Gavin de Becker shares his violent childhood—including his mother’s suicide and witnessing JFK’s assassination—that fueled his career in security, starting with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s protection. His research revealed 600,000 pre-incident threat materials (PINs) like obsessive communication or body part gifts, not direct death threats, as key warning signs. He exposes Pegasus 2 spyware’s ability to bypass encryption, self-destruct, and target figures like Jeff Bezos over Amazon deals and Washington Post ties to Jamal Khashoggi’s critics. De Becker warns governments exploit crises—COVID-19’s rushed EUAs, false-positive tests, and pharma ad dominance—to suppress dissent, citing historical precedents like internment camps and vaccine mandates. His free masterclass at giftofear.com teaches risk awareness, but he cautions against untrained self-defense, emphasizing intuition over government fear-mongering. [Automatically generated summary]
And I'm glad to talk about, we have a lot of shared interests, but this survival signals that protect us from violence.
Now, this is, I've always wanted to talk to you because you are truly an expert on preparedness and cautionary tactics and what to do and not to do, like in terms of security and how to protect people.
It is the more unusual of the two, you know, the two genders.
Certainly men are more violent more often throughout history.
So I had that experience, and a whole bunch of others.
My mother was a heroin addict.
She committed suicide when I was 16.
And so I saw a lot of stuff.
I saw a lot of criminality.
I saw a lot of violence.
And I guess I developed kind of like an ambassador between the two worlds.
I spoke both languages.
If I had a few other disadvantages, there's no way I would have succeeded in life.
I would have died young.
Like if I'd been a black kid with the same circumstance, I'd have been in big trouble.
And so that life brought me to a fascination with when John Kennedy was killed, I was 10, and I was home from school, and it just absolutely captivated and fascinated me, not so much the issue of who killed him or the conspiratorial sides of these things, which are very real.
Not so much that, but the actual physics of how you prevent assassination.
And that interest stayed with me throughout my life, and I eventually have had an odd life.
So as I tell you this story, you'll be ready for it to be unusual.
But by the time I was 19, I had already read and devoured everything I could on this subject, which was pretty limited.
Most of the stuff on anti-assassination strategies I wrote later in life, but there wasn't a lot to read at the time.
And at 19, I got a job working for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
And they were the most famous people in the world, maybe not known to everybody today, but she was a big movie star, and he was a big movie star.
And at that time, there was really only Jackie Onassis and Elizabeth Taylor and the Queen of England.
Those were the giant media figures.
Now we've got hundreds of media figures.
And Marilyn Monroe, who had died already.
And I worked for them starting as a kind of flunky.
Do you know the word?
A gopher.
And then through the course of everybody above me being fired, I ended up being what's called traveling chief of staff.
And I traveled with them around the world.
I got to work with protectors and intelligence agencies in South Africa and in Israel and in Mexico and all over Europe.
And I learned a lot.
And I observed everything.
And when I was done, I was 21.
And I wrote an article about public figure protection in the private sector for a law enforcement journal.
And everybody assumed I was a 55-year-old ex-FBI agent, but I was 21 years old.
And so I used to get asked to come and give speeches.
And when I would arrive, they would look around.
You know, is your dad with you?
You know, they'd look around and I had a mustache.
I used to darken it because you could see through it.
And I gave speeches.
And I got better and better at it.
And giving speeches, you have to be right.
You know, you get tested a lot by audiences.
And so I was driven by the idea of accuracy and a good intellectual process because I didn't have, I wasn't a former cop, I wasn't an FBI agent, et cetera.
Later, I became all that kind of stuff.
Later, I got appointed by the president to the Department of Justice Advisory Board and worked with CIA and FBI and all the things that have gone on between 10 years old and today.
By the way, the reason I mention that is sometimes when somebody wants to say something shitty about me, they say, oh, his whole training is that he had a bad childhood.
Could we count the 55 years between then and now, perhaps?
But ultimately, I developed a company that is a consulting company that advises people at risk and Wrote books on the topic and did a lot of research and study on the topic.
We were on welfare and food stamps, but my grandfather got a one-room apartment in Beverly Hills where we could lie, and my sister and I would say we lived in Beverly Hills, use that address.
So I went to Beverly High, and there I met a lot of friends who are still friends today.
And one of them was Gina Martin.
And Gina Martin was Dean Martin's daughter.
And so I went to work for her mother for $60 a week, which I still have, by the way.
And one day Elizabeth Taylor came over to their house.
And Gina and I, my girlfriend and I, we sat up at the balustrade and looked through the railing.
And I thought, Elizabeth Taylor, I didn't really even know who she was, but I thought, this is going to be a big deal.
And in came this giant, you know, big hair and all this stuff.
And then a few months later, somebody called me and said, she's looking for an assistant.
And will you go meet with her?
So I went to the Beverly Hills Hotel to meet with her, and she wasn't there.
Her boyfriend was there.
I met with him.
I got hired.
Can you type?
Yes.
Couldn't type.
Do you speak French?
Yes.
Don't speak French.
Why French?
They were going to France two weeks later.
So I got the job.
Then I went home and I told my friends, I got this job.
It's unbelievable.
And turned on the television.
And Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton have gotten back together.
She's left her boyfriend.
And I see her going through the airport paparazzi and my career is over.
I never even met her.
And then a few months later, got another call.
And this time she was back in Los Angeles with the same boyfriend.
You know, I was in Jerusalem a few years ago, and I stayed at the same hotel where Elizabeth and Richard and I had stayed when we made a trip to Israel.
And she had converted to Judaism in the 60s because she was married to a guy named Mike Todd.
And so she was an enormous big deal in Israel.
There were Elizabeth Taylor theaters when we landed the entire tarmac of the airport, hundreds of thousands of people.
And I thought, wow, Israel's really a disorganized country.
They let everybody on the tarmac, but it was obviously because of Elizabeth being there.
And so I was learning quickly about this and this kind of stuff.
And while we were there, many experiences went out with the Kissingers and crowds and blah, blah, blah.
But many years later, as an adult in my 60s, I was at that hotel.
And I was looking around at all the pictures they had of famous people.
And there I find Elizabeth and Richard and me.
And so it gave me the idea to download the diaries of Richard Burton, which I had never read.
He used to keep a diary all the time when we were traveling.
If he was drunk or in trouble, I used to go get the diary out of the room so it wouldn't get stolen by pop photographers or news media people or housekeepers or whatever.
So anyway, now years later, I'm at the King David Hotel and I download this book and it's a book of his diaries.
And I think, oh, am I in there?
So I start looking around.
And I find passages that, you know, by this point, it's been 45 years or so since I worked for them.
And I find these passages from him.
One of them says, Gavin gave us a long letter yesterday telling us that he's right about everything and we're wrong about everything.
I have no memory, but it sounds like some young Gavin move.
And then, you know, other entries regarding me.
But one of them that really struck me is that he said there were days and days without any entry.
There'd be five days with no entry, and at the end of it, he would say, lost five days.
Five days gone.
And I realized that I was a kid living with this couple and really had no idea what they were going through and what he was going through with alcoholism and what she was going through with drug addiction.
Because one of the things that I've encountered, and you meet a lot of movie stars and celebrity type people, especially rock stars, it's not just the life on the road and the partying that goes with that, but it's in response to the pressures of so many people wanting your attention and so much focus on you.
So all the people that are listening, that are listening right now, that are driving in their car and at the gym and wherever you listen to the show or watch the show, these people experience the show.
We are a part of the show.
So for us, it's just life.
So all the controversy behind it, they can bring it into work and go, did you hear about this guy that's on the JRE that said this and that?
And like, oh, I heard that's bullshit.
Or, oh, I know about that.
And then these conversations break out and all the controversy breaks out and we're blissfully immune to it.
But the world has changed so much for us because when we go out, then we experience it.
Then we experience all these conversations and all the controversy and all the people and all the attention.
And especially, I've always thought that of cops, like that people need to take that in consideration when, and also that cops, when they pull people over, they're really genuinely worried about being shot and killed.
I mean, you might think, hey, I was only going 10 miles an hour over the speed limit.
The cop is thinking, this guy could be an on-the-run criminal, and I could get shot in the face right now.
So did they, like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, when you first started working with them, were you old enough or aware enough that they were dealing with this pressures of fame and of celebrity and that they were diluting it through alcoholism and pills and that that's why they were doing that?
The problem is when people want something, that's a problem.
Like these people always want me to, they want to give me a book that they wrote or they want to talk to me about being on the show because of some experience they've had or that that becomes exhausting because they want to do it while you're eating dinner.
They want to do it while you're ordering food somewhere.
Yeah, I like this one that people come up to the table.
And I've been with so many famous people through my career and life that I've seen every variation of it.
And they say, oh, can I take a fast picture of you?
And if the person says yes, well, not with the fork in your hand.
Oh, so now you want to direct me and take a fast picture.
You know, not like this.
It becomes an entitlement.
There's a feeling of entitlement and a feeling of, you know, this is the protocol for approaching a famous person is that I say to you, can I have your autograph?
And you say yes, no matter what you're doing.
Argument with your wife, difficult times in life, you know, just lost something, just gained something, doesn't matter.
This is the protocol that people know, and they think that's the only one.
And of course, what I've learned is stand back and leave people alone or call out a nice thing.
Well, definitely don't interrupt them when they're eating.
They're just people eating.
And if, you know, I'm sitting there having a conversation with my kids, and I've had this before, where people come up and they want a photo, and I'm like, we're having dinner.
Well, I'm excited to read this book because a good buddy of mine really, really enjoyed this book.
And he said it was very valuable to him.
And the perspective that you have about this, you know, about security and psychology and threats of violence and all those different things.
Because of your childhood and then because of your experience initially with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, did you know like when you started working with them that this childhood that you had and this chaos would help you form this career?
Is that how you got into it?
Like realizing that you were working with these famous people, these famous people like uniquely vulnerable and that you could somehow or another protect them?
Way before that, I think I knew at 10 years old, I had a vision that there would be a company that people who were at-risk public figures might have a manager or an agent if they were in show business or a family office or a corporation or if they were religious leaders, they'd have a church.
And they would also have this consulting company that I envisioned, 10 years old.
And I'm not the only person who's had an experience like that where you have some certainty about what's going on.
I have a dear friend who won an Oscar and she designed her Oscar dress at 10 years old.
No, not an actress, you know, living in Massachusetts somewhere, no chance of being an actress.
And when she got to college, the acting teacher in the theater class said to the whole class on day one, only one of you will ever make it in show business, statistically.
And she looked around and she thought, oh, these poor kids.
I think it happens with a lot of, you know, look, as I get older, it happens more frequently that something slips into the flow, and I'm not as surprised anymore when things work together the way they do.
The universe has got a lot of mystery to it.
And, you know, my childhood and then the things I did afterwards were, you know, were sort of part of a story.
And I don't take credit for crafting that story.
I didn't, you know, I couldn't get myself with Elizabeth Taylor or get myself with Ronald Reagan or cause these things to happen, I guess.
But I watched the movie, and it's been super interesting.
And then I wrote this paper that got picked up by the National Criminal Justice Reference Center, which is part of the Department of Justice, and given to every police department in America.
Well, I had become, I became their, to use the lofty title, their traveling chief of staff.
So when we would go to cities, it was me who arranged security and logistics, and I learned.
