Feb. 3, 2023 - The Joe Rogan Experience
03:22:31
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | |
| The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. | ||
| Hi, Kyle. | ||
| Hello, sir. | ||
| Good to see you, brother. | ||
| Good to see you, too, man. | ||
| That was a great set last night. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It was a lot of fun. | ||
| Yeah, that was a lot of fun. | ||
| Isn't that place crazy? | ||
| That place is crazy. | ||
| It used to be an EDM club. | ||
| We turned it into a comedy club. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| How long ago? | ||
| Just by coming here. | ||
| Two years ago. | ||
| Two years ago it was an EDM club? | ||
| Two years ago it was like a bunch of dirty people that were doing MDMA and dancing around. | ||
| I feel like last year, it wasn't, like, I don't think they had that cool projection of the alien on the back. | ||
| Oh, yeah, no. | ||
| Yeah, it's like they've upgraded it in just a year. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's, you know, become a thing. | ||
| You know, we're there every week. | ||
| And then the club opens up within a couple of weeks. | ||
| I'll show you that tomorrow. | ||
| Yeah, and you got a lot of comedians who have joined you here, right? | ||
| 12 world-class comedians moved here. | ||
| And they all, come on, they all just followed you, right? | ||
| They saw what you did and they were like, all right, let's go there. | ||
| Well, I kind of let them know, like, you don't have to be there. | ||
| You don't have to be in Hollywood, stuck in traffic, and you don't have to deal with, like, it was always, in California, there was always the lure of Hollywood because they were going to give you work. | ||
| Right? | ||
| You'd get on a sitcom, and you would do talk shows, you'd do all these different things, but those aren't really a thing anymore. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so, what else are you going to be there for? | ||
| Movies? | ||
| How many movies are there? | ||
| You can go in for movies. | ||
| And what do you want to do? | ||
| Like, everybody wants to do stand-up. | ||
| Like, Stan Hope said it once, and I thought about it, I was like, Dad, that's right. | ||
| He's like, really what you're doing when you're doing a television show is it's an ad to get people to go see you do stand-up. | ||
| Yeah, that's what it is. | ||
| How many of your comedian friends still do TV, movies, stuff like that? | ||
| A few of them. | ||
| A few of them do? | ||
| Yeah, they're trying to do more movies now, like Burt just did a big movie, The Machine, and it was a real problem because it got delayed because it's all about Russia. | ||
| It's about him going to Russia. | ||
| It's a true story about him. | ||
| Yeah, I remember his famous... | ||
| The fucking trailer is hilarious. | ||
| It looks great, but they held it for a long time, and then we released the trailer. | ||
| On the podcast we did recently. | ||
| So now they're going to release the movie because the trailer got received so well. | ||
| Because they were worried. | ||
| People were going to say, you know, it's about Russia. | ||
| You can't have a funny movie about Russia. | ||
| But nobody really cares. | ||
| So who was pressuring them over it? | ||
| It's not a pressure thing. | ||
| It's a fear thing. | ||
| They're like, oh, let's not release this. | ||
| Let's hang on to this. | ||
| They did that with North Korea. | ||
| You remember when... | ||
| Yeah, that's the interview. | ||
| Who's the dude's name? | ||
| I'll blank it on his name right now. | ||
|
unidentified
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Franco? | |
| Yeah, James Franco. | ||
| And Seth Rogen. | ||
| Yeah, and they were like, hey, we don't want to cause any problems or whatever. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Which is like, it's hilarious to think that Kim Jong-un is somewhere. | ||
| Like, what did James Franco say about me? | ||
| How is he joking? | ||
| Well, I'm sure they're pissed. | ||
| But, you know, whatever. | ||
| These guys are pissed about everything, isn't they? | ||
| I know. | ||
| Well, you know, some of the propaganda that comes out of there is like... | ||
| World-class silly, you know, it's like they have effectively a state religion where, I mean, they said famously, uh, Kim Jong-il in his first round of golf, he shot like, I don't know, it was like, yeah, something ridiculous. | ||
| Yeah, so they go top-notch with their propaganda. | ||
| His first round of golf, imagine. | ||
| Which is beyond impossible. | ||
| I don't even think... | ||
| It might be impossible to shoot even par your first round of golf. | ||
| Yeah, how would it be possible? | ||
| I couldn't even hit the ball the other day. | ||
| These guys were driving him and, who's with us? | ||
| Cheeto. | ||
| Andrew Santino was here, and they were whacking the golf ball. | ||
| I missed it like three times in a row, just trying to hit it. | ||
| It's one of those things where, in theory, you feel like, I could do this. | ||
| I hit that little thing over there. | ||
| Yeah, how long is it to do that thing? | ||
| Yeah, it's a big green. | ||
| It's 120 yards away. | ||
| I got this. | ||
| And then you get up and you realize, like, oh, this is... | ||
| A lot of people have trouble just making contact. | ||
| You hit behind it, it's called a duff, and then it goes, like, five yards or whatever. | ||
| You thin it, and it goes way over the green. | ||
| It's a very difficult game. | ||
| I've been playing it my whole life. | ||
| I know Jamie's, like, obsessed with it now. | ||
| Yeah, Jamie's out there with that simulator every fucking day. | ||
| That's all you hear. | ||
| I would be with him if I was here. | ||
| If I lived here, we'd be playing golf at least twice a week. | ||
| I try to do that in the summer in New York, at least. | ||
| It's such an addictive game that I can't fuck with it. | ||
| I don't want to be one of you guys. | ||
| Well, I think I agree with you that that's a legitimate fear. | ||
| I just feel like if you did get addicted, you'd be like, this is awesome. | ||
| I'm sure I did, but I love pool. | ||
| I play pool so much, I can't be fucking around with another game. | ||
| Too much! | ||
| It would be four or five hours. | ||
| If you're into golf and you go play 18 holes of golf, it's going to be minimum four hours. | ||
| Yeah, that's the thing about it. | ||
| I could play pool, I could have a few games in an hour and be done. | ||
| You can play pool when it rains out. | ||
| There's a lot of stuff you can do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So the Kim Jong-un thing, yeah. | ||
| That movie, I never saw that. | ||
| Did you ever see the interview? | ||
| I never saw it. | ||
| First of all, I don't even know if they actually ended up releasing it. | ||
| Do we know if they ended up releasing it, Jamie? | ||
| I know they postponed it a little bit. | ||
| I believe it was. | ||
| No, it's definitely on streaming services and everything. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| They had that big Sony hack that happened as it was supposed to be released. | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| And then that was like being, it wasn't like the debate or the full thing that they were after, but they wanted the movie to be withheld. | ||
| Yeah, and I couldn't believe over Russia you said for the Burke movie. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| So it's like basically anything that causes political problems, they say, hey, don't release this. | ||
| But like everything is controversial. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| So how can you do that? | ||
| It was just, I mean, it was the timing of it, right? | ||
| You know, Russia invades Ukraine and then that's right when he finished it. | ||
| Yeah, that's poor timing. | ||
| Yeah, they couldn't say, look, Russia's fun. | ||
| These guys are drunk. | ||
| We're robbing a train. | ||
| Yeah, that wouldn't work out too well. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| But it's a funny fucking movie. | ||
| So the answer to the question is like, yeah, some of my friends are still doing movies. | ||
| Tom's doing some movies. | ||
| But really, the bulk of what everybody does now is podcasts and stand-up. | ||
| And you don't have to do that stuff anymore. | ||
| So that was one of the allures to get people to come here. | ||
| It's like, hey, the number one podcast in the world is here. | ||
| And Your Mom's House is a huge podcast. | ||
| Tim Dillon's here, which is another huge podcast. | ||
| Tony Hinchcliffe has Kill Tony here. | ||
| That's a huge podcast. | ||
| So it's like, there's a lot of reasons to come here. | ||
| It's like, there's a new scene here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it emerged during the pandemic. | ||
| Well, I saw Tim Dillon, this was just before the pandemic, just before I feel like he blew up. | ||
| We were, probably was just when you moved here, we were here and we saw him perform. | ||
| And I remember looking at Corin and saying... | ||
| This guy's going to be big. | ||
| He's going to be huge. | ||
| He's already getting way bigger. | ||
| He's selling out theaters now, but he's going to be one of the biggest comics. | ||
| Well, he's pretty close to one of the biggest comics in the world right now. | ||
| It's one of those things where his potential is massive. | ||
| Well, that's, you know, like, what's the black comedian's name from last night? | ||
| What's his name? | ||
| Brian Simpson? | ||
| He was phenomenal. | ||
| Yeah, he's amazing. | ||
| And I feel like he needs to get his due. | ||
| He's gonna get his due. | ||
| Yeah, he is, because he was really funny, and I'd only seen him maybe once before or something, but I feel like he's undervalued. | ||
| Well, he's still getting better. | ||
| He's coming into his own. | ||
| In just the time that I've known him, he's got quite a bit better. | ||
| He's one of those guys that's just like all the pieces are falling into place right now for him. | ||
| He did a Netflix special, and now people know him from that, and now he has a bunch of new material that he's working on. | ||
| Like last night, he's working on a bunch of new stuff, and he's better all the time. | ||
| He's like at that 10-year mark where guys really start to put it together and take off. | ||
| He was homeless, he was telling me. | ||
| And it wasn't too long ago that he was homeless. | ||
| Yeah, not that long ago. | ||
| A couple guys we work with were homeless. | ||
| Like Hans Kim, who wasn't there last night because he's in Hawaii right now. | ||
| But Hans Kim was homeless just a year ago. | ||
| And then a few months later, he's doing arenas with me. | ||
| How does that happen? | ||
| Is it your impact? | ||
| They come on your podcast, they get a little bit of a name for themselves, they get some spots? | ||
| Like, how does that work? | ||
| What's the pipeline? | ||
| Well, he's doing Kill Tony, and Kill Tony's a huge show, and he's a regular on Kill Tony, so he does a new minute of stand-up every week on Kill Tony. | ||
| And so there's that. | ||
| And then I start taking him with me on the road, having him open with me and Tony. | ||
| And so that's how he's doing arenas. | ||
| He's doing arenas with me. | ||
| And then he starts selling out on his own. | ||
| Now he's doing headlining tours. | ||
| So he's going out and selling out comedy clubs, and he's doing great. | ||
| What an amazing story. | ||
| I wonder, like, how many people out there are kind of similar in that they would be hilarious if given the opportunity, but they never really step on stage or things in life don't quite come together and they're stuck at their 9 to 5 or whatever. | ||
| It really makes you think, like, what percentage of people can do this if given the opportunity and if they get on stage? | ||
| You think so? | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot of... | ||
| There's the funniest guy that I ever met. | ||
| Never did stand up. | ||
| This is a guy that I used to work with that was a private investigator. | ||
| I was his assistant for a while. | ||
| It was really, he lost his license drunk driving. | ||
| And so he needed someone to drive him around. | ||
| And so he put an ad out. | ||
| This is like, you know, the 80s. | ||
| He put an ad out for a private investigator's assistant and I started working for him. | ||
| And I would, it was mostly like insurance scams. | ||
| People that were, you know, doing insurance scams, we'd take photos of them working when they were supposed to be debilitated. | ||
| And he was funnier than anybody I'd ever met. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| He was so fucking funny. | ||
| And what's crazy is his cousin owned a comedy club. | ||
| His cousin was one of the owners of the Comedy Connection, this guy Bill Downs. | ||
| So this guy, Dave Dolan, who's my buddy, we stayed friends for life until he died, which was a couple years back. | ||
| But he was, without a doubt, he would have been a brilliant comic. | ||
| Without a doubt. | ||
| He just had no desire. | ||
| Do you agree with me that there's different kinds of funny? | ||
| There's some people who can be funny off the cuff, naturally in a conversation, and then there's people who can actually take it to the stage. | ||
| Because, in my opinion, the stage is something totally different. | ||
| It's one thing to do off-handed, quick comments and play off what other people are saying, but if you're up there and the spotlight's on you and you got nobody else to play off of, that's like a different kind of funny. | ||
| It's a different way of delivering it. | ||
| It's a different kind of funny, but if you understand funny, it's just a matter of putting together subjects in a way that utilizes your sense of humor. | ||
| Like, if you can do it in a conversation, most likely you can do it on stage. | ||
| But it won't be easy. | ||
| It's like golf, right? | ||
| So if you can whack a golf ball and you can knock it into the hole, well, hey, you can kind of play golf. | ||
| Now, how good can you play golf? | ||
| Can you play golf in a tournament? | ||
| Can you play golf under pressure? | ||
| It's like everything else. | ||
| But comedy is different in that it seems like you're just talking. | ||
| So it seems so easy. | ||
| I can talk. | ||
| You can talk. | ||
| It seems like easy to talk. | ||
| Just go talk. | ||
| But once you start doing it, you realize like, oh, this is like a mass hypnosis I'm doing. | ||
| This is way more complicated than you think it is. | ||
| But it can be done. | ||
| But it's not like, you know, there's certain things if you're physically limited, you're never going to be able to do. | ||
| You know, like if you're frail, you're never going to be a linebacker. | ||
| It's just, it's insurmountable. | ||
| But if you're funny, you can figure out comedy. | ||
| It's just how much effort do you put in? | ||
| How much time do you put in? | ||
| How objective are you about your skills? | ||
| You know, how introspective are you? | ||
| How well can you see how people are perceiving what you're doing? | ||
| What's the flaws in your delivery? | ||
| And what's the flaws in the way you're piecing the material together? | ||
| I mean, it's complex. | ||
| Yeah, there's so much, I feel like there's so much pressure for a comedian because you have to get laughter within reasonable timeframes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you could try, if two or three punchlines flop in a row, now all of a sudden people are thinking like, you're bombing. | ||
| Yeah, you are bombing. | ||
| And you lost the crowd. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| You have lost the crowd. | ||
| But that's a very difficult thing because you compare it to something I do where I do like political commentary. | ||
| I don't need a laugh. | ||
| If I get a laugh, it's just extra. | ||
| I just get to babble and have no consequences, and people either accept it or they won't, but it's not the same level of pressure. | ||
| Because if I don't get a laugh, it's like, he's a commentator. | ||
| What do you expect? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not easy. | ||
| I mean, it takes a long-ass time to get good at it. | ||
| Some people are very... | ||
| We were talking about Chappelle when I met him when he was 19. He was good then. | ||
| He was really good then. | ||
| Some people just... | ||
| They have a better head start. | ||
| They have a better personality for it. | ||
| Maybe they studied comedy when they were young because they were big fans. | ||
| They were always watching it. | ||
| They kind of developed an understanding of patterns and delivery and stuff. | ||
| Whereas some people, they're just the funny guy at work and people talk them into an open mic night. | ||
| But I've seen guys like that. | ||
| There's this guy that went on to be an executive at Comedy Central, and he kind of stopped doing stand-up. | ||
| But he used to work in an office somewhere, and one night I saw him do an open mic night thing. | ||
| It wasn't exactly an open mic night. | ||
| It was like guys were talking people into going on stage that were funny at work or something like that. | ||
| And he went on stage and he fucking killed with his suit on, with his tie on. | ||
| It was really funny. | ||
| And I remember talking to him and I go, hey man, his name is Geordie Fox. | ||
| And I remember saying, hey dude, you can be a funny comic, man. | ||
| You can really do this. | ||
| And he did it for a little while, but then he just like, whatever reason, he just went on to be an executive at Comedy Central. | ||
| And he kind of stopped doing it. | ||
| But you saw a spark right away where I was like, if you just focus and drive, you can do this. | ||
| But that's a big ask for some people. | ||
| What I find interesting is, and I noticed this from the different comedians last night, some people, the delivery can be totally different and be good in different ways. | ||
| So some people, like, they tell a story and it's a slow build-up to a big punchline. | ||
| And then other people, like Tony Hinchcliffe, this is the sense I got from him, is that when he talks, every word seems kind of, like, weighty. | ||
| Like, everything kind of lands, and he's getting a laugh every, whatever, 20 seconds. | ||
| Where he needs to just say one sentence, and boom, the crowd goes off, whereas some other comedian could sort of build up to a laugh. | ||
| Like, little jokes along the way, and then hit you with a big punchline, whereas Tony's, like, hitting you over and over and over. | ||
| And it's very tight. | ||
| His set was very tight. | ||
| Where it's like, every word in this is in a place where I'm gonna get the maximum result. | ||
| Which, to me, it's like, you crack some sort of fucking code to be able to do that. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Tony's a dedicated professional. | ||
|
unidentified
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You know what I mean? | |
| He's really dedicated. | ||
| That dude's obsessed with comedy. | ||
| I mean, he's constantly going over his material. | ||
| We're constantly having calls where he'll call me up, oh, dude, this Black Adam bit now, it's got this and it's got that. | ||
| He'll tell me the new punchlines he came up with when he was in Denver and, you know, we're howlin'. | ||
| And we're always, like, bouncing. | ||
| You know, you saw us hanging out in the green room. | ||
| We're always bouncing stuff around. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a beautiful workshop. | ||
| The green room is amazing. | ||
| Because when you've got William Montgomery, and Bryan Simpson, and David Lucas, and me, and Tony, and we're all fucking around, and Ron White's there, and we're all bouncing stuff around. | ||
| Oh, is he usually there, too? | ||
| Some days? | ||
| Ron White lives here, too. | ||
| I wish I saw him. | ||
| We've seen twice we've been to that club, The Vulcan, and he wasn't there either time, but I would have loved to see him. | ||
| I always thought he was really funny. | ||
| I'll see if I can get him to come out tonight, because we're doing The Creek in the Cave tonight. | ||
| But yeah, Ron's in town. | ||
| We have Tim Dillon, Ron White, Tom Segura, Christina Prasitsky, Tony Hinchcliffe, David Lucas, William Montgomery, Hans Kim. | ||
| We have so many fucking people that live here now. | ||
| So are there any ego issues between those people? | ||
| Because they're all such big personalities. | ||
| They all can fill the room with their own personality. | ||
| So is there any butting heads or does everybody get along nicely? | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| Massive camaraderie. | ||
| It's a beautiful community. | ||
| It's really good here. | ||
| Really good. | ||
| Like shockingly good. | ||
| Like as good as the Comedy Store was. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| And everybody also recognizes there's something unique about this thing that's emerging here. | ||
| Because there was like a little community here. | ||
| There's some pretty talented people here. | ||
| You know, like they were kind of getting going and doing like little open mics and little small shows they put together here. | ||
| But now it's like thriving. | ||
| And so there's these people that are moving here just to do stand-up. | ||
| People that have this dream of doing stand-up. | ||
| They're trying to get on Kill Tony. | ||
| And there's clubs all around town now because the feeling of comedy being in Austin is like very tangible. | ||
| So, so many people are excited about it. | ||
| So, it seems like the breakup, eventually, between Hollywood and comedy was inevitable, given that, you know, with Hollywood, everything is sort of pre-produced and very particular, and you got executives telling people what they can and cannot say, and everything's very kind of scripted on that front. | ||
| Whereas comedy was always, in a sense, the anti-Hollywood, because it's like, alright, here anything goes. | ||
| You say whatever you want, and then let's just, you know, see what happens. | ||
| And so it seems like the breakup was inevitable at some point, that now, you know, they've moved away from Hollywood. | ||
| And it seems like, I don't know, you would know better than I would, like, who's still left in Hollywood and L.A. versus who's in New York, and now it seems like here there's almost maybe the biggest scene here now. | ||
| Yeah, there's a giant scene here. | ||
| New York still is a very good scene. | ||
| There's still elite comics in New York, and there's still some really good comics in LA. It's just less of them. | ||
| A lot of people moved away. | ||
| Theo moved to Nashville, Theo Vaughn... | ||
| Oh, is there a comedy scene there? | ||
| A little bit, a little bit, you know, but like there's Nate Bargatze, who's fantastic. | ||
| He's there. | ||
| But Theo's gonna move here now, so it's like he's excited about it too. | ||
| Like, there's so many people that have moved here. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| On any given night, we'll have like, fuck, eight comics up at the Vulcan. | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| It was packed yesterday. | ||
| Coldest day of the year. | ||
| Worst weather day in Texas. | ||
| 33 degrees. | ||
| Icy. | ||
| And I said to Crystal before we went in corn, I was like, I bet you there's going to be 50 or fewer people there when we go. | ||
| And we showed up. | ||
| It was packed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| On a Wednesday night. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| With ice on the roads and people. | ||
| But, you know, somebody made a good point. | ||
| They were like, a lot of these people lost power. | ||
| And, like, they're going to get warm, too. | ||
| Like, they're actually like, let's watch some comedy, but also let's get warm. | ||
| But it's also, it's packed there every night. | ||
| It's always packed. | ||
| It's a fucking cool thing. | ||
| Because it's a new thing. | ||
| It's very exciting. | ||
| And the town, it's such an artsy town. | ||
| I mean, the live music here is fucking amazing. | ||
| There's so many talented people. | ||
| There's this band, The Nether Hour. | ||
| There's really talented young guys that are here, and they're just working all the time. | ||
| They're at this bar, this night, and this bar, that night. | ||
| And this guy, Ellis Bullard, who's fucking amazing, is like honky-tonk dude, who's really fucking good and really cool guy, too. | ||
| He's out here, and then Gary Clark Jr.'s out here. | ||
| And now Suzanne Santo moved here from Honey Honey and she's here and there's so many good local bands that you could like on any given night, like on Monday night they go out to the Continental Club after they do Kill Tony and all the local guys get together and jam and it's incredible. | ||
| It's like the vibe of, like, live performances here. | ||
| Do you still love comedy as much as you did in, like, the 1990s? | ||
| More. | ||
| More? | ||
| Yeah, I love it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I got that vibe being in the green room with you guys. | ||
| I got the sense, like, we could literally be in 1998 right now and Joe would be doing, like, the same thing, just with different comics around. | ||
| Yeah, and the fact that there's like this energy to this place too makes it more exciting. | ||
| You know, and also I'm in this part where I'm just developing new material. | ||
| So it's like now I have to like really be invested in trying to make these new bits work. | ||
| It's like when you get together an hour and you're headlining and it's killing, it's like, okay, now I just got to keep this polished and tight. | ||
| But when you have new stuff, it's like, I gotta figure out a way to make this work. | ||
| And that's exciting too. | ||
| So what percentage, because some of the jokes were older jokes, but what percentage of it was new stuff would you say last night? | ||
| Last night was half. | ||
| Half new stuff? | ||
| Half of it was new. | ||
| That's a lot of new stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a lot of new stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And that's over the last four or five months that I've developed all that new stuff. | ||
| So it's exciting. | ||
| And it's dangerous because when you record, and I recorded something, I haven't released it yet. | ||
| But when I record something, I then have to throw all that material away and come up with a whole new hour. | ||
| So what I do is I record and then in the time before I release it, that's like crunch time. | ||
| We have to develop a whole new set and then when I release the special, then that material's burnt forever. | ||
| So now I have to figure out how to make this new stuff as good as the old stuff. | ||
| I feel like riffing, when you're talking, feels a lot easier to me than like writing something down and then trying to go through it in a way. | ||
| Because if I write something down and I try to go through it, I feel like I start sounding robotic and I'm not connecting to it as well. | ||
| So when I riff, that's when people are more interested in what I'm saying because, you know, you could hear that it actually is coming from my core as I'm saying it. | ||
| So that's what seems very difficult about comedy to me is that, because you always talk about how you write. | ||
| And so, like, you have to write down your bits, and then you have to deliver it in a way that doesn't feel robotic, that feels like you're still connecting with the words. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so I was, like Tony said last night, he's like, I don't even write. | ||
| He said, I don't even write my bits. | ||
| Yeah, Tony does it differently than me. | ||
| And to me, I feel like if I was a comedian, I'd be more like him, because if I write it down, I'll be like, and then this is the part of the joke where, like, it just wouldn't come out. | ||
| Right, but you don't have to say it that way. | ||
| Like, I think... | ||
| Everybody does it differently, and some people don't ever write, and some of the best comics alive don't ever write. | ||
| But I feel like you should do all those things. | ||
| I feel like comics are inherently lazy. | ||
| That's a funny sentence. | ||
| That's one of the reasons I led them to do comedy. | ||
| They're like, I don't want to work. | ||
| Fuck this. | ||
| Fuck this job. | ||
| And then you say something funny about the job, and everyone's like, ah! | ||
| And then you're like, oh, maybe I'm funny. | ||
| Well, that sort of rebellious mentality leads you to not want to be disciplined. | ||
| But I think there's a big value in sitting in front of a computer and just spending time going over ideas. | ||
| Like some of my best bits, I've come up with just writing. | ||
| Just sitting down and writing and then piecing them together. | ||
| And then the skill is to try to figure out a way to riff those concepts and get it to the point where it's funny. | ||
| Do you see a big difference day to day in terms of your delivery? | ||
| Like, some days we go up there and just be like, I'm just off today. | ||
| Like, I'm just not nailing it today. | ||
| And other days you're like, oh, I'm, you know, cranking it right now. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| Yeah, there's days where you're better. | ||
| But it's also, it's like, you got to figure out, well, what was different about the day when I was off? | ||
| You know, maybe I didn't get as excited. | ||
| Maybe I didn't pace enough and warm up enough. | ||
| Maybe I didn't, like, treat it with a lot of weight. | ||
| Like, you got to, like, there's a lot of heaviness to, like, going on stage. | ||
| Like, here we go. | ||
| And then you also have to be looser on stage sometimes. | ||
| There's a lot of variables, which is why it's exciting. | ||
| Do you feel like the more pressure the better? | ||
| The more pressure you feel, the better you do? | ||
| Yeah, you need some pressure. | ||
| I get nervous for every show. | ||
| That means you love it. | ||
| Tiger Wood said that. | ||
| He's like, yeah, I get nervous before every round, and that's how I know I still love it. | ||
| Yeah, that's what fighters say, too. | ||
| Fighters say the worst feeling is when you're not nervous. | ||
| Because if you're not nervous, and you go, and some of them are fine with that, but a lot of them, they want to be on edge. | ||
| They want to be in the green room, getting ready, like... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, because then the nerves and everything, you're excited about this moment, and it's an important moment for you, and that's important. | ||
| You know you care. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know you care in a situation like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, you gotta care. | |
| You gotta care, and people don't like to be uncomfortable. | ||
| But I think through being uncomfortable, that's where the growth comes. | ||
| That's where you learn things. | ||
| Yeah, well, after you feel nervous, and then you do the thing and you do it well, the feeling of relief you get afterwards is amazing. | ||
| You know, I felt it like I went on the PBD podcast recently, Patrick Ben David, and I went in there knowing, I mean, they're sort of like a grind set... | ||
| Make money. | ||
| Make money, hustle culture, that sort of stuff. | ||
| And I went in there, and as somebody who's on the left, you know, they're not really going to agree with me on it, but they're nice enough guys, and they're in favor of open dialogue and discussion of different ideas, and I was like, hey, this should be fun. | ||
| And so I went in there knowing it was a little bit like the lion's den, so I was a little nervous, but I went in there, and the conversation went great, they're really nice guys, you know, we got a great reaction to it, and the feeling afterwards of relief was like, ugh. | ||
| That's interesting, because you went in there ready to do battle. | ||
| No, so I didn't go in there thinking there's going to be a fight. | ||
| But contentious, perhaps. | ||
| Yes, I thought they're not going to agree with me on some stuff, and so I need to be able to explain myself in a way that can change their mind, or at least give them pause and make them rethink it. | ||
| And I think I largely succeeded on that front. | ||
| A lot of people in their own audience said, you know, hey, I like what this guy had to say. | ||
| No, you did a great job. | ||
| I watched some clips from that. | ||
| You did a great job. | ||
| He's a great guy. | ||
| He really is a great guy. | ||
| He's fair. | ||
| He was fair. | ||
| Genuine. | ||
| Yeah, he was genuine. | ||
| He wasn't trying to like, you know, because some people, if you have a debate and they're different perspectives, some people will go in with like, I'm going to own this person mindset. | ||
| And that's not him. | ||
| He just genuinely wanted to know, like, how do you think about this? | ||
| Tell me what you think about this. | ||
| Even when he doesn't agree with you, he's fair. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Correct. | |
| Yeah, he's a very genuine person, and that's the appeal, and that's why he's doing so well. | ||
