was kind of sold.
Obesity in U.S. children increased at an unprecedented rate during the pandemic.
unprecedented.
Look at this.
Among a cohort of 432,300 people, age 2 to 19, the rate of body mass index increased roughly double during the pandemic compared to the period preceding it.
The greatest increases were seen in children aged 6 to 11 and in those already overweight before the pandemic.
The national weight gain will surprise Few pediatricians who have been warning since the pandemic began of the likely effects of reduced physical activity and the increased screen time.
But the rate of change is striking.
The monthly rate of BMI increase nearly doubled to 1.93 times during its pre-pandemic rate.
The proportion of U.S. children who are obese was rising at 0.07% a month before the pandemic, but 0.37% a month, five times faster after the virus appeared.
And once you become obese as a child, you've put yourself so behind the eight ball now for the rest of life.
So, you know, it's almost like it's, you know, the only way to have a perfect study on all of these things would be almost like if you could run the counterfactual, like if you had a time machine, you could run back in time and not do the lockdowns and stuff and then see what happens.
And, of course, we can't do that.
But the point is just that, like, look, they were wrong.
It's almost objectively wrong about the lockdowns.
It's so understood that they were wrong now that, let's just put it this way, the Biden administration is blaming the Trump administration for the lockdowns at this point.
That's what Jen Psaki said when she was questioned about this study.
Oh, well, look, the lockdowns were long.
She's like, well, the lockdowns haven't been in the previous administration.
It's like, yeah, but it was your guy, Dr. Fauci, who was in there, you know, like pushing them the whole time.
But no, they just went, no, no, no, that was the previous administration.
Even though Joe Biden was praising Cuomo and praising Newsom and all of the governors who were doing it at the time, they wiped their hands of that.
But I don't think that is categorized as misinformation because it's not like there's contrary information that's better.
At that time, they were dealing with the stuff that was coming off of those cruise ships.
And one of the things off those cruise ships, they were finding evidence that COVID lived on surfaces for up to 14 days, which is terrifying to people.
Like if you walked into a restaurant, I'm not saying now.
Like now it's kind of preposterous, but it's still enforced.
There was a guy who just got pulled out of some school council meeting.
He was a father that was in the audience and he didn't have a mask on.
They physically assaulted him and pulled him out of the meeting because he didn't have a mask on.
Like, folks, you're looking around at all these people with cloth masks on.
This is nonsense.
It's been proven to be nonsense.
We know it's nonsense now.
But at one point in time, we didn't know it was nonsense.
And when you go to a restaurant and you wear a mask, people know you were an asshole.
And I think that was a good thing.
It was like a way of like signaling to everybody that you care.
I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
But I think the problem, we're dealing with these news sources.
It's the same kind of problem we're talking about the view and the same kind of problem when they're talking about me is that the answer to like if people more people believe me or trust me or want to listen to me talk the answer is not to silence me the answer is to you to do better the answer is for you to have better arguments when you're on television talking about how I'm taking horse paste and You know that's not true.
I'm taking horse dewormer instead of saying which you should have said How did Joe Rogan get better so quick?
How come he got COVID that's killing everybody and he was better in five days?
Negative in five days, working out in six days.
How come?
That's never discussed.
It's always like, he's taking ivermectin.
I think ivermectin was one of the things that I took that did something, but I think really monoclonal antibodies was the big one.
And that's the stuff that got Trump better in four days.
He wasn't taking ivermectin.
I think there's something legitimately really beneficial about monoclonal antibodies that's been proven, but yet they just pulled them.
They pulled the authorization for them, which I don't understand that at all.
Why don't they discuss that?
Why don't they have an expert on explains why, even though there is still a prevalence of Delta cases, they still exist, and monoclonal antibodies are very effective against Delta.
I said this once to Essie Cup and Don Lemon when I was working over there at Turner.
And I said to them, and I wasn't even really trying.
I don't want to help them.
But sometimes you just can't help, like just give your, like, and I said, and this was in 2017, if you can remember the environment back then, and I said, look, if you guys really, you know what you guys could do that would really help?
And hear me out, because I know you're not going to like this.
Give Trump credit for something.
Pick something you like.
One thing you've liked.
Maybe it was the First Step Act, that criminal justice reform, you know?
That way he let some people who were doing life for pot or whatever out of jail.
Pick one thing you like and really praise him for it.
And then the next time you criticize him, it'll hit much harder.
Because people will be like, well, yeah, look, they give him credit when they think he did something right, and they'll hit him hard when they think he did something wrong.
Because what you're doing right now is it's just all day, every day, Trump did the worst thing ever, Trump did, and now people are like, you're just in the business of trying to make him look stupid.
So even if your goal is to make him look stupid, it doesn't have any weight to it.
You know, like, it's not gonna, it's not gonna work.
Well, the thing that's crazy, too, is that, you know, and you were saying if they were going to tell the truth or be honest, is that...
So the last time I was on the show, Becca...
It was in April, I think, of 2021. We had that clip that went viral that Fauci called you out for.
And I was re-watching it the other day, watching the clip and then watching his response to it.
And it's funny, and it's funny thinking about this with the childhood obesity numbers that we were just looking at and all this stuff.
And basically what you said was you go, you know, if you're a 20-year-old healthy person, what I'd advise you to do with COVID is make sure you're still really healthy.
Make sure you're getting a lot of exercise in the sunlight.
Now, you said, I don't know if you need the vaccine.
It's like, what's really important is you being really healthy.
This was the spirit of what you said.
And Fauci's response to this, which I was literally just listening to the other day, does not age well.
