Sept. 20, 2023 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:47:22
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Joe Rogan podcast, check it out! | |
| The Joe Rogan experience. | ||
| Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day! | ||
| Hello, it's good to see you. | ||
| It's a pleasure. | ||
| How are you feeling out there, you truth warrior? | ||
| I keep waiting to be done with this shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| To be done with COVID. It'd be nice to be done, right? | ||
| They will not let it go. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's strange. | ||
| It's strange now. | ||
| Because it's also strange. | ||
| What bothers me, and I try to emphasize this as much as possible, and I even had to do this recently with some close family friends, you've got to take care of your health. | ||
| You have to take vitamins. | ||
| You have to eat right. | ||
| You have to. | ||
| If you don't do that, your body doesn't function well. | ||
| That includes your immune system. | ||
| It includes everything. | ||
| It includes, you know, inflammation. | ||
| It causes a host of diseases in your body. | ||
| You got to take care of yourself. | ||
| And that should be the most important message that everyone's putting out, not just podcasters, but the government, health officials. | ||
| Everyone should be saying that. | ||
| You should really supplement with vitamins. | ||
| You should really, you know, get your nutrient levels checked if you can. | ||
| Even if you can't do those things, though, you can eat decently. | ||
| You can eat decently. | ||
| You can try to exercise moderately. | ||
| Look, I know a lot of people have complicated lives. | ||
| They have kids. | ||
| They have work. | ||
| They don't have much time. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| But even if you can work out a half hour a day, three days a week, and not eat too much, you're in better shape. | ||
| Much better shape. | ||
| Yeah, there's been some studies done recently that something really crazy, like 20 minutes of exercise twice a week improves your overall all-cause mortality score. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| Just a little bit. | ||
| Moderate stuff. | ||
| Nothing crazy. | ||
| Do some push-ups and sit-ups and some jumping jacks and you're good to go. | ||
| You have to do something that gets your body moving. | ||
| Or it doesn't think that it has to, and it atrophies. | ||
| It's just an unfortunate aspect of our biology that we are not like other animals. | ||
| And other animals get stronger, too, is the exercise. | ||
| But we've all seen animals that are super muscular that don't do anything. | ||
| It's just that they're different. | ||
| And they only lived 13 years, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| The whole thing's different. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| With us, we're this long-term species with intelligence and ego and justifications and all sorts of weird ways that we... | ||
| We'll procrastinate and justify bad behavior and unhealthy choices. | ||
| And it's just a constant battle just being a human being. | ||
| No one wins that battle. | ||
| You just win battles. | ||
| Win like daily battles. | ||
| No one wins the war. | ||
| Everyone dies in the end. | ||
| Everyone dies in the end. | ||
| But I do, you know, I wrote about this on the Substack. | ||
| We were just talking before we started about when I didn't see you, but when you were in Vegas in July and I was in Vegas in July for, I was playing poker, that like, you know, gambling is, and I like to gamble. | ||
| I don't have a moral problem with it, but gambling destroys people too. | ||
| Overeating destroys people. | ||
| Gambling destroys people. | ||
| Gambling destroys people. | ||
| Drugs destroy people. | ||
| As human beings, we've set up all these modern things to take advantage of our dopamine, and we're not really built for it. | ||
| We're not. | ||
| And we're certainly not built for phones. | ||
| So many people are getting destroyed by social media. | ||
| Their lives have become wrapped up in arguing with people, and I just think that's super unhealthy. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| There's some aspect of it that's very beneficial and positive. | ||
| I think you get a lot of information that you wouldn't have gotten. | ||
| I think you get to... | ||
| See people's perspectives that occasionally are very inspiring and very unique and interesting. | ||
| I love listening or reading things from other people that I think have very good perspectives and interesting perspectives. | ||
| It's a rare opportunity to talk to people that you wouldn't be able to run into. | ||
| If we lived in the 1970s, you'd have to cultivate these interesting people like in the physical person, which is probably better for you, right? | ||
| But not available for most people. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| We tend to imitate our atmospheres and you see that in thought bubbles and I think that's another problem that we have with social media and there's these thought bubbles and People just you know you sort of gravitate towards them you stay in them and if you're busy You just sort of get affirmation from that thought bubble and you never think outside the box. | ||
| Yes Look I don't know what we do about social media. | ||
| I mean, obviously, my career... | ||
| I wouldn't... | ||
| Well, I guess I was on with you one time before COVID, you know, talking about cannabis, but... | ||
| Before you got kicked off. | ||
| Before I got kicked off Twitter, that's right, and then got put back... | ||
| Well, let's talk about that, because you came on for your book that I've referenced many times, and it's called Tell Your Children, and I think it's important. | ||
| I think when we talk about these things that some people like to use recreationally, like even gambling, like you talked about, we have to be aware... | ||
| That there's consequences to these things too. | ||
| It's not an even ride. | ||
| It's not like every person is going to handle every situation well. | ||
| We had a podcast yesterday with Kurt Angle. | ||
| You know, Olympic gold medalist in wrestling and he was the WWE Champion. | ||
| Amazing guy. | ||
| And he had a real pill problem. | ||
| And he had a pill problem because he broke his neck like five times. | ||
| He wrestled in the Olympics with a broken neck. | ||
| Broken vertebrae in his neck and won. | ||
| I mean, just a freak of freaks. | ||
| So he can do that, but... | ||
| But he got hooked. | ||
| He got hooked. | ||
| He got hooked. | ||
| I mean, this is like a man whose mind is as strong as any fucking human who's ever walked the face of the earth. | ||
| If you can win the gold medal in the Olympics in wrestling, wrestling is one of the most competitive, grueling, insane physical contests that are in the Olympics. | ||
| It's like boxing and wrestling are two of the craziest. | ||
| Judo. | ||
| Judo is pretty crazy. | ||
| But God, those guys are strong mentally. | ||
| And for that guy to get hooked on pills. | ||
| A guy like that, imagine. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because it's not about how strong you are. | ||
| It's just if they click with you in some way, you're going to have a problem. | ||
| And I also had Peter Berg on the podcast, who's brilliant. | ||
| And Peter, who did that film for Netflix, the series that's out now, Painkiller. | ||
| He said he tried an Oxycontin once, recreationally, and he was like, oh my god, this is amazing. | ||
| I could never do this again. | ||
| I'll never do this again. | ||
| But he's got a mindset that can see that and go, oh, I see where this is going. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Look, there's always been this stuff. | ||
| And legalizers, whether it's drug legalizers or people who want more gambling, they always say the same thing. | ||
| Well, you can't really stop people from doing it, and so you've got to make it safe for them. | ||
| Here's the problem with that. | ||
| Here's the flip side of that. | ||
| When you legalize it or normalize it, you wind up opening it to people who otherwise wouldn't do it. | ||
| True. | ||
| And let me go back to gambling because I think it's a little bit less emotionally charged for people. | ||
| Once upon a time, if you wanted to gamble legally, you had to go to Las Vegas. | ||
| Basically. | ||
| Or maybe Atlantic City after, you know, 1978. But basically, you had to go out to the desert and find that gambling. | ||
| And deal with the mob. | ||
| And deal with the mob. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Or if you wanted to... | ||
|
unidentified
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No, no. | |
| If you wanted to bet football, like, you could probably find a bookie. | ||
| You could call a friend. | ||
| You called a friend. | ||
| And you could... | ||
| But, you know, it was going to be some guy who might break your arm if you didn't pay. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So you could do it, but it was discouraged and not that easy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now, we have gambling in, like, you know, 23 states. | ||
| We have lotteries on every corner. | ||
| And just in the last five years, we have sports betting on your phone in many states. | ||
| So it couldn't be easier. | ||
| So what does that mean? | ||
| It means it's going to wreck people who it would never have been available to before. | ||
| That's just a function of freedom, right? | ||
| Well, okay, freedom would be go to Vegas and do it, and we're not going to really judge you for it, but you've got to go get it. | ||
| So make it less accessible. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| This is more, we're going to promote this because both private interests and the state, state governments, make money from it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Well, you can see it from their perspective, too. | ||
| They're like, why should we give the revenue to Vegas? | ||
| We can handle it here. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Our residents should be able to gamble here. | ||
| And there's a percentage, whatever that percentage is. | ||
| And I don't know if it's genetic or if it's based on personal experience in gambling. | ||
| Like, maybe it's like OxyContin. | ||
| Like, Peter Berg took one, but if he took, like, as many as Kurt Engle did, he would be physically hooked, too. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Maybe there could be just you chasing bad money a couple of times, and next thing you know... | ||
| You're doing it all the time. | ||
| I mean, you see it, okay? | ||
| You see the people who can't stop. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Who know they don't have this money, who know they're going to the credit card advance machine for the fifth time that weekend. | ||
| They can't stop. | ||
| So how do we balance that with the freedom to be able to do it? | ||
| Like, how do we say that it has to be regional? | ||
| Like, how do we say that you can go to Vegas, it's totally legal, but you can't gamble in Michigan? | ||
| That's a fair question. | ||
| I don't have a good answer to that. | ||
| So is the solution that we just have to have more people available for counseling and more rehabilitation centers? | ||
| Is that the solution? | ||
| I don't really think that stuff works very well to me. | ||
| Here's what I do think. | ||
| I think putting it on people's phones is a mistake. | ||
| I think putting it in every... | ||
| You don't think gambling rehabilitation works or any rehabilitation? | ||
| I don't think rehabilitation works as a rule. | ||
| I think when people want to stop, they stop. | ||
| But you don't think that support from other human beings that have also gone through it can be beneficial in making good decisions in the future? | ||
| I think for people who want to stop, that can be helpful to them. | ||
| I don't think anybody who goes to rehab unwillingly or even semi-willingly is going to get much out of it. | ||
| And I know this is a controversial perspective. | ||
| One of the things that, so before COVID, just before COVID, I was working on sort of a big book about, bigger than the cannabis book, sort of growing out of the cannabis book, about drug legalization and sort of addiction in general. | ||
| And the most disappointing thing that I found when I was doing this research is that when you try to do randomized trials, where you take 100 people and you say 50 of them, you're going to go to AA, the other 50 are not, and you look at their outcomes a year or five years later, there's no benefit to even going to AA, which I really thought worked. | ||
| The reason AA seems to work is that people go to it and stick with it, like you say, get something out of it. | ||
| But there are going to be a bunch of people who don't get anything out of it who are like, I don't need to give my volition to God. | ||
| This is a problem I'm going to fix. | ||
| I don't like the AA model. | ||
| And by the way, why do I have to sit in this room three hours a week? | ||
| So for every person who gets something out of it, there's somebody who doesn't get anything out of it. | ||
| The truth is people stop using drugs or stop gambling when they personally realize that it's become a crisis for them. | ||
| Sometimes, though, people are motivated by other people's feedback. | ||
| So is there a point of no return or is it – it's got to be variable for different people. | ||
| Like I think for some people, rehab is probably very beneficial. | ||
| Especially because they get a chance to talk to someone who made it out of it. | ||
| Who was telling us about this rehab guy that came in, cracked out of his mind? | ||
| It was Brian Simpson. | ||
| The guy, he was like a counselor or something like that, and then one night he just went off the wagon and came back to work in the morning, and everyone's like, hey, are we supposed to pretend that you're not cracked out of your mind right now? | ||
| No, but let me give you, but you laugh, but the most dangerous time for an addict is the first two weeks after they come out of rehab. | ||
| Because they've stopped using, their tolerance is down, and if they start again, that's when people OD and die the most. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| It's not easy! | ||
| But then the argument against legalization. | ||
| Here's the problem. | ||
| And, you know, I've talked about this ad nauseum, if you heard this, I'm sorry. | ||
| When I was a kid, if someone was on heroin, that was fucking super rare. | ||
| It was super rare. | ||
| You would know, that guy's off the deep end. | ||
| Like, Johnny's out there in the woods doing heroin. | ||
| Like, whoa, like that guy's gone. | ||
| But now to hear, oh, my uncle got hooked on pills is super normal. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's super normal. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And now because of these documentaries, we know like what was the root cause of that. | ||
| But now once it's kind of been established that this is a recreational thing for people. | ||
| So what do you do? | ||
| Do you outlaw it? | ||
| And then what does that do? | ||
| That empowers the cartels because there's the demand already. | ||
| So, okay. | ||
| So the roots of the opioid crisis are exactly, you know, Peter Berg, I mean, you know, that series is completely correct. | ||
| It came out of Purdue Pharma. | ||
| It came out of, unfortunately, some doctors, some of whom I think thought they were doing the right thing, some of whom were motivated by money. | ||
| They pushed prescriptions of opioids in the U.S. in an absolutely insane way. | ||
| And we've now tried to push back, but we're still dealing with the fruits of that poison tree. | ||
| Wasn't that done before in other countries to kind of ruin countries, like introduce heroin? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, the classic example, and, you know, when people talk about how the Chinese export fentanyl to the United States, I guarantee you there are people in China who have not forgot the opium wars. | ||
| In the 19th century, the U.S. and Britain, and this is something we should be ashamed of forever, we basically forced opium to... | ||
| On the Chinese. | ||
| And we destroyed that society. | ||
| Well, you and I weren't alive. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| So I don't think we should be ashamed. | ||
| But I think human beings in general have done some really fucking heinous things. | ||
| We just want to pretend that they don't do them anymore. | ||
| Oh, no, they do them. | ||
| But isn't it interesting? | ||
| It's part of the pushback of all this stuff from people that have no stake in the game other than they're a human being. | ||
| Is that you're saying something that shatters their narrative. | ||
| They have a narrative they've established about what's good in the world, what's the right thing to do, and the direction we have to go, and these people are looking out for us, and these people are Nazis. | ||
| And when you have that, and something comes along and says, hey, there might be something afoot here. | ||
| You should pay attention. | ||
| Like, there's some data you should look at. | ||
| We have a long history of people lying about all kinds of things, you know, whether it's the Opium War, fucking everything throughout human history. | ||
| But for whatever it is, like, now we don't, hey, that's not, that's, oh, this conspiracy theorist. | ||
| Oh, this guy, this wacky guy with his fringe ideas. | ||
| He's an alt-right hero. | ||
| I'm like, oh, okay. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| I wish the world was perfect, too. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I wish there was a guy in the White House that was this amazing human being and a shining example of what's possible from just a person, a loving person who wants to take care of a nation because they really believe in them. | ||
| You've got me laughing. | ||
| But it's what we want. | ||
| And we never get it. | ||
| We never get it. | ||
| It's like fucking... | ||
| It's Charlie Brown and Lucy. | ||
| That football just gets yanked away every time. | ||
| And we're like, shit! | ||
| Shit, I thought this was going to be the adults were in the room. | ||
| Shit! | ||
| Look, I mean, beware the person who tells you what to do because they know what's best for you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a normal thing of human nature, too. | ||
| It's a weird thing about human nature. | ||
| We're always led by someone. | ||
| It's very strange because it seems to be a part of just our programming that we have... | ||
| We've kept since we were primates in, like, the jungles. | ||
| Like, there was always a leader. | ||
| Like, have you ever watched that Chimp Nation show? | ||
| An amazing show on Netflix. | ||
| These scientists were embedded in this chimpanzee group for 30 years. | ||
| And so the chimpanzees had become totally comfortable with human beings as long as they were 20 yards away. | ||
| So they never moved any closer than 20 yards. | ||
| If the chimp moves close to them, they back away. | ||
| You never have food. | ||
| It's a bunch of rules about what to do and what not to do. | ||
| But if you follow those rules, these chimps behave as if they're just chimps in the jungle. | ||
| So it's this incredible opportunity to watch their social hierarchies. | ||
| And it's just like people. | ||
| There's a leader. | ||
| There's always a leader. | ||
| There's always a leader! | ||
| And there's young people that are challenging the leader and the leader has to beat him down. | ||
| And it gets to a certain point in time and the leader can't do that anymore. | ||
| And he has to relinquish. | ||
| And it's all about the relationships they develop while they're leaders. | ||
| And those are the ones that can go on the longest. | ||
| That's the same thing with human beings. | ||
| It's like, goddammit, it's literally our programming, and we've surpassed it in our ability to communicate, in our ability to understand the variables and the amount of variables, but we still operate on this chimp hierarchy. | ||
| It's really crazy because if you watch that Chimp Empire show and you think of us, like you go, oh my god, this is what our problem is. | ||
| We always want to have a leader. | ||
| We always want to run things. | ||
| We always want to tell other people. | ||
| We get power out of telling other people what to do. | ||
| Some people just get their jollies. | ||
| You know that if you have a bad boss, and the boss yells at all the people in the warehouse, like, fuck. | ||
| Just wants to humiliate and be in charge. | ||
| Yes, they want to beat their chest and run through the fucking trees and shake them. | ||
| It does sometimes feel like anybody who wants power should not be allowed to have it. | ||
| Yeah, right? | ||
| Like, and the only people who should be president, people don't want that job. | ||
| You know, it's like John Dutton in Yellowstone, he has to become governor. | ||
| You know, it's like, it's really, like, fucking, it's kind of similar. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Meanwhile, the old chimps now will not leave the stage. | ||
| Bro, not just the... | ||
| I mean, all of them. | ||
| All of them. | ||
| These people are hanging in. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| With, like, hormone replacement and Adderall and whatever else they have to take. | ||
| These folks can keep going deep into their 80s. | ||
| Except that Mitch McConnell guy. | ||
| No, no, he's... | ||
| He's having some real ones. | ||
| He's just gonna fall over. | ||
| He's having some real moments. | ||
| Like, that and any other job. | ||
| Like, imagine if you're a train conductor and you just freeze up, Charlie, Charlie, the crossroads, it's coming, Charlie! | ||
| And Charlie's just... | ||
| Locked up like Windows 98. That's right. | ||
| Blue screen of bats, bro. | ||
| You got control, alt, delete, Charlie, before this fucking train crashes. | ||
| But you can do it if you're a high-ranking politician in the greatest country the world's ever known. | ||
| It's very strange, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
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It's very strange. | |
| Like, Dianne Feinstein doesn't want to relinquish her throne. | ||
| But what I understand is it's also all the people that work for her, too, and they all have, like, a whole system. | ||
| It's probably not even her that's getting things done. | ||
| It's a giant staff. | ||
| And if she stays in office, then the giant staff keeps doing what they're doing. | ||
| I don't even know if it's a giant staff, but a competent staff. | ||
| It's not about— No, their jobs depend on her. | ||
| As much as Hollywood, right? | ||
| Like, your job depends on your relationship with the big guy, big woman. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, you know that lady's not making the big decisions. | ||
| At this point. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| At this stage. | ||
|
unidentified
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Nope. | |
| That's when she started? | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
|
unidentified
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Jesus. | |
| She was kind of pretty. | ||
| She was hot. | ||
| The thing is, man, when you get stuck, that job is like any other job. | ||
| If that's what you do, if you play football, you're used to colliding with people and scrambling for the ball. | ||
| That's what you do. | ||
| What they do is govern. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Like, why are you going to tell Mick Jagger he can't tour anymore? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| He looks awesome out there. | ||
| What are you gonna do? | ||
| They're fucking politicians. | ||
| What do we expect? | ||
| It's just... | ||
| That should be like fucking... | ||
| There should be some sort of a... | ||
| Cognitive test or something. | ||
| At some point in time, it should be like, look, we really need... | ||
| Can we give you another job? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Like a second job? | ||
| You have to be 35 to be president. | ||
| Why shouldn't there be a top limit? | ||
| Why shouldn't it be 80 or something? | ||
| I mean, it's some reasonable number. | ||
| Why don't we move, like, the elder statesmen into a different bracket and, like, advisors? | ||