| You know, we talked about that, the authenticity, that we talked about last night with Crystal, saying, with you guys, and with Sagar, and with Jimmy Dore, and even if you don't agree with people, What they're saying? | ||
| I know that's what you genuinely believe and feel and it's based on thinking, it's based on your research, it's based on your comprehension of whatever the subject you're talking about. | ||
| This is your real opinion and that's what people are missing in mainstream media and that's why you guys are eating their lunch. | ||
| That's why you're killing it. | ||
| There's a real reason for it because people have been deprived of that by executives, And networks that are orchestrating everything and giving people talking points and making people stay in these narrow parameters. | ||
| Did you say there was a woman that was, I forget who she was interviewing, but she was talking about something about climate change. | ||
| And she was asking a question and then she goes, okay, alright, I'm getting in trouble now. | ||
| Let me, because she has an earpiece in it. | ||
| Oh shit. | ||
| And so someone's saying, get off the climate change, stop talking about it. | ||
| Yeah, producer in the ear. | ||
| And so she has to course correct in the middle of the thing, which is virtually impossible. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And also fucks up the flow that makes people resonate with what you're saying. | ||
| Because I want to know that if you and Patrick David are disagreeing about a subject, I want to know that it's your thoughts and his thoughts. | ||
| Like, let me see which one I agree with. | ||
| Let me see why Kyle feels the way he feels and why Patrick disagrees. | ||
| And let me see them work this out. | ||
| And sometimes that takes 30 or 40 minutes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And if you're doing CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, you got a four-minute hit in and out, man. | ||
| Ask one question, give me one cut-and-dry answer, and then let's move on here. | ||
| Nobody's learning anything. | ||
| And also, the people who are on screen, you don't know what they actually think about this thing. | ||
| Because they're on a network where maybe if they tell you the thing they really think, that's going to buck the orthodoxy, and then they're in trouble, and then they're out. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Because I think networks are afraid of Backlash. | ||
| So if somebody says something, let's say, that's true, but also goes against the grain, they might see a response from the audience. | ||
| They'll be like, oh, we don't want any advertisers to flee. | ||
| Let's cut this controversy off. | ||
| And honestly, that is the worst thing you could possibly do. | ||
| The best way to handle it is, and I do this too, if I'm going to say something where I feel like My own audience isn't even gonna agree with me on this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You still, you gotta say it if you're telling the truth and then just let the chips fall where they may. | ||
| And one of the things I learned from you is just don't engage, you know, with Twitter and the mentions and YouTube comments because if you're getting good criticism, that's one thing, and you can tell when a criticism is fair, but if you're getting criticism that you're like, this isn't even close to true and now it's making me feel like shit, And then you're angry and then you respond to that. | ||
| Yeah, it's like, what's the point? | ||
| I'm going to waste three hours feeling negative emotions because some douchebag is attacking me when they don't even know what I really think on the issue? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Then that's a totally different thing, you know? | ||
| Or they've just seen a clip where you might have looked at both sides of it, but they're only seeing this one side that you're looking at, and they're like, oh, Kyle is turning his back on this and that, and like... | ||
| And then you're like, no, I'm not. | ||
| And then you're like, you get into it. | ||
| Don't engage. | ||
| Yeah, don't engage. | ||
| It keeps your mind pure, too, if you're like, you know, for what I do, I've got to read a lot of articles and watch a lot of videos and then react to it. | ||
| And I have more of an untainted perspective if I go right to the source, read it, and then I react. | ||
| Whereas if I see what other people are saying first, I don't want it to, like, sort of taint my own process going through the original material. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's a complex little dance we're doing. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But the beautiful thing is that now you're getting these people that aren't influenced by a group of people that have a vested interest on gaining some financial benefits from this show being successful. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Navigate it, move it in a way that they think is going to be the most commercially successful. | ||
| But they're not the people with the opinions. | ||
| They're not the people that are funny. | ||
| They're not the people that are putting out the entertainment value of it. | ||
| They're just the people that are profiting off of it. | ||
| And those are generally the people that fund it. | ||
| The executives, the network, the people. | ||
| But that's why CNN sucks. | ||
| It's because they're trying to do that, but you can't do that. | ||
| And so you have these people that are willing to do that. | ||
| You have the Brian Stelters and the Don Lemons that are willing to play ball and stay narrow. | ||
| And they're in these narrow pathways and people just don't like it. | ||
| They just don't resonate with it. | ||
| Because you know that's not a real person. | ||
| That's not who you are. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Crystal and I have honestly tried to go above and beyond on that front because we don't want any money from certain sources tainting us. | ||
| Because this is what happens with traditional media. | ||
| If you're taking a lot of money from Raytheon and Boeing and Pfizer and then if you really buck the narrative and you say, hey, you know what? | ||
| I think we should maybe nationalize Big Pharma. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Then you're going to be kicked out right away. | ||
| So the way we do it is we have the default ads on YouTube, which is thankfully there's a buffer there. | ||
| So like, you know, AdSense deals with that. | ||
| And I've never had a conversation with an advertiser over a decade of doing this. | ||
| So that's one way we make money. | ||
| The other way is Patreon, which is just people tipping because they like what I say and like what I do. | ||
| Five bucks a month, eight bucks a month, whatever it may be. | ||
| And then the other way Crystal and I have done it is with Crystal Kyle and friends in particular. | ||
| We have a sub stack and people pay five dollars a month. | ||
| They get the video of the interviews and they get it a day early. | ||
| And that makes it, again, so I've never had a conversation with any advertiser in over 10 years of doing it. | ||
| I've gone above and beyond on purpose so that people know, look, even if you disagree with me, this is 100% coming from a genuine place. | ||
| Yeah, that's awesome. | ||
| That's the future, I think. | ||
| And I think that's a commercially viable way to do it, too. | ||
| You can do it and make a living, especially when you realize that, you know, if you're working at CNN, you've got to realize there's probably, like, hundreds of people that are working there that aren't the entertainment. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, like, there's so many different pieces of the pie that get sliced up and chopped up, whereas you don't need as much money to be financially successful with your show, as successful as you would be if you were on a network. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Here's the issue, though, is that YouTube, unfortunately, has set up a tiered system. | ||
| So they have authoritative news, and then they have what's called borderline content. | ||
| And so shows like mine are put into the borderline content category. | ||
| Yeah, and I'll tell you what. | ||
| They're afraid of, because back in 2017, there was some like, big company ad, like a Nestle ad or something, that ran on a white nationalist video. | ||
| And so a bunch of media outlets wrote these articles that were like, oh my god, look what YouTube's doing, they're radicalizing people, this is terrible. | ||
| And so YouTube reacted to that by, they just wanted to cut their losses, and they said, just defund news and politics right now. | ||
| That was what was called adpocalypse. | ||
| So they cut off all the funding overnight for independent news. | ||
| What was the catalyst for that? | ||
| What was the video that did that? | ||
| I don't know what the actual video was. | ||
| I know it was like a white nationalist video that ran like an official ad. | ||
| We should find out what that was. | ||
| Yeah, you'd have to go back to 2017 articles to find it. | ||
| Because I remember ad-pocalypse, but I remember just going, what is going on? | ||
| And not paying attention. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I covered it at the time. | ||
| It was huge for us because we were one of the ones affected. | ||
| We literally all the money wiped out overnight, and we didn't know when it was going to come back. | ||
| Now, thankfully, it did come back about a week or two later, but it was never really the same since then, and it was in 2018, I believe, the YouTube CEO said, look, we're addressing the misinformation and disinformation problem, and so now we have authoritative content and borderline content, and so the YouTube algorithm pumps the authoritative content and suppresses the borderline content. | ||
|
unidentified
|
PewDiePie. | |
| Is it PewDiePie? | ||
|
unidentified
|
PewDiePie? | |
| But PewDiePie was not a white nationalist. | ||
| He's just a shit poster. | ||
| You know, he's like a funny guy. | ||
| If this is true, then it's even worse than I remember it being. | ||
| PewDiePie in 2017, the most subscribed YouTuber of all time, at the time, rather, excuse me, came under fire for posting videos that YouTube deemed anti-Semitic and hate speech. | ||
| These videos included references and jokes about Adolf Hitler as well as two Indian men holding a sign stating death to all Jews at the same time videos including chief Keef Dancing to Alabama n-word and other extreme is content We're surfacing leading to the UK government Coca-Cola dr. Pepper Johnson Johnson and many other major brands pulling or pausing their advertisers on YouTube Oh, I see Okay. | ||
| Yeah, so they rolled out this whole system to deal with this, and they end up suppressing us You know, and basically putting us in league with stuff like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, you know, it's a struggle. | ||
| It is a struggle because we were growing at a tremendous clip. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then basically overnight, it's like they flipped a switch in the algorithm and boom. | ||
| Now the issue is with recommendations. | ||
| So now if you're already subscribed to me, you're going to see a bunch of my stuff pop up. | ||
| If you're not subscribed to me, it is very unlikely you're going to get one of my videos pop up in the recommended algorithm. | ||
| So you can't really grow when that's the case. | ||
| You're just basically keeping your fan base. | ||
| So the way you grow is doing other people's podcasts and getting people from their fan base to come to you, like Patrick Bat-David. | ||
| Well, not even that. | ||
| It used to be if you typed in whatever news thing you were interested in, one of the top videos could be a secular talk video. | ||
| But now, if you type it in, it is never that. | ||
| There was a time when we used to run circles around CNN. They'd get like 2,000 views a video back in like 2015. And we were getting way more than that, 30,000 or whatever it was. | ||
| And then now you go look at any CNN video, even though the thumbnails are shit, the titles are shit, the content is shit, they'll get 300,000, 400,000 views. | ||
| Because that's what... | ||
| YouTube can decide to make somebody or break somebody like that. | ||
| Just by tweaking the algorithm. | ||
| If they decided, hey, what if once every six months we put a secular talk video on the front page of YouTube, that would immediately double the size of my audience. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| I wonder how much they think about that impact. | ||
| And I wonder if they just look at it in terms of bottom line, making money. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| They're scared of advertisers running away. | ||
| And look, they don't know what I'm going to say. | ||
| They don't know what I'm going to say. | ||
| For all they know, I'm going to come out tomorrow and say, I think the flatter theory is real. | ||
| And then it's like, okay, boom, scandal. | ||
| Then they'd suppress me even more, right? | ||
| But they don't know that there's a body of work there. | ||
| I put my record up against anybody else's in terms of giving the facts and the information. | ||
| And then I give my take on it, of course. | ||
| But the facts and the information comes first. | ||
| And they just throw us in league with the borderline content. | ||
| And they say, look, he's not reputable because he's not with a major media outlet. | ||
| And, of course, the irony is all these major media outlets have made horrendous mistakes over the years. | ||
| And I'm being kind by calling it mistakes. | ||
| Like, these are the people who cheerleaded us into the war in Iraq. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And they don't get docked in the algorithm if they do something that's incorrect. | ||
| Did you see the conversation that I had with Jan Werner about that? | ||
| I did not know. | ||
| Yeah, it was the exact same thing where he was talking about that the government should be regulating the internet. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| And I was like, what are you talking about? | ||
| That's anti-First Amendment. | ||
| That's like the very first thing in the Constitution. | ||
| He just has this idea of the government, and by government he means left-wing government only, that they're going to be altruistic and they're going to look at it the right way and do the right thing. | ||
| I'm like, What are you saying? | ||
| I'm like, these are the same people that brought us into the Iraq war under false pretenses. | ||
| He's like, no, no, no, that was politicians. | ||
| I go, that's the government. | ||
| The government is politicians. | ||
| Well, we need better politicians. | ||
| Like, no, no, no. | ||
| No, you need people to be able to sort this shit out. | ||
| It's going to be messy. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| It is going to be messy, yeah. | ||
| They want it to be not messy. | ||
| There's no way. | ||
| There's no way. | ||
| You gotta accept the fact that it's going to be messy. | ||
| Who's gonna watch the Watchmen is the old saying. | ||
| So like, you set up this, you set up this like, you know, this overlord group that gets to determine everything, but it's like, what about when they're wrong? | ||
| And they're gonna be wrong from time to time, because sometimes the conventional wisdom ends up being wrong, sometimes it ends up being right, but you never, you don't know, you have to, like you said, it's gonna be messy, you gotta try to figure it out, and anybody putting their thumb on the scale and trying to change the outcome by, you know, fiat from above, that's not the way it's supposed to work. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it's not just that their conventional wisdom is going to be wrong. | ||
| It's that they're being fed propaganda. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And they're disseminating it. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Ad hoc, with no questioning it whatsoever, no pretense, no worry. | ||
| Yeah, they have a lot of sources inside the FBI and the CIA. And if the government comes out with their official line, they just write it up like little stenographers. | ||
| They're stenographers. | ||
| They're not journalists. | ||
| They're not reporters. | ||
| You're supposed to fact check them, too. | ||
| Somebody in the CIA says something, you still got to say, hey, is it right or is it wrong? | ||
| One of the best examples of that is the Twitter files. | ||
| You see no coverage of this on CNN. No coverage of this astounding collusion between intelligence agencies and a social media network to suppress accurate information that would harm the political party that's in power. | ||
| Which is fucking wild. | ||
| It's wild that the news isn't covering this. | ||
| Arguably, that's as big a scandal as Watergate. | ||
| It's as big a scandal as any other times in the past where we've found that there's been some really shady shit going on that would change the way people would see a narrative. | ||
| Remember when you had Mark Zuckerberg on? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And Zuckerberg was like, yeah, the FBI reached out to us and they said, you know, hey, there's going to be a disinformation dump from Russia coming. | ||
| And so we were ready when the Hunter Biden thing dropped. | ||
| And it's like, okay, well, this is a perfect example of they were just wrong. | ||
| They said, oh, this isn't Hunter Biden's laptop. | ||
| You know, it's no big deal. | ||
| This is just Russian disinformation. | ||
| And then it turns out it was his laptop. | ||
| And so and Mark Zuckerberg was almost doing a victory lap by saying, hey, I only suppressed it in the algorithm. | ||
| As opposed to banning it. | ||
| He was like, oh, I didn't ban it, so therefore I'm, you know, good on me. | ||
| I don't think he was doing a victory lap. | ||
| I think he was just being accurate, and it seemed better than the way Twitter handled it. | ||
| Right, and it was, but it's still, this is exactly what we're talking about, the algorithmic suppression, where it's like, look... | ||
| Just let people decide for themselves. | ||
| And yes, you're going to have the occasional circumstance where maybe a flat earth video does get 2 million views, right? | ||
| Dude, I love a good flat earth video. | ||
| Yeah, that's the thing. | ||
| Like, sometimes these conspiracy theories, if you look at it as just like a creativity thing, it's interesting, right? | ||
| Like, oh my god. | ||
| They can find a way to make a case for a position that's so absurd where it makes you go... | ||
| Huh! | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But that's okay, right? | ||
| And some people will fall down the rabbit hole, and that sucks, but I do think you have to have some degree of faith that most people are going to be like, yeah, no, this is kind of bullshit. | ||
| Isn't it interesting, though, because that kind of stuff doesn't work on you, right? | ||
| Right? | ||
| If someone talks about hollow earth and there's dinosaurs living in the lava, it's not going to work on you. | ||
| But the concern is that it's going to work on some people. | ||
| And what they'll use as an example is things like QAnon. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which sets up January 6th. | ||
| But then they'll ignore the fact that the FBI has agent provocateurs that are instigating these people to go into the Capitol. | ||
| So they're only talking about the dangers of QAnon. | ||
| Like, what about the dangers of the federal government riling these people up? | ||
| Or agents from the federal government who are just trying to accomplish something that's going to enhance their career? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like we talked about last night. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| The way I think about that is very simple. | ||
| If QAnon is spreading like wildfire, and it's batshit fucking crazy, which it is, then the burden is on people like me to explain, hey, here's why this is batshit. | ||
| Here's why this is wrong. | ||
| Let me show you how these things don't match up. | ||
| Let me show you. | ||
| And again, the issue is, if it's coming from an independent voice, if the debunking is coming from an independent voice where, like, you know, you know I'm not beholden to anybody, you know I'm telling you what I really think, and I'm very detailed in responding to it, then that's eventually how you win on that front. | ||
| You're not going to win just by saying, just totally ban it, because then, you know... | ||
| We had a conversation the other day with a guy in the airport who was totally convinced. | ||
| Sweet guy, very nice, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he brings up, you know, I think Trump won. | ||
| I think Trump won the election. | ||
| And there's no way that Biden guy won. | ||
| And it's like, you know, I don't want to create more people like that. | ||
| I need to be able to respond in real time, bring a convincing case, and then just make people go, okay, at the very least I'll move to agnosticism as opposed to believing an incorrect thing. | ||
| Right, and the QAnon thing, that's why Into the Storm was so important. | ||
| Is that that Andrew Callahan one? | ||
| Oh no, that's the other. | ||
| What was the guy's name that did the documentary series on HBO? Did you see it? | ||
| Andrew Callahan, I think it is that one, right? | ||
| Into the Storm is the new one with Andrew Callahan? | ||
| No, he's the new one. | ||
| He's the new one. | ||
| Is that what you're referring to? | ||
| The newer one? | ||
| No, I'm referring to the... | ||
| I had the gentleman on who made that documentary. | ||
| I wanted to say it, but I want to say the wrong name. | ||
| I think I know the one you're talking about. | ||
| I think it was on Hulu, the one you're talking about. | ||
| No, it was on HBO. It was on HBO? Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Well, I saw that one with Crystal. | ||
| The Asian guy who ended up being Q. That one? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That was a great one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good documentary. | |
| It was amazing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because that's the only way you're going to really unravel that. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| And then you get to see, like, oh, these people got duped, and this is why, and this is, like, what's attractive about it, that these people are on the inside, they understand the secrets, and everybody's being lied to, and they're going to fucking bring back the real government, and... | ||
| This was the other one you were talking about. | ||
| Yeah, this was the newer one with Andrew Callahan. | ||
| Oh, This Place Rules. | ||
| He also did. | ||
| This was also about QAnon, but I saw the one you were just talking about. | ||
| I didn't see this new one. | ||
| I saw the one you were talking about, and it was a very, very good documentary. | ||
| Very good documentary. | ||
| Well, it's very good because you get so deep into... | ||
| The motivations behind these people, they're all a bunch of social outcasts and weirdos, and they find this group and it gives them meaning, and then it becomes their whole identity. | ||
| A lot of these people are just looking for something to care about, just looking for purpose, just looking for meaning. | ||
| And they would rather take a wrong answer than they would something that's right, but nobody makes a case for the thing that is right. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And so again, that's on people like me. | ||
| The burden's on people who are in the position that we're in to try to give an alternative. | ||
| Hey, you don't have to believe this nonsense. | ||
| Jeffrey Epstein, that's real. | ||
| That happened. | ||
| But it's also not the case that it's a demonic, satanic, pedophile cult run in the pizza shop basement with Hillary Clinton doing child sacrifice. | ||
| You can be nuanced on this stuff. | ||
| You can say the Epstein stuff is real, there's a lot of questionable stuff there, but also they're not literally demon-worshipping Evil people in a basement of a pizza shop. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's evil enough. | ||
| You don't have to bring the supernatural into it. | ||
| It's so true. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| It's fucking... | ||
| It's trafficking. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's sex trafficking. | ||
| And it's also involving leaders of giant financial institutions, politicians, celebrities, scientists. | ||
| I need to see that black book. | ||
| That Epstein black book. | ||
| You had Bill Clinton. | ||
| You had Donald Trump. | ||
| You had all these... | ||
| Bill Gates? | ||
| Billionaires, yeah, billionaires, celebrities. | ||
| They're all lying about it. | ||
| He was the CEO of Elite Sex Crimes Incorporated, and then he died in jail. | ||
| Yeah, mysteriously. | ||
| Did you see this video with Bill Gates recently? | ||
| Yes, I did. | ||
| I should have had dinner. | ||
| Well, have you seen Whitney Webb's take on Bill Gates's connection to Jeffrey Epstein? | ||
| It goes way further. | ||
| It goes way back. | ||
| His wife has blown the whistle on this and was like, oh, Bill Gates is saying he just had a couple dinners with him or whatever. | ||
| His wife's like, let me tell you something. | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| He was really close with him. | ||
| Not just close with him, but went to the island. | ||
| He knew him very well. | ||
| They had all sorts of business dealings together for quite a long time. | ||
| It goes way back. | ||
| You know, he knew him... | ||
| Whitney Webb was on Russell Brand's show recently, and she went into great detail. | ||
| She's fascinating. | ||
| She can pull up data and information off the top of her head. | ||
| She's such a good researcher. | ||
| But just absolute facts about the connection between Gates and him. | ||
| Yeah, it's a lot of very famous, very wealthy people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, I mean, the guy had an island. | ||
| An island. | ||
| Like, who has an island? | ||
| What are we talking about here? | ||
| Do you know the bit that I'm doing on stage now about that, that, like, you know, people saw Clinton and they're like, oh, we're fine. | ||
|
unidentified
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Clinton's here. | |
| That's such a great point. | ||
| I was laughing hard at that line because it's so true. | ||
| Yeah, it gives, like, it gives this the feeling of, like, oh, like, our former national daddy figure is here, so, like, it's everything's okay. | ||
| One of the things that people will do to try to get me to come to a thing is they'll tell me, hey, this guy's going to be there. | ||
| That guy's going to be there. | ||
| They'll send me an email. | ||
| Hey, Joe, are you interested in coming to our event, our thing, our retreat, or whatever? | ||
| And blah, blah, blah is going to be there from this band and that comic and this thing. | ||
| And it's like you go, oh, well, that famous person's going to be there. | ||
| I can be there, too. | ||
|
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|
Right. | |
| Right, that's how they try to get you. | ||
| So if they can talk one person into doing it that's prominent and recognized, and then you're like, oh, well, I will be in good company if I go there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, and I think that's what they did. | ||
| Yeah, you know, I've seen some pretty convincing stuff that Jeffrey Epstein was actually Mossad, Israeli intelligence. | ||
| Yeah, I've seen that too. | ||
| Yeah, there was an article, I forget where it was, it may have been Daily Mail, which is a questionable source, but they were talking about how Jeffrey Epstein was meeting with like a former Israeli prime minister. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, I mean, he also was meeting with the U.S. president, too, of course, but I think there's some reason to believe that this guy, because yet, if you have dirt on everybody, why do you have dirt on everybody? | ||
| It's just the craziest thing that they murdered that guy in jail. | ||
| It's just like, sweep, sweep. | ||
| That's all done. | ||
| Let's concentrate on Ukraine now. | ||
| Yeah, nobody actually believes he killed himself. | ||
| I haven't met anybody left-wing, right-wing, center, apolitical. | ||
| Everybody's like, eh, that's kind of sketchy. | ||
| Yeah, I've met some people that believe it, but they have a reason to believe it. | ||
| It's like they have this vested interest in wanting to believe it. | ||
| Yeah, the skeptics. | ||
| Not even necessarily skeptics. | ||
| It's like maybe they have some weird connection to it that they don't want you to know about. | ||
| They want to make it look like it's not that big a deal, and they got them. | ||
| One of the most eerie ones was when Bill Gates was being questioned about it. | ||
| He's dead now. | ||
| He said, he's dead now, so you have to be careful. | ||
| What the fuck does that mean? | ||
| What the fuck does that mean? | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| He's dead now, so I guess you have to be careful. | ||
| Like, what? | ||
| And Ghislaine Maxwell came out recently and said, I don't think he killed himself. | ||
| He didn't. | ||
| Michael Badden, that famous autopsy doctor, the guy who was from the show Autopsy, he said that out of thousands of cases of people hanging themselves, that he's personally investigated, he has never seen anybody with those injuries. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And that those injuries were of a person who was strangled. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And that the broken bones in his neck were indicate of a ligature strangulation. | ||
| The area where he was strangled was below, low on the neck, which is not where you get when someone's hanging by their own weight, which is higher on the neck because your body weight is dragging it down. | ||
| He's like, that was someone who got strangled. | ||
| And the security cameras were magically not working. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Magically not working. | ||
| The guards were somewhere sleeping or something. | ||
| Wasn't it like some former cop, like, juice head? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Who they think did it? | ||
| Well, there was a former cop who was a giant dude. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Who was his cellmate. | ||
| I think he murdered people. | ||
| I think that's what he went to jail for. | ||
| The cop was fucking jacked, too. | ||
| Yeah, he was. | ||
| He's still getting the sauce in there behind bars. | ||
| I don't know if he was still jacked in jail. | ||
| Oh, was it an old picture in the article I read? | ||
| I think it was, but he was a corrupt cop. | ||
| And if you're a corrupt cop and you're involved in drug dealing and this and that, he probably murdered a few people. | ||
| What'd they offer him? | ||
| Maybe they gave him juice. | ||
| They're getting him on the cheap if that's all they gave him. | ||
|
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Look at the size of that motherfucker! | |
| Jesus Christ! | ||
| Tartaglione over here! | ||
| Tartaglione tried to help Epstein would have been powerful mitigation in the penalty phase if he was found guilty of any death-eligible charges. | ||
| So what does it say? | ||
| The disappearance video... | ||
| Footage of the financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein's first suicide attempt should mean that his cellmate, ex-Westchester cop Nicholas Tartaglione... | ||
| That's where I'm from, by the way, Westchester. | ||
| ...doesn't face the death penalty in a drug-related quadruple homicide. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So that could be... | ||
| Look, if I was going to have somebody kill somebody, I'd have that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, absolutely. | |
| You're going to have somebody strangle somebody? | ||
| How easy could he do it? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| No. | ||
| What size of that motherfucker? | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| So maybe that's what they did. | ||
| Maybe they offered him a plea, or maybe they offered somebody else a plea. | ||
| But, you know, the evidence that nobody did anything was like, well, no one knew entered into the cell block. | ||
| That's what they said. | ||
| We don't have the cameras, but we're reasonably sure that no one entered into the cell block. | ||
| When I was looking this up, this popped up, too, which said somebody else was his last cellmate. | ||
| That guy was... | ||
| Maybe it was a cellmate of his. | ||
| So he died from COVID-19, they're saying? | ||
| They're saying his former cellmate died of COVID-19. | ||
| Who's that guy? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm just saying it's the first time I've ever seen him. | ||
| Prisonlegalnews.org. | ||
| But he was released, though. | ||
| It says he died in his mother's apartment in the Bronx from COVID-19 that he contracted while in the Queens, New York Correctional Center. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Prior to a state of the Queens, Lockup Reyes was housed at the Manhattan Correctional Center where he was Jeffrey Epstein's last cellmate. | ||
