Jim Gaffigan and Joe Rogan debate Jordan Peterson’s autoimmune diet, including his reported vegetable avoidance, while joking about genetic cancer risks and alcohol tolerance—Rogan cites 100,000 annual fentanyl deaths and unchecked decriminalized markets. They critique political corruption, comparing Biden’s foreign ties to Trump’s scandals, and question systemic accountability, like Epstein’s suspicious death. Rogan links corporate profit motives to harmful GMOs (94% of Americans exposed) and COVID-19 lab-leak theories, while Gaffigan highlights humanity’s shortsighted resource depletion—ocean plastic may outpace fish by 2050. Ultimately, the episode blends humor with urgent warnings about health, politics, and environmental collapse, framed through personal anecdotes and systemic critiques. [Automatically generated summary]
So for him, there was like an elimination diet, and he found out there was just a bunch of things that his body was reacting to in a very negative way, and one of them apparently was vegetables.
A lot of it is like just complex carbohydrates.
You know, a lot of it is bread and pasta and stuff like that.
A lot of people get really inflamed eating that, and it causes a host of issues.
Well, eventually, isn't there, you know, like, even the problem with chemo, you know, I'm a guy who tells diarrhea jokes, so I know a lot about this.
Isn't the expectation that if they could kind of concierge your cancer treatment to your specific type of cancer for your type of body or your type of cells, that that's why people are going to be able to live to 100?
I mean, there is like, I mean, you just hear about, you know, people from the Philippines, like an entire family, everyone died of cancer at 40. And you're like, eh.
It's interesting when you consider for generation upon generation, people would look at their parents and their parents would say, you know, I had to walk five miles to school.
I had to walk uphill both ways and all that.
And I look at my teenagers and I'm like, oh, they have it harder.
They definitely have it harder.
Like, you know, like...
In high school, dealing with, you know, you were compared to people in your high school.
Now these kids are compared to everyone on the internet.
It's like the, just the, you know, the, the acts, you know, like the, you know, like we used to, when we were kids, you're like, hey, Tommy's dad who's divorced has a Playboy.
We're going to go over there and we're going to look at it in a field.
Like we did that when we were like 13. Yep.
And now it's like the porn is thrown at you.
And so, like, I look at, you know, I think kids got it much harder.
And it is strange, because among, you know, there is this kind of the banter of the, you know, the greatest form of affection you can give another comedian is to give them shit, right?
But that's also...
You also can get a temperature of how they're truly responding to it.
You know what I mean?
Yes.
You guys pick on Bert and everything, but if you got a sense that it was truly hurting his feelings, you would be more constructive about it.
And, you know, like, when I think of how my dad used to drink, like, my dad would come home, he would have a vodka, and then at one point he would switch to scotch.
I thought that was normal.
I'm like, you know when your dad has two vodkas and then he switches...
But he would wake up the next morning and be fine.
Yeah, you know, I have like, yesterday was our anniversary and I had a glass of champagne with my wife and halfway through dinner I was starting to get the headache.
Yeah, when I take time off of drinking, like we do Sober October every year, and then I'll have a day when we go back, we get fucked up, and the next day I'm like, I'm not doing this anymore.
Like, all right, so on an average week, how often do, you know, like, because alcohol is different from, like, consuming, like, getting high in other ways.
Because alcohol seems kind of counter to the Joe Rogan lifestyle thing of, like, or are you sitting there going, oh, this special cumin-enlaced vodka has zero calories.
Do you ever look at the Europeans, the way that some of our foods have genetic modified things, and then the Europeans are like, no, we're not going to do that.
This groundswell, I mean outside of the obvious thing of financial interests of major corporations corrupting our political system, but like why is there not kind of people saying this is insane?
Okay, federal prosecutors are dropping campaign finance violation charges against alleged crypto crook Sam Bankman-Fried over a legal snafu in his extradition from the Bahamas to the US. Still faces 12 other charges in the case.
Five more of those counts are still in question because they were added after he was extradited.
Any comedian would look at that and go, alright, so somebody in the Justice Department was like, he donated a lot to our people, let's make this go away.
But here's...
Here's a question I have.
So, there is that level of corruption, but do you look at that level of corruption and see it as equal to what Trump has been repeatedly busted as?
Do you see those as equal, or do you see like...
That as...
Because, you know, like, I wonder if...
Like, to me, it's like, you know, like, the indictments against Trump, I'm like, it's gonna keep going, right?
There's gonna be more things.
Whereas, like, this is...
Vague corruption.
I'm not justifying it, but like I feel like some people see this as totally equal.
Because the way it's been described to me and the way the CEO was looking at it, he was saying that this is fraud.
This is like straight-out fraud.
It's financial fraud and they were They were taking clients' money and using it in a way that they were not supposed to.
They were funneling it off to Almeida.
He was not being honest about his connections to that.
I don't know all the absolute specifics of the case, but the way it's been described to me is that there is not enough regulation in cryptocurrency and that these people are allowed to do some really shady shit and that these people took it to the far end of this. but the way it's been described to me is that And they were making insane amounts of money and they were doing amphetamines and they were hanging out and having this polyamorous lifestyle with these bunch of super nerds banging each other.
Like these socially awkward weirdos, all of a sudden they're super rich.
If they were doing it above ground, everything was cool, I would be celebrating them.
I'd be like, yay, look at these.
They won.
But a lot of people lost a lot of money.
And, you know, there was also, they were being exposed by competitors, by Binance, and then it turns out that Binance is fucked too, and they're up their ass with a microscope, and they might have...
All sorts of problems and fraud and all sorts of other things that are being lobbied against them or leveled against them.
I don't know.
It's a lot of complicated financial stuff that's outside of my realm of understanding.
Yeah, it is interesting because the basic premise—again, I know nothing about crypto—but isn't the basic premise of crypto is, like, there's no regulations?
This currency is outside of—it's not tied to the dollar.
There's an independence there.
So you can't compare that to Martha Stewart going to jail for insider trading.
It's having information that would allow you to make not just an educated guess.
But you know what's going to happen.
You know what's going to happen and you know that because of these decisions that are being passed that these companies are going to become far more valuable because they've got certain deals and then you bet on that.
It's, you know, there's the corruption, but it's also like that, because I have a 19-year-old daughter, and she's amazing, and she is not, like, if I brought up the idea of her pursuing a career based on financial security, she would be offended.