| Have them be advisors to discuss policy. | ||
| Wouldn't that be great? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If, like, the senators could go and meet with the advisors who are still around back in the 2000s, there was an issue with 4G. You know, I mean, there's got to be a way to do it where you have, like, more vibrant people representing whatever they're representing. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But it's also they don't want to relinquish power. | ||
| And they've got a really good grip on it now. | ||
| It's really if you want to run a country like within the rules and kind of dominate it, they've done an amazing job. | ||
| Because they've done it all within the rules. | ||
| It's like it's pretty clever. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's like when Donald Trump was talking about not paying taxes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You know, it's like, yeah, you guys set it up like that. | ||
| So I don't have to pay taxes. | ||
| I'm going to take advantage of it. | ||
| It's like, it makes sense. | ||
| Well, I mean, so this is a good... | ||
| I mean, it's a good segue into a lot of things, but it's also a good segue into sort of COVID and pharma and those guys because they are masters at going to the edge of the line, going to the gray area. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They don't necessarily lie, although sometimes I think when they're forced to, they will lie, but they shade the truth. | ||
| They run studies in a way that determines... | ||
| It gets them to the outcome they want. | ||
| They use friendly doctors to promote. | ||
| With Purdue Pharma, with Oxy and with the opioids, you saw this in spades. | ||
| And we're seeing it again right now with the mRNA vaccines. | ||
| So these companies, they know they're very legally wise and they play games. | ||
| And they're allowed to. | ||
| And they're allowed to. | ||
| And that's their job, right? | ||
| That's what's interesting. | ||
| Well, you would hope it's not their job! | ||
| Well, there's one guy's job, and that guy's job is to invent medicine. | ||
| I mean, not one guy. | ||
| One group of humans. | ||
| And then the other people, their job is to sell it. | ||
| Their job is to get it out there. | ||
| In the very different kinds of thought processes I would imagine. | ||
| And that's part of the problem with like business and medicine when they're together. | ||
| It's like either we're looking out for each other or we're trying to make insane amounts of wealth from each other. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Both of those things are like that's two ways of looking at the health care for a country. | ||
| Either we say the whole reason the system is in place is to make sure that everybody is healthy and if you get injured we can help you. | ||
| If you could do it that way, that would be wonderful. | ||
| The other way to do it is saying, we got to fucking get you on as much shit as possible because the more stuff we sell to you, the more money we make. | ||
| And if there's a reason to recommend it, we're going to recommend it because you want to make our reps happy, want to make the hospital happy, and unfortunately, that seems to be real too. | ||
| It's very real. | ||
| So that's real too. | ||
| So that's a real possibility in today's modern age. | ||
| And I'm sure there are people that fall into the former. | ||
| I'm sure there's... | ||
| I mean, I know doctors that are great human beings and they really enjoy being able to help people. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's not... | ||
| It's just like... | ||
| It's just... | ||
| That's how a system works. | ||
| When a system has the opportunity to make more money by doing certain things... | ||
| It's like, it's not the scientists that are trying to do that. | ||
| It's like, there's a whole system. | ||
| So with the drug companies, and I think this is true of doctors too, it's not that they want people to get better. | ||
| I do believe that, okay? | ||
| But once you've invested a billion or two billion dollars in a drug and you've brought it to market and it's gotten FDA approval, you're going to do whatever you can to protect it. | ||
| And that means generally exaggerating its benefits and if there are problems with it, doing everything you can to hide those problems. | ||
| And that's almost like a fiscal responsibility if you're in a publicly traded company. | ||
| To your shareholders, that's right. | ||
| Which is really crazy. | ||
| That's what's really crazy. | ||
| What's really crazy about it is that money and medicine are all combined. | ||
| And it's not saying that doctors don't deserve money or the people that develop medicines don't deserve money. | ||
| They certainly do. | ||
| They work really hard. | ||
| What I am saying is when you have anything that gets wrapped up in a lot of money, people want to make more. | ||
|
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They want to make more. | |
| How do I make more? | ||
| I don't like making X amount. | ||
| I want to make Y. How do I get to Y? What do I have to do? | ||
| I'm going to sell this. | ||
| I'm going to do that. | ||
| I'm going to make some unnecessary these or those and do a few things to people that maybe they didn't need. | ||
| And it's okay because maybe it benefits them. | ||
| It probably doesn't hurt them that much. | ||
| You justify it. | ||
| And then there's real things that people thought were conspiracies. | ||
| Real things like incentives and that showed up during the pandemic as well. | ||
| They got paid per case for people that had COVID and they got paid per COVID deaths. | ||
| The whole thing was weird. | ||
| It's like if you financially incentivize the treatment of a pandemic disease I understand that hospitals have to make money, but isn't there a fear that... | ||
| You label something COVID death, you get more money. | ||
| That people would use that on things that weren't necessarily COVID, especially if there's no oversight. | ||
| Oh yeah, of course. | ||
| If they're not combing through your fucking books. | ||
| And if the worst thing that happens if they do comb through your books is you have to pay some of it back. | ||
| Whoopsies! | ||
| That's right, exactly. | ||
| We upcoded a little bit here, we cheated a little bit there, we'll give you a check. | ||
| Elon talked about it on the podcast and people said he was making it up. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| He was not making it up. | ||
| He was saying if you got bit by a shark and you had COVID, they would call it a COVID death. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's like, what? | ||
| And this is still going on, Joe. | ||
| This is going on until 2025. If you're a family member and you can get a family member who died to be classified as a COVID death, you get up to $9,000 for their funeral expenses. | ||
| You submit it to FEMA, they cut you a check. | ||
| And so, of course, those families want, you know, they want $9,000. | ||
|
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Who wouldn't? | |
| Yeah, it's free $9,000. | ||
| Your loved one's already gone. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| The whole thing is just so slippery because, yeah, if everything was perfect, you would say, maybe it would be good to help these people with a funeral. | ||
| Maybe it would be good if you... | ||
| But why is COVID different than anything else? | ||
| Good question. | ||
| Why do you get nine grand for COVID and nothing else? | ||
| What do you think it would be if people started promoting that for obese folks? | ||
| If you're obese and you die, we'll give you... | ||
| It would bankrupt the federal government. | ||
| Grandma was obese. | ||
| You know, like, you just like... | ||
| People respond to incentives. | ||
| When there's money, companies respond, doctors respond, everybody. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I guess, unfortunately, I mean, look, it's why we have this, you know, all these great things in this country, too, but... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I will give you—so an ophthalmologist called me a few weeks ago. | ||
| There's a drug—and the drug works, okay? | ||
| It's good for people if something called wet macular degeneration, okay? | ||
| It's something that older people get, and it can blind you. | ||
| So there's a drug—there's a couple drugs that actually work for it. | ||
| They block the flow of— They block blood vessel formation at the back of the eye. | ||
| They help you. | ||
| So these are administered, ophthalmologists administer them in their offices. | ||
| So a drug like that, the ophthalmologist actually buys and charges Medicare or the private insurer for. | ||
| Okay, what's happening, and I saw this with a different drug when I worked at the New York Times 15 years ago, so nothing ever changes. | ||
| These companies all play the same games, is that the companies that make this drug are giving doctors a rebate On the purchase price. | ||
| And the more you use, the bigger the rebate. | ||
| And this is a drug that costs thousands of dollars per person per year. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| It's dosed multiple times a year for a lot of these people. | ||
| So what all this adds up to is if you're an ophthalmologist who's using a lot of this, the company is cutting you a check for five or sometimes six figures, sometimes multiple times a year. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Don't tell me that's not a bribe. | ||
| Because that's a bribe. | ||
| It may be legal. | ||
| They may have found a way to do this. | ||
| And he showed me the check that his ophthalmology practice had received, and it was huge. | ||
| And by the way, these doctors make a lot of money on their own just doing the procedure. | ||
| They don't need this, but it's a way for the drug company to get them to use this more. | ||
| There is corruption all over our medical system. | ||
| And how does that get resolved? | ||
| Is there a way at this point or is it the system itself? | ||
| Is it just a function of that's how human beings behave when they have, you know, enough regulation where they can get away with some stuff and they just want to make more and more money and it just becomes that's what they're trying to do? | ||
| I mean, I don't know. | ||
| Is it just human beings? | ||
| I mean, if you're that ophthalmologist in Florida, do you need another Ferrari? | ||
| Maybe you don't think that way. | ||
| You don't think that way. | ||
| You just think, I can get it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I'm in this system, and the system is fucked already. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And I'm using this drug because I know it works and it's good for patients. | ||
| The problem is you're then having incentives to ignore the problem if there is one later. | ||
| And so in this case, the guy actually said to me, he's like, this is a good drug. | ||
| It does work. | ||
| He said, but sometimes if we dose it too many times, we can get, there can be sort of a paradoxical effect where it stops working. | ||
| If you're one of those doctors who's on the tit and getting that check every quarter or every six months or, you know, however frequently you get it, you're going to, it's going to be harder for you to see the problem because all of a sudden you have a financial incentive not to see it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I don't know what we do about any of this. | ||
| Except talk about it and make sure people know. | ||
| Talk about it and make sure people know. | ||
| You need senators to call this stuff out. | ||
| And we need people that run these companies to have ethical boundaries. | ||
| Because they make great stuff. | ||
| The thing about pharmaceutical drug companies is I would never say we don't need them. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| How many people they've helped? | ||
| You know how many drugs, the pharmaceutical companies that we currently demonize because of this thing, this for-profit aspect of it? | ||
| But how many of them have brought drugs to the market that have fixed all sorts of problems that people have been suffering for forever? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They just can't go ham. | ||
|
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You can't go crazy and force people to take your stuff. | |
| Like, that's a bad relationship. | ||
| A good relationship is a consumer and a provider. | ||
| And the provider develops these drugs that are very beneficial to people, and most of them are. | ||
| A lot of them are, right? | ||
|
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Some of them are. | |
| Some of them are. | ||
| But they do have drugs that they've developed that are really beneficial for people. | ||
| They really do. | ||
| They're real. | ||
| We can't fucking throw out the baby with the bathwater. | ||
| I just think that... | ||
| The problem is also the process, right? | ||
| Because to bring a drug to market costs so much fucking money. | ||
| It costs it crazy. | ||
| It's so prohibitive for most... | ||
| If you were like... | ||
| Some pharmacologist or some biologist and you guys were working together and you developed something. | ||
| You had this idea about a pathway and you figured out something and maybe this could fix it and you really figured it out. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Good fucking luck! | ||
| Right. | ||
| Good luck getting that thing approved. | ||
| Well, I mean, one of the great disappointments for me in the last 10 years is realizing that if you had to choose between a sewer system and a medical system, you'd choose a sewer system. | ||
| What's more efficient? | ||
| What actually helps human health more? | ||
| The great gains for human longevity in the last 200 years have been really simple things. | ||
| Clean water. | ||
| Try to get the air clean. | ||
| Don't have meat packing plants in the middle of cities. | ||
| Don't have giant graveyards in the middle of cities. | ||
| Have you read Dissolving Illusions? | ||
| I have not. | ||
| It's a fantastic book about just that. | ||
| And the beginning of it is they talk about the conditions that people lived in. | ||
| Because you never really think about it. | ||
| Like, what would it be like to live in a city before there were cars? | ||
| Well, guess what? | ||
| But nothing gets to you. | ||
| You're not getting fresh vegetables in the winter. | ||
| You're not getting vitamins. | ||
| There's massive malnutrition, starvation, extreme poverty, people living in squalor, terrible sanitation. | ||
| I mean, open outhouses for entire blocks of people and just crazy diseases. | ||
| And they all live on top of each other. | ||
| And again, malnutrition, no vitamin D, no sunlight exposure in the winter, etc., etc. | ||
| And a lot of those people get horrible diseases because of that, just like they did in the olden times, like we know about, when people dump shit in the streets. | ||
| The first few decades of the Industrial Revolution were terrible for human health. | ||
| People got crammed together, they got sicker, and then about 1850 they started to figure this stuff out. | ||
| For a hundred years, we did great, but it wasn't really medicine. | ||
| It was really more basic than that. | ||
| And so the last 50, 67 years we've spent more and more and more money on medicine Trying to continue that growth in life expectancy. | ||
| And it turns out there are limits to it. | ||
| There are just limits. | ||
| And we seem to be reaching them. | ||
| And the problem is, in the US anyway, we're now spending so much money and having so many unnecessary medical procedures of marginal value. | ||
| I'm not even talking about the cost. | ||
| I'm talking about value to people that we seem to have topped out. | ||
| And this is like a really depressing thing to realize, that ultimately, like once people get to be about 80, there's just not that much you can do for them. | ||
| Unless you're Vince McMahon. | ||
| You ever see what he looks like? | ||
|
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No! | |
| He's 78 years old and he's jacked. | ||
|
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Is he looking good? | |
| He's jacked. | ||
| Goes to the gym at 3 o'clock in the morning, sleeps two hours a night. | ||
| You know? | ||
| So, there's that canary in the coal mine. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Let's see him at 82. Yeah, well, that's only four years from now. | ||
| But the reality is you're right. | ||
| It's, you know, but it's also, there's a lot of complicated factors in being healthy. | ||
| They don't all involve medicine. | ||
| No! | ||
| And it's not just, there he is. | ||
| Are you joking? | ||
| No, no, that's legit. | ||
| I think he was 76 or the 74 there. | ||
| So it's four years ago. | ||
| He's still jacked up. | ||
| That's ridiculous. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| Modern science. | ||
| Right there, baby. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Look at him. | ||
| Jacked. | ||
| 76, 78-year-old man. | ||
| Jacked. | ||
| He keeps it rolling. | ||
| The train kept it rolling with him. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| There's a lot going on with people's health. | ||
| And the reality is we... | ||
| We rightly should attribute a lot of it to medicine. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| They did a lot of great stuff. | ||
| But also there's a lot of other factors. | ||
| And the factor with like plagues is like the sanitation systems that we had in this country at the beginning of the 19th century. | ||
| They were horrible. | ||
|
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Horrible. | |
| Horrible. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Horrible. | ||
|
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Cholera. | |
| I mean, this stuff was real. | ||
| Typhus. | ||
| Terrible diseases. | ||
| It's all gangs in New York. | ||
| People forget. | ||
| You think in New York, you think of like Fifth Avenue, like what an amazing place to visit. | ||
| Back then it was horrific. | ||
| Little Johnny came home with a cold and the next day it was dead. | ||
| Horrific. | ||
| People would just die left and right. | ||
| One thing that I also found out that was fascinating was about the Spanish flu. | ||
| The Spanish flu killed so many people. | ||
| A shit ton of people. | ||
| But they said that what it killed people from is not actually the flu itself, but the side diseases that come with it, and that you could have cured those with antibiotics. | ||
| Bacterial pneumonia, yep, that's true. | ||
| Bacterial pneumonia, and what was the other one? | ||
| There was another one? | ||
| Meningitis? | ||
| That may be. | ||
| Was it that? | ||
| But they said they could have cured those with antibiotics. | ||
| Yes, that's definitely true. | ||
| The fear was always that the Spanish flu happens today. | ||
| But because medical science has progressed, if that same flu came around today, they would actually be able to save most of them. | ||
| The mortality rate would probably be much lower. | ||
| No, if there's a bad flu or bad, you know, another coronavirus, I can just about guarantee you that will come out of a lab, just like this one did. | ||
| This is a conspiracy theory, and this is getting you kicked off YouTube. | ||
| It's not a conspiracy theory to say it came out of a lab. | ||
| Isn't it funny that it used to be? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You used to be racist to say it. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| There used to be something wrong with you. | ||
| They did an amazing job of gaslighting people. | ||
| I didn't say it was made in a lab. | ||
| I said it came out of a lab. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And it did. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it seems like the people in the lab were patients zero, right? | ||
| Yeah, they were fucking around with the coronavirus. | ||
| They were trying to make it more dangerous or trying to make a vaccine, a pan-coronavirus vaccine, and somebody slipped or somebody accidentally injected a ferret when they were supposed to inject a mouse, and it all started there. | ||
| Most likely. | ||
| Yes, most likely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just, um, that's weird how little outrage there is about that. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| By the way, if it came out of a cave, it came out of a cave when some idiot who shouldn't have been in the cave was poking around, swabbing a bat's asshole to try to, like, find a virus. | ||
| So, either way, it's the fault of our effort. | ||
| We did this, okay? | ||
| Is there any benefit from that kind of research? | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| It should all be stopped. | ||
| Period. | ||
| Do they just do it because that's what they do? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Just like we do research. | ||
| And I want to do research on coronaviruses and how to make them more infectious. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It should all be stopped. | ||
| It's useless. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| You want the proof that it's useless? | ||
| Did you hear anybody predict this was going to happen before it happened? | ||
| They spent 10 years trying to figure out what was going to happen. | ||
| But is there any benefit in understanding those things so that they can develop drugs to combat them? | ||
| Eh, probably no. | ||
| And also, there's a problem with that, because you literally have a thing where you have a cure for a thing, and if that thing gets out, then you can sell that cure. | ||
| If you're Dr. Evil, you're gonna fucking open the hatch. | ||
| That's right. | ||
|
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You would hope nobody would ever do that. | |
| You would hope. | ||
| But there's been people in the world that have done some horrible... | ||
| Like, we know Hitler was a real guy. | ||
| We know that was your... | ||
| Like, that never happened again. | ||
| Are you fucking sure? | ||
| Are you totally sure? | ||
| There's been genocide since then. | ||
| It seems like the only way... | ||
| Boy. | ||
| I mean, we have to figure out a way to catch up to our abilities, like catch up as a species. | ||
| I don't know how. | ||
| We have the ability to affect so many people in negative ways, whether it's drugs and all sorts of things that we do. | ||
| You know, so did you see Oppenheimer, the movie? | ||
| I haven't seen it yet. | ||
| It's pretty great, okay? | ||
|
unidentified
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It's amazing. | |
| And so I read the book it's based on, which is also pretty amazing, okay? | ||
| That was a case. | ||
| You know, those guys, unbelievable. | ||
| They just like, they looked inside the atom with their minds, right? | ||
| It's unbelievable they figured out how this works. | ||
| And then they took metal and they made the sun, okay? | ||
| They made an explosion like the sun. | ||
| They figured it out in a matter of years. | ||
| It was so scary to people, the threat that nuclear weapons posed, that we actually kind of got it under control. | ||
| We never used them again after 1945. Which is really astonishing. | ||
| It's pretty amazing. | ||
|
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Pretty astonishing. | |
| So when the threat is obvious enough that you can eliminate a city in seconds, our little lizard brains, we figure something out. | ||
| The problem is with these viruses, it's a little more marginal. | ||
| It's not as obvious. | ||
| And so we have these people just continuing to mess around with them. | ||
| I hate to take you off track, but when the nuclear bombs were first detonated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I think with some of the tests too, right after that is when people started seeing a lot of UFOs. | ||
| That's like the folklore behind UFOs. | ||
| They all started coming after 47. Yeah. | ||
| I did not know that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I would ask you, what the fuck is going on? | ||
| What the fuck is going on? | ||
| When you see all this UAP stuff and all these people that are whistleblowers and they're talking about crashed retrieval programs where they could recover crashed UFOs and back-engineer them, like, what's going on? | ||
| So I'm not a believer in this, and let me tell you why. | ||