| Yeah, but that doesn't mean anything. | ||
| They could be looking for something there. | ||
| He could have actually just died from COVID. No, that's not what I'm saying here. | ||
| My point of bringing this up was when I googled Jeffrey Epstein's last cellmate, this guy popped up, not the other guy. | ||
| Oh, not the juice head guy. | ||
| But the juice guy was his cellmate at one point in time? | ||
| Yeah, that was in all the articles that I read at the time of his death brought up that former cop. | ||
|
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There's so many levels to this conspiracy and mystery. | |
| But again, all this stuff we're talking about, totally reputable sources that showed you everything. | ||
| And you can connect those dots and be reasonable. | ||
| But again, you just don't have to go to the QAnon level. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| The real conspiracies are fucking wild enough. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And a lot of the conspiracies are out in the open. | ||
| The World Economic Forum. | ||
| Let's have at Davos all these billionaires, all these heads of state get together and tell you their ideas. | ||
| You know what the World Economic Forum actually is? | ||
| It's a status quo protection racket. | ||
| Because they're doing just fine over there. | ||
| They're the billionaires. | ||
| You know? | ||
| They're on top of the world. | ||
| So all these ideas that they're floating out there, really it's more like... | ||
| Let's keep what we got going. | ||
| Because people are suffering as it is, right? | ||
| I mean, I'm sure you've seen the Oxfam numbers about income and wealth inequality, that the richest 26 people on the planet hold more wealth than the bottom 50% of the world combined. | ||
| That's the conspiracy! | ||
| It's right fucking there! | ||
| It's right here! | ||
| Isn't that just a factor of the rich get richer? | ||
| Like, no matter what happens, when people develop exorbitant amounts of wealth, and then they just keep going, they have... | ||
| I just saw that Elon gained $9 billion over the last week or something like that because stocks go up. | ||
| That kind of stuff can just accumulate and pile up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's why, look, for a lot of US history, we had a progressive tax system where the more you made and the more wealth you had, the more you were taxed on that. | ||
| And so that's an attempt to do redistribution to give people at the bottom a reasonable shot. | ||
| It's saying, okay, Where's the money going? | ||
| The problem is where's the money going and who gets to decide? | ||
| Back in the New Deal days, when we had FDR in power, that money went to jobs programs and went to infrastructure and went to unemployment insurance, went to actually help people. | ||
| What you're concerned about, which I think you're right to be concerned about, is a lot of that money, there was a report that just came out, the Pentagon can account for 59% of the money it's received. | ||
| That's not a lot. | ||
| They still have 41% that they know where it is. | ||
| Literally trillions of dollars. | ||
| Gone. | ||
| I'm a glass half full guy. | ||
| Or 41% full. | ||
| I'm sure you remember, too, when Biden did probably one of the best things he did, which is pull out of Afghanistan. | ||
| The fucking meltdown from the media, the fucking meltdown from the military-industrial complex, they were attacking him over and over from the perspective of, what are you doing? | ||
| Why are you leaving? | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| You sure you want to do that? | ||
| Look at all the chaos that's happening. | ||
| Oh my god, you might want to go back in. | ||
| That was the perspective. | ||
| The perspective wasn't the Afghanistan report that had come out a few years ago, which showed that we literally wasted trillions of dollars and our own generals on the ground were like, we don't know what the fuck we're doing here anymore. | ||
| Like, what are we even doing here? | ||
| I think the real concern was protecting the Americans that were left behind and protecting the people that worked with the Americans, you know, the people that helped them because they were all murdered. | ||
| Yeah, tens of thousands of them of the, you know, Afghan people who helped us did end up getting left behind. | ||
| And they're tortured and murdered. | ||
| I mean, there's some horrific stories from some of my friends who were over there aiding in the extraction. | ||
| Of American citizens that were stuck there. | ||
| The way it was done was very scary. | ||
| So here's the issue with that though. | ||
| Like, I don't know. | ||
| It was always going to be this messy when you get out. | ||
| I don't know if that's true. | ||
| I do think it's true because everything, there's so much money invested in staying over there. | ||
| I mean, there's Raytheon, Boeing, Halliburton, all these people are making so much money staying there. | ||
| And there's, I guarantee you, not a single staffer of Biden's was telling him, hey, you're right about this. | ||
| They were all telling him, don't do it. | ||
| Don't get out. | ||
| You're causing a political headache for yourself. | ||
| And he did because the media hammered him and then his approval rating dropped, even though that was an issue where if you polled people beforehand, like 60, 70, 80% of the country was like, yeah, we need to get out of Afghanistan. | ||
| So it's one thing where he actually stood up to the deep state. | ||
| He stood up to the military industrial complex, and then he got shit on relentlessly for it. | ||
| I understand it was a mess, but... | ||
| The alternative is staying there 10 more years, 20 more years, 30 more years? | ||
| I mean, we got our infrastructures crumbling here. | ||
| Why are we spending trillions of dollars over there? | ||
| Yeah, I don't think anybody reasonable disagrees with that. | ||
| I think the reasonable perspective is, was there a way to get those American citizens out first? | ||
| And should that have been done? | ||
| A lot of them did get out. | ||
| Jamie, you could look this up if you want. | ||
| I remember that... | ||
| So the worst thing that happened was the attack as we were leaving. | ||
| There was some, like, ISIS attack on an airport. | ||
| And then what Biden did was super fucked up because he said, oh, we're going to attack them back. | ||
| And he did a drone strike on a house and said, oh, we got the ISIS guys. | ||
| And then it came out that was all... | ||
| They were innocent civilians. | ||
| They just bombed innocent civilians. | ||
| What are the numbers on drones? | ||
| The drone's innocence to actual people they're trying to target is so nuts. | ||
| There's a guy by the name of Daniel Hale who worked for the government and he was a whistleblower and he showed the numbers under Obama were killing 90% the wrong people. | ||
| And so he released that and you know what happened? | ||
| They put his ass in jail. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because he's leaking classified information. | ||
| So they put him in jail. | ||
| He's in jail now? | ||
| Yes, he's in jail right now. | ||
| And the people who actually were doing the drone strikes and killing 90% of the wrong people, they are not in jail. | ||
| I know. | ||
| That's a rough one. | ||
| Pardon Daniel Hale. | ||
| Commute Daniel Hale's sentence. | ||
| Get him out of there. | ||
| He's right up there with Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, all these names that a lot of people know where it's like, hey, they're kind of getting a raw deal here. | ||
| This guy Daniel Hale is right up there. | ||
| Do you think that with all the information that's available now and these narratives that do get discussed, like what you're saying, what we're talking about, what you talk about on your show, That more people are informed of that now so it makes it more difficult for them to do that and ultimately that stuff will diminish over time. | ||
| It's just the people with actual power don't give much of a fuck of what I have to say or others like me have to say. | ||
| But they give a fuck about the American people if the American people don't vote them in anymore because they're upset about that. | ||
| Well this is more what we call the deep state. | ||
| So CIA, like the people behind the scenes, the Pentagon, the people who are sort of there from administration to administration and they're not dependent on elections. | ||
| Like these are the people who... | ||
| They throw the book at a guy like that, you know? | ||
| Because if you leak something that makes them look good, it's fine that you just leak classified information. | ||
| You leak something that makes them look bad, like Daniel Hale did, and they'll rain holy hell on you. | ||
| It's very disturbing when you find out these egregious missteps of justice, where people get imprisoned for leaking information and discussing information, or the Stephen Dossinger case. | ||
| Oh, yes, that guy. | ||
| We've had him on Crystal Kyle and Friends. | ||
| Amazing story. | ||
|
unidentified
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Crazy. | |
| Yeah, he basically is like... | ||
| If you really get down to the bottom line here... | ||
| Explain to people what happened. | ||
| Yeah, so he was imprisoned for basically showing how... | ||
| I think it was Chevron, one of the big oil companies, flat out poisoned... | ||
| I think it was Peru. | ||
| You might want to fact check me on that. | ||
| I'm not sure it was Peru, but it was a South American country. | ||
| They basically, like, poisoned the water supply there. | ||
| They were doing all these terrible practices, polluting everything. | ||
| And he stood up against them in court and won. | ||
| And then basically... | ||
| You know, the Empire struck back and went after him, and he ended up in prison. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Basically for blowing the whistle on this and getting him out. | ||
| So here it is. | ||
| Ecuador, I'm sorry, there you go. | ||
| Not Peru. | ||
| So Dossinger, an American attorney known for his legal battles with Chevron, Particularly Anguinda v. | ||
| Texaco, Inc. | ||
| and other cases which he represented over 30,000 farmers and indigenous people who suffered environmental damage and health problems caused by the oil drilling in the Lago Agrio oil field of Ecuador. | ||
| The Ecuadorian court awarded the plaintiffs $9.5 billion. | ||
| $11.5 billion in 2021 dollars. | ||
| in damages which led Chevron to withdraw its assets from Ecuador and launch legal action against Dozinger in the U.S. | ||
| In 2011, Chevron, this has been going on for 12 fucking years, filed a RICO anti-corruption suit against Dozinger, which is wild in New York City. | ||
| The case was heard by U.S. District Judge Louis A. Kaplan, who determined that the ruling of the Ecuadorian court could not be enforced in the U.S. because it was procured by fraud, bribery, and racketeering activities. | ||
| Now that's all bullshit, just so everybody knows. | ||
| There was no fraud, no bribery, no racketeering. | ||
| What happened was the people who were corrupt went after him and said he was corrupt. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And the judge was corrupt who put him behind bars, and he just recently got out. | ||
| But this guy went through fucking hell because he exposed that Chevron was flat out poisoning people. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| So he was placed under house arrest in 2019 while awaiting trial on charges of criminal contempt of court, which arose during his appeal against Kaplan's Ricoh decision when he refused to turn over electronic devices he owned to Chevron's forensic experts. | ||
| In July 2021, U.S. District Judge Loretta Presco found him guilty and Dozinger was sentenced to six months in jail in October 2021. While Dozinger was under house arrest in 2020, 29 Nobel laureates described the actions taken by Chevron against him as judicial harassment. | ||
| Human rights campaigners called Chevron's actions an example of strategic lawsuit against public participation. | ||
| SLAP lawsuit. | ||
| In April 2021, six members of Congressional Progressive Caucus demanded that the Department of Justice review Dossinger's case. | ||
| In September 2021, the United Nations High Commissioner of Human Rights stated that the pretrial detention imposed on Dossinger was illegal and called for his release. | ||
| Having spent 45 days in prison and a combined total of 993 days under house arrest, Dossinger was released on April 25, 2022. So let me also add, so yes, he spent 993 days under house arrest. | ||
| Now the actual laws they're accusing him of breaking, it would have been like a max, I'm going to butcher this, but it was like a month or something. | ||
| So they kept him under house arrest for 993 days, then he actually went to jail, but even if he had gotten a max sentence, if he had the trial right away, it would have been like a month or something like that. | ||
| And more importantly, what that does is it scares the fuck out of anybody that's thinking about doing something like that in the future. | ||
| That's exactly the point. | ||
| The Empire will strike back. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they do. | ||
| Especially in a situation like that where there's clear evidence that they polluted that area. | ||
| Undeniable. | ||
| Fucking crazy. | ||
| Look, this is the impact, and you know this is my big thing, this is the impact of money on politics. | ||
| This is the way our system works. | ||
| I mean, when you have giant corporations and billionaires pay the politicians in campaign contributions, then when those politicians get in there, they're going to represent the corporations and the billionaires and not the will of the people. | ||
| I mean, you could look at any public opinion poll and it will tell you some very clear preferences among Democrats, Republicans, among everybody, and we don't get those things into law. | ||
| The stuff that goes into law is a new tax break or subsidy for a giant corporation or another bailout for Wall Street. | ||
| Like, that's the stuff that's prioritized because that's what these people are, who these people are getting paid by. | ||
| Like Nancy Pelosi, for example, she has like an 18% approval rating. | ||
| She was a leader of the Democrats for so long, all because she raised the most money. | ||
| She has the most connections with the corporations and the billionaires. | ||
| And so that's why she's at the top of the party. | ||
| It's not because she actually has people who like her and support her. | ||
| or Yeah, it's spooky. | ||
| It's spooky because there's no clear path to get money out of politics. | ||
| So there actually is. | ||
| One way is to do a constitutional amendment, but that's difficult because you need to get like three-fifths of the state. | ||
| It's a whole process. | ||
| It's very difficult. | ||
| And you're going to have to get the people that are involved in it to agree. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, so there's this thing called clean elections, which is you ban all the private money, everything is funded by the public, and you're allocated a certain amount, and then you really have a debate and a battle of ideas and different policies, and whoever wins, wins. | ||
| The fact of the matter is, we used to have laws that... | ||
| Limited corporate money in politics. | ||
| There was a, I think it was like, it's called the Tillman Act. | ||
| I want to say it was like 1907 or something like that. | ||
| They said, yep, no corporate money in politics. | ||
| No corporate money. | ||
| But what happened was the Supreme Court came along in the 1970s, and then in subsequent cases after that as well, Bucky v. | ||
| Vallejo, Citizens United, Bellotti, there were a bunch of cases where they basically said, yeah, we're going to go ahead and claim that bribing politicians is free speech. | ||
| They claimed it's a free speech issue. | ||
| So if a billionaire wants to give $200,000 or whatever to a PAC or a super PAC or a candidate, it's like, hey, that's their right to do that. | ||
| And you're just going to drown out. | ||
| There's some grandma in Cleveland who donates 15 bucks to a politician and wants her social security not to be cut. | ||
| And those voices are just drowned out. | ||
| The bribing is so fucking blatant, too. | ||
| It's so strange, these contributions that people do. | ||
| Like Sam Bankman-Fried, for example. | ||
| Oh, that was so bad. | ||
| So bad. | ||
| It was all scam. | ||
| Everything was a scam. | ||
| So crazy that that was going on for so long. | ||
| And unless that Binance guy went after them, That would have kept going. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| It would be going on right now. | ||
| He's the one who kind of, you know, exposed all of it. | ||
| Yeah, and meanwhile, now they're exposing him. | ||
| Now his company's falling apart. | ||
| Well, look, I'm no expert on crypto, but there are many experts who do say, like, it's TikTok. | ||
| TikTok. | ||
| The whole crypto industry may implode eventually. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, like I said, I'm no expert on it, but a guy named Matt Stoller, he basically says, like, the whole thing is bogus. | ||
| Like, everything is like FTX, Sandbank, but freed. | ||
| Like, it's all garbage. | ||
| Well, if people agree that it's money, that's the thing, right? | ||
| If people agree that crypto is money and they use it and exchange it and buy things, then it becomes established. | ||
| One of the problems is, it's a very tiny percentage of it that's actually used as currency. | ||
| It's like less than 10%. | ||
| Bitcoin, for example, which is like the most established one, people don't actually use it as currency for the most part. | ||
| It's a speculative investment. | ||
| And then now you have interest rates going up, that's affecting everything that's speculative, and they're all going belly up. | ||
| But the idea behind it, people want a decentralized currency that's not controlled by the government. | ||
| And so this is the reason why they created it in the first place, and the idea behind it is that We could put it in this decentralized form where we all agree that this is money and it's not being influenced by anyone else and you can exchange it. | ||
| And with Bitcoin, there's a limited amount of it, right? | ||
| So there's a benefit in that. | ||
| You really can't raise it and you can't make more of it. | ||
| This is it. | ||
| And, you know, you can exchange it, and its value is determined by the people, but it fluctuates so wildly. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's right. | |
| It doesn't act like a stable currency. | ||
| Even if we're super kind and, you know, we try to steel man their position, there are wild swings, and it's hard to treat something that swings that wildly as a stable currency, because it's not. | ||
| It's more of an investment than a stable currency. | ||
| Do you think the wild swings are because it's manipulated, because people that control fiat currency don't want it to ever be stable? | ||
| Is there any... | ||
| Evidence of that? | ||
| No, I think people who got in early on crypto, a lot of them probably made a lot of money on crypto. | ||
| And then you have this boom cycle where people get into it, here's the new hot thing, more people invest, and then eventually, you know, the rug gets pulled out from underneath them, and the people who came in originally may have made a lot of money, but everybody who came in later bought too late, and they're gonna lose money on their investment, so. | ||
| Jamie's a big crypto guy. | ||
| He knows a lot of shit about this. | ||
| All right. | ||
| All right? | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| Jamie's the number one crypto guy in the world. | ||
| I look at it, but I don't try to speak out of... | ||
| I hear things and I believe what people are saying, but I also watch... | ||
| To me, it's very speculative. | ||
| I see problems happening all the time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't understand why certain things are happening. | ||
| I'm Googling right now. | ||
| Can you manipulate Bitcoin? | ||
| People are saying that's the only reason it's going up right now. | ||
| But I haven't heard anyone lay out a plan of, like, this is how they manipulated it. | ||
| So they're saying it's going up because people who hold it are manipulating it? | ||
| Yeah, just a generic Google, though. | ||
| I don't know who's saying that. | ||
| Well, look at NFTs, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, that's one where... | ||
| Most people were like, get the fuck out of here. | ||
| Really? | ||
| You got a cartoon drawing of an ape with a captain's hat on. | ||
| It's a million dollars! | ||
| And this shit is worth 200 grand. | ||
| Like Justin Bieber lost like hundreds of dollars, millions of dollars. | ||
| That's a whole other part of what was going on that people, I don't think a lot of people understand that. | ||
| For instance, just briefly, they were giving celebrities the NFT. Yeah. | ||
| Giving it to them though. | ||
| I don't know that a lot of them paid their own money for it, you know? | ||
| So he didn't lose money. | ||
| If he would have sold it, that's like an unrealized gain, you know, like that kind of loss. | ||
| Right. | ||
| This is part of what happened with Kim Kardashian, too. | ||
| But no one knew that those people were being given the NFTs, though. | ||
| Kim Kardashian's a separate thing, I don't think. | ||
| You had to look through, like, who actually bought the NFT. They found like it was another exchange that was trying to manipulate things. | ||
| Yeah, see, with the Kim Kardashian thing that I just referenced, she did a post, I think on Instagram, for Ethereum Max, I think it was called. | ||
| And Ethereum was a more legit cryptocurrency, but Ethereum Max is not. | ||
| And it's not actually related to Ethereum. | ||
| It sounds like it's like the next generation or whatever of Ethereum. | ||
| And so she got paid, I think it was $250,000 to promote this. | ||
| And, long story short, the FEC fined her ass because it was a total scam. | ||
| And somebody just approached her and said, look, we'll pay you 250 grand if you just do this post. | ||
| And she was like, okay, sure. | ||
| And she did it, and it was basically like a pump-and-up scheme. | ||
| Unless there's another one, too. | ||
| This one got dismissed, but there are multiple ones, I think. | ||
| Yeah, so the SEC charged her, what, $1.26 million in penalties? | ||
| There's also the newest one, this class-action lawsuit against all the celebrities that endorsed FTX, right? | ||
| Dismissal comes after Kardashian paid over $1 million in October to settle with the SEC over a promotion of Ethereum Max. | ||
| The judge noted that the suit highlights legitimate concerns about celebrities' ability to readily persuade millions of undiscerning followers to buy snake oil. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's all really wild. | ||
| It's interesting, right? | ||
| Because it's emerging and people are wondering whether or not this is ever going to be legitimate. | ||
| But if you're right, and if these speculators are right, that it's all going to fall apart, that's interesting, too, to see what happens then. | ||
| Look, when I look at NFTs, it seems more clear-cut to me. | ||
| And I've heard your commentary on it and I relate to it because you're just like, nobody's ever been able to explain it to me. | ||
| I'm like, yes. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| With crypto, at least I see some theoretical arguments where it's like, yeah, I could kind of see, you know, but then it all depends on the implementation and how it actually plays out. | ||
| So I'm a little more agnostic on the crypto front, but on the NFT front, I'm not at all agnostic. | ||
| Yeah, no, I'm with you 100% on that. | ||
| I was approached both about crypto and about NFTs, and both times I was like, fuck off. | ||
| I don't want to have nothing to do with it. | ||
| Good on you, man. | ||
| If I don't understand, like, if someone says, hey, we have this amazing new protein powder, it's sugar-free, it's really good for you, it's got all these amino acids, and I can look at the data, and I go, okay, I'll take that, and I'll take it and try it, okay, I'll promote that. | ||
| That makes sense to me. | ||
| But if you're saying something that I don't understand, I can't, explain it to me again, like I'm five. | ||
| Tell me what the fuck a non-fungible token means. | ||
| Like, oh, well, you know, only you own it, but I can take a screenshot of it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, that's crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Good on you because that shows you have, like, some ethics in how you deal with all, because I'm sure you get, you know, crazy pitches all the time for all different products, but the fact that you say, I'm only going to really, you know, push the ones that I know I like and I know I use, that's big because there are, unfortunately, there are a lot of people who don't do that. | ||
| It's anybody who will cut me a paycheck, I'll take the fucking paycheck and I'll say whatever the fuck, and that's how you lose credibility. | ||
| That's how people don't trust you anymore. | ||
| If you're Hawking something that you don't use and you don't fucking care about, you don't even know about, then why should anybody trust you? | ||
| No, I won't do any ads unless it makes sense. | ||
| Like, is this a legitimate thing that people use, you know, like ZipRecruiter? | ||
| Oh, people use it. | ||
| It helps you get people for the job that you're trying to fill. | ||
| Yeah, that makes sense. | ||
| But whenever it gets weird, I'm like, what are we talking about here? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is this regulated? | ||
| Where does this go bad? | ||
| I mean, do I have any personal experience in it? | ||
| I don't. | ||
| Does anybody that makes sense? | ||
| And then you see all these people that have a vested interest in it succeeding, and they're making these exaggerated claims, and like, this seems like fucking bullshit. | ||
| Yeah, there was a few exposés recently that were really interesting. | ||
| One of them was, like, some company was claiming it's, like, high-quality Japanese steel knives. | ||
| Forget the name of the company. | ||
| But somebody did an investigation and were like, this isn't high-quality, this isn't Japanese steel. | ||
| They're flat-out lying. | ||
| And a lot of YouTubers were pushing this stuff, and podcasters were pushing this stuff, and everybody, you know, you look like a fucking dunce when you get caught like that. | ||
| But for knives, like, is it sharp? | ||
| Does it cut things? | ||
| Like, what are we talking about? | ||
| Like, a knife is a simple thing. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| It's gonna make a claim, though. | ||
| It's gotta hold up. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah, I guess so. | ||
| You can't say it's sourced from this place and it's not sourced from there. | ||
| You know, you're getting some cheap-ass deal and it's supposed to be high-level. | ||
| It's just fucking, it's sketchy. | ||
| It's not right. | ||
| Yeah, well, there's always gonna be that, right? | ||
| It's always gonna be hard to figure out what's valuable and what's not valuable. | ||
| The other thing was, they were selling, like, you can become a lord in Scotland or something like that. | ||
| Remember that? | ||
| Do you know what I'm talking about? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And people were doing the ads, and it was, you know, I remember looking at it the first time, like, what the fuck? | ||
| Like, what are you talking? | ||
| It's like the same thing, like, oh, buy a star. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Remember that? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| It's like, bitch, you didn't just buy a star for $17.99 or whatever. | ||
| You talked to Neil deGrasse Tyson, he's like, there is a very fucking robust system where they name stars. | ||
| They're not going to name the Kyle Kolinsky star. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| They just give you a piece of paper and you spent 500 bucks for that or whatever it is. | ||
| Yeah, it's an interesting world when it comes to advertising. | ||
| It's an interesting world when you're trying to figure out what's legit and what's not. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, like I said, I think there's degrees and the thing I respect the most is if people only do, hey, I use this, I like this. | ||
| Well, we were talking last night, you guys were explaining to me about this Indian guy who's one of the richest men in the world. | ||
| Oh, yeah, so Crystal knows more about that than I do, but apparently he's the fourth richest guy in the world, giant dude, and his whole company that's coming out now is just a total scam. | ||
| The whole thing's a scam. | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot of this that goes on, Joe. | ||
| There's a lot of this, you know, crazy fucking scam artist bullshit. | ||
| A lot of our economy is just scam artists. | ||
| I mean, look at the 2008 crash, right? | ||
| That was all just because total lack of regulation. | ||
| Everybody thought Wall Street's the smartest guys in the room, bro. | ||
| They're just doing what's right by everybody. | ||
| It's like, no, they're the greediest fuckers in the room. | ||
| Adani, how the billionaire's empire lost $100 billion in days. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| So Indian billionaire, how do you say his name? | ||
| Guatam Adani has sought to reassure Investors, after his company pulled a surprise by calling off its share sale. | ||
| On Wednesday, Adani Enterprises said it would return $2.5 billion raised from the sale to investors. | ||
| The decision will not impact our existing operations and future plans, Mr. Adani has said. | ||
| The move caps an eventful week, which began with a U.S. investment firm making fraud claims against Adani Group firms. | ||
| So these fraud claims is what Crystal was explaining last night. | ||
| Yeah, it's like a very reputable group that has exposed scams previously, and they did this whole detailed report explaining how his whole company is fraudulent, and now the market's reacting to that. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And is it legal scams? | ||
| Like, there's some scams that are like... | ||
| Multi-level marketing, yeah. | ||
| They're legal technically, but they really shouldn't be. | ||
| Even stock buybacks. | ||
| Stock buybacks started in the 1980s. | ||
| Ronald Reagan legalized them. | ||
| And previously, they were like, we can't allow this. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| You're just artificially pumping up your own stock price. | ||
| But now we allow them. | ||
| So how does that work? | ||
| I don't know the specifics of how the stock buyback thing works. | ||
| I just know in the 1980s. | ||
| There was a good video from Robert Reich. | ||
| R-E-I-C-H, where he explains the way stock buybacks work, but they were illegal until the 1980s. | ||
| Then they allowed them. | ||
| The gist of it is like a company artificially bolsters up its own stock price by like buying shares of its own company, as opposed to the way it used to work is like you would take that money that you have and you just like reinvest it into your company in a legitimate way. | ||
| Like you pay the workers more or you do more research and development or you expand and then that they don't do that anymore. | ||
| They just. | ||
| It's all just like, hey, let's pay the shareholders off even more by artificially pumping up the price of our own stock and screw the workers. | ||
| And it's legal. | ||
| And it's legal, that's right. | ||
| Now it's legal. | ||
| It wasn't back then, now it is, yeah. | ||
| Bizarre. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Bizarre. | ||
| Like how does it all, like, do you envision a real potential time where they get money out of politics and that these kind of things become illegal again and that there's some sort of sanity is achieved? | ||
| I mean that's a great question. | ||
| I am of the belief that the best we could do, and maybe this is a little bit of a pessimistic viewpoint, but it really is where I'm at, at least at the moment. | ||
| Maybe I'm wrong, but there are countries that have sort of achieved significantly better systems in my estimation. | ||
| Like, I think the Scandinavian region, they're just much better systems overall. | ||
| People self-report being way happier. | ||
| These are all countries that have, you know, free healthcare, free education, and The workforces are almost entirely unionized. | ||
| So they do what's called sectoral bargaining. | ||
| So they set wages across an entire industry. | ||
| And what happens in that scenario? | ||
| They don't even have minimum wage laws in these countries because they don't need it because everybody's part of the union. | ||
| They make more than whatever a minimum wage would be. | ||