And I had this really good gift you might like from your own Eastern self-defense training, and that is that in the mind of the beginner there are many possibilities, and in the mind of the expert, there are few.
The expert says, oh, we tried that.
That doesn't work.
The beginner says, why do they do it that way?
How about this way?
And that's been my whole career.
I wasn't a cop.
I wasn't a Secret Service agent.
But I've worked with Secret Service now and worked on research projects with them and trained police departments all over the country.
And it isn't always the path of going to college and learning a particular skill.
I'm glad I didn't, by the way.
I went to college for one course, one class, criminal investigation.
And then when I got appointed as a senior fellow at UCLA School of Public Policy and I had to give a little speech, I thanked the dean because you're the first person to ever put me through college.
And I've only been here for 20 minutes.
But I drove through Princeton once was my other college experience.
But look, not everybody has the life that is in the system.
And the system offers certain, makes certain promises.
If you do certain things, if you go to medical school, maybe you'll become a doctor.
I think those promises get broken very often by big systems.
But I just had a different life, a different circumstance.
And I did research just like a scientist, and I met with people, and I studied, and we did experiments, and we do all variety of things in my company, but it wasn't at a university.
But that's a very unusual thing for a 21-year-old to do with no real background in law enforcement other than the fact that you were coordinating with them when you were traveling with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.
That's strange.
You would write a paper and that that paper would actually be taken seriously.
So the next thing that happened is friends and people that knew me would recommend me to others who were just becoming famous and say, you know, you ought to talk to this guy, Gavin D. Becker.
Maybe he has some advice for you.
And so a good friend of mine at the time was a kid named Sean Cassidy.
And he became a big teen idol.
He was just my friend in high school.
And he went off.
He had an interesting experience too because he was our high school buddy.
He was a couple of years younger than me.
We used to pick on him like crazy, keep him in the middle of the pool at a friend's house, and we wouldn't let him go to the edge until he was getting really tired because he was smaller than us and we were what I would call.
And in fact, when we now, as adults, we would go into a restaurant and he could tell if the person seating you was of a certain age, we're going to get a great table, right?
Some people would say, oh, you know, I was a big fan of your brother because his older brother, David Cassidy, was also famous.
And then other people would say, oh, my God, you were on my bedroom wall all through childhood.
David's not, but Sean is alive, a big TV producer and a TV writer, smart guy.
But anyway, so then I had an experience with him.
Then he referred me to somebody else.
Then comes a whole series of clients.
And this company began to be formed.
And around 1980, a dear friend of mine, Morgan Mason, still a dear friend, went to work for Ronald Reagan.
Speaking of controversial and unpopular, that was like going to work for Trump out in Hollywood.
Oh, Ronald Reagan was the worst thing in the world.
He'd been governor of California.
And so he went to work for Ronald Reagan.
And guess what happened?
Reagan became president when everybody said you're wasting your time and he'll never become president.
And he called me and gave me a job.
I was now, I probably was 26.
And he gave me a job as a director of special services group for the president's inaugural.
And this president, because he'd been in show business, had all kinds of people coming, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and Johnny Carson, et cetera.
And right at the beginning of my getting there, John Lennon was assassinated.
And the Lennons had also hired me to do work for them if they went on tour.
And they were deciding whether to go on tour based on the success of his last record album called Double Fantasy.
And they decided not to go on tour.
I never met them at that time.
I did meet her later.
So I went up to New York, and we had a bunch of meetings after he was assassinated.
Sad memories.
And interestingly, I learned later that I was at Blair House.
I was now working for Reagan.
We're now working for President-elect Reagan as director of Special Services Group.
And I was at Blair House in the morning where the president-elect was staying.
And then I flew to New York for this meeting after John Lennon was killed.
And I later learned that John Hinckley made the same trip the same day and flew back on the same trip the same day.
He also went and stood outside the Dakota building where John Lennon was killed in getting up his courage to eventually shoot President Reagan.
And he shot him a few months later.
So then Reagan became president, and he was the oldest president at that time, not anymore, but he was the oldest president at that time.
And he appointed me as the youngest appointee ever at Department of Justice on the President's Advisory Board.
So I'm kind of giving you the process of how this particular life happened.
And I remember being on that advisory board, and there was the Supreme Court justice, Chief Justice from Arizona was on the board with me, and a Supreme Court justice from California, and the sheriff of San Diego County, and this kid, and we're sitting at the table at our first meeting.
And as an icebreaker, I said, well, has anybody here ever been arrested?
Knowing that, of course, none of these people would have been arrested.
And every single one of them had a story about being arrested.
We went around the table.
I had mine.
They had theirs.
It would be I was standing in line with my 20-year-old son and the guy behind me said such and such and my son took a swing at him and I took a swing at him and we all went to jail.
Or it would be I was in college and my girlfriend called the police because I took the record collection and I got arrested.
Every single one of them, Supreme Court justices, chiefs of police, head of the Pennsylvania Crime Commission, all of them had a story of being arrested.
And my asking that question was an icebreaker that made our relationship work.
Suddenly, this 26-year-old kid in the room who doesn't know shit about shit was actually kind of interesting.
And so that led to some big research projects that I got done, the biggest one being on assessment of threats to public figures that I worked on for five years.
And that was published and became a big deal, again, in law enforcement, and led to all kinds of things.
And then I got appointed to something by George Bush, also not the younger, but the older George Bush.
And it's a good question because it was a, you know, in those days when John Lennon was assassinated, there then came a few in a row.
And they tend to group all kinds of sort of media age violence groups.
So if you have a school shooting, you'll have another and another within a geographical area.
Right now, by the way, at the present moment in the United States, we're having multiple victim shootings almost every day.
So something that, you know, used to happen every few months and be a giant story is now happening all the time.
We'll cover that maybe later.
But on your question, I think the biggest mistake that people were making in public figure protection was the belief that threats, a direct death threat, I'm going to kill you, was the most important communication that could be assessed in advance.
And that was simply not true.
What I learned through research and then later wrote about is that of every public figure attack you've ever heard of, of everyone you've ever known where a public figure was killed, not any of them were threatened directly by the person who killed them in advance.
Really?
So the and likewise, none of the people who made a direct threat to a public figure later shot that public figure.
So when I started, everybody was very, you know, responsive to a direct threat.
Oh, it's a death threat.
He says he's going to kill me.
And I learned that other kinds of communications were far more indicative of who will show up.
And I learned that the art and still today, the art and craft of what I do and what my company does is try to avoid unplanned encounters, unwanted encounters.
Because if you avoid all the unwanted encounters, you're also avoiding the dangerous ones.
And you can be sure that nobody who travels 1,000 miles to get a meeting with you or waits outside your house if you're a famous person is going to hand you a check for a million dollars.
That's not what they're coming for.
It's always something for them.
And it's always something inappropriate because millions of people write fan letters or emails or are admirers of a recording artist or a politician or whatever.
But very few, statistically speaking, make what we call targeted travel.
You know, figure out where somebody lives or where they work and travels to see them.
So my approach was different from others, which was to try to detect as early as possible those individuals who might pursue encounters.
And from that to where we are now, we now have the largest library in the world of threat material directed to public figures.
I think it's about 600,000 pieces of communication.
People who send blood, people who send bullets, people who said this.
Well, I'll give you another one that I remember the message for, which is somebody sent an animal they had killed and said, I killed this because it was beautiful like you.
So there's no direct threat there, but clearly somebody has that much emotional investment.
It's a serious topic.
So that is probably the biggest change I made in my contribution was that direct threats were not the most important pre-incident indicator.
And before they were considered – If you went to cops when I was starting and you said, look, we've got this person and he's written 10,000 letters to one public figure.
He goes every single day to the mailbox to check and see if she's responded.
He's mentally ill.
He's lost his job.
And we're concerned about him.
Cops would say, well, did he make a threat?
It is a threat.
The circumstance includes hazard.
But in those days, they responded only to threats.
And now we've made a lot of progress in that, that there are other kinds of communications that are pre-incident indicators.
I just want to give you and your listeners this little acronym, which is PIN, pre-incident indicators.
So before everything that ever happens, there are PINs.
And so one of the things in my work and in my book and in the masterclass that I've done, what we're trying to teach people about is what are the early pre-incident indicators of people in your life who turn violent or people who aren't yet in your life who turn violent.
In other words, can we predict violence in advance?
Well, I have promised, I wrote one op-ed for the Daily Beast about this.
And in that op-ed at the end, I say, I'll never say another word on this case because I'm turning it over to the federal government.
That was a few years ago.
So what I can share is only that which has been public and a lot wasn't public.
But the circumstance did involve MBS, who's the prime, you know, the prince of Saudi Arabia.
And he did send a text with a video to Jeff Bezos.
They knew each other.
They had met.
They had exchanged phone numbers.
And embedded in that video was a system that downloaded something that then later connects to a website and downloads something more sinister like Pegasus 2, which is a system that governments around the world use to get into your phone and then they have full control of your phone.
It doesn't download immediately because it's a bigger package.
What you're getting in your first incursion into a phone or laptop or iPad or whatever, you're getting a very small file, a little executable file that then later reaches out via the Internet.
And that executable file could be a website, it could be...
And does it exist only on the physical phone itself or is it in the operating system?
And if you change phones and upload to the cloud and then re-upload or re-download on a new phone, does that spy software make it onto your phone again?
Probably not, but we don't know completely whether it does or it doesn't when a government wants you like the U.S. government or Saudi or basically there are two kinds of countries in the world when it comes to incursions into smartphones.
There are original developers, the United States, China, Soviet Union, and Israel.
So they're original developers of programs that do these things.
And then there are the purchasing countries, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and all 190 other countries.
By the way, I say 190.
Do you know there isn't even a consensus about the number of countries in the world?
So the best way I can put it to you is that if a government wants you from an informational point of view, wants to get into your phone, they have you.
These systems are extraordinarily robust, powerful, as I learned more and more about them.
It's not actually my area of expertise, cybersecurity, but as I had to learn more about it for myself and for clients, when the Saudis wanted to get into a phone, they could.
I do think, however, by the way, Signal is a foundation.
It's not a for-profit company, so I'm glad to promote it.
I do think they have something very valuable on Signal, and that is disappearing messages, which is you can set, if you and I were exchanging signal communications, we could set, in one week, make all this disappear.
In one hour, make all this disappear, up to four weeks.
That's very valuable, because otherwise our text messages, look, I was tasked to do this for myself when the Saudi thing started, which is I have to think about everything that's on my phone.
Holy shit.
Every communication I had for years, every text I sent, every photo, every argument, every joke that would be taken out of context, it's a very hard thing to do because we're like a mind.
We're collecting all of this data in the phone.
And so Signal is valuable.
I think Signal is a good service, but it doesn't solve the problem if a government wants you.
If a government wants information, they can get it through programs like Pegasus 2.
Because WhatsApp has had a for some reasons that I don't want to share and for some reasons that I do want to share, WhatsApp has had a particularly vulnerable circumstance with regard to people getting into other people's phones.
Now, having said that, there are thousands of people right now all over the world working on nothing but getting into the new iPhone operating system.
And then there's thousands of people at Apple working on nothing but being sure that the new operating system is impenetrable.
And this just is an arms race that's going to go on.
