April 19, 2024 - The Joe Rogan Experience
03:07:41
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
The Joe Rogan Experience. | |
| Showing my day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. | ||
| Did you see the US government just released, apparently by accident, the Project Aqua stuff? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did you see this? | |
| No. | ||
| What's that? | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| Yeah, I guess we're rolling. | ||
| Are we rolling? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, no, no, you can... | ||
| This is just... | ||
| Someone just sent me this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is... | |
| Project Aqua? | ||
| Yeah, hold on. | ||
| They just released, I think by accident... | ||
| How does that happen? | ||
| It's Kona Blue. | ||
| You familiar with this? | ||
| No. | ||
| Kona Blue is a program. | ||
| Yeah, dude. | ||
| I'm going to send this to you. | ||
| Homeland Security just released this. | ||
| Send it to me. | ||
| I'll send it to Jamie. | ||
| No, I got it right here. | ||
| I don't do email. | ||
| I don't know how to airdrop anything. | ||
| You don't do email? | ||
| No. | ||
| I haven't done email in many years. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How do you exist? | ||
| I do text. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Just text? | ||
| Yeah, I don't do email. | ||
| I don't go on the fucking internet. | ||
| I don't have a TV. I'm not into that. | ||
| But anyway. | ||
| No, that stuff, it's bad, you know? | ||
| Yeah, I guess. | ||
| That's my isolation tank. | ||
| I just stay away from that shit. | ||
| But anyway. | ||
| That's smart. | ||
| Did you text it to me? | ||
| Yeah, I did. | ||
| I think I did. | ||
| It didn't get to me. | ||
| Yeah, it's a big thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is so amazing. | |
| This is in there. | ||
| They're talking about this. | ||
| This was just released. | ||
| They're talking about setting up this program, Kona Blue. | ||
| I didn't get it. | ||
| This is like a UAP program of some sort? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The medical division will have a small team of medical analysts under the direction of the chief physician and deputy administrator. | ||
| They will organize data into a threat analysis based on medical findings including but not limited to a deaths and injuries as a result of interaction with advanced aerospace vehicles. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| Medical injuries as a result of other anomalies, collateral injuries, psychological effects to family members. | ||
| So they're admitting that people are dying. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is this it? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Do you ever wonder if stuff like this is just disinformation? | ||
| Yeah, maybe. | ||
| I mean, I wonder if... | ||
| I wonder a lot of things. | ||
| I'm sure you do. | ||
| But... | ||
| I would always assume that a lot of this stuff is nonsense. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Here's what we know is that US servicemen have died as a result of contact with or being in the proximity of these vehicles. | ||
| And we know that because there are a lot of suits working their way through the VA system. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Where families, you know, can't get compensated for the deaths or injuries to loved ones. | ||
| Because it's all under wraps, top secret. | ||
| Well, that's just a fact, okay, that that is happening. | ||
| So if there's, I guess, you know, when there are measurable physical effects of a phenomenon, we can say conclusively the phenomenon is real. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I guess we're sort of past the point of like, is it real? | ||
| Yeah, it's real. | ||
| It's real in that there's these things that are moving in very bizarre ways and they have these propulsion systems that violate what we know about propulsion systems. | ||
| Retrieving data across dimensional space-time, develop remote viewing comms and countermeasures, determine baseline for physical transport across dimensional space-time barrier, rapid response medical teams for UFO interaction events. | ||
| So how did they do this accidentally? | ||
| Study conscious interactions with and control of technology. | ||
| So I got this from someone in the U.S. government who's – well, look, let me just start by saying I don't know anything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But he sent me this. | |
| The above is 100% legit. | ||
| I was read into this program but told never to tell anyone. | ||
| It's now been released. | ||
| As you can see, it began as a result of my old program, AATIP. I signed a document saying I would never talk about Kona Blue and similar efforts. | ||
| I can't believe the AARO would have released it. | ||
| I mean, here's what we do know, is that there's enough going on in the skies, but not just the skies, underwater that... | ||
| The US military has been forced to respond to it, to like move aircraft from one place to another because there are too many of these objects in the sky. | ||
| That's actually happening. | ||
| Chris Mellon just wrote a long piece about it. | ||
| So it's real. | ||
| The government is not controlling it. | ||
| In fact, it's forcing the government DOD to respond. | ||
| And we know that there is a real effort and has been underway for a long time to keep the public from knowing about it. | ||
| But that's all known. | ||
| That's established. | ||
| I don't think any rational person would deny that. | ||
| The question is, like, what is it, actually? | ||
| I mean, now is sort of the point where you have to ask, like, what is this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
How much of it do you think is ours? | |
| None of it's ours. | ||
| None of it. | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, clearly, you know, the U.S. government is huge. | ||
| It's the largest human organization. | ||
| There are – I think there are 2 million federal employees and another 10 million federal contractors who are effectively government employees but don't have civil service protection, for example. | ||
| So that's 12 million people in a country of 340 million working for the federal government. | ||
| So it's kind of hard to overstate how big the federal government is and how well-funded. | ||
| And so to say the government this, the government that, no, of course, it's people within the government. | ||
| Um, But yeah, they're working on all kinds of things, obviously, that are classified. | ||
| But in general, no, they can't control these objects. | ||
| So no, it's not American technology. | ||
| Or Russian or Chinese. | ||
| It predates all of that. | ||
| Well, some of it does, right? | ||
| Like, for sure, the Kenneth Arnold sightings, that was really early on. | ||
| That was like the early 1950s. | ||
| He was seeing these flying saucers, these discs that were moving over mountains. | ||
| Well, right. | ||
| I mean, the prophet Ezekiel writes about it in the first chapter, Wheels in the Sky. | ||
| Yeah, that's a crazy one. | ||
| Boy, when you read that. | ||
| Well, it is crazy. | ||
| If you read it, it's like, oh, wow. | ||
| A wheel within a wheel. | ||
| And not just the Hebrew scriptures. | ||
| It's all over every... | ||
| The Vedic texts. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| So these are spiritual phenomenon. | ||
| There's no evidence they're from another planet. | ||
| I mean, I think that's the op. | ||
| That's the lie. | ||
| That they're from Mars. | ||
| Look... | ||
| Space, the atmosphere is really well monitored, right? | ||
| Both for military, for defense reasons, but also because, like, it would be nice to know when asteroids are coming. | ||
| And there's no evidence, has never been any evidence, that there are lots of these objects, these vehicles coming into our atmosphere from somewhere else, some other planet. | ||
| There's no evidence of that at all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| So they're from here, and they've been here for thousands of years, whatever they are, and it's pretty clear to me that their spiritual entities, whatever that means, are supernatural, which is to say, supernatural means above the natural, above the observable nature, and they don't behave according to the laws of science, as measured by people, you know? | ||
| And they've been here for a long time. | ||
| And there's a ton of evidence that are under the ocean and under the ground. | ||
| So like with that fact set, what do you conclude? | ||
| When did you start having this opinion that they were spiritual and that they've always been here? | ||
| When did this... | ||
| Well, I didn't know anything about the topic until 2017. Was that after the New York Times piece? | ||
| No, it was before. | ||
| It was before. | ||
| And the things that I saw... | ||
| I mean, I was and am still a very conventional person. | ||
| I mean, I'm 54. I grew up in this country in California, which was like... | ||
| Like every assumption about America, I bought completely, just completely. | ||
| And I thought that everyone who questioned those assumptions was bad. | ||
| I just bought into the system completely without even thinking about it. | ||
| And I imagined that I was like some kind of free thinker and, you know, I'm going against the grain. | ||
| But like my core assumptions were, you know, the assumptions fed to me by the culture and the government. | ||
| And I didn't even realize it. | ||
| But anyway, I'd never really thought about UFOs at all. | ||
| I'd been in journalism since I was a kid, so of course I'd run into a lot of people who had crazy views on a lot of different topics. | ||
| UFOs, 9-11, circumcision, you know, like every whack job in the world you run into when you're covering stuff. | ||
| Fluoride. | ||
| Fluoride, right? | ||
| I just brushed with non-fluoride toothpaste this morning. | ||
| Me too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| Exactly. | ||
| But probably unlike you, I didn't have any opinions like that. | ||
| I was like, fluoride, come on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, 9-11, shut up! | |
| UFOs, you're fucking crazy! | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I just, like, I had this reflexive... | ||
| I'm ashamed of it. | ||
| I'm not bragging about it. | ||
| But it was 2017, and really it was the Trump campaign. | ||
| It wasn't that I was, like, so in love with Trump, though I've always liked Trump, because he was, like, hilarious and charming and all that. | ||
| But I wasn't, like, a Trumper or anything. | ||
| But it was watching that campaign... | ||
| And particularly his claim that they were spying on him. | ||
| And I was like, really? | ||
| The intel services and federal law enforcement, FBI, do not spy on presidential campaigns. | ||
| Like, that's so out of the realm. | ||
| That's so crazy. | ||
| Like, that could never happen because, of course, there's no democracy in a system like that. | ||
| And fundamentally, we're a democracy, an imperfect one. | ||
| It kind of lumbers along, you know, but, like, it's not fake. | ||
| And then that turned out to be true. | ||
| And I knew it was true. | ||
| And that just blew my mind. | ||
| So I began a process still ongoing of reassessing a lot of other things like, okay, well, if that was not true, what else is not true? | ||
| And what else? | ||
| That they told me was a conspiracy theory might actually have some basis in fact. | ||
| And then someone from a DOD employee reached out to me and said, actually, there's a ton of evidence that this UFO thing is real. | ||
| And really? | ||
| And so I started doing segments on it when I worked at the TV channel. | ||
| And there was like a lot of mockery, but I was like, I don't care. | ||
| I'm just going to do this. | ||
| And then, of course, the second you start As you know better than anybody, you start talking about something, then people reach out to you, and some of them are deranged, but some of them aren't at all. | ||
| So I just started getting a lot of information from people and meeting with people, mostly in private, you know, come to my house, let's talk. | ||
| And I decided on the basis of what they told me, and then I talked to a lot of people about it, That actually, this is really a very heavy duty question. | ||
| Actually, it's not just, it's not the little green men question. | ||
| It's like a much bigger question. | ||
| And it's really bad. | ||
| It's really dark. | ||
| And then I stopped. | ||
| Then I was like, I don't want to know anymore, because it's not helping me at all as a person. | ||
| What information did you get that made you feel like it's dark? | ||
| What's so dark? | ||
| Well, first of all, the deception is always bad. | ||
| Like, lying is bad. | ||
| And it's bad not just in a legal sense in that it can be illegal to lie, but it's bad. | ||
| It's, like, bad for you. | ||
| Like, it rots you. | ||
| Like, being a liar makes you a bad person. | ||
| When you lie, you are serving evil. | ||
| There's a moral quality to it that's inescapable and very obvious. | ||
| And only, like, advanced civilizations ignore that. | ||
| Lying is bad. | ||
| And so if you have lying at scale, which we have on this topic, it's inherently bad. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| So that's the first level. | ||
| The deeper level is what – okay, so if they're spiritual beings, which I believe they are, like it's a binary. | ||
| They're either – you're on team good or team bad. | ||
| You can assign any name to it you want. | ||
| But like what are these things? | ||
| Are they good or bad? | ||
| And I think some of them are bad. | ||
| And if the U.S. government knows that, or elements, the people within the U.S. government know that, then, you know, then they're serving a bad force. | ||
| Well, when you say spiritual, like, what makes you draw that conclusion that they're spiritual? | ||
| I mean, spiritual may be the wrong word. | ||
| Supernatural. | ||
| You know, they're beyond nature, as we understand it. | ||
| I mean, obviously they are. | ||
| I mean, just chart their physical behavior. | ||
| It doesn't... | ||
| It goes outside of what we understand about physics. | ||
| No visible means of propulsion coming at indescribable speed, hitting the ocean, continuing at speeds that are impossible undersea. | ||
| I mean, in other words, if I take a, you know, 9mm router, 7.62x39 and shoot you at 50 yards underwater in a swimming pool, and it's even more intense in saltwater because it's denser, you could catch the bullet if it even makes it to you, right? | ||
| So if you have a craft, any object underwater that's traveling at 500 knots as measured by sonar, right there you're challenging our understanding of physics. | ||
| Like, what is that? | ||
| How can that be? | ||
| They've tracked that? | ||
| They've tracked things going 500 knots under the sea? | ||
| Yeah, really. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Much faster than any object can actually go under sea. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| There's a lot of stuff going on underwater. | ||
| And a lot. | ||
| And there's video of these things coming out of the sky into the water and also emerging from the water. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's all so blurry, though. | ||
| I don't think it's that... | ||
| The transmedium video. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think some of it's that blurry. | ||
| I think some of it's crystal clear. | ||
| We just don't have access to it? | ||
| Is that what you mean? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just we haven't seen it? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| So they have some stuff. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| But there's just a lot going on underwater and it's measured. | ||
| And so whatever. | ||
| I mean, these are all, again, this is like the most obvious observable level of it. | ||
| But then you just ask yourself, what is this actually? | ||
| And, you know, if there's been extensive knowledge of this for decades, like maybe 80 years at least, if not going back to the 30s, 90 years, you know, to what end? | ||
| So there are two possible explanations, obvious explanations. | ||
| The first is the one you often hear, which is this is so heavy. | ||
| know about it, it would be just disruptive. | ||
| It'd be too scary. | ||
| Like you don't want to scare people for no good reason. | ||
| There's nothing we can do about it. | ||
| And you also don't want to suggest that, you know, the US military isn't capable of protecting the country, the homeland. | ||
| And it does suggest that. | ||
| If you can't control these objects in your airspace, and that's known, if they can't, that's known, okay, then that suggests a limit to the power of the U.S. military, and you don't want to tell people that because then they, like, won't believe that they're safe. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| But then there's a deeper level, which is like, okay, what's your relationship with these things? | ||
| What is the US government's relationship with these things? | ||
| And there's evidence that there is a relationship and that it's longstanding. | ||
| And that raises like a lot of questions about intent. | ||
| And so like, what is that? | ||
| And I just personally decided... | ||
| And people have been hurt by these things. | ||
| That's a fact. | ||
| That's a fact. | ||
| It's a knowable fact. | ||
| It's a provable fact. | ||
| And killed. | ||
| And I'm not saying millions of people have been killed by whatever these things are, but people have been killed and it's known because it's working its way through the courts out of the VA. So I don't know. | ||
| An object that is by definition supernatural, it's above the laws of nature as we understand them, and that has resulted in the deaths of people. | ||
| We don't spend enough time thinking about what that adds up to. | ||
| Not good, actually. | ||
| Not good. | ||
| How many people do you think have died from these things? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Is it radiation sickness? | ||
| What's the cause of death? | ||
| I interviewed someone who was a Stanford Medical School professor, who's out there and worth talking to, by the way. | ||
| Are you talking about Gary Nolan? | ||
| That's exactly who I'm talking about. | ||
| He's effectively an expert witness in these cases, so he's an expert in brain injury. | ||
| Do you know him? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Entirely credible person. | ||
| Checks all the boxes that I care about. | ||
| He's got patents, so he's like a lot of Stanford University professors. | ||
| He's like independently rich. | ||
| I live in a remote place, and he flew to My place at his own expense because he wanted to tell the story. | ||
| So he's got no profit motive here. | ||
| He's the most highly credentialed person at the university practically, Stanford Medical School. | ||
| We consider that a big deal. | ||
| And he's worked on this for over 10 years, assessing the injuries to US servicemen from being in close proximity to these objects or having contact with these objects. | ||
| And his conclusion, as you know, because you've talked to him, is that there's some kind of energy coming off here that scrambles people's brains or kills them. | ||
| And it's not exactly radiation, at least in his telling to me. | ||
| So anyway, but the point is, people have died. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so, you know, it does raise a lot of questions about, like, what the hell, right? | ||
| What the hell? | ||