| Please tell me. | ||
| You are an alien, okay? | ||
| Super hyper advanced technology. | ||
| You can go faster than the speed of light. | ||
| You can get to Earth. | ||
| You can figure out that this one little planet has other human beings or has other life forms on it that you want to go see. | ||
| You do that. | ||
| Then you crash your stupid UFO into the desert. | ||
| I have a problem with that. | ||
| One more point on this. | ||
| What happened with the Titan submersible? | ||
| That thing went down and basically they knew within hours that it was blown up. | ||
| They still were human beings. | ||
| We try to rescue other human beings. | ||
| The aliens aren't going to try to rescue other aliens if there's been a crash. | ||
| They're not going to try to come get them. | ||
| So you tell me why it's always in the desert in Arizona. | ||
| They never show up at the White House. | ||
| They never show up in Times Square. | ||
| Why? | ||
| There have been places where large groups of people have seen it. | ||
| And there was a place in Brazil, Virginia, Brazil. | ||
| and there's a very interesting documentary about it called moment of contact and there was a crash there was a crazy lightning storm and there was a crash and they claimed that there was actual live beings and one of these guys took one of these beings to a hospital they refused that brought to another hospital I think they want to bring you to a third hospital the guy who is carrying this alien supposedly Supposedly. | ||
| But this is a fact. | ||
| This guy died of some incurable bacterial disease that they had no hope of fixing. | ||
| It just overcame his body and he was dead very quickly. | ||
| He was a young guy. | ||
| I think he was dead in less than two weeks. | ||
| And they were attributing that to him carrying this fucking alien. | ||
| So what happened to the body, the alien body? | ||
|
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I don't know. | |
| They say that the United States Air Force flew a jet—and this is in the documentary—they said it flew a jet to Virginia, Brazil to recover whatever this thing was because they have a recover retrieval program. | ||
| Who the fuck knows, man? | ||
| Every time I even say it, I sound so dumb. | ||
| I listen to myself like, you believe this? | ||
| Do you believe this? | ||
| I do think we just crashed an F-35. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| There's a guy who had a fucking eject out of his jet, and they're like, hey, if anybody sees one of our $800 million jets, call this hotline. | ||
| But this is what I'm saying! | ||
| But that's us, and that's the pinnacle of modern technology. | ||
| Maybe, if you just have their saucers over Washington, D.C. What year was that, Jamie? | ||
| 1952. 1952. Yeah, it was a newspaper article where they had, apparently they photographed Yeah, someone tried to shoot at one. | ||
| But what does that mean? | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| And, you know, when someone tells a story like that, you know, maybe they did see something. | ||
| I mean, how much of it do they remember? | ||
| How much have they embellished? | ||
| How high were they at the time? | ||
| But they're fighter jets. | ||
| Fighter Jets that have encountered them. | ||
| I believe those guys. | ||
| Sober, sober like American heroes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Like David Fravor. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| That story is insane. | ||
| But I tend to think more than ever that it's a drone and that there's some sort of a drone program that they've kept secret that is insanely powerful. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That I'll believe. | |
| Sure, that I'll believe. | ||
| And if I had a drone program that can do wild shit, Like go hypersonic speeds and hover dead still in midair and operated without any visible method of propulsion. | ||
| I would start talking about aliens too. | ||
| I'd be like, dude, they're here. | ||
| We don't even know what they are. | ||
| They're off-road vehicles. | ||
| Excuse me, off-world vehicles. | ||
| And then people would go, oh yeah, aliens are here. | ||
| But meanwhile, what it is is we have super sophisticated tech that your tax dollars have paid for without you having any idea it exists for your own protection. | ||
| So you don't believe in aliens? | ||
| I do and I don't. | ||
| Well, I do in, you know, of course, it's the Fermi paradox. | ||
| Like, if they're out there, where are they? | ||
| How can we haven't seen them? | ||
| But how much can we look? | ||
| That's like a guy poking his head out of a tent going, I don't see any bear. | ||
| How fucking much do you look at? | ||
| That's true. | ||
| How much are you really paying attention? | ||
| There's a hundred billion stars in this galaxy alone. | ||
| There's hundreds of billions of galaxies in the known universe. | ||
| Like, what are you talking about? | ||
| Like, where have we looked? | ||
| I'm not saying they're not out there. | ||
| I'm just saying they're not interested in us. | ||
| Most certainly think they would be interested in us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Who are these fucking idiots? | |
| Right. | ||
| Well, the same way we go to the Congo and film for Chimp Empire. | ||
| It's really not that much different. | ||
| The same way we go to butterfly habitats and study butterflies. | ||
| Like human beings are fascinated by some of the most primitive of creatures. | ||
| You know, a long thought instinct fox becomes a major news story amongst academics. | ||
| When people can go and travel to exotic places and especially biologists and study these animals, you know, like you ever read Sapolsky's work with the baboons? | ||
| Fascinating stuff. | ||
| Sapolsky, who's from Stanford, right? | ||
| Is he Stanford? | ||
| Just a brilliant guy who's done all this crazy work about toxoplasmosis. | ||
| Are you aware of that? | ||
| Toxoplasmosis is nuts. | ||
| It's one of the reasons why they tell women to not handle kitty litter. | ||
| Toxoplasmosis is a cat parasite that grows in a cat's gut and when it gets on rats it rewires the rats sexual reward system and make the rats sexually attracted to cat urine and it removes their fear of cats so that the cats devour the rats because the only way that that that parasite can reproduce is inside a cat's gut So the parasite reproduces inside the cat's gut, | ||
| comes out and cat shit, and then people get it. | ||
| And people get it from cat shit. | ||
| You might get it from an open wound, you might get it from handling it, but when people get it, it makes them more reckless. | ||
| He said there's a disproportionate number of motorcycle victims, crash victims that are toxoplasmosis infected. | ||
| At one point in time, France was like 50% of the people had toxoplasmosis. | ||
| Isn't that wild? | ||
| That is wild. | ||
| And it changes behavior. | ||
| It affects behavior. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I did not know any of this. | ||
| And it's a fucking parasite that like half a population of a country had. | ||
| Because feral cats. | ||
| Because you have feral cats everywhere. | ||
| I'm going to have to look this up. | ||
| So, point is, we study all kinds of shit. | ||
| Weird parasites and fucking monkeys and giraffes and everything. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Toxoplasmosis is considered to be a leading cause of death attributed to foodborne illness in the United States. | ||
| More than 40 million men, women, and children in the U.S. carry the toxoplasma parasite, but very few have symptoms because the immune system usually keeps the parasite from causing illness. | ||
| So this is like if you have... | ||
| HIV late stage or something you winds up killing. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Interesting, right? | ||
| It's a very bizarre parasite. | ||
| But we study fucking penguins, man. | ||
| They all look the same. | ||
| The March of the Penguins, people study them. | ||
| They love to watch organisms. | ||
| You don't think they'd want to watch us? | ||
| Yeah, but ultimately we mess around with those penguins. | ||
| The aliens would mess around with us. | ||
| I think they might be. | ||
| I think they might have made us. | ||
| They might have made us. | ||
| We might really be a biology project, and it's not a joke. | ||
| If you think about this weird thing with primates and us, we're so far past them. | ||
| We are so in another dimension of reality with communication, with our ability to create technology and alter the world. | ||
| We're in a weird place. | ||
| Like, how did we get here so quick? | ||
| Like, how did that happen? | ||
| How the doubling of the human brain size, the biggest mystery in the entire biological record, how'd that happen? | ||
| Over two million years, human brain size doubles. | ||
| People start walking upright and talking to each other. | ||
| What happened? | ||
| And if I was an asshole from another planet, and I came down here, I'd be like... | ||
| You know, it's like when people take a wolf and they breed it with a chihuahua because they're a dick. | ||
| They want to see what it looks like. | ||
| I wonder if they would do that to us. | ||
| I wonder if they'd come and they'd say, you know what we could do? | ||
| I just add a little of this to these things. | ||
| These crazy shit-throwing wild primates. | ||
| Yeah, just give them a taste of alien DNA. Alter some stuff here and there. | ||
| You know, just see how it works. | ||
| Do a couple different versions of it. | ||
| Do you know what I'm getting from this conversation, Joe Rogan? | ||
| What? | ||
| That COVID is definitely over. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's here. | ||
| Take care of yourself, and it's a cold. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Nobody wants to say that. | ||
| It's like this foreboding thing. | ||
| Come on, kids. | ||
| Let's be real about it. | ||
| Let's be real about it now. | ||
| That Kathy Hochschild thing when she was on TV saying, you have to get – this is a new vaccine. | ||
| The old one is not going to work for it. | ||
| She's always saying what the CDC just said. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| So, COVID is over. | ||
| But here's what I'm telling you, and I guess I'm going to be stuck beating this drum for I don't know how long. | ||
| We do not know what the long-term effects of the mRNA vaccines are. | ||
| I would go beyond borderline. | ||
| I would say it is immoral and unethical to keep using those right now. | ||
| If you're going to insist on giving people COVID vaccines, there are simpler, cheaper ones. | ||
| That don't have this question about what they do long term. | ||
| The mRNAs, at this point to me, they're a failed product and they basically should be withdrawn. | ||
| It will never happen. | ||
| There's far, far too much at stake for both the pharmaceutical industry and public health and the Democratic Party and the media to even consider allowing that to happen. | ||
| But the promise, Joe, the promise two and a half years ago was These vaccines are new. | ||
| They're going to revolutionize the treatment of respiratory viruses. | ||
| They're going to eliminate COVID. Don't let them tell you that's not what they said, because it is what they said. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Not, there may be some symptom reduction. | ||
| It may reduce cases of serious illness. | ||
| No. | ||
| It was, these are so effective, we're going to get the herd immunity with them, and COVID is not going to be a problem ever again. | ||
| That was total horseshit, and we can't let them forget it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I know this is boring. | ||
| I know there's only like a few people who care, but it's so important. | ||
| No, I think a lot of people care. | ||
| I don't think it's a few people. | ||
| It's just uncomfortable. | ||
|
unidentified
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All these things are so uncomfortable. | |
| You know? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| This is the reality that people would sell things that don't work just to make money and they could put you at risk. | ||
| But it's like if they can, they will. | ||
| And if they have it for sale, it's like we've got to get this stuff off the shelves. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| We've been developing this. | ||
| We developed this thing for the variants. | ||
| So this is a number... | ||
| Didn't they just test it on 10 mice? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Pfizer, literally 10 mice. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Not a joke. | ||
| There were 5 billion doses so far of the mRNAs made, okay? | ||
| About $100 billion sold by Pfizer. | ||
| No, a little bit more. | ||
| $110, $120 billion sold by Pfizer and Moderna combined, okay? | ||
| My best estimate, and I haven't been able to lock it down because the numbers are really hard to find, Two billion of those five billion doses were thrown away, unused. | ||
| The companies made somewhere between forty, fifty billion dollars on vaccine that just got tossed. | ||
| It was a pure gift to the companies. | ||
| Forty billion dollars. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Now that, even by American pharmaceutical standards, that's a lot of money. | ||
| It's a lot of money to waste. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Geez. | ||
| Because nobody wanted them. | ||
| They made, Pfizer made $75 billion in 2021 and 2022. Moderna made close to $40. | ||
| They made some more this year, not as much. | ||
| Yeah, it's a lot of money. | ||
| Yeah, it's hard to turn this bigot off. | ||
|
unidentified
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I get it. | |
| And it's hard to tell the truth when there's that much money. | ||
| Well, can you though, if you put something out, and again, we're bringing this back to the obligation to your shareholders and how to run a corporation versus what's the right thing to do, right? | ||
| If you have something and you haven't been called out for it, and there seems to be, like, enough gaslighting going on in the media that it sort of obscures the reality of it, you're supposed to keep selling it. | ||
| I mean, if that's what your company does, right? | ||
| I'm not saying it's good, but I'm saying, like... | ||
| If there's a problem, then you don't know there's a problem. | ||
| And if you don't look to find the problem, then you don't know. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you don't look. | ||
| So you don't look. | ||
| That's the game. | ||
| Boy, I wish that wasn't the game. | ||
| I wish the game was, we want to make medicine to make you feel better, and if that medicine doesn't work, we try to come up with a new one. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| No, that's not the game. | ||
| Isn't it sort of just the amount of money involved in developing one of those things? | ||
| The incentives to pass it through, regardless of whether or not it's effective, are so strong. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| Because you're so in the fucking red before you get out of the gate. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| Before you get out of the gate, you're into this thing a billion dollars or whatever. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And the flip side of that is it's so profitable on a per-unit basis because it takes a few cents to make and then you could sell it for $5 or $50 or $500. | ||
| So the per-unit profit Once you earn your nut back, it's phenomenal. | ||
| Phenomenal. | ||
| You know, I'm suing the government, right? | ||
| I'm suing the president. | ||
| How many people say that to you all casual? | ||
| You know, I'm suing the government. | ||
| I'm suing the government. | ||
| Oh, that's cool. | ||
| But I'm also suing the chief executive of Pfizer and one of the board members of Pfizer, all in the same suit. | ||
| So they've responded, and it's called a motion to dismiss. | ||
| They want the lawsuit gone. | ||
| One of the things they say in the lawsuit is, That I have been fundraising and I have a sub stack and I've been merchandising, which I haven't been merchandising. | ||
| This shirt is my own printed. | ||
| Borla is the CEO of Pfizer. | ||
| Fauci, we all know. | ||
| Gottlieb is on the Pfizer board and Slavitt is somebody else I'm suing. | ||
| You have a t-shirt on like you're a YouTube streamer. | ||
| I do. | ||
| I do. | ||
| A bunch of people's names on it. | ||
| For clicks. | ||
| But so Pfizer's lawyers, or Borla's lawyers, Albert Borla, the CEO of Pfizer, as I like to call him, the world's favorite veterinarian, because he's not a doctor. | ||
| He's a doctor of veterinary medicine, which is fine. | ||
|
unidentified
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We need those. | |
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| He sort of treated the world like livestock. | ||
| But... | ||
| But Borla is trying to get this lawsuit dismissed and he's saying, Berenson's making all this money. | ||
| Listen, buddy, your company made $70 billion selling the vaccines and you personally had your salary double from $18 million to $33 million, almost double, from 2020 to 2022. So don't call me the grifter, my friend, when you're the one who's made more money than anyone can imagine on these vaccines. | ||
| Well, he's calling you a grifter because you're making money from, what, Substack? | ||
| Because I have a Substack and because I've raised money to... | ||
| But you write about other things in Substack. | ||
| You write about many things. | ||
| I do. | ||
| But no, no, I mean, you would say I write a lot about... | ||
| You know, I write a lot about COVID and the vaccine, sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, you know, the whole thing is that having that as an argument seems kind of crazy. | ||
| Like, it should be based on whether or not he's right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And also, like... | ||
| Why did you guys get him kicked off Twitter? | ||
| Who did that? | ||
| And who talked to who? | ||
| And how did that go down? | ||
| So that's what the lawsuit's about. | ||
| But I know that this guy, Scott Gottlieb, who's... | ||
| Get this, Joe. | ||
| Scott Gottlieb, between 2017 and 2019, was the commissioner of the FDA. He quit the FDA and three months later, exactly three months, the minimum amount of time later, he joined the Pfizer board, where he's a senior board member, where they pay him about $400,000 a year. | ||
| That sounds like a sweet gig. | ||
| It is a nice gig for a couple of meetings. | ||
| It's a good move. | ||
| So Scott Gottlieb has earned his paycheck with Pfizer, though, because he, in August of 2021, made a call to a senior lobbyist at Twitter. | ||
| And within a few hours, I had gotten my fifth strike, and I was kicked off Twitter. | ||
| What were you kicked off for, specifically? | ||
| I mean, we can find the tweet, but the exact words were, it doesn't stop infection or transmission. | ||
| Think of it at best as a therapeutic that needs to be diagnosed in advance of infection and has bad side effects, and we want to mandate it? | ||
| Insanity. | ||
| That was the entire tweet. | ||
| Every word of that is true. | ||
| Let me tell you what was really happening. | ||
| Okay, we can talk about the vaccines and the approval process and the hype around them and the hope around them in early 2021. And you can make a good case that, hey, there were people just trying to get out of the pandemic, all right? | ||
| By the summer of 2021, everything changed. | ||
| Everybody who knew where to look, which was really Israel, could see that the vaccines were not working for very long. | ||
| The Israel data was important because, first of all, they were first. | ||
| They were first to vaccinate a small country. | ||
| They vaccinated almost everybody by the end of January. | ||
| And were they very open about their data as well? | ||
| They were. | ||
| And you can read stories from the spring of 2021 talking about the miracle, how COVID went to zero in Israel, basically. | ||
| Because there is this short period of time after those first two doses when you do actually prevent infection. | ||
| I don't think anybody who looks at the data can dispute that. | ||
| I know there are some people who do, but I don't think there's anybody who can really dispute that. | ||
| Then what happens is your antibodies go away and it comes roaring back. | ||
| And you also often provoke a new variant, which is what happened in the summer of 2021. The Delta variant sort of came roaring along. | ||
| So by July of 2021... | ||
| Could you explain to people that don't understand how that could be possible? | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| How does a vaccine promote a variant? | ||
| So these vaccines specifically, these mRNAs, cause a very focused immune response. | ||
| And what they do is they make your body make a specific version of the spike protein, which is, you know, the part of the coronavirus that attaches to your cells and gets the virus into your cells. | ||
| So the idea is your body makes a spike, Your body recognizes the spike as an invader. | ||
| It makes antibodies against the spike. | ||
| And then if you actually are hit with the coronavirus, if you're infected with it, you've got this great head start where your body's antibodies can attack the coronavirus and keep it from infecting any of your cells. | ||
| You don't get infected. | ||
| You beat it. | ||
| That's the basic theory of the vaccine. | ||
| The problem is the virus, quote-unquote, knows what's happening. | ||
| The virus... | ||
| The virus is going to mutate. | ||
| There are just going to be errors in its genome over time. | ||
| These mRNA viruses are notorious for this. | ||
| When they replicate, they make mistakes. | ||
| And some of those mistakes in the genome lead the virus to look a little bit differently, the spike to look a little bit different, and then the antibodies can't attach as well. | ||
| If you're a virus that's mutated and you have these different antibodies, you have an advantage. | ||
| The advantage is suddenly you can infect people again. | ||
| Guess what? | ||
| That version of the virus is going to take off and accelerate. | ||
| So that's a very natural process. | ||
| Here's one thing nobody sort of thinks about, which is We really stopped mass vaccinating people in late 2021, early 2022. The rate of variants slowed way down last year and into this year. | ||
| Omicron came, but since then there hasn't been another major variant class. | ||
| Is there any dispute in this? | ||
| Because there was a conversation that I got in with a friend of mine at the very beginning of the pandemic and he was Trying to tell me that his doctor was telling him that it was the unvaccinated people that were causing variants. | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| And I sent him some YouTube videos. | ||
| I'm like, this is what I've read. | ||
| And what is his name? | ||
| Geert van der Bosch? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| He's an expert. | ||
| And what is he? | ||
| He's an epidemiologist? | ||
| I forget what he is. | ||
| It's something to do with vaccines. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But he understands the whole pathway. | ||
| It's like you never mass vaccinate during a pandemic. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Especially with something that doesn't offer... | ||
| That's leaky, yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Complete... | ||
| So, I mean, that's why you give people the flu vaccine before flu season. | ||
| Ideally, you do not mass vaccinate during a pandemic. | ||
| But so, in the summer of 2021, everything went to shit from the point of view of the Biden administration, and to a lesser extent, the vaccine companies. | ||
| Okay, the vaccine companies were more aware that this was going to happen. | ||
| But remember, the Bidenites, and I can find you a clip of Fauci in May 2021 saying, this is over. | ||
| Like, I think we can eliminate this. | ||
| He said that on the record. | ||
| They were caught with their pants down, and their response was twofold. | ||
| One, we're going to try to get everyone boosted. | ||
| We're going to try to scare people into getting boosted or encourage people to get boosted, which they knew or should have known was only going to buy them a matter of months. | ||
| But they didn't care. | ||
| They just wanted to do something. | ||