And that's a problem with zero-day exploits, which is you don't know what happened, and you go on for months and months and months not knowing that somebody's in your phone is a problem.
In the case you described, I was notified originally by somebody in CIA, then notified eight times by the FBI about what information they had learned, and then we began to do work on the phone itself.
And you learn about it in those ways, which is very difficult, by the way, because Pegasus 2, I feel like I'm giving a commercial for Pegasus 2, but most people can't buy it anyway.
But Pegasus 2 is not sitting in an armchair waiting for you to arrive.
Hey, I'm over here.
It is extremely well hidden, right down at the very core levels of a phone or an iPad.
But there are strategies for finding it, and they're challenging and they're evolving all the time.
There are whole organizations like Citizen Lab and a really great expert, Anthony Ferrante, who used to work for Obama at the White House on this kind of stuff.
He's now in private practice.
They've had a lot of success.
They even have found Pegasus 2 in the wild, meaning before there was a reason to be suspicious, they've identified it.
And it's a tricky game because let's say you were targeted by the Mexican government, which happened a lot to people, and you have it on your phone and you think you are being monitored in some way, so you get rid of your phone.
You turn it off, you put it in the top drawer.
Well, Pegasus will say, hey, this activity has just stopped.
Self-delete.
It'll self-destruct.
So now you don't even have any evidence that it ever happened, even if you could get an FBI involved in it.
It can happen internally because what happens, remember, when it's turned off or the battery is taken out, or a wide variety of things can happen that with a quote, suspect phone, it will self-destruct on its own after a few days of no contact.
That's one of the things they market.
I got all their marketing material.
And at the time, when we were really doing this investigation, we were getting a lot of content from around the world.
It's sold by a company called NSO, which is in Israel, based in Israel.
And it's a very dark game all over the world involving governments and other powerful people.
And, you know, phone, look, most people say, well, what do I care?
Nobody wants to get into my phone, and they're right.
But if you are a person who is subject to the interest of government anywhere in the world, it's very hard to have privacy.
I hear, again, not an expert, but I hear that there's more vulnerability to iPhone, but that might be because they are the ones that are targeted most often and that thousands of people are working on all the time.
What about one of those de-Googled Android phones that are becoming more probably better, but I don't know.
You don't know.
Because there's a lot of people that are swearing by those now that have moved to these operating systems that have been manipulated to the point where they don't send information, you can't get tracked, GPS doesn't work, all that stuff.
Yeah, it's good to have the lowest number of apps you can have on a phone, the better.
If you're talking about just using it for phone calls, the challenge I have, because I get, you can imagine, every product is brought to me, usually given to me for free to try, hoping that clients will want it or that my company will want it.
I see everything.
But the challenge is it's a moving target.
So if somebody says today, oh, we've got something great for such and such, two weeks later people have been able, adversaries have been able to work on it, and it's an arms race.
And so it's sort of like saying, hey, I got this great new thing, you know, a catapult, and I can throw fiery bombs over the wall of a castle.
That's not so interesting anymore now that we have tanks.
I anticipate it going in the other direction, which is that it becomes far more accessible for far more people and that anything we do online is subject to being intercepted and seen more and more.
A lot of people, like I have clients who could be targeted by China, could be targeted by Russia, could be targeted by France, could be targeted by the United States, by other companies, by powerful adversaries.
And they often say, well, I just treat every communication as if it could be heard.
But the reality is that as human beings on a phone call, we are unguarded.
You don't want to have a phone call with me or a conversation that's completely guarded or I'm like this all the time.
And so the reality is that this is going to be a vulnerability in people's lives, period.
Well, those are some of the dumbest arguments ever.
Like, why would you want encrypted communication?
And there was during after January 6th in particular, there was a lot of talk of the dangers of encrypted peer-to-peer messages and applications, which I thought was hilarious.
Like, just because there's a few nuts that storm the Capitol, you want to have all encrypted messages illegal, or encrypted messages apps, you think they're a problem because a tiny fraction of the people that use it are up to nefarious actions?
Isn't that encouraging, though, about people having their head screwed on right?
In other words, that they were aware that some of what they're seeing is not just pandemic or is not just politics.
It is also a profound gathering of power.
And there's never been a day in human history, not a moment, that there weren't well-funded people, close to people in power, working on the best new weapon or the best new method for controlling other people.
Hard always to predict what someone else, you know, what's going on in their heads.
I can just tell you the circumstances at the time included that the Saudi government was negotiating a multi-billion dollar deal with Amazon.
And so that's one.
I think the far more likely one is that Jeff was the owner of the Washington Post, and the Washington Post was employing Jamal Khoshogi, and he was just really ramping up his communications that were making MBS crazy.
We had sources inside the Royal Palace and the family, and who said that MBS's first thing every morning was to open the Washington Post website and look at what was in there.
He was very stressed by it, and as you may have heard, he became so stressed that he ordered the killing of Khashoggi.
Yeah, I followed that very closely, and I had Brian Fogel on when he was promoting The Dissident.
And that documentary is terrifying.
And the response by the world, the world stage, is terrifying, too, because they kind of just waited to see how much outrage was out there and then sort of accepted the fact that this head of state killed a journalist and had him dismembered in a consulate.
I mean, the whole story is beyond crazy.
I mean, he flew a hit team with a coroner amongst them.
So I worked on that case a lot and know Brian well, and it's good that you mentioned The Dissident because it's a fantastic documentary and it too got canceled in every way possible.
I think he had a really hard time finding streaming services to accept it.
That's what I thought was fascinating, that even Jeff Bezos, who had been victimized by this intrusion on his privacy, he wasn't willing to have it stream on Amazon Prime.
You could buy it.
And you could buy it on iTunes, but the amount of people that would buy something versus the amount of people that would stream something for free on Netflix, it's a big difference.
And he was just coming off of this Icarus documentary, which was award-winning.
It was a huge hit for Netflix.
And he felt like Netflix is just going to welcome him with open arms for his next project because obviously the guy's super talented.
And so that is a, you know, the use of the word dangerous, for example, when you said, you know, it's dangerous for people to be able to communicate encrypted and to end encryption.
Anytime that word is floated, that something is dangerous, what you want to hear that as is it's dangerous to government.
That's who it's dangerous to.
I mean, governments have been in this game of using fear to control human behavior and to control their own populations throughout history.
There's never been anything else.
And so when we see anytime a government wants us to fear something, it's very important to ask yourself and really learn about what that thing is.
Is that thing worth fearing in the ways that the government is telling us?
Because government wins from a frightened population all the time.
And there's been examples of it.
You know, President Woodrow Wilson wanting to get support to get into World War I. He formed a virtual police state, like something out of 1984 with people fired and people losing their careers and people being lynched and new sedition Laws and all variety of things, and if you weren't with us, you're against us.
And it was pretty severe.
So it's happened before, post-9-11, of course.
And I just found an amazing one, by the way.
I want to tell you, because it's so amazing.
It's slightly off the topic of me.
But King Charles in the 1600s banned coffee houses in England.
Why?
Because coffeehouses were places that people gathered together and talked, and they'd be a little amped up because of the coffee, and they'd be feeling good with each other.
And so he put out a proclamation, I'm quoting it here, restrain the spreading of false news and licentious talking of matters of state and government.
And he said that this bold discourse that was going on, this is really worth it, that the public assumed to themselves a liberty, not only in coffeehouses, but in other places and meetings, both public and private, to censure and defame the proceedings of state by speaking evil of things they do not understand and causing jealousy and dissatisfaction in the minds of my subjects, the king's subjects.
But I want to give you one more piece of this.
The following year, he extends it to not just coffee houses, but any place that sells coffee or chocolate or tea.
And I'm not joking, by the way, this is true.
And then the following year, he does another proclamation, and this one says, spreaders of false news or promoters of anything malicious against the state will be considered seditious, you know, going against the government.
But interesting, why I wanted to share that with you is that here we are on the Joe Rogan experience, which has had its share of shit flung at it for literally just having conversations, nothing more going on in here, no collection of weapons or plans to overthrow the government.
And I always like to remind people that these things are not new.
They're human nature, meaning governments have done this always.
And every word I just read in that thing, it's amazing.
He wanted to ban coffeehouses.
And now people want to ban end-to-end encryption or anything else that will allow for an actual open dialogue.
Well, there's people that are openly talking about amending the First Amendment, changing it and saying maybe we shouldn't have so much free speech.
Maybe free speech is a problem, which is crazy.
It's crazy that there's so many people that have a voice and have a say in matters, and they're so short-sighted that that's one of the things that they would actually say.
Yeah, I think it is, but it has existed before, and I think it's important to remember that if you look at human history, it's almost all tyranny.
And the United States and Western Europe is a tiny sliver of the pie.
It's a tiny period in human history in which we grew up with freedom of speech, and we grew up with these protections from the court and from the Constitution.
But it's not some permanent state of affairs.
It definitely won't last forever.
And I say to people who want to change any amendment, you want to make an amendment to the amendments in the Constitution, you almost don't have to, because major media companies have done it anyway.
Major media companies, New York Times, CNN, et cetera, et cetera.
Something your listeners might not know about called the Trusted News Initiative that's run by BBC, which is a whole collection of major media companies from all over the world who decide together on how to handle certain stories.
And that's how you get 5,000 headlines that say ivermectin is a horse paste.
Ivermectin is an animal drug in the same way that antibiotics are an animal drug, meaning we have a shared biology with other animals, and it can be given to all kinds of beings, but of course it's a people drug, won the Nobel Prize as a people drug, given billions of times as a people drug.
But when you looked at what happened with you, you had a monolithic approach in media where everybody said the same thing, horse-paced, horse-paced.
And that's because of a monolithic approach in corporate media right now.
Well, the BBC Trusted News Initiative is certainly the most organized version that we're aware of.
But I think in any of these things like what we're experiencing for the last two years, people want to find a single villain.
You know, it's Klaus Schwab, it's Bill Gates, it's pharma companies, whatever it may be, because it's a simpler narrative.
And unfortunately, it's not a simple narrative.
What happens is this.
Many, many people have competing incentives to exploit a new thing.
So for example, when 9-11 happened and airplanes flown into buildings, there came up companies that reinforced the concrete on government buildings as if they could stop a fucking airliner.
Ridiculous.
But the government spent millions of dollars on it, on reinforcing windows and reinforcing the outsides of buildings.
My point being that in our current world, if you used to make perfume, now you make hand sanitizer.
If you used to make bumper stickers, now you make stickers that say stand six feet apart that are on the floor of the supermarket.
If you used to make fabric scarves, now you make masks.
And so everybody is inclined by the momentum of commerce to jump on to anything that has everyone's attention.
In attention, there is money to be made in the area of attention.
So when governments of the world say there's a virus and if you're over 60, it'll kill you.
That was the first, that was the original information.
And when that gets etched on the tablet, it's very hard to change people's minds after that, even though we learned that it was far more, you know, you were far more vulnerable if you were older, if you were frail, if you were, I mean, look at Canada.
70% of the people who died in Canada whose deaths are attributed to COVID were nursing home residents.
Meaning, what do you go to a nursing home for, by the way?
So when we learned, myself included, I heard about the pandemic and thought, oh, shit, over 60, you get it, you die.
So all kinds of cautions and care and concern.
