Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti critique U.S. aid to Ukraine—$100B surpassing global humanitarian support—while warning of corruption, NATO escalation risks, and potential WWIII if Western weapons like F-16s provoke Russian nuclear doctrine. They expose media bias via Russiagate omissions and congressional stock trading scandals (e.g., Pelosi’s trades, Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s 51% returns), linking systemic failures to unchecked Fed power and military-industrial complex interests. Ball and Enjeti argue Ukraine’s conflict is a proxy war fueled by U.S. influence, with no clear exit strategy, echoing Jimmy Dore’s claims of geopolitical manipulation for profit. The Pentagon’s $9T audit failure contrasts sharply with abandoned domestic policies like the child tax credit, revealing priorities skewed toward endless war and Wall Street over public welfare. [Automatically generated summary]
It's kind of hard to describe what we do, because if you say, like, you know, we're on the right and we're on the left, it does sound like this sort of thing that, like...
But what is really fascinating is that having these long-form discussions like you guys do, uncensored and undirected, without an executive leaning over your shoulder and telling you what to do, It's the best way to discuss things.
And when I get to hear from a reasonable person on the left and a reasonable person on the right who respect each other, it gives me hope.
Like, hey, we can all get along.
Like, we can sort through what's good and what's bad.
Because, I mean, we are living through incredibly, like, politically fraught times where you have a lot of people whose whole business model is to persuade you that, like, half the country hates you and is destroying the country and it's existential and we're headed to civil war.
And so I feel like if Sagar and I can, you know, agree on some things, which we do, and have debates on topics that are, you know, difficult and tense and fraught and be able to do that day after day in a way that is respectful, that's like, not just trying to score points, but actually trying to learn from each other.
You know, I hope it makes a small difference in the political atmosphere.
Yeah, I mean, what I'm most proud of in our analytics is half the audience is genuinely right and half the audience is genuinely left.
And one of the pitches that we give our people, we're like, hey, if you're gonna support us, you're not gonna agree all the time.
So you're almost conditioning people to be like, hey, this is a message that I'm buying into.
And I think the most impactful, sometimes you don't meet people or whatever and they're like, man, I watched a show with my dad and I'm just like, dad, Crystal's what I believe.
And dad is like, I'm with Sagar on some things.
And then we sit down and we talk about it afterwards.
Because that is one of the dangers in independent media.
There's a lot that's so exciting about independent media right now.
I mean, you see the traditional media is just like dying.
The ratings are failing.
People are abandoning them in droves.
Obviously, trust has completely fallen off a cliff.
But there are some pitfalls in independent media, too.
And one of them is that you develop an audience that is one ideology that just wants to hear one thing and is there to hear what they already think about things.
And so I think because of the fact that we have different opinions and our different political ideologies, that has sort of protected us against having an audience that is there for any one particular idea.
And, you know, we'll see sometimes, like, people go, oh, you guys said this and that.
We disagree with you.
And it's like, you know what?
If this isn't the thing for you, you owe it to yourself to go somewhere else where you're going to hear every day, I guess, whatever it is that you want to be told from within your bubble.
And that person that you don't know that lives in fucking Indiana that is on meth and is, like, really mad because, you know, the progressive in her district doesn't represent her views.
And she's, like, typing the meanest fucking shit.
Like, even though you know that that's nonsense, this is probably a crazy person, that's in your head now.
You know, the toughest thing actually was when we, and by doing the show, is actually by disconnecting from the broader, like, because in traditional media, the way it works is like, we used to go on Fox.
When you're in Fox, it's like an ecosystem.
You're in the green room, there's all the other conservatives that are around you, and then there's all these other people who work in conservative ink, like conservative world.
And you can't dissent.
And actually, the best, most rewarding part of our show is we're not connected to the system anymore.
I'm like, I don't give a shit.
Like, they're like, I don't really appreciate, you know, Trump's person or whatever, some Trump flacky.
He's like, you didn't say this about President Trump.
I'm like, I don't give a fuck.
I'm like, what are you gonna do?
You're gonna take me on Fox?
I don't care.
I don't care.
I don't actually want to be on Fox.
I'm like, I could be on my own show.
But being disconnected from the broader DC machine, it totally frees you up for conversation on Stop the Ste- anything.
Anything that's controversial.
And I can just be like, I think this is bullshit.
I truly, 100% guys, I believe this is bullshit.
I see commentators out there who I know- Don't believe what they're saying.
And I think we take it this year even more so than ever.
You know, our biggest podcast download and our biggest YouTube numbers last year were right when Russia invaded Ukraine.
And, you know, you talk about a high stakes situation where it's It's very difficult to sort through all the propaganda to really figure out what's going on.
And, you know, we were trying our best to do that in real time.
And the fact that so many people came to us to try to understand this conflict and what the U.S.'s role in it, what it should be, that really meant a lot, number one.
But it also, I think, put on both of our shoulders like a real sense of, all right.
We've got to make sure we're on top of our show.
We've got to read as much as we possibly can.
We need to go back and look at, like, Russian nuclear doctrine and just go as deep as we possibly, you know, are capable of on this topic.
Because there are a lot of people who tell us we're it in terms of the news that they consume.
So we have shifted to focusing, you know, we still do, like, fun and stupid and silly topics or whatever and indulge whatever our little hobby horse interests are.
But we've shifted the program somewhat to do more hard news because we care about it, because it's important, because there are a lot of people are looking to us to understand what's going on in the world.
And also because ultimately, you know, if there's going to be an alternative to the, you know, liars and propagandists at places like CNN and Fox News and MSNBC and some of the mainstream print outlets as well, you're going to have to have that kind of, you know, serious coverage of hard news events that people feel you know, serious coverage of hard news events that people feel like they can trust what you're presenting them And listen, we say all the time, sometimes we're going to fuck up.
Sometimes we're going to be wrong about something.
We're going to predict something.
It doesn't happen, whatever.
That is going to happen 100% of the time.
But what you can count on us for is we're always going to come back.
We're going to correct it.
We're going to own up to the mistakes.
And we are trying from the beginning our very best to sort through what the truth of the situation is.
This is one of the primary ways that we've been gaslit in this conflict.
And it just came out, I don't know if you saw this, you probably did, that Zelensky fired a bunch of his cabinet officials over corruption.
And it was like, they were taking these fancy vacations to Europe.
One of them was accused of basically overcharging the military for meals.
The amount that we have sent to Ukraine, propping up not only their military, but their government, their economy, etc., when they're taking that money, that's coming directly out of the U.S. taxpayer pocket.
And nobody reported on any of this until Zelensky fired people.
And then we were allowed to be like, yeah, there's some problems with corruption there, maybe a little bit.
Maybe we should worry a little bit about where the weapons are going and what exactly is happening there.
Even better, the Times actually changed its headline.
They were like, Ukraine goes corruption drive.
And it was like, Zelensky aims to stamp out corruption just to make it a little bit less like the appearance.
I have some fun numbers for everybody.
This is from a past monologue I've gone.
USAID currently at $100 billion is double what the entire rest of the world has given to Ukraine in one year surpasses what we gave the Afghan military in 20 years.
The total amount to Ukraine now exceeds all US military aid To the country of South Vietnam between 1956 and 1975. Wow.
But the total lack of debate, the lack of willingness to say like, hey, when we got into this, what you sold to the American people was you're going to provide defensive weapons only.
So Ukraine could defend itself.
Now we're sending tanks.
Now we're sending it just came out longer range missiles out.
These were things that were totally off the table.
And then suddenly, step by step by step, not only are they on the table, but you're not allowed to question it.
You're not allowed to say, hey, guys, are we setting ourselves up for World War three here, which is something the president himself was talking about not very long ago.
And yet no debate.
And that's the thing that, you know, however you feel about the Ukraine conflict and, you know, the buildup to it and how we got here and all of those things, I think at the very base level, the total lack of an ability to have dissent and debate and understand the potential consequences of what we're doing That is fucking terrifying, because we are talking about a nuclear-armed superpower that we are engaged in a proxy war with, and you're basically not allowed to say, hey, how does this end?
What do we need to do to try to get to negotiated settlement here?
How do we avoid having a conflict with this nuclear-armed superpower?
World War III seems like a bad thing to have on the table right now.
There's a thing that people, the way my friends who've served talk about war is so Titanically different than the way people who ideologically support or disavow it.
Like, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about if you say, there's no need for a military.
You're crazy.
We are going to get subjugated.
Someone will come here with men with guns.
If you take away all the guns that everybody has and no more military, we're fucked.
And if you don't think that, it's because you've never gone to the dark parts of the world.
The point, though, is that, you know, we have to try and convey this to people and just say, like, hey, when you're on Twitter and you're like, hey, you know, fuck you, you know, anybody who is against the narrative, you're like, this is not a joke.
Like, hundreds of thousands of Russians are dead.
Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are dead.
Millions are displaced.
We have no idea what the endgame is like.
And, you know, just what Crystal was saying.
I have this thing where, you know, the Fight Club line, like, on a long enough timeline.
I'm like, on a long enough timeline, Ukraine is getting everything that it wanted.
So originally it was like, no fly zone.
And Biden was like, I'm being responsible.
I'm saying no.
Well, first they ruled out Patriot missile systems.
Patriot missile systems are now on the way to Ukraine.
They ruled out tanks.
Now tanks are on the way to Ukraine.
Right now, there's an article talking about how F-16s, they're thinking about sending...
They've been invaded by a foreign and aggressive power.
That said, like, we got to think about what's best for us.
Right now, there's a New York Times article about US warms to helping Ukraine take back Crimea.
I'm like, well, hold on a fucking second.
I'm not saying it's just that Russia took Crimea in 2013, but they formally annexed it.
And if you ask people in Russia, Crimea is Russia.
So if they use if Ukraine uses a Pentagon provided F-16 to bomb Crimea, now what?
Like now that's a violation of Russian nuclear doctrine.
They've updated their nuclear doctrine, by the way, to not even say it's defensive.
They can say they can use it in any capacity that Vladimir Putin wants to.
That was a significant change.
If you look in the history of the way that the great superpowers actually consider their own nuclear first strike use, it's something that is considered ironclad and then boom, it changes like that.
And number two, the idea that Russia hasn't escalated in response to our actions is just not true.
They've been striking critical energy infrastructure, including, you know, in and around Kyiv, which was an escalation.
They went through with a conscription that there, you know, was very politically dicey for Putin.
There's rumors that they may go through with another draft.
So the idea that they just like took all of this lying down didn't escalate is a fantasy to start with.