| And so when I look at those systems, I think like that's That's what I like because, you know, there was a time too in the US with FDR with the New Deal. | ||
| We were on that path. | ||
| We were on the path of like, we're going to create a vibrant, thriving social democracy here. | ||
| We're going to have beautiful infrastructure. | ||
| People are going to get paid well. | ||
| We're going to have a thriving middle class. | ||
| And then with the neoliberal era, all of that was rolled back. | ||
| You have the introduction of money into politics. | ||
| You have basically, we became a giant corporatocracy where billionaires and corporations run the show. | ||
| People never get the things that they actually want. | ||
| So in my opinion, what you need is sort of like a grassroots movement On specific issues to achieve specific wins. | ||
| So, you know, one of my big things is universal healthcare. | ||
| We are literally the only developed country in the world that doesn't have universal healthcare. | ||
| There's a Commonwealth Fund study that comes out every few years, and they find that we rank 11th out of 11 of the countries that they study when it comes to our healthcare system. | ||
| So, like, we know how to do it, and there are experts in the world who can construct much better systems, but we don't do it, again, because of the influence of money in politics. | ||
| The health insurance industry buys the politicians, so they keep scamming. | ||
| I mean, Big Pharma is, like, the biggest scam going. | ||
| Over the past 20 years, you've had a situation where they make... | ||
| Sorry, hold on one sec. | ||
| Over the past 20 years, it's all tax money that funds new medicine. | ||
| All that comes out of tax dollars. | ||
| So what happens is you have grants go to universities, and they do the research, come up with the new drugs, then big pharma swoops in, buys up the intellectual property rights for those things, and then sells it back to us at a colossal profit. | ||
| So we pay for the research up front, and then they charge us on the back end. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| So there's an example. | ||
| I covered a story recently. | ||
| There's a drug in the UK, a cancer drug coming out of the UK. It costs about $200 in the UK. This is a drug that's existed for decades now. | ||
| We pay $38,000 for that drug here. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| Total scam. | ||
| It's a total fucking scam. | ||
| You can look it up. | ||
| It was a Raw Story article. | ||
| It's a drug for a specific kind of cancer. | ||
| Type in, like, Raw Story 38,000 cancer drug. | ||
| $38,000 cancer drug. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's just one example, Joe. | ||
| I mean, there's so many examples of, like, it's just a giant scam. | ||
| They're a middleman. | ||
| $38,398 for a single shot of a very old cancer drug. | ||
| $38,000? | ||
| That is so crazy. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Prostate cancer. | ||
| There you go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| Wow. | ||
| Well, we're going through the article there, but that's all the above. | ||
| Insane. | ||
| Absolutely insane. | ||
| So my answer is you need a grassroots movement to try to get universal health care. | ||
| You need a grassroots movement to try to get a higher minimum wage or get sectoral bargaining across the country. | ||
| Like, there are things that we can do that would fight back. | ||
| Now, honestly, when you talk about Joe Biden, he is largely a status quo protector. | ||
| There are little ways in which he's sort of tweaked it a little bit, where he's doing stuff that you could never even imagine Obama doing. | ||
| Let's do this in a minute, because I gotta pee. | ||
| Sure, go for it. | ||
| So we'll go over all this shit. | ||
| I'm sorry, I've been drinking a lot of water. | ||
| No, no worries, man. | ||
| I'll be right back. | ||
| No worries, man. | ||
| In fact, I might pee as well. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And we're back. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Feels good, doesn't it? | ||
| Yeah, it's so hard to concentrate when you have to pee. | ||
| So, I was saying, in some very interesting ways, Biden has broken with neoliberal orthodoxy. | ||
| Like, for example, the reduction of student loan debt. | ||
| Never before could you imagine a scenario, even under Obama, where he'd be like, let's just wipe out 10k, 20k of debt. | ||
| Has that been implemented? | ||
| No, so what happened is, he did it via executive order, and he did it using COVID justification. | ||
| So when Trump was president, he actually reduced some student loan debt. | ||
| It was for specific categories, like if you were a disabled veteran and stuff like that, they would reduce your student loan debt. | ||
| So Biden used that same justification that Trump did, some COVID justification, like, hey, the economy's rough, people are struggling, we're going to wipe out some of this. | ||
| And what happened was it went through the court system. | ||
| A couple of courts said, this is totally legal. | ||
| And then it just got to a court now that said, no, this is not legal. | ||
| We're going to slap it down. | ||
| And so it didn't work. | ||
| But under the 1965 Higher Education Act, he actually does have the right, the education secretary has the right to wipe the debt slate clean because the federal government owns about 90% of student debt. | ||
| So they already have the authority, but I don't think Biden used the most straightforward interpretation of the law in order to do it. | ||
| They very well may strike it down, but he could just turn around and say, okay, I'm going to do the exact same thing using the 1965 Higher Education Act, where I do have the authority to do it. | ||
| Is there plans to do that? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| And this is the thing about Biden, right? | ||
| He also is a status quo protector. | ||
| There's some little ways in which he's broken with orthodoxy, but, you know, in other ways he hasn't. | ||
| So, I mean, I could go through, I'll give you, like, okay, let's go through the bad stuff that Biden did. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, he ran on him to get us back in the Iran deal. | ||
| Because Iran, they were, you know, Obama made a deal with the Iranian government. | ||
| Hey, we sanctioned you, we're holding your money, we'll give you back your own money if you promise you're not going to create a nuclear weapon and we'll allow the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, to go in there and regulate and make sure you're not Building a nuclear weapon. | ||
| They agreed to it. | ||
| The deal was fine. | ||
| The UN comes out and says, every time we go and follow up, they're following the deal to a T. Trump comes in, pulls us out of it, which is a huge problem. | ||
| Biden runs on, I'm going to get us right back in it, because it was working before. | ||
| Now he's president, and he didn't get back in it. | ||
| And so now we're talking about, you know, regime change is on the table again with Iran. | ||
| We might have a war with Iran. | ||
| All because Biden didn't want to hop back in this deal. | ||
| I mean, Trump is primarily to blame because he pulled out of it, but then Biden said he was going to put us back in. | ||
| He didn't put us back in it. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| So that's one thing he did, which I hate. | ||
| Afghanistan. | ||
| I gave him credit earlier for pulling the troops out of Afghanistan, but the thing that he's doing now is horrendous because he is sanctioning Afghanistan and keeping billions of dollars of their money from their central bank. | ||
| We've just stole it and we're holding it. | ||
| The U.S. is holding it. | ||
| And, of course, the reason he's doing that is because he doesn't want the Republicans to hit him and say, if he releases that money, then they're going to say, oh, Biden's funding the Taliban. | ||
| And so he doesn't do it but as a result of this you have like women and children and civilians are starving. | ||
| I mean the country is like in famine right now as a result of this. | ||
| Is there any evidence that if they release that money that would change? | ||
| That those people wouldn't be starving? | ||
| Well if you if you yes if the country had more money you would have less food insecurity you'd have people who can eat but it is true that of course the Taliban is the government there so they would get some of that money. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| How much they would it would be up to their discretion. | ||
| I mean, I'm not sure exactly how it would work with the central bank versus the government and exactly where all the money would go, but it seems to be the general consensus that, you know, by not releasing that money, you are sort of sentencing people to starve. | ||
| So that's a huge problem. | ||
| He's backing Saudi Arabia's genocide in Yemen. | ||
| That's another huge problem. | ||
| He said, oh, we're not going to give them offensive weapons anymore, but we're still giving them billions of dollars in weapons, and they're using it on civilians in Yemen. | ||
| So that's another huge thing. | ||
| So that was it see this is unfortunately this is what happens a lot of the time with Democrats is like He looks at Trump who just openly supported Saudi Arabia butchering Yemen and was like oh that's not right We're better people than that so we're no no longer gonna sell them offensive weapons But then he just keeps doing the exact same policy and Pretending like no no we're not using this for them to bomb children and mosques and schools and hospitals But that is exactly what they're using it for so it really is just a sleight of hand trick It's the same policy what what categorizes something as an offensive weapon I mean, | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's the thing, right? | ||
| It's still the exact same, you know, weapon shipments that we had before. | ||
| But they're just pretending like, no, Saudi Arabia is using this to be defensive against Yemen. | ||
| It's just a lie, is what it is. | ||
| So that's another example of something he's doing this terrible. | ||
| Also, he, you know, he got a lot of... | ||
| Trump got a lot of shit for... | ||
| The border and, you know, trying to build a border wall and a policy called Remain in Mexico and a policy called Title 42, which is the pandemic policy where if somebody comes in to the country illegally, there's no due process. | ||
| We just ship you right out because we're like, look, to pandemic, you don't get due process. | ||
| So it's an emergency. | ||
| We're going to ship you out. | ||
| Biden actually continued Title 42. He continued Remain in Mexico, and he's filling in some of the gaps in Trump's border wall. | ||
| So he's doing basically a very similar policy when it comes to the border as Trump did. | ||
| So that's another thing that he gets he gets a lot of crap for. | ||
| He picked somebody who's like an anti-social security extremist to oversee the program. | ||
| That's a problem because they might try to cut it, they might try to privatize it. | ||
| I mean, to be fair to him, he's actually standing kind of strong on it now because there's this debt ceiling negotiation that's going to come up soon. | ||
| And Biden is saying, we're not going to cut a penny from social security, but questionable staffing choices that he made, which... | ||
| Many people think he might actually negotiate and do some cuts to Social Security. | ||
| He hiked Medicare prices. | ||
| He sent US troops to Somalia. | ||
| He bombed Syria. | ||
| So there's a number of things that he's done that are just like, you know, I'm a standard American president. | ||
| I go in line with the empire. | ||
| I go in line with the corporatocracy. | ||
| But there are some things he did that are actually genuinely surprising to me, because I expected nothing from this guy. | ||
| I mean, this is the guy who, when he ran, he said, nothing will fundamentally change to a room full of, like, wealthy donors. | ||
| You remember that? | ||
| There was a big story at the time where he was basically saying, you're good, like, we're not going to change too much. | ||
| But under him, we have, for the first time in my life, we've actually onshored 350,000 jobs. | ||
| He's done a couple policies with... | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| So, throughout my life, we've been offshoring jobs, which is like our manufacturing jobs, our factory jobs get shipped overseas to China, India, Bangladesh, places like that. | ||
| And for the first time in my life, it's going the reverse way. | ||
| There's a lot of jobs coming back here. | ||
| What's the reason for that? | ||
| So, one of the reasons is, because of the pandemic, people realized, oh, these global supply chains are kind of a problem. | ||
| Because when you have a pandemic, if China, for example, just shuts down their country and says no economic activity and we're reliant on them for a significant percentage of the goods that we have here, it's actually a national security issue to be so reliant on them for the supply chain. | ||
| And so they're like, we need to start building more stuff here. | ||
| And so it's one of the few good things that he's been doing through. | ||
| 350,000 jobs have been onshore. | ||
| To put that in perspective, under Obama we lost jobs, and under Trump we lost about 200,000 jobs for his four years in office. | ||
| This is the first time in my life it's going the other way. | ||
| And it took a pandemic for them to realize, like, oh, maybe global supply chains are kind of a problem. | ||
| What did they do in order to get that to happen? | ||
| What policies were put into place? | ||
| What they do is tax credits, for example, and subsidies. | ||
| You penalize companies for shipping the jobs overseas, or you incentivize them to keep it here. | ||
| Some of the things that they're doing here are like, Microchip factories, electric car factories. | ||
| There's a whole bunch of, like, burgeoning industries. | ||
| And it's in places where it used to be, like, you know, the heart of American car manufacturing. | ||
| They're bringing a lot of the jobs back to those areas. | ||
| Which is why it was interesting. | ||
| In the midterms, you saw the Democrats did pretty well in the Rust Belt. | ||
| And that was trending the other direction for a very long time, but it stopped and went back towards the Democrats. | ||
| And I think the main reason why is because Biden was doing those policies. | ||
| And so people see that there's more job creation there and there's factories that are coming back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| So that was one of the good things he did. | ||
| He also lowered drug prices for seniors in the Inflation Reduction Act. | ||
| Now, that's got an interesting backstory to it, man, because Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are the two corrupt Democratic senators, the most corrupt Democratic senators. | ||
| Corrupt how so? | ||
| They take the most big money from Pharma, from Wall Street. | ||
| I mean, they're swimming in donor cash. | ||
| And we were this close to getting lower prescription drug prices for everybody. | ||
| But, Kyrsten Sinema took a million dollars from Pharma at the last minute, and she said, I'm not in favor of lowering everybody's drug prices. | ||
| Let's only do certain drugs, and let's only do it for seniors. | ||
| And so that's the policy we ended up getting in the Inflation Reduction Act. | ||
| And when you say she took a million dollars, it's a million dollars in donations to her campaign? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Campaign contributions, yeah. | ||
| I know. | ||
| When people learn about how this stuff works, it's mind-boggling. | ||
| But yeah, we were this close, dude, to getting lower prescription drug price for everybody. | ||
| Didn't she decide to become an independent now? | ||
| She did, yes. | ||
| And she's in no poll is she winning in a theoretical Arizona race between a standard Democrat and a standard Republican. | ||
| In every poll now, she's like, oh, I'm an independent. | ||
| She might run again. | ||
| She might not. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| But she would come in third, no matter what. | ||
| So what gives someone the incentive to become independent? | ||
| I mean, my theory on this, and I don't know for sure, I don't think anybody really knows for sure, my theory on this is John McCain was viewed as like a maverick Republican. | ||
| He was a Republican who sometimes would buck Republican orthodoxy and vote with the Democrats, right? | ||
| Like he voted to keep Obamacare when if he went the other way, Obamacare would have been gone under Trump. | ||
| Remember that? | ||
| He gave a thumbs up and it was like, oh, see, he's being a maverick or whatever. | ||
| I think she's doing the same thing in the other direction. | ||
| So she's always been a Democrat. | ||
| But she's been a very, very conservative Democrat. | ||
| She votes like 50% of the time with Republicans. | ||
| And so she was trying to create that maverick brand in Arizona, like John McCain. | ||
| McCain was like a liberal Republican. | ||
| She was trying to be a conservative Democrat. | ||
| But ultimately, look, it's all about... | ||
| When I look at Kyrsten Sinema, it's all about the money, right? | ||
| Like, she's going to sell out to whoever the highest bidder is, and Pharma gave her all that money, and so she sold out to them, and she cloaks it in like, I'm being principled, but it's not about that. | ||
| It says, Kristen Sinema formally enrolls in the party of Wall Street and Big Pharma. | ||
| The senator's switch to independent aligns her more completely with the special interests that she has so diligently represented since coming to the chamber. | ||
| Trying to get paid. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Another thing, so Biden announced pretty recently that he's going to pardon federal weed offenders for simple possession. | ||
| Now, nobody's actually in prison. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| But there were 4,000 people who now are going to wipe that from their record so they'll be able to get a fucking job, which is nice. | ||
| And then also he said they're going to likely deschedule it or reduce the scheduling. | ||
| So right now it's Schedule 1, and you know how absurd that is. | ||
| So they're either going to take it off that list or they're going to make it like Schedule 2 or 3. Yeah. | ||
| So they're gonna do that. | ||
| When is that supposed to take place? | ||
| Well, he announced the process where they're gonna, you know, do some sort of, I don't know, some investigation into it, and then at the end you're gonna have one of the heads of the agencies come out and give his conclusion, but it's pretty well established. | ||
| It's either gonna be off the schedule list or it's gonna be reduced. | ||
| It's the most preposterous thing we have going. | ||
| Beyond stupid. | ||
| Beyond stupid. | ||
| I mean, you have so many states in the country where it is legal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Canadian province experiments with decriminalizing hard drugs. | ||
| Yeah, I have seen that. | ||
| That's British Columbia. | ||
| Yeah, so up to 2.5 grams of such drugs, as well as methamphetamine, fentanyl, and morphine. | ||
| Canada's federal government granted the request by the West Coast province to try out the three-year experiment. | ||
| Well, the state of Oregon decriminalized everything. | ||
| Like, you can get steroids, mushrooms, LSD, everything's decriminalized. | ||
| I think that's the right thing to do. | ||
| I think it's the right thing to do, too. | ||
| It's just trying to sell that to people that are terrified of their children doing drugs is what's weird about it. | ||
| Like, the idea that a grown adult should be prohibited from using something that Other grown adults disagree with. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| As long as you can drink alcohol and take prescription medication that can kill you, like, why are we telling people what they can and can't do with their body? | ||
| Yeah, I mean... | ||
| Especially when there's evidence. | ||
| Things like marijuana, for example, or psilocybin, which has tremendous therapeutic benefits to people with PTSD, soldiers, people that are dying, that, you know, like, end-of-life anxiety and... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| So I'm sure you've seen the numbers on fentanyl deaths. | ||
| It's like we have 100,000 overdoses a year now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think even one year was maybe 110,000. | ||
| And what's interesting about that is the only reason that's happening is because we did that crackdown on the pain pills because about 30,000 people were dying every year from the pain pills. | ||
| And so they said, oh my God, this is a crisis. | ||
| We got to stop it. | ||
| So they cracked down on those pain pills. | ||
| Doctors are less able to prescribe that. | ||
| And then those people who were on the pills decided, now I got to go to the black market and get heroin. | ||
| And some of that heroin is laced with fentanyl, and that's what's leading to people dying. | ||
| So you take this thing where people mean well, it's like they want, oh, I want to help the addicts, we got to get them off this stuff, let's ban it, let's crack down. | ||
| But the unintended consequence of that was, now fentanyl is the killer, and it's an even worse killer. | ||
| And so, generally what happens is, when you do, when you legalize, tax, and regulate, or at the very least decriminalize, it's just healthier for everybody all around. | ||
| You know, you can have better standards, better guidelines, I mean, we've talked about this before, but during Prohibition, you had people dying from a bad batch of alcohol. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because it was illegal and somebody was making it in their fucking bathtub and cutting it with some shit that could kill you. | ||
| Right, which is what we're having right now. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| It's brought in by the cartels. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| That's the issue with that fentanyl. | ||
| So then we're propping up this incredible illegal business in Mexico, which is, you know, getting them... | ||
| immense power and then you're seeing these wars that are going on with the cartels in Mexico. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| I saw your podcast with Peter Zihon where he was talking about how actually if you look at El Chapo he had consolidated power and he was the leader and then we did this what's called the decapitation strategy you take out the leader and then the thought is oh maybe the rest of the organization will crumble but what happened is you took out the leader and then you had people warring in the streets to determine who the next leader was going to be. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And so it got way worse. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, I mean, look, the answer is legalize, tax, and regulate. | ||
| Put all the cartels out of business if you do that. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Just put them out of business. | ||
| Make it so that, you know, it's all official, reputable companies that if there's a problem, you go to court and settle it. | ||
| You don't have a shootout in the street. | ||
| Yeah, but I mean, making cocaine legal in this country. | ||
| Would be a huge leap. | ||
| It'd be a really scary thing. | ||
| A politician would be suicidal to say cocaine should be legal. | ||
| They'd be like, what the fuck are you talking about? | ||
| How many kids are dying from drug overdoses? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, look, it's a crisis of imagination, right? | ||
| Because there was a time when, like, everything was legal. | ||
| Like, the first drug laws came late in our history. | ||
| And now we think of it as like, well, duh, we have the drug laws, but it's not a duh. | ||
| The big Schedule 1 drug push was in 1970, and that was a response to the psychedelic movement in the 1960s. | ||
| Did you ever see that quote from one of Nixon's top officials who said the reason why they did the drug war? | ||
| They said, look, we had enemies in our White House, and our enemies were hippie white people and black people. | ||
| They were never going to vote for us. | ||
| So, what do we do? | ||
| Well, you crack down on what you think is their lifestyle. | ||
| So you criminalize the psychedelic drugs, you criminalize the marijuana, the crack cocaine, and that's how we solved our political problem, is we locked these people up basically. | ||
| A guy admitted it. | ||
| It was out in the open. | ||
| Yeah, it's real obvious what happened. | ||
| And the consequences are horrible. | ||
| You know, it's like the same consequences during Prohibition is exactly what we're experiencing now. | ||
| It's just not organized crime in America, it's more organized crime in Mexico. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But people don't want to see that. | ||
| It's too complex and nuanced an issue for people to say, we're going to legalize all drugs. | ||
| People would go crazy. | ||
| Drugs are bad. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it hinges on that regulation part because it's legalized, tax, and regulate. | ||
| And if you regulate it effectively, what you're doing is you're taking like a safer version of all the different drugs and allowing it on the market. | ||
| Like, I'm not saying you should be able to go to the store and get, you know, fucking crystal meth or crocodile, right? | ||
| These are drugs that by their very nature, the way they're made, like you could rot your teeth out of your mouth with crystal meth. | ||
| Or you take crocodile, which is like poor man's heroin, and your fucking flesh rots off. | ||
| We've seen those. | ||
| Or bath salts. | ||
| People are fucking eating people's faces on bath salts. | ||
| We're not saying legalize that stuff. | ||
| We're saying legalize tax and regulate drugs so you create kind of like a safe alternative that still gives a semblance of that particular high, whether it's an upper or a downer or a hallucinogenic or whatever. | ||
| And then you have a more safer situation. | ||
| I mean, look, there's evidence that these safe injection sites, right? | ||
| People look at that and they go, oh my god, you're incentivizing people to go take fucking heroin. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| Like, what's wrong with you? | ||
| The reality is when you have safe injection sites, you have experts there. | ||
| So nobody's gonna, you're not gonna pass herpes around or pass diseases around. | ||
| Nobody's gonna overdose because they took a bad batch. | ||
| You just have professionals there who say, hey, we can save you if something bad happens. | ||
| And they can test the drugs to make sure they're not fucking tainted. | ||
| So really all those things do is make it safer for people. | ||
| But just the optics of that are like, ugh. | ||
| It seems like you're incentivizing going to take heroin. | ||
| And the places that have done that, like Oregon, are a fucking holy mess. | ||
| That's also part of the problem with decriminalization. | ||
| My understanding was that, so they did it in New York City, I don't know if they're still doing it, but like on the first day they saved like a dozen people's lives. | ||
| You know, and then I think in Portugal they've experimented with stuff like this and they've had some positive results. | ||
| So, I mean, it's tricky, but, you know. | ||
| Yeah, Portugal's done a great job of decriminalizing things. | ||
| I'm on the side of leaning as much as you can towards freedom, but being intelligent with the regulations. | ||
| That's my instinct, usually. | ||
| Well, when you talk to guys like Dr. Carl Hart, have you ever seen? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have. | |
| I've interviewed him. | ||
| He's phenomenal. | ||
| Phenomenal. | ||
| And his perspective is that we have a very distorted perception of what the dangers of a lot of these drugs are in the first place. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's true. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And that we have demonized a lot of these things. | ||
| And, you know, when he first started studying drugs, he was a clinical researcher. | ||
| He was like a straightforward scientist, teetotaler, wasn't doing anything. | ||
| And then he was realizing this is all bullshit and started experimenting personally with these different drugs. | ||
| And like there's some great benefits to that if used responsibly, which he does. | ||
| He did recreational heroin. | ||
| He said that was my favorite one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Still does. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Still does and openly talks about it. | ||
| And he keeps his job. | ||
| He does phenomenal writing. | ||
| And look, the fact of the matter is I think most people who are drug users actually fall in that category. | ||
| I think these stats come right out of his book. | ||
| Like 80% of people who do any drug, it's kind of like a recreational thing where they can do it. | ||
| There are a lot of other factors that are in play where people are dealing with severe mental illness or extreme poverty. | ||
| You mix those things with somebody who's addicted to drugs and it's going to get ugly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Because they're looking for escape. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So. | ||
| But then there's also drugs that could help people get off of these things. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's absolutely illegal, but people have had great benefits in going to Mexico and going to these Ibogaine retreats, and then they come back and they have no problems with any of these drugs. | ||
| Have you ever done that one? | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| Is it a psychedelic one? | ||
| Well, I think it's categorized as a psychedelic, but it's a disassociative, I think. | ||
| Let's look at what is the That's exactly what you just said. | ||
| It's a dissociative psychedelic. | ||
| What it does is, the people that have taken it, let's say Ibogaine is a disassociative psychedelic with, how do you say that word? | ||
| Onearic? | ||
| Onearic? | ||
| Onearic properties that has multiple aforementioned anti-addictive mechanisms, as well as the ability to generate therapeutic psychological insights, suggesting promise in treating alcohol use disorders. | ||
| So the people that I know that have gone over there, my friend Ed Clay went over there because he had a problem with pills. | ||
| I think that What it does to people is it lets them recognize what are the patterns that's | ||
| falling them into this addiction cycle and what is wrong with them. | ||
| What trauma have they experienced when they were younger that's causing them to try to escape? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For a lot of people, I think drugs like that are kind of like psychological resets. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And like you mentioned before, we've seen this. | ||
| There's a whole bunch of studies coming out now with MDMA, with psilocybin, and treating people who have severe PTSD, depression, anxiety, end-of-life concerns. | ||
| You know, you get diagnosed with a terminal illness, and you feel like you don't even have the fucking will to live, and then you take a trip on the right substance, and all of a sudden you feel... | ||
| Hope. | ||
| You feel happy. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And so these things have tremendous benefit. | ||
| But we've had... | ||
| It's a very weird approach that we've had from the top down now for a long time. | ||
| Where it's just viewed as, just say no. | ||
| It's all evil. | ||
| It's all wrong. | ||
| Look, these things are benefits, man. | ||
| I mean, every morning I wake up, I have caffeine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Caffeine's a fucking drug. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Like, people don't think of it like that. | ||
| But it's true. | ||
| You go have a Monster Energy. | ||
| You have a Red Bull. | ||
| You have some alcohol at night. | ||
| Like, you're tweaking your consciousness in various ways. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And it can be an enhancement for sure. | ||
| I do... | ||
| I probably... | ||
| Do better work on my show when I'm on a shitload of caffeine, right? | ||
| Yeah, but then there's people that really enjoy Adderall, which gets slippery. | ||
| I used to like that. | ||
| In college, I used to like that. | ||
| And then as I got older, I tried it again, and I just felt too, like, zippy. | ||
| It was like an uncontrolled high. | ||
| Whereas in the past, it felt like, oh, I feel productive, and I feel like I want to go do stuff. | ||
| But as I got older, it became like, I feel too jittery. | ||
| What do you think changed? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, that's a great question. | ||
| Life circumstances for sure. | ||