And I say that with a little bit of a joke, because I also remember, like, comedians, people that go into comedy are not like, you know, we didn't know it was going to be this type of business.
We went into it because it was, you know, creatively fulfilling to get on stage and make strangers laugh.
But, like, there is something, at least for me, having five kids, it's like, I really didn't care about money.
You know, in my 30s, I remember my parents died and people were, you know, like, all my siblings came around and we were getting stuff and I was like, I'll take the immigration papers, you guys can have the rest.
And so, like, I was the youngest, but, like, the point I'm getting to, as you get older...
Once you get a taste for comfort, it's, you know, because I've tried to articulate to my children, you know, money is about freedom.
You know, it's like the freedom to, like, afford to go on a date, you know, the freedom of independence.
Like, I don't have to ask mom and dad for my help, for help.
And so, but there is, you know, the perspective that changes.
And I'm not saying all people, but, like, when you're 20...
All right, do I have enough money to get beer?
You know what I mean?
As opposed to like when you're 40, you're like, all right, I might need knee replacement surgery.
Yeah, because when they reach a certain age where you can hear them actively not listening to you, and you're like, oh, I hope your peer group is communicating some of this stuff.
Because I've said it six times, and you're obviously not hearing it.
There has been, you know, again, going back to like these teenage kids, I would say like 13 to 19. I mean, you know, up, you know, some of them missed graduation from high school.
Some, you know, some of it was just a year.
Some people it was two years.
But it is...
social media it's like also you know you know the generation of our comedians you know we were I mean how many benefits did you do about legalizing pot decriminalizing pot let's get rid of all these rules and then so what happens in Manhattan is it's decriminalized right so like every bodega Is selling weed.
But since it's decriminalized, the police are like, we got enough on our hands.
But unlike LA, where it feels organized, in New York, it's a little bit of the Wild Wild West.
And so there's these two stores.
And again, there's no supervision.
So one store starts selling mushrooms, you know, kind of like discreetly.
Some of them starts, you know, they'll sell it to a kid that's 13.
Whereas in L.A. and Colorado, I don't think that happens.
And so as a result, what's happening in New York is that there's kids that like are getting stuff that since it's not regulated, they're getting stuff that's laced with stuff.
And so instead of smoking, you know, spending your age of 16 years old smoking oregano for three months, these kids are smoking some of the most powerful stuff that's laced with shit.
And then there's kids that are like, you know, there's kids jumping off buildings.
You know what I mean?
And the thing is, is like it's not talked about because it's, you know, some of these wealthy parents, there's so much shame about – I mean, I have no idea.
I can't even contemplate what it would be like.
But it's not in the news.
It's not like where I grew up in Indiana.
It's like, oh, that town, there's meth there.
You know what I mean?
It's not like that.
It's like...
There's a cover-up.
Like, this kid was going to go to this great college, and he got stoned off of a vape pen that was laced with, you know, whatever that stuff that they get from China.
So, you know, I've performed in China a couple times.
Now I'm never going to be able to perform there after saying this.
But, like, essentially...
During the Opium Wars, it's like the British were trying to take over China, and they were trying to trade, and essentially nothing was working.
So what they essentially did is they got an entire generation of Chinese addicted to opium, and they destabilized, and then they could take it over.
And the British did a lot of nice things in India and all over the world, but...
This is like one of the things that, you know, among the expats that were performing stand-up in China would tell me about, is that like, oh yeah, this fentanyl is all kind of like revenge for that.
And that, so they make it, they sell it to the cartels of Mexico, and it's just going to get in.
But like, so what is the, because the question is, what is the motivation behind them doing this?
It's kind of like, you hold a grudge.
You know, it's like, you literally, you know, this great nation that has, you know, Thousands-year-more history than most Western countries was essentially the British came in and they drugged them.
And so some of it is physical and some of it is, you know, the physical that leads to mental, you know, so you feel, you know, because I'm sure that I speak for you also.
It's like I feel mentally balanced after I do stand-up.
Like it's not just a high.
It's not a low.
It's like if I'm really high before I do a set, I'm kind of even keel if I'm kind of...
Exhausted.
It gives me a boost.
And so when I think about things that are for mental health, and for me it sounds kind of corny, but during the pandemic I started gardening, and it is amazing.
It sounds, and I know I'm You know, people are like, my grandma gardens.
But it is...
I mean, some of it is I wanted to be a farmer, you know, when I was in eighth grade.
But, like, farmers are happy.
Like, there's something about their...
about...
The meditative nature, there's also, you plant something and you come out and there's, sometimes there's a huge amount of peppers.
It's like Christmas morning and sometimes it's a disaster, but it's amazing.
You know, I have material on kale and I've grown kale and I'm like, all right, you know, this is better than the, you know, because of course the time I had kale 10 or 15 years ago, it was just bitter.
It was probably old kale, you know what I mean, that had bolted or whatever.
So I used to drink kale smoothies every morning, and then I started reading up on kidney stones and problems with oxalates when you eat raw vegetables in high quantities.
There's a lot of people that drink a lot of those veggie shakes in the morning, ground-up vegetables that wind up getting problems with oxalates.
Really?
Yeah, they say it's actually, for some vegetables, it's actually better to cook them.
It is fascinating how different cultures excel at cooking, right?
So, like, the Italians, amazing.
But, like, right above Italy is Austria.
I'm not saying Austria has horrible food.
But, like, you know, I've been to Vienna.
I did a show there.
It's like you get deep-fried, you know, whatever that dish is.
But, like...
Some of it is like the, you know, you go to Mexico, it's like that's the home of, you know, the people of the sun and all those fruits and peppers, and there's a pepper for every kind of state in Mexico.
And some of it is geography, but some of it is just like they really care, right?
And they've taken the time to figure out how to eat good stuff.
Yeah, so I eat mostly healthy, but if I'm going to go to Los Angeles, and I'm only there for one night, and I have a chance to go to a great Italian restaurant, I'm going to eat.
Then you go out for burgers at 2 o'clock in the morning.
Yeah.
Yeah, you definitely can do that.
The most important thing is like what is the majority of your diet and the majority of your time.
Is the majority of your time spent doing healthy activities and being physically fit and eating right and taking vitamins and doing the sauna, a cold plunge and all this other stuff?
Or is the majority of your time spent eating burgers and cheese and fucking drinking beer and fucking off?