But it's incredibly dangerous and foolish to think just because they didn't push the nuclear button yet that, oh, it's all fine and he's just full of it.
Thank God there's people like you guys out there, because there's so many people that they have Ukraine in the same category of importance and significance as they do climate change.
Climate change, which is a real thing, but it's a politically divisive alleyway where you're not allowed to veer from the course and even look at any kind of science.
It's the same thing with Ukraine.
A support for Ukraine is undeniable.
You must put it in your Twitter bio.
And you guys are saying, you're not saying don't support Ukraine, but you're saying, look where this is going.
Do you understand what this is?
Because you can't just openly support something you don't understand without a comprehensive view of what the fuck the factors are and how it got to be that way in the first place.
And you're not going to hear that in a five minute clip on mainstream news.
It's so important for us to internalize that message.
We're not saying we hate Ukraine.
We're not saying we don't even support Ukraine.
The Ukrainian cause is just.
What we're saying is, what about our interests?
There are interests that supersede Ukraine.
If I was Ukrainian, I would do exactly what they were doing.
But guess what?
Ukraine does not exist without the United States.
We provide the vast majority of the military there for the diplomacy perspective.
If we cut off military weapons to them tomorrow, that's it.
Done.
They literally are forced to the negotiating table.
I'm not even saying we should do that.
I'm saying, what is the endgame?
And, you know, in my neighborhood, there's more Ukraine flags than there are American flags.
It's like Ukraine flag, gay pride flag, no American flag.
But then it's like, okay, if you go to those people and if we would just say what they said, they say, this is disgusting.
This is Russian propaganda.
It's up to the Ukrainians for when they want to stop.
And I said, yeah, I completely agree.
But it's also up to us for whatever we stop providing them weapons.
We're like, hey, if you want to defend this part of your territory, that's totally fine.
My endgame is not having a nuclear conflict, is making sure that we have peace on the European continent.
Vladimir Putin is in opposition to that peace.
But Putin and Russia are going to exist.
You know, something I think people should take home, too, is you had Peter Zihon on.
He said it really well, which is the first year of every Russian conflict is a total shit show.
If you look at Finland, if you look at the first year of Hitler's invasion, even going all the way back to Napoleon and some of the Tsar's campaigns before that, they lose a shit ton of people.
It looks like a complete mass.
They fire a bunch of generals, all of this.
And then what do they do?
They use their vast...
The Russian Colossus is known out of that for a reason because they have a shitload of people.
They have a lot of military materiel.
They amass it and they throw it at them.
And so...
People are like, you know, Sager, Crystal, like what you guys are saying will be valid, but Ukraine is winning.
Look, we are barely a year into this.
One year into the First World War, I could make the easy case that Germany was going to win the First World War.
Second World War, I could easily make the case the Nazis were going to win.
If I go back to Civil War, I could easily make a case the Confederates were going to win.
All three of those, it didn't happen.
Why?
Because these things go on for a long time.
You have no idea what it is.
And one of the reasons that many of those conflicts, first and two, went on and ultimately came to the conclusion they were, was because millions of lives were lost.
And the whole point from those conflicts, if you look at the way that people talked, was we have to learn the lesson.
We have to learn the lesson, but it's been 75 years, and now this is all a game.
This is a tweet that people are saying about Ukraine, but it says real-world consequences.
And, you know, there's a couple things that do give me some heart, which is, number one, even though, like, I can't really blame the people who are just, who can't understand seeing it another way, because the propaganda that is coming from every network, really, like, almost across the board...
It's very strong and it's very hard to avoid that.
So I have sympathy for that perspective.
But even so, a poll just came out that had, from NBC News, they buried this at the very end of their write-up of the poll.
Public's now 50-50 split on continuing aid to Ukraine.
So people are questioning, even though they're being fed so much propaganda.
I think that is a credit to the rise of independent media.
I think it's also a credit to the fact that they don't fucking trust the mainstream friends anymore.
There were cables that actually WikiLeaks released.
And a friend who's a great journalist, Bronco Marcitech, who's been looking at the Ukraine conflict with a critical eye, he sorted through these cables.
And he found all of these diplomatic cables from the prior era, where you had NATO allies, you had U.S. officials.
Who were all saying, hey guys, Russia has red lines here with regard to Ukraine and floating NATO membership with Ukraine is a real violation of their hard red lines and were very fearful.
And they laid out exactly the trajectory that we could find ourselves on.
Now, that doesn't deny Russia agency or, you know, Putin and the Kremlin agency for invading.
No one made them do that.
However, it is to say that, you know, there was a time when you were allowed to acknowledge that U.S. policy could lead to this exact event.
And now when you even suggest that us, you know, floating NATO membership with Ukraine and saying that they were going to be made apart, that some of these things were exacerbating and they crossed the red line and You know, created a situation that was incredibly tense where this is the predictable outcome.
Well, it's also, like, to bring back the chest analogy, is if you looked at war and you ignored the human casualties and the horrors and the fact that it should absolutely be avoided at all costs and all human deaths are valuable and bombing apartment buildings and all the horrible shit, it's terrible and evil.
But this isn't like...
We are being fed a narrative that Russia made a big move and there was no other moves.
And the only way to get this discussion is you guys.
It's people like you.
And that's what's so fucking important about today.
And that's what's so dangerous about censorship.
And that's what's so dangerous about these partisan ideas where you're willing to, like, you're willing to absolutely ignore good points that the other side says, because then you would give them some sort of credit in winning this ideological bullshit game we're all playing.
And then we were like, hey, let's talk about Jared Kushner.
And then a lot of people on the right side, I'm like, hey, you know, this guy, it's actually great.
There are internal Saudi documents where he asked the Saudi Royal Kingdom fund or whatever for a billion dollar investment in his new fund, private equity fund, right after he leaves the White House.
The internal emails are like, I don't think this guy's a very good investor.
I'm not sure this would be a good use of our capital.
And MBS, the crown prince, is like, give him the money.
But to your point about censorship and the total lack of willingness to challenge your own side's narrative, did you just see this Columbia Journalism Review report that came out about Russiagate?
But I think this is one of the first, certainly mainstream, and CJR is as mainstream as they come, mainstream attempts to actually go back through the Russiagate narrative Where it started, how it was sold to the American people, and all of the lies and especially the omissions.
And they take a really hard look at the New York Times as kind of the main player in the story.
There were other villains as well, but the New York Times was the main player.
And they would report something that, you know, they would shade it to look as bad as possible with regards to Trump-Russia connections.
They would get some other piece of information that was exculpatory.
Wouldn't be in the paper at all.
And they got all kinds of, you know, millions of new subscribers to their paper who were there to hear this, like, you know, elaborate tale of Russian conspiracy and the Manchurian candidate and whatever.
And the underlying narrative that at least I take away from the CJR report is New York Times and MSNBC and a lot of other places.
They were more interested in feeding that audience what they wanted to hear than actually looking at the facts of what was happening.
And, you know, you read it.
It is as damning as it could be.
And listen, the way we were sold the Iraq war was bad enough.
Like that was a travesty after the fact they actually did some correctives that here's what we got wrong and we're sorry, whatever.
This, they will never admit that they did anything wrong here.
They just move forward and pretend like none of it ever happened.
And it is astonishing.
And then they turn around and wonder, like, why does no one trust us?
These people that are – they're just who they are.
You know who they are.
And it's possible to do now.
You can be a real person.
You don't have to be a propagandist or a spokesperson for the state.
You can be a real person and tell people what the fuck is going on.
Because this is a wild game that other people are playing on our behalf with money that they've gotten from our taxes where we don't even get a say in what the fuck they spend it on.
It's crazy.
It's crazy and it doesn't affect your daily life.
You drive to the same place.
You say hi to your neighbors.
It seems fine.
But you're dealing with a fucking destructive empire that has been doing things to other countries that if you saw them, if you were boots on the ground, you would be horrified if you watched a drone bomb a wedding party in Yemen.
If you were a part of something in another country that we're involved in, that our tax dollars have gone to, that we have just written off as being not of concern.
I mean, across the board, humanitarian organizations around the world say this is the greatest humanitarian crisis that is unfolding in the entire world.
And, you know, we are highly complicit in this through our support of Saudi Arabia.
You don't see Yemen flags on people's cars.
You don't see the news media talking about it.
You don't see them humanizing the children that are starving and dying there.
And so, you know, part of the way that the information ecosystem is shaped is what they decide to care about, what they decide to cover, the way they decide to cover it, and what just gets pushed off the page entirely out of sight, out of mind.
I think this is an important part to talk about with this, that With human beings, when human beings work inside corporate systems and these systems have goals and everyone's working together and there's a hierarchy of people and you're not allowed to step out of line, we develop a way of thinking that is almost like it's a tribal way and it's kind of a religious way.
And I'm curious to know how you guys feel about your ability to be completely independent outside of that and how that's affected the way you think about things.
Because for me, personally, having all these conversations with so many different people about so many different subjects, I'm a different person.
Bombarding, overwhelming education that it's like very difficult to process, but if you're in a corporate environment It's very hard to think independently.
But I won't ever say anything negative about my friends.
It's just like I don't think that's necessary.
And that's something that happens when you get a shit ton of money involved and you get relationships and you're drinking scotch together at a private club and you're discussing the advertising revenue and we'd like to donate a bunch of money to CNN. We'd like to figure out a way that we can work together.
You know, hey, I'm a fucking Captain Billionaire, and I want to donate all this money to all these people that own media organizations.
And I would, you know, I'd like to be your friend.
This is the other thing, actually, I was hoping to bring up, is I don't think people understand that cable is a fake business model.
So, for example, we talk a lot about the failing ratings.
The key demo numbers on all three of these channels is a joke.
I always like to say, like, Crystal and I would be starving in a ditch if any of these, if we were getting the same numbers as these people.
So how do they survive?
It's because they're part of something called the cable bundle.
And so, like, when you buy cable, like Cox Communications or whatever, they pay, or Comcast, for example, they pay CNN and MSNBC and Fox to be a part of the bundle.
The vast majority of the profit of these cable channels comes from the bundle.
So CNN made a billion in profit just last year, all propped up by the bundle, because they're getting paid just to exist.
I mean, can you imagine if we were getting paid to exist, not based upon our actual numbers?
You can actually reach less people and make more money.
And so it's all part of this fake system.
But I mean, the benefit is, is that with the rise of independent media, more and more advertisers are waking up, the less eyeballs, the less of an incentive for the bundle to actually pay them to be a part of it.
And that's why I was actually really excited by Amazon striking that deal with the NFL because I'm like, yes, get the rights away from these people because that is what props up all kinds of bullshit that we don't have like a small D Democratic input with our eyeballs on CNN or any of these places.