| You know, when you're in college and you're going to class and you're fucking off, you know, you don't really have much direction overall, so you probably feel like a nice little kick in the butt with an upper drug is nice. | ||
| But, you know, as you get more established and, you know, more of a workaholic than anything else, it just feels unnecessary. | ||
| You know, I could still do my work and do it well without being, like, basically high on legal cocaine. | ||
| I'm just amazed at how many people are on it. | ||
| It's very common, yeah. | ||
| It's a very common one. | ||
| Really common. | ||
| How much of our culture is fueled by speed? | ||
| It's a lot. | ||
| I mean, I feel like it started probably when I was in college is when it was first getting big. | ||
| But I took it more as like a party thing. | ||
| Like I'd pop an Adderall and go drink. | ||
| And man, you drink a lot when you're on it. | ||
| It's not good. | ||
| I don't recommend it, folks, but you drink a fucking lot when you're on that. | ||
| Yeah, Shane Gillis was talking about that. | ||
| It's a speedball, right? | ||
| You got the upper, you got the downer, and you're balancing. | ||
| But look, that is dangerous. | ||
| When you start mixing stuff, that's when it gets kind of dangerous. | ||
| You ever had Four Loko? | ||
| I don't think I have. | ||
| So that was an interesting one. | ||
| It was like a speedball in a can. | ||
| It's almost like a Monster Energy or a Red Bull mixed with high percentage alcohol. | ||
| Is that still legal? | ||
| No, so they banned the original formula. | ||
| Because the original formula, there were instances of like people fucking having heart attacks and shit. | ||
| You know? | ||
| If you drink two of those suckers, because they came in a big can back in the day. | ||
| You drink two of them. | ||
| Shout out Columbus, Ohio. | ||
| After the beverage was banned in several states, a product reintroduction in December 2010 removed caffeine, taurine, and guarana as ingredients, and the malt beverage is no longer marketed as an energy drink. | ||
| So now they took the... | ||
| So Four Locos still around, but they took out the speed part of it? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And it's different state by state, too, I think. | ||
| I think some states are more lenient, some crack down a little more. | ||
| And yeah, I mean, they had like, what, three, four different uppers in the drink, along with the alcohol? | ||
| You'd get fucked up off of it. | ||
| Dude! | ||
| Oh my god! | ||
| I only had one. | ||
| And I was like, why is everyone talking about this? | ||
| Because I left Columbus where it started. | ||
| It started at Ohio State, and then went off, and then everyone found out how fucked up you got. | ||
| They had four local parties. | ||
| You'd get fucked up so quick. | ||
| Ridiculous. | ||
| Back when I was a car salesman. | ||
| Miserable. | ||
| Fucking miserable. | ||
| I didn't want to fucking sell cars. | ||
| But it's like, you know, I graduated into the worst economy since the fucking Great Depression. | ||
| I graduated into the Great Recession. | ||
| And I was like, alright, I guess I'll go do this. | ||
| I had a political science degree. | ||
| I'm like, what am I fucking doing to sell cars? | ||
| So I go to sell cars. | ||
| And there were some great people. | ||
| I love the people who I worked there with. | ||
| And on a slow day, towards the end of the day, we'd fucking bust out. | ||
| I would drink a four loco at work. | ||
| One of my buddies, Gary, shout out to Gary, if you're still around, man. | ||
| He would have a Foster's. | ||
| He would drink a big Foster's can. | ||
| You know, you go to the grocery store, he got the big Foster's can. | ||
| And you would get fucked up, man. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| Four Loko is back, but this time in China, where it's called Lu's Virginity Liquor. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Imagine that fucking name. | ||
| Imagine the board meeting where they're like, what are we going to call this? | ||
| Lu's Virginity. | ||
| Blackout in a can. | ||
| Wow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow! | |
| While the drinks populated in the U.S. waned after a series of hospitalizations and other incidents, it's now being offered on China's giant online shopping portals, Alibaba and JD.com, where it's sometimes being advertised as blackout in a can. | ||
| Can you order it on Alibaba and get it shipped to America? | ||
| Probably, right? | ||
| I don't see why not. | ||
| I think people can still get it. | ||
| I think you can make it. | ||
| We should have a Four Loko episode. | ||
| Oh, dude. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| It's a strong high. | ||
| We should do a Lose Your Virginity episode. | ||
| We should do that with a Protect Our Parks one day. | ||
| If you guys all drink. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| You guys drink at Four Loko. | ||
| It would be crazy. | ||
| Find out if you can get it. | ||
| It's just strong. | ||
| It was 12%. | ||
| Which is part of what it is. | ||
| Like a beer is maybe five, six, seven if you're going wild. | ||
| Nine if you're in Canada. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| This is almost like shots of liquor. | ||
| And the problem is it tastes fucking good. | ||
| So you can down a can. | ||
| You can down a can and you're like, I like this. | ||
| Oh no. | ||
| And then it hits you later on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh no. | |
| But you like it because it's up down. | ||
| You don't know what you're doing, but you feel good. | ||
| God, calling it Lu's virginity is hilarious. | ||
| Yeah, they're asking to get banned, huh? | ||
| Well, I guess not in China. | ||
| I mean, they probably can get away with stuff like that over there. | ||
| You think so? | ||
| You think it's less regulated with substances? | ||
| I've thought they were... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| Because Trump, and this is Trump, so it could be wrong, but he always says in his speech, like, I asked Xi Jinping, do you have a drug problem here? | ||
| Do you have a drug problem? | ||
| And Xi says, no, no drug problem. | ||
| We kill the dealers. | ||
| And so he adds that in his stump speeches to make the argument, like, we should do that here. | ||
| Kill the dealers. | ||
| Which is hilarious, because he did the First Step Act, which was the opposite of that. | ||
| It gave people a second shot if there was some low-level drug offense. | ||
| And he pardoned Alice. | ||
| It was one of the best things he did. | ||
| He pardoned that poor Alice Johnson lady, this grandma who was involved in some weed sale or something years ago. | ||
| Remember Kim Kardashian went to the White House and was like, you gotta pardon. | ||
| He pardoned her. | ||
| Good on him. | ||
| And now he's out there like, we should kill him. | ||
| Kill the drug dealers. | ||
| Don't you think he's just saying that to rile people up? | ||
| It's hard with him. | ||
| He'll say anything. | ||
| He'll throw it against the wall. | ||
| This is something I wanted to talk to you about. | ||
| Trump vs. | ||
| DeSantis in 2024. Who's the favorite? | ||
| Who do you think wins? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Do you think that happens? | ||
| It seems like they're positioning that, right? | ||
| But wouldn't the ultimate be they combine? | ||
| They combine forces. | ||
| Never gonna do that. | ||
| You don't think so? | ||
| No. | ||
| Trump's ego, he would never team up. | ||
| He's already been shitting on him for the past month. | ||
| Yeah, but he shit on people before and brought them into the fold. | ||
| Think about all the shit that he said to Ted Cruz and all those other people. | ||
| Yeah, but the difference is Ted Cruz cucked himself to Trump. | ||
| So Ted bent the knee after a while. | ||
| And what happened was, that was actually a really interesting story. | ||
| So he went to the RNC and he said, vote your conscience. | ||
| Which basically was like, he wasn't endorsing Trump. | ||
| He was saying, do whatever you want. | ||
| Like, I'm not endorsing him. | ||
| Then he got a phone call from his billionaire donor daddy, Robert Mercer I think his name is. | ||
| And he was like, remember who you work for. | ||
| And so Ted fell in line, and then he was phone banking for Trump with that Weasley face on, like, yeah, vote for Donald Trump. | ||
| And so he fell in line. | ||
| He fell in line. | ||
| And so I don't think... | ||
| DeSantis is not going to do that. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| If he's smart, I don't think he would. | ||
| Look, if you had a straight-up race just Trump versus DeSantis, I actually think DeSantis could win that. | ||
| But the problem for DeSantis is this. | ||
| There's already a bunch of other assholes who nobody cares about who are jumping in the race who are going to get 2%, 3%, and that all comes out of DeSantis' numbers and not Trump's numbers. | ||
| So if you have a race with 10 different Republicans, nine of them are not Donald Trump. | ||
| Nine of them are splitting the non-Donald Trump vote, and there's one Trump who can win with 29% of the vote or something like that. | ||
| Which is likely. | ||
| Nikki Haley, she seems like she's gonna run. | ||
| She's a fucking total donor creation. | ||
| Nobody gives a fuck about her. | ||
| She's been told by bridge people, yeah, you're the one, go ahead. | ||
| She's gonna get destroyed, right? | ||
| But she runs. | ||
| Mike Pompeo, he wants to run. | ||
| John Bolton, he wants... | ||
| Like, all these people are gonna run, and then if you have all of them and DeSantis and Trump, you're handing it over to Trump. | ||
| There are other Republicans who need to get in a room behind closed doors, talk it out, and say, look... | ||
| We all have egos here, but we gotta put it aside. | ||
| And they should dole stuff out. | ||
| DeSantis could say, alright, who wants to be Secretary of State? | ||
| Who wants to be Vice President? | ||
| Let's make a deal so I'm the only one running against him, because that's the only way they're gonna take him down. | ||
| Do you think that's how it goes? | ||
| I don't because they don't have that level of organization. | ||
| And you have a whole bunch of giant egos. | ||
| So I think what's likely is they all run and Trump wins with like 30% of the vote. | ||
| Because, you know, it's first past the post voting. | ||
| If he gets 30% and the closest to him is 21% or whatever the fuck, Trump wins. | ||
| And it's in the primary, so it's all registered Republicans. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| So it's an interesting situation. | ||
| And Crystal and I and Sagar as well, we've been having this debate back and forth. | ||
| Because there was a period there after the midterm loss where, There were a bunch of polls showing DeSantis up comfy on Trump. | ||
| It was like DeSantis by double digits, right? | ||
| And we were having the debate where I was like, no, I think DeSantis is the favorite. | ||
| He is the favorite. | ||
| But now, just recently, new three or four polls came out. | ||
| Trump's back up double digits. | ||
| And so it could be a heavyweight slugfest, but also... | ||
| I don't know if he has the balls to like jump right in and take them on. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Because he is the heir apparent. | ||
| He is like diet Donald Trump in a sense. | ||
| So he might feel like if I just wait till 2028, I could probably win it. | ||
| But his moment is now, right? | ||
| Because in the midterms, the candidates that were most Trumpy were the ones who lost. | ||
| So Carrie Lake, she was denying the election left and right. | ||
| She was one of Trump's favorites. | ||
| She lost. | ||
| Doug Mastriano ran for governor in Pennsylvania. | ||
| He lost, and he was at January 6th. | ||
| He was a big-time election denier. | ||
| Like, all the election deniers, all the ones who really cuddled up to Trump, those are the ones who lost. | ||
| The more, like, old-school Republicans, like Kemp in Georgia, and he's a guy who said to Trump, remember Trump said, find me 11,000 votes after 2020? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's the guy who was like, no, I'm not going to do that. | ||
| And that guy won his election easy in Georgia. | ||
| So, basically, the more non-Trump Republicans did better. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm. | |
| And so, you know, there's a real, real weakness there. | ||
| And he was siloed off on Truth Social for a while. | ||
| He wasn't like, he sort of lost his normie touch a little bit, you know what I mean? | ||
| He was getting too wacky. | ||
| And so DeSantis was the heir apparent, but now things are changing. | ||
| Do you think that Trump comes back to all those social media platforms? | ||
| Like, what is his, I read something about his deal with Truth Social that it might be up soon. | ||
| Oh, if that's true, that's interesting. | ||
| I did read that he's planning on coming back to both Facebook and Twitter. | ||
| I did read that. | ||
| But to your point, yeah, my understanding was he had a deal with truth. | ||
| So the whole value of the company is tied to Trump being on it. | ||
| And so he pulls out of that. | ||
| He's pissing off a lot of people who invested a lot of money in that company, which, you know... | ||
| He's done shit like that in the past, so I don't see why he wouldn't do it now. | ||
| But look, he kind of needs it. | ||
| He needs to be back on Twitter. | ||
| He needs to be back on Facebook. | ||
| Right, because if he's on Twitter, that's where people are going to go. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| It's more accessible. | ||
| I haven't been at True Social. | ||
| Have you? | ||
| No. | ||
| Let's go to True Social and just see what the front page looks like on True Social. | ||
| Because I'm fascinated. | ||
| Because it's one of those neighborhoods that I never go into. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's just... | ||
| Let's see how you guys are living. | ||
| Trump land Twitter. | ||
| You know, that's all it is. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| Click on Learn More. | ||
| Accept. | ||
| They're going to make you sign in. | ||
| Yeah, they're going to make you create an account to do it. | ||
| Make yourself a little account there, Jamie, and we'll wait. | ||
| Use your real email, too. | ||
| I want to see what kind of shit you can do. | ||
| Do whatever you've got to do, but I'm sure you've got some burner emails. | ||
| We all do. | ||
| I'm interested. | ||
| I'm interested to see what they have. | ||
| Because, like, every time they create an alternative platform, it always winds up being a lot of the people that got kicked out of these other platforms for being shitheads, and they overwhelm these things when they say, oh, we're not going to have content moderation. | ||
| And then these people just spam things, and it becomes QAnon and chaos. | ||
| Gab became, like, literal Nazi central, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Oh, Gab was terrible. | ||
| The guy who runs it was, like, openly kind of anti-Semitic and wild. | ||
| So that is what happens, unfortunately. | ||
| You know, they say, hey, we want a free speech alternative, but then it's just the band people go there, and they don't even have the liberals there that they want to dunk on all the time, so it just becomes, like, crazy. | ||
| You know, and by the way, I don't even trust a lot of the numbers coming out of these alternative platforms. | ||
| Like, a lot of it'll say, like, you know, what, X number of re-truths or whatever, or X number of video views. | ||
| Is it a re-truth? | ||
| That's what it's called, a re-truth. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I gotta give my phone number. | ||
| I don't want to do that. | ||
| You don't have a burner phone? | ||
| Not on me. | ||
| They're gonna send me a message. | ||
| Oh, shit, I don't have a burner phone on me either. | ||
| You're not missing much, Joe. | ||
| I want to see! | ||
| When you signed up, by the way, originally... | ||
|
unidentified
|
You need to change your phone number anyway, buddy. | |
| Whatever. | ||
| You were on a waiting list when you signed up originally. | ||
| When they launched it, people would sign up and they'd be like, you're number 8,212 on the waiting list. | ||
| And you had to wait to get in there. | ||
| Why wait? | ||
| I mean, maybe they just didn't have the infrastructure to get the influx of people who were going to sign up to it. | ||
| Yeah, there was a big issue at the beginning. | ||
| I don't know if it's still like that now. | ||
| It's been around for a while. | ||
| But originally, you had to wait to get in. | ||
| Well, there was a lot of talk about people, the progressive people, banning or bailing, rather, on Twitter. | ||
| And they were going to go over to Mastodon. | ||
| Mastodon's complex. | ||
| Yeah, and that was just talk. | ||
| Nobody went anywhere. | ||
| Some people did. | ||
| A few celebrities bailed. | ||
| But they did it, like, with a very virtue-signally way. | ||
| You know, they made this announcement. | ||
| Hey, it's getting gross here. | ||
| You know, I'm leaving. | ||
| Love you all. | ||
| Bye-bye. | ||
| It's not... | ||
| You're not gonna... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, that... | |
| I'm sorry, but Facebook is the place. | ||
| Twitter is the place. | ||
| It just is what it is, right? | ||
| So, it's like... | ||
| But it became the place. | ||
| Yeah, it did over time. | ||
| But now that it is the place, it's hard to imagine. | ||
| I mean, I guess you could kind of argue maybe it'll be like a MySpace situation at some point where these things will go away. | ||
| But, I mean, they're so big and... | ||
| Alright, we're close. | ||
| Oh, we're close. | ||
| Suggested accounts to both. | ||
| Suggested accounts. | ||
| Babylon B, Charlie Kirk, Devin Nunes. | ||
| I debated that guy, by the way, Charlie Kirk. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| How did that go? | ||
| It went well. | ||
| We did a Politicon in like 2018? | ||
| I met him at a gun range once. | ||
| Did you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'll skip for now. | ||
| Yeah, it was a good debate. | ||
| It was a fun debate. | ||
| So let's view the feed. | ||
| So I'm not following anyone. | ||
| Okay, let's see what we got here. | ||
| You're not following anybody. | ||
| I know, so I probably have to follow people. | ||
| No, no, I'm saying it says that. | ||
| You're not following anyone. | ||
| So when you go to the homepage, it doesn't show anything? | ||
| So this basically without anything on it looks like Twitter. | ||
| It looks exactly like Twitter. | ||
| Yeah, this is exactly like Twitter. | ||
| Yeah, they have check marks, but their check marks are red, not blue. | ||
| Ah, of course. | ||
| So you have to follow people in order to... | ||
| Okay, let's click on... | ||
| They're truths instead of... | ||
| Okay, here we go. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Anti-Semitic representative. | ||
| That's such bullshit. | ||
| You remember what she said that they called anti-Semitic? | ||
| No, I do not. | ||
| She was talking about the Israel lobby, and she says, it's all about the Benjamins. | ||
| That's anti-Semitic? | ||
| And they said, that's anti-Semitic, that you said that. | ||
| She's like, I say the same thing about the fucking Saudi lobby. | ||
| It's all about the Benjamins. | ||
| They care about money. | ||
| Donald Trump says, I'm killing everybody in the polls, but Fox News is always able to find an outlier, usually old and non-credible, that makes me look as bad as possible. | ||
| They work with the club for no growth, and losers like Karl Rove and their board member Paul Ryan. | ||
| Globalists all, in any event, we are winning. | ||
| Big MAGA! She doesn't like Fox News now? | ||
| Is that what that says? | ||
| Well, he's always in some sort of battle for ultimate loyalty. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's his game. | ||
| And when people step out of line, he goes after them, and they panic, and then they soften their approach. | ||
| And so it's a very offensive sort of way of dealing with stuff. | ||
| And to this point, it worked. | ||
| But now it's starting to work less. | ||
| Because he's got so many enemies. | ||
| Because so many people were... | ||
| Everybody on Fox News was criticizing him when he lost the election. | ||
| When all of his candidates shit the bed, they were like, you know what? | ||
| Maybe it's time for a new direction. | ||
| And he lost it on them. | ||
| So it was the Bannon trial. | ||
| So there's all these different things you can follow. | ||
| It says there's 58 people talking about it. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| This is a small chat room. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think this is a... | ||
| How many people are actually on True Social? | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| 309 people talking. | ||
| 127 people talking. | ||
| That's not... | ||
| That's not big. | ||
| I mean, look, if anything, props to them for being honest about the numbers, because a lot of these alternative sites just lie. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know Facebook was caught lying about their video views, right? | ||
| This was years ago. | ||
| Really? | ||
| You had whole news channels that went belly up because they bet on Facebook over YouTube, and Facebook just lied about the numbers, and when the advertisers figured that out, they pulled all the fucking money. | ||
| And so you had these people who were like big YouTubers or had their own news sites and then they went to Facebook and then they ended up losing everything. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Because they were rigging the numbers. | ||
| It was a big scandal, yeah. | ||
| But why did they go there exclusively? | ||
| Because they were told that this is the new place. | ||
| Look at the numbers they're getting. | ||
| This is amazing. | ||
| This is where you're going to make most of your money. | ||
| So a lot of them went exclusively over to Facebook. | ||
| But was there a financial incentive to go exclusively to Facebook? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Because it doesn't seem like it makes sense that you wouldn't want to be on both platforms. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's the smart thing to do, right? | ||
| To do both platforms. | ||
| Speaking of, I'm actually on Spotify now. | ||
| Oh, congratulations. | ||
| Shout out Spotify. | ||
| You weren't for a long time? | ||
| No, I was only YouTube for a very long time. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| So are you on video on Spotify as well? | ||
| No. | ||
| I don't even know if they have that option for somebody like me. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Because I didn't have any conversation with anybody at the company or anything. | ||
| We just started posting my show as a podcast on Spotify as well. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know how many video podcasts there are on Spotify now. | ||
| Yeah, that's a good question. | ||
| I mean, I only listen to you and Breaking Points on Spotify anyway. | ||
| And are both of those videos? | ||
| I don't think they have video, no. | ||
| They're just audio. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, how many videos are on Spotify? | ||
| To be honest, I'm not even sure how I would check that. | ||
| I'm trying to think about it right now. | ||
| I'm Googling some stuff, but I'm not sure how you would find a database of that because you kind of just have to check the podcast, I think. | ||
| So you were on iTunes or Apple Podcasts. | ||
| So that's actually the only platform, podcast platform I'm not on. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, somebody had taken my name before me. | ||
| Like, I used to do my show on this little nothing site called Blog Talk Radio, and people would take it from that and then put it on Apple. | ||
| And that account is still there, so I don't have my name on that platform. | ||
| So all the other podcast outlets, I'm there. | ||
| You can't contact them? | ||
| I mean, it's impossible to get in contact with these fucking people. | ||
| We've tried. | ||
| I mean, hey, help me out, anybody out there. | ||
| I would really appreciate that. | ||
| Their website says as of November it's available for most creators in the world in most markets. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| There's a good chance you have access. | ||
| Video podcasts are now available to creators in most markets around the world. | ||
| That means there's a good chance you have access. | ||
| Get started here. | ||
| That's interesting, so we'll figure that out as well. | ||
| Do you know one of the main reasons why video got brought to Spotify? | ||
| You? | ||
| Yeah, but because of Elon Musk smoking weed. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yes, because my manager said, that's a viral moment that you don't get with audio. | ||
| And they were like, oh shit. | ||
| Because, like, you have to see it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was a very big moment. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That kind of a viral moment, you really get more so for video. | ||
| I mean, people like to share video clips. | ||
| You know, video clips, they share them on Twitter and YouTube. | ||
| It kind of has to be video. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I'm way bigger. | ||
| Audio doesn't go viral. | ||
| Way bigger on YouTube than I am on Spotify. | ||
| Well, you've been on there for so long. | ||
| Been on there for a very, very long time, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, the idea of an alternative social media platform is so interesting because it would seem that both with a video platform, like, you know, a new YouTube, that there would be an opening for someone to sort of recreate the success of YouTube. | ||
| And then for something like Twitter, there should be an opening for someone to recreate the success. | ||
| Getting people to commit to posting on a new thing is very hard. | ||
| And in my experience, anything that tries to do like just a copycat of something else, it never really works. | ||
| You need to bring something kind of new. | ||
| Like TikTok, for example, we were talking about that earlier. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's kind of a new medium the way they do with the short videos and it just sort of captured the generation, the younger generation. | ||
| And so if you just do a copy of YouTube or a copy of a podcast, it doesn't usually work. | ||
| It's got to be something a little new, a little different that gets people hooked. | ||
| Yeah, the TikTok thing is fascinating. | ||
| I told you Adam Curry's take on it. | ||
| That he thinks that the reason why they're trying to ban it is that it's competition. | ||
| And that they're killing the game. | ||
| And that that's why these... | ||
| Companies are talking about TikTok being so invasive. | ||
| But I also read an article by a software engineer that back-engineered the TikTok's program. | ||
| And they said, no, this is the most invasive software we've ever looked at in terms of what it does to your computer, how it checks everything you're doing, monitors your keystrokes, listens to your recordings. | ||
| It has access to your microphone. | ||
| Yeah, I think they're both right, honestly. | ||
| I think they both make a very good case. | ||
| The TikTok one's been interesting to me because, like, I see all the arguments that people make, the ones who are like, hey, we gotta ban this thing. | ||
| Because I think it's true. | ||
| The Chinese government's probably data-farming everybody and they have everybody's information. | ||
| But I also just find it kind of weird that there's, like, a specific focus on them because... | ||
| They spy on everything we do on every platform. | ||
| I mean, we had the Patriot Act, which goes all the way back to the War on Terror days, where they're illegally collecting all of our metadata. | ||
| I mean, you had Edward Snowden on the show. | ||
| He could explain this stuff way better than I could explain this stuff. | ||
| So yeah, you have YouTube, Google, I guess, is the parent company. | ||
| So you have Google, you have Twitter, you have all these... | ||
| They all have our data. | ||
| And I'm sure you've had this experience. | ||
| It's gotten creepy. | ||
| Like, there was one time I was talking to Crystal. | ||
| And I mentioned something. | ||
| I never mentioned it before. | ||
| Never Google searched it. | ||
| I think I mentioned the cereal Wheaties or something like that. | ||
| I go to Amazon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I got a fucking recommendation for Wheaties, bro. | |
| I was like... | ||
| What are the odds? | ||
| What are the odds that that's just random? | ||
| Zero? | ||
| Yeah, about zero. | ||
| .0001. | ||
| I'm like, Jesus Christ, that's so invasive. | ||
| Yeah, it is weird because we've talked about that before. | ||
| So many times we mention something and then you get an ad for it. | ||
| And it's like, what is that coincidence? | ||
| Because people want to say it's coincidence, but it can't be. | ||
| So what are they doing? | ||
| Are they just listening to everything you say? | ||
| I mean, Alexa is probably the worst, right? | ||
| People who have Alexa. | ||
| Sneaky little bitch. | ||
| Fucking robot in your house who's spying on your ass. | ||
| All the time. | ||
| Here's a list of the top ten sites based off of daily active or monthly active users, I guess. | ||
| Rank among social media platforms. | ||
| So Facebook is number one, YouTube is number two, and then there's WhatsApp, which is not really a social media app, it's a messaging app. | ||
| Then you have Instagram, WeChat, and then TikTok. | ||
| What is that, man? | ||
| What's MAUs? | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Monthly active users, I believe. | ||
| Oh, come on. | ||
| There's only a million on TikTok? | ||
| That's horseshit. | ||
| I think it's a billion. | ||
| Yeah, it's a thousand million, so a billion. | ||
| I'm so stupid. | ||
| Facebook Messenger. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| 988 million is just below that. | ||
| Doesn't Facebook own all five of these companies? | ||
| Four of these? | ||
| Facebook does not own YouTube. | ||
| Not that one, but WhatsApp, Instagram. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Do they own WeChat? | ||
| Who owns WeChat? | ||
| What is WeChat? | ||
| I don't even know what that is. | ||
| It's the same kind of thing, I believe. | ||
| What's WeChat? | ||
| That's WhatsApp. | ||
| There's a new messaging app called IQ that the UFC is using. | ||
| I saw ads for that. | ||
| I've never heard of that before either. | ||
| I'm too old for this shit. | ||
| Then what am I? I can't keep up. | ||
| I can't keep up with all this stuff. | ||
| So it's... | ||
| It seems China. | ||
| It's a Chinese thing. | ||
| WeChat China. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So it's the WhatsApp of China, right? | ||
| That's the gist of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| A lot of people in other countries use WhatsApp. | ||
| Like, you go to other countries, you talk to people, they go, what's your WhatsApp? | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| I'm like, oh. | ||
| Now, they are encrypted, right? | ||
| Isn't WhatsApp encrypted? | ||
| Yes, it's encrypted. | ||
| And that didn't change recently? | ||
| I feel like maybe that changed? | ||
| I do not know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No? | |
| Okay. | ||
| I rarely use WhatsApp. | ||
| I used to, I don't really use it. | ||
| Yeah, I used to use it, not much anymore. | ||
| That's how I talk to Zuckerberg. | ||
| We WhatsApp each other. | ||
| Because he probably won. | ||
| He's like, hey man, look, FBI's listening, CIA's listening, let's go over here. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| But they should be able to listen to that too, though. | ||
| If they can monitor your keystrokes, you tell me they can't monitor your keystrokes on an encrypted application? | ||
| I mean, my understanding is that encryption was the way to protect yourself from that. | ||
| But I don't know much about this stuff, so you can't take my word for it. | ||
| Same as Signal, it says. | ||
| Every WhatsApp message is protected by the same Signal encryption protocol that secures messages before they leave your device. | ||
| When you message a WhatsApp business account, your message is delivered securely to the destination chosen by the business. | ||
| Yeah, end-to-end encryption. | ||
| End-to-end encryption. | ||
| Okay, so it's basically very similar to Signal, which I use. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's one of the things, Twitter DMs, that's one of the things, you should talk to Elon about that, because it's totally, they can see all of that shit. | ||
| All of it. | ||
| All of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, which is wild. | ||
| Wild. | ||
| Well, not only that, there was a link that I tried to send someone on Twitter DM back during the censorship-heavy days of COVID. I could not send the link. | ||