It's really, first off, he said, he goes, he's like, no, Joe Rogan, what you don't understand is that you get the vaccine to protect other people.
Because if you get it, you can't spread it.
You know, and you're like, well, hmm, that didn't age so well.
And then he says at one point, he goes, if you don't get the vaccine, and this is almost word for word, what he said.
You could pull up this clip, Fauci responds to Joe Rogan and see it.
it, but it was almost word for word what he said was, he goes, if you're a healthy 20 year old and you get COVID, you may not experience any symptoms, but you will likely spread it to a bunch of other people.
And his claim was that an asymptomatic person will likely spread it.
And I'm like, I'm sorry, but if you're looking at what is misinformation, or let's just say incorrect information, I do not think the science backs up the idea that someone with no symptoms will likely spread it to other people.
Oh, so, by the way, just to be clear, I completely agree with you on that.
I mean, COVID is a really nasty virus, and it has killed a lot of people.
And if you are sick and have a weakened immune system, if you have comorbidities, you do not want to get this thing.
It is very dangerous.
Less so with Omicron.
But still, it's still dangerous.
And so that's, I completely agree with you on that.
I'm just saying that, look, first of all, the claim was, if you want to talk about bad information that may have led to real damage in COVID, Joe Biden, the President of the United States, straight up said, if you get the vaccines, you will not get or spread COVID. How about Rachel Maddow?
Rachel Maddow said, we know for a fact, this is it now.
You get the vaccine, it stops with you.
It doesn't go on.
Now, think about this, and I don't know exactly, I don't know if anyone can measure these numbers.
How many people got these vaccines, like, when they first came out, and then thought to themselves, well, I can't get COVID now, maybe had, what you're saying, the sniffles, had mild symptoms, and went, well, it can't possibly be COVID, because I'm vaccinated, and went and spread that to a whole bunch of people.
So, I'm not saying, like, I've been talking about COVID and the COVID regime for, like, basically two years on my podcast.
I'm sure I've gotten some things wrong.
You know, I'm not saying you haven't gotten some things wrong and, like, maybe, like, that's true.
But for anyone to be pointing the finger like you got things wrong and this is dangerous and led to all of this, like the most catastrophically wrong things that have really led to real world catastrophes have all been coming out of CNN and MSNBC and the White House and Dr. Fauci like the most catastrophically wrong things that have really led to real world catastrophes That's all I'm saying.
I completely agree with you.
COVID is nasty.
A lot of people have lost people.
Even if it's somebody who's like – if you're 91 and you have several health problems but you would have lived till say 95 and you get COVID and die at 91, I mean that's awful.
That's awful.
That person might have had four more years with their grandchildren and their children and all of that.
It's a horrible thing.
And it's terrible.
Anyway, just to make that clear, I agree with you.
It's a nasty virus.
I'm just more concerned with the totalitarian regimes that are sweeping the entire Western world.
They got 10 million dollars in donations for the truckers and GoFundMe thought it would be great if they gave that money to the charities of their choice.
You fucking imagine the gall The gall of that, after they, listen, I'm not saying they shouldn't have supported Black Lives Matter.
I think you should support, I think GoFundMe should be available to anyone who wants to use it for anything where people can argue that it's a good cause.
And the Ottawa truckers, a lot of people think that's a good cause.
Black Lives Matter, a lot of people thought that was a good cause.
The fact that you can make a distinction between one and the other, if they had taken all the money that was donated to Black Lives Matter and they said, you know what?
We don't agree with this.
We're going to give it away to the charities that we choose.
And the way Trudeau talks about people who are unvaccinated, the way he said that they're misogynists and rapists, or racists, he said they were misogynists and racists and You're in the demonized class all of a sudden.
You're taking people that have a perspective on a medical intervention and you're deciding that you're gonna demonize them in the worst possible ways with no evidence.
And isn't it something that so many of these people, like say the nurses who are unvaccinated, the truck drivers who don't like the mandates, that they were the heroes.
These were the essential workers.
The healthcare workers.
These were the people in New York City, they were clapping at 6pm every day for these workers.
And those same...
They'll be nurses who worked through a year and a half of the pandemic.
If you were working through the pandemic the whole time, 100% of them either got COVID or learned how to protect themselves from getting COVID. There's no other option there, right?
Literally around COVID-positive patients all day long.
But we're learning from this, from this whole pandemic, is not just about authoritarianism and a lot of the issues that we're dealing with about ideologies and how rigid people are, but also about how fragile our civilization truly is when confronted with any kind of adversity.
People are so fragile, and most people, they rely upon existing structures, whether it's the office they work at, whether it's the neighborhood they're in.
They rely on these sort of structures in order to have any semblance of normalcy in life.
And when forced upon themselves to be confronted with The unknown, to be confronted with open-ended possibilities and having to make moral and ethical decisions based on your values and how you feel about people, not based on whether people want you to condemn someone for their choices or attack people for choices.
I know a lot of people that hate people that have been vaccinated.
Do you know how crazy that...
I don't know him personally, but I mean people online, I've seen them.
Like attacking people.
Like they attack Trump.
They boo Trump.
Because he talks about how you should get vaccinated.
His base and then like how he handles that and then he's caught between this thing where like Donald Trump's like like he's got the narrative in his head figured out he's like well I did the vaccines and I'm the greatest so that's the greatest and I get all the credit but then he's losing his people.
And a lot of people, I think, are really tired of the COVID regime.
Like, they just want to go back to normal life.
A lot of people are really tired of the culture war bullshit because so much of it is manufactured and they just want to go back to real life.