They can exist just fine without us.
Like to really kill them, we have to get away from live news on TV.
That's that's the number one thing still propping them up today.
But I will tell you, I mean, I have a lot of optimism, certainly about what we're doing, about the response to what we're doing, about the independent media ecosystem.
But we were you and I were talking the other day, Joe, about.
I do think it's a dangerous moment for people.
And one thing we've been covering a lot on the show is you have a kind of breakdown in previous national stories and narratives.
And people are very, like, story-driven.
You know, you have a breakdown in, I'm not a religious person, so this is, like, not my bag, but you have a breakdown in religion.
So some of the stories that have kind of, like, held the country together and that people helped use to make sense of their life, or even the story about the American dream.
A lot of these things are kind of breaking down.
Now, that's a good thing because it creates a possibility for a new, more beneficial story.
But in the meantime, it is just a like heyday for con artists and charlatans and, you know, people who are willing to sell a narrative to, you know, a lot of folks who feel kind of lost, kind of adrift and don't like existing in that chaos situation. kind of adrift and don't like existing in that chaos So it's like, you know, whether they're being scammed by, like, SBF or this, like, Congressman George Santos who, like, made up every aspect of his life.
The part I'm obsessed with him is, first of all, I just can't imagine being that person who can, like, whoever he was across from, he was going to tell them what they wanted to hear.
When the dude was like, I'm into volleyball, he's like, I was a star volleyball player at a college he didn't even go to.
You know, to the donors, he was like, I'm a wealthy businessman.
I'm highly successful.
I worked at Goldman Sachs, all this stuff.
They're like, oh, this is our kind of guy.
To the electorate and the Republican, he pitched that he's like this trailblazing, you know, Americans, I am the American dream, like Latino, gay, all this stuff.
I mean, it really was incredible the way that he told people what they wanted to hear.
And so that's a part that...
I'm really interested and obsessed with because all of these people are like a reflection of the holes and vulnerabilities in society.
You know, same thing with Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX. He told people in Congress, he told the media, he had this very specific cultivated image of his like wacky hair and his like dressed down look and whatever, that he was the eccentric genius or whatever.
And a lot of people who were supposed to be super smart in the business press and in the regular press and on Capitol Hill, they all bought it hook, line, and sinker.
The most sophisticated investors and just totally bamboozled by this guy.
And then on the other end, a lot of people who bought into what he was selling or NFTs that were being sold or whatever random crypto scams were out there.
You know, they had their own vulnerabilities of maybe they were hurt in the financial crash.
Maybe they feel like it was disproportionately young men, right?
So maybe they feel like the American dream of like getting the house and having the family and the, you know, the like...
Basic middle class prosperity wasn't really open to them and they're being sold this sort of hero journey narrative about, you know, fortune favors the brave and you got to get in early and this is secret special knowledge that's going to allow you to achieve your goals of wealth creation that has been held out to you of like what is at the core of being a man.
He's like, what we are talking about, though, is in the last two decades, we've had a crisis amongst young men.
And something we talk about on the show is what Crystal's getting at with the decline of the American dream, like the idea that you were going to do better than your parents.
And that's just not really true anymore.
Even if you went to school and you have a shit ton of of student debt, even if you're working class in terms of wage growth, upward mobility.
People who are graduating from high school, who are men and working class having much more trouble actually finding a mate.
So there's a big college imbalance right now where a lot of men are dropping out of college.
They no longer feel Accepted and you're reaching almost 60-40 splits of women and men in college, especially who are graduating.
A lot of women who have college degrees don't actually want to date somebody who doesn't have a college degree.
And so there's this big imbalance in the dating market.
And then also among single men, you see a big decline in lifetime wages.
But what really makes me really sad is the drug overdose numbers and they die much earlier.
They're much less likely to exercise, much less likely to fulfill A stronger life.
And that's what gets to the charlatanism of being able to buy into the charlatan.
Signing up for some MLN scheme that you might see online.
Well, and this is where, you know, the Andrew Tates of the world come in and they, like, perform this just, like, caricaturish, ridiculous, masculine whatever they're doing.
And then also maybe as a sex trafficker, we'll find out.
We'll see what happens there.
but it again speaks to the fact there used to be a really clear sort of cultural narrative, right or wrong, about what it was to be a man.
And at the core of that was being a provider, right?
For women, it was like, you know, it was other things being like a mother and a nurturer and like the way you look.
For men, it's like about the wallet, right, the pocketbook.
And then, so I think when we've had An assault on the middle class, on the working class, where it becomes so much harder to be able to fulfill that cultural narrative of what it is supposed to be to be a man.
I think that's been, this is this woman, but, you know, from my external perspective, I think that's been really, really devastating.
And I don't want to pretend also, though, like it's like only young men who are getting scammed right now.
And there's a great series about this MLM multi-level marketing scheme of these fucking ugly leggings that a bunch of Midwestern housewives for some reason loved these things.
You're going to be able to still have time with your kids.
You're going to be able to have it all.
But then...
As the thing went on, and originally there was like a real demand for these leggings and people really did want them.
So you felt like, oh, I'm doing the thing.
But then as time goes on, the only people who are making money are the people who are convincing more to get into the legging sales business.
And, you know, it's a classic basically pyramid scheme.
And over time, the quality of the leggings degrade.
They're sending out packages that smell bad and they're ripped and whatever.
But the bottom line is the only way to make money was by bringing in more people after you, which is definition of MLM. That was for the Midwestern housewife or whatever.
I don't know, but anyone who's willing to lie about doing steroids when it's so obvious to anyone who understands hormonal optimization and steroid use and like that More Plates More Dates guy, Derek.
Love that guy.
I love that guy.
You know, he called it, we both called it way in advance, like there's not a chance in hell.
But that's why I want people to be honest in the manosphere.
I work out at a bodybuilding gym, and so I'm like, there's guys who are on gear, and then there's guys who aren't fucking on gear.
And that's just what it is.
But the Liver King thing drove me nuts, because you were looking at teenagers who thought, they're like, oh, this is real if I eat bull testicles, or if I buy whatever his bullshit supplements are.
I'm little what's a little different yeah, but oh my yeah that that's a good Kalini is yeah, yeah freakish it really is forgets well they you know like he's in the middle of full exertion there, right?
He's throwing a spear.
Look, the guy's built like a brick shithouse.
No if, ands, or but.
You don't get that way without putting in a lot of work.
That guy works hard.
There's no way.
There's no way you get there without the hard work.
Like, the real tragedy in this is that this guy had an opportunity to say what's possible with chemical intervention, Here's the pros and cons, and this is the dangers of it.
Also, this is the nutrition that I take to optimize my body, which is also critical.
You cannot get to that physique with just steroids.
You must have amazing work ethic, incredible discipline, ability to push through Exertion and just have a fucking force of will.
And you have to have amazing nutrition.
You have to be really fucking healthy to allow all those tissues to recover and nourish them and then stay that lean.
So you have to be very disciplined with your diet.
I think that there's been a bunch of people that are openly taking performance-enhancing drugs and have enormous social media platforms.
I don't think that's the problem.
I think the problem is just being dishonest.
If you're the liver king and you're talking about your stack and explaining to people what you take, and that you're doing it all legally, and then you're also eating all this food, the question is, is that a thing that would influence other people to do that when they shouldn't do that?
And I think that's a personal choice.
I think the real responsibility that someone has when you're in that situation, if you are doing that stuff, You should be honest about what you're doing and then also honest if something goes wrong.
So I didn't get into health and fitness like two years ago or so.
And it's so important to have realistic expectations about what you can do, about what you can get, about what it actually means to diet.
So like Dr. Lane Norton, who I use his app, Carbon, like, you know, you realize after a couple of weeks into a cut, you're like, oh, this fucking sucks.
And you're like, and I'm only losing, you know, I'm only losing whatever, two pounds a week.
And then also even with heavy resistance training, four times a week, diet relatively on point.
Shit is hard, man.
It takes years.
Like you are not going to look like Liver King overnight.
But I'm more saying, like, for kids, especially, you know, look, I didn't know a fucking thing before I started consuming all this content, like Puberman and all these other folks, Derek, all these videos.
And Derek had a video once of a guy who was, like, one year out, I think.
It was like, this is what a realistic, like, six pounds of muscle looks like.
And he was like, yeah, it doesn't look great.
He's like, but that's what it looks like, man.
And I was like, yeah, that's actually very helpful to me as somebody who was just starting off from the ground.
And then I think about 22-year-old me.
I would've fallen for it, man.
I would've bought the supplements.
I would've bought the, you know, if I was 18 years old, absolutely!
But at the end of the day, does it matter if you're playing a character if people believe it?
You know, then there's no difference whether you're just like playing a ridiculous character because you're still selling the same thing to a public that's buying it.
But I do think in general, it was easier for them to sell a unified, like, propagandistic narrative to the American people, except when it came to things that were just, like, farcical on their face.
I mean, that's the thing with the existing, like, the legacy media business models.
There's no—you know, CNN has a new boss, and he's saying different things and trying to—it's like— You're still dealing with the same beast here, though.
Same incentive structure.
You're going to find yourself falling into the exact same mistakes and holes.
I mean, that's why, you know, you see the same dynamic going on at Twitter right now, where it's like the part of the reason they were making the censorship decisions they were was because of ideology.
And I think that comes out in the Twitter files like you had a couple of people.
You had a lot of people who didn't want to make a decision.
They're just like, you know, that's in general.
People don't like being responsible or making decisions.
And a couple of really ideological actors.
But you also see in the fallout with advertisers fleeing now that a lot of the reason these censorship decisions were driven was about the money.
It was about the bottom line.
It was still, just like with legacy media, it was the advertisers shaping what was the bounds of acceptable discourse.
You see that on Twitter.
You see it on YouTube.
I mean, anywhere that's ad supported, you're going to have that same dynamic.
But then, you know, you think about the incentive structure you're creating.
How many people are going to want to cover those stories knowing that they're not going to make any money off of it?
I mean, we, you know, we built our business model so that we could try to insulate ourselves from those incentives because we're human beings too.
And we don't want to be so arrogant to assume that we're not also shaped by whatever incentive structure we ultimately live in.
But yeah, that's how you end up with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc., making very similar content moderation decisions because ultimately it's all about what the advertisers are going to feel comfy with.
But the problem is, if you say, okay, we'll let Crystal and Sager talk about it, because they're going to mock this guy's claims, but then you're going to have some right-wing, like, QAnon person who's going to put it, and then they're going to have it, and we need to do this because of that, and then it's a call to arms, and they're like, oh, Jesus.