| They did that with the Hunter Biden article. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You couldn't even DM it. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| You couldn't even DM it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Crazy. | |
| Crazy. | ||
| It's crazy now that we know that it's true. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I mean, they had, like, intelligence officials like, this is Russian disinformation. | ||
| And they knew it was true. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| The whole thing is so wild. | ||
| What a concerted effort to try to suppress a legitimate story by the New York Post, which is one of the oldest newspapers in the country. | ||
| They overreached. | ||
| I mean, that's what led to the scandal. | ||
| If they just did what Zuckerberg did, just algorithmically suppress it... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Nobody would even have known about it. | ||
| Nobody would have said anything. | ||
| People would have complained, but it would have been, you know, in and out of the public consciousness. | ||
| But because they overreach so much, people are like, Jesus fucking Christ, this is crazy. | ||
| This is insane. | ||
| It's such an overreach, and it also really undermines people's confidence in intelligence agencies, unfortunately. | ||
| Oh, dude. | ||
| I mean, be skeptical of everything you hear. | ||
| Like, look, okay. | ||
| When it comes to the FBI, yes, I could point to some things that they've done where it was like, good on you. | ||
| They went after the mafia. | ||
| They went after the Ku Klux Klan. | ||
| Like, they've done some good work, right? | ||
| But at the same time, they also went after Martin Luther King Jr. They sent him a letter that was like, hey man, we know what you're doing. | ||
| We know you're cheating on your wife. | ||
| You probably should just kill yourself. | ||
| Ooh, is that what they said to him? | ||
| Absolutely, yeah. | ||
| They said you should commit suicide. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| The FBI sent a letter saying you should kill yourself? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| Do we have access to that? | ||
| Yeah, I think we can get it now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You've never seen it? | ||
| I don't know if I have. | ||
| Maybe I've forgotten about it. | ||
| So what they do, the FBI, like, they're not ideological in a traditional partisan sense. | ||
| What they are is they're all about protecting the establishment and the status quo. | ||
| So if they feel like a threat is coming from the right, they'll go after the right. | ||
| If they feel like a threat is coming from the left, they'll go after the left. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| So, King, there's only one thing left for you to do. | ||
| You know what it is. | ||
| You have just 34 days in which to do. | ||
| This exact number has been selected for a specific reason. | ||
| It has a definite, practical, significant. | ||
| You are done. | ||
| There is but one way out for you. | ||
| You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bare to the nation. | ||
| Now, they tried to do this to Malcolm X as well, but he lived a squeaky clean life. | ||
| He was not cheating on his wife. | ||
| Look how this is written. | ||
| No person can overcome facts, not even a fraud like yourself. | ||
| Lend your sexually psychotic ear to the enclosure. | ||
| You will find yourself in all your dirt, filth, and evil, evil and moronic talk exposed on the record for all time. | ||
| I repeat, no person can argue successfully against the facts. | ||
| You are finished. | ||
| You will find the record for all time. | ||
| Your filthy, dirty, evil companions. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Male and female! | ||
| Giving expression with you to your hideous abnormalities. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| So this is the 60s. | ||
| And they're not even the worst of the intelligence agencies, Joe. | ||
| The CIA is way worse. | ||
| Have you ever listened to the Blowback podcast? | ||
| No. | ||
| You would love that podcast. | ||
| So they go into the history. | ||
| I think they do one on the Iraq War. | ||
| They give you everything that led up to it, why they did it, what the people were saying to each other behind the scenes, what the motivations were. | ||
| They do it with our war on Cuba, like Bay of Pigs and how we were trying to get rid of Fidel Castro. | ||
| They walk you through all this. | ||
| They do a phenomenal job. | ||
| And basically, I mean, the CIA... Their whole job was like paramilitary for the US government, trying to topple, in this case, Cuba, to put back in a puppet dictator. | ||
| Because the guy who came before Fidel Castro was Batista, and he was a vicious dictator. | ||
| And basically, Cuba was like a gangster mafia state. | ||
| You had, like, famous gangsters had a stake in the casinos over there. | ||
| It was like the playground of the U.S., basically. | ||
| And so people there were terribly exploited. | ||
| That guy was a vicious dictator. | ||
| He was toppled by Fidel Castro. | ||
| And then it was the mission of the CIA for so long. | ||
| We got to get this fucker out of there. | ||
| And it's all the stuff's on the record. | ||
| All the stuff's... | ||
| It's incredible, the stuff that... | ||
| I mean, even today, like, we're doing with Venezuela what they were doing with Cuba back then. | ||
| Where we're trying to overthrow what happened under Trump. | ||
| It was continuing under Biden. | ||
| Now it's actually changing a little bit because Saudi Arabia is acting a fool over their oil and they're not giving us as much as we want. | ||
| And so now you have the U.S. government is sort of slowly opening talks with Maduro. | ||
| Yeah, maybe we can be friends because they got a lot of oil in Venezuela. | ||
| So what happened with Saudi Arabia that this relationship soured? | ||
| I mean, how much of it does anything have to do with the Jamal Khashoggi murder? | ||
| I think a lot of it does, yeah. | ||
| So when Trump was in there, yeah, they did... | ||
| MBS killed Jamal Khashoggi, they chopped him up into little bits and pieces, and Trump didn't even do... | ||
| He didn't even give, like, lip service to doing the right thing. | ||
| He didn't even say, like, don't do that, that's fine. | ||
| He did nothing. | ||
| In fact, he continued sending them weapons and money. | ||
| Didn't he say something like, we do similar things? | ||
| I think that was in context of a different interview when he was talking to Bill O'Reilly before the Super Bowl. | ||
| Anyway, yeah, so Biden, you know, mouthed some of the right things about Jamal Khashoggi. | ||
| And like, I think he said, we're going to make Saudi Arabia the pariah state that it should be. | ||
| He said something like that. | ||
| And when MBS heard that... | ||
| No. | ||
| So he even started talking to Russia. | ||
| He started talking to a lot of our enemies and making deals with Iran. | ||
| No, not Iran. | ||
| They hate Iran. | ||
| He was making deals with Russia behind the scenes. | ||
| And it was just some mild criticism. | ||
| And now we keep going to them in response to the oil markets because with the war in Ukraine, there's a lot of issues with the oil market where it's not doing well. | ||
| And so when we had really high gas prices, Biden went to MBS and was like, you got to help me out here. | ||
| You got to release more barrels of oil per day. | ||
| And he didn't do it. | ||
| He basically said, fuck off. | ||
| And then it was right after that, you saw these articles about how Biden was talking to, or, you know, top U.S. officials were talking to Maduro in Venezuela, trying to get, slowly ease back into some sort of a business relationship with them. | ||
| But it wasn't that long ago, it was just a few years ago, they were trying to overthrow this fucker. | ||
| They were trying to overthrow Maduro. | ||
| Remember, they pretended like the guy Juan Guaido, totally unelected, did not win an election, and we were just pretending, Trump was pretending, like, yeah, that's the president now. | ||
| He's the president. | ||
| It's not Madero. | ||
| This is the real president. | ||
| I'm very ignorant about Venezuela, unfortunately. | ||
| I don't really know exactly what's going on over there. | ||
| Yeah, well, they were so reliant on oil. | ||
| Remember Hugo Chavez was the leader there? | ||
| They were doing okay with their oil, but when we sanctioned them, then they had nothing. | ||
| It became a super poor state, massively high inflation almost overnight because we cracked down on them. | ||
| And so now with Maduro, it's a similar situation, but it looks like maybe relations will change if the situation with Saudi Arabia doesn't work itself out because we'd want to do more oil deals with them. | ||
| And then all of a sudden you'll start seeing articles about like, maybe we had this guy wrong. | ||
| Maybe he wasn't such a human rights abuser. | ||
| How do you keep track of all this shit? | ||
| I mean, I just read... | ||
| It must be overwhelming, though, to have... | ||
| I'm interested in it, you know? | ||
| Yeah, no, I'm sure, but I mean, it must be still overwhelming, just the sheer amount of information that you have to fucking pay attention to. | ||
| I mean, I feel like it's actually very similar to you. | ||
| When you're interested in something, you go down a rabbit hole and you'll read everything about it, and then you know a lot about the topics that you read about. | ||
| And it's just the same thing for me. | ||
| It just happens to be very... | ||
| It was directly involved in politics that I'm interested in. | ||
| You know, and so I'm reading about foreign policy, I'm reading about domestic policy, I'm reading about economics, and, you know, you just... | ||
| Sometimes I'm good and I can remember the facts, other times I need to sort of jot them down when I'm doing my show and hit the points that I know I need to hit, you know what I mean? | ||
| Do you enjoy this as it is, or do you ever plan on going into politics? | ||
| Oh, no, I don't want to go into politics, no. | ||
| I don't want to do that. | ||
| Isn't that wild, though, because you're so interested in politics? | ||
| I mean, I'm interested in following it, learning about it, thinking of solutions, and calling bullshit on the system. | ||
| You know, like, that's what I'm interested in. | ||
| If you actually are in the game, man, it's just a different world. | ||
| I mean, you know, it's dirty. | ||
| I don't even know if somebody like me, because I would come out and say, I'm not taking billionaire money, I'm not taking corporate money, I'm going to raise it all through small dollar donations, and I'm still probably going to only come up with one-tenth the amount of money I would need to even be competitive. | ||
| And then when you add the media into the game too, and their effect, then you're done. | ||
| Because they'll dig up every little thing I've ever said in my life, go through my old tweets, and go through my old YouTube. | ||
| They'll find things, take them out of context, post them, and that's it. | ||
| It's over. | ||
| But you enjoy the commentary aspect of it. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I just find this stuff interesting. | ||
| I like to share the things that I read that I think are interesting. | ||
| Because there's so many things I come across where I'm like... | ||
| Damn, I want people to know about this. | ||
| I think the media, they just go towards the dumbest stories, the most sensational stories, the cheap clicks, the cheap headlines. | ||
| But if I'm reading about the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed, and I'm going through the provisions, I'll see... | ||
| This is a really good fucking provision. | ||
| Nobody's even talking about this. | ||
| Like, people don't even know, like, what just happened. | ||
| Just to give an example, remember when there was this bill called the PACT Act, which was struck down in Congress. | ||
| And the PACT Act was to give healthcare to toxic burn pit victims who are U.S. veterans. | ||
| They voted that down. | ||
| They said, no, we're not going to give health care to these toxic births. | ||
| So what happened was Jon Stewart saw that. | ||
| God bless him. | ||
| He gets out there and he starts doing interviews. | ||
| He starts calling these people out by name like, this motherfucker voted against it and this asshole voted against it and I brought these guys here who are struggling to fucking breathe and they're going to tell you what their situation is. | ||
| And that was an instance of there was so much shame brought about by Jon Stewart going on the crusade that the media actually got whipped into shape and were like, oh shit, we gotta talk about this. | ||
| So Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, they all talked about it. | ||
| And that actually led to change because then they had another vote and it passed. | ||
| And so when I look at that, I think like, yes, I see my role similar to that. | ||
| I'm nowhere near as big as Jon Stewart is, right? | ||
| But that's one of those things where when the story first came out, Nobody's fucking talking about it. | ||
| They just voted down a bill to give healthcare to toxic burn victims who are U.S. veterans. | ||
| Nobody was talking about it. | ||
| And so I look at that and I'm like, our media is broken. | ||
| It is broken. | ||
| If you can't look at that, like, their outrage meter is broken. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| They get outraged at all the weird... | ||
| Like, a comedian makes a joke that... | ||
| Some people are offended by it. | ||
| It's like, oh, let's talk about this for fucking a week. | ||
| Distractions. | ||
| It's just distractions. | ||
| And so I view my job as like, let me tell people the things that I think are actually interesting, that I think they should know, that should be the news of the day, the big story of the day. | ||
| And so that's my role. | ||
| The difference between someone being outraged at a legitimate, important thing versus what's going to get clicks, that's part of the problem, right? | ||
| Because what they're looking for in the media is the things that are going to get the most attention. | ||
| Yeah, I agree, but I also think they're short-sighted. | ||
| Like, I think they sell people short in terms of what is interesting. | ||
| Because if you tell people all the information, the real world is crazy enough. | ||
| The actual things that are going on are crazy enough where they are kind of, like, shocking and interesting. | ||
| But yes, it's easier to get the cheap headlines with cheap topics, and that's what they do. | ||
| They lean into that. | ||
| And also, they have a financial incentive not to talk about the real issues in the system. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because they're the beneficiaries of the system. | ||
| There's so many different things to think about, which is part of the problem. | ||
| If someone has a job, and during that job they're required to use all the resources to benefit the company and they're working on things all day, and then when they're off work, then they're supposed to be paying attention to Venezuela and Jeffrey Epstein and the Twitter files and the this and the that. | ||
| My God, there's so much. | ||
| And then they're getting their news, many people, from one-hour mainstream news broadcast where they do a cursory examination of a few very specific topics. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And I don't blame those people for not knowing about something. | ||
| It's not their fault. | ||
| Like you said, they're working all day. | ||
| They're busy. | ||
| They're just trying to pay the bills. | ||
| And they're just getting fed absolute garbage. | ||
| So I'll give you another example of something I thought was amazing is... | ||
| They did this extended child tax credit about two years or so ago, and that reduced child poverty by 50%. | ||
| 50%. | ||
| And then they let it expire. | ||
| And now it's just gone. | ||
| Stop and think about that. | ||
| We reduced child poverty by 50% like that! | ||
| And nobody stopped and said, well, hold on. | ||
| This kind of implies that child poverty is a choice. | ||
| Like, we made a choice as a nation to keep the child poverty rate what it was, right? | ||
| And so you had this brief moment where they reduced it 50%, and then that just goes away. | ||
| How long was a brief moment for? | ||
| A year? | ||
| You know, it was part of, was it part of the IRA? It was part of one of the COVID relief bills. | ||
| They did the extended child tax credit. | ||
| People were struggling and they said, we'll give you $3,000, I believe the number was, for every child who is six or younger. | ||
| Six or younger or six or older? | ||
| Anyway, one grouping was $3,000. | ||
| The other group was $3,600 per child. | ||
| And that had, it was an amazing impact. | ||
| I mean, you had, there were studies coming out showing that like depression and anxiety were reduced as a direct result of those people who got those payments. | ||
| And this is something that nobody talks about. | ||
| It wasn't a big deal, you know, in the media. | ||
| I've never heard it. | ||
| See, this is what I'm talking about. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I know another great example is you've had Andrew Yang on the podcast before. | ||
| You've talked about UBI before. | ||
| There was a study that came out of Stockton, California. | ||
| There's the mayor in Stockton, California is a guy by the name of Michael Tubbs. | ||
| And he decided to do this UBI pilot program, which is like, okay, I'm going to try to get 500 bucks a month to a group of people and just see what happens. | ||
| See how this changes their lives. | ||
| See what they spend the money on and all that stuff. | ||
| So they did this program, 37% of the money went to food, 22% went to, like, home goods and clothes and shoes and stuff like that. | ||
| 10% went to car costs, and 11% went to utilities. | ||
| Less than 1% actually went to, like, alcohol or fucking off type shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And so this was an example, like, UBI worked and it had the effect of, by the way, it didn't even affect unemployment. | ||
| Unemployment went, excuse me, employment went up. | ||
| Unemployment went down when you do this program. | ||
| Do you think that that's scalable? | ||
| I mean, all the evidence that we have right now is yes. | ||
| There's obviously a tipping point where if you give too much, you might disincentivize people from doing other things. | ||
| Right, so what's the right number? | ||
| That's the question. | ||
| I mean, there are people much smarter than me who will debate that and find the right line. | ||
| And what did they give in Stockton? | ||
| They gave $500 a month. | ||
| No strings attached. | ||
| That's a reasonable amount because you can't live off that. | ||
| It just helped people. | ||
| Employment went up, productivity went up, people self-reported better well-being, lower stress, kept people out of debt. | ||
| Imagine if they scaled that nationwide, what the implications would be, and where would the money come from? | ||
| That's one of the things that I found fascinating about Bernie's ideas, is that Bernie wanted to take a very small percentage of stock trades, You know, these things where they're speculating. | ||
| And it was like less than a cent for each one of them. | ||
| And then that would generate an enormous amount of money because of the amount of stock trades. | ||
| And his argument was it wasn't going to hurt business, but it was going to greatly benefit people. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, we have tremendous body of evidence that redistribution works really well. | ||
| I mean, this is what FDR was about. | ||
| This is what the New Deal was about. | ||
| Yeah, you tax the wealthy a little more. | ||
| Right now, there was a study that came out a few years ago, after the 2017 Trump tax cut bill, 83% of the benefits went to the top 1%. | ||
| And it just, I mean... | ||
| They pretended like it was for the working class, but it wasn't for the working class. | ||
| It was for the wealthy. | ||
| And so now we have billionaires actually pay a lower effective tax rate than a middle class person. | ||
| The effective tax rate for a billionaire is now lower than it is for a middle class person. | ||
| And you can fact check me on that, Jamie. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, in other words, we're doing a regressive tax system. | ||
| It's not even a flat tax. | ||
| Flat tax is when somebody says, like, hey, do like 15% across the board, everybody pays 15%. | ||
| It's not even that. | ||
| It's a working class person pays a higher tax rate than a billionaire does, as a percentage. | ||
| If they did this universal basic income thing, like, say if they kept that number, $500 a month, and they do it across the country, like, what income bracket would receive this? | ||
| It'd be universal. | ||
| So you get $500 to billionaires. | ||
| Yeah, but you're going to tax them more, so it's going to cancel out and then some. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm. | |
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| It's basically an attempt to try to get people who need the money the fucking money. | ||
| That's all it is. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Bill Maher had a good line. | ||
| He's like, I did a study. | ||
| You know what poor people are lacking? | ||
| Money. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| And it's like, yeah, fair enough. | ||
| Yeah, fair enough. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, a lot of people got sour on the idea of universal basic income when they saw how people didn't want to work when they got COVID relief. | ||
| I think that was largely bogus. | ||
| I mean, because look at the unemployment rate right now, right? | ||
| It's like, what, 3.5% or something like that? | ||
| It's like the unemployment rate was relatively stable in this area, but there were all these media articles about like, oh, nobody wants to work because they got one check for $1,400. | ||
| I think there's also a thing that happened to people where their employment was taken away, and then they had to reassess their values and what they wanted to do with their life. | ||
| I think that had a significant impact. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| Because there was a lot of people that were like deep in the grind and thought they were going to be rewarded for it, and then all of a sudden, boom, everything's taken away from them. | ||
| And then like, what the fuck am I doing? | ||
| I want to do something different. | ||
| It was a real wake-up call for a lot of people. | ||
| I think you're right about that. | ||
| And that's why you see a lot of people now like, I don't want to go back to the office. | ||
| If my job wants to make me go back, I'm not going to fucking go back to the office. | ||
| I'm not going to do that. | ||
| RV sales went through the roof during the time of the pandemic. | ||
| Some people were like, hey, I want to travel. | ||
| I'm reassessing. | ||
| And look, it's a good thing. | ||
| There was a poll I read a long time ago. | ||
| Only like 18% of Americans feel engaged when they're at work. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Which is like, dude, less than 20% of the country likes their fucking job. | ||
| This is like a crisis. | ||
| That's so crazy. | ||
| So of course you're going to have depression high, anxiety high, all these issues that are associated with that. | ||
| I mean, you're lucky, I'm lucky, we happen to do things that we really like, but imagine being somebody who doesn't Doesn't like your job? | ||
| Yeah, well, I've been that person in the past. | ||
| Me too, yeah. | ||
| You have too. | ||
| Yeah, it's not a fun existence. | ||
| The difference between the overall happiness of being able to do what you enjoy versus doing something that you have to do, it's immeasurable. | ||
| It's night and day. | ||
| The impact that it has on your psyche, the way you think about life, the way you think about the weekend, the way you think about Monday morning... | ||
| It's just a totally different way of existence. | ||
| And also, it's not like these people that are in that 18% that enjoy their job, like, they suffer more. | ||
| They're more, generally speaking, they're happier, they live better, they have a better possibility for the future, they're enthusiastic about it, whereas the vast majority of those people, That are doing something they don't want to do, they're barely even getting ahead. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| What percentage of people are actually saving money and putting together a nest egg? | ||
| How many people are living check to check? | ||
| Over 70%. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| Over 70%. | ||
| You know, Crystal did a good thing recently. | ||
| There was some study that came out which showed the happiest people, what profession they're in, and the most depressed people, the happiest were farmers. | ||
| Really? | ||
| They were the happiest people and then I believe the least happy were like lawyers, people who like work kind of office jobs. | ||
| Probably massive hours too. | ||
| Yeah, but the theory was like the people who, and I'm forgetting the others that were at the top, but the theory was that like people who are more working with their hands, they're outside, they're actually doing something of value, that those are the people who are happier. | ||
| And that makes sense to me, you know? | ||
| Farmers, that's a fucking hard job. | ||
| It is, yeah. | ||
| And also there's fewer small farmers now. | ||
| It's mostly the big... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Man, that's shocking. | ||
| Farmers. | ||
| I would think it'd be like artists or something. | ||
| Someone who does something that... | ||
| Some artists are tortured, you know? | ||
| Yeah, that's true too, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and that's why they're artists in the first place. | ||
| They have all these emotions and conflicted ideas, and it comes out in their art. | ||
| But you've talked about the impact of nature too. | ||
| You know, like when you're out in nature, and I feel this... | ||
| I get it to a much lesser extent because the thing that I'm doing in nature is not really in nature golf. | ||
| But it is in nature. | ||
| Well, yeah, you're out, the grass is there. | ||
| It's a manipulated nature. | ||
| It is a manipulated nature, but like when I'm out there after I play, I feel fucking great. | ||
| You feel great. | ||
| We were talking about people that are getting cancer from putting golf tees in their mouth. | ||
| Do you know about that? | ||
| I did not know about that. | ||
| That's fucking terrifying. | ||
| Well, you know, I knew a guy who got like severe cancer and he was one of many people in his neighborhood because of runoff from a golf course. | ||
| Because golf courses use so many pesticides and herbicides and that this was getting into the water supply. | ||
| And this guy is like a fake femur. | ||
| He had bone cancer. | ||
| So one of his femurs had to be replaced with like a rod. | ||
| Yeah, heavy fucking shit. | ||
| And, Jamie, weren't you the one who was telling me about it? | ||
| Probably, yeah. | ||
| I'm reading a story on our favorite website, Snopes, that's actually true. | ||
| Whoa! | ||
| About a guy in the Navy who bit off a T, and it almost killed him in like 10 days or something, it says. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| He had an allergic reaction, though, I believe, to the pesticide or fungicide. | ||
| He died 10 days later after a toxic substance had burned the skin from 80% of his body and caused major organs to fail. | ||
| The toxic substance was determined to be an FDA-approved fungicide that had been sprayed on the Army-Navy golf course twice a week. | ||
| Pryor apparently had a hypersensitivity to the chemical used in the fungicide causing a severe allergic reaction. | ||
| That's one, but what I'm hearing about is mouth cancers. | ||
| Yeah, from the T. Yeah, so you're imagining they're spraying all these golf courses to keep them pristine and rolling nice, and then you put it in your mouth because your hands are free. | ||
| I mean, how many things are like that that we don't even think about now, we don't even know about? | ||
| Like, you know, the Monsanto thing. | ||
| What's the name of that? | ||
| Roundup. | ||
| The Roundup stuff. | ||
| There's a lot of evidence that that stuff causes cancer. | ||
| A lot of evidence. | ||
| And there's just a lot of places that are just like, we're just going to not care. | ||
| Well, not only that, have you seen the numbers when they look at people's urine and blood and they test how many people test positive for Roundup? | ||
| It's extraordinary. | ||
| Google that. | ||
| What percentage of people that were tested found Roundup in their body? | ||
| It's a very high number, and a lot of the shills were like, oh, it's a minimal amount of parts per million. | ||
| Parts per million of something that kill you? | ||
| You're not making me comfortable. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, here it goes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| According to the Center for Disease Control Prevention, found that 80% of Americans have glyphosate in their urine. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| The health consequences of the situation are unknown. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Though many scientists insist glyphosate is linked to cancer and other health issues. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's just to kill weeds. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's the byproduct of monocrop agriculture, which is also something that people need to understand how dangerous this is to the topsoil, how dangerous it is to environment, the runoff that gets into streams and rivers. | ||
| And, you know, we had Will Harris from White Oak Pastures on who explained that in depth about how he came to an understanding of the dangers of this stuff. | ||
| converted his industrialized farm to a regenerative farm and it took 20 years to do it. | ||
| Oh my god! | ||
| It's very difficult, very time-consuming. | ||
| He has a lot of money invested in keeping it the way it is. | ||
| And he was a guy that I actually had on the podcast because I saw him On Fox News. | ||
| He was on this mainstream show, and they gave him five minutes, and the guy was trying to hurry him along. | ||
| And Will talks in a very slow and deliberate manner. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Where he picks his words carefully. | ||
| Very interesting guy to talk to. | ||
| Fascinating. | ||
| Really intelligent human. | ||
| And very, I mean, has amazing ethics and character, the way he decided to do this. | ||
| So I talked to him for three hours. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| First of all, I'm happy that Fox actually had him on. | ||
| That's surprising, because normally they take the anti-environmentalist... | ||
| But they had him on the shit on Bill Gates. | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
| Because Bill Gates is buying all the farmlands. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, yeah. | |
| Well, that's fucked up. | ||
| I mean, that's not good. | ||
| I'm not for that. | ||
| No. | ||
| Well, the idea that he is this altruistic person that's only doing these things because he's a philanthropist, that doesn't bide with the profits that he makes from these ventures. | ||
| There's incentives that are other than philanthropy. | ||
| Yeah, he had a phenomenal PR campaign for years, which portrayed him as like, he's the good billionaire, bro. | ||
| He's just looking out for everybody. | ||
| Not only that, but it was funded. | ||
| Like, that PR campaign, when you find out how much money he donated to these major news organizations, those donations were sizable in the hundreds of millions of dollars, which is really wild. | ||
| I know. | ||
| See, that's a big problem, too. | ||
| And this happened with Sam Bankman-Fried, as well. | ||
| There were a bunch of puff pieces written about Sam Bankman-Fried, and come to find out, he donated a lot of money to all these different sites. | ||
| And that's the sort of conflict of interest shit, to come full circle back to what we were talking about before, that's the sort of conflict of interest shit that you're never going to get good, unbiased, fair, objective reporting from an outlet that's funded by... | ||
| I mean, you see a Sunday show, they'll have a commercial for Lockheed Martin or something, and you're like... | ||
| Lockheed Martin? | ||
| And what's the impact of that? | ||
| I mean, I remember I was reading a Politico article one time, and it said at the top, I think it was either funded by, or like, from Lockheed Martin or from Raytheon, and the article was about how, like, we needed to go to war with, I don't know if it was Syria or one of the other countries over there. | ||
| It was like, yeah, we gotta go to war. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I'm more likely to take your opinion seriously if you don't have a financial interest vested in going to fucking war. | ||