| The other part, though, was even worse, and that was the mandates. | ||
| The mandates were unforgivable. | ||
| Unforgivable. | ||
| Unforgivable constitutionally, unforgivable medically. | ||
| And here, this is unfortunately what I've concluded about the mandates. | ||
| You know what else was happening in August 2021? | ||
| Afghanistan collapsed, okay? | ||
| And I don't know if you remember, but I'm sure you can find it. | ||
| There's a picture of Joe Biden sitting alone in the Situation Room, looking at TVs, and he looks completely lost, okay? | ||
| We left Afghanistan in July. | ||
| By August, the Taliban was in Kabul, and Marines were getting killed, and Afghans were trying to get on airplanes. | ||
| It was terrible, okay? | ||
| Here's the thing about the mandates. | ||
| Let's just pretend the vaccines actually work for a long period of time. | ||
| And let's pretend that 90% of older people hadn't been vaccinated, which they had been. | ||
| So let's pretend that there was an actual justification for these mandates. | ||
| What were they, Joe? | ||
| They were workplace mandates. | ||
| The government couldn't directly make old people get vaccinated. | ||
| So they said, we're going to have workplace mandates. | ||
| Who is in the workforce? | ||
| Healthy adults under 65. So there was no possibility. | ||
| That the mandates could actually affect the population most at risk from COVID and get them vaccinated. | ||
| They were designed not to work, but to be something that the president could say he was doing at a time when he looked completely incompetent because of what had happened in Afghanistan. | ||
| That is my true belief about this. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| You need something that is not that picture. | ||
| Jeez. | ||
| That was August. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jeez. | |
| I don't know if that's the case, but I do know that, I mean, if you have a vaccine that protects the people that take it, What is the point? | ||
| Why are you mandating it for the people that won't be protected? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| If it does work, you should probably encourage people to take it if it works. | ||
| But the people that don't take it, hey, let those people get sick if that's what they want to do. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And they'll figure it out. | ||
| Because who are they going to get sick? | ||
| Just other people that haven't been vaccinated if it really works. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And then people would eventually catch on, right? | ||
| And then they would figure it out. | ||
| You don't have to mandate it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So there was this theory that there was this young people for whom the vaccine hadn't been approved yet, but that was, of course, a complete lie because young people are not at high risk from COVID. The only exception to that is there's a small number of people who are seriously immunocompromised. | ||
| I'm talking about people who have chemotherapy, people who are really sick. | ||
| And those people don't necessarily have a strong immune response to the vaccine. | ||
| So you say, okay, our theory is we're going to make everybody get vaccinated to protect those people. | ||
| Here's the problem with that. | ||
| That's not how we practice medicine. | ||
| You don't practice medicine on a group basis. | ||
| I was talking with my friends the other day about it. | ||
| I was like, imagine if for some reason, we were actually talking about fluoride in the water, but it's a similar analogy. | ||
| Imagine if some people were more susceptible to skin cancer, so we put sunscreen in apples. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Like, people go, no, I want a fucking, just a regular apple. | ||
| No, no, no, you need this. | ||
| It's for everyone. | ||
| We have to protect the other people that are vulnerable. | ||
| So this is how apples come now, because people love apples. | ||
| What kind of craziness is this? | ||
| You guys put medicine in the apples? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I mean, the thing about fluoride in drinking water is it's very, very, very... | ||
| I don't know that there's any risk to it at all, but that's what the standard has to be. | ||
| But do you know that there's associated lower IQs at places that have higher fluoride ratios? | ||
| That I did not know. | ||
| Yeah, we found it out the other day. | ||
| We were trying to figure it out. | ||
| We're like, why is fluoride in the water? | ||
| I've heard wacky conspiracy theories. | ||
| The wackiest ones is to make people dumber and more docile. | ||
| But what I'm telling you is... | ||
| You're mandating this not for the people who are at risk, but for adults in the workplace who are not at risk. | ||
| What is the logic there? | ||
| It is just to make that man look like he's doing something. | ||
| Do you really think that's it? | ||
| I do, because I can't imagine... | ||
| I think people were so in the throes of that thing. | ||
| I think people, when COVID was in its just full phase, and there was a heightened... | ||
| It's hard for us to remember because I think it was very traumatic. | ||
| It's, you know, because when you have situations, like, you know, it's like people after 9-11, their memory's very foggy, right? | ||
| COVID is very traumatic in a way that, like, was a long, slow drip of trauma in a weird way where it gave people horrible anxiety. | ||
| There's a Invisible thing that's gonna kill us all, and you gotta stay in your house, you gotta take the medicine and get boosted. | ||
| I don't think people got off that ride, man. | ||
| No, they didn't. | ||
| And maybe you're right, and maybe I'm giving the White House too much credit. | ||
| Maybe they're just afraid and stupid, but you go... | ||
| It was the mindset of the country to do something, and if you got vaccinated, you were a good person. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And if you didn't, you remember people saying you're pointing a loaded gun at someone's head if you're not vaccinated? | ||
| Joe, I'm not vaccinated. | ||
| I mean, not against this. | ||
| I have no mRNA, no COVID vaccine. | ||
| Believe me, I remember. | ||
| Find the statement that Biden made. | ||
| It's either September 8th or September 9th, 2021, where he said it was the White House. | ||
| It was when he announced the mandates. | ||
| He said, we have lost patience with the unvaccinated. | ||
| And there's one from a... | ||
| So you think that was him taking control? | ||
| I do, but it's also what you're saying. | ||
| There was real fear. | ||
| But, I mean, imagine that. | ||
| Imagine trying to divide the country like that. | ||
| The wildest one was the White House statement that said the unvaccinated will experience a winter of severe illness. | ||
| A winter of severe illness and death. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Our patience is wearing thin. | ||
| Yeah, I remember that. | ||
| We've been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. | ||
| That's so crazy if it already was proven that it didn't work. | ||
| You know, people, didn't one person get COVID while they were in the test? | ||
| I mean, more than one. | ||
| But they're definitely, what happened was during the clinical trials, which only lasted a couple of months, that's that period when the vaccines really worked. | ||
| There is this short period when you have a tremendous number of antibodies and you don't really get sick. | ||
| And that's what the data showed. | ||
| But it didn't show anything else. | ||
| And that's why they have to have long-term studies. | ||
| Long-term, yes. | ||
| But we didn't have the luxury of long-term studies. | ||
| So they seem to have a belief that it works. | ||
| We chose not to. | ||
| It's just, the weird thing was the ignoring of natural immunity. | ||
| That was very strange. | ||
| That's another weird one. | ||
| Not just ignoring, but I had intelligent people that I respect trying to convince me that I should get vaccinated right after I recovered from COVID. And I was like, well, I don't think that's scientific. | ||
| I think if you read the data, it shows you that you have a much higher level of immunity from recovering from it naturally. | ||
| That's the data. | ||
| I'm not encouraging people to go get COVID, but I'm saying that that was what the data said. | ||
| So like, well, you get even more protected if you get vaccinated. | ||
| I'm like, okay, but... | ||
| Is that more risks? | ||
| Like, what is the risk factor now? | ||
| Like, is it? | ||
| Because that's what I've heard. | ||
| There's like an elevated risk factor for adverse side effects if you've just recovered from COVID. Is that true? | ||
| Yes, that is true. | ||
| There's no reason to be vaccinated. | ||
| But here's what it really was. | ||
| They wanted me to join the club. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| That's what it was. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I'm in the club. | ||
| I took the vaccine. | ||
| Did you take the vaccine? | ||
| I got the new iPhone. | ||
| Do you got the new iPhone? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Team Pfizer, Team Moderna. | ||
| Team electric car. | ||
| Team Apple. | ||
| Team Apple. | ||
| No, man, it's sick. | ||
| It's sick what they did. | ||
| Yeah, they got us. | ||
| They got us. | ||
| They played us against ourselves. | ||
| And people, they literally enjoyed, like... | ||
| Chastising people for not following the rules. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And when those rules turned out to neither be accurate, scientific, or even beneficial, when those rules turned out to be bullshit and actually detrimental, nobody apologized. | ||
| Nobody cared. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And the reason it's worth talking about this now is because of what they did last week. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So they announce more. | ||
| They're trying to get everybody to get boosted. | ||
| Six-month-olds, boosted. | ||
| 12-year-olds, 12-year-old boys, 20-year-old guys who have a risk for myocarditis boosted. | ||
| It's wrong. | ||
| And it's not what the rest of the world's doing. | ||
| And they should be ashamed of themselves. | ||
| What did you tweet? | ||
| You tweeted something about the numbers. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So what I tweeted, and this one, this really landed, this has gotten 5 million views since last week. | ||
| It was showing the CDC's own calculations. | ||
| You'd have to give a million doses to save maybe, maybe one 12 to 17 year old. | ||
| But when you give those million doses, you have 100 to 200,000 Not 100 to 200, 100 to 200,000 severe side effects that are short-term following the vaccination. | ||
| Plus, and I didn't put this in it, you have another 50 to 300 cases of myocarditis. | ||
| So maybe you save one person with those million doses, but your side effects are so much worse, and those are going to include some deaths. | ||
| They are, because myocarditis can kill young people. | ||
| So what are we doing? | ||
| The rest of the world, practically Germany, Australia, Britain, most of the world, did not follow this path. | ||
| It's only basically the United States and a couple other countries like Canada that basically follow our recommendations that follow this path. | ||
| So these are the slides, but if you go back to the main... | ||
| Yes, this is what it says. | ||
| This is what it says. | ||
| So the CDC's own data admits that you get 100,000 to 200,000 severe side effects per 1 million doses? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that means like... | ||
| Are they getting that from VAERS? So they're getting that from the clinical trials that the companies ran. | ||
| So that doesn't mean like you're in the hospital for a month. | ||
| What it means is you might have a week of fever or you might have nausea that keeps you from going to school for three days. | ||
| But you said severe. | ||
| Yeah, but those are classified as severe. | ||
| Because remember, COVID isn't going to do that to most 12 to 17-year-olds. | ||
| It's more severe than the illness itself. | ||
| But the myocarditis aspect of it, those cases can kill. | ||
| No question about it. | ||
| Not that they frequently do, but they can. | ||
| So putting aside the fact that this is an expensive thing and when we were trying to mandate it, remember a lot of schools, high schools, colleges said you had to have this if you were going to go. | ||
| Putting aside the fact that you're taking away people's autonomy... | ||
| On a strictly cost-benefit basis, it makes zero sense to try to get kids and young adults and teenagers to take this and the rest of the world knows it. | ||
| Why don't we? | ||
| Isn't it wild that what you said is controversial? | ||
| Isn't it wild? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's wild! | |
| It's a sign of the times. | ||
| What you said was dangerous. | ||
| Like, oh my God, what is he saying? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| These people listening to that that are branch Covidians that are all in and still supporting the vaccine. | ||
| I know it works because I took five and I'm still alive. | ||
| Like, there's people out there like that. | ||
| I've read comments. | ||
| Every now and then I'll dive into someone's COVID debate and read, especially from the hardcore lefties that are still all in on it. | ||
| I'm starting to mask again. | ||
| Yeah, they're masking again. | ||
| They're doing it in New York City, I'm telling you. | ||
| But I'll tell you something. | ||
| So DeSantis. | ||
| Who's the only real politician who really understands the math on this and takes it seriously? | ||
| And Joseph Lodopo, his Surgeon General, they came out last week and they said, we don't agree with the CDC recommendations. | ||
| We think only people over 65 should get this. | ||
| Now, that's in keeping with the rest of the world. | ||
| So what happened? | ||
| The New York Times and The Washington Post and NBC. All the sort of elite media outlets attacked DeSantis and Lodopo over this. | ||
| And not one of them said, hey, what DeSantis is saying is what the rest of the world is doing. | ||
| We're the ones who are the outliers. | ||
| No, it was Ron DeSantis doesn't agree with the CDC recommendations. | ||
| He's trying to get people in Florida killed. | ||
| No, it's a lie. | ||
| Did they get that hyperbolic? | ||
| He's trying to get people in Florida killed? | ||
| That part I'm exaggerating. | ||
| If that was a real headline, I'm like, man, that guy really went for it. | ||
| No, but the headlines were like, experts say he may be putting people in Florida at risk. | ||
| There was stuff like that. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Maybe. | |
| Maybe not. | ||
| Maybe not at all. | ||
| Like, at what point in time do we just look at reality and stop being so fucking tribal? | ||
| Because I think if the people that had gotten vaccinated, the people that got talked into it, maybe some of them that regretted it, if they didn't have a stake in the game and they could just look at this thing for what it is, they would be like, what? | ||
| Right? | ||
| Like, as it is now, they'd be like, what are you talking about? | ||
| But they're already so invested in being team vaccine. | ||
| Isn't it interesting that team vaccine is also team Ukraine? | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| So I'm one of the few people who actually is not in favor of the mRNAs, but I do support our intervention. | ||
| I don't know if intervention is the right word. | ||
| I do support our supporting Ukraine. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I'm like the only person. | ||
| That's a complicated conversation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| It's a very complicated conversation. | ||
| But just to go back to vaccines, you can't get unvaccinated. | ||
| So if you'd taken two or three of these, or worse, if you'd had your 15-year-old take one or two, you don't want to think about it anymore. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And also you don't want to feel responsible. | ||
| So anything that comes, it's confirmation bias, that can give you some sort of a feeling of peace that you didn't fuck up. | ||
| And give the wrong thing to your kids. | ||
| And take the wrong thing yourself. | ||
| And anything you can do to like comfort yourself. | ||
| Because imagine if you're for your children. | ||
| You gave it to your children. | ||
| Now all of a sudden your children has like some sort of a heart issue. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| So people do like to hold on to their beliefs as much as they can. | ||
| Especially when those beliefs are integrated into a tribal ideology. | ||
| Which it was in some strange reason. | ||
| For some strange reason, rather. | ||
| During the pandemic, being vaccinated and believing the science and trusting the experts became part of the left's ideology. | ||
| And anyone else was a moron and a Trump supporter. | ||
| And, you know, take your horse paste and die. | ||
| This is why they don't like you, because you're clearly not on Team Trump. | ||
| You're not a MAGA guy. | ||
| So they can't... | ||
| They can't sort of tar you that way. | ||
| They don't like anybody they can't categorize. | ||
| Well, we should all be uncategorizable. | ||
| There's a lot of great ideas that come from both sides. | ||
| It's like the idea that there's only two sides is crazy because there's so much variability. | ||
| So much variability in the left and variability in the right. | ||
| When you're looking at the craziest fucking... | ||
| Militia guys on the right, and then you look at the craziest fucking Antifa people on the left. | ||
| Like, that's not representative of the right and the left. | ||
| It's representative of the worst aspects, the furthest out on the edges. | ||
| But if you are in agreement with anything that the right has to say, whether it's stuff about regulations, the economy, whatever the fuck it is, you are all of a sudden on the side of this goddamn militia. | ||
| Like, how did that happen? | ||
| You know, you're on team Michelle Obama's a man. | ||
| You're on team... | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, you gotta go all the way with all this fucking kookiness that's on that side. | ||
| Like, oh, no. | ||
| I just think that, you know, maybe we should have free speech. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| Maybe freedom of speech is actually really important, and freedom isn't something that should just be dismissed. | ||
| It sounds corny and cliche, but... | ||
| Freedom is really critical. | ||
| The older I get, the better I understand the Constitution and why we have it and why we need it. | ||
| Those guys were wizards. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| They were so good. | ||
| The people that wrote the Constitution were so good. | ||
| They understood human nature so well. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's really crazy how they set it up because they're like, there's got to be a way to stop dictators. | ||
| There's got to be a way. | ||
| And they were kind of on it for a while, up until like World War II. They did a great job! | ||
| They did a great job until people amassed power and then they had the media and newspapers. | ||
| They didn't control newspapers and all that. | ||
| And then it was like, oh boy. | ||
| Boy, it's getting slippery. | ||
| They did a great job of setting it up, though, that at least we have things that they don't have in other countries, like freedom of speech. | ||
| The First Amendment is so fucking polarizing for some strange reason. | ||
| There's smart people that have openly said, maybe we should amend the First Amendment. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So I wrote this in a substack about a month ago. | ||
| This is very upsetting to me. | ||
| There was a poll that Gallup, I think it was Gallup, did of just a few weeks before that. | ||
| I think it was June. | ||
| 70% of Democrats now essentially think the government should be able to ban, quote unquote, false speech on social media. | ||
| So, first of all, who's deciding what's true and what's false, okay? | ||
| And second of all, you want the government to do that? | ||
| The Democrats used to believe in free speech. | ||
| You know, liberals, the famous instance is when the ACLU in the late 70s, there were these Nazis, Nazis marching in Skokie, Illinois, and the ACLU said, we're going to defend them. | ||
| We hate them, but we're going to defend their right to speak because that's the First Amendment. | ||
| That's America. | ||
| The left has just totally forgotten this. | ||
| They don't want to hear anything that they don't want to hear. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's unfortunate that we just have this thing in our head that this is what my team believes. | ||
| It's so unfortunate because it really allows these things to take place. | ||
| Whereas if we're rational and objective and agnostic, we would look at it and go, these are problems. | ||
| Like, this is a problem for all of us. | ||
| This is a problem for everybody. | ||
| But if, you know, that's your fucking problem, I want an internal combustion engine, bitch. | ||
| You know, you can't fucking make me drive an electric car. | ||
| Like, everyone is so... | ||
| We're so... | ||
| We have an identity, you know? | ||
| We identify with being a progressive. | ||
| We identify with being, you know... | ||
| Whatever it is. | ||
| Whatever it is. | ||
| And when we do that, we want everyone... | ||
| We want to signal to everyone else that we're on the team. | ||
| It's so frustrating. | ||
| It's so crazy. | ||
| It's so crazy. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And you see, I don't know if you paid attention to this woman in Virginia, she's a Democrat running for the House of Delegates, like the Virginia State office. | ||
| And she was caught, I think it was about a week ago, she had essentially a porn site with her husband Oh yeah, I heard about that. | ||
| Yeah, like filthy. | ||
| Just absolutely filthy, okay? | ||
| Yee-haw. | ||
| Okay, so there's- Filthy. | ||
| Filthy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Filthy. | |
| That's a good advertisement for it. | ||
| Alex Berenson says filthy. | ||
| Absolutely filthy. | ||
| So meanwhile, you got Lauren Boeber, right? | ||
| Who's like doing what she's doing in that theater in Denver, right? | ||
| I heard about that. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| So here's my thing, okay? | ||
| They're both, they've both disqualified themselves from political office. | ||
| Not because I have any problem with sex or anything like that, but because your judgment is so bad, okay? | ||
| You have two little kids. | ||
| Don't start talking about how you're going to take money so people can watch your husband fuck you up the ass, which is literally what that woman in Virginia... | ||
| When I say filthy, I mean filthy. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| And don't start jerking off your, like, buddy, your first date buddy in the theater, the Beetlejuice Theater, with a pregnant woman directly behind you and kids around you. | ||
| Just don't do it, okay? | ||
| Neither of those women should be... | ||
| Holding political office. | ||
| I don't think that should be a controversial position, okay? | ||
| But if you're on the left, you know, this is the right of a married woman to have sex on camera with her husband, and God forbid we say anything about it. | ||
| And if you're on the right, you know, Lauren Boebert was just having a tough day or something. | ||
| No! | ||
| Why can't we just judge these things sort of apolitically as the crummy behavior that they are, and why can't we say to these two, Like, apologize and leave us alone. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's certainly an inappropriate place to be grabbing dicks and titties. | ||
| But I like the enthusiasm. | ||
| I like the fact that they're getting after it. | ||
| And they probably didn't think anybody could see because it was a dark day. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There was a woman directly behind them, a pregnant woman. | |
| Oh, really? | ||
| Because they were doing it all the time? | ||
| Wow, she's a lot of fun. | ||
| Yeah, probably a reckless human. | ||
| Note to self, this did not go the direction I hoped it would. | ||