Then you're going to have negative consequences.
I think as long as the absolute majority of your time is spent doing healthy things, then you just enjoy yourself on these ones.
Like The Rock has this cheat day he does, and it's legendary.
He takes photos and videos of it, giant stacks of pancakes, maple syrup.
And then you get to provide these people with an amazing experience of fun and joy and laughter and they walk out of there and he's talking about that.
You're having conversations, so you're getting the fulfillment.
Because you're talking to friends, you're talking to...
You're talking to peers.
You're talking to people that you're seeing develop their careers in MMA. And then you're also talking to fascinating people that you're curious about.
There's movies that I want to meet that director, and they'll be like, well, you should find a way, because if an agent proposes someone, that director's not interested in that person.
When they have, like, vision, they have an idea of a thing, and they're trying to put it together in their head and trying to plan it all out, and then someone's like, you should do this.
And I think that, you know, that's some of, you know, not getting caught up in other people's expectations is...
And that's like the lesson that I personally have to keep relearning.
Not like from scratch, but it's like, I guess I would call it like a relapse where I'm like, oh, wait a minute, I only did this because they told me to do it and I didn't even want to do this.
Do you know what I mean?
Whereas, you know, when I was in my late 20s, I'd be like, what do I do?
Like, I feel as though, you know, with comedians, we are so used to being around people of different points of view and different sensibilities that we grow to love that...
It's not completely foreign to...
I remember at 4th of July, I had a friend that was at Occupy Wall Street, and then I had a friend who works at Fox News.
And they were there, and they've known each other for 30 years.
And it was nothing.
It was not an issue.
It was interesting.
I mean, I was asking them questions.
I'm like, alright, so what's going on here?
But...
There is something – maybe it's because comedians are misfits because I say that also and I sometimes think like – sometimes people in the entertainment industry are like, you know, my business is so weird when the reality is, you know, in a bank, in a construction site, there's – People have dramatically different opinions, too, and they gotta go along to get along, right?
Well, people like being in opposition of other people, and they like thinking that those people on that other side are keeping them from living the dream.
Or keeping, you know, this country from being great.
Or keeping, you know, people from prospering and keeping democracy alive.
And if we don't defeat them, we're fucked.
And they like having this, like, wild cause.
And there's some validity to it.
I mean, there's a lot of real challenging issues in this country.
Real dangerous, scary issues.
And there's a lot of financial interests that are tied up in these dangerous, scary issues.
And they will avoid solutions because they're profiting off of the problem itself.
There's a lot of that going on.
That's a lot of the homeless problem.
There's a lot of issues in this country that you could pick one side or another and just decide those people are the problem.
It's insanely complicated.
It's insanely interwoven and complex.
And to just reduce it down to the right versus the left and we're the good guys and they're the bad guys, it's like...
That's such a stupid perspective.
And you're being played.
You're being played by the media.
You're being played by politicians.
It's like manufactured outrage, recreational outrage, and it's just a giant distraction.
Why is it that the UFO thing comes up every couple months where people are like, there's UFOs, and then a half hour later people are like, did you see the new Colts uniform?
We're so easily distracted by really unimportant things from stuff that is the theme of every sci-fi movie.
You know, the aliens thing, in the pandemic, they're like, well, here's the aliens info, and people are like, that's unbelievable.
Did you see what Trump said to that female reporter?
You know what I mean?
Like, we are so easily distracted by...
But, I mean, I don't think it's a conspiracy, necessarily.
I think it's just that human beings are just like goldfish.
We definitely are, but then there's also people that take advantage of that.
And I think there's definitely calculated news releases and leaks that they put out to distract us from other complicated things that are also going on simultaneously.
The fascinating thing about the UFO thing is because if this had happened in like the 1980s, it would be front page of every newspaper.
Everyone would be talking about it at work.
Everyone would be talking about it on the street.
Like, oh my god.
They had congressional hearings where they said, we've recovered multiple crashed vehicles from other planets.
We have alien biological entities that are in freezers.
That they have right now.
The government has been doing this for 80 years and keeping it secret.
There's a crash retrieval program.
There's a back engineering program.
This is all in the congressional hearings yesterday.
Like, because you talk to him, you're probably friendly with him, but like, he reminds me of a comedian.
He reminds me of like the comedian that, because there's the comedians where they'll be like, hey, do us a favor, whatever you do, don't bring up that person with the blue shirt.
And the comedian's like, I'm bringing up that person with the blue shirt.
He is that, like, the X thing, and I haven't done a deep dive, I know people are upset about it, and But I'm sitting there, and I know that people are like, but my takeaway is like, oh, he's just doing that for fun, right?
That's just him like, alright, the Russians did a Z on their trucks, what could I do on Twitter that would freak people out?
And that's kind of...
Or is it a distraction?
What he's doing?
Here's my conspiracy.
My conspiracy is Twitter threads.
It's still in development, but Twitter is really struggling, right?
You don't want problems that are insurmountable, like you live in a war-torn country and there's no food.
Those are horrible problems.
But you want problems like, I'm in a difficult occupation, there's a lot of competition, it's fascinating, intellectually challenging, but I have to be on my fucking game.
And I have to get up and I have to put in the work, and the more work I put in, the better the results will be.
That's what you want.
And you want that feeling of satisfaction.
Complex problem solving.
We require things that we have to accomplish and do in order to feel good.
Like we've got some, we've made some headway, made some ground, we made some progress.
We're doing the right thing.
There's like a built-in thing that I think that's from our evolution and our development.
That we had to develop the proper tools and figure out how to hunt and gather and all those different things.
There's a lot to that.
There's a lot to that.
That it's like it's wired into the psychology of being a human being.
The most miserable people I know have nothing to do.
They're bored and lazy and they're sedentary and they distract themselves with drugs and alcohol and whatever and pharmaceuticals and those are the people that are struggling the most because they don't struggle with the thing that they do where there's this thing that they have to be on top of.
They have to be focused and really dedicated to it.
And then you see the results of those, whether you're working in a team, an office that's trying to accomplish a goal, and you get it.
You're like, yeah!
And then everybody can go out and celebrate.
There's a real feeling of accomplishment when you do something.
When you don't do anything, anything at all, I just think people get really depressed.
I think it's really bad for you to not do anything.