| Like, what are we talking about here? | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is insane! | |
| It's insane. | ||
| But how does one take money out of those things? | ||
| How does one take money out of the news? | ||
| Well, that's the thing. | ||
| It's so hard. | ||
| It's so hard. | ||
| I mean, so you could do public funding, sort of like PBS, but even PBS now doesn't, it's not just purely public funding. | ||
| No, no, they have establishment narratives that they promote as well. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And they think they're doing the right thing by promoting those narratives. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They definitely do. | ||
| But I mean, the other way is small dollar donors. | ||
| But again, it's almost like I got kind of lucky and people who started when I started doing what I do, we got kind of lucky because it was more of a meritocratic algorithm in YouTube where, like, we got a little bit of popularity, we got enough of a following so that when they did, you know, crack down, we're still, you know, not as affected as we could be. | ||
| I mean, there are some great YouTubers. | ||
| This guy Mack, good politic guy. | ||
| He does great videos and he just gets crushed by the algorithm. | ||
| If he started when I started, he'd be as big as I am. | ||
| But he didn't. | ||
| He started like two years ago or whatever. | ||
| And he gets no traction. | ||
| And it's all because of YouTube. | ||
| It's not because of him. | ||
| What's his channel? | ||
| GoodPolitikGuy. | ||
| Good politic guy. | ||
| Yes, that's his channel. | ||
| Yeah, he's a good guy. | ||
| We like Mac. | ||
| That's very unfortunate. | ||
| And that brings up the idea, the possibility of an alternative platform that doesn't operate in those same algorithms. | ||
| And I think one of the plans that Elon has for Twitter is to try to incentivize people to publish on Twitter. | ||
| Videos? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Videos and by giving them a larger percentage of the ad revenue and by not hindering them with this sort of complicated algorithm that only favors establishment positions. | ||
| I mean, it'll be interesting to see where that goes and how far he'll get, but like, you know, he said originally like he was against shadow banning and then at some point he said freedom of speech is not freedom of reach and we're gonna like not spread far and wide the stuff that he deems hateful. | ||
| But then the question is like, what is hateful? | ||
| That's the question. | ||
| How do you do that? | ||
| How do you do that? | ||
| Somebody asked him about, hey, are you going to bring Alex Jones back on the platform? | ||
| And he was like, no. | ||
| You know, so it's like, okay, well, I don't think we could rely on one single person to make these decisions. | ||
| These are the sorts of things. | ||
| My whole answer has always been regulate YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, all these big social media companies like their public utilities and expand First Amendment protections. | ||
| So then you actually have law backing up. | ||
| That doesn't mean people could go on there and do direct threats of violence, because direct threats of violence are illegal, right? | ||
| There's still going to be some things where you can't do that. | ||
| But outside of that, Yeah, I'd like to see it. | ||
| Way more free, way more open. | ||
| When it comes to YouTube, I'd love for them to go back to more of a meritocracy of the algorithm where, if you do good, it spreads far and wide. | ||
| And like I said, you may have some instances where a conspiracy video pops off, and that's gonna suck. | ||
| It's going to be messy. | ||
| But at the same time, it's gonna be messy, but that messiness is way better than having some overlords determine, based on their own biases and their own feelings, what they think should spread and what they think shouldn't spread. | ||
| Especially when you know there's clear evidence it's manipulated by money. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Yeah, the idea that a bad idea should be suppressed versus a bad idea should be refuted by better ideas. | ||
| That's really the essence of debate, and that's how we come to an understanding of what's real and what's not. | ||
| And a lot of, I'm sorry, but a lot of people are just lazy. | ||
| Like, I don't, look, I don't think CNN is good at debunking ideas that they dislike. | ||
| I don't think they're good at it. | ||
| And so I think it's sort of like a cheap shortcut to be like, oh, just sort of jerry-rig the algorithm a little bit, and let's get rid of that. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And it's just lazy. | ||
| People who actually care about this stuff, who care about the facts and the information, you need to be able to spread it to new people and debunk things that are incorrect. | ||
| And look, it's hard, right? | ||
| Because a lot of people, if you go down a conspiracy rabbit hole and you really believe it, you know all these little data points and things you could pull out and say, well, what about this? | ||
| And it's hard, but you know what? | ||
| Doesn't matter. | ||
| You still got to get in there. | ||
| You got to have the debate. | ||
| You got to have the conversation. | ||
| And sometimes you'll win. | ||
| Sometimes you'll lose. | ||
| But you got to engage in that because that's the only way you're going to change people. | ||
| One of my favorite things when I go to these like the Politicon events like they used to have, people would come up to me and tell me like, I want to thank you because you took me out of going down a very bad path. | ||
| And that always felt so rewarding to me. | ||
| Because, you know, I treat people like they're people. | ||
| And somebody might be going down a bad path and going towards down that pipeline where they like some alt-right troll or whatever, and then it's like, you know what, I watched you, I thought you were fair in how you debunked it, and you won me over. | ||
| And that's the way to do it. | ||
| That's the only way to do it. | ||
| There's also people that feel alienated, right? | ||
| And then there's a group that sort of accepts them, and so then they become captured by their audience, or captured by the group that they're a part of, and then they say things and lean towards things that this group accepts. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| There's a lot more that goes into this. | ||
| It's just general human psychology that is overlooked. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, and it's like, if you treat people like people, and you meet them where they are, and you say, one of the biggest things is going, hey, you know what, I think on that one you have a point. | ||
| That's a good point. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Right there. | ||
| It's very, very important. | ||
| But, this other thing, here's where I disagree on this other thing, let's talk it out, right? | ||
| And that makes people go, oh. | ||
| At least you're honest, right? | ||
| It's funny, I've always had a love-hate relationship with libertarians, because I love them, they love me on certain issues. | ||
| When it comes to civil liberties, when it comes to war, I love this Kyle guy, man, he's right about everything. | ||
| But then when we get to economics, they totally disagree with me, and they're hardcore, ardent capitalists, and I'm over here advocating for social democracy. | ||
| Ayn Rand. | ||
| Yeah, but it's fair and it's good and it's fun because we'll agree where we agree, we disagree where we disagree, and let's see what happens. | ||
| And so as long as you keep that dialogue going, I guess the only caveat here is when you're dealing with a quote-unquote bad actor. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Somebody who doesn't even believe what they're saying, but they're just saying it. | ||
| That's a little different because then it's like, well, how do you deal with somebody who they're not even having a real conversation? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So that's harder when you deal with that. | ||
| But don't you think that the more people there are like you, the more stuff like that becomes transparent? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I like to think so. | ||
| I think so for discerning people. | ||
| That's my dilemma about conspiracy theories and nonsense, is that I do know that some people get sucked into the QAnon stuff and all the wacky shit, but I don't. | ||
| So, if I don't, why you tell... | ||
| Like, if I don't get sucked into Flat Earth, and I think it's funny if I watch a video, who are we protecting? | ||
| And why are we protecting them in that manner where we're suppressing something that doesn't affect people Who are discerning and intelligent. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like we're infantizing, infantilizing people in a certain way. | ||
| We're protecting them because you're not smart enough to recognize that this is nonsense. | ||
| Or you're not diligent enough to look at the possibility that it's nonsense and look at the alternative perspectives and the arguments against it. | ||
| Yeah, and look, I mean, some percentage of the population, yes, they're gonna end up wherever they're gonna end up, and they're gonna go down some bad rabbit holes, but again, that's the price of freedom. | ||
| The question is, how do we limit that as much as possible in an honest and open way? | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's the question. | ||
| And then there's the question of people that are manipulating these narratives on purpose in order to get people to argue with each other. | ||
| Yeah, I've heard you talk about that many times before. | ||
| Which is fascinating. | ||
| Well, you said the whole... | ||
| What was it? | ||
| The biggest Christian Facebook pages were not even... | ||
| 20 of the top Christian Facebook pages, 19 of them, were run by Torrell Farms. | ||
| That's amazing to me. | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it makes sense, right? | ||
| I mean, why wouldn't you do that? | ||
| If you want to fuck with these people and rile them up and get them to lose their faith in democracy and faith in the system and faith in... | ||
| That's how you do it. | ||
| And then also get them upset about certain things and get them to act and get them to do things. | ||
| Yeah, see, and that's a harder—I don't know how to deal with that problem. | ||
| Like, if I was running Twitter, I wouldn't know how to deal with the problem of, like, total spam, you know what I mean? | ||
| And people doing, like, what you're saying, like, this isn't even a real person, a real thing. | ||
| Like, the whole point is trolling. | ||
| Like, I don't know how to deal with that. | ||
| I always look at a post now when I see people getting angry at things. | ||
| I'm like how many of these people are real people and then you go to their page and you realize they have like five followers or ten followers and all these posts and All these posts are very specific to a narrative and you got a very generic picture of this person like how do I even know this is a human? | ||
| One of the things we learned from the Twitter files, Lee Fong did some great reporting of The Intercept. | ||
| They... | ||
| The U.S. government asked for special status for certain accounts that would push the narrative that they want to push. | ||
| Special status? | ||
| Yeah, so like, again, it all goes back to algorithm. | ||
| Like, we need to put this tweet in front of more people. | ||
| Can you help us get it in front of more people? | ||
| They were asking Twitter to do that. | ||
| And a lot of the stuff was like anti-Iran stuff. | ||
| Yeah, it was pro-Saudi Arabia stuff. | ||
| It was trying to force a narrative that makes it look like it's grassroots. | ||
| There was a whole Saudi bot issue. | ||
| One of the biggest investors in Twitter was a Saudi Arabian. | ||
| I don't know if it still is, but one of the biggest investors was a Saudi Arabian government official, and there was a huge bot problem with pro-Saudi bots. | ||
| The bot thing is so strange because that was one of the main contentions when Elon was buying it. | ||
| When they were saying we have 5% bots. | ||
| And he was like, how did you determine that? | ||
| And I think they determined that by like 100 different pages. | ||
| And they went to 100 people's Twitter pages and they determined that 5% of them. | ||
| Oh, like small sample size type stuff? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| See, I didn't know if he was trying to do that to get a better negotiating position. | ||
| Because he was saying if it's more than X percentage, I'm not going to buy Twitter. | ||
| Like, they made the deal, then he said, only if it's X number or less bots. | ||
| Right, prove it to me. | ||
| Yeah, he said, prove it to me. | ||
| But I think what he was trying to do was like, The number is going to be higher than what you say it is. | ||
| Therefore, give me X amount of a discount. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It could have been a negotiating tactic. | ||
| I'm sure that was part of it. | ||
| It makes sense that it was part of it. | ||
| But also, you would like to know. | ||
| Because we brought up the fact that there was a former FBI analyst who went over Twitter. | ||
| And he said that the number of fake accounts could be as high as 80%. | ||
| 80%? | ||
| Yeah, see if you can find that article again. | ||
| Oh, Jesus Christ. | ||
| That's like we're all talking to ourselves. | ||
| We're all over there. | ||
| There's still, you know, there's millions and millions of people that are on Twitter. | ||
| So out of those millions and millions of people, 20% of them are legitimately human beings. | ||
| But I mean, if you were a government, or you were a corporation, or you were someone that had a vested financial interest in pushing a narrative, it kind of makes sense. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Eight in ten Twitter accounts fake claims top security expert as Musk laughs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If that is true, that is absolutely absurd. | ||
| Yeah, so this is it. | ||
| Dan Woods, head of intelligence at cybersecurity company F5, who spent more than 20 years with the U.S. federal law enforcement and intelligence organizations, told The Australian that more than 80% of Twitter accounts are probably bots, a massive claim. | ||
| As Twitter says, only 5% of its users are bots or spam. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And then Musk tweets, sure sounds like higher than 5%. | ||
| Yeah, while tagging the article. | ||
| If I had to take a guess as to what was fake, I would say between 10% and 20% if I had to guess. | ||
| But that's totally anecdotal. | ||
| It's based off my own personal experience. | ||
| Still a lot. | ||
| And if you weaponize that, you could really shape a narrative and get an argument going and also disincentivize people. | ||
| You could incentivize people to not talk about certain things if they're getting attacked. | ||
| Yeah, that's definitely a real thing. | ||
| I mean, I do find everything's always better face-to-face. | ||
| Always. | ||
| Always. | ||
| Always better face-to-face, even if on paper you guys disagree totally. | ||
| I mean, there are people who agree with you who might shit on you relentlessly if it's just on Twitter or through the computer. | ||
| And there's the real problem of virtue signaling, that people say things specifically to try to garner likes. | ||
| It's like a natural human reward thing. | ||
| Yeah, the holier-than-thou thing. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of that on the left, where people will be like, I'm leftier than thou, and I'm more pure than thou, and I'm the only uncorrupted one in the conversation. | ||
| And it's like, what are we even doing here? | ||
| What is this? | ||
| Yeah, and they see people getting a certain amount of positive attention, so they decide to chip them down and attack them. | ||
| For their positions. | ||
| It's really weird. | ||
| There's so much that's involved in that. | ||
| It's human emotions and incentives and why they do things and what do they really mean by what they're saying and how many people are just objective and they have a healthy understanding of their own biases. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why are they saying what they're saying? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a shit way to communicate. | ||
| Well, I mean, I don't even do it anymore. | ||
| I told you this. | ||
| It's, you know, you helped get me to this position. | ||
| But, you know, back in the day, I think everybody goes through some point on Twitter where they engage and go back and forth. | ||
| After a while, you're like, the fuck am I doing? | ||
| Yeah, I feel like shit. | ||
| Why am I doing this? | ||
| This is so stupid. | ||
| Somebody's saying, you believe X. I know I don't believe X. But I'm arguing with you about what I believe? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| What is that? | ||
| And it could be over nonsense. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| It could be over nothing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's amazing how that affects people psychologically. | ||
| And it's a lot of people go through that. | ||
| Even people, big names, well-known, they'll just be fighting on Twitter all day and it's like, what are you doing? | ||
| And it could be about nothing. | ||
| The other night in the green room, me and Tony Hinchcliffe were fucking with Brian Simpson because Brian Simpson is an Android user. | ||
| And we're joking around about different things. | ||
| I'm like, why do you like it so much? | ||
| And he's explaining, it's customizable, all these things that make sense. | ||
| And I go, do you have a flashlight right here? | ||
| I go, watch this. | ||
| I press a button, I got a flashlight. | ||
| Can you do that? | ||
| And he's like, well, I could have a widget and this. | ||
| I go, no, you don't have that. | ||
| You don't have that. | ||
| I go, do you have a button like that right there where your camera pops up? | ||
| You don't have that, do you? | ||
| And then he's like, oh. | ||
| And then I took a picture of him and then I posted it on Instagram and I said, iPhone for life, Brian Simpson. | ||
| And so immediately he was like, oh man, now the comments, the comments. | ||
| I go, don't read them. | ||
| So he starts reading them. | ||
| And he's engrossed in the Android versus iPhone arguments in the comments. | ||
| And I see him getting obsessed because he's pro-Android. | ||
| So he's like ideologically attached to this idea that Android's a better platform. | ||
| And so he's... | ||
| He's, like, immersed in these arguments. | ||
| And so we were just joking about all night that he's going to be up till 4 o'clock in the morning reading comments about Android and iPhone. | ||
| He might be. | ||
| It's weird because I like the freedom of being able to go on Twitter and these social media outlets and do whatever I want, but at the same time, I know... | ||
| There he is. | ||
| Meanwhile, it's a blurry-ass picture, too. | ||
| It's not even a good picture. | ||
| Well, I took it, like, instantaneously as I... I just wanted to get... | ||
| Because he's looking at his face like... | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But like, so the psychological effects of these online fights, it's gotta be super negative, but like, I don't want to ban the social media platforms, but I do know that we'd all be much happier if we didn't have them, but I believe in the freedom to go on them and use them, but it's like, this is, we're all, fuck. | ||
| I mean, I feel like that says a lot about The way the system works today, right? | ||
| We all know certain things are terrible for us, but it's like, well, I do it. | ||
| How many people feel good after online arguments? | ||
| That's a really good question. | ||
| Some people live for it. | ||
| They live for the fucking, I'm gonna get in there. | ||
| There is a certain personality trait. | ||
| Don't you think there's a certain personality trait with some people where they're just shit stirrers? | ||
| And that's how they get their kicks, right? | ||
| And it's probably a minority, tiny percentage of the population, but some people are all about it. | ||
| And that's where they get their dopamine rush, that's where they get their little serotonin kick. | ||
| Such a fucked up way to live. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Some weird social maladjustment issue from when you were a kid, probably. | ||
| We're just not designed to communicate in text. | ||
| There's so much lost, so much context lost. | ||
| You know, you don't know what the person's thinking and saying. | ||
| You don't know who they are. | ||
| You don't know what their life is like. | ||
| You don't know what their incentive are to say things like that. | ||
| Yeah, reading, that is an issue, right? | ||
| Reading texts and like, just totally misinterpreting the tone of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| You're like, damn, this is a fucking dry-ass response. | ||
| Like, why is this guy not like me? | ||
| What the fuck? | ||
| Well, I love a really subtle troll account. | ||
| There's some really subtle troll accounts that are fucking amazing. | ||
| They're so, just, like, so subtle. | ||
| Yeah, like, it could be real, but it's not. | ||
| I feel like there's a guy, Nick Adams, I want to say his name is, Australian guy, he plays the role of, like, the super MAGA dude, and I'm super convinced it's a troll. | ||
| I'm 100% convinced, but it's right on that line, though, right? | ||
| It's, like, right there! | ||
| Because there are people that are like that. | ||
| That's what's nuts. | ||
| You know, like Tatiana McGrath. | ||
| Yeah, that's been around for a while. | ||
| Andrew Doyle, which is a hilarious guy, who created this super woke, crazy left-wing character that people oftentimes retweet unknowing that it's parody. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I've seen fights. | ||
| Over that. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Somebody says, like, this is a fucking crazy bitch, and then it's like, this is not real. | ||
| Yeah, this isn't real. | ||
| Did you see what happened with this yesterday, Aaron Foster? | ||
| Oh, this was a joke. | ||
| Oh, I know somebody who fell for it. | ||
| I know somebody who fell for it. | ||
| They were telling me about it. | ||
| What did he say? | ||
| He said that the NFL gives them a script before the season, and they go over it, and it's a week-by-week breakdown of what happens. | ||
| Oh, like the games? | ||
| The rig? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, and he went super deep with how rigged it is. | |
| And they were just playing it like it was real. | ||
| The clip went out, and I got sent it by at least a couple people that were like, see, I told you it was fake. | ||
| I'm like, dude, they're joking. | ||
| Aaron Foster, that's hilarious that he did that. | ||
| He's a funny dude, though. | ||
| He went deep with it, too. | ||
| He went, like, really over the top. | ||
| But somebody told me it was real. | ||
| The NFL script. | ||
| People want it to be real. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I will say, though, talking about rigged sports, the NBA, the way the refs act, super suspect. | ||
| Well, we have had evidence. | ||
| Very clear evidence. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That refs do get paid off. | ||
| Gambling stuff. | ||
| And they rig it. | ||
| And, I mean, LeBron James, there was like three or four games in a row. | ||
| Where every single game it was a shit call and they lost as a result of it. | ||
| I was watching the game the other night. | ||
| I forget who they were playing, but they straight up, they hacked his arm when he was going up for a layup. | ||
| They just hacked his arm. | ||
| And the ref didn't blow the whistle. | ||
| And if he made that layup, which he was going to, that was game. | ||
| And so then it went to overtime and the Lakers lost. | ||
| Fucking crazy! | ||
| He doesn't get too emotional on the floor, but after that play, he was livid. | ||
| As a LeBron fan, he gets very emotional all the time. | ||
| Well, that was worse than I ever saw before. | ||
| Right or wrong? | ||
| He laid on the ground for like a minute afterwards. | ||
| He was holding his head like, ah! | ||
| Here's maybe the play, I think. | ||
| They found out that the referee and his family apparently are huge Boston Celtics fans. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| That's a conflict of interest. | ||
| Do they have the slow-mo of it? | ||
| Because on the slow-mo you see he gets hacked. | ||
| His arm gets hacked. | ||
| No slow-mo. | ||
| I mean you can't tell from right here. | ||
| But he does get fouled. | ||
| They didn't call a foul. | ||
| They just said they missed it. | ||
| Which is bad. | ||
| A lot of people are betting on these games. | ||
| They apologized after. | ||
| There's a huge amount of money being bet now. | ||
| That's crazy if the referee had some sort of tie to the Celtics. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Correct. | |
| And that's where going online afterwards could be a problem because you can then find pictures and make it seem like it and you can put a narrative out there and it can get amplified very fast. | ||
| Now everyone just believes this narrative that maybe or maybe not this referee is a Celtics fan and his family is a Celtics fan. | ||
| Well, there's biases like that, and there's gambling, which is even more insidious. | ||
| Yeah, but look, whatever the reasons are for this one, we don't even need to get into the intentions of the refs, because just the plain facts of the matter are, that was a shit call, because of that the Lakers lost the game, and that's bad enough. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| You don't even need to go levels deeper than that to be like, you guys gotta get your shit together. | ||
| For the first time ever, I saw the refs actually apologized. | ||
| They released a statement the day after, and I'm like, I was gonna fuck this one up. | ||
| I've never seen that before. | ||
| And I think that's because it was LeBron. | ||
| Like, they're apologizing because they just fucked over at the king. | ||
| Ooh, wow. | ||
| The next day happened again in the NFL, though. | ||
| There's big controversy, extra plays given, ending didn't happen the way maybe the NFL wanted it to go, so everyone thinks they fucking scripted it. | ||
| Well, people always think fights are fixed. | ||
| Did you ever see the Tyson Fury, Deontay Wilder controversy? | ||
| It's the dumbest controversy. | ||
| But people were convinced that Tyson Fury's gloves weren't attached properly, and that he was punching with gloves that, like, the glove wasn't even attached to his fist. | ||
| He was punching him with the part. | ||
| See, that's not the best example because that's a common thing that happens when you punch someone, your wrist gets bent backwards. | ||
| But what Tyson Fury does, if you understand boxing, this is a common thing, the way he throws punches, he throws punches like this and then he'll throw a hard punch. | ||
| So he's touching you and showing you things and in the process of doing that, if you look at it in slow motion, his hand goes way back and it will even look like the glove's not attached. | ||
| And so he has these really long ass arms and knuckleheads were thinking that His wrists were actually in the wrapped area. | ||
| And so the wrapped area is hard and no padding at all. | ||
| And then he was hitting him with that. | ||
| And Deontay Wilder saw these videos and was like, this guy cheated me, he was hitting me. | ||
| Oh shit, really? | ||
| Yeah, see if you can find the video of it. | ||
| Was this the first or the second fight? | ||
| That they had. | ||
| The second fight. | ||
| Because the first one was close, the second one was not. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Well, what happened in the first fight was Tyson Fury got knocked down and almost knocked out in the 12th round, but then came back to win the round, and the way he won the round was by putting Deontay Wilder on his heels, making him back up. | ||
| And then he realized, I believe, from that round and that approach, that's the way to fight Deontay Wilder. | ||
| Because even though he got knocked down at the beginning of the 12th round, he wound up winning The remainder of the round and even had Deontay hurt at one point in time. | ||
| I think that that is what started it. | ||
| But then in the second fight where he overwhelmingly beat Deontay Wilder, Deontay came up with all these excuses like he was wearing this thing, it was too heavy when he walked out and his water got poisoned. | ||
| And Tyson Fury was cheating. | ||
| It was terrible. | ||
| It was a terrible look from a great fighter. | ||
| Because whether he had people in his ear or whether he just was unsophisticated in his analysis of what happened. | ||
| See if you can find the video where people were using this as an example. | ||
| Because if you look at it in slow motion, it looks like, look, People were thinking, see how his hand is moving back like that? | ||
| But that's normal. | ||
| That is absolutely normal. | ||
| And they were saying that the gloves weren't actually attached and that see how he was like punching him without hitting with the knuckle that he was actually the knuckles were where the wrists were. | ||
| But it's not. | ||
| It's just you're looking at something in slow motion so it looks weird. | ||
| And so the people that were, you know, that thought about conspiracies too much, they thought that that was what was going on. | ||
| You see how his wrists are moving? | ||
| Please explain what is in Tyson Fury's gloves. | ||
| They cheated. | ||
| Bronze Brommer. | ||
| That first fight, I thought Deontay did win. | ||
| I thought that Tyson Fury was down for the count. | ||
| But the second fight, it wasn't even close. | ||
| Well, he didn't win because Tyson Fury got up. | ||
| Wasn't it a 10 count, though? | ||
| The count was long. | ||
| But it's not Tyson Fury's job to get up at the correct 10-second mark while he just got rocked and dropped. | ||
| It's his job to listen to the referee when the referee says 8, 9, and then he gets up at 10. It might have already been 10, but he doesn't know that. | ||
| Yeah, but would a different ref have done it differently? | ||
| Would a different ref say, that's it? | ||
| Possibly. | ||
| Well, here's my take on it. | ||
| It should have been a digital count. | ||
| And that digital count should start. | ||
| It should be very clear and obvious to everybody. | ||
| It shouldn't be up to the referee to decide the pace of the count. | ||
| Another example of that is Mike Tyson versus Buster Douglas. | ||
| When Mike Tyson knocked down Buster Douglas, he knocked him down for more than 10 seconds. | ||
| No shit! | ||
| This video has all four of them synced up. | ||
| And what does it say? | ||
| It just shows the knockdown. | ||
| Oh, see, boom. | ||
| So Mike Tyson drops him. | ||
| Or, excuse me, this is actually... | ||
| They got all of them in there. | ||
| It's all four of them. | ||
| Yeah, it's all four of them. | ||
| So, let's see. | ||
| Eight, nine, ten. | ||
| Buster Douglas is down past ten. | ||
| And then he gets up. | ||
| See? | ||
| And this was argued by Don King after. | ||
| Let's see that again. | ||
| No shit. | ||
| Yeah, so let's see the Douglas one. | ||
| So Tyson hits him, boom, down. | ||
| And now you see the count. | ||
| 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. He's out. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Buster Douglas was out. | ||
| He was out, but it's not his job to know how many seconds are going on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's his job to respond to the referee's count. | ||
| The lack of objectivity, I like your point about using the clock, because the lack of objectivity drives me crazy. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I want to leave as little as possible up to subjective interpretation, you know? | ||
| And so when you get a call egregiously wrong, it's like, you gotta change the rules to make it so you don't. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, they should have a digital count where the whole audience could see. | ||
| Where when the guy goes down, ten seconds starts. | ||
| Nine. | ||
| Eight. | ||
| You should see it. | ||
| Just like that. | ||
| And that's the only way you should do it. | ||
| You should never, because sometimes referees, you go, one! | ||
| Yeah, weird count. | ||
| And then they'll extend the count. | ||
| Has there been any history in fighting of gambling issues? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And is it just old school or is it new also? | ||
| New. | ||
| There's a big controversy in the UFC currently. | ||
| No shit. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| There's one of the coaches, this guy named James Krause, who's a known gambler. | ||
| And he actually has a gambling... | ||
| Was it a Discord server? | ||
| Discord server. | ||
| And one of his fighters, there's a lot of like late money that came in, like strong money against this fighter. | ||