Then I got that first report that came out of Italy, which showed that 94% of the people had 2.7 fatal comorbidities, meaning they already had other diseases that could kill them.
I didn't.
And they already were elderly.
I wasn't.
They were, in many cases, overweight, all variety of problems.
And the point being that it was highly age stratified.
This disease is highly age and health stratified.
And so young people, you know, a kid in college, you don't have a challenge from this disease.
Now, quickly, if Dr. Fauci were in my pocket right now, he would be climbing up here to yell at me, oh yeah, but we've got a lot of young people who are killed.
First of all, it's not a lot relative to anything.
And secondly, people get killed in car accidents.
Life is a sexually transmitted, always fatal, communicable disease.
That is what life is, right?
It is a condition that is sexually transmitted, always fatal, and communicable.
We cannot eliminate all risk.
And government always pretends they can.
After 9-11, the color codes.
It's a red day.
It's a yellow day.
The UK is using the color codes in this pandemic.
And it looks like comedy when you see it.
This is a yellow day.
And what do I do?
Duck, not breathe, say under the kitchen counter?
What do I do with this information?
And then you see how do people actually die?
Overweight, heart disease, diabetes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So this trusted news network, like in the instance of COVID and in my recovery in particular, they concentrated on one thing, and that one thing was ivermectin.
And it was one of many things that I listed.
I listed ZPAC, I listed prednisone, I listed monoclonal antibodies, and I said also ivermectin.
I said IV vitamin drips and NAD as well, I think.
But all they concentrated on was ivermectin.
And then there was all these stories, like all over the world, about me taking horse dewormer.
And it was very specific.
It was horse dewormer.
Even though ivermectin, by the way, I found some stuff in my cabinet that was heartworm medication for my dog that was ivermectin.
And I was like, I wonder what's in this.
I was like, I wonder if this is ivermectin.
This is all after the fact.
And I was like, holy shit, this is ivermectin too.
But they had come up with one narrative, one narrative that they all stuck to.
And that was horse dewormer.
Why do you think that's the case?
Because like, why would they be, why would they concentrate on only one aspect of this laundry list of medications that I took?
They did a similar hit job that was years in the making on hydroxychloroquine.
I say years in the making, you know, for anybody who hasn't read Robert Kennedy's book called The Real Anthony Fauci, you can skip right to the last chapter and have your socks blown off in terms of things that are going on in the world.
And it's got 3,200 citations.
Everything is very carefully researched and studied.
And it's been the number one book in the country for silently, for coming up on 25, 30 weeks now without a single review in the United States.
Now, when in our lives did that ever happen, that a book is the number one best-selling book in America and nobody reviews it.
So it goes to the same question you're asking, how you have a monolithic opinion that is foisted on the public.
And it's why, Joe, this show has been so important, not because you give people advice or you give them some specific guidance and tell them what to do, but because you just give another, you can hear another view.
Any time you hear only the government view in world history, that's been bad news.
And when in world history was it the good guys who were censoring books?
That's just not the way it works.
But I want to go to your question specifically on ivermectin.
Any treatment for COVID-19 was a threat to the emergency use authorization and a threat to vaccines.
The reason being that the emergency use authorization is not available if there are treatments available.
So that's why they had to go nuts on hydroxychloroquine and why they had to go nuts on ivermectin.
Because if there was a viable treatment available to the public, then you do not get an emergency use authorization.
And what is the emergency use authorization?
The emergency use authorization allows you to go from step one to step 30 in 100 days instead of 12 years.
Before you would inject something into somebody's body, it used to be that vaccines took seven, eight, nine, 10, and on the average, 12 years to be approved by the FDA.
This was 101 days.
And so ivermectin was a threat.
And if people knew it was a viable treatment, or any early treatment, by the way.
I mean, how can you have a government health system that doesn't even bother to say to people through a pandemic, take vitamin D, take zinc?
You know, there are many experts who feel that this was a pandemic of low vitamin D, meaning that's an absolute epidemic in America.
You know, people don't go out, and what did the government do?
Stay home, don't go outside, watch television, eat everything you can possibly eat, and they don't say a word about your health.
And it's supposed to be public health, but it isn't public health anymore.
It's much more focused on specific outcomes.
I still haven't answered your question, though, which is how it happens.
It's this group of shared incentives.
So you have the pharma companies where the incentive is not small, right?
Pfizer, upwards of $60 billion already, just on this one consumer product, Moderna in the 30s.
These are enormous, enormous events, and it's the best business in the history of the world because they have no liability.
They cannot get sued for any effect from these particular products.
And even 500 years ago, when you went into the town square and you bartered with somebody to buy something off him, if it turned out to be shitty, you could bring it back to him and say, hey, man, this thing you sold me isn't what you said it was.
And you could engage with him, not with pharma.
No matter what happens from these particular products, they cannot have liability.
Well, I can't speak to or pretend to know every incentive, but I can look from the outside and see what we do know.
Every major news program is sponsored predominantly right now by Pfizer.
Literally Pfizer, not just a company or drug companies in general, but they've been pharma companies for a decade.
Meaning that's what, if you watch regular television and you see commercials, you're going to see pharma commercials, all those commercials that tell you about the adverse effects, et cetera.
Do you think that there's a specific conversation that gives in this narrative, or do you think that they know that their interest lies in keeping these pharmaceutical companies happy so that there's this sort of like understanding?
There's the former head of Fox who's died now, I forgot his name, Fox News.
He said to a good friend of mine, I will never put on, he was talking about a particular guest who was perceived as going to speak adversely about vaccines.
He said, I'll never put him on because Pfizer is our primary, you know, this is how we run this place is based on these sponsors.
So that is just an incentive.
Other incentives would be in the beginning, in the beginning of this pandemic, would be to get rid of Trump, meaning mainstream or corporate media had had enough.
They had whatever their philosophical beliefs were about Trump.
And so all bets were off.
A very interesting example was the New York Post story on Hunter Biden.
New York Post, oldest newspaper in America, started by Alexander Hamilton, for God's sake, runs this story about Hunter Biden's laptop.
And the Biden campaign, he hadn't won yet, floated the idea that it was all Russian disinformation.
And 50 former intelligence officers wrote a public letter saying it has the earmarks of Russian disinformation, meaning it looks like it could be Russian disinformation.
But the really bad thing that happened is Twitter would not allow you to share the story.
And Facebook would not allow you to share the link.
So the story was literally killed.
And guess what?
Two weeks ago, the New York Times has now come out and acknowledged that it wasn't Russian disinformation.
It is Hunter Biden's laptop.
By the way, I don't care about me.
I'm not a political person, don't care about Biden, don't care about Trump, don't care about Hunter Biden.
It's not interesting.
But what is very interesting and important to me is the control of information in terms of censorship.
There might be some kind of charge arising out of an investigation.
Or, you know, the New York Times has done this before.
Big media companies do it, which is eventually they say everything.
You can't believe it could possibly happen, but eventually there'll be an article saying, you know, these 70 studies about ivermectin might actually, you know, speak to some remote, impossible efficacy for this drug when the Pfizer, you know, ivermectin is of a category of drug that Pfizer's new drug is of the same category.
My point here, though, is I, you know, you asked earlier about my life and childhood.
I think by not living a conventional life, I ask questions.
And I have a phrase in my company which is always go 10 questions deep.
So you don't just say, oh, there's going to be guards at every post.
You say, well, what are they told to do?
What are their instructions?
What's their qualifications?
Are they standing together and talking?
Or are they divided?
There's 10 questions to ask to get to the real information.
And it might be genetic.
It might be circumstance, but some people, yourself included, are curious, right?
And you can, if you said something to me now, I don't know if that's accurate.
I'm curious.
I want to look it up.
I want to see what I can learn about it.
But people are not that way, some people, with government proclamations.
And so it's considered everything, you know, fake news.
If you disagree with these particular public health officials, and an interesting thing to remember about, for example, the FDA, 25% of new pharmaceuticals are later recalled.
They're not perfect.
The FDA is not perfect.
They let things go out that later are found to be problematic, opioids being a big example.
Opioids for 11-year-old kids, which our current head of the FDA, who's been at the FDA before, and a consultant to 15 pharma companies in the interim, of course.
He presided over, you know, over all variety of opioid problems that have led to some of the biggest fines in American history, criminal fines against pharma companies, Johnson ⁇ Johnson, Pfizer.
The fact that people put their faith in it's an industry that's been the most deceiving, the most ruthless, the most willing to allow people to die for profit.
I mean, when you look at what they did with Vioxx, you know, I had John Abrinson on the podcast to talk about that because he worked with that case.
And he's explaining how they knew that it was going to kill people.
They knew that it was going to have these sort of cardiorespiratory problems and blood clots and the like.
And it wound up killing somewhere in the neighborhood of 60,000 people.
And they were fined, but yet they're still in business.
These are the same companies that people are defending as somehow or another amazing because they've come up with this solution to what is this, for many people, this existential crisis, this terrifying reality of a virus that is going to kill a certain amount of people no matter what you do.
And there's got to be some sort of a solution.
Then there's this one solution that gets presented.
And everybody who thinks of themselves as being a good person or wants other people to think that they're a good person stops all questioning of this one group of companies that has been notoriously the most deceptive.
It's amazing.
It's amazing the willingness to just believe people that have been profit motivated and driven and willing to do whatever the fuck it takes to get products to market, regardless of whether or not they're even effective or more effective than the current products that are available that are safe.
Well, I want to say since you mentioned Vioxx that the president's nominee and the current head of the FDA presided over the Viox disaster as well and even went against an advisory board recommendation and approved Viox.
And so Viox leads to fines of more than a billion dollars, but he gets to be head of the FDA again.
When Abramson was on, one thing that he told me that blew me away.
He said, when scientists do peer-reviewed work on whatever the pharmaceutical drug company is working on at the time, whether it's painkillers or anti-inflammatories, whatever it is, they don't get access to the data.
They get access to the interpretation of the data from the pharmaceutical companies.
And I think the public probably assumes that trials, like trials for a new pharmaceutical product, are, you know, the material is studied by the government in some government lab.
But that's not what happens, of course.
These trials are run by the pharmaceutical companies using independent companies that are beholden to them.
And so going back to your original question about how you have a monolithic opinion, I think the corporate media in America at the beginning wanted to disadvantage Trump and advantage Biden.
And by the way, I'm all, you know, I get it.
I get that people have strong opinions about Trump or about Biden or about politics in general.
I think you can make a good argument that we'd be better off with a change and you can make a good argument that we'd be better off keeping Trump.
I mean, you can go around that stuff all you want.
What happened, though, is that they succeeded at, you know, in a very close election.
They succeeded at Biden winning.
And that's not considered, of course, election tampering, not letting the public know about the Hunter Biden laptop, for example, which would be a big thing in a normal campaign, right?
The president's son, and he's got references to the president inside his emails.
He's working with other governments.
I mean, it would be a big, it wouldn't be nothing.
And I think that then the overall structure that accomplished that now had a lot of power and simply did not stop using it.
Because the next one, you know, it started around vaccine disinformation.
That's how the Trusted News Initiative organized itself, that we'll all find out what's true and we'll tell the public that that's bad information and this is good information.
But it then morphed to regular politics with the Hunter Biden thing.
And now I doubt it will be given up.
There are very few people in world history that give up power.