I think the chance of Biden is entirely dependent on whether or not they can do something to turn his health around because it seems like his mental health is deteriorating so rapidly and so publicly that it's a narrative now and it's an inescapable narrative.
When I was growing up, people turned 65, they retired, and they either went to Florida or Arizona, and they retired or they got a different kind of job, but they kind of disappeared.
Then they went to the blue plates, they dyed their hair blue, and then they started sending their kids two bucks in a birthday card.
I didn't even know 80-year-olds existed.
I mean, now there's so many 80-year-olds.
Like, there used to be, like, people that were 65 that moved to Florida, and then there was, like, Willard Scott would announce one or two hundred-year-olds.
Well, Biden is a particularly bad example because he's also had two brain surgeries.
He had a serious brain surgery where they literally remove the top of your skull and deal with aneurysms.
He's got real problems and they know it, but they also know that he's the president of the United States and they can't address that or they'll lose power.
And they also know that he's stated that he wants to run again.
Whether they can talk him out of that, or whether he decides not to do that, or whether the health complications get more severe.
Like, you don't get better when you get 80, and you're in the most insane, high-pressure job.
I think every other person who was involved in January 6th, who was involved in coordinating a break-in into the Capitol and in instigating people break-in, they were all arrested.
This guy wasn't.
Not only that, they were defending him in the New York Times, the Washington Post, those different things, saying that Fox News has unjustly accused him of instigating.
Well, he clearly instigated.
He did it on camera.
I don't know if he was a Fed.
I know a lot of people think he was a Fed.
The people that were there were calling him a Fed.
What I do know is when they asked the FBI, the FBI said, we can't tell you whether or not there were people that were there, that were doing that.
Now, there's been reports that there's hundreds, I don't know if that's true either.
But I do know that they do use agent provocateurs to disrupt peaceful protests.
It's a common tactic.
What they do is, say if there's a—like the World Trade Organization is a great example.
That was in, I think, the 90s in Seattle.
And so what they did was they were protesting the World Trade Organization.
They were doing it peacefully.
It was a big problem.
So what they did is they sent in, allegedly, agent provocateurs.
They started smashing buildings and lighting things on fire.
Now it's not a peaceful protest.
Now they can bring in the police.
Now they can start arresting people, and then they created a no protest zone, where literally if you had a pin on your jacket that was the WTO with a red line through it, they would not let you cross.
You could not cross with a pin that was against the WTO and go to work.
There was a no protest zone.
So they silenced protest, which is a part of our freedom of speech.
So this is a tactic that some government agencies use to stop peaceful protest.
No, but you're saying that they're like, you know...
We'll make this, instead of an awkward protest, we'll encourage it so that it'll backfire on Trump rather than being this rising of people that believe that there was election corruption.
I think that, you know, that the FBI or the CIA saying, hey, you know, Trump lost this election.
Because here's what you're kind of implying.
Trump lost the election.
He is such an amazing communicator and he's convinced this loyal base that there was election interference.
We don't want them to protest how we can end this Is if we encourage people to go beyond protesting to essentially go into the Capitol and take a shit in the hallway.
I mean I'm exaggerating a little bit.
But like I don't see why that would be – Like, I'm more suspicious why Trump didn't call for backup when, you know, for the Capitol Police.
You know what I mean?
It's like, there was...
And that, like, Michael Flynn's brother was...
You know what I mean?
Like, there's way more conspiracy stuff against...
Trump.
And, you know, then I think the slim likelihood that people were like, oh, Trump's a problem.
Let's just get these people that are loyal to Trump to run into the Capitol so that we can arrest 300 people.
And so you're saying when he was in Helsinki and he was saying, I believe Putin more than my intelligence community, that was something the intelligence community was like, we're going to get him.
Well, I think they were going to get him in any way that they could because he's an enemy of the intelligence agencies.
And he was openly...
Talking about them being incompetent and being corrupt and he you know he fired Comey and you know he was against the FBI and You know look it's a very dangerous thing you talk to people that are intelligence agencies like it's a very dangerous thing for a president to be at war with the intelligence agencies and to do it so publicly and I think it's Without a doubt,
when you have a gigantic, massive protest that a lot of people think is a threat to democracy, you have these people that are saying the election was rigged and they're on the Capitol lawn, they're screaming and yelling.
I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that they would encourage people to do things that were unlawful.
Instead of peacefully protesting, which is what everybody was doing on the outside, which is totally legal, to take that and escalate it to entering into the Capitol.
Now you can lock things down, and now you have real clear evidence that this president is responsible for this insurrection attempt, and this is dangerous, this is a threat to our democracy, and He's never gonna be president again.
We're gonna indict him.
We're gonna go after him.
We're gonna do all these different things I think it's not it's not like it's there's a lot of shenanigans going on on both sides It's not like a clear-cut like he shouldn't have done that and they should have done this It's like there's a lot of fuckery and there's a lot that's been going on Throughout history, whenever people have unchecked power and unchecked influence, and they have enemies.
Yeah, but I think even, you know, and again, I'm not saying that there isn't corruption on both sides, but, like, in the end, for me personally, it's like when people complain about Biden's, you know, age or his cognitive decline or whatever, I'm like, the alternative to me is Is not acceptable.
Well, I think, look, you know, Joe Biden's relationship with his son or, you know, who obviously struggles with addiction.
I mean, look, half of our friends struggle with addiction.
It's like...
You know, he's a compassionate father.
Is there some of that, like, some, you know, let's make some money with our influence after we left office or even when we were senator or stuff like that.
But compared to Trump, compared to, like, Jared getting a $2 billion contract, compared to, like, You know, like even the documents, like the documents that like Biden had or Pence had versus like Trump literally showing the documents, some of them being of, I think we're going to find out, Being really inconsequential.
I'm not saying he was selling them.
I'm not saying...
I don't know if he was, you know, it was like a big swinging dick move.
I think that's different than, you know, Pence having some documents in his house that he shouldn't have.
By the way, I do want to make clear that I do have the approach of like, I could find something out and be like, alright.
But like, there is part of me that's like, it's very little doubt in my mind that Trump is the most corrupt and, you know...
You know, was, you know, like just the, you know, it's not, you know, like Andrew Jackson was like, you know, did horrible things, but like, I don't begrudge someone having kind of like kick ass and take no prisoners kind of attitude.
It's not the style, it's just I think that there's repeated corruption.