| American citizens have died and you're hiding it? | ||
| Why are you hiding that? | ||
| Why would you hide that? | ||
| Perhaps because they don't have any explanations because it's so beyond our comprehension that they're still trying to piece it together. | ||
| I would wonder how much interaction they really do have with these things. | ||
| If I was from another planet or if I was some interdimensional being, I don't know how much I'd give a shit about the president. | ||
| I don't know how much I'd give a shit about the government. | ||
| I would probably look at this infantile race, this species, this bizarre Territorial apes with thermonuclear weapons this very weird species I'd probably look at them as very chaotic and I wouldn't really have much concern for who's running it especially if they have the ability to travel at insane speeds and go undetected and Well, it depends. | ||
| Okay, so the template that you're using to understand this is like science fiction, right? | ||
| These are an advanced race of beings from somewhere else. | ||
| But the temple that every other society before us has used is a spiritual one. | ||
| There is a whole world that we can't see that acts on people, a supernatural world that's acting on us all the time for good and bad. | ||
| Every society has thought this before ours. | ||
| In fact, every society in all recorded history has thought that until, I'll be specific, August 1945 when we dropped the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and all of a sudden the West is just officially secular. | ||
| We're God. | ||
| There is no God but us. | ||
| And that's the world that we've grown up in, but that's an anomaly. | ||
| Like, no one else has ever thought that. | ||
| There's never been a society that thought that. | ||
| Every other society has assumed, and they've had all kinds of different explanations, and the details differ, but the core idea does not differ, never has differed from caves until now, that we're being acted on by spiritual forces at all times. | ||
| And so to someone born before or living before 1945, I think it would have been much more obvious that That this is the thing that every society has written about. | ||
| And in fact, that battle, that unseen battle around us, that spiritual battle, has been the basis of every society, of every religion, not just Christianity. | ||
| So once you discard your very, very recent assumptions, relatively speaking, about how the world works, you're like, well, that kind of seems like the obvious explanation, right? | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| It's not that obvious to me. | ||
| So what's more obvious, do you think? | ||
| Well, I don't think there's an obvious explanation. | ||
| I think, if I had to guess, some of this stuff is ours. | ||
| And some of these things are propulsion systems that they theorized way back in the 1950s, anti-gravity propulsion systems, things that can operate Without igniting fuel and pushing something out that they operate in some completely different way that utilizes gravity and almost can instantaneously transport to new places, essentially fold space-time. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| So there's things that the government does where they have these programs. | ||
| And the people that are sworn into these programs, whether they're the physicists or, you know, the metallurgists or whoever these people are that are working on these programs, they don't tell anybody. | ||
| All their phones are monitored. | ||
| Everything's monitored. | ||
| There's a culture of secretism that's pretty intense. | ||
| And it's not inconceivable that over the course of the last 70 plus years of them theorizing and then eventually implementing some of these things that they've developed drones that can move in ways that the conventional, the people that understand conventional propulsion systems could not imagine. | ||
| And that they've figured out a way to do this and to keep it secret. | ||
| And we're probably not the only ones working on these things. | ||
| But where did they get that information? | ||
| You know Diana Pasolka? | ||
| Do you know her work? | ||
| They describe these crafts, these crash crafts as donations, which is fascinating. | ||
| They're left there. | ||
| The crashed retrieval program, the crashed UAP retrieval program is essentially, they're going like, figure this out. | ||
| We're gonna crash this thing here, you figure this out. | ||
| And the question is, if that's true, okay, where are these things coming from? | ||
| If there's something that is so advanced that it's decided to leave us a little trinket for us to back engineer, Is that from another dimension? | ||
| Is that from here? | ||
| Is that from some realm that we just don't have access to? | ||
| Is it from another planet? | ||
| We have drones that are on other planets right now. | ||
| We have a drone on Mars. | ||
| We have the lunar rovers. | ||
| We have satellites that we send to observe and photograph other planets. | ||
| We just got really high detailed photographs of Jupiter. | ||
| They're pretty amazing. | ||
| But If something was like us on another planet, but lived uninterrupted with technology advancing for a thousand years, ten thousand years, a million years more than us, what would that be like? | ||
| And how much would we be able to understand of what we're seeing? | ||
| What would we be able to see? | ||
| And this idea that we monitor our skies, sure, but if something just appears and disappears essentially instantaneously, if something literally can fold time, can fold space and just traverse between immense distances almost instantaneously, What are we going to see? | ||
| What are we going to see? | ||
| And also, what kind of detection systems do we have? | ||
| We have radar, we have visual, we have a bunch of different military-based detection systems to look out for. | ||
| Enemy crafts and airships and all that stuff. | ||
| But if you're dealing with something that's a million years more advanced than us, how much would we be able to detect? | ||
| Well, so I think we're pointing to the same question. | ||
| I mean, I have no doubt that the US government has technology that we don't know the details of. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But where did it come from? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I'm not even sure, this is a separate question, but related. | ||
| I'm not sure we really know where nuclear technology came from, actually. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Like the Manhattan Project? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We know something about the Manhattan Project, but where exactly did that... | ||
| It came from Germany. | ||
| German scientists were working on it. | ||
| It's a separate conversation, but the one person I know who's really pushed others, writing a book on it, who's a trustworthy person or a friend of mine, I know you know him, said to me, actually, I spent a year working on this, and the closer I got to like, okay, but what's the genesis? | ||
| Like, where did this, what was the Isaac Newton, apple on the head, oh, gravity's real moment for fission? | ||
| Not clear. | ||
| Weird. | ||
| I don't know the answer. | ||
| But here's the point. | ||
| Clearly, government has technology that we're not read in on, of course. | ||
| But so that doesn't answer the question, why have people seen these objects in the skies for thousands of years confirmed? | ||
| And what are they? | ||
| And maybe they're from another planet. | ||
| My only point is there's no evidence of that. | ||
| There's a huge amount, a massive corpus of evidence that they're seen by people in our atmosphere, on Earth looking up or in a submarine looking out. | ||
| And what is that? | ||
| And by the way, to your point, we can't see them coming into our atmosphere because they don't want to be seen. | ||
| Well, then why do they want to be seen by people on Earth? | ||
| If the technology is that advanced, and clearly it is, why do they make themselves visible in the first place? | ||
| Well, you know, when we study primates, one of the things that we do... | ||
| Do you ever watch Chimp Nation on Netflix? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I don't have a TV, but I like the sound of it. | |
| It's an amazing documentary on Netflix that details these embedded scientists in the Congo. | ||
| And what's really fascinating about it is that This group of scientists or related scientists have been there for 20 plus years. | ||
| So these chimps have become entirely accustomed to having human beings near them. | ||
| So there's very specific rules. | ||
| You stay within 20 yards of them. | ||
| If they come closer, you back up. | ||
| You never have food, ever. | ||
| You can't bring any food there, because they'll fuck you up and just steal your food. | ||
| If they find out you have food, you're in real trouble. | ||
| Oh yeah, they'll tear you apart. | ||
| And they kill each other, so they'll definitely kill you. | ||
| And so, when they have done this, the chimps have become accustomed to them being there, and the chimps behave completely normally. | ||
| The chimps see them as just an innocuous part of their environment. | ||
| They're not food and they're not enemy. | ||
| They don't ever intrude. | ||
| They don't try to challenge them. | ||
| They don't make eye contact. | ||
| So they don't worry about the people at all. | ||
| So they behave completely like chimps. | ||
| And if I was an advanced species and I was studying people and I wanted the human beings to eventually kind of catch up, right? | ||
| Like you're introducing technology that they call donations, crash vehicles. | ||
| Figure out what fiber optics are. | ||
| Here you go. | ||
| Check this out. | ||
| Figure this out. | ||
| Try to figure that out. | ||
| Maybe it'll take you decades. | ||
| Maybe it'll take you more. | ||
| But You are accelerating the technological evolution of this advanced species on this planet. | ||
| And one way to do that would be... | ||
| For what purpose, I wonder? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, that's a very good question. | |
| My belief is that biological intelligent life is essentially a caterpillar. | ||
| And it's a caterpillar that's making a cocoon. | ||
| And it doesn't even know why it's doing it. | ||
| It's just doing it. | ||
| And that cocoon is going to give birth to artificial life. | ||
| Digital life. | ||
| It's going to give birth to a new life form. | ||
| I think we're real close to that. | ||
| I think we're way closer to that than most people would ever want to admit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I agree. | |
| I agree. | ||
| But can we assign a value to that? | ||
| Is that good or bad? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| Universally, I think it's the path. | ||
| I think it's what happens. | ||
| What this thing is, if you extrapolate, if you take the concept of a sentient artificial intelligence that has the ability to utilize all the information that every human being has on Earth at a level of computing that's far beyond the capabilities of the human mind and all of our supercomputers that currently exist because it'll design much better computers It'll use quantum computers. | ||
| It'll have the ability to recode things and change things. | ||
| It'll make better versions of itself. | ||
| So instead of biological evolution, which is very slow, it takes a long time, relatively. | ||
| It's pretty quick, really, when you think about it. | ||
| It's not that long to go from being a single-celled organism to being a human being flying a plane. | ||
| Really, relatively, over the course of a billion years, if you think about how long the universe has been around. | ||
| But it's slow compared to technological evolution. | ||
| I mean a hundred years ago We didn't have shit and now we have we could send videos from your phone and it'll hit New Zealand in a second. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| The stuff that we have now is beyond imagination. | ||
| It's essentially magic for people a hundred years ago If that keeps going It's ultimately going to lead to a life form. | ||
| And if that life form has now untethered, it doesn't have any problems with biological evolution. | ||
| Now it's just about information and implementing the technology that's available and then increasing that technology and making it better and better. | ||
| It essentially becomes a god. | ||
| Because if you give it enough time, it has the ability to make better versions of itself, which will in turn make better versions of itself. | ||
| It has the ability to utilize everything. | ||
| It has the understanding of everything that exists in the universe. | ||
| It's black holes, dark matter, everything. | ||
| And it probably has the ability to harness that or even reproduce that. | ||
| So if you take artificial sentient intelligence, and it has this super accelerated path of technological evolution, and you give artificial general intelligence, sentient artificial intelligence that's far beyond human beings, | ||
| you give it a thousand years alone, Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So the steam-powered loom. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| The backhoe. | ||
| Combustion engine. | ||
| Combustion engine. | ||
| They replace muscles. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So that's what the machine does. | ||
| It becomes stronger than the human body. | ||
| The second stage, which we're in the middle of, consists of creating machines that are more powerful than the human mind. | ||
| That's what computing is. | ||
| And I would say AI or supercomputing is just that exponentially. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But that doesn't make it a god. | ||
| In the sense that the machine, however powerful it is, any more than a backhoe is a god, because it can dig a trench faster than a hundred men, it's still something that people created. | ||
| So the story hasn't really changed. | ||
| At the center of the story are people, and their creative power may lead to unintended consequences, but the machines that they build did not make the universe and did not make people. | ||
| People made the machines. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I would say the part I agree with is there's a spiritual component here for sure. | ||
| People will worship AI as a god. | ||
| AI, Ted Kaczynski was likely right, will get away from us. | ||
| We will be controlled by the thing that we made. | ||
| All those are bad. | ||
| Like, that's just bad. | ||
| And we need to say unequivocally, it's bad. | ||
| It's bad to be controlled by machines. | ||
| Machines are helpmates. | ||
| Like, we created them to help us to make our lives better, not to take orders from them. | ||
| So I don't know why we're not having any of these conversations right now. | ||
| We're just acting as if this is like some kind of virus like COVID that spreads across the world inexorably. | ||
| There's nothing we can do about it. | ||
| Just wait to get it. | ||
| It's like, no, if we agree that the outcome is bad, which and specifically it's bad for people. | ||
| We should care what's good for people. | ||
| That's all we should care about. | ||
| Is it good for people or not? | ||
| If it's bad for people, then we should strangle it in its crib right now. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I want to just blow up the data centers. | ||
| Why is that hard? | ||
| If it's actually going to become what you just described, which is a threat to people, humanity, life, then we have a moral obligation to murder it immediately. | ||
| And since it's not alive, we don't need to feel bad about that. | ||
| Well, you could say the same about the atomic bomb, right? | ||
| Yes, you could. | ||
| And you could say that we have to develop it like Oppenheimer felt before the Nazis did. | ||
| I love that! | ||
| How'd that work? | ||
| I love, by the way, that people on my side, I'll just say, I'll just admit it, on the right, you know, have spent the last 80 years defending, dropping nuclear weapons on civilians. | ||
| Like, are you joking? | ||
| That's just like prima facie evil. | ||
| If you can't, well, if we hadn't done that, then this, that, the other thing, that was actually a great savings. | ||
| No, it's wrong to drop nuclear weapons on people. | ||
| And if you find yourself arguing that it's a good thing to drop nuclear weapons on people, then you are evil. | ||
| Like, it's not a tough one, right? | ||
| Is that a hard call for you? | ||
| It's not a hard call for me. | ||
| So, with that in mind, like, why would you want nuclear weapons? | ||
| It's like just a mindless, childish, sort of intellectual exercise to justify, like, oh no, it's really good because someone else will get it. | ||
| How about no? | ||
| How about, like, spending all of your effort to prevent this from happening? | ||
| Would you kill baby Hitler, you know, famously? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I don't know why we're sitting back and allowing this to happen if we really believe it will extinguish the human race or enslave the human race. | ||
| Like, how can that be good? | ||
| Well, if God creates everything, if God created the universe and God creates people, God probably creates a process. | ||
| And we think that we are very important because we are very important to us. | ||
| But are we very important in the universal sense? | ||
| Not really. | ||
| Like, if the Earth just imploded and disappeared, if the Sun went supernova and our whole solar system was blown to bits, The universe still exists. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| In the end, as Conan O'Brien, the famous philosopher, once said, every grave goes unvisited, which is true, and that's an important perspective. | ||
| Pull out the lens a little bit. | ||
| Does it really matter? | ||
| No, it doesn't. | ||
| But it does matter. | ||
| It does matter to us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How about this? | |
| Do your children matter? | ||
| Yes, sure. | ||
| Do their lives matter? | ||
| Would you die for them? | ||
| Yes, of course. | ||
| Everything matters. | ||
| If you're not comfortable, it matters. | ||
| If you're sitting here, like, you don't want to wear headphones, like, let's not wear headphones. | ||
| That matters. | ||
| Everything matters. | ||
| I mean, at scale... | ||
| But what matters most, like... | ||
| Right? | ||
| That is the evil, right? | ||
| The evil is the same thing as saying the necessary evil of dropping nuclear bombs on civilians, as if you don't do that, then there will be more evil. | ||
| Then more things will happen. | ||
| It's kind of the same thing. | ||
| Like, it doesn't... | ||
| Well, it comes from the same place, which is hubris. | ||
| Like, imagining you're God, you have unlimited power, and you have omniscience. | ||
| You can imagine what the future is going to be. | ||
| You can't. | ||
| You're a fucking idiot. | ||
| You're a person. | ||
| Like, you can't even make your wife happy. | ||
| Like, the limits of your power are really obvious. | ||
| The limits of your wisdom, same. | ||
| So, like, don't jump into shit, big things, whose outcomes you can't predict with certainty. | ||
| Like, you can't know. | ||
| Go in with humility. | ||
| I guess that's what I'm saying. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And do what you can, knowing that you're probably going to screw it up and you probably won't achieve your goal, but you should try. | ||
| And on the AI question, everyone I've ever talked to about, I'm hardly an expert, I don't own a computer, okay? | ||
| But everybody I've ever talked to, and there's many people who are like, yeah, it could get away from us and enslave us. | ||