| Come on, Alex. | ||
| We have to have some fun with this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I knew what you're saying. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not that I have a problem. | ||
| I mean, listen, you know, adults are going to do what adults are going to do. | ||
| Well, the Hunter Biden thing is the greatest example of that. | ||
| There's almost no pushback on the left. | ||
| There's no outrage, no chaos. | ||
| You know, here's the most disgusting part of that. | ||
| That he and the president wouldn't recognize his daughter. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| That is disgusting. | ||
| Especially if you believe that, you know, like, there's all this evidence, you know, getting raised by a single mother is not, you know, it's not a good thing for your outcomes in life. | ||
| Yes, plenty of people overcome it. | ||
| Yes, we don't want to stigmatize. | ||
| But in general, it's better to have two parents involved. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay? | |
| You have... | ||
| The son of the President of the United States refusing to acknowledge his daughter. | ||
| That is disgusting. | ||
| Is that because he didn't think it was his? | ||
| DNA proof! | ||
| He's paying child support. | ||
| So even after the DNA proof? | ||
| Yeah, he still refuses. | ||
| And the Biden said, we have six grandchildren. | ||
| They have seven grandchildren. | ||
| That is a national shame. | ||
| And I don't care if you're on the left or the right, it is not right. | ||
| The thing about him is just that he's such a hot wire. | ||
| I was like, you can't touch it. | ||
| It's just too much there. | ||
| You don't want to bring any attention. | ||
| If you were on the left, you wouldn't want to bring any attention to him and that laptop and those business dealings and all that stuff because like if that was the Trump family, oh my god, they'd be like, we told you! | ||
| We told you! | ||
| But you think the Trumps are much better? | ||
| Look how much money Jared Kushner made when he was in the White House. | ||
| I mean, it's crazy how much money the Trumps are making and did make. | ||
| Yeah, no one's saying that that's good either. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's the thing about someone... | ||
| No one has any shame! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| People love, people on the left love to do that though. | ||
| As soon as you point out anything on the left, they'll go, what about Trump? | ||
| What about Trump is like, they should make a t-shirt that just says, what about Trump? | ||
| Because that's like one of those things that they say. | ||
| And yeah, you're right though. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| That kind of corruption, that's inexcusable too. | ||
| And you know, some of it is just business, air quotes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| With the Saudis. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I'd love to hear about that business. | ||
| It's fascinating. | ||
| Kushner's 35. He's got his whole life to suck at the trough. | ||
| Did he have to do it when his father-in-law was in the White House? | ||
| I don't know the details behind that. | ||
| What happened? | ||
| I mean, so he and Ivana made an enormous amount of money. | ||
| During the four years of the Trump administration. | ||
| You can look it up. | ||
| I don't want to quote a figure because I don't want to be wrong. | ||
| But it is an absolutely stunning amount of money. | ||
| And now Kushner, he's got Saudi money that he's managing. | ||
| I don't know where we are as a country. | ||
| It seems like the people in charge think that anything goes. | ||
| What do you think of RFK Jr.? | ||
| I like him personally. | ||
| I've been interviewed by him. | ||
| I think he's right to raise questions about the mRNAs. | ||
| I don't agree with a lot of the details of what he says. | ||
| He's a fascinating guy. | ||
| You've interviewed him, right? | ||
| Yeah, I really enjoyed talking to him. | ||
| What's really important is his work as an environmental attorney and what he did with the Hudson River. | ||
| They cleaned up the Hudson River. | ||
| A lot of it based on him winning cases. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| And he really cares about people. | ||
| Genuinely does. | ||
| I think he's a good person. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| Would you vote for him? | ||
| Yeah, I'd vote for him. | ||
| Yeah, I would. | ||
| I don't think I'm going to get the opportunity. | ||
| It doesn't look that way. | ||
| I have a feeling they've got some rascally tricks up their sleeves to keep him from ever challenging. | ||
| And there's not going to be any debates, that's for sure. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Which is, it's just, I just really want to know, I mean, this is like a show that I can't stop watching. | ||
| If I wasn't personally involved, it wasn't something going on in the country that I live in, I would be like, wow, the show. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| Is that guy going to make it? | ||
| Like, what's going to happen? | ||
| Is she going to be the president? | ||
| Like, is Russia going to nuke us? | ||
| I would be like, what a show! | ||
| This show's crazy! | ||
| You know, opium is legal, you can sell pills, but marijuana's not. | ||
| Okay, mushrooms aren't, but, you know, fentanyl is. | ||
| Like, okay, this show's crazy. | ||
| Look, they got alcohol, they drive fast, they're putting speed cameras up all around LA now. | ||
| They're putting speed cameras up where they give you a certain ticket for X amount of miles you go over the speed limit. | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| Yeah, see if you can find that. | ||
| I just saw this. | ||
| It's like, okay. | ||
| Big Brother's watching you drive, watching you drive down the street now. | ||
| So you're still leaning towards not interviewing Trump. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| I don't want to interview anybody. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| Speed camera bill in California heads to Newsom for approval. | ||
| Please, Gavin, don't do this. | ||
| Oh, you know he's going to do it. | ||
| Please don't do this, Gavin. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Issue automatic tickets for drivers going at least 11 miles over the speed limit. | ||
| Cameras would be prioritizing areas surrounding schools, high-injury intersections, and known street racing corridors to reduce speeding and traffic fatalities. | ||
| Oh, well, hold on a second. | ||
| You put it that way, I'm like, okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Are there certain areas? | ||
| But the problem is, once you're allowed in that area, like, oh, we're going to put it in there. | ||
| Prioritize means nothing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Prioritize is a weird word. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But, if that's the case, those fucking street takeovers, that's bananas. | ||
| And how many times do you have to see on Instagram some dude standing around the circle and the guy's spinning around his car and hits one with the ass end and sends him flying through the air? | ||
| Jesus Christ, kids, get the fuck out of that circle. | ||
| I know it's a thrill, but get out of there, man. | ||
| That's pure Darwin. | ||
| Get out of there, man. | ||
| You'll see it even in the Tour de France, those people on the side. | ||
| Yes, they take out one of those bikers. | ||
| All the time. | ||
| It happens all the time. | ||
| And then there's like 83 of them go down. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, trusting just regular people to stand there. | ||
| Like, one's gonna be a moron. | ||
| One's gonna be on their phone. | ||
| One's gonna have a text that they can't not answer. | ||
| Waving a French flag or whatever. | ||
| Yeah, they're gonna do something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're gonna try... | |
| They've got toxoplasmosis. | ||
| Well, also, the fucking... | ||
| When you have, like, car races. | ||
| When, like, they're doing those rally races. | ||
| Like, those people are out of their mind. | ||
| Those things come sideways around corners. | ||
| There's people right there. | ||
| But at least those are experts. | ||
| The street racing kids are just nuts. | ||
| That street takeover thing, when did that first start taking place? | ||
| You are jealous of this, I can tell. | ||
| Street takeovers? | ||
| No. | ||
| You wish you were in one of those cars. | ||
| What? | ||
| How dare you. | ||
| I'm not interested in that at all. | ||
| I don't want to spin around in a circle. | ||
| I have zero desire to spin around in a circle. | ||
| But I mean, I wonder if that was like, was Fast and the Furious about that, or was it before that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Before, before. | |
| So the street takeovers were before? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, way before. | |
| 80s, Oakland. | ||
| Side shows. | ||
| 80s in Oakland. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Informal social gatherings of Bay Area youth. | ||
| Sideshows, that's what they would call them. | ||
| So they would just take over an intersection and start spinning around in circles. | ||
| How long would that generally last? | ||
|
unidentified
|
How long? | |
| Half hour? | ||
|
unidentified
|
10 minutes? | |
| 15 minutes? | ||
| Guys have held up an intersection for a half hour just spinning around in circles. | ||
| Have you been to the Bay Area recently? | ||
| It's kinda anything goes. | ||
| What a wild thing to do though. | ||
| To make everybody stop so you can drive in a circle in your car. | ||
| And everybody does. | ||
| They know what's going on so they all just deal with it. | ||
| What are you gonna do? | ||
| That's nuts. | ||
| There's some rap song. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Here's the rules. | |
| Now listen, this is code to the show for the people out there who just don't know. | ||
| If your car is real clean, then bring it. | ||
| If it's high performance, then swing it. | ||
| If it's a motorcycle, you better serve it. | ||
| And if you get a ticket, you better deserve it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right, then. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Part of the culture. | ||
| Part of the culture. | ||
| Noted. | ||
| If you get a ticket, you have to deserve it. | ||
| Yeah, don't do some bitch-ass thing. | ||
| Get a ticket. | ||
| Shut the whole intersection down. | ||
| Do donuts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're not racing. | |
| Fast and Furious is about races. | ||
| That's a whole different thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Yeah, that's a different thing. | ||
| But it's a lot of those cars are like those souped up Fast and Furious type cars, right? | ||
| Aren't they? | ||
| Like a lot of like souped up cars. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If your car's clean, bring it. | |
| There you go. | ||
| It's not, well, okay. | ||
| I guess. | ||
| It's just, what a crazy thing to do to people. | ||
| Make them wait until you do donuts. | ||
| Wasn't there... | ||
| Didn't something like this happen in Austin pretty recently? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, they did while I was here. | ||
| They do them everywhere. | ||
| It's all over the country now. | ||
| It's like kids want to be kids. | ||
| Like, they see it on Instagram. | ||
| But I guess they don't see the ones where the ass end hits the people and they go flying. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| They're definitely seeing that. | ||
| Dude, there's so many of those where people don't know how to control high-performance cars and they just get on the gas and the thing spins around in a circle and slams into a telephone pole. | ||
| Ha ha ha! | ||
| There's so many of those. | ||
| Oh, to be young. | ||
| Oh, to be dumb. | ||
| Not know how to drive a car. | ||
| Something happens here I've heard about, definitely not been a participant, is kids taking over people's houses. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, Jesus Christ. | |
| They'll find a big house that's empty and be like, it's time to throw a party. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, God. | |
| Definitely doesn't only happen here, but I've heard of it. | ||
| I've seen Instagram ads for it. | ||
| Imagine coming home from vacation, there's a party going on in your house, you've got to kick everybody out. | ||
| I think that's a Will Ferrell movie. | ||
| Is it? | ||
| It should be. | ||
| It should be. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Yeah, it should be, but they can't make those movies anymore. | ||
| Yeah, that's right! | ||
| They can't make those movies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is that true? | |
| You try to make Step Brothers today, you would get canceled. | ||
| Isn't that crazy? | ||
| It wasn't that long ago. | ||
| No. | ||
| They killed the genre. | ||
| They literally killed, wokeness killed the really over-the-top, ridiculous comedy genre. | ||
| You know, like Superbad. | ||
| You could never do that movie today. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| It's a fucking brilliant movie. | ||
| It's so funny. | ||
| That movie. | ||
| No way. | ||
| Uh-oh. | ||
| The four-year-old virgin? | ||
| Yeah, probably all of those are... | ||
| All those. | ||
| Stepbrothers? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-uh. | |
| Uh-uh. | ||
| Tropic Thunder? | ||
| You better get the fuck out of here. | ||
| There's so many live wires in Tropic Thunder. | ||
| So many landmines. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, but meanwhile, brilliant movie. | ||
| You can still watch it. | ||
| You know, it's like back in the day when we were free. | ||
| Yeah, 10 years ago. | ||
| It'd be ridiculous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's so quick. | ||
| It happened so quick. | ||
| Social media. | ||
| People gathered together in echo chambers and decided what was acceptable and what wasn't and enforced it on everybody else. | ||
| But don't you feel maybe we hit the peak of that about two years ago? | ||
| When they went after you? | ||
| I think there's enough understanding now that the vast majority of people don't like that. | ||
| The vast majority. | ||
| And also the vast majority of people think that context is important and that humor is important and that fun is important and that I don't like when other people are telling me how I have to think and talk. | ||
| Like, you should be willing to let people – you want to call yourself a zur, that's great. | ||
| But you get mad at me that I won't use that made-up word. | ||
| Like, this is bonkers. | ||
| This is just bonkers. | ||
| You know, if you have makeup on and long hair and you're a girl and you tell me you're non-binary and I have to call you a zur, I'm like – I don't want to participate. | ||
| This is not my dance. | ||
| You can go fucking cosplay. | ||
| Do whatever you want. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Dress up like an angel. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| But I don't like it when people start reinforcing their ideology on other people. | ||
| And that's part of what goes on whenever people have the ability to do it. | ||
| When people have the ability to tell other people what to say, how to think, they just do it, whether their way is right or not. | ||
| They don't want them to debate it. | ||
| They just want you to comply. | ||
| And they'll say things to you like, you should just be quiet and listen. | ||
| They'll say things like that, which is – that's an amazing thing to say. | ||
| Just be quiet and listen when woke people are educating you. | ||
| Oh, just be quiet and listen. | ||
| OK. Well, that would make it easier because as soon as I start talking, your argument is going to fall apart. | ||
| You know that there's now been some research done into like some of the DEI stuff, you know, that shows that it actually causes a backlash. | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| Like that, you know, when you tell people they're not allowed to talk and they come out angrier than they went when they went in. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| And it's also the... | ||
| Wasn't the person who created DEI just came out and said it didn't really work that well? | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| That would not surprise me. | ||
| Isn't that something that just happened, Jamie? | ||
| I'm pretty sure I saved it. | ||
| Because it was so bonkers. | ||
| I was like, this can't be real. | ||
| I have to look into this. | ||
| Let me look at it real quick. | ||
| Because it was so kooky that I was like, I need to read this. | ||
| Because a lot of times, and guilty as charged, if you ever thought I did this, if you see me come on this podcast and just start talking about shit, I probably just read the headline. | ||
| Alright, what am I looking up again? | ||
| DEI. Right, right, right, right. | ||
| I got it in here. | ||
| I know I do. | ||
| Okay, here it is. | ||
| Jordan Peterson tweeted it. | ||
| And it was tweeting it. | ||
| He was, quote, tweeting Michael Sherman. | ||
| I'll text you, Jamie. | ||
| So all that stuff became, explain that to people, what DEI is and how it came to be and what it does and what its impact is. | ||
| Well, I mean, I'm not an expert in it, but, you know, DEI is diversity, equity, and inclusion. | ||
| And it is basically this idea that, you know, white people need to shut up, right? | ||
| And Well, it's not just that. | ||
| They want equal representation in, you know, here it is. | ||
| Even Harvard psychology professor, who, how do you say his name? | ||
| Mazarin Banaji has come around. | ||
| She literally pioneered the research upon which all the DEI nonsense was hypothetically predicted, predicated rather, not alone. | ||
| No second Greenberg too. | ||
| For her to write this in the Wall Street Journal, it's astounding. | ||
| This is a Freud abjured psychoanalysis. | ||
| But here's the Shermer thing. | ||
| That's interesting, right? | ||
| So Michael Shermer says, Astonishing admission from the pioneer of research on implicit bias, bigotry, racism, same person Mazarian Banaji, my apologies, that DEI training programs don't work and even hurt. | ||
| Racist attitudes still exist, but much improved since 1960s, and most don't act on them anyway, and DEI now. | ||
| And that's what Shermer wrote. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, yeah, because when, you know, look, everybody has stray thoughts that, you know, may not be the best in the world, but if people aren't going to act on them and you make them sit in a conference room and tell them how terrible they are for three hours, they're going to wind up feeling... | ||
| Probably more aggravated than they were when they came in. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Nobody likes to be told they're awful all the time. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it's also not productive. | ||
| That's not... | ||
| Bill Maher talked about this, that we're supposed to be striving for a colorblind society. | ||
| But somewhere along the line, we were told that that's not possible. | ||
| You shouldn't do that because color's important, race is important, all these things are important. | ||
| Why DI training doesn't work and how to fix it? | ||
| There's no question that bias exists. | ||
| There's no question that the way organizations deal with it is more likely to hurt than help. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But maybe she's saying how to fix it. | ||
| Maybe she thinks it just needs to be tweaked. | ||
| We would have to read the article. | ||
| It's just too much trouble. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, the real problem is everybody wants a meritocracy, right? | ||
| But in this long race of self-improvement, not everybody starts at the same starting line. | ||
| Well, that is true. | ||
| And the reality is we put very little effort into making a better starting line for a lot of people in this country. | ||
| That's an unfortunate reality of this country that is undeniable. | ||
| And that needs to be addressed. | ||
| That's the root of the whole thing. | ||
| You can't just, like, decide to just do something about the fruit. | ||
| You got to do something about, like, what is the fertilizer for the civilization? | ||
| What is the root structure of the civilization? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That needs to be improved. | ||
| But to go back to where we started today, there's nothing that's worse for parenting than parents of young children using drugs. | ||
| Whether the drug is alcohol, cannabis, or meth, or heroin, it is terrible for parenting. | ||
| I mean, it leads to abuse, neglect, it leads to poverty, it leads to terrible outcomes. | ||
| And I don't know how you stop that, but one of the things when you consider whether you're gonna set up a world where drug use is sort of allowed, slash encouraged, slash commercialized, is the effect on young kids. | ||
| It's a really good question. | ||
| And, you know, as a person who believes That freedom is one of the most important things. | ||
| I also come from a perspective where I'm in a different place in life than I was when I was 20. And what would I be like when I was 20 if heroin was legal? | ||
| What would I be like if cocaine was legal? | ||
| What would I have done? | ||
| There's a reality that if you open the gates now, And you say, now all of these drugs are illegal, we're going to regulate them, and the way to stop fentanyl coming in in these tainted cocaine is to sell pure cocaine, and it'd actually be better for everybody. | ||
| I don't believe that. | ||
| I truly don't believe it. | ||
| I don't think the problem is the tainted drugs. | ||
| I think the problem is that drugs just eat people. | ||
| I think there's both of those things. | ||
| But what I was about to say is if you did do that, you would undeniably have a certain amount of people that are going to get addicted that never would. | ||
| Certain amount of people that were going to lose their lives that never would. | ||
| Certain amount of violent actions, car accidents, people on meth and heroin and drugs and coke. | ||
| They're going to do wild shit. | ||
| People are super unpredictable when they're fucked up on drugs. | ||
| You're going to have real problems. | ||
| That That's also true, but would more people do it if it was legal? | ||
| I think you're right. | ||
| I think more people would try it, but eventually not. | ||
| So we just have to sacrifice a whole generation to people learn? | ||
| You have to go to Europe and see, like, kids are allowed to drink wine in Italy. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And so they don't, like, there are instances of alcoholism, and it's not a big deal to them. | ||
| For us, it's a big deal. | ||
| Like, I remember the first time I got drunk with my friends, we were listening to the Led Zeppelin. | ||
| I was with my friend Jimmy, and it was like... | ||
| We were like 15 years old. | ||
| 14, 15 years old. | ||
| And I got sick in a cab. | ||
| But getting alcohol was crazy. | ||
| If you live in Europe, it's normal. | ||
| They get their kids acclimated to it. | ||
| You don't let them drink, but they're allowed to have a sip of alcohol. | ||
| It's not that big a deal. | ||
| Don't think of it as some forbidden fruit that you can't wait to get to to get fucked up on. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| But even with, you know, adults, we know that even with adults that have, you know, reasonable ways of approaching every other aspect of their life, some of them can't have a drink. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| They can't. | ||
| They can't do it. | ||
| They get fucking gerbilized and they're gone. | ||
| You know? | ||
| You know those guys. | ||
| Yes, of course. | ||
| Those are real people too. | ||
| And what do we do about that? | ||
| And it's a good question. | ||
| But it's a question that unfortunately... | ||
| There's so many pros and cons of both sides. | ||
| And the con of both sides is crazy because you're empowering a gigantic criminal enterprise. | ||
| That is, yes. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| And that was prohibition. | ||
| That was the thing that was going on in America. | ||