You just don't see this as...
I mean, I'm not saying it doesn't exist at all.
And I've noticed it in stand-up comedy.
That things have changed, particularly in liberal cities.
There's certain things, if you talk about trigger audience members more and things like that.
But in general in life...
You just kind of like you go, you know, you could watch like, you know, social justice warrior type, you know, college campus activists on online and, you know, the fat phobic person we were saying before, and they're all this like white privilege and this and that and all of this.
And you're like, oh, my God, there's like all racism is everywhere.
And then you like go to the supermarket, you know, like it.
Hey, hi, how you doing?
Some black guy steps in front of you and he's like, oh, excuse me.
Well, I think that was one of the big appeals of him because crime has really risen quite a bit over the last couple years in New York.
And this is coming off of, you know, New York.
You know, like New York, when I... I grew up, you know, I was born in 83, so I grew up in New York in like the 80s and 90s, and New York crime was like a major problem, and it got way, way better.
Like my whole life, the crime rate was going down and down and down and down, and then all of a sudden it started coming back, and people were very upset.
So I think that was a big part of his appeal, was the kind of like, we're going to take care of street crime.
And understandably, people were attracted to that message.
But I think it was very, very a bad sign to me that immediately getting in there, the first thing he did was like continue the emergency power acts and the vaccine passport and all that stuff.
Oh, I saw that in New Jersey, they're saying they're gonna drop the mask mandates for schools, which is really great news.
And I think that's incredible.
And it's one of those things that like, you know, I know you just said you're tired of talking about this, but one of the worst things is, you know, masking up kids.
I'm wondering what the world's gonna look like in two years from now.
I wonder what's gonna change and whether or not we're gonna get out of this better.
Like, you know, that's one of the things that does happen whenever human beings are confronted with any sort of an adverse situation where it requires adjustment.
It's like there's a possibility and an opportunity for growth.
And it's not completely outside the realm of possibility that we do figure out how to grow and get better.
And I think that there is, you know, even if like from my perspective where I'm like, well, you know, talking about everything I've been talking about since we've been here and how the regime is so corrupt and they're liars and they've read.
But I look around at this and I see the fact that I think the collapsing trust in all of these institutions is a great thing.
I think the fact that people are like waking up to this stuff is incredible.
Yeah, and also just that I think that we can, like, we have the capabilities to have a more prosperous, a freer, a better, a kinder society than ever before.
We just haven't put it all together yet, and that's like a growing process.
What I hope people learn from everything over, say, like, the last, you know...
I don't know, five years or so, even before the COVID stuff.
And I think this is what I was saying, like, people are tired of the culture wars and all this stuff.
This is a big part of the reason why I'm a libertarian, and I believe in drastically reducing government, is that politics is so poisonous.
And this is one of the major problems with the COVID stuff in general is that now politics became everything.
Politics became finding out, you know, whether you're allowed to go to work or whether you're allowed to visit your father or whether you're allowed, you know, everything was dictated by a governor and political differences.
Are like wars even when they're mini wars or cold wars It's like it's a war when you have a political difference with somebody you're now Fighting over who is going to rule over the other person like this is why once every four years Tensions rise so high over is it gonna be Hillary or Trump or Biden or Trump because one of you is gonna lose And have to be ruled over by the other one Do you remember when Biden won and then they started putting out lists of people that supported
But she was great on COVID. Eh, you win some, you lose some.
Anyway, so I was talking there to the crowd about this stuff.
The idea of political differences versus differences.
And I was like, look, if you look in the crowd somewhere here, there is a Christian sitting next to an atheist.
It was like a big crowd.
It was like 1,000 people there.
So it was like somewhere – this is true in the crowd.
There's a Christian sitting next to an atheist.
You guys have the most profound differences in the way you view the world.
I mean like literally one of you believes the other one is going to burn in a pit of fire for eternity and the other one believes that you are delusional basically, that you believe you have this personal relationship with something that doesn't exist.
And you're just sitting next to each other.
And everything's fine.
And maybe you'll have a beer later.
No one cares.
But we're going to war over whether you're a Democrat or a Republican.
It's only when the differences are political that this becomes this crazy culture war.
But if it becomes political, let's say that the school that your kids go to, the public school, is now going to teach Muslim prayer in the school.
You go, wait a minute.
I don't want my kids being indoctrinated with stuff I don't believe in.
So my point is just that when you reduce government When you reduce government intervention, when you reduce the size and scope of government, what you end up getting is more peace.
You end up getting things where it's like people can have disagreements.
We can have different cultural preferences.
We can have different feelings about gender or whatever.
We can have COVID, whatever it is.
And we don't have to go to war with each other.
And I really do think...
I believe that...
In order for this country to survive and to thrive, we need liberty.
It's the answer to all of this.
We need the government to stop doing all of the evil stuff that it's doing, and we need a spirit of liberty where it's like, look, we can disagree with each other and not have to go to war with each other.
It was Obama's government working with the Saudis to launch a war against the Houthis in Yemen.
And basically the back story to it is that Obama had really...
The Saudis were pissed off at our government and they're a big trading partner in ours.
But number one, they were against the war in Iraq that George W. Bush started because they kind of were the only ones who saw obviously how this was going to go.
And they were like, you know, their big enemy is Iran.
And you were like, well, if you overthrow the Sunni minority government in Iraq, obviously the Shiites are going to take power.
And then Iran's going to have all of this influence in the region.
So you're just empowering our worst enemy.
So don't do this.
But America wanted to do it.
Israel wanted to do it.