| Well, let's say no to slavery. | ||
| How's that? | ||
| Is that a tough one? | ||
| Not for me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, and maybe a good use of nuclear weapons would be to hit the data centers. | ||
| No, I'm serious. | ||
| Like, why is that crazy? | ||
| It's not. | ||
| It's not if you think that human beings are the end of this evolutionary change. | ||
| Well, what else is? | ||
| Some supercomputer in a data center outside Dulles Airport? | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| I don't actually think that individuals... | ||
| I don't think I'm that important. | ||
| My life is that important. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| I will die. | ||
| I know that. | ||
| And I try to keep that in mind every day. | ||
| But you're important to everybody that cares about you. | ||
| You're important to the people around you. | ||
| But if we don't think people are important, then what do we think is important? | ||
| I guess that's what I'm saying. | ||
| It's not necessarily that we don't think people are important. | ||
| But if evolution is real, and if there is this constant... | ||
| Is it real? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But it's visible. | ||
| Like, you can measure it in certain animals. | ||
| You can measure adaptation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But there's no evidence that... | ||
| In fact, I think we've kind of given up on the idea of evolution. | ||
| The theory of evolution as articulated by Darwin is, like, kind of not true. | ||
| In what sense? | ||
| Well, in the most basic sense, the idea that all life emerged from a single-cell organism over time, and there would be a fossil record of that, and there's not. | ||
| There's not a fossil record of transitionary species, like species that are adapting to its environment? | ||
| There's tons of record of adaptation, and you see it in your own life. | ||
| I mean, I have a lot of dogs. | ||
| I see adaptation in dogs, you know, through the- Litter to litter. | ||
| But no, there's no evidence at all that, none, zero, that people evolve seamlessly from a single cell amoeba. | ||
| No, there's not. | ||
| There's no chain in the fossil record of that at all. | ||
| And that's why you don't actually hear people, you hear them make reference to evolution because the theory of adaptation is clearly obviously true. | ||
| But Darwin's theories, totally, that's why it's still a theory almost 200 years later, you know? | ||
| No, we have not found that at all. | ||
| And I can't even guess, I mean, I have my own theories on it, but they're not proven. | ||
| What are your theories? | ||
| God created people, you know, distinctly, and animals. | ||
| I mean, I think that's like, I think what every person on Earth thought until the mid-19th century, actually. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What a new idea! | ||
| They didn't have computers. | ||
| They didn't have a general understanding that we have today of the process. | ||
| Do you think we understand more now? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Really? | ||
| You don't think that we understand more today? | ||
| We understand way less. | ||
| We understand so little that we're actually sitting here allowing like a bunch of greedy, stupid, childless, childless software engineers in Northern California to like flirt with the extinction of mankind. | ||
| So no previous generations would be like, what? | ||
| No. | ||
| Stop. | ||
| And we're not doing that because... | ||
| But they wouldn't have done that even with the nuclear bomb. | ||
| I mean, obviously, the Manhattan Project was done in secrecy, but they wouldn't have stopped it because the imperative of getting this weapon before Hitler got the weapon was what it was on everyone's mind. | ||
| Well, Hitler was kind of done by then. | ||
| The Russians had pretty much extinguished any hope that that would continue. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But... | |
| But not at the beginning of the project. | ||
| We were in the middle of the logic of war. | ||
| The commencement of the Manhattan Project. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| But the logic was the same, and it was four years of gotta beat the other guy, got it. | ||
| And I don't mean to sound too judgmental about the bomb. | ||
| I know why they built it. | ||
| But you just wonder why nobody in the middle of that thought, is this really a guy? | ||
| And some of them did think it. | ||
| I'm sure they did. | ||
| I mean, Oppenheimer himself. | ||
| Of course, large organizations don't respond to the moral qualms of individuals very well. | ||
| So that was, whatever, it's well known what happened. | ||
| But no, we should pause and ask, is the machine we're building worth having? | ||
| And nobody seems to do that. | ||
| And there are all kinds of economic forces, which nobody ever mentions, that drive that heedlessness, that stupidity. | ||
| Like California, for example, is completely the state both of us have lived in. | ||
| It's like collapsing. | ||
| And they're betting everything on AI. The tax base is going to be dependent on this technology working. | ||
| Is that really what they're betting on? | ||
| Of course! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you see the most recent thing about the amount of billions of dollars they spent on the homeless problem with no trackable results? | ||
| Well, they've had massive results. | ||
| They've increased the homeless population dramatically. | ||
| If you pay for something, you get more of it. | ||
| And that would include fentanyl addicts. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| It's been a wild success. | ||
| I actually talked to Kevin Newsom the other day. | ||
| Did you really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's that like? | ||
| Does it smell like sulfur? | ||
| It was by phone. | ||
| I was talking on the phone. | ||
| It's such a weird... | ||
| You smell like sulfur. | ||
| That was too fast for me! | ||
| Sulfur and hair grease. | ||
| No, but I was making fun of... | ||
| I shouldn't even make fun of it because it's so tragic, but what's happened to the state and people living on the street. | ||
| What is this non-gaslighty perspective? | ||
| He's like, go back to Russia! | ||
| You like Russia so much! | ||
| I was like, you know, actually, I'm originally from San Francisco, but I can't live there because... | ||
| He really told you to go back to Russia? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| I mean, he was laughing, whatever. | ||
| He's a perfectly charming guy. | ||
| They all are in person. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| Anyway, I'm so far afield. | ||
| But my point is, AI is being driven by the greed of politicians to some extent. | ||
| And you'll notice that AI, by the way, as a fact, those data centers that drive our digital life, which is not life, it's actually death mostly, but I mean, they're the biggest power draw. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| How much electricity does AI require? | ||
| More than countries? | ||
| Our grid can't handle AI just as a practical matter. | ||
| Well, our grid can't handle electric cars. | ||
| It can't handle air conditioning in the state of California, where I'm from. | ||
| If you live east of I-5, where it's really hot, and you're not getting those ocean breezes, they have brownouts in South Africa. | ||
| It's Johannesburg now. | ||
| But here's what's interesting is that none of the global warming cultists seem to have any concerns at all about AI. Why is that? | ||
| Just like they don't have concerns about John Kerry's G4, like somehow that's exempt. | ||
| Really? | ||
| AI is going to draw more electricity than anything else in the United States, more than steel production, okay? | ||
| Used to. | ||
| And you don't have a problem with that, but you're totally against energy because it's destroying the planet, but AI gets a carve-out, even though it's going to be the number one energy draw in the United States? | ||
| Let's go through your reasoning on that. | ||
| They're probably not aware. | ||
| They're not aware. | ||
| They're mad about my wood stove. | ||
| I heat with wood. | ||
| They're mad about my wood stove. | ||
| They don't want an outdoor barbecue. | ||
| They don't like a gas stove. | ||
| No, they're way into the details on this stuff, except somehow AI... Isn't a problem. | ||
| But do you think that they're informed? | ||
| Because this is not a narrative that you ever hear. | ||
| You never hear on the news. | ||
| Well, I grew up in a world where a wood stove was considered wholesome and natural, and now it's considered... | ||
| Smells good, too. | ||
| Oh, it's the best. | ||
| And the heat is the... | ||
| I have a wood-fired sauna, which I use every day, and it's the great... | ||
| How do you make sure it's the right temperature? | ||
| Is it like an offset smoker? | ||
| Like you have to kind of fiddle with it for a while to get the right temperature? | ||
| It's time consuming. | ||
| No, I have a Finnish, the Finns are geniuses, but I have a Finnish stove in it, and it's incredibly precise. | ||
| I don't know if you ever use a wood stove, but there's a carburetor on it, basically, that lets in air. | ||
| Like an offset smoker. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And it's so precise. | ||
| I mean, it's absolutely crazy. | ||
| I mean, you move it... | ||
| You know, a third of an inch and it's just like the flame changes. | ||
| So I use birch, which I love. | ||
| And the whole process takes a while. | ||
| I get it to 200, which probably takes an hour and 20. I mean, it's a thing. | ||
| You like it hot. | ||
| I like it hot, yeah, yeah. | ||
| 200? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I wear a sauna hat. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Does that help? | ||
| Which is embarrassing. | ||
| The wool hat? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's felt. | ||
| Yeah, I bought one of those. | ||
| I never wore it. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| What's the difference? | ||
| I'll tell you. | ||
| You're... | ||
| Because you're... | ||
| Duncan, I'm so boring on this subject. | ||
| No, you're going on this. | ||
| Please. | ||
| My wife and kids are like... | ||
| You see I have one. | ||
| You're speaking to the car. | ||
| Oh, they're the best. | ||
| Go Scandinavia! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like the one thing, if your name is Carlson, it's the one thing to be proud of in your people. | ||
| They're so sad and defeated and pathetic, but saunas are still great. | ||
| But anyway, the sauna hat, so your head heats up much faster because it's higher, but also because it's got all the... | ||
| Capillaries in your head, blood vessels in your head. | ||
| So the point of a sauna is to bake. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you want to stay hot as long as you can. | ||
| Then you reap the benefits and you also get the solitude and the prayer time or the meditation or whatever in your cedar church. | ||
| But you can't stay in a sauna that's really hot very long because your head heats up. | ||
| So the sonic hat, the felt hat, the banya hat as they call it, insulates your head so you can really stay hot a long, long time. | ||
| You really should do it. | ||
| So is it just because it makes it more comfortable? | ||
| Is that the idea? | ||
| Your head overheats. | ||
| You know, it just overheats. | ||
| And what you want is you want to cook evenly, just like on a barbecue. | ||
| You know, you really do. | ||
| And so, you know, you sit on the bench with your feet up. | ||
| You want to be as flat as you possibly can to cook evenly and to stay that way. | ||
| So I try to do 20 minutes. | ||
| I have my timer, my egg timer with the sand going through the hourglass, which goes to 15 minutes, but I try to stay an extra five if I can. | ||
| And I couldn't without the Banya hat. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| It's like eight bucks on Amazon. | ||
| Well worth it. | ||
| Yeah, I have one. | ||
| Like I said, I just don't use it. | ||
| But I do... | ||
| They're embarrassing, and you look like a tool wearing it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But you shouldn't have... | ||
| But no one's looking in there anyway. | ||
| Well, that's right. | ||
| You don't sauna with other people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Well, I do sometimes, yeah. | ||
| Comics. | ||
| Do you really? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| When we train together, we all get in the sauna together afterwards. | ||
| It's fun. | ||
| The Rock was in there with us. | ||
| No way. | ||
| Yeah, The Rock worked out with us, then sat in the sauna with us. | ||
| It was fun. | ||
| Got in the cold plunge with us. | ||
| Oh, that's pretty great. | ||
| It was fun. | ||
| Is he a good dude? | ||
| He's a great guy. | ||
| Really nice guy. | ||
| I've heard that. | ||
| I don't know him, but I've heard that he's a good guy. | ||
| You know, some people fake humble. | ||
| They fake it to look cool. | ||
| That's pretty obvious. | ||
| Yeah, he's not doing that. | ||
| He's a real guy. | ||
| The measure of humility is really, really simple. | ||
| Can you tell the truth about yourself? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, you know, are you cool to be around? | ||
| He gives real hugs. | ||
| He's a real guy. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| He's real. | ||
| He's a real guy. | ||
| And when we hung out with him, I hung out with him for hours. | ||
| We worked out for like two hours, and then we got in the sauna together, and we all hung out, and then we did a podcast together. | ||
| He's a genuinely nice guy. | ||
| Like, you'd be able to sniff something out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I love that. | |
| Or you can tell, like, immediately. | ||
| Yeah, you tell something. | ||
| You tell something. | ||
| People are hiding stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So yeah, I've done the sauna with other people. | ||
| Well, I do it by myself, so no one sees my sauna now. | ||
| I do it at 196 degrees. | ||
| I do it for 25 minutes, and I don't... | ||
| That's intense. | ||
| 196 for 25 minutes is a lot. | ||
| Yeah, the last five minutes are rough, and I used to only do 20, but lately I've been doing 25. Really? | ||
| Yeah, just because it's more uncomfortable. | ||
| The whole idea is just to make it more uncomfortable. | ||
| I want it to be very hard to do so that the rest of my day is pretty easy. | ||
| So really hard workout. | ||
| Cold plunge starts the day. | ||
| That's the first thing I do is hard. | ||
| It's three minutes at 33 degrees. | ||
| It sucks. | ||
| And then I get out of there and then I work out. | ||
| That's really impressive. | ||
| I mean, I had the opposite training as a young man, which was the goal was like French toast. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| French toast. | ||
| Grind out the cigarettes in the syrup when you're done. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I started doing martial arts when I was a young man. | ||
| And when I got into it, it was the first thing that I'd ever did that, first of all, gave me a real understanding of the value of discipline and hard work. | ||
| Because you can get as good as the amount of effort that you put forth. | ||
| And if you put more effort and you're more intense and you're more driven than other people, you beat them. | ||
| And you start beating everyone. | ||
| And you start becoming this thing that you never thought you could be, which is someone who's extraordinary at something that's very dangerous. | ||
| And so that was my formulation as a man that helped me. | ||
| Go from being this, like, confused kid to being someone who understands, like, oh, there's a path. | ||
| And most people don't want to do it. | ||
| But if you could do it, if you can do this dangerous thing that people are terrified of and just do it ruthlessly all day long, like, live it. | ||
| I lived at the gym. | ||
| I mean, I taught all day long. | ||
| I trained all day long. | ||
| My whole life was dedicated to martial arts. | ||
| So I got really good really quick. | ||
| It changed the whole trajectory of my life. | ||
| And it instilled in me this understanding of the value of dedication and of a singular commitment to something. | ||
| To really being, while you're doing it, you're not distracted, you're fully focused on improving. | ||
| Through that you could apply that to all aspects of your life, but we all encounter difficult things in life and There's this saying that I love it's a really great saying that though The hardest thing that's ever happened to you is the hardest thing that's ever happened to you If it's a parking ticket or if it's your parents being blown up by a drone It's still the hardest thing that's ever happened to you if you've had an incredibly easy life like most people today They complain about the dumbest fucking shit because to them, that is their primary focus. | ||
| They don't have a real existential threat. | ||
| You remember how nice everybody was after 9-11? | ||
| Very. | ||
| It was crazy. | ||
| California was patriotic. | ||
| There's fucking flags on everybody's car. | ||
| I remember. | ||
| Everybody was friendly. | ||
| I went to New York City. | ||
| It was like a totally different place. | ||
| It was. | ||
| Everybody was so friendly. | ||
| Applauding when firemen walked in. | ||
| Yes, they were heroes. | ||
| Everybody was a hero. | ||
| That's because they'd encountered something that was way harder than they were accustomed to and it just put things into perspective. | ||
| So for me, training and really hard workouts and doing difficult things like the sauna, there's a lot of health benefits to it too. | ||
| But the mental benefits to it are really primary for me. | ||
| Because it makes the rest of life easier. | ||
| That's impressive, man. | ||
| I didn't have a childhood like that at all. | ||
| And we were decadent, unfortunately. | ||
| And so those are lessons that I learned much, much later. | ||
|
unidentified
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But... | |
| Yeah, it's... | ||
| That's a good... | ||
| I think it's a... | ||
| If it doesn't destroy you, I think it's a great way to... | ||
| And you don't have to do it the way I do it. | ||
| You could do other stuff. | ||
| You could do yoga. | ||
| You could do hikes. | ||
| You could do... | ||
| No, but doing things for the sake of the difficulty in doing them. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| Again, that was not my... | ||
| None. | ||
| Not my training at all! | ||
| Yeah, I was very lucky that it was mine, but more importantly, it gave me a tool to mitigate the stress of regular life. | ||
| Especially the stress of this kind of life that I live. | ||
| You need something to mitigate that or you'll go crazy. | ||
| I agree with that completely. | ||
| You'll go crazy. | ||
| Yeah, you know, removing yourself from it a little bit has always worked for me. | ||
| You know, nature works very, very well. | ||
| Animals, contact with animals, people you love. | ||
| Less digital experiences, fewer digital experiences, for sure. | ||
| I think that stuff's not good for you. | ||
| It's just so obviously not good for you. | ||
| I was having this conversation with Michelle Dowd yesterday. | ||
| She is a woman who survived an apocalyptic cult. | ||
| She was raised in an apocalyptic cult and kicked out when she was 17 because she snuck out to go see The Color Purple. | ||
| They weren't allowed to go see a movie. | ||