| They didn't stop people from drinking whiskey, but they stopped them from drinking good whiskey. | ||
| They were making moonshine. | ||
| That was what NASCAR was created for. | ||
| They were trying to run away from cops. | ||
| Those boys, yeah, yeah. | ||
| They developed hot rod cars to run away from cops. | ||
| And they said, you know, we should race these motherfuckers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They just kind of fucking race tracks in a circle. | |
| I mean, that's literally how NASCAR started. | ||
| It's kind of amazing. | ||
| But it's just, there's no real, there's no one perfect answer. | ||
| There's no one thing we say, you know what, if we do this, we'll have zero deaths, and everyone's going to be peaceful, and the world's going to be a utopia. | ||
| There's no answer like that. | ||
| No, but, and I'm not suggesting this, okay, but if you have a regime that is really strict on drug use, you don't have much drug use. | ||
| I mean, I'm talking about like Saudi Arabia. | ||
| If you're cutting people's hands off, and that would never fly here, and I don't think it's a good idea. | ||
| It's definitely not a good idea. | ||
| But this idea that you can't culturally and societally lower the levels of drug use is not true. | ||
| You can't. | ||
| It's just the question of the price you pay. | ||
| Right, but isn't that the thing about, like, peace as well? | ||
| Like, as long as you're willing to have, like... | ||
| Like, who is the... | ||
| Was it the... | ||
| Was it the president of the Philippines that was killing drug dealers? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah, Duarte. | |
| Yes, yes, yes. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I bet that had an impact. | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| I mean, I wouldn't recommend it, but I bet it worked to a certain extent. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| No, it's... | ||
| But... | ||
| So, there's just... | ||
| This idea, the drug legalization lobby has very successfully argued that basically you can't manage the amount of drug use in a society. | ||
| You just have to manage the consequences. | ||
| And that is demonstrably untrue. | ||
| Here's another, like, drinking and driving used to be pretty societally acceptable. | ||
| And now it's not acceptable. | ||
| I mean, people still sometimes do it, but levels are way down. | ||
| Have you ever seen that video from when they first started telling people you can't have an open beer in your car? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| See if you can find that video, Jamie. | ||
| I think it's from the 1970s. | ||
| And this lady's like, basically, we're becoming communists. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And this guy's like, you work all day, it'd be nice if you could have a beer on your way home. | |
| It's crazy. | ||
| These people are advocating for openly drinking in their cars. | ||
| You can change your behavior and attitudes. | ||
| Well, that's a wild one. | ||
| That's a wild one that people want to be able to just fucking booze it up while they're driving. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Drinking and driving here is viewed by some as downright undemocratic. | |
| It's kind of getting communist when a fella can't get put in a hard day's work, put in 11, 12 hours a day, and then get in your truck and at least rain one or two beers. | ||
| Where you can't drink when you want to. | ||
| You have to wear a seatbelt when you're driving. | ||
| Pretty soon we're going to be a communist country. | ||
| That is fantastic! | ||
| That's when Trump got its first light bulb. | ||
| I think I'm going to be president. | ||
| That guy, I didn't even, like, his accent, I didn't even, I underdid it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He was over the top. | ||
| But the baby next to the lady. | ||
| The baby right there. | ||
| That's how you used to carry babies around. | ||
| Just put them in there. | ||
| No airbags. | ||
| No, stick them in the front seat. | ||
| Those cars, they fall apart when you get in accidents. | ||
| When I was a kid, we just sat in the back seat. | ||
| You didn't even wear a fucking seatbelt. | ||
| Everybody's bouncing around back there. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| It's not the end of the world. | ||
| Most of the time, people survive. | ||
| And there's an amazing-- there's something I've been meaning to write for the stack. | ||
| It's been like I started to write and I haven't had time. | ||
| But this is a non-COVID thing. | ||
| This is the kind of stuff I need to write more of. | ||
| So there's been a lot of research done recently on the unhappiness of adolescence and teenage girls especially. | ||
| And one of the things that's really interesting is if you look by political party, liberal kids are much, much more unhappy than conservative kids right now. | ||
| And if you look at the outcomes, that's not necessarily the case. | ||
| You know, like... | ||
| When did this become... | ||
| Was this always the case? | ||
| Was it the case more recently? | ||
| It's gotten much worse in the last few years. | ||
| The last how many years? | ||
| The last few years. | ||
| I got to go back and, again, I don't want to misquote it, but, you know, their parents are... | ||
| Because of lockdowns and COVID as well? | ||
| Lockdowns and COVID and their parents scaring them to death with climate change and they're just like a bunch of neurotic, like, kids who, you know, who don't have any, like, they don't have any fun. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The climate change one is wild. | ||
| Because the thing about the climate change one, it's – both sides is kind of undeniable. | ||
| Like it is undeniable we're having an effect. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| It's undeniable. | ||
| Agree! | ||
| But I watched this guy discuss – I forget what legislators, what politicians he was talking to. | ||
| But he was asking them because they were trying to figure out what to do about carbon emissions. | ||
| And he said, what do you think the level of CO2 – like what percentage of the air is CO2? And everybody had a guess, like 5%, 7%, whatever it was. | ||
| And he said it's actually 0.3 or 0.4. | ||
| 0.3. | ||
| And at 0.2, plants die. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| Find out if that's true. | ||
| When that guy was saying that, I was like, they don't know because they're just guessing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No, it is 0.3 because it's 300 per million, 0.3. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Right. | ||
| And there's an effect that we're having, and that effect is causing the Earth to be the greenest it's ever been, right? | ||
| Yeah, no, look, we know this is real. | ||
| It's actually.03, but yeah. | ||
| But you can't scare the crap out of your kids all the time. | ||
| Don't scare them! | ||
| Also, here's the other thing. | ||
| This is, again, not denying that human beings have an effect on the climate. | ||
| We clearly do. | ||
| It's never been stable. | ||
| No. | ||
| The climate's never been stable. | ||
| It's never like a flat line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, look, if we go back to the dinosaurs before people started fucking around, it was a nice flat line. | |
| You always knew what the temperature was going to be on September 19th, 2020. September 7th. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| No, you didn't. | ||
| It was all kooky. | ||
| The whole thing is like this. | ||
| I had Steve Coonan on, who's a physicist, who explained all this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think he asked me to look up. | |
| Is this it? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| Yeah, here it is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
...atmosphere is CO2, carbon dioxide. | |
| Wild gas, it's up by 5%. | ||
| Five? | ||
| I'll just follow you then. | ||
| See their five and suggest that we know that transportation causes 49 percent of the CO2, so that's why we're all working on energy transition. | ||
| All right, so what number you think it is? | ||
| Five. | ||
| Five? | ||
| How about you? | ||
| I didn't hear you, Mr. Ayer. | ||
| Seven. | ||
| Seven? | ||
| Do you have one, Mr. Boyd? | ||
| So we got a five, seven. | ||
| Price is right. | ||
| Eight. | ||
| I'm gonna hit the high end. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, I appreciate that and I don't mean to put you on ice. | ||
| I ask a lot of people that because all we hear is climate change, climate change, CO2, CO2. I heard a couple of you on the panel saying you're looking to change your vehicles to electric even though we don't have the electric grid. | ||
| And me as a farmer, I wouldn't be real happy about running out and replacing $300,000, $500,000, $1,000,000 pieces of equipment because someone wants to be electric. | ||
| The answer is 0.04%. | ||
| Not 1%, not half of a percent. | ||
| It's 0.04%. | ||
| It's gone up from 0.03 over the last couple of decades. | ||
| This is what we're being all contorted into doing, is this tiny change in CO2. If we get below 0.02, plant life starts dying. | ||
| So, let me ask Mr. Boyd, are a lot of your vehicles Tier 4 already? | ||
| Or the vehicles that you know about in the industry? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So that's the cleanest burning diesel equipment you can get, right? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| All right. | ||
| How about Mr. Dreher? | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So why would anybody be anxious to go out and change out all those vehicles that you've been upgrading? | ||
| In my home state of California, CARB has eliminated lots of equipment. | ||
| Trucks, you know, we're going to be, we're down at least 70,000 truckers. | ||
| And all because they don't make a mandate for 2011 a newer vehicle. | ||
| And so it's going to be harder to get things from the ports, all this, all that. | ||
| So anyway, I just wanted to underline that as, you know, giddy about trying to make everything electric, especially in my home state when they're shutting down the power grid and taking out hydroelectric dams. | ||
| And they barely kept in place the nuclear power plant for an additional five years, which is 9% of our grid. | ||
| I don't know how we're going to do this. | ||
| I don't know how you guys are going to do this. | ||
| Construction on remote areas where there isn't power lines yet nearby or what have you in order to charge this stuff. | ||
| Maybe you'll bring generators. | ||
| So, anyway, thank you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a mess. | ||
| So, interesting, right? | ||
| You see these people, that's why we're working so hard to remove carbon from the air, and she doesn't even know it. | ||
| She doesn't know what he just said. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But she'll tell you that 49% of that 0.4, or.04, comes from trucks. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Comes from transportation. | ||
| Look, I think there's an even more basic problem, okay? | ||
| The problem is the Chinese and the Indians, we can go to a post-industrial society and all live, you know, growing beets in the United States and Europe. | ||
| They're not going to stop building coal-fired plants. | ||
| They haven't stopped building them. | ||
| Maybe they will promise to stop building them. | ||
| Europe, basically, if you look at a graph, Europe is like... | ||
| A tiny fraction of the world's CO2 right now. | ||
| In the U.S., we still emit a lot, but the Chinese emit a lot more, and I think the Indians are on track to pass this if they haven't passed this already. | ||
| So we can destroy our own economies, and it won't make that much difference, unfortunately. | ||
| That's a real problem. | ||
| We are really concentrating on climate and we're really concentrating on our impact. | ||
| But we also have to be concentrating on what other countries are doing and our ability to economically compete with them and be sustainable. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's one of the really important things that we should have probably learned from the pandemic when we couldn't get stuff. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Yeah, you couldn't get anything from overseas because it's COVID, lockdowns. | ||
| We do not want to be in the pockets of the Chinese. | ||
| They're not necessarily our friends. | ||
| I mean, are we already, though? | ||
| Well, yeah, we are. | ||
| We are. | ||
| Listen, we can have a decent relationship with them. | ||
| What they've done is so clever. | ||
| Yeah, we depend on them for everything. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It's not a good position to be in. | ||
| But that's what makes people really cynical about these relationships these countries have. | ||
| They're kind of enemies but kind of not. | ||
| You know, they're competing, but they're also, you know, selling each other stuff and their economies rely on each other. | ||
| Economic sanctions are the most devastating. | ||
| Yeah, I think we'd be mistaken to depend too much on the Chinese right now. | ||
| But just go all the way back. | ||
| Don't scare your kids. | ||
| No, don't scare the fuck out of people. | ||
| But how do you not scare the fuck out of them while making them aware at the same time? | ||
| They're two kind of different things. | ||
| But don't tell your kids the world's going to end in 50 years. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no. | |
| That's all nonsense. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, wasn't that what Greta Thunberg was saying in 2015? | ||
| Yeah, the idea that you can predict how this is going to go down seems nutty. | ||
| But really, we need to concentrate on some stuff that we absolutely can control. | ||
| And one of them is plastics in the ocean. | ||
| These people that are doing a great job of trying to figure out methods to sift that stuff out, just the sheer knowledge of how much is out there. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Do you know a lot of our stuff, apparently? | ||
| We used to think that when you recycled, that everything gets recycled. | ||
| But apparently, they don't do such a good job recycling plastic. | ||
| They just use it and put it in landfills. | ||
| And sometimes they ship it to other places. | ||
| This is something I know nothing about, but I believe you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's horrific, horrific imagery and videos of other countries where they're just dumping their waste into a river. | ||
| And you see these river systems that are just completely clogged by plastic bottles and garbage. | ||
| Humans are so fucking weird! | ||
| We're so weird. | ||
| We need the aliens to save us, Joe. | ||
| No, we need to get it together. | ||
| But I do think if I was an alien, I would be watching. | ||
| I think if I had to guess, if I had to put my chips on whether or not it's real or not real, I would think, yes, it's real. | ||
| I think most likely we've been observed, most likely we've been visited multiple times. | ||
| Why wouldn't they? | ||
| If they have the capability, we'd be fascinating. | ||
| Also, I think some of the stuff we're seeing is ours. | ||
| I think both of those things could be true at the same time. | ||
| And I think one of the ways that, again, I would obscure whether or not we have stuff like that is to start talking about aliens. | ||
| That just seems like common chess moves. | ||
| I'm like, oh, I see where you're going. | ||
| You know, if you just all of a sudden you got whistleblowers and all of a sudden you're telling me that all this stuff is real, like, okay. | ||
| Now I'm suspicious. | ||
| I was less suspicious when you were lying about it. | ||
| You know, when you were lying about it, I was like, oh, they're hiding the aliens. | ||
| They're hiding it, but now they're talking about it. | ||
| I'm like, oh, you guys probably are still hiding the aliens, but you probably back-engineered some shit or developed some stuff on some completely independent government-funded black ops branch of physics where they knew something about magnetic propulsion or something, and they've developed some unmanned drone that can go hypersonic speeds. | ||
| What do you think they look like? | ||
| Aliens? | ||
| Well, if you want to go back to the old CIA documents, because there are documents that George Knapp and Jeremy Corbell have uncovered from the Freedom of Information Act, where they said there was four different races that were visiting us. | ||
| Yeah, and some of them are the classic greys, and some of them are what they call the tall whites. | ||
| They look like Nordic people, like really pale skin and long hair, and their ears are like flat to their head, and they have larger eyes than we do. | ||
| But they look almost like humanoid. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, but I mean, who fucking knows? | |
| You know, this is all just nonsense talk. | ||
| It's like, what kind of elves do you believe in? | ||
| Oh, I don't believe in leprechauns. | ||
| But the regular wood elves are real. | ||
| You know, I don't know, man. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I haven't seen one. | ||
| I would die to see one. | ||
| I mean, it would be fascinating. | ||
| I'd be willing to not tell people. | ||
| Show me. | ||
| I want to know. | ||
| But everybody thinks that way, right? | ||
| Everybody wants to know. | ||
| But until you see something, and if you do see something, you're going to go, what did I fucking see? | ||
| Is that real? | ||
| Like, how reliable is my goddamn memory? | ||
| You know? | ||
| Like, did I just have, like, some internal burst of psychedelic chemicals, and it tricked me into thinking that I'd been abducted? | ||
| That's a good, all good question. | ||
| Well, that's a real question, too, because a lot of these alien abduction stories, they happen at night. | ||
| And when people are sleeping and dreaming, occasionally people get sleep paralysis. | ||
| That's a real factor. | ||
| And then dreams themselves. | ||
| People have lucid dreams. | ||
| They have dreams that appear that they're real. | ||
| They have, like, different levels of dreams. | ||
| Like some medications you take give you wild, vivid dreams. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| We know that, right? | ||
| So what is happening there? | ||
| Well, there's obviously some sort of neurochemicals that get released during sleep that appear to be, if not hallucinogenic, maybe they're definitely psychedelic. | ||
| What are they doing? | ||
| Are they connecting your consciousness with some other realm? | ||
| Like, what is going on? | ||
| And I can imagine if you were You know, you had one of these endogenous dumps of these naturally produced psychoactive substances and you're lying in bed, you would see fucking aliens over you. | ||
| But does that mean that the aliens aren't real? | ||
| I don't know that either. | ||
| Because that might be how they get to you. | ||
| Look at the bottom paragraph. | ||
| The ICIG office did nothing to look into the information they received from David Grush on UAP crash retrieval programs. | ||
| They have no information they can give to Congress. | ||
| Cover up. | ||
| This is Representative Tim Burchett. | ||
| He calls cover up. | ||
| It's posted the two-page letter that the ICIG Thomas... | ||
| Monheim is his name, who is working with David Gresh, I think. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| And their claim is that they haven't done anything. | ||
| They're not looking into the claims at all. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Well, maybe they're not allowed to. | ||
| If there was a crash retrieval program, I would imagine, I would say, shut the fuck up. | ||
| No, you can't look at it. | ||
| If there's some UFO that we have, and if we find out, look, how do you know how do those people working for you, whether or not someone's been taking money from Russia, or taking money from China, or taking money from Iran? | ||
| Taking money from the aliens. | ||
| How do you know? | ||
| How do you know there might be some guy that works for you that's a spy? | ||
| You can't let everybody come in and see the UFO. It's on a need-to-know basis. | ||
| So you deny them. | ||
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think everyone needs to know if it's a UFO. I don't know. | |
| When they cover it up, now I'm starting to think they're real. | ||
| I think What would it matter if they brought up a spy stall? | ||
| They'd be like, hey, they have something. | ||
| Maybe they could take pictures and send it to them and they could start reverse engineering. | ||
| They could explain it. | ||
| Maybe they don't know how to get it to work and then one person figured out how to get it to work. | ||
| That's the whole Bob Lazar lore. | ||
| The whole Bob Lazar lore was that they hired him to be a propulsions expert to go and back engineer this thing because they didn't know how it worked. | ||
| And then initially he was like, oh, that makes sense. | ||
| The reason why people keep seeing those, they're ours. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And then very quickly as he examined the thing, he's like, what the fuck is this? | ||
| This thing designed to carry three foot tall people that operates on some sort of gravity generator from an element that we haven't even stabilized yet. | ||
| And it's only theoretical at that point. | ||
| So that's what he says. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| But I had to take you down this road because I know you're like one of those guys that calls bullshit on things. | ||
| And I know you're paying attention to it because it's everywhere. | ||
| I'm very COVID focused. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I'm vaguely aware. | ||
| Just vaguely? | ||
| I would say just vaguely. | ||
| I mean, I'm busy suing the government. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| Are you worried when you do stuff like that? | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, we're all in the NSA database. | ||
| I haven't done anything that interesting. | ||
| You're definitely in the NSA database. | ||
| No, but we all are. | ||
| So, you know... | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| What does it mean, exactly? | ||
| I mean, so... | ||
| I'm not that worried. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| I'm... | ||
| I'm honestly... | ||
| It'd be more likely that Pfizer would be interested in me, but they're not going to do anything either way. | ||
| These are court cases. | ||
| You make your best case. | ||
| They hire really expensive lawyers. | ||
| They make their best case. | ||
| And it doesn't seem like they ever really face criminal charges. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| They face fines. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Nobody really goes to jail. | ||
| If you're a senior corporate executive, you don't go to jail. | ||
| So why do anything that could actually get you in trouble? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's really fascinating is that their criminal charges they get hit with are often less than the profits they made. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's true of both, you know, Eli Lilly, which is a company that I covered when I was at the New York Times. | ||
| I mean, this is a funny thing. | ||
| Like, these people on the left, they want to pretend that I'm some kind of conspiracy theorist. | ||
| I'm the same reporter I was when I worked at the New York Times and covered the drug industry and wrote these stories. | ||
| This is why I'm so aware of the games the companies play, because I've been writing about it for so long. | ||
| When you worked at the New York Times, what year was this? | ||
| This was in 1999 through 2010 I worked there. | ||
| Could you ever imagine that journalism would be where it's at now? | ||
| No. | ||
| As a person who was there on the inside of the Grey Lady, did you notice a shift while you were there? | ||
| There was a slight shift. | ||
| Look, I was a business reporter, okay? | ||
| I was an investigative business reporter. | ||
| They never told me, don't write about this or do write about this. | ||
| I mean, sometimes they tell me, do write about this, but they never told me... | ||
| Don't do this. | ||
| It might offend the Democratic Party or whatever. | ||
| That's not how it worked. | ||