And what's fascinating to me is that so many people are willing to pretend that this isn't happening.
They're willing to stick their head in the sand and think that all these other folks that are making a big deal out of this, they're Trumpers or they're this or the, you know, they have these biases that don't allow them to see the truth.
And, you know, and there's also a bunch of people that bought into things early on.
And because they bought into it, they have this established narrative in their head and they're not willing to say that they were wrong.
They're not willing to say that they had an incorrect assumption or that they bought into the narrative because the government was saying it and they were scared and they wanted to have some sort of a feeling of comfort and also wanted to signal to all the people around them that they're doing their part, that they're a good person.
And if you are a sports league, for example, and you have mandated that the young athletes get the vaccines and boosters for young athletes, and then someone has myocarditis and collapses or dies, the sports team does not want to say we were wrong.
So they double down.
And we're seeing a lot of doubling down altogether.
And by the way, I think it's awesome that people have their opinions, whatever they are, and however they got them.
What I strongly oppose is any effort to censor various views.
The idea that there is an okay scientist to talk on your show and that there's another one that's not okay to talk on your show is itself a little bit alarming because your show in particular, these are conversations.
Like, I mean, if you're talking about people that are quacks, that you can prove that they're full of shit and they haven't worked in years and they're just nuts and they've got schizophrenia.
Then you're talking about one thing.
But if you're talking about people that are amongst the most published doctors ever in their field, and you're saying there's something wrong with them because they've deviated from the narrative about one particular subject ever in their whole career.
We have a real problem in this country, too, with that there's only two countries in the world where pharmaceutical companies are allowed to advertise.
Yeah, it would, you know, even when I was growing up, you would learn about medications from your doctor, who you hoped had, you know, got the best information.
And slowly, throughout my life, you now had people would come to the doctor's office with a nice briefcase and samples of the new pharmaceutical, usually a cute girl, and she would meet with the doctor personally.
He'd look forward to that meeting, and she'd say, oh, here's a bunch of samples you can give out to people, and here's our paper on how good and safe it is, and on and on and on.
And some of those drugs were thalidomide, meaning they weren't all perfect.
And the idea that we think that a product, this is the most successful product in world history, by the way.
This makes Coca-Cola look like nothing.
There is no other product in world history that billions of people have taken and that is going to be taken billions of times more as it comes into its fourth and fifth approved booster here in the United States.
So my problem with all of it is I don't even have to have a medical opinion.
I have to have an opinion that I want all the information.
Just imagine, you go to your doctor and he says, so let me tell you about this product.
And he says, I want to give you this piece of paper about the product.
And I said, what about the other papers you have over there?
He says, I don't want you to see those.
Beg your pardon?
I don't want to tell you that stuff.
What do you mean you don't want to tell me that stuff?
Informed consent is telling me the two sides of the issue, what's favorable about this product and what's unfavorable about this product, so that I can make a decision.
Well, informed consent went out the window here in these last two years.
And I think that something that I care about is that people be allowed to have a dialogue and have access to information.
They can make their own decision on anything, but have access to information.
And I'm always stunned when people say, I don't want to see that guy, that interview.
Some interview you've had, for example.
I'm not going to watch that guy.
What do you know about that guy that you're not watching?
What is it you know about that guy?
Well, I read that such and such.
Where?
What?
And you ask 10 questions and people fall off it about question number three.
Your job is not to form a consensus opinion amongst the general public through the way you present things.
Your job is to give them the data and to allow the public health experts and the scientists to interpret that data in a way that makes the most sense to people.
Your job is not just to say, we're going to withhold this data because we personally don't feel that it's within the best interest to let people know the facts.
And so, you know, this is, by the way, for me, it's just one subject among many where I encourage people.
By the way, even my books, my books are about personal responsibility.
You learn it.
Don't rely on the government.
Don't rely on the police.
Don't rely on the corporation to be sure the lighting in the parking lot is okay, so now you're safe because they put lights up.
You learn about your own internal nuclear defense system.
And that, so my buttons get pushed around this topic because the misuse of fear causes extraordinary anxiety.
Look what it's done in the whole world throughout history, but in recent times.
And I want to tell you an interesting thing.
I mentioned earlier that you have the world, you have world history, and tyranny is the norm.
That is the default for world history.
And we're this tiny little sliver.
And it's quite an unusual experiment we're doing and have done in Western Europe, the United States, Canada.
And to me, it's something really worth protecting.
Like, you've got to really, you know, no, no, we said free speech.
We mean free speech.
Even if you've got to listen to that guy on Joe Rogan, who you don't want to hear, turn it off.
But we don't want him to be censored, for example.
And so what I've seen with fear being used by, just in my lifetime, it starts with fear of the other, the Russians.
Russia is a country, and they're going to hurt us.
They're going to send nuclear bombs toward us.
Then it goes to communism.
Sorry.
Then it goes to communists, their people.
Then it goes to communism.
Now that we're down to an idea.
And after 9-11, it goes to terrorists.
Then it goes to terrorism, a strategy.
Then it goes to, you're either with us or against us.
And the point I'm making is that it gets smaller and smaller and smaller, right down to the smallest particulate matter ever, which is like talcum powder, much smaller, which is a virus.
And in all these things I just described to you, only government can tell you if you're in danger, and only government can fix it.
They have that in common, right?
You couldn't even know whether you had COVID in the beginning for 18 months.
But honestly, if you stop and think about it, you're talking about something that is important.
when you're reporting the number of COVID cases.
If someone's doing it incorrectly and they're getting a false negative, but then they actually do have COVID and they wander around and spread it because they incorrectly used a home test.
Like until they knew that there was, I mean, that's a big piece of information.
If you're talking about a pandemic, especially early in the pandemic, where people were legitimately concerned that it was going to kill everybody.
I mean, in March of 2020, people were terrified of this.
If they had a test then and people, people misuse everything.
So you're allowing the general public to take something and give them a false sense of security and they could potentially use that false sense of security to bypass safety protocol and go out and spread this deadly virus.
That makes sense to me, that you would only be able to get tested in places where people are trained to do it correctly.
Well, I think the concern about the virus is lessened because of vaccines and then because of previous infection and then because of education.
Enough people have understood now that your vulnerabilities increase because of obesity, your vulnerabilities increase because of vitamin deficiencies and all sorts of other factors that I think people have a more comfortable sense.
I mean, there's still a bunch of like very paranoid people out there that are highly ridden with anxiety that still wear double masks when they're walking around outside.
I see them every day.
But there's always been people in our culture that are overwhelmed by anxiety and overwhelmed by fear.
And those, you know, there's a spectrum, of course.
There's people that were maskless in the early days, like, fuck it, I don't care.
And then there's people who are like cautionary, but not sure how much risk is really truly involved.
I think we kind of have a, as a general base of fear and anxiety over the virus, it's greatly diminished.
And now, particularly because of Omicron, because of Omicron, I think most people who get it, and, you know, there's this weird narrative where people get it and they're sick, but they go, oh, thank God I'm vaccinated because it was really mild.
You know, you should go get vaccinated.
I'm like, well, I wasn't vaccinated.
It was really fucking mild for me.
Like, this is a mild virus.
Like, you're just saying that because you want to justify the fact that you got vaccinated.
I think for the early version of the virus and for the Delta, vaccines helped a lot of fucking people.
I'm not anti-vaccine in any way, shape, or form, although it's been said that I am.
I'm not.
I encouraged a lot of people to get vaccinated.
But I don't like bullshit.
I don't like false narratives.
And that's what's going on today.
You're seeing a lot of people that are saying things that don't necessarily make sense because it justifies their life choices or their choices.
When it comes down to testing, though, I think it's probably wise that especially in the early days when we weren't exactly sure what's going on.
I mean, it's easy to look at as a Monday morning quarterback and say they should have done this.
But when you're looking at what people did in the early days, if you gave people home tests and they weren't good or they weren't good at it and they did a shitty job, you would get a totally distorted idea of whether or not you were safe and you probably would cost lives.
You probably would go to visit your mom when she was sick.
I think the concern of government was a slightly different one, which is that if consumer tests were available, we could decide on our own, yeah, we will have that wedding.
Yeah, we will go to that funeral.
Yeah, we will test everybody.
I believe in testing, by the way.
I think it's great.
People who are concerned about getting the vaccine.
Are you wanting to control people because it's in their own best interest to do so because they'll get sick less often?
Or are you wanting to control people because it's your default position and when you get it, you know, it's the greatest wet dream you ever had, what we saw with mayors and governors and city officials of all kinds who sort of their inner bureaucrat came out or dictator came out.
So the question isn't whether they wanted to control people.
They wanted to control the numbers as well.
And so when you have tests that are only done by official sanctioned locations that report back the information, you have a far greater connection to the data, right?
If I just do it at home, that test isn't recorded somewhere.
So I do think that in all of the things I mentioned about governments and the narratives of fear that have been used, they all have an element of only the government can help you and only the government can tell you whether you've got it.
I agree with you, but I also think there's a real problem managing at scale.
You're managing millions and millions and millions of people.
To offer options when you're thinking about something that you really need to control, which is the spread of a deadly disease, to have options available for people which would create gray areas, which would look if you're not reporting, if you just buy a home test and you decide whether or not it's accurate or inaccurate.
Like you can get a home test and test positive for COVID and just fucking lie to people and say, yeah, I tested, I'm good.
Like if you go to a place and they tell you whether or not, I mean, there's still an area of inaccuracy with all these tests, right?
They're not 100% accurate.
But if you go to a place and you get tested, at least they have an accurate recording, or at least they have an accurate recording of the test results.
What scares me is the notion that people might start using these same sort of draconian measures of control with something that we've always just accepted as a part of everyday life.
Now, a lot of people have accepted COVID, and they're encouraging people to accept COVID as endemic.
And this is just a part of life now.
Well, that's always been how we accepted the flu.
But I'm hearing a lot of talk of mandatory flu vaccines.
I'm hearing a lot of talk of mandating things.
And that makes me nervous because I do know that there's a financial incentive.
Whenever there's any kind of financial incentive, and you do know that these financial incentives trickle down into media, which shapes narrative for the entire population, like as a whole, we should be super fucking concerned about that.
I think that piece is it's not about the virus and it's not about the pandemic.
That is just the latest iteration of a time that can be used to empower government and reduce the power of the people.
And I give you a fast example.
If we had a community group of 100 people and we got together to do something in the community and we said, hey, let's have Bob and Susie be in charge.
They'll be the administrators, right?
That's 2% of the people in our 100-person group.
And then Bob and Susie say, hey, everybody stay in their homes.
Don't come out.
Don't do this.
Don't do that.
And start giving us all a variety of instructions.
In that little democracy that we had, this little 100-person democracy, we would say, we don't want 2% telling everybody what to do.
And we'd laugh at them.
Bob and Susie started saying ridiculous things.
Now, in the actual, the non-metaphorical version of this, it's a minuscule percentage of our population in any country controls the rest of the population.
And what do they tend to like, people in power?
What they tend to like is, throughout history, the king and queen would look over the castle wall.
First of all, they always have a castle wall, a question we can ask ourselves, why is that?
But the reason is they look over the castle wall and they see the people fighting with each other.
They're disagreeing over things.
And they give each other a hug because that is the best news possible.