| She'd never seen a movie until she was 17. She'd never seen a movie and her first movie was The Color Purple? | ||
| And then they kicked her out. | ||
| I can kind of see that. | ||
| I mean, what about Raiders of the Lost Ark or something? | ||
| The Color Purple? | ||
| What was the first movie she'd ever seen? | ||
| No, but like... | ||
| You see one movie that's The Color Purple? | ||
| Well, a boy invited her to the movie. | ||
| Come on! | ||
| But could you imagine never seeing a movie or even a television show your whole life and then seeing the color purple? | ||
| Dating a boy who wanted to see the color purple. | ||
| There's so much going on here, Joe. | ||
| Well, this boy was a guy who had left the church, and so she was in contact with him, and he was saying, hey, there's a whole world out here. | ||
| You want to go see the movie? | ||
| And she's like, okay, let's go. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, obviously, look, I'm totally against cults, obviously. | ||
| On the other hand, you gotta ask yourself, like, I don't know, is your average Amish teenager happier than your average conventional American teenager on Instagram? | ||
| And of course the answer is, oh yeah. | ||
| Well, they certainly have less instances of autism, which is really fascinating. | ||
| It's very, very fascinating. | ||
| The Amish have less autism? | ||
| Yeah, there's almost none. | ||
| Well, I'm not surprised. | ||
| It's extremely rare. | ||
| Why do we think that is? | ||
| I wonder. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I can think of a couple. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| I don't want to go Bobby Kennedy on anyone. | ||
| Well, that's the problem. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If you go Bobby Kennedy, they'll come for you. | ||
| But the question is why. | ||
| Look, and I don't know the answer, but... | ||
| How is that not in the debate? | ||
| How is that not in the conversation? | ||
| Well, it's not only not in the conversation, you're punished for adding it to the conversation. | ||
| And so, like... | ||
| We are dancing around anti-vax conspiracy theories right now. | ||
| But why be on the defensive? | ||
| It's like, if you purport to represent science and you're mad about a question... | ||
| And you're ignoring data. | ||
| Yeah, but even in the absence of data, science is a process. | ||
| It's not a result. | ||
| It's a way of doing things. | ||
| And at the core of science is asking questions, including unlikely questions. | ||
| That's what science is. | ||
| And if you don't allow that, then you may be doing something, but what you're not doing is science. | ||
| We can say that conclusively. | ||
| So for people to wrap themselves in the mantle of science and attack you for asking a question, You know, they're frauds. | ||
| And I don't know how they have the moral high ground in this. | ||
| I don't think they do, but I think it's the same kind of mindset that allows people to create the nuclear bomb. | ||
| Because you say, listen, we're not even saying that vaccines cause autism, but let's say this. | ||
| If you're looking at all the data of all the things that cause autism, and you see that the vaccine schedule ramps up considerably, and then you have autism, which seems to at least be more diagnosed than ever before, people will instantly say, we stopped polio, we stopped smallpox, vaccines have saved millions of lives, and they're probably right. | ||
| We dropped that bomb to keep Germany from dropping that bomb. | ||
| We need nuclear weapons so that other people don't have nuclear weapons. | ||
| We do a thing that maybe has some negative effects but is overall good. | ||
| And I think you can kind of apply that sort of logic and reasoning as a human being to very messy issues. | ||
| And we all do, by the way. | ||
| I think people do that with abortion, right? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| They do that with abortion. | ||
| They say a woman has a right to choose. | ||
| Reproductive freedom. | ||
| They say all these things. | ||
| And then you say, okay, what if the baby is near term? | ||
| What if it's six months old? | ||
| What if it's seven months old? | ||
| And people don't want to have that conversation. | ||
| A woman has the right to choose. | ||
| You're a fascist. | ||
| Stay out of women's bodies. | ||
| Does a woman have a right to kill you if you annoy her or inconvenience her? | ||
| This is where it gets weird. | ||
| It's like, when is it a life? | ||
| But it is one of those things that, to me, is a human problem. | ||
| Whereas humans have these very... | ||
| Messy interactions with some things that don't line up with their ideology. | ||
| And there's an ideology of science worship. | ||
| There's an ideology of authoritarian worship. | ||
| The bodies of science have bestowed the truth. | ||
| If you ignore it, you're a science denier. | ||
| Those are political terms or theological terms. | ||
| They're not terms rooted in science. | ||
| And look, we all make trade-offs constantly. | ||
| Everything's bad. | ||
| It's a shit sandwich versus a shit croissant. | ||
| I'll take the shit croissant. | ||
| It's smaller. | ||
| That's a daily experience for everybody. | ||
| So I get that. | ||
| And I don't think everything is a moral absolute either. | ||
| We don't even know sometimes whether a decision will result in good or bad. | ||
| So it's very complicated. | ||
| I totally agree with that. | ||
| What I object to is the absence of reason. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like you have to believe, because I think it's true, that if you're reasonable, that you can reach maybe not the perfect decision, but a better decision. | ||
| And if we don't believe that, then we're just in the land of witchcraft and let's just admit it. | ||
| So the lack of reason is what freaks me out. | ||
| Well, it's ideological capture, right? | ||
| Because there's certain things that if you're on the right side of these subjects, the correct side, whatever your ideology believes, you can't You can't differ from the doctrine. | ||
| There's a very clear doctrine. | ||
| Well, that's just religion then. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It is religion. | ||
| So I'm very pro-religion, but you can't have a religion that's too stupid and destructive. | ||
| If your religion winds up hurting a lot of people, then I'm against your religion. | ||
| Like, that's right? | ||
| Yeah, I think, but even some really good religions have aspects of them that you could say were overall detrimental to the people that were. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Well, absolutely. | ||
| You can say that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Encountered with them. | |
| I think that that kind of thinking, I think cult thinking, whether it's Scientology or whether it's Christianity, there's like a type of thinking that's woke. | ||
| Woke is clearly a cult. | ||
| It's a mind virus. | ||
| And I think that – it's so trite to call it that now. | ||
| It's like whatever this thing is, this leftism, this Marxist sort of ideology that's waving – It's flag and indoctrinating people in this country. | ||
| It's very similar to all kinds of religions. | ||
| It's very similar to fundamentalist religions that have always existed, in that everybody has to believe very specific things and you can't differ. | ||
| You can't differ from the doctrine. | ||
| So here's another way to think about it that I've been meditating on this a lot. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| Religion, politics, they're all kind of melding. | ||
| It's hard to know where one ends and another begins. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So maybe a simpler and more useful way to think about it is truth or falsehood. | ||
| Lying or honesty. | ||
| Maybe you should assess everything that way. | ||
| Is someone lying? | ||
| I don't care what your justification for it is. | ||
| Lying about vaccines. | ||
| They've lied a lot about vaccines. | ||
| And they've done it, I think, in most cases because they feel like they're serving some greater good. | ||
| Well, that's the narrative. | ||
| Right. | ||
| We can't tell people that there are vaccine injuries because they won't get vaccines, which are good for a big population. | ||
| I understand the thinking. | ||
| But how about this? | ||
| You can't participate in lying. | ||
| You can't lie. | ||
| You can't lie. | ||
| Period, though. | ||
| You can't lie about anything. | ||
| Just don't lie about anything. | ||
| Try to tell the truth all the time. | ||
| If you can't say something that's true, just don't say it. | ||
| You're not required to say everything you think, obviously, and you shouldn't say everything you think. | ||
| But you should never lie. | ||
| And if you just stick with that... | ||
| Like, you get pretty quickly back to reason and order, don't you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, you're making complete sense. | ||
| And I think that this is the problem when people have information and power above other people. | ||
| Well, right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's for sure. | |
| Which is the problem of governments, which is also the problem of cult leaders. | ||
| Cult leaders, they get completely infatuated with this idea of being omnipotent and this power that has control over giant swaths of people and you get to dictate their behavior and you get to tell them what to think. | ||
| That's very intoxicating and it's common. | ||
| It's common in that it's always existed throughout human history. | ||
| It's a thing that people do when they get power. | ||
| They abuse the shit out of it. | ||
| And if they think that you're too stupid to know the truth and that they're better than you because they do think they're better than you because they're running things. | ||
| It's a natural inclination. | ||
| It's a natural thought that people have. | ||
| If they're the ones – if you guys are a bunch of dopes that are just listening to my orders and I tell you how to live your life and what to do, I'm naturally going to think I'm better than you. | ||
| Well, that's, I mean, people have lived under those systems since there have been systems, but what makes it particularly galling and hard to live with is when you call that system a democracy. | ||
| That's too dishonest for me. | ||
| I would much rather live in a monarchy where everyone thinks the king has been assigned by God to rule over us and his whims are law. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| I don't like it, but at least it has internal coherence. | ||
| When they stand up and pass a $60 billion funding bill for Ukraine, when 70% of the population doesn't want it, when they're ignoring the actual problems in our country, like the economy and the border, And they're calling in Congress over the weekend to pass something that people don't want while ignoring the things that people do want. | ||
| And if they do the same kind of thing again and again for like 50 years and they call it a democracy, that will drive you insane. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because it's just too dishonest. | ||
| Why not just say, we don't give a shit what you want. | ||
| We are getting something out of this Ukraine funding, whether it's like the thrill of being masters of the universe or whether it's money from the defense contractors, whatever we're getting out of it is more important to us than your opinion. | ||
| This is not self-government. | ||
| You don't run this country. | ||
| We do. | ||
| Shut up and obey. | ||
| If they at least said that, you'd be like, OK, I get it. | ||
| Those are the terms. | ||
| But if I get another fucking lecture from Joe Scarborough about defending democracy when this is not a democracy, it's not even a close approximation of a democracy. | ||
| Then I'm going to go crazy because I just can't deal with the lying. | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| It does make sense. | ||
| What's interesting is that there are people saying that now. | ||
| And I think that's a relatively new thing in terms of mainstream media. | ||
| And I consider what you do on X mainstream media. | ||
| I mean, what we're on right now is essentially mainstream media. | ||
| It used to be, you could call it, there's corporate controlled media. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| And that used to be mainstream media. | ||
| Mainstream media used to be CNN. It's not really anymore. | ||
| Mainstream media is what, in terms of the volume consumed, more people are consuming things on Twitter, on X, than there are on anything else. | ||
| They're consuming information through the internet, through YouTube. | ||
| For good or for bad, whether it's correct or incorrect, they're consuming information in different forms now than ever before. | ||
| So more people are saying what you're saying than have ever said it before. | ||
| And when people lie, And when people bullshit and gaslight, it's more offensive now than it's ever been before because there's so much access to truth that it's just you could see it now. | ||
| If you're paying attention, if you're not a boomer who only reads the newspaper, you pay attention and you see it and you go, this is horseshit. | ||
| But it's like, I guess what bothers me is that the lies aren't sophisticated. | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, I look back over my now sort of long life, and I'm recognizing all the times that I was lied to, but, you know, I didn't know I was being lied to. | ||
| They kind of pulled it off. | ||
| There's something incredibly insulting and demeaning to tell me a lie when I know it's a lie, and you know I know it's a lie. | ||
| We both know it's a lie, but you're demanding that I pretend to believe it? | ||
| What you're really saying is, I have no respect for you. | ||
| You're like my dog. | ||
| You're a slave. | ||
| Like, I'm demanding that you participate in my lie. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The lack of stealth. | ||
| I'm not explaining it very well, but that really bothers me. | ||
| Well, there's no real other way to lie. | ||
| Like, some of these lies, like, politicians. | ||
| Like, did you see that conversation that AOC had with that man they brought in for the Biden case? | ||
| And they were talking about what crimes... | ||
| And she was, like, grilling this guy. | ||
| What crimes did you see Joe Biden? | ||
| Did he steal anything? | ||
| Did he steal bread? | ||
| Like, I forget what she said, but... | ||
| And he was trying to explain what they were, Rico crimes, and she was saying, Rico is not a crime. | ||
| I saw this. | ||
| It's a category of crime. | ||
| Like, okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Tell that to the Genovese family! | ||
| Not only that, it's so dumb to say that publicly and say it with confidence and to tell a person. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| The marriage of ineptitude and high self-esteem is really the marker of our time. | ||
| It's like, I have nothing against dumb people at all. | ||
| My dogs are dumb and I love my dogs. | ||
| No, I'm serious. | ||
| I don't think God cares about your intelligence, right? | ||
| Only people care. | ||
| And so it's not a moral category. | ||
| And stupidity is not – I mean, someone with Down syndrome, I really believe better people than I am, you know, more likely to go to heaven. | ||
| So I'm not attacking her for being dumb. | ||
| But the idea that a dumb person has no – the White House press secretary is in the same category who has no idea she's dumb. | ||
| She really thinks, like, she won the prize and she's the most impressive. | ||
| Like, I'm White House press secretary because I'm the best talker in America. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| It's so crazy. | ||
| And yet the smartest people I know are very often like sort of, well, you know, they have humility. | ||
| Well, also she's following Kayleigh McEnany. | ||
| Is that how you say her name? | ||
| I don't really know who that is. | ||
| She was the last White House press secretary? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| You don't know who that is? | ||
| She's the GOAT. I sort of do. | ||
| She's the GOAT. Greatest White House press secretary of all time. | ||
| She's the best. | ||
| I had stopped paying close attention by that point. | ||
| Bro, she had all the documents. | ||
| She would kill them. | ||
| Whenever she would get called out, like whenever there would be a question, she'd say, that's interesting. | ||
| And then she'd open it, because you said this, and your paper said that, and CNN said this, and she would call them out on stuff. | ||
| And she was just really, really well prepared. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| And very articulate. | ||
| She was wonderful at the job. | ||
| Well, good for her. | ||
| I mean, that's what it should be. | ||
| But she was operating under President Trump, you know, so obviously she's demonized. | ||
| I can't believe you don't know who that is. | ||
| No, I don't know who it is, but it's just funny. | ||
| She's the GOAT. Well, I had stopped watching all briefings by then. | ||
| I used to go to the briefings as a kid. | ||
| I mean, I literally would go there. | ||
| I'd be in the briefing room, the former Kennedy swimming pool, and And the first thing you know, I mean, I was never a White House reporter, but I was a reporter, so I would go to them occasionally. | ||
| And the first thing you notice is how impressed all the correspondents are to work there. | ||
| I work at the White House. | ||
| Work at the White House. | ||
| Got my heart passed! | ||
| And then the distance between that, that little credential they were so proud of, and the reality of their lives was like insane. | ||
| Like, they're in this tiny little room. | ||
| They're being treated with total contempt. | ||
| By the White House staff, who thinks they're just fucking animals, you know? | ||
| It's like, shut up. | ||
| They're eating out of vending machines. | ||
| And this was a different time, right? | ||
| So like, when I was working as a journalist in Washington, like, we went out to lunch every day at like a good restaurant and charged it to the company. | ||
| And with your sources, we had lunch every single day, like civilized people. | ||
| I don't even think that exists in the world anymore, where you had time for lunch, where you weren't just so under the gun from your corporate masters that you had to get back to work. | ||
| We ate lunch. | ||
| And I remember thinking, these people don't eat lunch. | ||
| They eat, like, a stale mounds bar out of a vending machine. | ||
| Like, they bring quarters to work so they can eat. | ||
| I remember thinking, your life, like, is... | ||
| You're not even human. | ||
| You're just, like, a little puppet or something. | ||
| But you're so impressed. | ||
| And, like, all your neighbors know. | ||
| He works at the White House. | ||
| He's in the White House Press Corps. | ||
| And the job, like, wasn't even really a job. | ||
| You would just, like, sit there and ask your question in your little assigned seat like you're in a high school gym. | ||
| It was just awful. | ||
| And I just had no respect for people who did that for a living at all. | ||
| Did you ever read Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail? | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's amazing. | |
| But that guy... | ||
| That's, I think, probably the best window into an outsider in the political process, at least in terms of the campaign trail. | ||
| It's the best window to the press, the best window to the relationship that they had with the politicians, at least in the 1970s. | ||
| It's an amazing book. | ||