| And I remember going to Iraq for the paper and coming back and some guy sent me—I was in Las Vegas, actually, in 2003—and some guy, I think I was getting my shoes shined, the guy next to me getting his shoes shined, said, Oh, it must be hard to work for The New York Times when they tell you to make things up. | ||
| And I said, I was in Iraq and, like, I put my life on the line for that place and to get to the truth. | ||
| Like, you don't know what you're talking about. | ||
| And so that was really, like, a responsibility and a trust that I felt to try to get to the truth. | ||
| But people were always cynical even back then. | ||
| Oh, yeah, they were cynical, but they were more wrong then. | ||
| What happened was that Trump got elected. | ||
| Okay, Trump got elected and it broke the American media because they couldn't believe that the United States elected this guy instead of Hillary Clinton. | ||
| They all wanted Hillary Clinton, and especially younger female reporters at the paper. | ||
| And she was also projected to win, did the entire thing. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I don't know if I said this to you some previous time I was here, but there's this famous Onion headline I'll never forget from 2015, Hillary Clinton tells Nation not to fuck it up for her. | ||
| And that's how it felt, right? | ||
| Like, I'm going to be elected whether you want me to be or not, right? | ||
| Do you think we would have been better off as a culture if she got elected? | ||
| Oh, that's an interesting question. | ||
| Do you think that the separation, the polarization of the right and the left wouldn't have been so bad if she won? | ||
| Because she was projected to win. | ||
| This stuff was happening anyway. | ||
| Right, but I wonder if that was—because Trump is such a polarizing figure that I think that was the tipping point. | ||
| Yeah, maybe. | ||
| Maybe we would. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But she didn't win. | ||
| He won, right? | ||
| And he—and the media— Not if you listen to some interviews. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| That's right. | ||
| But when, yes. | ||
| Russia hacked our elections. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Remember that? | ||
| I do remember that. | ||
| That used to be okay to say. | ||
| But he, the media hated him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he used their hate, and their hate got worse and worse, and they became openly partisan in a way they hadn't been, I don't know, in a hundred years. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was weird. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| It's weird, and it just doesn't seem like it's ever going to bounce back. | ||
| And if he wins again, Jesus, Louisa, what is going to happen to us? | ||
| I don't know what's going to happen next year. | ||
| I mean, he could be in prison. | ||
| There's a real chance he could be in prison and win. | ||
| I don't know what that looks like. | ||
| Which is just bananas. | ||
| If he goes to jail for the crimes that they're accusing him of, how long are we talking about for this? | ||
| Well, the Georgia stuff, he could do 20 years. | ||
| Oh, my goodness. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Imagine he's covering the country from his cell block. | |
| Would they allow him to have access to phones and shit? | ||
| Oh, I think he'd have to be the president. | ||
| I think there'd be enormous pressure to let him out under those circumstances. | ||
| And then put him back in once he gets out? | ||
| That's a great question. | ||
| I mean, it's unthinkable. | ||
| Now, the federal stuff, he could pardon himself for, it seems pretty clear. | ||
| He can pardon himself? | ||
| There's a debate about this. | ||
| But he could also direct the Justice Department to drop the prosecutions. | ||
| But the state stuff, he can't. | ||
| State stuff, he doesn't control. | ||
| So it's crazy. | ||
| And I've increasingly concluded that it was a huge mistake to indict him. | ||
| They should have presented the information. | ||
| Because this is a political issue, not a legal issue. | ||
| The political issue is, does the country want him as president? | ||
| If it wants him as president, it'd be different. | ||
| Okay, if you said he murdered somebody or he committed espionage, this is all... | ||
| I mean, nobody really is accusing him of crimes like that. | ||
| So the idea that he might be in jail and the country might have to vote in an election where one of the candidates is in prison is crazy. | ||
| I was listening to a conversation that Dennis Prager had. | ||
| And I forget who he was talking to. | ||
| Oh, David Pakman. | ||
| And they were having a conversation about the election. | ||
| And one of the things that Prager said that I thought was really interesting, like, if you knew... | ||
| That Hitler was an incredibly evil person and you knew that you could stop this person from getting into power by manipulating the election. | ||
| It would be your moral imperative to do so. | ||
| And that a lot of people viewed Trump like that. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's a real thing. | ||
| And I think they do right now. | ||
| If the will of the people is that he becomes president, the rest of the people that don't agree with that will go into a fucking fury. | ||
| A fury. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| If he becomes president again, like, God, what is going to happen? | ||
| No, it'll be terrible. | ||
| But if he's in jail and can't campaign, his supporters are going to think it's terrible. | ||
| They're going to think it's unfair that way. | ||
| The whole thing from top to bottom is just fucking bonkers. | ||
| It's bonkers. | ||
| All the scenarios are bonkers. | ||
| President Kamala... | ||
| I can't stand him. | ||
| And people, you know, I lose sub-stack views whenever I say that, but I don't like Donald Trump. | ||
| But I do think that he, like, the way the left is behaving towards him is not wise. | ||
| Yeah, it's like telling someone to shut the fuck up. | ||
| You ever tell someone to shut the fuck up? | ||
| They don't want to shut the fuck up. | ||
| The only reason why they shut the fuck up when you tell them to shut the fuck up is like a threat of violence. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Or if they realize they really fucked up and they just like take a moment of reflection. | ||
| But most of the time, you tell people to shut the fuck up and they're like, you know, you shut the fuck up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| They get mad. | ||
| It doesn't work. | ||
| It's like when you think you can just hit somebody because you saw it in a movie. | ||
| No, they're going to hit you back. | ||
| They might beat the fuck out of you. | ||
| They might wait for you after school one day and kick your ass. | ||
| They're not going to just take it. | ||
| Like people don't just – when you do something like that where you just try to silence your opponent and try to jail your opponent on what some people think are trumped up charges, no pun intended, that makes people furious. | ||
| It emboldens and empowers the other side unfortunately. | ||
| That's just how it goes. | ||
| You know, it's like what we're talking about, the DEI stuff. | ||
| It's like you force stuff down people's throats and they get angry at it. | ||
| Like, this is, the fuck out of here with this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| And when you make people take vaccines, they get angry. | ||
| Yeah, they get angry. | ||
| And it emboldens them and it enforces their idea that other people are out to get them. | ||
| And that's real dangerous. | ||
| It's real dangerous when we think like that. | ||
| It's real dangerous. | ||
| And we gotta be very careful. | ||
| Gotta be very careful about that. | ||
| Because we don't want a fucking civil war. | ||
| And I just think we're almost like at this point where there's parts of one side that hate parts of the other side so much. | ||
| Both sides it's true of. | ||
| Yeah, that's why I didn't pick a left or a right. | ||
| It's like it's both sides. | ||
| It's like there's evil on the right, there's evil on the left. | ||
| It's just humans. | ||
| It's humans in groups. | ||
| You get enough of us together in a group, certain percentage are just going to be fucking assholes. | ||
| So what do you think is going to happen? | ||
| You know, a year from now, one year from now, we'll be right up to the election. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know, and I'm not happy. | ||
| Also, it's fascinating watching RFK Jr. not get Secret Service protection. | ||
| Yeah, that's weird. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| It's gross. | ||
| How is that even a thing that they can deny him? | ||
| Hunter Biden gets it, and he doesn't? | ||
| How could they deny him that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then there was some guy who showed up, heavily armed, pretended he was on a security detail, just a nutter. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, not good. | ||
| None of it's good. | ||
| It's not good. | ||
| It's like – but you see these power struggles and you see these power dynamics and it just doesn't take into account – it's like concentrating on short-term victory, right? | ||
| Short-term victory is win the election at all costs. | ||
| But it's not looking at the big picture of the future of the nation, right? | ||
| If you choose to bend the rules because it's like the rules are the reason why we're great. | ||
| It's a big part of why this is such an amazing place is the freedom of speech. | ||
| And if you're going to social media companies and you're the government and you're having them release or delete things that are accurate, that's not good for the nation. | ||
| It's not good for all of us. | ||
| It's not good for human beings as a whole. | ||
| It's not good for the country that you live in as a person doing that, making that decision. | ||
| It's not good for all of us. | ||
| Well, you're not going to have to convince me of this, right? | ||
| Obviously. | ||
| But, I mean, look, my case, you know, there's two big cases. | ||
| There's my case and there's Missouri v. | ||
| Biden. | ||
| So Missouri, the state of Missouri and the state of Louisiana sued Missouri. | ||
| You know, over social media censorship. | ||
| And they did that in the Western District of Louisiana. | ||
| And they got a favorable ruling in July. | ||
| And then the Fifth Circuit, which is just one level below the Supreme Court, you know, it's several states in the South, basically upheld that ruling. | ||
| It was about 10 days ago. | ||
| And now the Biden administration has appealed to the Supreme Court. | ||
| And what the Fifth Circuit has said is we don't want... | ||
| I've seen your officials in the Biden administration, including the same people who I've sued, talking to social media companies and trying to pressure them. | ||
| They've gone too far. | ||
| And here's what's really interesting about this job. | ||
| So what the Biden administration says is... | ||
| We're not forcing anything. | ||
| We're not making explicit threats against anybody. | ||
| We're just saying this is what we think should be on your platforms and this is dangerous to let people talk about the problems with the vaccines because it discourages people from getting vaccinated. | ||
| That's dangerous to them. | ||
| We don't like that. | ||
| And, you know, famously, Biden said in July 2021, you're killing people. | ||
| Those are his words. | ||
| The platforms are killing people by allowing people like me to talk about problems or potential problems with the vaccines. | ||
| OK, now, from my point of view, I've basically been proven right in terms of most of the concerns that I raise. | ||
| Now, we could argue about that. | ||
| But the truth is, it doesn't matter. | ||
| Whether I was right or wrong. | ||
| I'm an American. | ||
| I have the right to express myself and Twitter was my platform to do that. | ||
| It was my biggest journalistic outlet. | ||
| So try and get Twitter to ban me. | ||
| It's one thing maybe if you, you know, If you just talk generally about what you want to see, but what's clear is that the Biden administration went way past that. | ||
| This is what really comes out when you read, and of course I've read the rulings in the Missouri v. | ||
| Biden case, and of course my own stuff, is that They pushed for months and months and really years until really 2021, 2022. They put a lot of pressure on these companies. | ||
| And the White House is powerful. | ||
| And the companies have a lot of interests beyond... | ||
| Me or other users and what we're allowed to say. | ||
| They have interests in Europe. | ||
| They have interests with Section 230, which is this provision that enables them not to get sued for the content that they carry. | ||
| And so at some point, even if you're not making an explicit threat of you better take this guy off or you're going to pay... | ||
| The companies hear that. | ||
| They hear what you're saying without you saying it. | ||
| And that's what the Fifth Circuit ruling basically says. | ||
| And that's my argument. | ||
| I mean, my argument goes past that, actually, because I have evidence that the White House explicitly, quote-unquote, asked why I was allowed to be on Twitter. | ||
| I mean, that's in black and white. | ||
| But the point is, and this is the analogy, because I think everybody gets this, when you get pulled over, And the cop says, can you get out of your car for me? | ||
| I really need you to get out. | ||
| Can you get out for me, please? | ||
| That's not really a question at some point. | ||
| That's a demand. | ||
| And so... | ||
| It is not right for the government to try to stifle me or anyone else that way. | ||
| And that's at the core of Berenson v. | ||
| Biden, and it's broadly at the core of Missouri v. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Biden. | |
| And in a perfect world, what they would do is ask you how you came to this conclusion and what's the data and show us. | ||
| But you did base it on data. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| The White House, they're the most powerful organization in the world. | ||
| They can say whatever they want. | ||
| They have a billion-dollar advertising budget. | ||
| The president or anybody on the COVID team can call the New York Times at any time and express their point of view. | ||
| They don't need to shut me up. | ||
| Whether what I'm saying is right or wrong, true or false, they don't need to shut me up and it's against my constitutional rights for them to do so. | ||
| And that is wrong. | ||
| And by the way, I was right and they were wrong and the vaccines have basically failed and that's why nobody wants to take them anymore. | ||
| But that actually is almost irrelevant. | ||
| Yeah, it's just, it's a strange time when it comes to this because really there was never social media before like the Obama administration. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Right? | ||
| This is really a new thing. | ||
| And it became what it really became during the Trump administration. | ||
| It became this like boiling pot. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And during COVID. Because pre-COVID, I would have just been an ex-New York Times reporter and I wouldn't have had any audience at all. | ||
| That's what they don't like. | ||
| They don't like you because you have an audience they can't control. | ||
| They don't like me because I have a half million people on Twitter and more back then who would retweet me and really wanted to hear what I had to say. | ||
| And they couldn't control it and it was free to me. | ||
| I didn't have to pay Twitter. | ||
| It was just an audience and a voice. | ||
| And they don't like that. | ||
| That's a real problem if you're telling the truth. | ||
| That's what's crazy. | ||
| It's like we're not talking about someone who's advocating for violence. | ||
| We're not talking about someone who's trying to take down the government. | ||
| No, we're just talking about someone who's advocating for truth. | ||
| You're just talking about truth. | ||
| And if you've got a government that's trying to stop truth, they shouldn't be doing that. | ||
| They just shouldn't be doing that. | ||
| Everyone should know they shouldn't be doing that. | ||
| They, and you know, these are documents that have come out. | ||
| They knew that people like me were the biggest problem because what they didn't, you know, if you're out there saying like, oh, the vaccine is going to make your foot fall off or whatever, stuff that's obviously untrue, people know that. | ||
| You know, they're going to disregard that. | ||
| But if you have me saying, look at the CDC's own statistics and make a judgment for yourself whether this makes sense. | ||
| Did they make those conclusions or are you just doing math based on what they have? | ||
| I'm just doing math based on their data. | ||
| So it's not their conclusions, but it's their data. | ||
| That is what they know is the biggest problem for them. | ||
| Because they can't say I'm lying. | ||
| They can't say it's false. | ||
| All they can say is it's misinformation. | ||
| Misinformation just means information that we don't like. | ||
| Isn't that mal information? | ||
| Like true information that's bad for the country? | ||
| So there's mis, dis, and mal. | ||
| Yeah, what is mal exactly? | ||
| My joke about this was mal is just the third thing because they need three things. | ||
| But the difference between mis and mal can be kind of hard to distinguish. | ||
| Mis, technically, I think... | ||
| Can be false, whereas mal is not ever false, but it is taken out of context. | ||
| It's stupid. | ||
| It's all stupid. | ||
| Or dangerous. | ||
| Or dangerous. | ||
| Somehow or another dangerous to the country as a whole or something like that. | ||
| That's mal. | ||
| Let's hear what it says. | ||
| Mal's purposeful, I think, is the difference. | ||
| Malinformation is truth used to inflict harm on a person, organization, or country. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| But they're saying examples of malinformation include fishing, catfishing, and doxing. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Okay, well, if that's it. | ||
| But if you broadly define it as it could do harm to an organization, like information that could do harm to an organization. | ||
| So how do they define misinformation? | ||
| If malinformation is truth, misinformation... | ||
| So misinformation... | ||
| Incorrect or misleading. | ||
| So that can be true, too. | ||
| Certainly misleading can be true. | ||
| It could be misleading, but you could take something out of context, or someone could be saying, you could be using a part of something, like you could say, this does this, but the reason why it cancels itself out is because there's also this, that, and that happening. | ||
| So you might say the one thing only, and that's misinformation. | ||
| That's called making a case, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Disinformation refers to false information that is intended to manipulate, cause damage, or guide people. | ||
| Organizations and countries in the wrong direction. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| Wrong direction. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wrong direction. | |
| That's pretty Orwellian. | ||
| Malinformation refers to information that stems from the truth, but is often exaggerated in a way that misleads and causes potential harm. | ||
| Oh, you mean like climate change? | ||
| Isn't that kind of mal-information then? | ||
| Like a lot of the discourse on climate change? | ||
| Like if you go back to an inconvenient truth Would that be considered malinformation? | ||
| So this is actually something I did not know. | ||
| Malinformation is meant to cause harm. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Harm to who? | ||
| The information I shared was intent to cause harm to Pfizer's profits. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You could decide that that's malinformation because you're trying to cause harm, which is just bonkers. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So this is why, you know, so I filed Berenson v. | ||
| Biden in April. | ||
| The Pfizer and the Justice Department and Andy Slavitt, his lawyer, there are three separate motions to dismiss that came back about three weeks ago. | ||
| We now have to file our responses, which we do in October. | ||
| Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is going to hear the Missouri v. | ||
| Biden appeal, which is, of course, of great importance to my case, too, because If the Supreme Court says that some of the people in my case violated the First Amendment, obviously we're going to say to the judge in my case, look, look what the Supreme Court just ruled. | ||
| You know, this is a very powerful ruling from our point of view. | ||
| So we'll see what happens. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| It's a very important case, you know, as is the case, was it Missouri, the case? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, where they said that the federal government is no longer allowed Can you explain that? | ||
| So there's another case that came out of Texas. | ||
| So Texas passed a law saying that Twitter and the really big social media companies can't censor content. | ||
| They have to allow all content. | ||
| And the company sued and said, that violates our First Amendment rights. | ||
| We have to be allowed to choose what we're going to carry or not. | ||
| Now, in their defense, though, isn't part of that because of advertiser revenue? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's the big thing. | ||
| Wasn't that the discussion that was going on recently about the Facebook ad fallout? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That these companies come to them and they say, unless you police your website, you can no longer have our advertiser revenue. | ||
| This is a very complicated question legally, because the companies do want to be able to curate content. | ||
| It's a business. | ||
| It's a business. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And they want engagement, so they want to show you stuff that you want to see, especially Facebook. | ||
| That's their model. | ||
| So if you're going to regulate these guys like telephone companies, basically what you're going to say is everything that everybody posts has to be allowed. | ||
| And I can see the arguments on both sides of that. | ||
| My case and the Missouri v. | ||
| Biden case are, to me, they're very different. | ||
| And the reason is we're not saying, hey, Facebook or Twitter, you have to carry everything. | ||
| We're saying the government can't tell you what to carry and not to carry. | ||
| The Texas case, the separate case, this third case, that says you guys have to carry everything. | ||
| That's where it gets weird, right? | ||
| That's where it gets weird, yes. | ||
| Because then you have to decide, okay, are these social media platforms, are they a town hall that everyone should be able to participate in, or are they a private company that can dictate what's on their platform, especially if not doing so hurts their financial bottom line? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And I think that's a hard question. | ||
| Again, AT&T, if you make a phone call, you can say racist, anti-Semitic, whatever you want to say. | ||
| They carry your phone call. | ||
| Yeah, that's what's interesting. | ||
| If there was no stepping in, would the market figure it out? | ||
| Would sites like Rumble or these other social media platforms that choose not to moderate that heavily, would they rise now? | ||
| A lot of people thought that was going to happen with Threads, right? | ||
| People were tired of all the hate speech that was on Twitter, and now X, and they said, you know what, we're going to go over to Threads. | ||
| But it didn't work. | ||
| People seem to want a more open platform. | ||
| They want Twitter. | ||
| They don't want threads. | ||
| They already had established followers and all this stuff over there. | ||
| And it's just, it was convenient to bitch over there. | ||
| So many people are like, I'm out of here. | ||
| And then two weeks later, I go to their account, bitch, you post every day. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| No, Twitter, for whatever reason, we don't seem to be able to quit Twitter. | ||