All of the neocons wanted to do it.
And so the war ended up happening.
And so the war happens.
It went exactly that way.
It was a gift to Iran.
And then Obama came in and he, you know, made the deal with Iran that also really pissed off the Saudis.
So Obama said, and you can Google this and you can find it.
He said in order to placate the Saudis, he supported their war against the Houthis in Yemen.
So we got involved in a war which has turned into a genocide to placate one of the most evil governments in the world, the Saudis.
So that's what Obama, the man who won the Nobel Peace Prize, gave us.
Besides for funding bin Ladenite Islamists in Libya and Syria and committing literal treason, he should be tried for war crimes and literally spend the rest of his life in a cage for what he did in Yemen.
Literally launched a war of genocide to placate The Saudis.
It's the Saudis and the UAE are really launching the war.
But it's always...
I mean, it's the Saudis doing it, but with American weapons.
For the first, like, several years of the war, we were literally refueling their fighter pilots as they were doing it.
And they're conducting the war in the most brutal, egregious way.
I mean, they're bombing, like...
They're bombing farms, and they're bombing...
You know, and they put a full blockade around the country.
So...
There's there was something at one point there was in the ballpark of a million cases of cholera.
I'm not sure if they were actually all cholera or there were some other similar like infections that were but it's been hundreds of thousands of people who have died in in this war.
The UN said it was the number one humanitarian crisis in the world and it's it's these are you know Infectious diseases that are targeting, that disproportionately hit babies.
I mean, there's babies dying.
And Yemen, by the way, before all of this was the poorest country in the Middle East.
And they put a full blockade around the country.
And this has been going on forever.
Obama started it, Trump continued it through his entire presidency, funded the Saudis even more than Obama had, gave them even more weapons.
And Biden said he was going to end it.
And he said he was going to end the war.
And there were some people, I will say, Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul were both really great on this in the Senate, trying to bring awareness to this, that we've got to end this.
This is a genocide at this point.
And Biden said he was going to end it, and he didn't.
He backed off of that promise.
And now, I guess the Houthis launched a few attacks that hit the UAE. And so now they're talking about escalating the war.
Anyway, so that's the biggest thing.
What government should stop doing, that's like the biggest one to me, is like cut the military budget drastically.
Stop fighting stupid wars.
Anyway, on top of that, I would say that we need to end all corporate welfare.
The motivations that they have for getting involved in wars that benefit Saudi Arabia, is it negotiations in terms of oil access?
Is it negotiations in terms of control of the region?
Is it, like, compromises in terms of, like, they make these compromises in terms of, like, we want to do this, and you want to do that, so we'll allow you to do this, we do that, and then we'll work together?
So there's several really big, like, financial incentives behind it.
The number one, Saudi Arabia buys a tremendous amount of weapons.
So this is worth a lot of money for weapons manufacturers.
There's also the whole petrodollar thing, where it has been this agreement for a long time that Saudi Arabia will peg their oil to U.S. dollars and only trade in dollars.
Supposedly, Saddam Hussein, around the year 2000, had a plan to start trading oil in gold and other assets and not using dollars anymore.
I've also seen people say that Gaddafi had plans to be in on this.
I don't know if that's true or not.
I do think it's interesting.
I do know that very shortly after we got off the gold standard, after Richard Nixon put us on the gold stand, took us off the gold standard, that we made this deal with Saudi Arabia in the 70s where they would only trade oil for dollars, which in some ways kind of replaced the gold standard.
Like, look, dollars aren't redeemable for gold anymore, but they are redeemable for oil.
And so you got some commodity kind of behind the money.
And that allows us to print as much money as we want to without suffering the consequences of it quite as drastically because there's still some value to the money for other people.
We can export our dollar around the world.
I'm sure there's other motivations that I don't know about.
I don't know for sure what they are.
But I do know that hundreds of thousands of innocent people are being slaughtered over these wars.
So whatever exactly the motivation is, it ain't worth it.
And it's also one more crazy addition to all of this is that we're fighting on the side of Al-Qaeda.
Over there.
Like Al Qaeda is fighting the Houthis.
There's still a pretty sizable Al Qaeda presence in the Arabian Peninsula, and particularly in Yemen.
And they're the enemies of the Houthis.
We're fighting on the side of Saudi Arabia and Al Qaeda against the Houthis because Iran kind of likes them.
It's nuts.
And we need to just stop doing it.
And it's insane.
While our country's falling apart, we're still trying to remake the world.
Is the idea, though, that the reason why they're making these concessions to these other foreign countries is that it ultimately does help America in some sort of way?
I have talked to several of them, and I've heard a lot of their arguments.
By the way, there's also a lot of those guys who...
Would agree with me on this, or I would agree with them, I should probably say more accurately.
I'd highly recommend anybody who wants to know what's really going on to listen to Colonel Douglas McGregor, who is as smart and as decorated as you could possibly be, and he's the guy who really makes the argument the best that we should be completely out of all of these wars.
But he was actually, I believe he was McMaster's boss at one point.
But McMaster's, you know, rose up.
I guess the political stuff with it did a little bit better than him.
And he ultimately became, you know, the guy.
And he didn't.
But also might be because of what their views are on this stuff.
But yeah, there are people who will make these arguments.
But really, usually the arguments, you know, they come down to like, well...
I mean, it's like the way the wars were sold.
It's like, well, we had to go into Iraq because of whatever, weapons of mass destruction, or we had to go into Syria because Assad was killing all of his own people, or we had to go into Libya because he was about to go genocidal, or we had to go into blah, blah.