And I'm saying that to say that Biden is like the good, that was like what everybody thought when he got into office.
Finally, the adults are in the room now.
But that's not really true.
And nothing really changed that much once they got in there.
It's not what, it's not like what everybody would like.
There's a good guy and a bad guy.
I think there's two bad guys.
And I think there's corruption that exists in big business and in government that is on a scale that we probably would get violently ill if we found out the actual numbers and what really is going on in terms of influence and how decisions get made and about how certain people become immune to prosecution and certain people become...
It's nuts that they put that woman in jail for sex trafficking to no one.
Who are the people?
There's no list.
You have no idea.
There's no disclosure.
But the fact that no one's asking for that and the people that were involved in these crimes have never been brought to justice or even discussed And it's just something that just gets swept under the table.
There's no outcry.
There's no people demanding an investigation to find out what the fuck happened.
There's real clear evidence that he was murdered.
And everyone's trying to say, oh, it was just suicide.
No big deal.
And they're like, oh, the cameras didn't work.
No big deal.
Whatever.
It's over.
Let's not talk about it anymore.
That's nuts.
That's crazy.
There's clear evidence that they did that in front of everybody's face.
I mean, Michael Badden, the autopsy doctor from the HBO series, he investigated the autopsy and he said the contusions, the ligature marks on his neck were indicative of someone being strangled.
He also said the break of the bones or the type of break that happens when someone's being strangled, not when someone's being hung.
When you're hung, it's your body weight.
That is hanging you, right?
So it's usually on the upper side of your neck because your weight is hanging you down.
But this was down on the bottom of his neck where he's getting fucking strangled by somebody.
And the bones in his neck were broken, which is what happens when you get strangled and doesn't happen when you get hung.
I think it's the same thing why no one's paying attention to the UFO thing.
I think we're inundated with so much information.
There's so much going on.
There's the Ukraine war.
There's climate change.
There's this, there's that.
There's wildfires.
There's fucking pollution in the ocean.
It's like it's constant.
There's always something to be freaked out about.
Oh, people are dropping like flies, and myocarditis, and how much of it is climate change, and how much of it is vaccine injury, and how much of it is this, and then there's new medications that are coming out to deal with this and that, and what are the side effects of those, and there's new corruption here, and new there, and crypto, and financial, and Sam Bankman-Fried's release.
We're just overwhelmed with information.
And I think we're just like, bah!
News cycle is like three seconds.
It's in and out, and then there's a new football player.
Well, there's so much debate about the lab leak theory, and that keeps people occupied.
There's so much debate about funding gain-of-function research, whether or not Fauci lied to Congress, which it appears he did.
There's so much.
There's so much to freak out about.
Unless you're one of those people, like you're a climate change guy and you concentrate on one specific thing and that's all you focus on all the time, you're overwhelmed.
You're overwhelmed by constant new threats, constant new distractions and dangers and things to freak out about, and you're overwhelmed with anxiety and existential angst.
It's hard.
We're not designed to deal with the information that comes from 8 billion people.
We're designed to deal with local stuff.
Like, what's going on in my town?
What's happening in the country?
That's the big local.
The big community is the country.
And then the rest of the world is like, what's happening in Argentina?
Like, what's going on in Nicaragua?
But when it's just fucking thrown at you all day long, constantly, the cartels, the borders porous, fentanyl's coming in!
You can't get a break unless you disconnect and unless you're off of social media and unless you're not reading the news and just trying to exist with the minimum amount of information coming at you possible.
I think Biden is a product of a very corrupt business that has been corrupt for a long time.
And he's just not that good at being discreet about it, not that good at covering it.
I also think, you know, when he bragged about getting the prosecutor fired in Ukraine, I think he's just a guy that has a lot of like, I'll fucking show them.
I'll show them.
And it's dumb.
And I think that's why a lot of his stuff gets exposed.
I don't think he's evil incarnate.
I think he's one of those people that is in charge of government and has been in that business, entrenched in that business forever.
I think it's a deeply corrupting business because it's so overwhelmingly corrupted by financial interests and by business and contracts and military industrial complex and the pharmaceutical industrial complex and there's so much influence.
There's so many lobbyists.
There's so much going on.
There's so many deals being brokered.
I think he's a product of that.
I think Trump is a businessman who, for sure, has been involved in some shady shit.
You know, the Trump University thing is a good one.
But he's also a guy that was a Democrat most of his life, and he's also a guy that knows how gross that system is.
And he was a part of it until he became a president.
Well, I think Ron DeSantis is finding that out, that he can't compete with them.
I think he was so successful and so loved as the governor of Florida that pulled everybody through the COVID crisis that he was going to take this no-nonsense, conservative approach and then run the country in a good way, and everyone's going to get back to the way America used to be.
Mike Pence, when they were taking him away from the Capitol, they were like, he refused to get in the car because there was an expectation that the Secret Service was going to take him away from the Capitol so that they couldn't complete what he was supervising on January 6th.
And we're all being manipulated, all of us, everyone, constantly, all day long.
There's so many pieces of evidence of...
Of interference, where it's not just discourse where people are just discussing things online.
There's people that are hired to take egregious, ridiculous positions and fight against other people and say horrible things and attack people.
They're doing it on purpose.
They're doing it to try to disrupt rational conversation and rational disagreements where people could possibly come to some sort of a reasonable conclusion.
You know, like, for instance, getting rid of gerrymandering, you know, rank choice voting, you know, some of the Andrew Yang stuff.
It's like all this nonpartisan things that conservatives and liberals and moderates essentially all, you know, because essentially what's happening now is that 70% of the American public will want one thing to happen.
And our government officials will not do it because they're so beholden to special interests.
And so it's like we really don't have a representative democracy.
Well, they probably would, and that probably would be good.
And then it would be the rise of independent news sources and real journalism, which you're seeing more on the internet now than you're seeing in mainstream media.
Independent news sources on the internet are far more reliable in my opinion than what you're seeing on Fox News or on MSNBC. What you get on those is sanctioned propaganda.
And what you get on independent channels is people that don't have a vested interest.
They're not being controlled by corporate interest.
And they have the ability to, whether it's guys like Jimmy Dore or whether it's Breaking Points, they have the ability to talk about things in a complex way and look at them on both sides and find out what the influence is and where the corruption is and talk about it publicly and openly.