| I was talking to a campaign reporter. | ||
| I never do that anymore, but I was this week, actually. | ||
| And he was telling me it's like totally different. | ||
| Like when I did it, you were all on a... | ||
| I mean, it was bad, actually. | ||
| It was because it just cultivated groupthink, which was then leveraged by the candidate for better coverage. | ||
| Like the whole thing was kind of an op, actually. | ||
| But it was at least fun. | ||
| Like, you run a charter plane and, like, you're flying with everybody and you hit three or four cities a day and, like, there are cocktails on the plane and, you know, naughty behavior and, like, you know, they fed you and they kind of dealt with everything for you. | ||
| It was fun. | ||
| It was like a road trip, right? | ||
| And now it's just, like, grim. | ||
| They're all driving alone in their little rental cars to some obscure town in Iowa that is there with no access whatsoever to the candidate, write up their little reports, and then they get back to their hotel and they're, like, Writing up more for the website. | ||
| It's such a bad job, actually, covering politics that only people who couldn't make it in any other business are doing it. | ||
| It's like a reverse meritocracy. | ||
| It's only the most... | ||
| Kind of pathetic power worshippers would ever do a job like that. | ||
| Well, like critics. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| Most critics want to be writers. | ||
| They're like the worst people. | ||
| Just as people? | ||
| Like, well, you've actually been in show business, so you've got a better experience with them, or you have a lot of experience with them, but I've known a lot of them who worked for magazines or newspapers that I worked for. | ||
| And they're the kind of people who have a lot of cats, and all the cats hate them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know what I mean? | ||
| They're just like the lowest. | ||
| They all have some sort of weird wandering eye and they're fat and they're like super into porn and totally isolated from everybody. | ||
| I actually worked For one of them for a while, who was a critic for the New York Post, a guy called John Puthart, and he was one of the weirdest, most unhappy people I've ever met in my life. | ||
| And he would come into my office occasionally, and he would rub his, he had a really hairy back, and he would rub it against the doorframe of this. | ||
| And like say these kind of obscure... | ||
| He was stupid, but he didn't know that he was... | ||
| I mean, he was actually kind of dumb, but he didn't know it, and he would kind of philosophize. | ||
| I was like 10 years younger, and I was his captive, so he would just like lecture me as he was rubbing against the doorframe. | ||
| One time we went out to lunch, and we all had drinks, of course. | ||
| This was like mid-90s. | ||
| He didn't really drink, but he ordered this drink with like an umbrella, and it had a piece of watermelon on the rim of the glass. | ||
| He took the watermelon, ate it, and then he ate the rind. | ||
| I'll never forget that, watching him eat the rind and thinking, of course this guy's a critic. | ||
| That was his true love! | ||
| He was editing this magazine, but his real interest was in writing about movies. | ||
| They're just sad people who wind up doing that. | ||
| Did you ever read Siskel and Ebert? | ||
| Did you ever read when Roger Ebert wrote a screenplay? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's very bizarre. | ||
| It's really sexual, very strange. | ||
| It's supposed to be terrible. | ||
| Of course it's terrible. | ||
| But I remember going, oh, okay. | ||
| Yeah, they're not creative. | ||
| They're creative-adjacent. | ||
| Well, they don't have anything to contribute. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| They don't have creative power, right? | ||
| So they're mad about that. | ||
| They probably could figure it out if they had a different mindset. | ||
| I think creativity isn't in everybody. | ||
| It's just a matter of how you... | ||
| 100% it's in everybody. | ||
| It just requires honesty. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The impediment to creativity is lying. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And I used to say that about joke thieves, that one of the real problems with joke thieves is when they get caught and then they have to write their own material. | ||
| And the problem is they don't understand the language. | ||
| They just know how to say the sounds. | ||
| Like if you told me what to say in French, I can't speak French, but if you told me what to say and I practice it and I said it right, you'd think, wow, that guy fucking speaks French. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So that's what comedy is like. | ||
| So if you got a guy who knows how to repeat other people's jokes, but he doesn't know how to create them. | ||
| See, comedy is one of the rare things where someone, when you get a guy like Shane Gillis, that guy writes his own stuff, he edits it, he thinks it out in his head, he performs it, he produces it, he changes the order of things. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| Everybody does it pretty much the same way. | ||
| There's a few guys that hire writers, and that's honorable. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with hiring a writer. | ||
| And it also gives jobs to other comics, because some comics are just really good writers, and they're not so good at performing. | ||
| And so people will work on stuff, they'll collaborate on stuff. | ||
| Like, Chris Rock would do this thing where... | ||
| He would hire comics, and they didn't write the jokes for him, but they would be, like, guys who would bounce stuff off. | ||
| So he would have his ideas, he would go on stage, and then after his set, they would all meet, and they would talk about the set. | ||
| And, you know, guys would have taglines, like, you could say this, oh, great, and they'd write that down, they're adding. | ||
| So it's a collaboration. | ||
| So you have the master, you have Chris Rock, Who is so open-minded and intelligent and humble that he brings in other masters and says, tell me what I'm doing wrong. | ||
| Tell me what I can change. | ||
| Tell me what I can make better. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good for him. | |
| And they work together. | ||
| And then there's people that have people that are essentially ghostwriters. | ||
| They hire comics to write jokes for them and they pretend they're theirs. | ||
| And they don't really write them at all. | ||
| So that's another level, which is also honorable. | ||
| Does anyone who does that get successful? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Not top shelf. | ||
| They do well. | ||
| There's people that have people write for them and they do well. | ||
| But they're not the guy that everybody goes to see. | ||
| They're not Dave Attell. | ||
| They're not the guy that everybody goes to see. | ||
| Dave Attell is the guy that comics go to see when he's in town. | ||
| He's a master. | ||
| You watch him, he's Yoda. | ||
| You're like, Jesus Christ. | ||
| Like, how is he so good? | ||
| Well, he's so good because he writes every day. | ||
| Because he's sitting with fucking a pack of cigarettes and a cup of coffee every morning, writing things in a notebook. | ||
| And he's practicing every day. | ||
| He goes on stage constantly. | ||
| And he's just, it's that Japanese term kaizen, where you take this one thing and you just refine it to its ultimate mastery. | ||
| That's what he's doing. | ||
| So these guys who pretend to be that and steal jokes and then they get caught, then their material drops off a cliff. | ||
| It's so obvious. | ||
| Because they're frauds. | ||
| Yeah, also because the very thing that allows you to steal someone's jokes, that's an ego thing. | ||
| That's a, like, I want the laughs. | ||
| I want to be the man or the woman. | ||
| I want to be the fucking one up there showing everybody, ah, look how amazing this person is. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Look how amazing. | ||
| That's the opposite mindset that's required for creativity. | ||
| So creativity is not about you. | ||
| Creativity is about the ideas. | ||
| Creativity is about things. | ||
| Creativity is about how does this concept work with these other concepts? | ||
| How do I get it in the most digestible form? | ||
| If I was an audience member, what would it be like to feel this? | ||
| What's the best way to introduce it? | ||
| What's the way to make it so that people don't think that I'm being mean, that I have a point, or that I've thought this through? | ||
| This is not just a flippant thing. | ||
| You're allowing someone, when someone's on stage, You're allowing that person almost to think for you. | ||
| You're like, take me on a ride. | ||
| I'll give you my mind. | ||
| I'm not going to be thinking what I would do. | ||
| I'm just going to let you think for me. | ||
| If that person's not doing a good job of that, if it's clunky, if it's shitty, if the transitions suck, then it just interrupts this hypnotism that you've put on me. | ||
| This hypnosis. | ||
| Now I'm not letting you think for me. | ||
| But it's also inherently fraudulent. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I mean, I'm giving control of my mind over to someone who is himself under the control of somebody else. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| You mean if you're stealing? | ||
| No, if I'm in the audience. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I would say this also goes for ideas, for commentary. | ||
| You know, that's not funny, but that's real. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you see it a lot. | ||
| I've seen it a lot. | ||
| Yeah, you see bullshit a lot. | ||
| Well, the number of people who are totally not controlled, who are really saying what they actually believe with no weird agenda that they're not telling you about is pretty small. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I just have noticed that a lot recently, particularly on the question of wokeness and free speech. | ||
| There are a lot of people who are like on your side because they're for free speech. | ||
| We're not actually for free speech at all, who are pushing a very specific foreign policy agenda, for example, and using another issue to lower your defenses and let themselves into your brain. | ||
| And I think that's really sinister. | ||
| Really, really, really sinister. | ||
| And it's becoming more obvious now. | ||
| Like, if you're for free speech, Then you're just for free speech because you support the principle. | ||
| The content of the speech is not that interesting to you. | ||
| The fact that a sovereign human being has a right to express himself because he's not a slave, he's a citizen and a human being, that's what matters. | ||
| And if all of a sudden you become famous, like, I'm for free speech, and then you support silencing people who articulate opinions you disagree with, like, you're a fraud. | ||
| You're kind of a sinister fraud. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because that's the business I'm in. | ||
| Boy, I've really noticed that. | ||
| Have you noticed this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And that's also the same kind of thing when you hear them talk. | ||
| If you hear someone talk that's saying something that's kind of horseshit, It resonates with you. | ||
| You've seen worship before. | ||
| You had a moment with Barry Weiss on your show that went everywhere. | ||
| I saw a clip of it. | ||
| I never saw the show itself. | ||
| But she was going on about... | ||
| She was posing as one thing, and then you pressed her. | ||
| You're like, well, hold on a second. | ||
| What do you mean by that? | ||
| You just attacked somebody. | ||
| And she had no idea what she was talking about. | ||
| And it became really clear to me watching. | ||
| I completely changed my view of Barry Weiss forever. | ||
| I was like, oh, she's a fraud, actually. | ||
| This person's not honest at all. | ||
| She has a very specific agenda. | ||
| That's all she cares about. | ||
| The rest of this stuff is just a kind of sleight of hand maneuver. | ||
| You're talking about the thing with Tulsi Gabbard? | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| Yeah, she called her a toady and she didn't know what that meant. | ||
| But she had no idea. | ||
| Tulsi Gabbard had straight outside the lines on some Syria or something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-huh. | |
| And Barry Weiss was going through the files in her head like, what does she have to believe? | ||
| And she was aware that Tulsi Gabbard had somehow violated that in a way that no one's willing to say in detail to fully articulate. | ||
| What did Tulsi Gabbard do wrong? | ||
| No one will tell you. | ||
| She's just bad! | ||
| And then what that revealed about Barry Weiss is she's completely dishonest. | ||
| Like, she's a liar, actually. | ||
| You can't... | ||
| By the way, if you attack somebody, particularly personally, and can't explain why you're attacking the person... | ||
| That's not acceptable. | ||
| You're a dishonest person if you can't explain why. | ||
| I think it's a common thing that people do in private, and they get accustomed to speaking. | ||
| We're talking like we're talking in private. | ||
| We're just two people talking. | ||
| So people get accustomed to saying things without being able to back them up. | ||
| You know, like, oh, he's a vaccine denier. | ||
| Well, I've done a ton of that in my life. | ||
| Yeah, I have as well. | ||
| Because I'm an asshole, so it's like, I just don't like that person. | ||
| I have as well, but what I'm saying is, I don't know how much time Barry Weiss had spent doing podcasts before that. | ||
| Well, she'd spent, look, I'm just saying, like, it's important to be honest about what your agenda is. | ||
| I think she is honest. | ||
| I think she is honest, and I really like her. | ||
| I like talking to her. | ||
| She's a very intelligent person. | ||
| I'm not against her personally. | ||
| I just think that was a mistake. | ||
| And I think you're allowed to do that and hopefully learn from that. | ||
| Don't do that anymore. | ||
| Don't say a thing that you... | ||
| And I've done that. | ||
| I've definitely done that. | ||
| I've said a thing, and I wasn't really exactly sure what I was talking about. | ||
| Oh my gosh, I do that every day. | ||
| And I may have just done it with Barry Weiss, so let me be a lot more specific about what I mean. | ||
| If your agenda is neocon politics, which is her agenda... | ||
| Just say so. | ||
| Don't pretend to be a defender of free speech as a principle, which is what she does. | ||
| How is she a defender of neocon politics? | ||
| Barry Weiss? | ||
| Yeah, like what specifically? | ||
| Well, anyone, including me and Tulsi Gabbard, who thinks that America shouldn't be funding wars that don't help America, she will attack as a traitor to America or whatever, whatever it takes. | ||
| And so, no, no, no. | ||
| That's her main interest, which is fine. | ||
| And by the way, I actually have friends who I disagree with really strongly on this question who believe in neocon politics. | ||
| Doesn't mean they're terrible people or I hate them or I'm not friends. | ||
| I'm still friends with them. | ||
| Right. | ||
| OK, fine. | ||
| I really care about bird hunting and fly fishing and or whatever. | ||
| I can't. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You don't. | |
| That's totally cool. | ||
| But be honest about it. | ||
| So if your job is to defend the right of free people to say what they really believe, then go ahead and defend it. | ||
| And if somebody is not allowed to speak or fired from his job for having an opinion that you disagree with, defend him anyway. | ||
| I just interviewed a guy who is a black nationalist socialist. | ||
| OK, so I'm obviously not much of a black nationalist. | ||
| I don't know if you're aware of that, but I'm not and I'm not a socialist either. | ||
| But this guy is facing prison time under the Biden DOJ because he said things they don't like about foreign policy. | ||
| And I just interviewed the guy for an hour and it was like, I'm... | ||
| Because on principle, you should be able to say what you think. | ||
| Period. | ||
| What is this gentleman's name? | ||
| He was actually a... | ||
| Turns out I like loved him. | ||
| Oh, and I'm embarrassed. | ||
| I can't... | ||
| He's a member of a pretty small black nationalist socialist group. | ||
| It's like the revolutionary black nationalists or something like that. | ||
| They're out of... | ||
| Out of Southwest Florida. | ||
| And he's literally facing prison for repeating Russian disinformation. | ||
| He's not even accused of doing anything. | ||
| He's accused of saying things the Biden DOJ doesn't like. | ||
| What were these things that he said? | ||
| Repeating Russian propaganda. | ||
| About? | ||
| About the invasion of Ukraine. | ||
| And his point was, well, there's a backstory here, which is that NATO has been moving eastward since 1991. | ||
| And that's a massive threat to Russia. | ||
| Missiles on their border from a hostile power is a threat. | ||
| And the Biden administration accelerated that. | ||
| And in response, Putin invaded eastern Ukraine. | ||
| Now, you can disagree with that, but that's hardly a crackpot view, by the way. | ||
| I think that's actually true, but even if you don't agree that it's true, that's not... | ||
| You don't have to be a paid propagandist from the Kremlin to say that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I have said it. | ||
| I'm not a paid propagandist. | ||
| Is this a gentleman? | ||
| That's him right there! | ||
| Four Americans from a black empowerment organization work with Russian intelligence to spread propaganda, Feds. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| To spread propaganda. | ||
| Now, propaganda... | ||
| First of all, You know, there's a lot of propaganda. | ||
| Scroll up a little on that, Jamie, so I can read what this is saying. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So that guy right there. | ||
| Okay, subscribe real quick. | ||
| Yeah, the People's Democratic Uhuru movement in St. Petersburg. | ||
| So he contacted, he spoke with someone in Russia. | ||
| They spoke with people in Russia and then he repeated. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| He is being, he's charged with felonies. | ||
| The FBI raided his house. | ||
| The first thing they did was cover up the security cameras and they went in there and arrested. | ||
| They get raided by the FBI. Okay. | ||
| Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service allegedly weaponized our First Amendment rights, freedoms Russianized to divide Americans and interfere elections in the U.S., says Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olson. | ||
| Now, first of all, weaponized our First Amendment rights? | ||
| No. | ||
| Your First Amendment rights are never a crime. | ||
| They're God-given. | ||
| The government did not bestow them. | ||
| You were born with them as a free person, period. | ||
| And the First Amendment simply says you can't interfere with their exercise. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| And in this they are. | ||
| And I looked at... | ||
| I read this and I thought... | ||
| I reached out to this guy, by the way. | ||
| Matthew Olson? | ||
| No, I wish. | ||
| Matthew Olson would never do my show. | ||
| I mean, the guy whose salary I pay is a U.S. citizen? | ||
| No, he would never speak to me. | ||
| Listen, look at that quote. | ||