It's only when all the people agree that they have a risk of coming over the castle wall.
Follow my thinking?
So division itself that we are experiencing and which you're at the center of often, this whole idea that I won't, there's a road I don't have to go down, but my point is division itself is beneficial to those in power.
And you can't speak about vaccines as if they're one thing.
There have been vaccines taken off the market because they're dangerous.
There's the Gardasil vaccine that's downright dangerous and terrible and shouldn't be given to nine-year-old boys who don't have, you know, who cannot get cancer in their female sex organs.
They don't have female sex organs.
But nine-year-old boys right now are scheduled in the American Pediatric Association to get Gardasil, which is a very bad drug.
Yeah, but the nine-year-old boys, Jesus Christ, it would take us the whole show, but HPV vaccine is a bad vaccine.
And it is a dangerous vaccine.
It is not worth it.
And HPV is not clearly demonstrably going to lead to cancer for your little girl in 40 years, because you have these cancers that are serious cervical cancer in your 50s.
So you're taking this little girl right now, nine years old, 10 years old, and you're saying, gee, I don't want her to get cervical cancer.
Well, it's not her we're talking about.
It's her in 40 years we're talking about.
And cervical cancer is highly treatable.
It's not a terrible killer.
And we don't even know if the vaccine works.
And it has a lot of serious problems.
The package insert for that particular vaccine is macabre.
Many of the people are not likely to be contagious and identifying them may contribute to bottlenecks that prevent those who are contagious from being found in time.
But researchers say the solution is not test less or skip testing people without symptoms, as recently suggested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Whoa.
Instead, new data underscore the need for more widespread use of rapid tests, even if they are less sensitive.
In three sets of testing data that include cycle thresholds compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York, and Nevada, up to 90% of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by the New York Times found.
I don't know about whether that's done nationally, but it was recommended.
I'll just read one more quick paragraph.
The United States recorded 45,000 new corona cases.
If the rates of contagiousness in Massachusetts and New York were to apply nationwide, then perhaps only 4,500 of those people may actually need to isolate and submit to contact tracing.
There's a reason that you saw countries all over the world have 80% asymptomatic cases, right?
The other way to say that is the way we would have said it pre-COVID, our whole lives is, oh, you not sick, right?
You don't have any symptoms.
And 80 to 90% of the people having no symptoms is called not sick historically.
So now we're searching for something that the testing process allowed for a great deal of disruption in the United States.
I happen to believe in the test more for the negative than for the positive, just FYI.
I'm sorry, more for the positive than for the negative because, okay, now you're going to take a 9 out of 10 chance and I'm not going to come to your dinner party because I tested positive, right?
I would do that.
But, and then I don't get sick and then I don't get sick and then I don't get sick and I never get sick.
That's not called you have COVID.
That's called you're not sick.
Historically, we did not call something a case of pneumonia or a case of the flu unless you had the flu.
One is I had to advise a lot of people on how are we going to navigate life in this new circumstance.
Everything from, you know, in the beginning, we were told that it will live on packages that come from the store.
So you're cleaning packages or you can get a pizza delivery.
The outside of the box will kill you, but the inside, the pizza will be just fine.
You remember this period where you're cleaning everything, you're wiping off the bananas before they come into the house.
And so it was my challenge to manage life for people during this circumstance.
And it's also just my general curiosity.
The second issue that affected me a lot is that we have a lot of, I've got 570 employees, a lot of them young people, and a lot of them out of the military.
And we had our own four cases of myocarditis inside.
We also had a young man come out of the military and come to our physical fitness requirements and while running on the track, 33 years old, fall down and die.
He was not our employee.
He was applying to be an employee of ours.
And so it was in my interest to learn a great deal about whatever the risks are from both the vaccine and whatever the risks are from the virus.
And to do what I think people wisely do, which is compare the two things and make your decision about how to administer it.
As an employer, I had to decide, was I going to mandate vaccines, for example.
And I had a bunch of clients ask me, you know, I'm this age, I'm in this general physical condition.
Just asking me for medical advice, but they're asking me for statistical information on, you know, what are the risks here.
So in the beginning, after we got the Italy information, what you had to do to die of COVID in the beginning, if you were, say, 53 years old and fit, first you had to get COVID.
Then you had to ignore it for a few days.
Then you had to go to the hospital.
Then 90% of people were sent home, not admitted.
So then you had to be admitted.
Then you had to go up to the ICU.
That's 87% didn't get to the ICU.
And then you had to be put on a ventilator, and then you could die.
So there was quite a series of things you had to go through in order to say this is a giant risk to the individual, to a specific individual who's fit.
Much different when you're looking at it from a public health perspective and you're looking at a global population that is, you know, if you pick a number, 40% obesity, extraordinarily high amounts of diabetes, for example.
And so I had to do a, you know, just a statistical look at every kind of risk.
We do it when clients go to another country.
What are the risks in that country?
Everything from being pickpocketed all the way to getting a disease.
What, for example, would you take a yellow fever vaccine, going to a country with yellow fever?
Yes, you would take a yellow fever vaccine.
But some people don't take the flu vaccine, for example.
And the flu vaccine has the same rap that you described earlier, where people say, oh, I got the flu.
Good thing I got that flu vaccine.
It was milder.
What form of science is there that tells you it would have been worse if?
Yeah, I want to go back to something that I said about Gardasil, which is that the commercials for Gardasil are a little girl talking to camera, and she says, do you know about this, mommy?
Do you know about this, Daddy?
After the information.
So they think, my little girl dying of cervical cancer.
And so it's a brilliant product because in half the circumstances that people get cervical cancer, their parents will already be dead.
They've already bought the product, given it to them two and three times, by the way.
It has boosters as well.
And it has one of the worst side effect profiles of any vaccine.
The problem is, excuse me, not pharmaceutical drugs.
The problem is to be the, if you can advertise, if you can advertise and you can manipulate people and change their opinion based on theatrics, right?
You have music and people dancing and holding hands and spinning around in a wheat field.
Like that is so manipulative.
And we are subject to manipulation.
And when it's something that is so important, like making critical health decisions, you know, I mean, how many of these, you know, consult your doctor and then they rattle off a list of things that could go wrong.
Like your asshole becomes a fire hydrant of blood.
Like it's like there's so many of these fucking commercials.
Like so many times I'm watching television.
I'm like, how many goddamn drug commercials are there?
But it's like the problem is manipulative ads are effective.
They work.
If your person is sitting at home and you don't feel good and there's an ad that comes on and these people are living the way you would like to live, they're dancing around, they're laughing and smiling.
You're like, I want to dance around.
I want to laugh and smile.
I want to be like these folks.
That's one thing if you're selling toasters.
Well, it's innocuous.
It's not going to hurt anybody.
It's just a toaster.
But if you're selling something that could potentially change a person's entire life if it goes sideways.
And that is the end of my shameless advertisement.
Oh, except I want to say this.
At the core of that book, it is really about people listening to their intuition.
And if you can imagine a woman in an office building late at night alone, she's leaving her job.
And the elevator doors open up, and there's a guy inside who scares her for whatever reason, how he's dressed, how he looks, that he's there, whatever it may be.
And she says, I'm not going to be the kind of person who doesn't get in the elevator.
I'm not going to be the kind of person who judges this guy.
And so she gets into a steel soundproof chamber with somebody she's afraid of.
And there's not an animal in nature that would ever do that.
And so my work is really to encourage people just this one little thing, which is to listen to your intuition.
And that masterclass is that I went back after, this book is 25 years old, and I went back and interviewed.
First of all, I just got 17 women together.
Every one of them had a truly profound experience of violence.
And I think that would be true if I got 17 people together in a room in America.
You know, you'd either know somebody, it'd be one, you know, one removed, or it'd be you that had some experience of violence.
And in fact, there's a thing in the masterclass where we asked people on the street, men and women, when's the last time you thought about yourself being in danger?
And the men would be like, hmm, danger?
Nope, can't think of anything.
And the women would all be yesterday, today, when I parked last night, where I park, where I go.
So it's just a different world for men and women in society.
So a lot of that book is about, you know, listen to your intuition.
And a lot of the masterclass, the idea came from Oprah that she did a bunch of shows with me.
And then 10 years later, she did a 10-year anniversary show on this book.
And I thought, and got some of the people together who were involved.
And I thought, well, let me go back and get these people together and do this thing where we just sit around and have a conversation.
And I got a woman whose child was killed at the Newtown school shooting, someone else whose daughter was killed by her boyfriend, a man who shot his own brother by accident when he was a kid.
Very interesting perspective because you never hear from that person.
You get the news stories about the tragedy, but the guy who has to go through life, having had that accident, that shooting accident.
And then a bunch of experts, FBI, LAPD, et cetera.
And I think it can help people.
And I think it can help people now when there's a lot of fear and a lot of crime and a lot of demonstrations and a lot of upset in society right now.
In fact, it's even, you know, I saw you talk about Will Smith.
Even decorum in general is being broken in this time in America, in that a lot of people are on edge.
You have a lot more multiple victim shootings.
You have a lot more violence.
You've got these break-ins in California where 70 people break into a store.
At the same time that laws are changing that says we're not going to prosecute in California, most cities, for anything over, unless it's over $1,500 theft.
So people just walk into a CBS and pick up something or a target store and walk out.
So it's a hard time, and I know there's a lot of fear.
And I always want to remind people that there are women who were killed by their husbands or boyfriends, but the fear they were thinking about was terrorists during 9-11.
So more people have died at the hands of boyfriends and husbands than died at 9-11.
Triple.
Oh, sure.
And so we focus on the wrong things, right?
You know, on our refrigerator, we might have the doctor's name and number, but we don't have the nuclear emergency search team phone number, you know, the black helicopters that the Pentagon has, because it's not in our thinking day to day, and it shouldn't be.
But we let television news program our fears.
And years ago, I was doing a book tour for this book, and a guy said to me, well, a television producer, he said a little, he had a guest on talking about the flesh-eating disease that has come and gone in our consciousness.
Do you remember it?
It was a big news story.
You could get the flesh-eating disease.
And I met this woman who was going to be interviewed, and I thought later on she could have told me about the flesh-eating disease before I shook hands with her.
I thought jokingly, but she didn't, and I didn't get it, and she didn't have it.
She only wanted to talk about her fear of it.
They couldn't find somebody with the disease.
So I said to the news producer, you know, what the fuck?
What are you doing?
Like, this is a thing that six people got in another country.
Why is this a news segment here?
He said, well, he said, a little worry never hurt anybody.
And I put it in one of my books because a little worry is the cause of hypertension and drug addiction and alienation from people and fear of each other and all this stuff that goes on programmed, our fears programmed.
And my teaching is the things to fear actually have not changed.
They are each other.
They are the relationships you're in.
And so you have a choice when you're getting into a new relationship with an employee, with a boyfriend, or girlfriend.
You have choices and you can observe the circumstance you're in and you can predict violent behavior.
People have that capacity, just like every other animal in nature does.
You know, if you see two wolves come together on some mountain path, and one of them puts his ears back and shows his teeth and his hair stands up on his back, the other one, and then he attacks the other wolf, right?
The other wolf does not say, oh my God, I had no idea that was coming.
But people do that every day.
They participate in their own victimization without recognizing that they have every piece of information that they need in their intuition, which, by the way, the word intuition, the root of it is in tear, and it means to guard and to protect.