And because of that, because these are the only sources that are available now, is independent sources where people are individuals that you can trust because you know they don't lie.
They might have their biases, but they're not being influenced by corporations.
Yeah, but I do sit there, and I think the lesson of Fox News is...
I remember when Fox News kind of rose, and they started with the mainstream media kind of language, is that what I learned is, oh, it's impossible for a human being, whether it be Walter Cronkite or Jesse Waters...
To deliver a sentence of news information without kind of having their personality.
It's impossible for it to be completely objective.
Do you know what I mean?
Even the most boring newscaster, it's like, well, now they're downplaying this riot.
You know what I mean?
There was a riot.
Because CNN used to be like that.
It used to be very talky head, right?
And...
But I don't know.
It's weird, because I think it's hard for something to be completely objective.
There's the problem with those shows, too, is that they're very limited in time, right?
So if you have a guest on and you have one segment with that guest, you have seven minutes to discuss the complications of NATO encroaching on Russia and how much of an influence that had on Putin invading Ukraine.
It's complicated.
You'd have to go into the coup, the organized coup that was probably funded by the United States in 2014. You'd have to go into the fact that we've been delivering arms to them.
A lot of shit that you would have to unwrap.
The influence and the amount of time that you would need to do that is hours and hours and probably multiple episodes.
Instead, they have to jam it all into five minutes and then we'll be right back with cute cats.
We'll be right back with, you know, here's a new thing that you should take.
Here's a new study that shows that, you know, obesity could be conquered by this.
Like there's no other time when you're eating food naturally that you get that kind of a dose of sugar.
Like how much sugar is in...
Let's Google this.
How much sugar is in a 16-ounce glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice?
I bet it's extraordinary.
I bet the amount of oranges you would have to eat to get that sugar.
And again, when you're eating an orange, you're eating it with the pulp and the fiber and it digests more slowly.
It's more natural.
It's normal.
It's the way...
Your body likes fruit because fruit is delicious because it tricks your body into eating it and then you eat the seeds, you shit them out, and then the seeds grow and then plants grow.
Because during the pandemic, you were like, get rid of bread and sugar and see what you're doing.
And so when I would cheat and I would have gluten-free pizza, and by the way, you bring that up to an Italian, they're like, we don't do gluten-free pizza.
But if you have gluten-free pizza or gluten-free pasta, is that better or am I just kidding myself?
Now, if you have a gluten sensitivity, like two of my kids have gluten sensitivities.
One of them really has a problem with gluten.
It just gets swollen, so it just feels like shit, like bad stomach aches.
If you do that, yeah, gluten-free pasta is better because they can eat gluten-free pasta and they don't have any problems.
But it's also what's interesting is, and many people talk about this, when you go to Italy and you eat pasta over there, you don't have the same reaction because they don't have the same bread.
They don't have the same wheat.
They have...
They have heirloom wheat.
So their wheat has never been genetically modified.
They have the same wheat they've had for hundreds of years.
So when you eat bread and pasta, it's not the best thing in the world for you, but it does not have the same effect on your body.
I don't have this overwhelming feeling of, like, inflammation and grossness that I have when I eat American pasta.
Because American pasta, what they've done is modified the wheat for higher yield with smaller ground.
And I'm not talking about, you know, in World War II, you know, they had to make cheese slices in a large quantity so that they could give them to all the soldiers.
That's why we have sliced American cheese and stuff like that.
But, like, why does it seem with every food item that America is...
The worst.
By the way, if Americans care about money, it's like you're going to pay at the end.
So the people that are involved in the industry that makes wheat, makes corn, makes these different things, all they're thinking about is maximizing profits.
So in the pursuit of maximizing profits, they create an item that's worse for your health.
And they don't care.
So it's up to you.
So as long as there's other options, as long as other options are readily available, it's up to you to decide to only eat things that aren't modified and aren't bad for you and aren't filled with pesticides, eating organic, eating healthier stuff.
But if it's a corporation, a corporation's obligation is to their shareholders.
So they have to continue to make more money and they make decisions that would maximize profit.
And in doing so, a lot of times they're making a product that's worse for your health than the original product.
But it lasts on the shelf longer.
You get higher yield for acreage.
And that's what they do.
It's all money.
Now there's certain people that have recognized that and have changed their farms.
Like I had Will Harris from White Oaks Pastures on the podcast.
A fascinating guy.
And he had an industrial farm that his family was running forever.
And over the course of 20 years converted it to a regenerative farm and a natural farm where it's all organic and no pesticides, no herbicides.
When they have a problem with some sort of invasive insect, they bring in another insect that kills those insects.
Well, the way Will Harris describes it, he's like essentially you're reproducing nature in a controlled environment.
So instead of applying pesticides and herbicides and chemicals and toxins, which leads to horrific runoff.
One of the things that we've showed on this podcast multiple times is they documented how their farm is connected to industrialized farms.
There's an industrialized farm right next to it.
And the river runs through both properties.
But there is a clear line where the runoff from this industrial farm is just this brown pollutants that's going into the river because it's industrial fertilizer.
And on his side, the water's clear.
Because on his side, he doesn't use any of that stuff.
And they have fertile topsoil.
Because during the regenerative farming practices of using manure, the cows only eat grass, and this all creates its own natural fertilizer.
And then you have the pigs, which are roaming and foraging, and you have the chickens that are roaming and foraging.
And then you grow the vegetables with that manure as fertilizer.
And then everything sort of has its place.
And it recreates what a natural environment would be.
It's just contained.
It's just fenced in and many, many, many acres.
And it's all like this recreation of nature, a natural method.
And then, by the way, genetically modified doesn't necessarily mean bad.
You know, there's been genetic modifications that have led to superior nutrition, and I think that's the case with, I believe it's golden rice, or it's more nutritious, more protein-rich rice, and it led to many more people not dying of famine and starvation.
There's different things that can be done to foods that make them superior.
You know, it's not all negative, but pesticides and herbicides, like on whole, like pretty much, are terrible.
There was something also about farming that, you know, all right, so you could feed a lot of people where we had the corn and we had the potatoes, but all they ate was the potatoes.
They didn't eat anything else, whereas, like, before that, before farming, people would forage, and there was a variety to the diet, and there was more nutrition.
It's just, and there's just also just so much, there used to be so many fish, and I don't know if you've seen that map of like just the Gulf of Mexico.