Yemen, they don't really try to make this argument as much for.
It's just kind of like- Well, you don't hear about it.
It's a painting that they look at, and someone's auctioning it off for a relatively low amount of money.
But it might be very valuable.
They find these occasionally.
Someone found a drawing recently.
That someone bought at a yard sale that was worth millions of dollars.
And I think they bought it for like 50 bucks.
And someone recognized the handiwork and they're like, oh my god, I think this is...
And they bought it and it turned out to be like hyper valuable.
Well, this one is weird.
Because this one, this guy found it and it's in this thing, in this, you know, where they're looking at these paintings that are going to go up for auction.
And he purchased it for like a little over $1,000.
And he ships it to New York.
And these art experts start going over it, and they think it's the lost Leonardo da Vinci.
And so they have to, it's been over-painted, which means somebody painted over the original painting.
So they have to strip it down.
This is where it's squirrely.
So go to the Salvador Mundi and then find what it looked like before restoration.
Because this is what I didn't understand.
This is wild.
It was way worse than that.
Because he painted it, but hold on.
He painted it on wood.
Da Vinci would paint things on wood and so he painted on wood and there was a lot of evidence that he prepared for this.
Like there were sketches, if you scroll back up you can see that.
These are sketches that he had drawn of like the way the cloth would fold on, because it's a painting of Jesus.
It's the way the cloth would fold on Jesus' arms, and there's evidence that he was working on this painting.
There's also copies of this painting, and one of them got displayed in the Louvre in Paris because The MBS, the owner of this painting, wouldn't allow them to put it unless they put it right next to the Mona Lisa.
He wanted them to call it the male Mona Lisa.
See, that's a copy right there, that one down there.
But I want you to see if you can find, Google what the original image looked like.
After stripping away the overpaint.
And it's so damaged.
Like there's so much missing from the painting.
So this painting, that's what it looks like.
So this painting that's sold for, like in the, see in the bottom, that circle, that's actually a knot in the wood.
And so a lot of the painting was missing.
So the painting that sold for $450 million, the most expensive painting ever, was painted over by a woman in New York City.
That's what it looked like before she started restoring it.
Because the documentary is not just about the painting itself, but it's also about the psychology of selling it.
And one of the ways that this thing was selling, one of the reasons why it became an issue...
It's because there was this French guy who was selling these paintings to this Russian oligarch.
So this Russian guy was this billionaire, was spending all this money on paintings, and he found out because of an article that he got ripped off by this French guy.
He thought that the painting cost 130, I think it was 135 million dollars.
That's what he paid for it.
But the French guy got it for 75 million.
So this French guy was marking up all the paintings he sold to this guy, but like as much as 100%.
So this guy got fucked.
And so he realized this by this, and then he made him auction off everything he ever bought from him.
And so one of the things they did is they brought it to Sotheby's.
And Sotheby's made this incredible promotion, this really elaborate promotion, selling this painting.
And one of the ways they sold it was videotaping people's response, because people thought it was a Da Vinci.
They videotaped people, including Leonardo DiCaprio.
So Leonardo DiCaprio is in this video staring at this.
So they took it from the perspective of people looking at the painting.
People were crying and weeping, and this is part of what Sotheby's did to sell this.
See, the thing is, if it is Da Vinci, wouldn't you rather have the one that's not fucked with, that's just cleaned, that looks like shit, rather than someone comes along and paints over it?
Like, if that was up there, like, yeah, man, if you go to Italy, and I've been to Italy many times, and one of the more amazing things about Italy is the art.
There's incredible art all over the place.
Like, so many different churches, and a lot of it is really worn out and old.
But through that, it's amazing because you get to look at this art that's been weathered by time.
If they could actually attribute that to Da Vinci, that should be worth way more than the lady painting over it.
But I don't know if they knew the lady painted over it.
This is the thing.
It's not clear.
When they show the painting, and they say this is like a lost Leonardo, and it goes for $450 million, I don't think they said, hmm, by the way, this is what it used to look like before this broad in New York City who really knows how to paint.
And she's an amazing fucking artist.
It's really crazy her perspective, too.
She's like...
They're saying that I did this, but I could never have created this masterpiece.
Yes, some of it hundreds of years old, some of it just decades old.
But the point is he was selling this wine to all these wealthy buyers.
So he would curate this collection of these incredible wines and then he would sell them to people.
Well then someone figured out that some of the wines that he was selling were counterfeit.
And then they started doing an examination.
And where he fucked up was he sold the wine to the Koch brothers.
So one of the Koch brothers who had bought like millions of dollars in wine from this guy got fucked because one of the gentlemen who worked for the original company, the original vineyard, was like, we've never made a magnum in that year.
We didn't make it with that label.
This is misspelled.
This is incorrect.
And then they start doing a deep dive and then they go to this guy's house.
They fucking raid his house.
They find out he's got, like, these aged labels.
He's got, like, things that are...
Yeah, like, this is...
Stashes of old corks and labels were discovered.
And, um...
How do you say his name?
What is his full name?
He's, like...
What is his...
Rudy.
That's right.
So, what's really funny is my friend Matt is in this documentary.
And I didn't know it until I was watching it.
My friend Matt is a legitimate wine connoisseur.
And Matt loves wine.
Like, he has a giant warehouse and it's like a wine room in his house filled with wine.
And one of his birthday parties, I went to his birthday party.
And on his birthday party, it was all of his wine friends.
They had a wine tasting.
So we went to this amazing restaurant, and they would bring you over a small plate of food and then a flight of wines.
And so they would all taste it.
They would all swirl it around and like...