It was actually a Republican candidate who won because they were using this sketchy system of ballot harvesting, and that one actually got uncovered, and it was a very close race, and it was enough to throw the result.
That's one of the only instances I know where there was enough sufficient to actually change what the result was.
We were like, look, we're not going to make fun of you.
We're going to cover every single lawsuit that the Trump campaign filed.
We're like, here's the lawsuit.
Here's what they allege happened in Milwaukee.
Here's what they allege happened in Arizona.
Here is what they were able to prove in court.
At the end of the day, that's probably what matters, right?
Here's the judge ultimately dismissed it in this case.
And I believe it.
I don't remember the exact number of—I want to say it was like 40 or 50 cases.
Every single one of them was thrown out.
And so I think with election fraud, it's important also to think about what level of fraud is being alleged, what exists actually today, how corrupt our elections actually used to be.
In some measures, we actually have some of the least election fraud in modern American history.
We're sitting in Texas.
One of my favorite books, Means of Ascent, which is about how LBJ straight up stole the 1948 Senate election here in Texas.
I want to revise my previous statement about that North Carolina election being the only one.
I mean, to me, the most obvious example of election fraud was the 2000 presidential election where it was like, you know, top down and they had all the officials in place to get them to stop the count and like, okay, it's going to be George W. Bush.
So, in my opinion, that was probably the greatest election fraud.
They had one Secret Service agent that didn't get to eat what everybody else ate, and he was on this vegan diet, and they were giving him all these pills.
Like, what the fuck?
Why am I jogging every day?
And he was just the guy, the moment Chaney drops dead, they fucking shoot this guy in the head.
Here's something that people need to understand about bears, because people think about bears like, oh, there's a beautiful animal in the forest, and it's also a teddy bear, and it's Winnie the Pooh.
I was there when there was a brawl between a male bear and a female bear, and the female bear scared the male bear off, and the male bear killed one of her cubs, and then she ate the cub.
It's so weird how much the culture has changed in terms of the way that theocratic right and the way they would think about who was advocating for censorship.
That's where I grew up in.
I grew up here in Texas.
And then it's like you get to D.C. and I feel like everything changed very quickly.
Well, it was always bipartisan, honestly, because if you go back to the Tipper Gore days, that was Al Gore's wife and she was the one that was advocating for censorship of rap videos and rap songs.
But like, I can see that when they're in even like third grade, fourth grade, where they're able to understand there's things we can say here, but we can't say in this other place.
But I mean, I have a five year old in kindergarten right now.
I don't know that she would really get to make the distinction.
I think there's a lot of people who feel like you do, Joe.
I was so laughed my whole life.
We both feel the same way you do in terms of like, you know, I don't see myself as like fitting with the Democratic Party and everything that they're doing.
I just saw like Nancy Pelosi is endorsing Adam Schiff for a California Senate.
When you read through the way that man lied to the American public through all of Russiagate, you're like...
I understand that the way she phrased it, like she could have phrased it a different way so that people would have less of a freakout, but can you not talk about the influence of money in D.C.? Of course.
I mean, there's a very obvious reason why for my entire life, There's been a uniparty consensus around our policy vis-a-vis the Israeli government and a total inability or unwillingness to criticize the Israeli government.
It has everything to do with organization and, yes, money, just like every other fucking interest in D.C. And so, yeah, the fact that she said that she got kicked off the Foreign Affairs Committee.
Look, I have issues and disagreements with Ilhan Omar, but she actually is one of the more courageous voices on foreign policy who's willing to call out some of the hypocrisy and bullshit In U.S. foreign policy, extremely rare in terms of United States Congressmen.
So it's actually kind of a real loss that she got kicked off that committee.
You know, it's also funny in terms of, like, what you're not allowed to say, what you get censored off of a committee for.
Like you said, look, I don't agree with Ilhan Omar on a lot.
I mean, I also don't think that it should be out of bounds to talk about influence of any government, including the Saudi government, of which a lot of these people are on the take of hypocrisy, which drives me fucking crazy.
She would go to a bunch of CPAC and NRA conferences and ingratiate herself with GOP officials and then she would sleep with them and then basically try and get as close to Trump as possible.
There's a lot of governments that do this, right?
The Israeli government does this, the Russian government, the Chinese government.
If you look at it, they explicitly, when they banned Google, Facebook, and all that, they're like, they're going to use it to shape our population and spy on us.
Why would we do that?
And then we're like, yeah, let's get TikTok on in here.
The worry was that there would be debris that would hurt the civilian population, and then the other thing I saw was that they actually wanted to be able to observe it more and see what it was and capabilities and whatever, and it might be more useful to it in the sky than shot up into a billion figures.
This is why I think it all connects to UFOs, where it's like, I just got to...
I can't imagine but stepping back and dreaming of.
Like, Earth.
We don't even know what it looked like 2500 BC. Beyond that, we have no idea.
That's when written history begins.
You've talked a lot with Graham Hancock, his ancient apocalypse series, and the reason why I think there's a connectivity is like, what's possible, man?
That's with the UFO thing.
I'm like, if there is ancient life here or multiple forms of alien life or, you know, some connectivity between that or even past contact of all this, it's like our entire understanding of the world is just completely wrong.
And I just find that so seductive, I guess, like that idea.
Maybe that's foolish and maybe that's, you know, part like a male thing like you're talking about.
But there's enough there that we can't help but be interested.
The Sasquatch is more likely because it definitely existed.
Like they know that within the time that human beings were alive, we're going to have stories about this creature.
Now whether or not those stories persist long after the creature is extinct and people pretend they see it when they're really just seeing black bears that are walking upright, which they do all the time.
I've seen black bears walk upright.
And if black bears have a hurt paw, there was a famous black bear in New Jersey that had a very badly damaged front paw so it would walk on its rear legs.
It would walk upright like a seven foot tall animal.
So it was like late at night and they hear all this barking and barking and they look out from his fucking bedroom window to one of the stalls and you see a pack of wolves devouring a horse.
That like super ideological libertarians took over and they like moved to the town.
They like voted themselves onto the town council and they went about getting rid of like every single regulation they possibly could, including the ones that had to do with like the proper way to store your trash to avoid attracting bears.
I don't remember this.
You don't remember this?
This made such an impression on me.
Because it was such a tale of ideological arrogance.
You're like, oh, the free market will work it out.
Well, next thing you know, bears are coming into town.
Bears are mauling people.
They have this whole massive bear mauling issue in this New Hampshire town because of their ideology.
I mean, look at giant chunks of fur flying off of them.
These are huge bears.
These are giant predators that will 100% kill your dog, 100% kill your kids.
You leave a baby outside, the baby's dead, the bear eats it and runs away with it.
They don't have any morals, they don't have any ethics, they're playing by a totally different set of rules than you would imagine from a Disney movie.
But this is what happens when you don't control predators.
The wildlife conservationists have long been saying, you have to keep these animals in check, because it's bad for them, it's bad for the people, and the nutty people are like, yeah, but we're in their area.
200 years ago, probably in this spot, it was a bloodbath.
It was brutal.
Pure Comanche range versus rival Indian groups, like complete just slaughter for resources.
Like, I don't think people really get what it really was like, even 150 years ago, like, if you think about Buffalo and the range and the conquering of the Old West, I've read so many books about that time period, just because I'm so fascinated by it.
That era of what it was like and what the actual West and the range and all that was, it was a dangerous place.
I've read a lot about Theodore Roosevelt and some of his original encounters on some of his hunting trips with bears and everything.
So there's more Asian and exotic African animals in South Texas than often in Asia and in Africa.
There's some animals that are, in their country, are endangered.
But in Texas, they hunt them regularly.
That's a Neil guy.
And that is an animal that evolved around tigers.
And those dudes, you can't get close to them, and if you hit them, they run like there's nothing wrong.
Like, that animal had an arrow that went through its vitals in a perfect shot, passed through its body, went 30 yards past its body where it found the arrow.
They were telling me they shoot those with a.300 Win Mag and they have to have another one in the chamber because the guide will do a follow-up shot on the animal because they're so fucking tough because they evolved around tigers.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, like, everybody's like, well, I'll just live off the land.
It's one of those skills where you have to put it in from a very early age.
And when you learn about indigenous tribes, or I read a lot of history, like the Mongols I know you're into as well, they start learning when they're like three or four years old.
Like they start pulling bows before they can, like barely when they can start walking.
So it becomes part of the actual culture itself.
And that level of skill, I don't know if you could teach that at this point in the West.
We were talking the other day about people that live in the Congo that are working in these cobalt mines, and I was like, you've got to imagine if this is what you were born into, because humans are so adaptable.
We're so accustomed to whatever we're accustomed to.
And if you live there, you would do what everyone else is doing, because you would get by.
And if you were born into a nomadic tribe that traveled around and followed the buffalo, you would be hunting them the same way they did.
That's just what people do.
We adapt.
And that's the whole idea behind Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson's theory about the restarting of human civilization, is that we have achieved a very high level of sophistication, which explains the pyramids and Gobekli Tepe.
It explains all these immense stone structures where they move stones with some unknown technology from as many as 500 miles away.
1,000 tons stones through the mountains.
We have no idea how the fuck they did it.
And then you go 5,000 years later and you have barbarians.
And like, what happened?
Well, most likely a fucking natural disaster that forced people to figure out a way to adapt.
And overcome.
And I think that's one of the reasons why, if we go back a few thousand years ago, you have these people with these brilliant minds that live these unbelievably barbaric lives.
And I think it's because they're the descendants of people that had to survive whatever was left over after the sophisticated civilization was hit by comets.
Crystal just bought me a copy of the Perry Reese map, that famous map, which was the Ottoman Admiral written like 1513. I think he drew it and he based it off from the Library of Alexandria and it includes that 10,000 year old coastline of Antarctica.
And the more evidence that gets uncovered, the more that's a very viable theory.
Because the core samples, the hard physical data of those core samples shows that somewhere in the neighborhood of 12,800 years ago, there was massive impacts all over the earth.
As much as 30% of the Earth shows evidence of this.
30% of the Earth shows evidence of iridium in high levels, which is very rare on Earth, but very common in space.
Nano diamonds from the impact, carbon from burnt everything.
I think people got fucked up.
Somewhere around 12,800 years ago, the end of the Ice Age.
And I think those guys are right.
I think the more data that gets uncovered, which is like almost every day, they're finding new discoveries that point to that.
They're finding new impact craters.
They found a giant impact crater in Antarctica.