You know, I played this character that worked at a fish refiner.
I didn't realize it.
All the streams, all the lakes, they're just farmed fish.
Because we destroyed the ecosystems in these things, or we gobbled up all the fish, so then we have to put, like, bass into these lakes that, I don't even know if they were there.
He's a young man who created an invention to siphon the plastic out of the water, to filter the plastic out of the water.
And then they take that plastic and make things out of it.
They make like eyeglasses and stuff like that out of it.
It's pretty interesting because he's got this machine that goes over the Pacific garbage patch, that giant fucking enormous size of the state of Texas.
And they just scoop up This plastic, and then they carry it out, and then they take that plastic and convert it into usable goods.
I mean, I think he made this invention when he was 19 years old.
Brilliant, brilliant guy.
We've had him on twice, right?
Yeah.
But salute to him.
So this machine, and they've refined it over the years, they've employed multiple ones of it now, and they're using them to clean up oceans and rivers, and they just scoop up the plastic, and they take that plastic and recycle it.
It's fascinating that we find ourselves in this very unusual time in human history.
It's a very unusual time where we're overwhelmed by information.
We're overwhelmed by problems, but also overwhelmed by innovation and things seem to be changing.
Insanely rapid pace.
We have more access to information than it's ever been available before.
People know more about more things than they ever have before.
And if you choose to really concentrate on things to enrich your intelligence and your acquiring of information, you could really have a pretty fascinating life today.
But we're also overwhelmed by fear and anxiety and social media and health problems and this and that and poor diet.
Environmental concerns and are we leaving behind a world for our kids?
There's so much.
There's so much to freak out about.
But there's also so much beauty and joy.
There's more art and music and comedy than ever before.
The movie industry is fucked.
They seem to be in a bad situation now.
And now that there's a strike going on with the...
The actors and the writers, it's like, fuck.
That's a bad situation.
But in terms of content, in terms of the amount of things that people produce, the amount of art that people produce, it's unprecedented.
And to set that standard, the people to aspire to that ridiculous fake life, that's also a problem with media depictions of reality, is that people start comparing themselves, just like kids are getting fucked up by social media, comparing themselves to filters and fake people.
But media depictions of reality, whether it's through television or movies or songs, it gives people an idea of how their life is supposed to go based on these heroic adventures of these people, based on all these people that are doing the right thing.
And then when you have a movie that's a realistic movie, a movie that realistically explains people in a way that you know to be true, like that movie's gritty.
It is pretty ridiculously different, but again, it goes back to what a corporation is.
If you want someone that's going to run a corporation, and that corporation is going to ruthlessly try to acquire wealth for their shareholders, You want someone who's willing to do a lot of shit to do that.
So you want someone who's gonna get...
They're gonna benefit from that.
They're gonna financially benefit from that in an extraordinary way.
So they're gonna be the most driven, the most psychotic about it, and in turn...
They're going to generate the most wealth for their shareholders.
And because of the way structures are created, these corporate structures, they have an obligation to make more money every year, more money every quarter.
If they don't do that, they'll get kicked out and they'll find someone new.
And by the way, there's no one who's running those giant corporations that's over 65. They get to a certain age, they get rid of them.
All those Fortune 500 companies, you don't see people running CEOs of those companies that are 80 years old.
No, they fucking funnel them out and get some new guys on Adderall.
And that guy goes fucking ham and, you know, funds some fucking Fugazi studies and shows that this product is totally safe and effective and free!
And now the money's flowing in.
And then the politicians are paid off, and they're using the money for advertising for corporate media, and they've got this kind of nice balance going along where they're just racking up numbers.
You're crafting it and editing it to the point where it gets into someone's head, like surprise, sneak punchlines, and pop.
It's a beautiful exchange.
The money that you get is well-earned and deserved, and you're creating joy.
It's a net benefit.
But if you were creating pesticides, you know, if you were creating something that might be killing some kids, but for the most part it's just killing bugs, Yeah.
Yeah, that's when things get sketchy.
And then when you've been making $15, $20 million a year doing that, you're going to keep doing that, especially if you can shield yourself with politicians and laws.
Not only that, you're funding studies, so you're controlling these scientists that are the ones that are supposed to be coming up with these peer-reviewed studies that show whether something is effective or good or bad.
And that's how fucking glyphosate gets into all of our food supply.
That's how 94% of the population in America tests positive for glyphosate, which is dangerous.
It's a dangerous chemical.
Yeah, and 94% of us have it in our body from food because it's sprayed on everything.
And, you know, they'll say, oh, it's just a minimal amount.
And then there's also phthalates, which exist in microplastics that all of us have in our body.
There's a direct correlation.
There's a woman named Dr. Shanna Swan from Harvard.
She wrote a book called Countdown.
She's from Harvard, right?
She shows that from the introduction of petrochemical products, plastics in society, there's been a direct correlation between that introduction and a decrease in sperm count, an increase in miscarriages, a decrease in penis and testicle sizes based in Mount Sinai.
Okay.
So this woman's amazing.
She's really fun, too.
She published more than 200 scientific papers and featured in extensive media coverage around the world.
Her appearance is...
She's an environmental and reproductive epidemiologist.
And so her work is all about how these microplastics are affecting children and they're affecting the development of kids in the womb.
So in mammals, when they do studies with mammals, they introduce phthalates into the mammals.
When the mammals are pregnant, the babies of the mammals become affected by this and the reproductive systems are affected.
And we're seeing the direct results of that with human populations as well.
And she's showing through all these studies that people are eating so much microplastic.
You eat like, what is it, a credit card size piece of plastic every week?
Yeah, but you remember I found out that they studied, like, some penguin or something like that and found, like, the penguin had a mount, and then they were like, well, that's probably close.
They did some math equation to figure out that's how much humans had.
Or you can isolate yourself from that kind of news and meditate and concentrate on positive things and just go take yoga classes and go for hikes and be around all the positive things.
In the world.
Because there's still a lot of that.
Like if you go for a hike in Wyoming and you go through the mountains, it's a beautiful experience.
Well, because there's some of the leadership, right?
Because, like, even, you know, when we use the CEO example, like, there was – I just – you know, I'm sure there was corruption back then.
But, like, there was this greater sense of civics and, you know, like, helping – you know, like, just – The drive during World War II, people were sacrificing things and now it's like, you know, there's a little poison.