I don't know much about wine, right?
But the wine was incredible.
And Rudy, that guy, was at the wine tasting.
And I recognized him.
So this guy went to jail for this for a long fucking time.
They certainly did, but the point is it's the same thing.
It's like people that want to have this very exclusive, very rare thing, and so they get They're romanced by the auction, by the idea that they're going to be the one that has it.
So that's what's so interesting about it is that we're such weird animals.
That's what it's to be.
It's like the psychological, like, appeal of something.
Because the truth is that you could just get, look, you could get someone who's a good artist to paint you a picture that's real nice that you like looking at.
You could get a good bottle of wine that you enjoy drinking, but you are so interested in having this thing that confers with it status or something like that.
Especially if you're a billionaire and you fancy yourself to be an intelligent person who's an expert at this one thing that you're obsessed with, which is wine.
They show this coke brother going through his basement or his you know his what would you call it his wine cellar and it's incredible his collections massive collection of all these wines he's so proud of it and then it turns out it's bullshit and then he's furious and he's like well I have 40 bucks Billion dollars to spend on getting even with you, sir.
So also the Koch brothers are like probably the worst or up there with the worst billionaires to piss off because they're also like politically connected.
So they're like, well, let me just call the DA who is my good friend and the senator who I funded.
And in this documentary, what's really interesting is this one guy like the thing about wine is like I don't know how many real experts there are and how many people are just pretending they can taste the differences in these wines.
You've taken a thing that's supposed to be a drink that people enjoy that makes you feel good and put all of this psychological importance on top of it to create this entire structure that is absurd.
That we were all going to dinner with, all the production staff.
And then after we had that bottle of wine, I go, let's get a 2018 bottle of wine.
Let's get a regular bottle of wine.
It was way better.
It was way better.
I enjoyed it more.
It was like $40.
I'm like, this is a better Like, this is so crazy that, like, this $1,200...
But what is it?
What are they looking for?
Like, what is it about it?
That's what I'm obsessed with.
That's what I'm obsessed with about the Salvador Mundi.
That's what I'm obsessed with the sour grapes documentary.
I'm obsessed with this obsession that people have with, like, these, like, very subtle differences and things that only someone who's, like, deeply studied can understand.
Well, it's also one of the reasons why it's what fucking really holds back.
I mean, I'm sure in some ways it propels human advancement.
Otherwise, we probably wouldn't have it.
But...
It's like what holds back a lot of these things is that it's very hard for people to admit when they're wrong and they'd rather just double down because it's a very difficult thing to do.
I mean, in the political world, I see this all the time.
Even when people say they're wrong about stuff, they tend to try and like, well, we don't really believe that anymore, but here's why we're pissed off at this guy now.
And you're like, okay, but you should really probably spend some time on this.
Like I do.
I mean, just shoehorn politics back into everything.
But that is one of my beefs with all the right-wingers who now kind of admit the war in Iraq was a big mistake.
But they don't really spend a lot of time on that.
You know, it's just kind of like, I guess we were wrong about that whole thing.
It certainly seemed really shady that they did it the way they did it.
That you wouldn't feel like just – and it's surprising that you would think just for political reasons, just for like to bring closure to the American people, you'd want to like demonstrate in some way.
Well, right, so there were several kind of like layers to it.
It's like that number one, right, so in 1979 to 1980, we funded the Mujahideen, which was his group, and funded, armed, and trained them on how to lure a superpower into an unwinnable war and beat them through guerrilla warfare to bankrupt their country.
And by the way, I've heard people who dispute the number.
It was like a UN study that found that.
Maybe it wasn't 500,000.
It might have only been a couple hundred thousand children.
But this type of shit was going on.
And this is what bin Laden wrote about in his declaration of war against America.
Basically, the complaint was that we...
Prop up brutal dictators in the Muslim world.
We prop up Israel, who's oppressing the Palestinians, and that our military interventions in Iraq and in other Muslim countries have killed a whole bunch of innocent people.
And this was the shtick he used to recruit people.
Whether he believed it or not, I don't know, but this is what he used to recruit people.
And so the lesson of 9-11 should have been That if you do these things in the Middle East, if you have these military interventions, if you kill all these people, if you have your Secretary of State on television saying the price of 500,000 dead children over there is worth it, there's a cost to that.
And in this case, the cost turned out to be 9-11.
And the cost turned out to be that people are going to hate you so much that they're willing to try to come kill people over here.
And in response to that, We decided, well, the lesson is that we gotta go fight more wars over there.
And it's been 20 years of fighting wars since then.
21 years of fighting wars since then.
And there's only more Bin Ladenite terrorists than there were before.
And trillions of dollars and, you know, millions of lives.
That people make that is even remotely compelling that if we didn't do that There would have been a superpower with you know nuclear capabilities That is run by a brutal dictator that would have had substantially more control and more ability to enforce their I haven't heard anyone make that argument.
I think it's almost impossible for anyone to argue that, as bad as they were, that Saddam Hussein still being here, Gaddafi still being here, would not be a better situation than what we've had.
Can I say this to answer that question?
Because I think this is very relevant to what you're asking.
Bill Kristol.
Do you know who he is?
So he was the editor for Weekly Standard.
In many ways, he was the leading intellectual neocon.
So the Cheney-ite kind of intellectual who was all about all of these wars.
So he had a debate.
So it was an Oxford style debate at the Soho Forum, which is the debate thing in New York City run by Gene Epstein.
It's a brilliant economist.
He puts together these debates.
He debated Scott Horton, the guy I was just telling about, who's my guy on foreign policy.