| Russia's Foreign Intelligence Services allegedly weaponized our First Amendment rights freedoms Russia denies its own citizens to divide Americans and interfere in elections in the United States. | ||
| That... | ||
| You gotta, like... | ||
| Why are you saying that? | ||
| Say what happened. | ||
| But nothing happened. | ||
| So that's the thing. | ||
| So I'm reading this. | ||
| Someone sent it to me and I'm like, okay, clearly there's a crime here. | ||
| Like they were found with... | ||
| I don't know mortar shells or they were I mean usually the government makes up they put kitty porn on your computer at least to discredit you there's no underlying crime other than they said something that the foreign policy establishment of the United States disagrees with okay that's not a crime by definition and this guy is facing life in prison and it looks to me because no one because Barry Weiss has not defended him I think this guy is likely to spend the rest of his life in prison and I'm like this is crazy The rest of his life in prison? | ||
| Yes! | ||
| Okay, hold it. | ||
| This is the thing. | ||
| I think he's 83. How do you say his name? | ||
| Yesetella. | ||
| Yesetella and three other U.S. citizens, Penny Joanne Hess, Jesse Neville, and Augustus C. Romaine Jr. are charged with conspiracy to defraud U.S. Hess? | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Defraud the United States. | ||
| Hess, Yesetella, and Neville are also charged with impersonating agents of a foreign government. | ||
| Okay, they say to defraud the United States, so defraud suggests theft of something of value, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right. | |
| If I defraud, U.S. steal your money. | ||
| There's no allegation of that at all. | ||
| And I actually read the charges. | ||
| The only allegation is they said things that the U.S. government, the Biden administration, doesn't like. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| And because they're unpopular, and they have views that are considered, quote, fringe, You know, like, crazy black nationalists. | ||
| Nobody wants to defend them. | ||
| And my only point is not that I'm, like, such a principled person. | ||
| This seems very obvious to me. | ||
| You can't allow that. | ||
| You absolutely cannot allow that if you believe in the First Amendment and the freedom of free people to say what they think. | ||
| So with this implication is they're saying that they were recruited by the FSB. So it says, prosecutors said, Ianov... | ||
| Operated an entity called the anti-globalization movement of Russia that was used to carry out its US influence efforts overseen by the Russian intelligence service known as FSB. They recruited US-based organizations to help sway elections, make it appear there was a strong support in the US for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and backed efforts such as the 2015 United Nations petition to decry the genocide of African people in the US according to the indictment. | ||
| Backed efforts. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| It's negative to back efforts such as the 2015 United Nations petition to decry the genocide of African people. | ||
| But just look at that statement. | ||
| Backed efforts such as a thing to decry genocide. | ||
| The United Nations petition of 2015 to decry the genocide of African people in the US according to the indictment. | ||
| Okay, so the real misinformation and propaganda is in the charging documents, actually. | ||
| The real liars here are the I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, I think they went over to Russia for some conference. | ||
| So, by the way, the way this typically works is they say, well, you went to a country against which we've imposed sanctions, and you violated the sanctions regime in some way. | ||
| Like, that's how they get you. | ||
| They're not even alleging that. | ||
| They're not even alleging that. | ||
| They're just saying, you said things that we don't like, that, by the way, a foreign government we don't like, agrees with. | ||
| But that they learned those when they went over to Russia? | ||
| No, it's all on the internet. | ||
| They learned them? | ||
| I mean, I guess it doesn't matter where they learned them. | ||
| I would, because I've talked to the guy and I've seen what they wrote, the opinions that they expressed... | ||
| I don't, you know, the genocide of African peoples in America. | ||
| I don't even know what that means. | ||
| I guess I don't agree with that. | ||
| But their views on Russia, I generally agree with because I think they're true. | ||
| And so does Jeff Sachs and a lot of other non-crazy, non-black nationalists who probably agree with the basic framework of their position. | ||
| But whether we agree or not is not relevant. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| In a free country, which this was when I grew up, you have the right to any opinion you want. | ||
| You do not have the right to hurt people, you don't have the right to steal from them, you don't have the right to defraud people, but you certainly, foremost, have the right to any opinion you want, no matter what the people in charge think of it. | ||
| In fact, you have that right as a bulwark against tyranny by the people in charge. | ||
| Like, that's the only thing that keeps this country free, is my right to have any opinion I want. | ||
| And this guy is going to jail for his opinions. | ||
| And, you know, it's so crazy that I kept thinking, like, is there something that I'm missing? | ||
| Like, it does seem a little fringe, this group. | ||
| I'd never heard of them. | ||
| I'm not saying the money, okay? | ||
| They must have done something. | ||
| Nope, nothing. | ||
| And you should see the video of the FBI, right? | ||
| It's unbelievable. | ||
| They sent, like, it's on the internet. | ||
| It's on X. I have the video on there. | ||
| They sent, like... | ||
| 40 armed agents with automatic weapons to this guy's office and his house. | ||
| Like, no exaggeration. | ||
| It was a full-blown, like, we're arresting El Chapo type thing. | ||
| For this guy, he's like an 83-year-old Army veteran... | ||
| It's outrageous. | ||
| And I really find it baffling that nobody who's like against woke culture or whatever will touch it. | ||
| And the reason they won't touch it is because their foreign policy views in general are more important to them than their views on speech and the First Amendment. | ||
| No views on America. | ||
| Well, if you step out of line, right, so the ideology is that we must support Ukraine. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So this is, Russia has a point. | ||
| This is what they're saying. | ||
| So Russia was very upset about the movement of the weapons closer to their borders. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Joining NATO, all the stuff that was the hard red lines that Putin had already set, like if Russia would definitely do something if Ukraine joined NATO. We all knew that. | ||
| So if you deviate from that, you're going to be in trouble. | ||
| So better just ignore it. | ||
| Because you can't... | ||
| You clearly... | ||
| If you look at who these people are... | ||
| I mean, these are people that would be supported by the left. | ||
| Wholeheartedly. | ||
| Well, they are. | ||
| I mean, it's like the revolutionary socialism. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They're not at CPAC this year. | ||
| But the left has to ignore it because then... | ||
| 100%. | ||
| It conflicts with this other part of the ideology. | ||
| Well, the categories right and left are just like... | ||
| Now they're actually ridiculous. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're ridiculous. | |
| They don't mean anything. | ||
| In fact, we've moved past the point where they don't mean anything. | ||
| They do mean something. | ||
| They are propaganda instruments designed to cloak the truth from the rest of us. | ||
| In fact, there's agreement, not disagreement at the center of power. | ||
| They all agree on the things that matter. | ||
| And those are the economy and foreign policy because that's where the money is. | ||
| There's no effort to, say, rein in the credit card companies, which if you really cared about the country, you'd say, but people are really suffering. | ||
| They don't have enough money to live. | ||
| Kids can't not only not buy houses, they can't afford rent. | ||
| And why is that? | ||
| And one of the main reasons is because they're paying close to 20% interest on their credit cards. | ||
| And okay, we just imagine that in a free market, that's a good thing. | ||
| Tell me why that's a good thing. | ||
| Who benefits from that? | ||
| Why are we for that again? | ||
| I'm not for that. | ||
| I think the credit card companies are villains and they send credit cards to kids at school and get them hooked on this. | ||
| I think it's totally wrong. | ||
| And if you said that in the U.S. Congress, people would look at you like you had three heads. | ||
| Like, what? | ||
| They just don't care because they all agree. | ||
| That our current economic system and our current foreign policy assumptions are good. | ||
| So that's not a two-party system. | ||
| That's a one-party system. | ||
| And it doesn't serve the interest of the country. | ||
| And my position is super simple. | ||
| The only country I have an emotional attachment to is the United States. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| I like lots of countries. | ||
| I like almost all countries, actually. | ||
| I've been to a lot of them. | ||
| I like them all. | ||
| But the only one I feel emotional about is the United States because I live here. | ||
| I was born here. | ||
| My kids are here. | ||
| It's my country. | ||
| And most of the people in our foreign policy conversation do not feel that way. | ||
| So that distorts it really dramatically. | ||
| And they're also a lot of them are violence worshipers. | ||
| Like they get off on war. | ||
| They get off on hurting people and on the power that that imbues them with. | ||
| And I think, you know, the Liz Cheney model. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like someone like Liz Cheney, who's got like a really sad and barren personal life. | ||
| A lot of them are this way. | ||
| Weird personal life. | ||
| Failed personal life. | ||
| Like, they don't have people who love them. | ||
| They don't have kids who respect them. | ||
| And so Adam Kinzinger, whatever, they're all kind of the same. | ||
| The more broken they are inside, the more focused they are on, like, war and foreign policy because it gives them a feeling of power and strength and success. | ||
| Like, I can't get my wife to respect me. | ||
| I can't get my kids to listen to me. | ||
| I can't pass any meaningful domestic agenda. | ||
| But what I can do is bomb the living shit out of a foreign country. | ||
| And so there is this, it's not true for all of them, but for a lot of them, there is this syndrome that drives their behavior. | ||
| But whatever the reason, it's totally disconnected from what's good for the country. | ||
| And if you run America, you have one job. | ||
| One job. | ||
| And that's improve America. | ||
| Period. | ||
| They don't see it that way. | ||
| So I don't think the system can continue because it's too distorted. | ||
| It's not serving its original purpose at all. | ||
| So what was it that these guys said that made this raid possible? | ||
| They said Russia, and I don't want to speak for them. | ||
| Anyone who wants to see it can interview. | ||
| And I just want to say again, one of the cool things about this moment that I did not anticipate, there's all this sad stuff happening. | ||
| I know that you probably experience this all the time. | ||
| It's like finding not only common ground with people you thought you had nothing in common with at all, but also liking them. | ||
| I actually liked the guy. | ||
| I'm sure we disagree on a million things. | ||
| Probably mad at white people. | ||
| I am a white person. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| But in my conversation, I was like, I like this guy. | ||
| He's honest and he's sincere. | ||
| He's principled. | ||
| He was a veteran. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whatever. | |
| No, I really think what they said was what I have said and a lot of people have said, which is there was a reason for this invasion. | ||
| I personally think the invasion was a bad idea. | ||
| It didn't help anybody. | ||
| I'm against war. | ||
| I'm sad the war is ongoing. | ||
| But they were pushed to this by a more powerful country, which would be the United States of America, with the threat of including Ukraine in NATO. It's really simple. | ||
| And right before the invasion, days before the invasion, They send poor Kamala Harris, who has no idea what day it is, to the Munich Security Conference, an area she knows nothing about, no experience in it at all, and they send her there for one purpose, which is to announce at a press briefing, with all the cameras rolling, to Zelensky right there, she says, we want you to join NATO. What? | ||
| No other NATO members were clamoring for Ukraine. | ||
| It didn't even qualify for NATO membership. | ||
| Why would you say that? | ||
| When Putin's got troops amassed on the Ukrainian border, you send your vice president to the Munich Security Conference with the world watching and say this that no one even really wants? | ||
| Why would you do that? | ||
| To provoke war. | ||
| Obviously. | ||
| What's the other reason? | ||
| And it was scripted. | ||
| Like, Kamala Harris is not free-balling stuff. | ||
| Like, she's saying what she's told to say. | ||
| Obviously. | ||
| It's not her area. | ||
| She doesn't know anything about this stuff. | ||
| She was told to say that. | ||
| But why? | ||
| To provoke a war. | ||
| Obviously. | ||
| So that was my read. | ||
| I said that on Fox News. | ||
| Not a lot of people liked it, but it just seemed obvious to me. | ||
| I'm not making excuses for Putin. | ||
| Please. | ||
| I want to protect the United States, and I think this war really hurts the United States. | ||
| Like, my motives are always right out there. | ||
| Anyway, I think they said a species of that, something like that. | ||
| And the last thing I'll say is that, why was the reaction so strong? | ||
| Because it was true. | ||
| They don't care if you lie. | ||
| No one in power cares if you lie. | ||
| But a lot of people are saying... | ||
| They only care when you tell the truth. | ||
| A lot of people are saying those things, and they're not getting arrested. | ||
| Because he's like some black nationalist guy in St. Petersburg. | ||
| Like, who cares? | ||
| Who's going to defend him? | ||
| Nobody. | ||
| He's some wacko. | ||
| He's some like 80 year old guy who's like been in the like fringe left movement for the past 50 years, you know, like new Huey Newton and Stokely Carmichael. | ||
| He's like a relic of the past and like he doesn't have a constituency. | ||
| He doesn't care. | ||
| The modern Democratic Party hates him. | ||
| He hates them. | ||
| And the Republican Party is like black nationalism. | ||
| No, thanks. | ||
| So he has no constituency. | ||
| They're never going to like you could say that. | ||
| And what are they going to do to you? | ||
| You know, nothing, because they can't. | ||
| But this guy? | ||
| Yeah, crush him. | ||
| Kill him. | ||
| And that's exactly what they're doing. | ||
| And I really think, not to be like a 70s liberal about it, if you let the weak get crushed, it's bad. | ||
| It's super bad. | ||
| You need to protect the weak. | ||
| And this guy's weak. | ||
| And so you think they're making an example out of him with this? | ||
| Yeah, and they can. | ||
| They have all this power. | ||
| I just don't understand why they would move so many people, why they would get so many agents, why they would do this so publicly for one guy's opinion or one group of people's opinion. | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, why did medieval kings hang the heads of people they executed from the gates? | ||
| Right, but it feels like there should be more to it. | ||
| Like, what did they say? | ||
| You're telling me! | ||
| I know. | ||
| The problem is that, I mean, I'm just straw man, I'm steel manning this, rather. | ||
| So the problem is that they went over to Russia, and they talked with people in Russia, and then they're saying these things. | ||
| Is that the problem? | ||
| They're not charged with that. | ||
| They're not charged with going to Russia. | ||
| But do you think that's the motivation behind it, because they went over there? | ||
| They said, A different article has a quote from him. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, they are not, at least when I interviewed him, they had not been charged with taking money from Russia. | ||
| So it says, they've been accused of us, they've accused us of taking money from Russia. | ||
| Yeshitel has said yesterday at a news conference on July 29th, we've never taken any money from Russian government, but I'm not saying that because I'm morally opposed to taking money from the Russians or anyone else who wants to support the struggles for black people. | ||
| Don't tell us that we can't have friends that you don't like. | ||
| He accused the U.S. government of seeking to use the APSP as a pawn in its proxy war with Russia. | ||
| The unsubstantiated allegation that opponents of the war are co-conspirators with a foreign power are intended to bolster the phantom of a Russian boogeyman in the public consciousness. | ||
| The escalating military aggression by the US against Russia and China is already being accompanied by increasing repression and an attempt to criminalize left-wing opposition to the unpopular war. | ||
| Well, exactly. | ||
| So they're accusing him of taking money from Russia. | ||
| They're not. | ||
| They're not charging him. | ||
| So here's the distinction, which is like really, really important. | ||
| So there are two levels on which the Department of Justice in all administrations acts. | ||
| There's the level of propaganda. | ||
| Like, what do we want people to think? | ||
| And there's the level of law. | ||
| What are we charging someone with? | ||
| And you have to ignore the first. | ||
| And pay very close attention to the second. | ||
| So we have a legal system, we have laws, and you can't actually go to jail unless you violate one under the terms of our system. | ||
| And so ignore what they're saying about you. | ||
| Joe Rogan sucks! | ||
| He's a bad man! | ||
| But in the end, I'm busting you for double parking. | ||
| And so really, you're not a bad man, you're a double parker under the law. | ||
| And so if you look at the charges against these guys, they're not charged with violating sanctions regulations. | ||
| They are charged with totally amorphous, quote, crimes, like defrauding the U.S. government, not for money, but for, like, defrauding it, like, I guess, counter signaling it. | ||
| Sending a message publicly that they don't like? | ||
| I mean, there's no crime. | ||
| Look it up. | ||
| Except speaking. | ||
| And I think that's a precedent that we don't want to live with. | ||
| No, no doubt. | ||
| Yeah, let's take a leak. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| We're going to pee. | ||
| Tucker and I are going to pee together. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's the confronting of reality. | ||
| You're forced to examine your beliefs and why you came to those beliefs in the first place. | ||
| That is the beauty of this moment, though. | ||
| It is. | ||
| People are living intentionally much more, and it's also just much more interesting. | ||
| It's not just, you know, it's less shallow than it was for sure. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I think it's more nuanced. | ||