They found a giant one off the coast of New Zealand.
We get hit.
And when we get hit, all bets are off.
All your fucking hard drives are useless.
All the known knowledge that you get off the internet is no longer available to you.
See, I listened to Sam Altman, who's the CEO of OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT.
I heard he got a question about the fourth version, because there is a lot of speculation that it's going to be like...
A whole other universe in terms of his capabilities, that it's going to be more closely approximating actual intelligence in a way that's going to really super freak people out.
That's what a lot of people like Lex and others, I guess, are projecting.
He was really trying to pour cold water on that idea, but that may just be because he doesn't want to get it overhyped.
He wants to set the bar low so that when the thing actually drops, It lands with an appropriate, I guess, fanfare.
The real thing of concern is that this didn't exist four years ago, three years ago, two years ago, and now it exists and it's gotten better really quickly.
Maybe it did exist two years ago, but it wasn't publicly consumable.
Actually, this was, again, listening to this interview with Sam Altman, he was talking about how he was actually really surprised by the way that the public, when they got to play with it, were like, oh my god.
Because in his mind, working so closely with the technology, this just felt like the next logical step.
But for people who hadn't been deeply, you know, enmeshed in the details of the technology, when suddenly you had this thing in front of you and you could play with it and then you've got this, like, the image generators and whatever, that it kind of blew people's minds.
And we've been talking about how you've got universities professors who are freaked out.
About kids cheating on tests and using this to write their essays and whatever.
And so I do think it's going to require a kind of entire rethink of the university experience, of what parts of what human beings can do are more difficult to replicate by the machine.
Because the machine can spit out a Sager and Jetty theoretical UFO monologue, but it can't create new ideas, right?
And I do think part of the freak out right now is because most automation that has like killed people's jobs has been service workers, has been blue collar.
And now you have a lot of white collar workers who are like, oh shit, this could be coming for me.
And doesn't it leave room for creators that you get an obvious look into their mind and they take pride in their writing?
I would say to young kids, I would say, fuck around with ChatTPT.
I'd say, figure out what it does because it's an important thing.
But learn how to write.
I think it's good for you.
And I think if you want to get better at whatever you're doing that requires writing, like if you're going to be a journalist, even if you use ChatGPT to give you a framework, you should learn how to be creative.
I mean, you know, we write these monologues for the show and like...
We do three a week.
So some of them are going to be great.
Some of them are going to be, you know, solid.
Some are going to be like, oh, it was a bit of a struggle.
But when you get that one that it's like you have the idea and you're able to lay it out in a way that you feel like really captures what you were trying to say and, like, makes a point that you feel like hasn't been made before, that's wonderful.
That's why I'm celebrating it with the classroom, though.
Because I had to do—when I was in college, we had so many bullshit, like, busywork quizzes that they were just doing to assign so they could check a box on the syllabus.
Now, they're sitting in the classroom being like, what do you think?
They have to test you live to see if you're either paying attention.
I think that's great.
Like, that's— Ultimately, what did we really get out of college?
I don't know.
In terms of what I use right now, even you were talking about writing, a lot of that was bullshit academic writing.
When I learned how to write for journalism, it's totally different.
It's like all the opposite rules, actually, in terms of the way you do it.
it.
But from what's being what's useful in life is being able to understand ideas.
Part of what our show is consider an alternative point of view, the famous Plato quotes, the mark of an intelligent mind to consider an opinion, something like an opinion that he doesn't necessarily agree with.
It's I'm butchering it.
But that is what you could possibly get out of higher education today, coming together, taking a four year pause in your life, talking with this professor, So there's a professor right now at UPenn, Wharton, who's actually requiring ChatGPT in the classroom.
He's like, no, no, no, no, no.
For entrepreneurship, we're all going to use it.
We're going to learn how to use this tool together, and then we're going to talk about it in the classroom.
That's what education actually can be.
And so I talk a lot about higher education corruption.
And really what it is to me is, you know, places charging $80,000 a year, which is outrageous, putting these kids into debt and not teaching them anything which is actually useful in the real world.
And then we're doing all these segments about the Fed.
I'm like, well, maybe it shouldn't.
And then it's like, oh, this is all a human design system.
So you'll read books.
It's like something on Jekyll Island on the creation of the Fed and then what the Fed's actual mandate is.
And you're like, oh, the Fed has a lot of Over our society, over our economy, over our politics, actually.
There's a lot of arguments about certain politicians never would have gone if the Fed hadn't been doing the policies that they had, like Jimmy Carter in 1979 with Paul Volcker.
We're living actually in an era right now of tremendous departure from previous Federal Reserve policy.
We went from a zero interest rate environment to higher interest rates.
The economy right now is the craziest thing you've ever seen.
So the jobs numbers actually came out this morning.
We are at one of the lowest unemployment rates in modern American history.
Since 1969. Right, so it's a great economy, right?
But wage stagnation, it's not keeping up with inflation of goods.
Try buying a house right now.
Mortgage rates are a disaster.
They're falling slightly.
We've been talking a lot about the used car industry.
Car loans are a total nightmare.
You're seeing all these charlatans in the economy.
Like, what is this?
What has been created?
The tech layoffs is a good example.
You have Google cutting 10%, Amazon cutting 10,000 jobs.
Salesforce cutting 10,000 jobs.
All of this was just because of cheap money.
And so that makes you take a step back and be like, wow, the Fed is a non-democratic institution.
You and I have no input on the Fed whatsoever.
The president appoints a chair and the rest of those people get confirmed by Congress.
And then after that, it's up to them.
They could nuke the entire U.S. economy if they wanted to.
This is actually Alan Greenspan sort of innovated this of like Fed speak, where any pronouncement he made was like incomprehensible if you didn't have a PhD in economics.
And it hasn't always been like that in American history.
You know, Fed policy, monetary policy was hotly debated.
But there's a real anti-populist movement to consolidate power in the hands of a few credentialed bureaucrats by posturing like, oh, we're just sort of like doing the math and it's just a calculation and there's no morals involved.
We don't need to understand what other people think about it and to make it feel like, oh, we've got this because we're the credentialed experts when, you know, in reality, these are things that affect people's lives.
But on the fakery in the economy, I think this is one of the under-told stories of our era.
We were talking a lot about incentives earlier.
The incentives for corporate America are not to innovate, not to create new products, certainly not to invest in their workforce.
It's all to engage in financial engineering to reward themselves and their stockholders.
So stock buybacks.
This year I just saw a stat.
Largest first quarter or first month of the year stock buybacks that we've ever had.
You look at companies like airline companies where you think, oh, they're making their money by flying people around or whatever.
No.
Actually, they're giant hedge funds, and most of their money comes from financial manipulation.
It started with, let me hedge the cost of jet fuel, but then that turns into big business, and so they basically become Wall Street.
Apple, this is one of...
Rana Faruhar, who's a very smart financial thinker, she wrote a book that highlighted this statistic.
Apple, when they released the iPod, their stock that year actually went down.
When they did financial manipulation and like gigantic stock buybacks, their stock goes up.
So it just shows you how much of our whole economy big picture is basically fake, geared towards financial engineering and not towards actual innovation, development, like growing a company based on a good idea and a good product.
Well, you talk about this with your phone all the time, right?
You're like, my iPhone, what was it?
iPhone 4 is not all that different from iPhone 14. That's an exaggeration, but like iPhone 11 and iPhone 14 aren't that different.
Apple has actually increased its revenue significantly through its bundle of services by increasing the amount of costs it can pull from the App Store.
I've got my Mac here, so everything is locked in here.
Software as a service, everything is linked into the Apple bundle.
That Tim Cook's great – there's a great book.
I forget exactly the name.
I think it's Apple – Life After Steve.
So after Steve Jobs died.
Steve was a product guy.
He would invest hundreds of billions of dollars into R&D, into creating game-changing, beautiful new products.
Tim Cook is a managerial type.
His job is to squeeze as much money out of the stock price.
So how do you do that?
A, you park $100 billion or whatever overseas so you don't have to pay – Taxes on it.
B, you don't invest necessarily in brand new R&D. You invest in making sure that people get the new phone every year.
You invest in paying $2.99 for that iCloud bubble.
I mean, imagine what that is at scale.
And at scale, what they're doing is locking people into services with Apple, which are recurring subscription revenue.
It's a shitload of money.
And I think their stock is at the highest level ever.
But when's the last time you held...
Okay, you have a Tesla.
When you got into a Tesla, it's like picking up the iPhone 4 for the first time.
And you're like, holy fuck, I can't even believe this is real.
This is a new thing.
The first time I had an iPhone 4, it had that beautiful back.
And it was like Steve Jobs described it as looking like a Leica camera or something.
I remember holding it and just being like, this is the coolest fucking thing I've ever seen.
I felt the same way whenever I got into a Tesla.
I'm like, I'm not in a car, I'm in a computer.
I'm in a computer that drives.
And that leap, think about how rare that is.
Over the last 20 years.
You had Marc Andreessen on, and Peter Thiel also has a famous quote on this.
He's like, we were promised flying cars, and all we got was 140 characters.
Except now we have 280 characters.
It's like, yeah, I mean, you know, we had some tech advancements, but at the end of the day, like, I've been using the same relative phone for the last 10 years.
And if you were to ask me in 2012, when the first time I picked up that iPhone 4, I would be like, no way, man, 10 years from now, who's gonna know?
We're gonna have Oculus, or we're gonna be living in this, like, brave new world, for example.
And We're not really there.
ChatTPT is the first time I felt excited about something.
Well, at least at the end of the line of what gets done— It's like if you looked at the Earth from above, I use this analogy all the time, if you didn't know us, if you were from some other culture, some other planet, and you were trying to observe what human beings do, well, they make stuff.
They keep making better stuff.
There's a bunch of other stuff that goes on.
There's a bunch of...
This is keeping up with the Joneses, materialism, but what that does ultimately is it forces you to buy more stuff.
The materialism instinct that people have, it's a base thing, it's like silly, why do it?
It's a part of human beings for some strange reason, a status thing.
And that status thing allows people to continue to innovate and buy new stuff and continue to make better and better versions of that thing so you're compelled to buy it.
So much of public companies in particular, this is where the incentives are the most fucked up.
The amount that they spend on research and development now is way less than it used to be number one and dramatically less than private companies.
Because, again, I was telling you the other day about this, what might be...
The greatest corporate con like in history from this Indian industrialist who was at least up until like the last week, the richest man in Asia, like fourth richest man on the planet after like, you know, Elon and Bezos and Bill Gates.
And there's no doubt his company is big.