It's really great.
I highly recommend people check it out.
It's on YouTube.
So there's Bill Kristol and they're debating about regime change wars and whether they're good for America or not.
And one person asked Bill Kristol, and this is Bill Kristol.
He is the, you know, Bush Cheney.
We have to, you know, we have to go fight all this war on terror.
He's the biggest cheerleader of all of it.
And they asked him, what can you look at to one intervention, one military intervention that was successful?
Like, what is one military intervention that you could look at and say this was a success?
And he said the Balkans in the 90s.
Which I don't agree with, but leaving that aside, he did not even try to point to one of the...
He would not even try to say, Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Somalia, or Libya, or Syria, or Niger, or Yemen.
He would not even dare, because no one, even he, could not possibly come up with an argument to say that this would have been worse.
Like, when they say, like, what we would have done differently to be successful in these places, where we would have mitigated all these lives of innocent civilians.
Well, there will be some people who, some of those right-wing hawk types, who would have, at the time, at least blamed Obama for not being hawkish enough.
You know, he just shouldn't have, he shouldn't have drawed down, he should have surged more, and if only that, we could have won it.
But the problem with that is that, I mean, he sent in like 70,000 troops to Afghanistan.
McMaster thinks that we should have left 10,000 people in Afghanistan to keep the Taliban from coming in and taking over, and then if they wanted to get out their equipment, they should have done it slowly.
I think the problem with that, and I don't know, I'd be interested to hear how he would respond to this, but this is a big thing that people like.
So we had a very small footprint in Afghanistan toward the end, right?
And there wasn't that much violence.
And so then a lot of people tend to have this attitude of like, well, then why do we pull them out?
We could have just kept them in there.
But that's not exactly true.
The thing is that we had a deal with the Taliban that we were leaving.
And the deal was kind of a ceasefire until we leave.
But we're leaving.
And the Taliban was keeping to that deal.
But if we now Joe Biden came in, the deal was we leave in May and he pushed it back to September.
And the Taliban was kind of like, all right.
And they kind of kept there still wasn't a lot of violence going on.
But if we hadn't have left, there's no guarantee at all that they would have kept that ceasefire.
They might have got right back to war, in which case we would have needed a hell of a lot more than 10,000 people there to do it.
So I really don't think there was any way to do this.
The best way to do it would have been to not fight the war to begin with.
We never needed to go to war with the Taliban.
I mean, even if you wanted to go to war to take out al-Qaeda, we did that very quickly after 9-11.
And they had bin Laden cornered at one point.
And a whole bunch of the military people there were asking for backup, and they didn't give it to him.
And they let him escape into Pakistan and then decided the mission was regime change against the Taliban, which was never necessary.
It was all stupid from the beginning.
But I don't think it's so evident that – and I think Biden, which I don't give him credit for a lot of things, but I think he was right about this, that he realized that he was going to be – He was gonna be caught between two decisions, which was either to pull out or surge.
I don't think there was an option to just keep the troop levels there.
And I think he just wasn't gonna double down on it.
It's so good, but it's so crazy that like if you did that with Obama people would go but that doesn't make any sense Well, yeah doesn't make any sense if you do that with Clinton, but he's but that's that's not how he is But you do that with Biden and people go oh god, that's so close like there's so many times where he just says a non-word his vision And you're like, what?
It's like a real emperor-has-no-clothes type situation where it's like even like most people in the corporate press, like Fox News aside, but like CNN, the New York Times, Washington Post, MSNBC types, they hated Trump so much.
And I understand why they hated Trump.
They wanted him out, thought it was an embarrassment, incompetent, he pissed them off.
So they went in with Biden.
But now they're in this position where they have to pretend that they don't see what we all see.
Well, the problem they're going to have is like I understand why you'd say you don't think so and part of that's because like people don't like her and she's not good at this.
But the problem is the Democrat kind of woke establishment.
How can they really argue that the vice president, who oh just so happens to be a woman of color, that she should be skipped over?
And it was a great thing that she took her out on.
It's like this idea that I think one of the things that is the most infuriating to regular people is that it's like, and this is one of the things through COVID that's been infuriating to people.
You see these videos of the other day with Stacey Abrams in a classroom.
Right, and you're fine imposing these draconian rules on everybody else, knowing That you're going to live above them.
And in Kamala Harris' case, it was the most despicable hypocrisy.
That you yourself laugh about how you smoked weed, and yet you, as a prosecutor, threw other human beings in cages for lengthy prison sentences for the same thing that you laugh about when admitting you do it.
It's one of the things I hate the most about COVID, or I shouldn't say hate the most, but one of the things that makes me real uncomfortable, and I noticed this even here today, like in the hotel that I'm staying at, where it's like, it's here in Texas, so like, Most people aren't wearing masks.
Like, I'm not wearing a mask in the hotel and stuff.
But then it's like, you see the maids coming, and they're all masked up.
And I'm not.
And they come in to clean your room, and they have to wear a mask.
And I just hate this feel.
There's already this thing where it's kind of like, hey, you're cleaning my room for me.
It's already a little bit of a weird feeling like I'm just relaxing and you're cleaning everything up and then you have to I've been at clubs like around the country where like the bus boys have masks on and you're in this environment like you're on stage you're having a lot of fun you're telling jokes everyone's in the audience they're having a lot of fun they're drinking they're laughing everyone's having fun the one person here who's working and doing you know kind of a this isn't really fun I'm bussing tables and that's the guy who's got to wear the mask I guess it's for appearances Well,
I was watching Bellator the other day, and the Bellator fighters, I don't know if it's like a commission thing, they were in Arizona, they had to put their masks on as they got out of the cage.
