Joe Rogan and Kyle Kulinski dissect Austin’s comedy boom, where 12 Hollywood comedians abandoned scripted content for spontaneity at The Vulcan, contrasting it with media censorship—like YouTube’s suppression of "borderline" creators post-2017 adpocalypse. They expose systemic hypocrisy: whistleblowers jailed (e.g., Daniel Hale, Stephen Dossinger) while powerful figures like Epstein evade accountability, and corporate-backed policies (Biden’s $578M Disney tax break, DeSantis shielding Florida’s sugarcane industry). Rogan’s deep dives into health risks—glyphosate in 80% of Americans, pesticide exposure on military golf courses—highlight media’s selective coverage. The episode argues for progressive alternatives (Portugal’s drug decriminalization, UBI trials) but critiques establishment figures like Biden and DeSantis as PR-driven, regressive protectors of the status quo. [Automatically generated summary]
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, 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.
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.
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?
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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, 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?
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?
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.
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.
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%.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.