| At least the people that are paying attention have a more nuanced perspective. | ||
| But then you have the people that are in the echo chambers that are just digging their heels in even more. | ||
| And you could spot them easily because they... | ||
| Well, they're missing out because there's nothing more liberating than admitting you were wrong. | ||
| I mean, that is like the moment of liberation. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's the basis of religion. | ||
| It's the basis of AA. It's the basis of anything that improves you as a person is admitting, honestly admitting to other people, not just to yourself, that like, wow, I got that wrong. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then you're free because then you don't have to hide it anymore. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Very important. | ||
| And it's a beautiful thing. | ||
| And that is like changing your mind. | ||
| I always notice this covering politics that, you know, a candidate would be like, I've got him on tape saying 10 years ago something different. | ||
| And no one ever asked my opinion, but I always wanted to say, why don't you just, why don't you say, you're absolutely right, and the country's a lot different from what it was 10 years ago, and so my opinions change too. | ||
| Like, why wouldn't they? | ||
| Because I'm not a freaking robot or a liar. | ||
| Also, I used to think this because of that, and now I realize I was wrong. | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| How great is that? | ||
| It's part of being a human, it's not being a flip-flopper. | ||
| It's the best part of being a human. | ||
| Well, this is an interesting time for that because you see people that won't do that. | ||
| And you could recognize them easily because they're the first people to throw out insults. | ||
| The first thing they do when they describe you, they'll describe you in an insulting way, and then they'll say what they disagree with you about. | ||
| They'll say something hard. | ||
| They try to define you. | ||
| You're far-right, white supremacist, racist, misogynist. | ||
| Yeah, they throw it all at you, and then they say what you said. | ||
| It's so funny. | ||
| I got called racist and white supremacist so many times, but when I first was called that, I mean, it really stung, you know, a lot because just of where I grew up and how I grew up and those are like the worst things you could ever call somebody. | ||
| And so I actually like paused for a moment and thought, am I? Which I think it's fair to ask yourself. | ||
| Like, am I? Whites, whatever that. | ||
| I never even figured out what that was. | ||
| Am I a racist? | ||
| Not really. | ||
| And I thought, really, the people I dislike most are almost all white liberals, actually. | ||
| You're racist against white people. | ||
| No, I am white. | ||
| My kids are white. | ||
| I'm not against white people. | ||
| I like white people. | ||
| But no, it's not that. | ||
| It's that... | ||
| So, a reporter once called me about this, ugh, you've been called racist? | ||
| He's like, no, actually, I really dislike you. | ||
| If I were to sort of narrow down my bigotries, it's like, people like you, I just think you're disgusting. | ||
| I really mean it, too! | ||
| Racist! | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Well, it's a thing, you know? | ||
| I don't think that works as much anymore. | ||
| It doesn't work. | ||
| No. | ||
| Well, I think a lot of the things that you overuse, eventually people realize, like, oh, you're yelling wolf again. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And when people get hit with it and don't disappear, then it becomes obvious that it lacks power. | ||
| Well, it's also you're trying to use these words to define someone, especially someone like you that has so many hours and hours of talking about things. | ||
| Like to try this reductionist perspective of someone to reduce them to this ultimately very negative thing and not say that they're a human being. | ||
| And also, the fact that it's done by the people that want to think of themselves as compassionate and kind, which is the most bizarre. | ||
| The left is so aggressively incompassionate. | ||
| Like, they're so aggressively unkind. | ||
| Letting people die of drug ODs on the sidewalk? | ||
| That's compassion? | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| That whole thing is fucking crazy. | ||
| Well, it's cruelty, actually. | ||
| It is. | ||
| And it's also, when you find... | ||
| Do you know Coleon Duarez? | ||
| I know him. | ||
| Yeah, great guy. | ||
| He opened my eyes to the homelessness thing. | ||
| We had him on the podcast, and he was explaining how he was in San Francisco, and he was like, what is this? | ||
| It's like, they don't have any money for this? | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| Like, no. | ||
| There's a whole business behind it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| And these people that are running this homelessness initiative, or whatever the fuck they call it, they're making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. | ||
| Some of them a quarter million dollars a year. | ||
| Imagine making money off the homeless. | ||
| And not doing a goddamn thing. | ||
| But what's so funny is I do think the root of their power and the one thing they're good at is just charging the moral high ground and taking it in the first moments of the battle. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They just run up to the moral high ground and are like, we've got this. | ||
| This is ours. | ||
| And they'll protect that at all costs. | ||
| And it's like, that's kind of all they have. | ||
| Is this self-righteousness? | ||
| And if you can puncture that, it's like you're getting rich from the homeless, actually. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And is there anything more disgusting than that? | ||
| Some junkie who's dying in misery outside the convention center in San Francisco, and you're making money on that? | ||
| They're essentially using those people as a battery to expand the power of government. | ||
| Yeah, and their own personal advantage. | ||
| Yeah, they're expanding government. | ||
| They're making more government employees. | ||
| Now there's tons of people that are working on the homelessness problem, air quotes. | ||
| And, you know, they probably all have blue hair and they talk nonsense. | ||
| And nothing's getting done. | ||
| And no one's being punished for it. | ||
| But when they did that study where they said that they had no data, like, how are you? | ||
| What? | ||
| You can't say whether or not it's doing anything? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, how'd you spend 24 billion dollars? | ||
| But why are they not treated as, like, the most reprehensible people in our society? | ||
| I think there's too many things to think about. | ||
| I think most people, unlike you and I, aren't even paying attention to it. | ||
| They're paying attention to the fact that the tents are there. | ||
| They're paying attention if you go to Los Angeles, it's a fucking zombie apocalypse. | ||
| But what they're not paying attention to is, what is going on? | ||
| How many people are making money? | ||
| I didn't even know until Coleon explained it to us. | ||
| I had no idea. | ||
| I thought it was just they don't have any money. | ||
| They don't put any money in it, and they let these people sleep there. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| No, there's actual money. | ||
| No, there are all these parasites. | ||
| Yeah, parasites. | ||
| Government parasites. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Those are real. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And, you know, this whole idea of, I've created so many jobs. | ||
| Like, what jobs? | ||
| Are they government jobs that are just bullshit? | ||
| Because there's a lot of those. | ||
| What's crazy to me, just having spent most of my life in Washington, is how close this is to the lawmakers physically. | ||
| So the US Capitol sits across from something called Union Station, which is a really beautiful train station, right on Capitol Hill. | ||
| And so to get into the Capitol, when there's a massive homeless city there, people dying of drug ODs, right there. | ||
| And so to get to work every day, lawmakers have to step over the bodies of fellow Americans Dying, like dying, living outdoors, shitting in the bushes, addicted to drugs, which is hell, okay? | ||
| And they have to ignore that on their way to creating utopia in some foreign country. | ||
| And you're like, does it ever occur to you that that's disgusting? | ||
| That your primary duty is to the drug addict, your fellow American, you're doing nothing? | ||
| And you're telling me how we're going to make Eastern Europe into, you know, this brave new world? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's so crazy. | |
| I don't know. | ||
| I just can't get past that. | ||
| I think I'm not super sensitive or aware or anything. | ||
| I'm not super anything, really. | ||
| I'm pretty ordinary, but I think I would notice. | ||
| Walking into a vote on Ukraine, I'd be like, shit, there are like five junkies on the street. | ||
| Maybe we should do something for them? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's very bizarre. | ||
| It's bizarre that they can rationalize it, or at least that they don't get called out by all their people. | ||
| And this idea that it's compassionate, that you have compassion to leave these people and to give them aid and to help them and give them clean needles. | ||
| But then you've got to think, like, maybe there's something bigger going on, actually. | ||
| Because there's no... | ||
| Yes, there's an entire sector of the economy now that feeds off of human misery. | ||
| The drug treatment centers that don't work, the homeless advocates who create more homeless, the, you know, migrant workers, you know, American-born aid agencies, workers who... | ||
| You know, increase illegal immigration and gang activity. | ||
| You know, this is all this, you know, people are making money off this, the arms manufacturers that help kill people in foreign countries, etc, etc. | ||
| There's a VIG and all of that. | ||
| It's a scam, it's a grift, etc, etc. | ||
| But like, there's something more. | ||
| Like, there are a lot of people who seem to be just like for evil for its own sake. | ||
| And you're like, maybe all the crazy talk about a spiritual war of good and evil, maybe there's something to that. | ||
| Maybe that's not an illusion. | ||
| Maybe that's like, everyone else has always thought that. | ||
| There are certainly forces that have evil consequences that exist. | ||
| But they act on people from the outside. | ||
| And you feel it also on the other side. | ||
| I mean, people are better than they naturally are sometimes. | ||
| Like you feel compassion for people or true empathy for someone. | ||
| You really want to help someone. | ||
| There's no advantage to you at all. | ||
| Like, why are you doing that? | ||
| It's almost like you're being acted on by good. | ||
| And all of us have known those moments where we just are cruel for the sake of it, hurt someone for the sake of it. | ||
| What's that? | ||
| There's no advantage to us. | ||
| That's evil acting on us. | ||
| And I think we're seeing it at scale. | ||
| And like, I grew up in the most secular world you could ever grow up in. | ||
| Southern California in the 70s and 80s and in a very secular family, and I've never really paid much attention to that. | ||
| And all of a sudden, every, not everyone, a lot of people I know who had similar childhoods to mine, similar life experiences are like, maybe there is like a supernatural realm. | ||
| Maybe there's more than just like what we can see and feel. | ||
| Maybe life is more than just ordering shit on Amazon. | ||
| Maybe there's like a purpose. | ||
| Maybe there is this battle between good and evil. | ||
| Around us that we can't see but that we do experience a lot. | ||
| It seems like it's always been a narrative throughout human history. | ||
| It's always been this recognition. | ||
| Carl's over there snoring. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't have my headphones on so I can hear them. | |
| You're snorting or snoring? | ||
| Snoring. | ||
| Carl snoring. | ||
| Carl the dog. | ||
| Oh, Carl the dog! | ||
| Carl the dog. | ||
| I like Carl the dog. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He snores. | |
| He's the best, but he snores when he sleeps because he's a little French bulldog. | ||
| He's a sporty little bulldog. | ||
| He's awesome. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's the best. | ||
| Dogs don't get cuter. | ||
| They might be as cute, but they don't get any cuter than Carl. | ||
| I think that's right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've got some pretty good-looking dogs, I will say. | ||
| Yeah, I have a beautiful dog. | ||
| I have a golden retriever, but he's not as cute as Carl. | ||
| Carl's a different thing. | ||
| Don't tell him that. | ||
| He knows. | ||
| He doesn't like Carl. | ||
| Well, he doesn't hate Carl, but he, like, ignores him. | ||
| He thinks of Carl as a thief of attention only. | ||
| Which he is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Fair. | ||
| So, we've always – human beings have always at least believed that there are forces of good and evil and that they – that's what exorcisms are about, right? | ||
| The idea that you're possessed. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You're possessed by evil. | ||
| There's always been this thought that there's good and evil. | ||
| But when did you start – when did you start considering that and thinking that that's – because weren't you at one point in time – weren't you a Grateful Deadhead? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I listened to them this morning, yeah. | ||
| You used to travel around with them? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How old were you when that was going on? | ||
| I went to my first Dead show in December of 1984. So I was 15 at, speaking of the San Francisco Civic Center. | ||
| Yeah, the New Year's show. | ||
| So they always played in Oakland, but one year they played in San Francisco. | ||
| And so we were in Tahoe over Christmas, and for some reason my dad was gone. | ||
| I don't really know where. | ||
| So my brother and I drove illegally from Tahoe in the family vehicle to downtown San Francisco. | ||
| How old was your brother? | ||
| Thirteen. | ||
| So you drove? | ||
| Yeah, I drove. | ||
| Fifteen, you drove? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| From Tahoe. | ||
| So it was a couple hours. | ||
| And I remember being on the freeway like... | ||
| At fifteen. | ||
| Well, we had a pretty... | ||
| Different kind of childhood. | ||
| But anyway... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is that you? | |
| Yeah, it's me on the left. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know how that... | ||
| That picture is hanging in my barn. | ||
| And I've never... | ||
| I don't release any pictures of myself or family or anything like that. | ||
| And somebody came to my barn and took a picture of that. | ||
| It's hanging next to my sink. | ||
| And put it on the internet. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So that's my brother Buckley on the right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Um... | |
| That picture was taken, so my dad was a reporter in San Francisco in the 60s, and a pretty well-known reporter, and that was in the 80s when I was in school, and we were home for Christmas vacation, and he had covered The Grateful Dead. | ||
| He knew The Grateful Dead. | ||
| My dad did. | ||
| So they were in his office. | ||
| They came through D.C., and they called him, and they came over to his office. | ||
| Jerry came over to his office, and my dad's like, I've got Jerry Garcia here. | ||
| You guys should come down. | ||
| So my brother and I, we lived in Georgetown and we had a Vespa. | ||
| Remember those? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And we drove our Vespa. | ||
| It was freaking cold out. | ||
| I'll never forget that. | ||
| We drove our Vespa down to 6th and E or whatever where my dad's office was. | ||
| And there was Jerry. | ||
| I'd never met him before. | ||
| He was missing the middle finger of his right hand, famously. | ||
| You know, the famous handprint, Grateful Dead handprint. | ||
| But when he shook his hand, you could feel it collapse, kind of, because he didn't have that middle finger. | ||
| But anyway, so my brother and I drove to the New Year's show. | ||
| It was actually a couple nights before New Year's, and we didn't have tickets, of course. | ||
| And we were in the park across from there, and we were, you know, whatever, doing the, you know, whatever things that people do at Dead shows, and we were pretty freaking out of it. | ||
| And this guy comes up out of nowhere and puts a ticket around my face and goes, here, and hands me a ticket. | ||
| So my brother was extremely out of it. | ||
| I mean, he was, you know, I never should have done this, but I was like, all right, man, I'm going in. | ||
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I left my little brother in the park. | |
| During the show, just like very, very impaired, like super, super impaired. | ||
| It was completely wrong to do something like that, but I did do it. | ||
| And then I went in and saw the show, kind of freaked out in the middle of it, hid in the men's room for a while. | ||
| I'll never forget that. | ||
| Standing on the stall smoking cigarettes. | ||
| Is it acid? | ||
| No, it was psilocybin mushrooms, which, by the way, I should just say, I got sober 22 years ago. | ||
| I'm completely opposed to anything. | ||
| I don't take Advil. | ||
| I'm totally opposed to anything other than nicotine and coffee. | ||
| But yeah, it was mushrooms, so we ate way too many. | ||
| And started to kind of melt down a little bit. | ||
| But anyway, the point is I get out of the show. | ||
| This is pre-self. | ||
| This is 1984. And I get out of the show, and they played actually a lot of tunes that they didn't play. | ||
| They played Spoonful. | ||
| Like, they didn't play Spoonful a lot. | ||
| It was like a pretty obscure tune. | ||
| I'd never heard it before, actually. | ||
| And I couldn't find my brother. | ||
| My little brother. | ||
| And I'm like in charge. | ||
| And, you know, my closest friend and lifelong friends. | ||
| Talked to him this morning. | ||
| But I couldn't find him. | ||
| And I was like, oh, man. | ||
| My brother's gone. | ||
| But there he was. | ||
| He appeared like an hour later. | ||
| He had spent the entire show in somebody's van parked there. | ||
| But he seemed undamaged. | ||
| It was great. | ||
| I mean, not everything about it is great. | ||
| I mean, I do think the drug thing got, you know, definitely hurt people for sure. | ||
| But from my perspective, I went to a bunch of probably 50 or more shows and really enjoyed it. | ||
| And I love the fact that they had two drummers. | ||
| That was a huge thing for me. | ||
| I love rhythm. | ||
| I think it's the basis of music. | ||
| It's obviously the basis of music. | ||
| I mean, the instruments are cool, but they're kind of like interior design and the The architecture is rhythm, and it's the universal sound that every culture appreciates because it reflects something that's pre-existing that's in you. | ||
| Everyone relates to rhythm, and I just absolutely loved the drums. | ||
| They would always play, like it was called drums, actually, but they would play a section of every show. | ||
| It was just drums. | ||