So here they are.
Having fucking wars in a cage and then like safety first and they get off they gotta put this fucking cloth mask on they were waiting for them at the gate so as soon as they open maybe it was like a Showtime rule cuz they're on Showtime?
MMA it's like you're like the guy's like in your guard and you cut him open with an elbow and he's just bleeding directly into your face but then when you leave they're like don't forget a cloth mask yeah you gotta put that mask on when you walk outside this fucking fenced-in environment of doom Safety first.
And I believe he had takedowns in all of those fights, which was not typically the way he had fought.
I mean, like, I'm sure he's always had some wrestling, but he wasn't really using his wrestling.
I don't remember any fights where he took guys down before then.
He was always just knocking guys out and stuffing takedowns and knocking guys out.
And so it kind of adds an interesting element to it that he's now been, like, using his offensive wrestling a little bit more because for the Israel Adesanya fight, Whether or not he can take him down, I think he really needs to at least make Israel Adesanya think that he might be trying to take him down.
But Jan Blachowicz, on the other hand, is a really big guy.
And he was able to control Israel, take him down, and really the ground game was where he scored probably the most points and had the most dominance in that fight without a sign yet.
So a lot of people look at that performance and say, well, if Jan can do it, maybe this is the way that someone can beat him.
I don't think Whitaker is obviously not as big and as strong, but what he could maybe do is I think at least if he can land a takedown or two and at least be able to mix up the threat of a takedown with his very good striking.
He's probably not as good as Israel Adesanya's striking, but still very good.
I mean, you don't want to get hit by that dude.
Maybe that's his way to have a shot.
I wouldn't bet on Whittaker in this fight, but I'm interested to see it.
I mean, Pereira, the first guy he beat was, you know, not an elite fighter or a top contender, a very good fighter, but he knocked that guy out with that flying knee.
I mean, Sean Strickland might grapple with him, though.
I mean, Sean Strickland's boxing is excellent, but I don't know, if you're Sean Strickland and you're fighting that fight, if you were in Sean Strickland's corner, wouldn't you be like, maybe try to take this guy down?
We don't even have to call that person out, but whoever it was, don't do that again.
Stop!
You don't know what you're doing.
Not only that, this isn't even a complicated fight to judge, right?
This is not like a jiu-jitsu match where, you know, like, look if a guy takes a guy down and if it turns into more of a jiu-jitsu type situation where he comes really close to finishing with a triangle, really close to finishing with an arm bar, but he gets out of it, and then he hits him with a punch.
Like, who wins that exchange?
Complicated.
Right?
There's various factions that would think that the jiu-jitsu guy scored.
Other people say, hey, he didn't submit them, so it didn't count.
He didn't take any damage.
I see those two different arguments, but in this case, it's a stand-up fight.
Or even in a stand-up fight, like, let's say, Nate Diaz-Conor McGregor 2, Where you had this round in the second round where Conor McGregor drops Nate Diaz a couple times, but he drops him with one punch, Nate falls to his guard and he's like, come on in, come on in, and he backs up.
And then at the end of the round, Nate Diaz puts him against the cage and just unloads with these combinations, hits him with a ton.
Now what do you value more?
There's a debate there.
This isn't boxing.
This isn't like an automatic, I have to score it because you drop down.
He's telling you, come down with me, and you're backing off.
And then he hits.
But this wasn't even anything like that.
They're just standing.
One guy's trying to take the other guy down and can't, and he's getting punched in the head more than he's punching this guy in the head.
And the fact that it was a split decision, I see that it's heartbreaking.
That drives me crazy because if you don't know the way it works, folks that are listening, the way the UFC's pay structure works, say if you're Sean Strickland.
I don't know what he got per that fight.
Let's say he gets $250,000.
He might get $250,000 to fight and $250,000 to win.
He might get an additional X amount, whatever his paycheck is, to win.
So when they have that kind of a pay structure, you're literally getting robbed of half your pay because a judge sucks, or two judges suck.
All he takes is two judges that suck.
One other guy like that guy, and you're fucked out of your money.
Well, that's a good argument for him not getting some fights stopped that were stopped like the Henry Cejudo fight where he felt like it was stopped too soon.
He's very good at breaking down scenarios and what's happening because he's not just an MMA fighter and not just an analyst, but he also coaches people.
He has a website now.
I believe he has a website dedicated to tutorials specifically on his footwork, which is amazing.
Dominic Cruz is a real innovator in terms of footwork and movement.
When he came along, it took Alpha Male, many fighters, to fight him before they kind of cracked the code.
And they cracked it with Cody, but I attribute a lot of that to Cody's skills lined up well with Dominic's skills.
Cody was a very good wrestler who is wicked boxing, knockout power, and he's fast as Fuck.
Well, he does seem to have really turned a corner, where he kind of went from being this guy who was almost falling into a gatekeeper type status, like we start thinking you're a real contender if you can beat Derrick Brunson, to going on this streak now where you're like, ooh, Derrick Brunson is actually really looking like he's putting it all together now.
That's almost what I meant by that, is that was the fight where we all, like, kind of started realizing how good he was putting it together for MMA. Yeah.
You know, like, where you're like, oh, wow, and he can really deal...
It's like, I got two kids now, and I got a career, and got all this stuff, so you're like, look, I can only justify so much time that I'm spending on this, you know?
And it's like, but there's one, I'm going to pick one, and if I have to pick one, that's like, I'm not going to miss the UFC. Exactly.