Particularly a kind of self-defense class called, sometimes called model mugging, where you may have seen it where the perpetrator is in a padded suit.
And for women who are not going to invest years in some self-defense class, it's very valuable because it teaches them to strike.
Many women, maybe most, have never really hit anybody to hurt them.
And so with a padded assailant, this kind of training, often called model mugging and there are other names for it, which is available in every major city, is something I really believe in because it lets you engage with somebody physically and prevail.
And it teaches you a few tricks, not at the level that somebody who takes martial arts courses, but I like martial arts for every purpose, for confidence, for self-defense, for health, I think in every way.
So, yeah, even in this book, more in my later books, but in this book, there's a discussion about model mugging and that kind of engagement where you sort of gain some muscle memory about what it is to actually strike somebody.
unidentified
You know, in my – We have a different opinion on that.
I don't believe you're going to learn how to effectively hurt someone in such a short period of time.
And I think in particular for women, the problem is just by their own, because of their own anatomy, they don't have the ability, a lot of them, I should say, don't have the ability to actually harm someone hurting them.
You're just going to make them angry.
I don't think you really learn anything in those environments, in those classes.
When I used to teach martial arts, one of the things that I had a problem with was trying to gently explain to someone that everything they had learned in one of those classes was useless.
Like the idea that you should drop to your back and start kicking up.
Everything about it, like maybe it's better than not knowing anything, but all of it would only work on someone who's weak.
And the idea that a weak person would attack a woman is very unlikely.
If it's a very strong, powerful man, you may even anger them if you try to strike first.
A real fundamental understanding of actual martial arts is the only thing that's going to save you.
And in particular, jujitsu.
A martial art where a lighter, smaller person actually can prevail over a bigger person because they have skills and they understand techniques.
They understand positioning.
They understand leverage.
And they've applied it over and over and over and over again so that in times of extreme stress, they can perform.
Because most people, when encountered with actual violence, will freeze up because they don't know what it's like to be in actual physical conflict.
One of the great things about jiu-jitsu is you are in constant violent conflict in class.
It's controlled, but you're going full blast.
And because of that, when a situation occurs and you have to grapple with someone, you have muscle memory completely built in.
You will know exactly what to do.
It won't be a question of thinking.
It'll be a question of the leg is open.
There's the trip.
I get double underhooks.
We're down on the ground.
I move to side control.
Block the punches.
Block the eye gouges.
Move to mount.
Elbow to the face.
All those things are just going to be ingrained in your system.
You'll know how to sick a rear naked choke in because you've done it thousands of times.
You take a fucking class for a couple hours and you're like, no, and you punch the guy now and you're like, yeah, I'm going to go out there and stop mugging.
Someone's going to punch you in the fucking face and you're going to forget everything.
I don't believe in those things.
I don't believe you can learn French in an hour.
I don't believe you can learn martial arts and how to defend yourself against a guy in a giant stay-puff marshmallow costume.
I just think there's no shortcuts to self-defense.
There's no shortcuts to being able to take care of yourself.
And I think what bothers me is that there's some people that walk out of those classes, and I don't know how they're taught if they're taught this way, but that walk out with an interpretation of it.
They're misinformed.
And I think they have this false confidence that I think is dangerous.
And if you think you're just going to go around punching people that you think are a threat and that that's going to protect you because you took a class, like that's not likely.
Doesn't need to be strong, doesn't need to be big.
He's not using force.
He is using persuasion to get you into that place, that location, where you can't get away and where you can't call for help.
That's the most common persuasion predator.
The other one, the power predator, very rare.
He just charges out of nowhere like a bear.
And he's brave.
He's bigger.
He's courageous.
And I agree with you that for the power predator, other than the ability to get away quickly, you are not going to have a successful fight with a power predator.
It's 2% of the predators in the world, but in a Western world, but nonetheless, I agree with you on that.
But for the persuasion predator, the teaching early for your daughter and my daughters, what am I being persuaded to do here?
Why is this person not listening to me when I say no?
Why is this person wanting to go to this more remote location?
Why is he saying lock the door at the end of work when he's the manager and I should all of those early intuitions are how you actually save your life or save yourself from a violent that all makes sense to me?
I had no idea that it was six hours or six weeks of doing it.
That actually makes sense more too, because you're explaining to people possible scenarios and how to get out of them.
I just don't like the idea of giving people false confidence about their physical prowess.
And maybe this is on my own personal bias from actually being a martial arts instructor and talking to people that were saying, do I really need to learn this because I learned that I can just palm strike you in the nose?
And, you know, I'm like, that's enough.
Man, you palm strike a guy in the nose, like there's a very high likelihood that's going to not do much.
No, I don't think we're even disagreeing because I think in many ways I'm ignorant to the protocol that they're prescribing if they're doing it for six weeks.
I think there's something about long courses where I don't think you can get anything in a class.
This one woman that I'm referring to was one of my former students.
She had taken one class.
And, you know, there was this one class where this guy had this big blue foam thing on, and she was explaining what they told her to do.
And I'm like, God, you don't want to be on your back.
Like, you want to run away.
You want to get the fuck out of there.
Like, this idea that you're going to be on your back and you're going to kick someone, that shit, that's not going to work.
So you just did something, Joe, that is such an interesting example of Joe Roganism, which is you went from your opinion, which is very well informed because you have a lot of experience, and then you heard some new information, and then you said, you know, maybe I don't know enough about those classes.
My opinion on this is, you know, I'm talking about women's self-defense courses, but in many ways, it's actually not about women.
It's about men having a delusional perspective of their own ability to defend themselves, which is very, very common, more common than with women.
Women, in many cases, are physically more vulnerable than men, in most cases.
And so when someone is teaching self-defense courses, again, I probably shouldn't have said that I don't agree with it because I don't know how they're running their course.
But I've seen a lot of women's self-defense courses, and I'm like, man, that is not going to work.
And I really get upset by giving people false confidence.
There are so many men out there that have this delusional idea of their ability to defend themselves.
And it's so crazy.
And it's amazing how the ego can play tricks on you to the point where there's men out there starting fights and they have no idea how to fight.
It's legitimately like, back to speaking French, it's like having an argument with someone when you don't even understand their language.
Like you might know Poly Vous Francais and you're literally getting in a fucking debate with them.
This is what it's like to get into a physical altercation if you don't know how to defend yourself.
I think there's some real value in giving people some examples of scenarios that you should avoid.
There's some real value in giving people, before it ever gets to a physical encounter, giving people some real clear boundaries you should never let someone cross, particularly women.
My concern is, and I have a deep concern about this, is people having a distorted perception of their ability to defend themselves.
Because I see it from people that think that they know how to fight, from men more than even from women.
But from women, I think the consequences concern me far more.
Because with men, I worry about men getting beat up by other men because they're delusional and they'll start fights.
But I'm not thinking of them as a victim the way I'm thinking of a woman as a victim.
So when a woman has a distorted perception because of a class, an erroneous, I mean, it's like there's so many of these goddamn self-defense classes that are teaching them nonsense.
And, you know, one of them is like kick the knees out.
Like, are you good at that?
Are you practicing kicking knees?
You know how hard it is to kick someone in the fucking knee?
Other than through my work, in my company, you know, my clients have protectors, so they have bodyguards with them.
They're in a different circumstance.
But if I were just talking to sort of the public as I do through a book, I do like pepper spray.
I think it's a valuable thing to remove the vision of somebody who has put you in a situation where you're in fear.
You know, in terms of recommending, like, would I recommend somebody have a gun in the bedside drawer?
No, because I don't have enough information yet.
You've got to tell me who we're talking about.
Who are we talking about?
What degree of training are they going to go to?
There's an example in this book, in The Gift of Fear, where a woman, while she's asleep, takes the gun from underneath her pillow and shoots herself in the face, thinking it's her asthma medicine.
And so my concern – Yeah.
Yep, true story.
My concern about firearms in the beds in the bedside table, for example, is that you're asking somebody, it's like asking somebody to fall into a deep sleep and then wake up.
Well, the example I gave you, though, was not an intruder in your home.
The example I gave you was an intruder at the foot of your bed.
And so now I don't know the answer.
Depends on who the person is.
You have to, you know, a gun is not, it's a fantastic consumer product.
It lasts longer than the consumer that buys it, right?
It lasts for hundreds of years, if well taken care of.
And people pay $300, $500 for the gun, whatever it is, and they now believe, just like you feel about self-defense, they now believe, oh, I'm safe.
The guy in the gun store says, this is the one that'll do it for you.
Yeah, it'll do it for you if you're smart, if you're sober, if you have some detection system downstairs that gave you some heads up, if you are reasonable, if you're not shooting your 10-year-old kid.
But too many of them are accidents, whatever the number is.
And so, you know, I have a strong belief in smart guns.
This is a very controversial topic as well, because there isn't a smart gun consumer product.
There's one coming that's very good.
Why?
Because the smart gun, just like my phone, cannot function unless it's being operated by the owner who's authorized, my thumbprint, my face, whatever it may be.
And so the good smart gun that is coming is facial recognition and fingerprint recognition, both.
And it cannot be shot by the nine-year-old son of the plumber who's looking around your house on a Saturday while you're not thinking about it.
And so the accidental shootings to me, there's a lot on them in the masterclass as well, are by far the most tragic.
These situations where the eight-year-old kid kills his six-year-old sister or kills his mother or those lives are all ruined.
The dead person is easy, but the other lives are all ruined.
So I'm a believer that in, you asked me, do I recommend guns?
I own hundreds of guns because of my company.
So I'm not anti-gun.
I'm not for gun control.
But I am a believer that it really is a matter of who's the person, what's their level of training, and what's the circumstance.
And so let's say you had a dog.
If you have a dog downstairs that gives you a heads up that somebody's going crazy, now you have some time to gather yourself.
You have some time to arm yourself.
If you have a firearm that you know how to use, all good.
But if you just have a gun in the bedside drawer and it sits there for 15 years and you think you're safe now, that's as bad a mistake as the mistake you're talking about with taking a 20-minute self-defense class.
I think that is a genuine issue with the accidental shootings and a genuine issue with people being delusional and their ability to use that in a high-stress situation where they really, you know, adrenaline is so crazy and anxiety is so crazy.
When you're in the middle of a thing like that, you have tunnel vision, you can't see well, if you don't know how to stay calm under pressure, if you don't experience a lot of physical stress and you don't know what to do.
By the way, that's the reason those courses are important because they do give people the ability to understand what it is to be engaged, pushed down, knocked over, struck.
And even that by itself is valuable for somebody to not freeze up in quite the same way.
Forget whether they win the engagement.
That's a different question.
But we have exercises, for example, if you ever come to our academy, and we're moving our headquarters to San Antonio, by the way.
So our academy is going to be here.
But we've got a jet there, an aircraft that's got the engines taken off and is used for, we put people in it, we fill the thing with smoke, we turn off the lights and say, get out.
As my company, we train people in public figure protection.
So they go through 18 weeks altogether.
But the essential protection skills, the earliest academy, is at a facility.
Right now it's a 70-acre place in Los Angeles.
I hesitated because it might be 170.
It shows you how disconnected I am.
But we have a jet aircraft.
We have pools that are used to really stress people.