He's got close ties in with the Modi government.
He's built ports.
He's involved in energy, runs airports, all this stuff.
But there was a big 100-page report that came out from this group called Hindenburg Research, which is known for sort of identifying fraudsters.
They're short sellers, so let me be clear.
They have a financial incentive also on the other side.
They're betting on this company going down.
But what they revealed was essentially that this guy, allegedly, they deny it, had set up all of these shell companies that they were using to manipulate their stock, which propped up the company's value, which also hid how bad their debt situation was, that his brother was controlling a bunch of these shell companies.
And so over the course of the past, what, week and a half, his suite of companies, like seven different companies, have lost like half their Their value.
The scheme is actually not all that dissimilar from the SPF thing, which is basically Mauritius, which is offshore.
They were using Mauritius-based shell companies to have cash there that they actually owned to buy their own stock, inflating the stock price.
Based on inflation of stock, they're able to borrow— The actual cash against that stock.
So the actual value of the stock wasn't as high as it supposedly was.
SBF kind of did the same thing by issuing that own token, which they then claimed had value and then borrowing actual cash based on the value of this false token.
And that's how you get the billions and billions that stack up on each other.
And this would all be funny if Adnani was not one of the most powerful men in India.
If his companies did not prop up and not was invested in by the, I think it's the State Bank of India, there is a tremendous amount of exposure in the Indian economy.
And Nani is a hero there alongside Ambani and a few of the other industrialists.
There's a good book, if anyone's interested, called The Billionaire Raj, which is specifically about the rise of these new Indian oligarchs.
And the amount of power that they yield in India is tremendous.
So this is not a joke.
I mean, this really would be like if Bezos was going down.
And his response, now listen, I want to be clear, the response was 435 pages.
I do not claim that I read all of it, but in part, what it said was basically like, this is an attack on India, rather than responding to the specific claims he's playing to sort of like Indian nationalism to try to rally the troops.
Because, I mean, so much of crypto is collapsing now.
And, I mean, that's why it looks like they got so overextended at Alameda, which was basically the crypto hedge fund, because they placed all these bets.
The bets were going south.
They needed more cash.
And so they're tapping into their customer accounts over at FTX. It's all story of leverage, yeah.
I just feel like with so many of these crypto bubbles and schemes and whatever, it's like they're just rediscovering all of the worst ills of the banking system.
You know, it's like, oh, we did this new thing.
We discovered a bank run.
Like, wow, this is what happens when people freak out and come and get their cash.
It is a little complicated because, I mean, look, ultimately, you know, FTX was unwound.
The existing laws do not let you commit fraud.
So there needs to be enforcement.
Now, one of the things that we are keeping an eye on...
Is at some point in the FTX run-up when he's buying all these politicians and he's buying all his like puff piece coverage and the New York Times and everywhere else, there was actually some effort to investigate him coming from the SEC. And there was a bipartisan group of lawmakers that sent a letter that was like, hey, he's our boy.
I guess I'm more sympathetic to the original idea of Bitcoin.
To be fair, Bitcoin is very different than a lot of these other shitcoins that are out there in terms of the invention by the invention of this mysterious man, and then it has a limited number of supply, the original selling point of it as a hedge against inflation, and also where I thought it was the most important was the idea of being able to get around Sanctions, regulation, people being able to censor you.
Where a lot of that came apart, though, and this was scary, was, if you remember, right before Ukraine, what was one of the biggest stories in the country?
Canada.
And the Canadian freedom protesters.
And how the Canadian government was seizing their banks.
And then what was even crazier is they were actually seizing their Bitcoin.
So it actually showed us one of the big choke points in crypto.
I have some friends who work in the industry, and I haven't really gotten a good answer on this, which is, you know, to be able to seize Bitcoin, it's because a lot of it was sent on the platforms, which are itself regulated.
So, for example, Coinbase is still subject in the United States to U.S. regulation, and Canada, similarly.
So the idea of the censorship-free money, it's possible if you know how to do it.
I'm not going to say it was Coinbase necessarily, but they were...
Jamie, I'm sure you can find this.
It was Canadian government seizes cryptocurrency sent by U.S. citizens to the actual Canadian freedom protesters.
And that was one of the problems was that because some of that was on the exchanges, which are subject to regulation, it's the same thing as if I were trying to wire them money to a prohibited group in Canada.
But you were looking at that and you're like, man...
You know, that level of censorship resistance, which I really still really believe in, like, we got to have something, you know, in terms of, there's a current lot of pressure right now for the Fed and for the United States to create like a centralized digital currency.
And even, I mean, essentially, cashless, we don't, we basically live in a quasi cashless society right now.
If you think about China, one of the ways that they're able to implement their social credit score system is everything is within the WeChat app.
Over there.
An Alipay.
It's all integrated, not only for your social credit core system, your Uber, all of that is there, and you tap to pay.
Well, that's great for convenience.
It's also, oh, if you piss off the government, you can't pay for anything anymore.
The problem is, when you have the wild, wild west, the people are going to rise to the top.
It's not an accident that you end up with psychopathic charlatans like SBF at the top of this thing.
You know, because it is like the time, in a way, the time before you had like a central bank and when you had all these different currencies competing with each other in the U.S. And so I, too, was sympathetic to the original idea behind crypto, which is like, you know, look, fiat money is also just based on what we all decide to put value on.
Now, I would say like our fiat currency is also backed by the United States government and the military, etc.
So that would be the most powerful country of the So there is more than just like a belief in it at this point, but okay.
And so if we have this like mode of exchange and this sort of like anarchist principles of organization, it was really a response, a philosophical response, the failures of 2008. When you see how bankrupt are and corrupt our existing financial institutions are and how rigged and how much they lie and how captured the political system is.
And so I understand the impetus for it.
But in reality, it has never been used as actual currency to a significant degree.
It just became a purely speculative vehicle.
And to your point, like the idea that the three of us could just go out and be like, we're making Rogan coin and like, we bought- We could make a shitload of money on that, by the way.
We like hired Kim Kardashian to sell you Rogan coin and if we can like pump it up and do the confidence game enough, then we can run away with real cash and leave all these people holding the bag.
When I look at that, I'm like, I think this went astray.
Or even leading up to the Great Depression and the stock market crash of 1929, there was a whole buildup in the 20s of people were introduced to the idea of buying stock on margin.
And they didn't really understand what it meant.
And there were all these local dealers who were getting them in on it.
And there was just tons of fraud, charlatans, people lying to you, all this stuff.
And so after 1929, there were a lot of banking reforms that basically made banking boring.
They separated all the gambling and wild speculation out from the just like basic Customer deposit, like regular bank that people go to.
And then, you know, over the years, that was eaten away and those regulations were eaten away.
And eventually you ended up sort of back to a pre-1929 situation where they were again allowed to speculate in these wild ways and there was no separation.
And so after the...
the housing crash in 2008, there was effort to reform the banking sector.
There were some things that were done through the Dodd-Frank financial reform, but they never went back to just separating out those two pieces and making it boring again, the way that it was boring and stable, the way that it was.
And so to me, I understand the response of crypto and looking at this and being like, this system is fucked.
We need to just do our own thing.
It's corrupt.
It's disgusting.
I totally get that.
But I think the only answer to it is to have better reforms of the existing system to make it safe and less corrupt and not have this wild speculation that can create these bubbles that just destroy the entire economy and people's livelihoods.
If 2008 happens and we have Dodd-Frank and the system doesn't get fixed, what are we supposed to do?
I actually get that.
I don't know.
I'm really of two minds of it.
On the one hand, I deeply sympathize with the individualism of like, look, we're going to take it into our own hands, boys.
Nobody's coming to save us.
This is all we got.
There are a lot of preppers actually who bought Bitcoin are sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars because they bought in very early.
So shout out to those guys.
On the other, look, at the end of the day, systems can change if enough people actually want to do something about it.
We've talked a lot about the stock market ban.
I think that's actually probably step one.
If we get to the point where we can just ban members of Congress from trading stocks, the institutional trust I think that we could all then have within the system, just at a baseline level, it would help a lot.
That is an independent media story, though, because that's one of those where that guy published it.
We started talking.
This is not just us.
This is a lot of people.
Dave Portnoy.
There's a lot of other people out there who've talked about it.
A lot of independent media.
People like you have also brought it up.
That kind of put it in the cultural pop culture conversation.
You got TikTokers out there doing Pelosi trades like they have huge accounts.
Where Gen Z and millennials are totally bought into how corrupt the system is, that floats upward with the outrage.
Insider picks it up.
And President Biden actually originally had a line in the State of the Union just last year where he was going to endorse a congressional stock rating ban.
Well, and again, like, Republicans, you know, all these people, like, the Republican holdouts or Kevin McCarthy, the apostatingly populist or whatever, this was not one of the demands that they made of, like, let's get stuck.
I mean, and like I said, McCarthy, he brought it up at a moment when he thought it would serve him politically, but then the moment he actually got the gavel and took power, nothing.
That's the key to getting what you want in politics, though.
That's, you know, look, these people, they're never going to do anything because it's the right thing.
You've got to force him to do it so that it's politically advantageous.
And look, there's actually a lot of room for some politician out there.
Originally, I think it was John Ossoff, the senator from Georgia.
He's a young guy.
He's like 30-something.
He's like maybe 37, relatively young.
I guarantee you, he's pretty online from what I can tell.
He was the one who caught this.
He goes, oh, I'll just introduce a bill to ban this.
He got a ton of good press for being the first senator to actually propose a ban.
So we need to make it and create a system where right now it's politically advantageous to sell out To K Street, which is the lobbyists, that's where they all sell out to big business, Wall Street, military, industrial complex, any of these people.
I think what I would love to do, and one of the aims of the show was creating and rise with independent media and working with everybody is to create an alternate system where you get rewarded for.
We had a big conversation about Ukraine.
Just let one politician say it.
Right now we've had like maybe two who have ever raised any questions.
Rand Paul was one of the old people.
He goes, I'm not going to even vote against the aid for Ukraine.
Let's just have an auditor to make sure that it's all being spent right.
There may be no opening for diplomacy, especially right now.
But Sagar is right to point to the fact that early on in this conflict, there actually were meetings happening between Russian officials and Ukrainian representatives.
There were talks that were happening.
And reportedly, they were kind of working out an outline.
There were still very difficult sticking points, you know, based on the reporting that's available.
And Boris Johnson, who was at that point Prime Minister of the UK, and of course they have been our closest ally in all of this, was dispatched to go to Kiev and give the message to Zelensky.
This was reported actually in Ukrainian press.
We do not want you to make a deal.