People are eating a credit card a week.
Anyway, what's going on?
Do you know what I mean?
Like there is, is there, and I don't want to blame a certain generation, but like, do you sit there and you go, People our age, it's like, we should be stepping up.
And some of it is like, why are these 80-year-olds in charge?
First of all, they don't want to run for president because they have skeletons in their closet.
They don't want their life to be picked apart.
And they don't want lies printed about them, which is also part of the dirty thing of politics.
It's not just things you actually did.
It's like gross distortions of things you did to have the least charitable view of you so that the world, oh, that guy's a monster.
We've got to cut him out.
We've got to put this good guy in.
We don't have a lot of shining choices.
When it comes to politicians, I mean, Obama was a shining choice for a lot of people, but then when he got into power, a lot of the policies were very similar to George Bush's policies, particularly with drone bombings and the protection of whistleblowers.
There's so much that you could point to and say, well, this is not what we wanted.
This is not what we thought we were getting.
And there's no one that really stands out other than the outsiders, other than the RFKs and the Viveks and these people that are just different from the established politicians.
And those people, they're fighting against those people with fucking tooth and claw because they don't want them to get into power and they don't want that kind of change because that change disrupts this business that they're running.
I think it's easy for us to characterize, oh, it's the quality of the people that go into politics, but some of it is the occupation.
And the inability for them to even embrace a sense of compromise.
So I think that with Obama, there was...
You know, a lot of people on left and right would say that he compromised too much on things when he had this kind of, you know, particularly the first time he had, like, 60 senators, you know?
But, like, you know, I'm not saying Vivek or any politician.
You're going to be corrupted.
Eventually, you're going to be...
You know, like, Bill Clinton, I think, you know, I'm going to lose everyone, but, like, I think he wasn't a well-intended guy.
Hunter went to see Carter speak, and I remember reading about it that he was just not impressed, not interested in going.
I thought it was one more fucking bullshit politician.
And in the middle of the speech, it was so good that he went out and got a tape recorder and brought a tape recorder back to record the rest of it and remembered thinking, like, this guy's quoting Bob Dylan and he's talking about the future of this country in a way that he hadn't heard any politician talk about in a long time.
And when you have that much money involved, it's going to stay dirty.
You're never going to get a completely pure, like, ethical, moral, enlightened structure that's running a capitalist society that is so overwhelmingly influenced by money.
And special interest groups.
It's a matter of mitigating all those things to the maximum amount possible while exposing fraud as much as possible.
And then putting checks and balances in place to make sure that fraud and that corruption can't get to the place where it's at now in the future.
How do you do that?
Well, you have to take money out of politics.
Good fucking luck.
You have to take money out of advertisements in terms of pharmaceutical drug companies being able to advertise on television.
People are vastly over-medicated and not being given the information that a lot of their medical issues could be mitigated by exercise and diet.
A lot of them.
A large percentage of them.
With diet and nutrition and vitamin supplementation and healthy lifestyle.
And meditation and the mitigation of stress, you can do something to make your life far better and you won't need as much medication.
meaning like it's a human trait to sit there and go okay well all right so we don't want World War III so it wasn't China it's just like look it's it's a I don't think that's the case with the lab leak theory I I think there's real clear evidence that they knew it was responsible.
And you think that Fauci covered it up because he had given money?
And they were doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses.
And I think people in that lab got sick, and I think they spread it out to the world.
And I think Fauci covered it up.
And I think there's real clear evidence.
There's real clear evidence in terms of email chain where the original doctors who had the scientists that examined it said it appears to have leaked from a lab.
These appear to be manipulated viruses.
And then they get emails from Fauci, and then within days they change their tune, and then they get funded.
What I'm saying is that, like, the general resistance...
It doesn't exist right now, the lab leak theory, resistance.
But the general resistance to that is a very human kind of reaction to something.
Where it's like, well, obviously...
It's kind of like the...
And America's hesitation to looking at some of its hard facts about our, you know, this experiment that we've undertaken, which is, you know, understanding, like being able to look yourself in the mirror.
Like, the lab leak theory is...
Is in a way the most logical solution, right?
But also like the, you know, and I'm drawing this comparison.
So like America lived after World War II under this belief system that, hey, we're a country of immigrants.
All these immigrants came over.
We're a melting pot.
Isn't it great?
Anyway, end of story.
Of course, that's not the reality.
The reality is that the wealth of this nation was built off of slavery and about, you know, many, you know, stealing land from Native Americans.
And so, like, there is like a resistance to embracing that knowledge.
So similar to the lab leak theory, whether Fauci caused it or whatever, there is a general tendency to not want to look at a hard fact that might not be comfortable.
Definitely for people that were responsible for it.
And it also makes you feel like you're on the right side of things.
Even if you don't believe in them.
If you can say some facts and some statistics that seem to point to the fact that it probably was some sort of a natural spillover.
Yeah.
I mean, it also eliminates this fucking horrible fear that this could happen again.
You know, that this is a product of this monkeying around with viruses and fucking around with things and making them more contagious for human beings, which is just a dangerous practice that Obama had stopped.
There's also just pure financial interests, right?
There's a lot of funding involved.
If you get billions of dollars from organizations to fund this research, and then you have a business involved in funding this research.
Look, if their way of doing that was to come up with some sort of a cure for coronaviruses when they came around, well, they failed fucking miserably at that.
Because the mitigation efforts were very unsuccessful.
They weren't prepared.
They didn't know what to do.
And they likely did create something that was way more contagious and wound up killing a shitload of people because it got out.
There's money in the treatment and an insane amount of money that gets pushed around.
That's when people get real crazy and think that it was leaked on purpose so that they can make money off the treatment, which is the most evil way to look at it.
I mean, but like the advancements we've made, the fact that we're sitting there complaining about all these 80-year-olds running the world is because we've advanced to a point.
It's like, it was, if you look, I don't know if you can, like, the invasion, where they landed in the Korean War, where the North Koreans had taken over, and, like, there was, like, down here, and then they came in in Pusan.
Yeah, they comment on what's the correct approach, like what path the player should take, what kind of English he has to put on this ball, what are the problem balls that he has to knock out, how he has to maneuver around the table.
You know, the offer, some of it was the timing that Netflix wanted to do, and then, honestly, you know, Prime offered me more money, but, like, I also think it's good to mix it up.