This is relevant to your point.
We put people in the pool, and a little like I used to do with my friend Sean Cassidy when I was younger, we don't let them near the edge.
We get them into panic.
We pull them down from underneath.
So we have the dog thing, and all of these things are called stress inoculation.
If you never had it, what you're describing, you know, that people break into the house and suddenly they're going to shoot somebody, making a split-second decision, and they've never had any of those experiences, they won't do as well as they would do, right?
An experienced soldier versus some other 18-year-old kid or a police officer who's been in some shootings.
We are trying to train your heart rate to stay low.
If you engaged with me physically, if you and I were going to fight, and a few minutes ago the argument was getting pretty close, I think.
If you and I were going to fight, you'd have a lower heart rate than some other guy who's never had a fight.
And with a lower heart rate, you get to what you were talking about.
You get to avoid panic.
You get to make decisions.
Like we have a thing where we have a vehicle and there's a sniper and we're shooting at you while you're walking a protectee to the car.
And we're hitting you with simmunition.
We don't wear any protective gear.
It hurts.
It makes you bleed.
And it's stressful and it's noise and all that stuff.
And then you have to operate car key, for example, or operate 911.
And your fingers are this big when you're panicked.
You can't even call 911.
So a lot of what we're training to do is training for stress inoculation and for courage.
Because the dog thing isn't something you'll get somewhere else.
A lot of stuff you wouldn't get somewhere else.
And we've had a lot of clients come to the academy, and it's interesting, and had clients' kids come.
And we don't, you know, you can get injured, but we don't, we're more careful, clearly, than we are with our actual employees.
And, you know, years ago we had an employee say, well, I don't want to have marks on my back from being shot at by simmunition.
Goodbye.
If you're worried about marks on your back from simunition, why don't you go with the client to Zimbabwe in two weeks when they're at some controversial event giving a speech?
And so we're training, increasing the likelihood of courage.
And so all that stuff gets sent to us, as I said earlier, for free.
I'd be the biggest consumer of a product if it was a great product.
But there are clothes, there are suits, there are definitely overcoats that work real well because an overcoat's already bulky, right?
But a garment like what you're wearing now, it will come, that you can have something that will stop a bullet going through a thin garment.
Problem is it can't stop the energy.
And so you need, you know, people have been shot, cops you've heard about, where they have a steel plate in the body armor in addition to the body armor.
And we have that body armor where you can slip in a steel plate, very light body armor.
Well, what's that about?
Well, that's because if you get hit there, you don't even have to deal with the trauma, right?
When you get shot, a cop gets shot wearing a bulletproof vest, even a heavier type, they're hurt, right?
It's not easy.
I believe very much in body armor, by the way, for our protectors.
Anybody who's in a position where they might have to engage with a gun and they think they're there because, like a cop, thinks you're there because you might have to engage in a gunfight, body armor is very valuable.
So these are such great Joe Rogan questions because this is what you do.
You keep going.
I love it.
Probably more than slight benefit, probably a substantial benefit.
Whether we're there, though, in terms of all the fashion and all the clothes that people want to wear, I'm not recommending to people anything that I've seen yet, and I've seen some pretty nice stuff.
Now, I do recommend conventional light body armor under your clothes if you're doing the most controversial speech of your life or you're an at-risk public figure or you're a protector in our company or a cop, of course, a secret service agent.
And I think it's a mistake because one thing that you want a protector to be able to do is stop the bullet from going through me, something like a 223 or something, going through me and into you.
So the excuses for all variety of people who choose not to wear body armor is comfort, I'm hot.
I say, well, you know, I've had this with people in my company over the years.
It's hot because it's 102 degrees outside.
It's not hot because you're wearing body armor.
You want to know what's hot?
Accelerated lead.
That is hot.
And so we have an absolute policy, absolute requirement, body armor on every assignment.
I was looking at an online company that was selling bulletproof clothing that people wear over their vests, that the clothing itself would stop the penetration of a bullet.
One died during lockdowns because of lockdowns, 31 years old.
So I'm pissed about that.
But what happened is he got diagnosed with leukemia, which is not that serious if you're 31 years old.
I mean, it's a serious disease, but you're not going to die.
And so we would normally just get on a plane and go to Australia.
Australia wouldn't let him in and lockdown.
Then New Zealand wouldn't let him in.
Then the United States wouldn't let him in.
We finally got India to agree to take him, and he died the night before the flight after six weeks of bullshitting with these countries to let in somebody who needs care.
So that was a pisser.
But yeah, I raised 10 kids altogether, two of them here with me who are 12 and about to be 14.
Just the nature of how that society, both of those societies, but I'll take Australia, became so dictatorial and totalitarian over this issue, the abuse of citizens.
It was really dark.
And somebody said to me, can you believe it?
They were immigrants originally and they were prisoners.
They should really resist and not like this kind of treatment.
And I said, yeah, you have to remember they were also the prison guards.
That was a big argument that those kind of draconian measures stopping people from working unless they complied with mandates would never work in America.
By the way, speaking of mandates, you saw that Washington, D.C. event against the mandates that had a bunch of doctors speaking and firemen and all kinds of people.
So that is happening again April 10th in Los Angeles.
And I support it because, again, I don't need any medical opinion.
I don't need to like or dislike a particular pharma product to support the idea that mandates are destructive.
Today you might love it because you're afraid of COVID.
Tomorrow it'll be something else, and tomorrow it might be you.
And so I really believe in the people who are standing up and saying that mandates themselves, without regard to why, mandates themselves are destructive.
And that's April 10th in Los Angeles.
You'll find it somewhere.
I think it's stopthemandates.com.
StopthemandatesUS.com, something like that.
So I encourage people to go.
And if you're lucky enough to be on the Joe Rogan show, you talk about things you believe in.
The reason I'm saying probably, and this is a bit discouraging, what I'm going to say, is that, you know, I mentioned throughout human history, governments have been in the business of how can they control the only population they really care about.
It's not the enemy.
It's their own population.
And that is just human nature, right?
If you're made the chief of the village, you don't want to not be the chief of the village.
And so that process has been getting more and more perfected over time.
1984, Orwell predicted that television and electronics and other things would be important parts of this, and God bless him.
He was right.
So what my concern is, is that maybe the methods of controlling populations are close to perfected.
That is a concern I have, meaning with technology as it is, with social media, pushing the buttons that you're a bad person if you say this or that.
And there may be a place for draconian actions by government, but you have to choose that very, very artfully and carefully because you're never going to get it back.
And so if we, you know, it turns out it's most of our conversation today about that subject, which, you know, people asked me what I was going to talk about.
I said, I don't know.
It's Joe Rogan.
So what's he going to ask?
I have no idea what it's going to be.
But this, my reality is that we have a beautiful experiment in America, an extraordinary constitution.
You realize when America was formed, the idea that you would say to the king, you can't come into my house with your goons.
The king would laugh at you and kill you on top of that, right?
So we were a country in a pendulum swinging away from control by one individual.
And every country on earth today that's controlled by one individual is bad news.
So I'd like to think we will look back soon, by the way, and say, well, wait a minute, maybe we weren't so right about this and this and this and this, and maybe that was a little much.
And maybe we shouldn't have had children in school wearing masks that don't work, that they're not wearing properly, that are under their nose anyway, but they have to do it.
Maybe we shouldn't have done that to kids developing their language skills who can't see mouths.
And maybe we shouldn't have frightened these kids to think that everybody is going to kill them because they're carrying a virus and to touch the doorknob and then somebody spray that doorknob.
All this shit went on and is going on in some schools right now.
So maybe we shouldn't have inoculated 12-year-old kids with boosters after they had myocarditis, for God's sake.
Maybe we shouldn't have done all that.
That's true.
What I'm concerned about, though, is will the information even become known?
Because you and I both talk to a lot of people and you say, what about this FDA thing wanting 75 years?
Sorry to interrupt, but do you think we have the, because we've got to go wrap this up soon, but do you think we have the potential for an uncensored social media network that's not a dumpster fire?
Because there's been some attempts at uncensored social media, but a lot of them are not that good.
You go there, they're filled with assholes and trolls, and I don't even know if the people that are posting on those are real people or if they're people that are been sent over there to try to ruin these companies.
But everything you just said applies to Facebook, with the only difference being that Facebook will censor certain kinds of things and has tens of thousands of people to do it, by the way.
So will we get one?
I would take it even with all the shit.
For example, there's the streaming services like BitChute and to give me another one, Odyssey, and there's one I'm forgetting.
I'm sure I could find all kinds of things on Rumble I would hate, but I'm not looking for shit I hate.
And if I hate it, I might not watch it or I might watch it because I'm curious.
But I'm a 67-year-old, intelligent, thinking person.
I mean, porn is like this.
Porn is downright destructive.
If you find the darkest, most horrible thing you can imagine and your kids find it, I think it's bad news.
But they have to learn in life, like I did, what am I going to look at?
Where am I going to give my attention?
What am I going to believe?
What am I going to question?
And for me, the process of questioning government is what makes this country extraordinary.
If we're not allowed to question the king, if the king can just say, as Biden did, by the way, if you get this injection, you will not get sick and you will not spread it to anyone else.
That was not true.
I don't think he's lying, by the way.
I just think he doesn't fucking know.
But that's a problem when your president can say that and I can't question it.
And that's the moment we're in.
And so long answer to your question is, will we look back with help from you and others to just provide an alternate view and let the consumer decide?
Maybe we look back on it, but it's also possible that it will disappear.
Well, it seems that there's the potential for an extraordinary shift in our ability to ascertain what's right or wrong if someone created a social media platform that was uncensored, that did abide by the freedom that we expect from the First Amendment.
I know it doesn't apply to private companies.
That's the argument always.
These are private companies.
But when you get to something like Twitter that is so extraordinarily influential, it reaches, I don't know how many people are on Twitter, but it's fucking insane amounts of numbers.
And information can spread so quickly on there, good and bad, real and false.
But you've got to figure out a way to not censor people, especially not censor people that just have disturbing but accurate information like the Hunter Biden laptop story.
That alone, the fact that that alone was removed from Twitter should disturb the shit out of people that just want the truth, especially when you realize that that was a factor in choosing the president.
And clearly, the administration is not doing well.
I mean, I'm not a Trump supporter, and I didn't vote for him.
But I'm saying if you look at what happened, and that had an absolute influence on the election.
And I agree with you, and I think that many people I know and you know, Joe, if we talked about the Hunter Biden laptop, they say, oh, that's Russian today.
Yes.
That's Russian disinformation because the New York Times article was this big that has them coming around, but all the other stuff was so enormous.
Well, it also used to be a gigantic part of the internet.
It was like it was just chaos.
And it didn't ruin society when that was the case.
No.
It made things uniquely interesting because it was a first moment in time where we had access to information in that way.
And having these nannies and gatekeepers in the form of Facebook and Twitter, it's not helping us.
It's dividing people even further, and it's polarizing the strong elements of the far right and the far left.
And I think that's extremely detrimental because I think most people lie somewhere in the center and they have ideas from both sides.
And if you give people the ability to debate things, to have controversial or maybe even incorrect opinions, but then someone comes along and shows how those opinions are incorrect.
If someone's paying attention who's an outside observer, they get a chance to see the argument play out and they form their opinion based on what's a stronger position.