That was our posture.
We do not want diplomacy.
We do not want negotiations.
So the thing that I object to is the idea that is sold by Biden and others of like, oh, it's just it's just up to Ukraine.
That's bullshit.
They are where they are 100 percent because of us.
This is an incredibly dangerous situation because of the proxy nature of it, because Russia certainly sees themselves and they accurately should as being in a proxy war versus us.
And so the idea that we have no say and no influence over whether or not there are negotiations is completely bunk.
And so, you know, that's the piece where my other concern is that we're sort of building up to another Afghanistan situation where, you know, we went in with one goal, like, okay, we're going to get the bad guys, we're going to get Osama.
And then when we failed at that, we end up with this 20-year occupation and total disaster at the end of it.
And no one can really say how or why we were there for so long.
Like, how do we get to some sort of exit ramp in Ukraine?
And here the stakes are so much higher because, as you point out, it's like nuclear war and World War III on the line.
And even if that's like a tiny chance, we should care a lot about that tiny chance.
Just like we provoked the war in Ukraine, we are now provoking a war with China.
And who benefits?
I'll tell you right now.
Your enemy is not China.
Your enemy is not Russia.
Your enemy is the military-industrial complex which has been fleecing this country to the tunes of hundreds of billions and trillions of dollars.
How many times are we going to have a defense secretary say, hey, we can't account for two trillion dollars in the Pentagon again?
Which has happened twice now in my lifetime.
So, again, people are being...
The war machine cannot be stopped.
Who's running this country?
The war machine.
It certainly isn't Joe Biden making these decisions.
I would like to know who is making these decisions.
And I just want to remind everybody, the United States is the world's terrorist.
We just set the Middle East on fire in the last 20 years, and now we're doing a proxy war in Ukraine, which we provoked, NATO provoked, and was just admitted that we provoked it by the former Prime Minister of Germany, and now we're trying to sable-rattle with China, and they're predicting a war.
Again, China's not going to invade us.
China's not our enemy.
We might have an economic war.
That's what these are.
These are economic wars.
These are wars for in Ukraine.
It's about liquefied natural gas and making sure Germany and Russia never come together because we fear Russia's natural resources and manpower, and we fear them getting together with Germany with their technology and their capital.
And so that's why we blew up the Nord Stream pipeline.
That's why we're doing the Ukraine war.
This is all about hegemony, imperialism, and economics.
And if there's a Marine somewhere, it's there because they're about to steal some natural resources from another country.
As everybody's screaming about what a bad guy Putin is for invading Ukraine, the United States is currently occupying a third of Syria.
And which third is that?
It's the third that has the oil.
And how do I know we're there to steal their oil?
Because the President of the United States said so.
I mean, the bottom line is, we've talked a lot about incentives.
What's the incentive for the people who make bombs?
They're trying to make money.
And they're very influential.
They donate a lot of money in Washington.
They go, you know, revolving door, not just from, like, Government officials, but also they go on CNN and MSNBC and whatever, and it's never disclosed like, oh, and by the way, this person is like on the board of Raytheon and happens to have a vested financial interest in what we ultimately do here.
So, listen, it's...
It's at the core.
The profit motive is at the core of a lot of what happens in this country.
You know, something crazy is that even the Navy secretary, we just covered this, he came out and was like, in a few months, we may have to choose between arming ourselves and arming Ukraine.
And then the Biden administration made him come up and, quote, clear up that comment.
He's like, oh, I didn't mean it that way.
It was just, well, no, he actually did mean it that way, because it turns out that we've been sending so many munitions and stuff that we have over to Ukraine.
Yeah, there you go.
If the defense industry can't boost production, arming both Ukraine and the U.S. will become challenging.
He literally came out and said that we may have to choose if these weapons makers don't get their act together, because actually, and this is the other thing where, you know, military industrial complex.
One of the things that we forget is they're not actually particularly good at what they do.
If we look at the F-35 program, it was a colossal disaster.
It was over a trillion dollars.
It cost way too much money.
The U.S., I want to say it was the Zumwalt class, a new...
Navy people are going to freak out at me, but it's either a destroyer or something.
It's supposed to be a new generation ship.
We were going to build dozens of them.
We only ended up building three.
They cost a shitload of money.
The gun costs a million dollars a round in order to fire it.
So we're not able to even produce what we need.
This is a big fight during the Iraq War, too, where guys in the Pentagon would rather fund boondoggle programs than stuff that was actually protecting the lives of our soldiers, like MRAPs.
Like, they didn't want to fund some of the stuff that was actually protecting American soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan.
The A-10 Warthog is another good example.
Cheap Plane, which actually has ability to assist people in a tactical situation because they're more interested in their, you know, ridiculous flying shit.
And Jimmy also points to the correct thing, which is the Pentagon did just fail its fucking audit.
I read once that they have one of the largest HR systems in the entire world.
I was like, on what?
What are they spending that on?
A lot of it—look, I have no idea.
That's the point.
Even with terms of Ukraine, there was a great—this is a great media episode.
CBS News did a whole documentary about how many of the weapons that we were sending to Ukraine were not making it to the front line, which is bullshit, right?
Because if we're going to take all these weapons, I would at least hope a Ukrainian soldier is using it to protect— His own life.
Literally, the day after that documentary went live, he had to delete it.
CBS News retracted it and said, no, actually, the situation has changed.
It's very easy to be manipulated by these people because you see what happened when Biden pulled out of Afghanistan.
And I acknowledge it was a mess.
It was a disaster.
It was ugly.
It was not good.
All of that.
But you see the way that they came out in force because they hated this decision.
They wanted us to continue to be there forever because this was like the endless gravy train for them.
And so, you know, that was the most effective, most potent criticism against.
It was uniform across the board with the media.
And so that they did the same sort of stuff to the leak against you.
They'll really damage your approval rating.
They're really tied in with the media in terms of like, you know, they're leaking to their sources and they will go on and make their own case, et cetera, with no disclosure that they have financial incentives involved.
It's very, very easy to be manipulated by the people who want to be in a place forever or want to start a war or whatever it is.
Great book, Bob Woodward, Obama's Wars, about the very first year of the Obama presidency.
He promised to run on the good war, Afghanistan, but he's not necessarily wedded to a surge.
The Obama's Wars book just details how Biden was the only guy in there being like, Mr. President, what the fuck are we doing in Afghanistan?
He's like, why should we send 40,000, whatever, more troops?
What are we going to do?
What's our endgame?
Let's just have a counterterrorism mission.
And David Petraeus, Mike Mullen, and all the other generals in the Obama White House were leaking against President Obama and actually actively undercutting him to the New York Times and to the press to create a Obama is soft on terrorism narrative, specifically so they could do a surge in Afghanistan under Stanley McChrystal.
And look, it's complicated.
But if we look back on that, Did it really buy us anything in the long war of history with Afghanistan?
I know personally people who were blown up during the surge in Afghanistan, and I also know how much it hurts them emotionally to watch ground that they fought and lost their brothers for, lost limbs for, get retaken by the Taliban several years earlier.
It's just like we're talking about with Ukraine.
What is the endgame?
And the endgame is not something that Washington really likes to talk about.
And even if you're looking at the pullout situation on Afghanistan, it's like, well, why should we stay in Afghanistan?
If you're listening to the media, it was like, because so Afghan girls can go to school.
And look, I feel very bad for Afghan girls.
I do not wish a situation where they are unable to go to school.
Does that mean that we should have people there in perpetuity and spend $200 million per day and have Several American soldiers get blown up by an IED. I'm sorry, I don't think so.
I think there's a lot of bad shit that's happening all across the world.
But they're never going to frame it that way.
And that's why, man, the media on this, on war in particular, they offer no nuance.
Afghanistan was a real red pill moment for Crystal and I. And look, I'm not defending it.
I'm not saying it wasn't a shit show.
What's the alternative?
They were like, oh, we should have surrounded the city of Kabul.
I'm like, so you want to send thousands of American soldiers to create a perimeter around the city of Kabul?
That suicide bomb that happened in the airport, it would have been that times 100. In terms of we were occupying and surrounding an entire city, there are valid criticisms of we should have held on to Bagram, we shouldn't have abandoned the military base or whatever.
And that's a tactical consideration.
I'll leave that to the people whose job it is.
But on a broader strategic level, why should we have stayed in Afghanistan?
And I haven't heard a particularly good answer to that.
You know how much they actually cared about the women and girls by the fact that now that those women and girls are starving in a mass famine, they don't give a shit.
They don't cover it.
They don't cover the fact that we're partly connected to it because of the fact that we are continuing to hold their central bank reserves.
Now we're over that.
We've moved on.
Now we're focused on humanitarian stories elsewhere.
So it's just very selective and it's weaponized humanitarianism because Americans are good people.
Like people don't want to see someone suffering.
And so they'll use the legitimate humanitarian concerns to try to achieve their aims.
And then once those aims are accomplished or not accomplished, they don't give a shit.
I forget the exact name of the company, Jamie, but it's basically called the heist of the century.
If you Google like heist of the century, China, semiconductors, I think it was called AML. It was a British semiconductor company.
Any American or Western business is required to do business in China has to have a Chinese subsidiary.
So essentially what happened is the Chinese subsidiary, I believe of AML, was stealing the technology from within it.
And after they were reprimanded for something like this, the CEO of the Chinese subsidiary just said, nope, I'm taking it.
He stole all of their IP, created an independent business backed by the Chinese government, and is now spinning up, based on their IP, semiconductors that were originally intellectual property of this British semiconductor company.
And the reason that this matters is that is just the tip of the iceberg for IP theft that is happening with respect to China.
It's one of the reasons why if you look at Chinese or American businessmen who do business over there, they fully and readily admit the amount of IP that has just been straight up stolen through their fake legal process of this Chinese subsidiary.
But really, it's just a farming operation.
There's no such thing as private industry in China.
You know, I talked about with TikTok.
All the time, the CEO, Zhang Ximing, he actually was forced to pull one of ByteDance's apps from the Chinese app store and apologize because it was not supporting, quote, socialist principles.
He was like, I apologize.
This is the CEO of TikTok today, the owner of TikTok.
Everything there is totally controlled by the government.
They're very savvy and they're very smart.
And at this point, they've actually even reached a point where in some cases, they don't even need our IP. In some areas, they are far more superior and advanced than we are.
One of the ones that scares the shit out of me is electric vehicle batteries, so the entire EV battery supply chain.
It's connected to China in some way.
You've talked about the cobalt and all that.
And one of the things that Siddharth brought up on your show was that it's the Chinese companies that are working with these Congolese gangs.