| It's very powerful. | ||
| It's also people that don't like the fact that Elon Musk bought it because it seems so outrageous. | ||
| This guy just spent $44 billion to own Twitter. | ||
| Like, what a nut. | ||
| You've got to get him back on. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I'd love to. | ||
| Paying for it might be not a fun idea. | ||
| No, I don't know if that's going to work. | ||
| It seems odd. | ||
| I think for everybody, I mean. | ||
| Yeah, everybody has to pay. | ||
| That's what he's saying now. | ||
| I wonder how much that would cost. | ||
| I presume he'd charge a dollar or two a month. | ||
| Who knows if he's going to do it. | ||
| If you could just watch ads to pay for your monthly thing, that's a way to pay for it back. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wild. | ||
| What a time. | ||
| I'm happy to pay my eight bucks a month. | ||
| It's fine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I pay. | ||
| I just feel like I'm using it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's a resource. | ||
| I learned so much on it. | ||
| There's so many articles that I find that I never would have found. | ||
| So many... | ||
| Really fascinating things about everything, about space, ancient history, like so many things that I find out on Twitter. | ||
| Or X now. | ||
| Can we not call it X? It's Twitter. | ||
| I'm never going to forget. | ||
| It's always going to be Twitter. | ||
| I guess eventually I'll... | ||
| But Jessica, without Twitter, I wouldn't have had the voice that I had. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I think it's good that it exists. | ||
| Well, the crazy thing is you got back on Twitter before Elon even bought it. | ||
| Yeah, I did. | ||
| I sued my war back on. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Which is bananas that you won in court against Twitter. | ||
| Against Twitter. | ||
| Well, now, but now I'm going up against Pfizer and the government. | ||
| I just decided I took it up another level. | ||
| Yeah, you're a maniac. | ||
| Just a glutton for punishment. | ||
| Stress. | ||
| Geez. | ||
| I got a good lawyer. | ||
| I believe you. | ||
| That's why I don't want to interview any more presidential candidates. | ||
| I don't even want to be a part of this kookiness. | ||
| I wanted to talk to Robert Kennedy Jr. because I read his book and I was fascinated. | ||
| Have you interviewed DeSantis or Vivek or any of those guys? | ||
| No. | ||
| I interviewed Bernie back in the day and Tulsi and Andrew Yang. | ||
| I liked all of them. | ||
| I like people with ideas that are non-corporate ideas. | ||
| I just don't know if it would ever work. | ||
| If I was ever going to talk to Trump, the one question I'd really want to know is, what is it like when you get in there? | ||
| Like, what is that like? | ||
| What is that day like? | ||
| What does it feel like when you're just running the show? | ||
| Like, what the fuck happens? | ||
| Who talks to you? | ||
| I guess you couldn't even tell me, right? | ||
| Because he wants to be president again. | ||
| But like, what do they say? | ||
| How do you fucking, how do you pay attention to everything? | ||
| The idea that one person is in charge of the whole thing is just so nuts. | ||
| I don't know how you could do that. | ||
| It's funny because I don't see him as having a problem with that part of it. | ||
| We have this illusion of what it's like. | ||
| You know the old Bill Hicks joke? | ||
| They bring you into a room full of guys smoking cigars and they show you a video of the angle of a presidential Kennedy assassination that you've never seen before. | ||
| And then they go, any questions? | ||
| And you're like, yeah, what's my agenda? | ||
| It's like, what happens when you get in there? | ||
| How much power do you really have? | ||
| What is reality like versus perception? | ||
| I'd be interested in hearing that. | ||
| But you'd have to listen to a lot of other stuff. | ||
| I'd listen to a lot of other stuff. | ||
| I'm willing to listen to stuff. | ||
| I'm curious. | ||
| But, yeah. | ||
| I'll tell you who you'll never have on. | ||
| It's Biden. | ||
| They wouldn't let him near you. | ||
| That would be fascinating. | ||
| I would feel bad. | ||
| I would feel bad. | ||
| Just because, you know, he's a human being. | ||
| He's a human being, regardless of his past. | ||
| He's in a declining state. | ||
| It's obvious. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And that's just, you know, just what it is. | ||
| He's too old to be the President of the United States. | ||
| So who do they run? | ||
| Do you think if he doesn't make it, do they run Gavin Newsom? | ||
| Because he said, no, Kamala Harris would take the spot. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Newsom certainly fits the role. | ||
| Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer, you know, like I don't like either of them, but they certainly are viable candidates. | ||
| But you'd have to get someone who's popular enough to defeat Trump and who's strong enough of a politician. | ||
| And that's where I think Newsom steps in. | ||
| I mean, he looks like a president. | ||
| He's tall, handsome. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A strong personality. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's very articulate, like the way he lays things out. | ||
| He knows how to steamroll you with facts and statistics that... | ||
| And even if they're true... | ||
| Yeah, it doesn't matter. | ||
| No, he's a politician. | ||
| Yeah, it's a really good one. | ||
| So that's probably who I would imagine they would run, even though California is a mess. | ||
| But California, I think, would have been a mess with anybody running it during COVID. I think it was a fucking disaster. | ||
| As soon as you started the lockdowns, you let people camp in the streets, and you fucking, the crime shit, and the being lenient on bail. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Oh boy. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And the defund the police. | ||
| Oh boy. | ||
| Yeah, it's a mess. | ||
| Cleaning that up, boy, I do not envy anybody there. | ||
| There are viable Democratic candidates. | ||
| Newsom, Whitmer, not Cuomo anymore. | ||
| You have to start from right now. | ||
| They don't have to already be out there on the campaign trail. | ||
| People have to really get to know them. | ||
| We're in September of 2023. We've only got a year left. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it is funny with DeSantis. | ||
| I really like the way he handled Florida during COVID. I think he's smart. | ||
| But he is not connected with the voters at all. | ||
| People just don't seem to like him. | ||
| Also, as soon as he's running against Trump. | ||
| The Trump or bust people are not on board because then he becomes the enemy. | ||
| And that's just a sizable chunk of the opposition. | ||
| The people that are in opposition to the current party, there's a sizable chunk are Trump loyalists. | ||
| And if you go against that, that's just not a good strategy. | ||
| I understand you want to be president, but do you see the landscape? | ||
| If Mike Tyson is the champ and you're just coming out of the Olympics, wait a few years, bro. | ||
| Get some fights under your belt. | ||
| That guy is just kind of unstoppable. | ||
| There's some magnetism he has for all these people. | ||
| I don't understand it, but it's real. | ||
| You know, you're not supposed to say it because you're supposed to be in opposition of him. | ||
| You hate him and all this stuff. | ||
| But it's clearly obvious that he's got like this cult of personality that they don't have. | ||
| It's like he's a giant figure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When he showed up at the UFC in Miami, it was bananas. | ||
| Oh, so that's right. | ||
| You've seen him up close. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| First of all, I've shook his hand on two occasions now. | ||
| He has regular-sized hands. | ||
| So all that is crazy. | ||
| All that's crazy. | ||
| Because I have pretty big hands. | ||
| He has regular-sized hands. | ||
| And I was like, this is crazy. | ||
| All these years they've mocked him for having little hands. | ||
| He doesn't have little hands at all. | ||
| It's so strange. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| And by the way, how gross to mock someone for something they were born with. | ||
| That's so anti-liberal and anti-progressive. | ||
| Like, why are you doing that? | ||
| Why are you doing that? | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| That's such a crazy thing to do. | ||
| Like, the one thing that he can't control? | ||
| What about his personality? | ||
| What about all the things he says? | ||
| If you want to get mad at him, get mad at him for the things that are really changeable. | ||
| But so, okay, he's got the normal size hands, but so does he have this magnetism? | ||
| Well, he's very, very, very famous and part of people's dissatisfaction with the current regime, right? | ||
| Especially people's dissatisfaction if you see Biden's state of decline. | ||
| Regardless of how you feel about the policies, most people aren't even engaged. | ||
| They don't even understand what's going on and whether or not it's beneficial to people and whether or not there are more jobs and whether or not the economy is moving. | ||
| Because there's arguments that it is moving in a good direction, right? | ||
| There's arguments that some of the policies work. | ||
| But they look at him as a figurehead and they say, this is bad. | ||
| And then they really believe because he said it so many times that the election was rigged. | ||
| They really believe it. | ||
| So a lot of them really believe it. | ||
| It's like I was in Aspen and this lady, she's like, I'm a big fan of yours, like this grandma lady. | ||
| I said, thank you. | ||
| And you know that Trump's our president. | ||
| I go, well, actually, he's not, because the president is Biden. | ||
| If you could Google it, you could find out. | ||
| He's like, oh, they got to you. | ||
| I go, oh, no, they didn't get to me. | ||
| He's actually in the White House. | ||
| He won. | ||
| I don't know if he won. | ||
| You don't know if he won? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I'm not saying that. | ||
| I'm just saying he's definitely in the White House. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Now, whether or not there's any election manipulation, I am not the one to fucking come to for any of that. | ||
| But I would guarantee you that it's not zero. | ||
| I would guarantee you that in the course of human history, there's probably never been an election where there's zero election fraud. | ||
| There's always some monkey business going on. | ||
| But I have seen no evidence. | ||
| I mean, maybe they'll show it if this trial comes about that that shows that he should. | ||
| I mean, maybe I should go seek it out. | ||
| My line about this and I'm going to stick with this is that he lost unfair and square. | ||
| In other words, the media was against him. | ||
| What people are responding to is this idea that corporate America was against him, that everybody in power, including a lot of Republicans, I think, wanted him out. | ||
| They couldn't stand him anymore. | ||
| But that is different. | ||
| Then the election was manipulated and votes were taken. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then the Dominion stuff. | ||
| It's all horseshit. | ||
| It's horseshit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It seems like it's really hard to sort out, too, because there's so many different cases and so many different states and all these different people. | ||
| No, it's not hard to sort out. | ||
| There's no evidence. | ||
| But I don't mean about that. | ||
| I don't mean that. | ||
| What I'm saying is, like... | ||
| It's when you are tallying mail-in votes, digital votes, all these different things, and they have projections for these places. | ||
| One of the things that Kyle Kingsbury showed me, or excuse me, Kyle Kalinske, Jesus. | ||
| Hi, Kyle Kingsbury. | ||
| Long time, buddy. | ||
| Kyle Kalinske showed me is that when we had him on during the election, and he accurately predicted, he said, yes, Trump is winning because these are the people that show up first. | ||
| But you're going to see the Democratic surge for the mail-ins when they count those. | ||
| And that's exactly what happened. | ||
| Because he's very politically aware. | ||
| He understands how it works. | ||
| I don't dispute any of that. | ||
| What I'm saying is... | ||
| It would be wonderful if we had a system where it was bulletproof. | ||
| It would be wonderful if we had a system where it was impossible to have anything other than zero percent election fraud. | ||
| I don't know if that's even realistic. | ||
| But we can bank on our phones. | ||
| We can bank on the internet. | ||
| There's like federal IDs that are connected to you and this idea that IDs for voting is somehow racist is so bananas. | ||
| I agree with that. | ||
| This is, that's what I mean. | ||
| I mean, like, there was a documentary that HBO had on in a fucking, like, the early 90s called Hacking Democracy. | ||
| Do you remember that? | ||
| It was during the Bush administration. | ||
| And they were making this argument that Bush didn't really win. | ||
| And they were making this argument that you could manipulate the voting machine. | ||
| So they actually—this was a Diebold machine, I believe. | ||
| And they actually showed that it was somehow or another—it was available for a third-party input. | ||
| And they did it on the show and changed a vote on the show. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was like, oh, my God. | |
| But it was about the Republicans. | ||
| Right, so it was okay to— All right, so now I'm going to play the other side here. | ||
| Some of these sentences that have been handed out in the January 6th cases are insane. | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| It's 20 years? | ||
| 17 years? | ||
| The 22 years the guy wasn't even in, he wasn't at the Capitol at the time? | ||
| He's getting a terrorism enhancement? | ||
| I mean, come on. | ||
| Yeah, it's pretty wild. | ||
| It's pretty wild. | ||
| I'm not saying that, like, I'm not defending what happened. | ||
| I know what you're saying. | ||
| But, you know, a year, two years, three years, maybe five years, like, that's a pretty long prison sentence. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| For non-violent stuff. | ||
| I think they want to make sure that people never do it again. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Which is probably a good thing. | ||
| But also, how did it happen? | ||
| Like, why wasn't there more security there? | ||
| What was up with cops opening up the gates? | ||
| Did you ever see some of that? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, my understanding, and I've not paid super close attention, my understanding is they basically just got overrun and decided to back off. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Interesting. | |
| Which is a legitimate, like, military sort of police response. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And I don't think those people were in opposition to the police, and they were probably worried about the police's safety since they were vastly outnumbered. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I think there was some of that, right? | ||
| But also, it's super illegal to get into the Capitol. | ||
| Don't do that. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Like, when you got Alex Jones out there with a bullhorn saying, don't go in. | ||
| And, you know, Alex Jones is the voice of reason. | ||
| That's not a good sign, no. | ||
| But he was right. | ||
| He was saying it's a trap. | ||
| And it is. | ||
| Ultimately, it is. | ||
| You know, and ultimately, also, they did break the windows. | ||
| They did climb. | ||
| I mean, they did commit cars. | ||
| No, again, they should be in jail. | ||
| Don't do that. | ||
| 20 years is a long time. | ||
| But the weird one is that guy with the buffalo hat where they're leading him around on a tour. | ||
| How come you didn't show that part? | ||
| That part's crazy. | ||
| You guys were leading him around on a tour. | ||
| What a mess. | ||
| What a mess. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Also, don't do that. | ||
| Don't do that. | ||
| Don't ever do that. | ||
| Don't ever do that. | ||
| Guys, they were going in there with zip ties looking for Nancy Pelosi. | ||
| Yeah, that was bad, too. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| The guy that had his foot on the desk, he took a photo of himself. | ||
| Hey, bro, how do you think that's going to turn out? | ||
| But that's the thing. | ||
| They're not thinking. | ||
| These people aren't thinking and they really do. | ||
| But that's also the problem. | ||
| If you if you've been told and this is the this is the argument against what Trump did. | ||
| Right, was that if you've been told the election is rigged and you're not showing clear evidence of it, you're just putting that narrative out there. | ||
| Now people, they operate as if their country's been taken over and they think they're patriots. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And they think there's almost like a God-given... | ||
| Like, not a right, but an imperative to do something. | ||
| No, then Trump behaved in a disgusting way. | ||
| Look, when your own vice president says it, you know, Mike Pence basically did everything Trump asked of him for four years, okay? | ||
| And he's come out and said Trump behaved in the wrong way. | ||
| I think you've got to acknowledge that. | ||
| But to go back to your point, there's a large group of people in the Republican Party for whom Trump is basically a god, and they will not acknowledge it. | ||
| Yeah, they won't. | ||
| They're scared of him. | ||
| He's the big booming figure that's at the head of the fucking pack. | ||
| And it's just, man, it's so polarizing for the country. | ||
| It's just, I wish there was two people that we respected. | ||
| Or even one! | ||
| Or one. | ||
| Just two people that, you know, like, hey, I don't agree with his policies about this and that, but I think he's a good person, and I think he's really got the best interests of the country in mind, and who knows? | ||
| Maybe their policies are correct. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Maybe his policies are correct. | ||
| Let's find out. | ||
| But instead, it's like... | ||
| Hell in a handbasket, no matter which way it goes. | ||
| And then, my God, what if Biden wins again and beats Trump? | ||
| And is 86 in four years? | ||
| And what if people just, like, don't believe it's real again? | ||
| And it gets worse than January 6th, right? | ||
| What if that happens? | ||
| What if Trump wins and people decide the government has been overcome by fascists and we have to wage war on the infrastructure and blow up fucking generators and kill the grid? | ||
| Now you're depressing me. | ||
| You're playing the role of the liberal parent with the climate change. | ||
| Well, I'm just looking at this precarious position in which we stand while we're also involved in a proxy war with Russia. | ||
| It's bananas. | ||
| It scares the shit out of me. | ||
| And we're so scared of it that we'd rather concentrate on things like climate change. | ||
| It's almost like we'd rather concentrate on things that are not as terrifying immediately. | ||
| In the distance, it's going to be a real problem. | ||
| We can focus on it now. | ||
| We've got our choices. | ||
| Just don't get your kids vaccinated with the mRNAs. | ||
| The other vaccines, fine. | ||
| Don't get your kids vaccinated with the COVID vaccines. | ||
| It's not good for them. | ||
| Yeah, and take some vitamins, people. | ||
| Take some vitamins. | ||
| Please, exercise a little bit. | ||
| It's not going to kill you. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| It's a good place to end. | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And thank you for having the courage to talk about this stuff. | ||
| I mean, it's amazing that a lot of the things that you got in trouble with early in the pandemic are now absolutely... | ||
| It's regarded as fact and discussed openly in mainstream circles, like Dr. Lena Wen was on CNN, which is the most mainstream thing out there, and she was saying that the estimates of COVID deaths was probably actually 30% of what was reported, which is a crazy thing. | ||
| When she said it, you could see the look on the people's face like, what the fuck is she saying? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a lot of discussion now about the lab leak. | ||
| It's commonplace to discuss it. | ||
| It's commonplace to discuss the pros and cons of gain-of-function research. | ||
| Most people are currently aware that cloth masks don't work at all. | ||
| Most people are currently aware. | ||
| When was the last time you heard the phrase, test and trace? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| I don't remember that. | ||
| How about social distancing? | ||
| That one drove me nuts. | ||
| That one drove me nuts. | ||
| And everybody agrees that school closures... | ||
| I mean, that one, we all agree. | ||
| Disaster. | ||
| Should never happen again. | ||
| Shouldn't happen again. | ||
| I mean, I was talking about that. | ||
| If there's one thing I'm proud of, I was talking about that in April of 2020. The schools need to be reopened. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they were in some places. | ||
| Yeah, they were down here. | ||
| That's what's crazy. | ||
| You know, what's crazy is we have examples of Florida and Texas and a lot of other places where they just opened up. | ||
| And they didn't have worse... | ||
| I mean, even though, like... | ||
| Look, we're in a bad state in terms of, like, the health of this country. | ||
| Like, people are not that healthy. | ||
| And wasn't that one of the arguments in one of your sub-stacks recently? | ||
| Does it explain that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Oh, so... | ||
| So the argument, this is just today... | ||
| This epidemiologist wrote, well, we have different rules about the new COVID boosters in other countries because we're sicker than other countries, so we have to give people more mRNA. | ||
| And it's like, so wait, your argument is our public health establishment and medical care is so bad that we are giving people advice that other countries aren't giving them. | ||
| Maybe we should listen to the other countries where things are going better for a change. | ||
| Maybe instead of trying to medicate our way out of every problem, we should just tell people, go for a walk. | ||
| I mean, this was one of the things about lockdowns way back in 2020, right? | ||
| This is a disease that hurts people who are obese or morbidly obese the most. | ||
| So maybe the solution is not to have them sit on their asses For another six months. | ||
| There's also been some real data about vitamin D. Yep. | ||
| And real data about how many people it could have helped. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| So it's been a long three years. | ||
| But what's so depressing, sort of this last thing, they don't seem to have learned anything. | ||
| That's what the last week taught me. | ||
| That's why I feel like I can't stop talking about it. | ||
| They're doubling down, even as the rest of the world is realizing, you know what, COVID is not a big deal. | ||
| We need to, you know, reserve these vaccines for people who are at really high risk. | ||
| The U.S. will not let it go. | ||
| At least the U.S. public health establishment will not let it go. | ||
| And the truth is, 98% of the country isn't going to listen to them. | ||
| But it's still important to point out that they're full of it. | ||
| We have to keep doing that. | ||
| Well, thank you for doing that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks, Joe. | |
| Appreciate you. | ||
| You're out there telling the truth. | ||
| And, you know, in the beginning, you took a lot of shit for it. | ||
| You really did. | ||
| And a lot of people owe you an apology. | ||
| Well, they're not giving it to me. | ||
| Well, they don't have to. | ||
| You got it. | ||
| I mean, you deserve it. | ||
| You know you do. | ||
| Thanks, Joe. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. |
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