| And the guy, it turns out, had an injury and threw a kick and went down early in the fight and got stopped. | ||
| And then he was suspended. | ||
| The coach is suspended. | ||
| No longer can that coach referee or can he train fighters. | ||
| So anyone who's a UFC fighter who trains at his gym had to leave his gym. | ||
| Yeah, and so it's a real big deal. | ||
| So people were spending, and then the UFC banned gambling for any of its athletes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah, I mean, look. | ||
| I think any of the trainers as well. | ||
| See, that's the interesting thing, because on the one hand, like, I'm in favor of gambling being legal. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, I don't think it should be. | ||
| Illegal. | ||
| But on the other hand, it's like you do introduce a whole new set of problems when it comes to sports because now there's massive incentive to just let's fucking rig this. | ||
| I'll pay you two million dollars to take the fall. | ||
| You want that? | ||
| That's life-changing money. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And then you have a whole other set of issues. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| I don't know how you do it and then you regulate it effectively where you don't have issues like that. | ||
| Or is it just something that we're never going to get rid of, right? | ||
| Is it like crime where nobody can say, oh, let's abolish all crimes. | ||
| It's not possible, right? | ||
| We're always going to deal with some level of crime. | ||
| Is it the same thing for cheating? | ||
| Is there always going to be some level of cheating because of gambling? | ||
| I think there's going to be always people that want to try it. | ||
| But sunlight is the best disinfectant. | ||
| To be able to see it and know what's going on and then penalize those people. | ||
| But there's always been accusations of bad judging and boxing that's related to gambling, related to money, related to bribes. | ||
| I mean, it's been from the beginning of time. | ||
| The mob has always been involved in organized boxing and telling people to take dives. | ||
| It was always a thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Speaking of fighters, I met Boss Rutten last night. | ||
| Yeah, he's the best. | ||
| And you said something a long time ago, and it really stuck out to me after meeting him. | ||
| You said fighters are the nicest fucking people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because there's no degree of insecurity. | ||
| They know they can fuck up anybody, and so they're just sweet. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's exactly all of us. | ||
| Myself, Corin, and Crystal, we were all talking about that guy was so nice. | ||
| Such a nice guy. | ||
| He's the best. | ||
| I love that guy. | ||
| And he moved to Texas, too. | ||
| He's a Texas guy. | ||
| Uh, Corrin was saying he looked up his record. | ||
| He didn't know much about him. | ||
| He looked up his record when we got back to the hotel. | ||
| He was like, we just met the fucking Michael Jordan. | ||
| Of UFC. Well, he's without doubt one of the all-time greats. | ||
| I mean, I don't know if you'd call him the Michael Jordan of the UFC. I think that you'd say that about Jon Jones, maybe. | ||
| But he's without doubt one of the all-time greats. | ||
| I mean, he was a UFC heavyweight champion. | ||
| He was the king of Pancrase. | ||
| He fought in multiple organizations. | ||
| Universally respected one of the the first elite strikers to compete in MMA because in MMA you had these guys that were like really good at one thing or another thing But you know to have a guy like boss who came over who had that Dutch kickboxing style and he was like an intelligent animal That's how he fought just like intelligent marauding berserking guy who just destroyed people he was an amazing amazing fighter So he did the Tyson-style blitzkrieging | ||
| of his opponent? | ||
| Well, he fucked a lot of people up, that's for sure. | ||
| Relentless power. | ||
| And just super hyper-aggressive. | ||
| The Dutch are known for this Muay Thai style, this kickboxing style, and they're some of the greatest fighters in kickboxing history who have come out of Holland. | ||
| Now, you put a guy like that up against a jiu-jitsu expert. | ||
| Well, Bas knows jiu-jitsu. | ||
| He knows jiu-jitsu, too. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, he submits guys, too. | ||
| The thing is, Bas was one of the first guys to incorporate leg locks. | ||
| No, Bas is a very, very well-rounded fighter. | ||
| I mean, he could do everything. | ||
| But when you had to stand with him, you were in deep shit. | ||
| He was just a really good striker. | ||
| So now, does everybody in the UFC know both? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Everybody does now? | ||
| Pretty much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| You still have some specialists that are really good at stand-up, but their vulnerabilities are the ground. | ||
| You know, like Alex Pajera, who is the UFC middleweight champion, is just an elite kickboxer who's learning grappling, but his grappling is not nearly as good as his striking. | ||
| But the problem is every fight starts standing up. | ||
| And so when you're standing up with him, you're dealing with one of the most dangerous human beings on planet Earth. | ||
| And so just trying to get him on the ground is so dangerous. | ||
| You've got to get close to him, you're gonna get hit with a knee or a punch, and he's good at takedown defense. | ||
| But he's not like an elite wrestler. | ||
| He's not the most well-rounded fighter, but he's the UFC champion. | ||
| That's interesting though, because then that sort of undermines the point a little bit that jujitsu is the main thing. | ||
| That's not real anymore. | ||
| No? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I would say the main thing is to be well-rounded. | ||
| And some guys are really good at just being a specialist. | ||
| Like the guy he beat, Israel Adesanya, who was the middleweight champion at the time, is also a specialist. | ||
| He's a specialist in kickboxing. | ||
| So his specialty and Pejera's specialty were the same specialty. | ||
| But Pejera is bigger, and he had knocked Israel out in kickboxing. | ||
| So that was one of the reasons why it was such a highly anticipated fight, was because everybody knew that Stylebender, Israel Adesanya, is one of the greatest strikers in the world. | ||
| So for him to be fighting another guy who's one of the greatest strikers in the world, and a guy who had already knocked him out, everybody anticipated, like, this is going to be a wild encounter. | ||
| I always wonder about size like that. | ||
| You remember Bob Sapp? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| And you remember Butterbean? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Like, I just got the sense, and I don't know anything about fighting, but when I look at it, I just got the sense, like, this guy's just so large that I feel like he wins fights from being large. | ||
| Well, Bob Sapp most certainly won some fights from being large. | ||
| It's not that he didn't have any skills. | ||
| He certainly was skillful, but he was also 375 pounds with abs. | ||
| Just a mountain of a man. | ||
| Yeah, he was a walking pharmaceutical factory. | ||
| And he was also fighting in pride. | ||
| But that's not him at his best, his most fit. | ||
| You gotta see him, Bob Sapp, look at that. | ||
| That's him at his most fit. | ||
| Look at the fucking size of that guy. | ||
| He was so big. | ||
| I mean, he was just enormous and skillful. | ||
| I mean, he wasn't the most skillful guy, but he was very skillful. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| But Mirko Krokop, who only weighed like 250 pounds, knocked him out in a kickboxing fight. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| He broke his eye socket with a straight left hand. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Do you remember Kimbo Slice? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah, Kimbo, when I was in high school, there were these huge street fight videos of Kimbo. | ||
| Yeah, it's the backyard fights. | ||
| Kimbo, fuck somebody up, bro. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's watch this. | |
| Those were crazy. | ||
| Those were crazy, those backyard fights. | ||
| And then he did the UFC for a little bit, right? | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| Was he successful? | ||
| Yeah, he fought in the Ultimate Fighter. | ||
| He did pretty well. | ||
| But he was a guy that was really lacking grappling. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And by the time he got to the UFC, he already had fucked up knees. | ||
| It was hard for him to get better at grappling. | ||
| And he wound up being a big fighter in this organization called Elite XC that they were doing for a while. | ||
| Until he fought a really good fighter. | ||
| He fought this guy named Seth Petruzzelli. | ||
| And he was supposed to be fighting Ken Shamrock. | ||
| It's kind of a funny situation. | ||
| Shamrock apparently cut himself accidentally, like the day of the fight, something happened. | ||
| I forget what it was, but pulled out of the fight. | ||
| And so they had to fight. | ||
| Kimbo was the star. | ||
| And so they had this guy, Seth Prezzelli, take Kimbo's place. | ||
| Take Ken Shamrock's place. | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| Take Ken Shamrock's Vice to fight Kimbo. | ||
| I found out about it in the green room of the punchline. | ||
| I had just got off stage in Atlanta, and we were watching it on the screen, and I called it right away. | ||
| I go, oh my god, Seth Petruzzelli's gonna fuck him up. | ||
| And so it's a six-second knockout. | ||
| So it's me, and there's a video of me backstage going... | ||
| Seth, this is a terrible fight for Kimball Slice. | ||
| Seth Petruzzelli is going to fuck him up. | ||
| Watch. | ||
| And then Seth Petruzzelli winds up knocking him out in six seconds. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And like I told you. | ||
| See, that shows the difference between somebody with a lot of knowledge about it versus somebody like me. | ||
| Slice, this is a last minute replacement. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I got to think Seth Petruzzelli is going to fuck him up. | |
| If I'm wrong, you'll never see this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So here's... | |
| This is a bad motherfucker, by the way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I just think Seth Petruzzelli is going to fuck him up. | |
| This is the beginning of the fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh! Oh! | |
| Oh! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh! | |
| What'd I say? | ||
| Holy shit! | ||
| Yeah, so that was one of those things where I was like, oh, there's a difference between a backyard brawler and an elite MMA fighter. | ||
| The difference is pretty stark. | ||
| Yeah, because me and my buddies, you watch those street fights, and you're like, bro, nobody can beat this guy up. | ||
| This guy's a monster. | ||
| That's how he looks like. | ||
| A real fighter. | ||
| And that's somebody who's just more highly trained, has a better skill set. | ||
| Yeah, so he had a cut. | ||
| So he sustained a cut from a headbutt during a light workout. | ||
| Sometime within the last 24 hours. | ||
| In an interview on CBS, Ken Shermock said the cut required six stitches. | ||
| He said, I was warming up, getting loose, and caught a head and didn't think much of it. | ||
| So I must have head-butted. | ||
| Next thing I know, a couple of drops are dripping from my head. | ||
| He said he went to CBS, went to look to hopefully glue it together or something, but it needed six stitches. | ||
| We were trying to figure out a way to do this, but we came down here and the commission said we weren't going to let me fight. | ||
| Now, Ken Shamrock was an actual fighter, but he also was in probably WWF back in the day, not even WWE. Yeah, and then for a guy like Kimbo, I don't know if he ever did that kind of wrestling, but he should have. | ||
| He would have been huge, right? | ||
| He would have been huge. | ||
| Did he do it at all? | ||
| Jamie, did he do that? | ||
| That article I pulled up said there was talks of him going to it. | ||
| He wound up dying, unfortunately. | ||
| He was a great guy. | ||
| He was young, right? | ||
| He wasn't old. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did he die of a heart attack? | ||
| I forget. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Something along those lines. | |
| Unfortunate. | ||
| Great guy, though. | ||
| And what a personality. | ||
| And, you know, had the balls to fight in the UFC. I mean, took a chance and, you know, decided, like, the UFC said, well, we'll take you in, but we want you to go through the ultimate fighter, which is their proving ground. | ||
| So they have, you know, these guys live in a house together and fight. | ||
| And he won that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, no, he didn't win. | ||
| Oh, he didn't win it? | ||
| No, he wound up losing to Big Country, this guy Roy Nelson, who took him down, got on top of him, put him in a crucifix, and just punched him in the face until the referee stopped it. | ||
| No shit. | ||
| His grappling wasn't up to par. | ||
| But that's, you know, specialist stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Before we wrap up, do you want to... | ||
| You want to talk a little bit about DeSantis? | ||
| Because I know you're kind of a fan of him, right? | ||
| Well, sure. | ||
| I'm kind of a fan of what he did with COVID. I'm kind of a fan that he looked at the reality of who the disease was hurting, and he said, we need to protect our vulnerable people, but we don't want to destroy our economy. | ||
| And he allowed people to make their own choices, and it turned out to be correct. | ||
| Now, what's interesting, I don't know if you saw this the other day, but Trump started going after DeSantis on COVID. Yes. | ||
| And he was saying, like, bro, we shut down the beaches, bro. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| Which is kind of funny. | ||
| Trump was involved in, at least partially, shutting down the country, in a sense. | ||
| So he goes after DeSantis over it. | ||
| Well, you know, he's playing politics, you know? | ||
| Yeah, so that's your big thing that you like about him, is he was a little more live and let live on the COVID stuff. | ||
| Well, he didn't take away people's freedom. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I felt like there was a lot of people that were overreaching. | ||
| Well, certainly, you were in LA at the time, right? | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| That was my response, because LA was horrific in their overreach. | ||
| Well, you said they've even banned outdoor dining. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| For no reason. | ||
| When there was already no evidence. | ||
| No evidence. | ||
| And my friend who worked for the state, who worked in the, well, it's actually my friend's brother, who worked for the state in their COVID, you know, whatever the fuck it was, whatever they called the organization, where they were determining what the laws were. | ||
| He brought up, like, why are we banning outdoor dining? | ||
| There's no evidence that shows that it's transmitted that way. | ||
| And the woman who he was working with said, it's for the optics. | ||
| Shutting down all these businesses in a time where they were already struggling. | ||
| I mean, California, or I'm sure San Francisco as well, but LA lost something in the neighborhood of 75% of their restaurants during this time. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then Newsom was caught at that restaurant at the same time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They said he wasn't even outdoor dining. | ||
| He was indoor dining. | ||
| None of those people lost any money by shutting people's businesses down. | ||
| That's part of the problem, is that their financial situation was unaffected by these decisions that they made. | ||
| And these decisions that they made, it was the first time in my life where I realized how important it is what your mayor and your government do. | ||
| And when you have a government and a mayor and a governor that can decide to shut businesses down arbitrarily, gyms, the places where people can be the most healthy, they decided to do these things that radically affected people's lives and it turned out they were wrong. | ||
| And that's what I liked about DeSantis, that he looked at when they opened up the state and he was being roundly criticized, he said, we have to protect our most vulnerable, we have to protect our elderly, we have to get them vaccines, we've got to do this, but everybody else, you should be able to make your own decisions. | ||
| Yeah, I definitely understand that aspect of it, because when the data came in on how different states were affected, it seemed to be the case that states that were a little bit more lax with those sorts of things fared just the same as the ones that were really cracking down hard. | ||
| But they didn't fare as bad economically. | ||
| They did much better economically in those other states. | ||
| Yeah, and I mean, I also, to his credit, he did the... | ||
| Monoclonal antibodies, like, free little clinics. | ||
| I gotta pee again, unfortunately. | ||
| Okay, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We'll continue this. | |
| One more thing, and then we'll wrap this up. | ||
| Alright, you got it. | ||
| We're already, like, three and a half hours in, right? | ||
| Better? | ||
| Yes! | ||
| It's good to be hydrated, but it's bad to have to pee when you're doing podcasts. | ||
| I'm proud of myself that I peed less than Joe Rogan in the podcast, and you're the expert. | ||
| You're the bladder. | ||
| Person. | ||
| Yeah, well, I did my blood work recently and I found out I was dehydrated. | ||
| So you gotta drink more water. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So I've been drinking a shitload of water. | ||
| Yeah, I feel like that's actually common that people don't drink as much as they should. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's kind of common. | |
| Generally, I'm good about it, but this one time where I got my blood work done, I just left. | ||
| I didn't even know I was going to get my blood work done that day, so I left from the sauna and went there, which I think probably affected it. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| No doubt about that. | ||
| But still, it's enough to me to go, well, I didn't even know that I was dehydrated. | ||
| All right, I gotta up my... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, no, that's for sure. | ||
| Right thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Anyway. | |
| DeSantis. | ||
| So, because I know you were also a fan of Bernie. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And they're like polar opposites in terms of the rest of their policies. | ||
| Well, I'm a fan of him for different reasons. | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| But I know you said that you thought he would make a good president. | ||
| And there's a bunch of things about him that I think would probably change your opinion on it. | ||
| Like, for example, he thinks weed should stay illegal because it smells bad. | ||
| Is that really his opinion, that it smells bad? | ||
| Does he not know about edibles? | ||
| He said it smells, quote, putrid, and he wants it to stay banned because of that. | ||
| Oh, that's hilarious. | ||
| Is that really his rationalization? | ||
| Jamie, if you want, you can pull that up. | ||
| Yeah, that's what it says here, but it's legal in Florida, or medically. | ||
| It says marijuana should remain criminalized because of its putrid odor. | ||
| Polling compiled by the University of North Florida showed that most Floridians want the adult use of marijuana to be legal in the Sunshine State. | ||
| That's certainly not the case. | ||
| In fact, under state law, the possession of up to 20 grams of cannabis is punished by $1,000 fine and up to a year in prison. | ||
| Possession of greater amounts is a felony. | ||
| So what is he said? | ||
| What I don't like about is if you go to some of these places that have done it, the stench when you're out there, I mean, it smells so putrid. | ||
| I want people to be able to breathe freely. | ||
| Well, that's silly. | ||
| But that's also like, I want to know the context. | ||
| I mean, that's a quote. | ||
| The smell of marijuana. | ||
| DeSantis demurs on marijuana legalization but can't stand the dank stank. | ||
| Well, okay, you don't have to like the smell. | ||
| You know, I mean, that doesn't necessarily mean that's why he wants it illegal. | ||
| He just doesn't like the smell. | ||
| A lot of people don't like the smell. | ||
| But it's not legal there recreationally, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not yet. | |
| No, not yet. | ||
| No? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's not legal here either. | ||
| Would he sign the bill is the question, you know? | ||
| And it seems to me like he would, because he's a social conservative by and large, you know, like that's his perspective. | ||
| Another one is he, they had a vote in Florida, a direct vote on raising the minimum wage during the 2020 election. | ||
| And so Trump won the state, but 60% of Florida voters voted for a minimum wage increase. | ||
| They wanted to make it 15. And leading into that, DeSantis said, don't do that. | ||
| I'm against doing that. | ||
| Did he have a rationalization? | ||
| I mean, I didn't see if he did, but just the fact he's against it was a strike against him in my mind. | ||
| But the voters voted for it, and that is the law. | ||
| So, because they had the direct vote, and I don't know if he has any legal recourse, so it's becoming law, but he told them don't vote for it. | ||
| So that was a big issue. | ||
| Because I know you're a fan of legal weed, you're a fan of raising the minimum wage. | ||
| He's also a big Wall Street guy. | ||
| I mean, a lot of these Republicans, you don't have to look too far into the surface to find out they're all playing the same game. | ||
| He took $20 million from Wall Street. | ||
| He did $5.7 billion in tax cuts and giveaways to corporations. | ||
| Apparently 99% of companies in Florida pay no corporate income tax. | ||
| So it's one of the states that corporations go to sort of, you know, it's a field day over there. | ||
| And remember, he was feuding with Disney. | ||
| Remember when he was feuding with Disney? | ||
| And he was like, you know, you guys are fucking woke and this has got to stop. | ||
| But he let them keep a $578 million tax break at the same time. | ||
| And at that same time, he also did a $1 billion tax hike on regular Floridians with a new sales tax. | ||
| Well, the amount of business that Disney must be bringing into Florida is insane. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which is all the reason they don't need more of a subsidy, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, let them fuck it. | ||
| They'll be able to swim. | ||
| They're not going to sink. | ||
| Like, let them be. | ||
| What do you think that is? | ||
| Do you think there's just some financial chicanery, some behind the scenes? | ||
| I think if you're the governor of Florida and you know how big Disney is... | ||
|
unidentified
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Mm-hmm. | |
| You might talk a game every now and then of like, yeah, we don't like these guys or whatever. | ||
| They're too woke. | ||
| But when push comes to shove, he's cutting the check. | ||
| I don't remember what that was in regard to, the woke thing. | ||
| I don't recall. | ||
| It was a very specific instance. | ||
| Yeah, I don't either. | ||
| I don't remember it either. | ||
| But he had a big fight with them, but ultimately he gave them their tax break. | ||
| And then the other thing is, so there's a big sugar cane industry in Florida. | ||
| And they lead to a lot of pollution because they do these things called burn fields. | ||
| It's part of the process involved with the sugarcane. | ||
| And he came in and shielded them from any legal accountability. | ||
| So people can't sue them over that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the Florida Republican Party took a $350,000 contribution from the sugarcane industry and then in turn he... | ||
| Protected them from legal liability. | ||
| And when you're saying pollution, there's particulates in the atmosphere because of the burning? | ||
| Yeah, they say that because of those sugarcane burn fields, there's increased risk of cancer and red tide. | ||
| Have you ever heard of red tide in Florida? | ||
| That's the ocean red tide? | ||
| Yeah, there's some weird ocean red tide thing. | ||
| Apparently, the burning of the sugarcane helps lead to that as well, along with, like you said, the particulate matter, which could lead to cancer. | ||
| The burning of it, that's like a common agricultural approach, right? | ||
| Where they do that to sort of revigorize the, that's not a word, but reinvigorate the soil, right? | ||
| The topsoil, is that what they're doing? | ||
| I mean, there's some industrial reason why they do it, but I think there was conversation around, hey, we got to regulate this, we have to make it, you know, we got to lower the cancer rate, we got to lower the red tide, we got to figure this out. | ||
| And there's a direct correlation between those burns and cancer instances? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a lot of health problems around those things, yeah. | ||
| He's quite the opposite of Bernie. | ||
| I think he's... | ||
| He's an establishment Republican who's good at PR, basically. | ||
| I think he's positioned himself—so there's two parts to politics. | ||
| There's politics and there's policy. | ||
| On the politics front, I think he's actually plotted his way around brilliantly, where, you know, he is the heir apparent to Donald Trump, and there's a chance he could even beat Donald Trump in a Republican primary. | ||
| And honestly, I think any Democrat should fear him over Trump in a general election. | ||
| I think even half-dead Joe Biden can defeat Trump again. | ||
| Really? | ||
| You think so? | ||
| Yeah, well, see, the problem is, Trump has siloed himself off, and he can't shut up about the 2020 election. | ||
| It's rigged, it's stolen, it's, you know, and it's, he comes across as whiny. | ||
| And the Republicans, under his leadership, got wiped out in the 2018 midterms, they got wiped out in the 2020 main election, and they got wiped out in the 2022 midterms. | ||
| Well, people either love him or they hate him. | ||
| And I don't think there's as much polarity when it comes to DeSantis. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| DeSantis has a much better chance of gaining back some of the moderates that kind of fled. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They just want conservative economic policies. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so I think he would be a good general election candidate, but in terms of how he governs, it would be George W. Bush, it would be George H.W. Bush, it would be Trump, it'd be all the same stuff. | ||
| Tax cuts for the wealthy, super-serve Wall Street, keep the military-industrial complex going. | ||
| Who do you like if Biden drops out? | ||
| The only person I'm interested in at the moment is Marianne Williamson. | ||
| Because there's some chatter about she might primary Joe Biden. | ||
| And I would love that. | ||
| Because, look, the problem with Biden... | ||
| There's a lot of problems with Biden. | ||
| But, like, ideologically, the problem is... | ||
| He has no grand vision, right? | ||
| Like, there is no, here's what I'm trying to do, here's what I'm trying to get to, here's the ideal. | ||
| It's very, like, I call him a status quo manager. | ||
| It's like, I'll do some tweaks around the edges here and there, and we'll make some things a little bit better here and there. | ||
| But he's also dead, right? | ||
| Like, he's a zombie. | ||
| And then you have Marianne Williamson, who I think she... | ||
| Would run in the spirit of FDR. She would say we got to go back to the Democratic Party used to be the Workers' Party. | ||
| It used to look out for people and we need to get back to that. | ||
| So we need to do things like universal health care. | ||
| We need to do things like universal education. | ||
| We need to have higher wages. | ||
| And that's more my politics. | ||
| So right now she's the only one I'm interested in. | ||
| There's a decent chance that she challenges Biden. | ||
| And I think that'll be interesting for this reason. | ||
| Polls show over 60% of Democrats are like, we're done. | ||
| We're done with this. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| We've got to move on from this. | ||
| Do you buy into this idea that that's one of the reasons why they keep finding these classified documents? | ||
| Oh, see, I don't... | ||
| That they're trying to push him out? | ||
| I think it's incompetence, to be honest. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| I think you have a... | ||
| It's a fun theory. | ||
| It's interesting to think about, right? | ||
| But I think the Democratic establishment kind of realizes that they need him because Kamala's worse. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is wild. | ||
| Wild, right? | ||
| Kamala's worse. | ||
| Mayor Pete is worse. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| These are people who are more unpopular than Biden. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They would rather take a half-dead Joe Biden than take one of those and roll the dice. | ||
| What about Newsom? | ||
| So, Newsom is plotting like he wants to run, but he would never primary Biden. | ||
| He's a good little Democrat, and he'll fall in line and go through the process, and he'll think 2028 is my time. | ||
| That's what he'll think. | ||
| But, you know, a lot of these people are secretly waiting in the wings for Biden to croak. | ||
| Which could happen any second. | ||
| Absolutely, it could happen. | ||
| And then Newsom would run in 2024. But he's trying to, you know, he's starting to edge his way in there. | ||
| And again, for him, I think he would have a better chance than a Kamala or a Mayor Pete, but I still think he's got the slimy politician feel to it. | ||
| There's a lot of stuff to pick apart in his record, as you accurately pointed out. | ||
| I mean, there's just... | ||
| Look, this is the era of the outsider. | ||
| It's the era of the outsider. | ||
| Trump ran as an outsider. | ||
| He won. | ||
| Biden was the return to normal guy. | ||
| Like, okay, Trump's guy's getting a little crazy. | ||
| Let's go back in this direction. | ||
| But it's still the era of the outsider. | ||
| People still want something fresh, something different, something from outside of the political system to come in and bring about real change. | ||
| It's not like politics used to be. | ||
| Where it's like, if you're the most buttoned up, if you're the most clean, if it's your turn, then it's your turn. | ||
| Now it's more like, holy shit, this is fucking crazy. | ||
| The whole hell's breaking loose. | ||
| Let's get some people with good ideas in there who are actually smart. | ||
| Alright. | ||
| Well, listen, man, it's always a pleasure talking to you, brother. | ||
| Always a pleasure talking to you. | ||
| Tell everybody how they can consume your program, both programs. | ||
| Spotify, I'll say, first of all. | ||
| Everybody check out the Kyle Klinski Show. | ||
| It is on Spotify. | ||
| Check me out over there. | ||
| I'm with Joe over on Spotify. | ||
| It's fun. | ||
| YouTube is Secular Talk, youtube.com slash secular talk. | ||
| And then we also have Crystal Kyle and Friends over on Substack, where Crystal Ball and I, this is my Spotify page here. | ||
| Crystal Ball and I do a show together. | ||
| We do an interview show together, and we bring people on and we talk to them, people we're interested in. | ||
| And that's over on Substack. | ||
| And you guys are doing a live show in Austin. | ||
| Correct, yeah. | ||
| So we have the Paramount Theatre tomorrow night, and I think we're sold out. | ||
| We might have maybe a couple tickets left, but if you're in the Austin area... | ||
| Come to the Paramount Theater tomorrow. | ||
| They're going to get this tomorrow, so that would be Friday, February 3rd. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Today. | ||
| Tonight. | ||
| Yes, tonight. | ||
| Tonight. | ||
| So it's going to be myself, Sagar, Crystal, and then Marshall. | ||
| And it'll be fun. | ||
| We've got some stuff. | ||
| We're lined up for a debate. | ||
| We enjoy sparring, going back and forth on some stuff. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| You know? | ||
| All right, brother. | ||
| Thanks for having me, man. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| Appreciate you. | ||
| Always good to see you. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. |
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