Chinese don't give a shit about labor.
I mean, it's not like we give a shit either, so to be fair.
But anyway, they're willing to come in and be like, Look, we want the cobalt.
Give it to us.
This is actually part of the reason why Elon is in a precarious position.
A huge part of the Tesla EV battery supply chain is in China.
Even here in the United States, a lot of the new EV battery plants that are being built, it's a Chinese subsidiary and a conglomerate that is behind that.
And look, what did we come through with the whole pandemic?
If you're going to have critical supplies being manufactured and connected to China in some way, they're always going to put their interest, as any country should, above your own.
You need to have some sort of resilience.
Taiwan is another example.
TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturer, they are building a plant here in Arizona.
They're building, I think it's a $100 billion plant, which is great.
I'm glad that they are, but it takes a decade to spin those things up.
They create 92% of the world's most Advanced chips.
If we have a conflict in Taiwan, I always talk about this on the show, we are all turning this shit into the government so that they can create missiles and bombs.
Like, they will literally need to rip the semiconductors and chips out of our cell phones, out of our computers, because we're not going to have anything.
92% of the world's most advanced chips.
Everything goes dark.
Everything is turned over into some sort of ration thing.
Chips is the new gold.
It is one of the most precarious as an industry for the United States that we remain in.
The Chips Act was a great step in the right direction that the Biden administration passed, but tip of the iceberg, man.
I mean, that is the, like, if we're looking for a more positive story, less, like, gloom and doom.
The Biden administration has, like, dipped their toe in the water of industrial policy, recognizing that, I mean, the best response to China, the problem for us is being so interdependent, where, you know, The pandemic, you come to realize, like, oh, fuck, they make all the masks.
Vitamins, drugs.
And then the other piece is we realized with these sprawling just-in-time supply chains that they were incredibly fragile, right?
That if you have a disruption, your whole economy is, like, going to go to shit.
You're going to have inflation.
You're going to have all these backups at the ports and all this stuff.
They have dipped their toe in the water of having industrial policy that makes us more resilient, less reliant on these other countries, including the Inflation Reduction Act had a lot in it for bringing that green energy production and EV battery production to our shores and has requirements about where those batteries are built and where the sourcing comes from.
But it really is just starting to dip your toe in those waters, ultimately.
I mean, the sourcing on the EVs is such a nightmare.
And if you're trying to get, you know, Conflict Creek cobalt or lithium, right now there's a huge battle right now in South America, in Mexico, in Chile and elsewhere where Chinese companies are trying to buy all of the lithium deposits, which of course you need for a lithium operation.
Ion battery.
And if we also, I mean, look, this shit takes a long time.
I think that's the one thing I want people to, you don't just snap your fingers and build a semiconductor fab.
You need water.
If a single human hair gets into the TSMC facility, the whole thing shuts down.
This is the most sophisticated manufacturing basically in the entire world, and we're trying to rebuild it overnight.
It's very, very, very difficult.
And then even if you think about from an infrastructure point of view, so we have an explosion right now in electric vehicles.
I think that's great.
I think EVs are really cool.
They're really fun to drive.
But if you don't have a Tesla, if you're driving long range, where are you going to charge it?
It's not like we have a ton of EV battery stations.
It's complicated, whereas nuclear has like a 93% rate at which it's always being able to run.
It's actually even more powerful than natural gas, very reliable.
Unfortunately, we haven't built a new nuclear power plant in the United States since 1974, which is insane, right?
And luckily, California decided not to totally lose its mind and close the Diablo nuclear power plant.
Here in Texas, I think only 13% or whatever of our power comes from nuclear.
We get more power from coal, I believe, here in Texas than we do from nuclear in the year 2023. It doesn't make any sense.
The point is, is that even if we wanted to, though, and this is the fair criticism.
It takes a long time, but with all of these things, no time like the present.
We've got to start now.
The current system is not working.
Texas, a lot of the power just went out here in Austin.
One of the reasons why, from what I've been able to read so far, it's actually not the grid, it's because power lines are constructed above ground.
And people are like, okay, well, why do we do that?
It's cheap.
It's a lot more expensive to have to bury these things underground, so it's a trade-off.
Yeah.
Even if we look at the previous grid failure here in Texas, it was failure to weatherize the natural gas grid.
So a lot of this stuff is preemptive investment to make sure that old people don't die in the middle of a freeze or, you know, that horrible situation like in Buffalo, right, where people were losing power and freezing to death in their cars and stuff.
It's like that is why we need to have more forward thinking as a country and actually get some agreement about these things.
And frankly, we're going to have to throw a shitload of money at it.
Like it costs a lot of money.
But the idea that people say, oh, but that's like government subsidy.
Listen, we subsidize the shit out of the oil industry.
You really think we don't subsidize oil?
Of course we do.
It's critical energy infrastructure.
There's so much regulation around it.
You can't even get a new nuclear power plant approved if you were to apply to, I think it's the FERC, it's like the Federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
So we need reform on all these things just to make life better in America.
And unfortunately, a lot of it is just corrupted so that it's not really possible.
energy, all the issues that we have, and that's where it gets really crazy when you look at the money that we're putting into other things like Ukraine.
If we had the resources to do what we're doing right now currently, that means we had the resources to attack all these problems domestically.
I mean, they might say it, but they all vote for it, right?
I mean, how many of them actually voted against it?
Jamie, you might be able to look it up what the actual vote count was on the extra 50 billion to Ukraine.
I'm not 100 or at least the original 50 billion.
It was almost unanimous in terms of what was sent over there.
And Look, I think a lot of them, what they're saying is a more financial perspective of what you're talking about.
They're like, hey, why should we spend $50 billion to Ukraine if we have all these problems here?
I mean, I don't necessarily agree 100% with that feeling.
Yeah, 11 senators who voted against the Ukraine aid bill.
But that means that 86 of the entire chamber did end up voting for it.
If I were to look at it, I'd be willing to bet a lot of them are fiscal Republicans.
So Josh Hawley, Mike Brown, yeah, Boozman, Crapo, Hagerty, Lee, Loomis, Marshall, Tommy Toro.
These are mostly more libertarian types, so they're going to be more concerned.
on the spending side.
But, you know, the critique that we've all talked about here on the show today, you will not hear a single word of this out in the mainstream.
I have not seen one intelligent discussion in any format of mainstream media on Ukraine raising any of the valid points that we just did because the lobby and the denunciation of, oh, you're pro-Russia, Oh, you're spouting Putin talking points and all that.
It's vicious.
And a lot of these people just succumb to that, unfortunately.
I really don't know how to get around it.
But if I can have anything take away, is what you said.
Look, if people were willing to unanimously, relatively agree to send $100 billion to Ukraine, and we have all these problems that we just talked about, that shows you what the priority is.
I always look at, what's the bipartisan consensus in Washington?
So we passed during the pandemic this expanded child tax credit.
Phenomenally successful program.
Lifted like half of all kids that were in poverty out of poverty.
You know, they did research on the way that parents were spending this.
They were spending it on their kids.
They were spending it on like, you know, enrichment for their children.
It was like unanimously great policy that worked really well.
And Democrats, Republicans decided they were against it, and Democrats just let it expire without a peep.
And so again, it's like, you know, the hard thing is...
So many people's political approach is so focused on, like, whatever the cultural outrage of the moment is, that things like that don't even get surfaced, they don't get debated, they don't get discussed.
And then this program, which was one of the most successful programs we've done in a long time, just...
I know you've been talking about UBI and concerns about it.
So we actually been doing a lot of deep dive into this.
And we looked at a couple of new studies.
There's a new one actually just came out that a big part of the, quote, labor shortage is actually men who were working much longer hours during the pandemic cutting back on their hours.
So it's not—and actually, Matthew Iglesias tweeted this study, if you want to see it, Jamie.
It's from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
So it's a couple of things.
It's a cutback in the amount of hours that people are willing to work.
Also, because 2020, with the initial reopening, there was more labor ability to bargain.
Many people were not willing to go back to work at the same wages.
One of the concerns around unemployment I know that you would raise and others was, oh, well, people are getting all this unemployment.
They're not going back to work.
And there were certainly some cases of that true.
But we had a interesting natural experiment where they actually ended unemployment benefits back in 2021. It had little to no change on the overall employment rate.
So even when you took away the unemployment benefits, all of the anecdotal stories of like, I can't get somebody in because they're getting unemployment, they didn't want to work.
Actually, when they stopped getting unemployment, a lot of them didn't go back to work.
And it wasn't just because they had money saved up, because we know right now we have some of the highest credit card debt in modern American history, which is never a good sign.
In fact, many bank accounts are below pre-pandemic levels.
And so there's actually just been a fundamental reset in the way, a cultural reset, in the way that a lot of people approach work.
A lot of it is women.
One of the fascinating things that happened is we had, for the first time in modern American history, we had an increase actually in the amount of babies that were born.
The pandemic baby bump.
That happened from 2020 and 2021. We've almost never had that happen before.
People were bored and they had more time and they were able to plan pregnancy, be at home, not have to worry about one week or whatever of maternity leave.
So we're living in a really interesting moment in the way that people have evaluated their relationship with work.
There's a real reorientation going on, especially for like white collar workers who were very wrapped up in their like, you know, whatever their work dramas were and their whole life was centered around work and climbing that ladder and whatever.
And so when they were forced to go remote and all of that was stripped away, it was like, why am I, why is this the only part of my life that I'm focusing on?
This thing that I don't even really like when I have like a family, I have a community, I have other things that are important to me.
And I don't think that that – I think that is a dramatic mindset shift that is probably not going away, like a cultural mindset shift.
And you see all these people, too, like moving to different areas, valuing different things in terms of their quality of life.
And so, yeah, as we look at the labor force participation rate, A lot of the decline was actually people not leaving their jobs, not that they didn't want to work, but just working fewer hours and being unwilling to dedicate their entire waking life to their job.
Listen, the three of us, we get to do things that we really love, right?
We really...
We're passionate.
We feel like it makes a difference.
Like, we, you know, eat, sleep, drink it.
And that's rare.
That's really rare.
Most people are, you know, they're, like, punching the clock.
They're doing their thing to be able to get a check, to be able to support their families.
And so, you know, there's been this sort of, like...
I don't know ideology sold around careerism to especially like college educated white collar workers that like this is the thing that's supposed to be who you are in your whole life and I think taking a step back from that and being more intentional about like well is that actually what I want my whole life to be about and maybe there are other things that are outside of the workplace that are more meaningful to me that provide me More happiness or more joy or more fulfillment in my life.