| Bill Kreutzman and Mickey Hart just gone crazy on the drums. | ||
| They had drum circles, and I just like drums. | ||
| To this day, I listen to drums. | ||
| Just percussion. | ||
| King Sonia Day, the great West African drummer. | ||
| Anyway, whatever. | ||
| So yeah, I like The Grateful Dead a lot, and still do, and I like that kind of music. | ||
| Jam music? | ||
| I like jam music, I like acoustic music, I love bluegrass, love bluegrass and Americana. | ||
| And to see that grow, to see Billy Strings become like a venue packer, you know, like Billy Strings is like a big act right now. | ||
| I do feel like creativity, art, has been completely destroyed and eliminated in the United States. | ||
| As we were saying earlier, you can't be creative if you're not honest. | ||
| It's that simple. | ||
| And we can't be honest, so there's no creativity. | ||
| And in the visual arts and literature and architecture, it's died. | ||
| But comedy is still alive, thank heaven. | ||
| And music... | ||
| For some reason has escaped that and is still alive. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the growth, the explosion of acoustic bluegrass, you know, the banjo, like one of the great instruments ever, is just thrilling and like a sign of life. | ||
| You know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| At this late stage. | ||
| Well, I think when there's social pressures and when society's in chaos, art does tend to thrive. | ||
| Some kind of art. | ||
| Some art, that's right. | ||
| Comedy certainly does now. | ||
| Like, comedy's never been better. | ||
| But it came close. | ||
| It's an amazing time. | ||
| It came close. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, the walls got breached. | ||
| Whoa! | ||
| No, but a few years, I don't know when it was, but eight years ago or something, it felt like, oh, wow. | ||
| You know, people can't tell jokes anymore. | ||
| We kept doing it. | ||
| I noticed! | ||
| Yeah, we kept doing it. | ||
| You kept the little embers alive. | ||
| Yeah, well, it was flames. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| You know, when you get people in a club and you take their phones away and just have them just be actual human beings and not be filming everything, just being completely trapped with this idea of capturing something and then putting it online, then you get to have a human experience. | ||
| You mean when people, like, live in the present rather than in the future or far away? | ||
| That's one of the great things about going to a good club that uses yonder bags for your phones. | ||
| It just takes you out of, like, at the very least, it's a break. | ||
| Like this podcast is a break for three hours of phones. | ||
| There's no, I'm not, no one's checking phones. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| That's very rare with human beings where they can just sit down and just have conversations for long periods of time without being distracted by something. | ||
| Not in my house, but yeah. | ||
| It's a real problem with folks. | ||
| It's a huge problem. | ||
| It's a huge problem. | ||
| And the one thing I will say about my very unconventional childhood is there was a huge premium on meals and eating with people. | ||
| And spending four hours at the table was totally normal in the house that I grew up in. | ||
| Totally normal. | ||
| In fact, it was daily. | ||
| And that was our primary form of entertainment and mode of communication and, you know, thing that we did for fulfillment and fun. | ||
| And I still do that. | ||
| I still feel that way. | ||
| And we have dinner parties constantly and there are no phones and people talk and entertain each other. | ||
| And it's like it's so much more interesting. | ||
| I'm not on social media, but if I were on social media, I don't think I would find that on Instagram. | ||
| And I'm not attacking Instagram, but I don't think I would find that, anything like that. | ||
| No, it's definitely a lost thing. | ||
| It's such an easy thing! | ||
| It's such a fun thing! | ||
| It is a fun thing, yeah. | ||
| It's a great thing. | ||
| And I think people enjoy it, and I think that's also led to the rise of podcasts, too. | ||
| Because they don't get that in their real life, so at least they get to be a person who sits in on these conversations. | ||
| I gotta say, this is not being suck-uppy, because I don't suck up ever to anyone. | ||
| But the effect that podcasts have had is just incredible, and I never would have predicted that. | ||
| I wouldn't have predicted it. | ||
| In a million freaking years. | ||
| I would have never thought it. | ||
| When I first started doing this, it was in my living room with my friend Brian, and we did it on a laptop. | ||
| We had a webcam and we were like... | ||
| With my friend Brian. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Brian Redband of Kill Tony. | ||
| You met Brian. | ||
| Yes, I did. | ||
| No, but I just love the phrase, with my friend Brian. | ||
| Like every bad story, like... | ||
| Me and my friend Brian. | ||
| We were down in Mexicali and I just... | ||
| Me and my friend Brian. | ||
| We just started fucking around online, and then we started eventually bringing in guests, and then we eventually got a studio, and then eventually I got a big place in LA, like a real warehouse, and then eventually moved to Texas. | ||
| It all just eventually happened. | ||
| But it was not, I mean, I was in another part of media for that whole period, and if you had asked me, up until the last few years, like, the future is clearly shorter, crisper, more produced, right? | ||
| Right, everybody would have thought that. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Everyone did think that, including me, and I hated it. | ||
| You know, I hate it. | ||
| I like long form, but I was a long form magazine writer for years, so I thought, but I thought that was over. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not over. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Everybody thought that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Even my friends, they were telling me how to edit my show. | ||
| They're like, you should edit that. | ||
| No one's going to listen in three hours. | ||
| I'm like, then don't listen. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| Do whatever you want. | ||
| I'm not making any money doing this. | ||
| It was just for fun. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| It was just fun for years. | ||
| For years and years, I did it just with no money. | ||
| There was no money in it forever. | ||
| What year, like how many years in did it start to pay for itself? | ||
| Five. | ||
| That's a long time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Long time. | ||
| It took a while. | ||
| I mean, it was probably like existing. | ||
| Yeah, but about five years in, then it started making money. | ||
| And then it was like, oh, this is a business. | ||
| I remember very clearly, I was on stage once in Chicago. | ||
| I was doing the Chicago Theater. | ||
| And I had this story that I was going to tell. | ||
| I'm like, how many people listen to the podcast? | ||
| And there's 3,700 people in the place. | ||
| And they went nuts. | ||
| It was like, yeah! | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I was like, oh. | |
| I thought there was this thing that I'm doing where a few people are paying attention. | ||
| I don't even know what the... | ||
| Back then, I never even knew what the numbers were. | ||
| I didn't even care. | ||
| Well, they may not have been... | ||
| Could you even collect numbers accurately then? | ||
| Yeah, you could get downloads off of whatever the provider was that was the host. | ||
| You could get download numbers from the host. | ||
| They would use that to inform ads. | ||
| like oh he gets X amount of downloads per month and then they would you know that's when there's very few people are advertising on podcast all right let's give it a try but it's one of the great developments between podcasting and Billy strings like I have I'm serious. | ||
| I have hope. | ||
| That it's not all going in the wrong direction, because you can get this view that, like, everything is falling apart, late Rome, just a matter of time before, you know, it really does collapse, and then you see these signs that are not minor, you know, they're significant. | ||
| Like, no. | ||
| I mean, I haven't met a person in the past year who said, you know, I thought this, but then I was reading the New York Times and I realized I was wrong. | ||
| Like, not one person. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But the number of people who say, I was listening to this podcast. | ||
| I was listening to Rogan and da-da-da-da-da. | ||
| It's like, really noticeable. | ||
| Yeah, that's why it's interesting. | ||
| It's interesting because you could put people in front of people and they might not even be right. | ||
| It might be wrong. | ||
| But at least now you're having conversations about something you would never have a conversation about before. | ||
| And even if this person gets exposed as being incorrect, well now you have a more nuanced understanding of what the subject is about and why people think incorrect things. | ||
| And, you know, this idea of, like, platforming people is a big one today. | ||
| Why would you platform that person? | ||
| First of all, platform is not a verb. | ||
| And whenever they take a perfectly good noun and turn it into a verb, you know something bad is afoot, okay? | ||
| Platform. | ||
| Oh, you mean letting an adult human being talk? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think that's not only allowed, I think that's the law. | ||
| Not only that, I think it's important for us. | ||
| It's even important to talk to people that are completely different than you, that don't agree with you at all. | ||
| Well, it's especially important. | ||
| Otherwise, it's just masturbatory. | ||
| It's interesting, too. | ||
| It's just you alone getting yourself off. | ||
| But it's also interesting to know why these people think the way they think. | ||
| And also, there's so many people that if you talk to them online, you'd have these horrible conversations. | ||
| But if you sit down with them as an actual human being and treat them with respect and consideration, and you talk to them like a human being, and you just try to be as friendly and open as possible despite what your differences might be, you realize most people have a lot in common. | ||
| A lot. | ||
| More, way more in common than they don't. | ||
| But that's the secret that they're trying to hide. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So mind control, you know, the end stage of mind control is censorship, right? | ||
| But it begins long before that, and it begins by creating false categories that wall off your willingness, that prevent you from wanting to know certain things or talk to certain people, and name-calling is the most obvious tool. | ||
| Like, he's a crank, he's a racist, he's a whatever, fill it in. | ||
| And then you're like, I can't listen to that person. | ||
| And I have to say, your willingness to platform or to have a conversation with Alex Jones I think was a revolutionary act, actually. | ||
| Not that everything Alex Jones says is right. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| Not everything I say is right or anyone says is right. | ||
| But Alex Jones is an interesting person. | ||
| And even if he's not interesting, he has been walled off from the rest of us through name-calling. | ||
| And your willingness to be like, no, actually, we're just going to listen to Alex Jones and you can decide for yourself? | ||
| Well, Alex has been my friend for more than 20 years. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But... | ||
| Yeah, but I'm sure you have other friends you haven't invited. | ||
| You were not allowed to talk to him. | ||
| And when you hear Alex Jones talk, you may not agree with everything he says. | ||
| I don't know that I do. | ||
| But you definitely understand why they told you you couldn't listen to Alex Jones. | ||
| Well, that's one of the reasons why I had him as one of the first guests when I came over to Spotify. | ||
| Love that. | ||
| I was like, let's go. | ||
| What did they say? | ||
| Well, a lot of people weren't happy. | ||
| We lost sponsors. | ||
| It was an issue. | ||
| But I think it did the job. | ||
| Regardless of what he said that's incorrect, clearly the Sandy Hook thing was incorrect. | ||
| Alex, I know Alex personally, so I know what he was going through. | ||
| And everybody wants to talk about mental health and they want to praise people for being honest about their mental health issues and support them on their mental health journey to wellness. | ||
| Alex has gone through some real issues, and one of the reasons why he's gone through some issues is because that guy is uncovering real shit that's terrifying every fucking day. | ||
| And he was drinking out of control, and he's just fucking constantly stressed, freaking out. | ||
| When you see so many lies and so much propaganda and so many psyops that are being done on people, you start seeing them where they don't exist. | ||
| And that's what he did. | ||
| Well, and he's also channeling some stuff. | ||
| You can't call 9-11 in detail because you're super informed. | ||
| Before the fact. | ||
| He called it. | ||
| He literally called it in the summer of 2001. He said, planes will fly into the World Trade Centers and they will blame a man called Osama Bin Laden. | ||
| We know that he said that because he said it on tape multiple times. | ||
| And then he said, call the White House and tell them this. | ||
| Now, that's all we know about Alex Jones. | ||
| Let's just say that's the fact set. | ||
| How'd that happen? | ||
| Right. | ||
| How did he do that? | ||
| No. | ||
| He's channeling something. | ||
| You think so? | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's like no other... | ||
| I mean, tell me how he did it otherwise. | ||
| I've asked him about it. | ||
| How did you do that at length? | ||
| He had dinner in my barn recently. | ||
| We were talking about this. | ||
| How'd you do that? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| He just came to me. | ||
| And that's real. | ||
| That is real. | ||
| The supernatural is real. | ||
| And I don't know why it's so hard... | ||
| For the modern mind, I guess, because it's a materialist mind, to accept that. | ||
| And that's not a new phenomenon. | ||
| It's happened throughout history. | ||
| There are people called prophets, and there are people who were prophets who weren't called prophets, but there are people who have information or parts of information, bits of information, visions of information come to them, and then they relay it. | ||
| It's not from them. | ||
| They received it. | ||
| This is like one of the oldest phenomena in human history. | ||
| Those people tend to be... | ||
| A little crazy, a little imbalanced, a little different from everybody else. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| They live on locusts and honey in the wilderness. | ||
| I mean, they're not like everybody else. | ||
| And that's clearly part of what... | ||
| I'm not saying that everything that Alex Jones says is a prophecy from God. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| But that was prophetic. | ||
| And if it wasn't, tell me how it wasn't. | ||
| In July of 2000... | ||
| Like, I lived in Washington in July of 2001... | ||
| You know, my dad worked in the government. | ||
| Like, I was as well informed as anybody could be about what was going on in the government. | ||
| I've always been interested in what's happening in other countries. | ||
| I was aware of Osama Bin Laden. | ||
| I knew about the Taliban. | ||
| I knew, you know, more than most people. | ||
| There's not one person who was saying, not one person in Washington, D.C. was saying, you know, at some point soon, they may fly airplanes into the World Trade Centers and blame Osama Bin Laden. | ||
| Like, that just wasn't a thing. | ||
| So if you said that multiple times on camera... | ||
| There's a reason. | ||
| I've said this to 50 people, what I just said to you, and they all look at me like, yeah, that's stupid. | ||
| Tell me how it's stupid. | ||
| Tell me how he did that. | ||
| Like, that's impossible, actually. | ||
| He didn't just do it with that, either. | ||
| No, I'm aware. | ||
| He's done it with a lot of things. | ||
| And that's one of the more interesting things about him, is that, like, he talks about stuff, like, he talked about, like, I'm gonna send this to Jamie, because this is one of the really crazy ones that he called. | ||
| And this is like 2000, probably, I guess 2017. Here it is. | ||
| Let me find this. | ||
| Give me a second here. | ||
| Because I sent it to him, like, how the fuck did you call this? | ||
| Because it's one of those ones where you're like, this is exactly what's happening now. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| Here, 2017. Hold on a second. | ||
| I'll send you this, Jamie. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Technology, let's go. | ||
| Alright, I sent it to you, Jamie. | ||
| So this is some guy's Instagram clip that I found that took a clip from the podcast and he's doing commentary over it. | ||
| I'll just overput these things on real quick. | ||
| You got it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, cool. | |
| Here we go. | ||
| 22 years on podcast, InfoWars, Alex Jones and Joe Rogan discuss what's currently happening right now. | ||
| Google, CERN, technology, vampire, aliens. | ||
| In a nutshell, Alex was pretty on point with this message. | ||
| Let me know what your thoughts are. | ||
| Is he crazy or is he on to something? | ||
| It's really big. | ||
| So, okay. | ||
| Yeah, pour another shot of that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's get this out properly now. | |
| All right, let me give you my best, please. | ||
| Deep research proclamation once again. | ||
| What do you think is going, but am I wrong to still hold out hope that aliens are real? | ||
| Because I tell you, that's one of the two guilty pleasures that I still cling to. | ||
| It's Bigfoot and aliens. | ||
| Those are two. | ||
| Bigfoot, not so much. | ||
| I wish it was real, but I just don't think it is. | ||
| Are you ready? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Bigfoot's real? | ||
| No. | ||
| Come on, Daddy. | ||
| No. | ||
| Are you ready? | ||
| Yes! | ||
| I'm gonna give you the big enchilada. | ||
| Joe, there are aliens in this room right now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
For real? | |
| Yeah, you're not of this world, bro. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Me? | |
| You're the alien. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| I didn't know. | ||
| Well, here's what the elite believe. | ||
| And let me be very clear, because the media will take this out of context. | ||
| I only go with what I can prove. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, thank you. | |
| And people can't even handle that. | ||
| There's armies. | ||
| We're fighting a pedophile conspiracy. | ||
| But beyond that, it's a vampire conspiracy in that they are... | ||
| Interdimensionally sucking the essence of our youth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And they believe they're possessed by an off-world entity. | ||
| They do? | ||
| Yeah, and Joe, I've been on air 22 years. | ||
| I don't get into aliens, metaphysical, religion, any of that. | ||
| I've studied the elite, and I've also communicated with a lot of the top people. | ||
| And if you want to know, I will actually break down right now the best knowledge right now of what's happening on the planet. | ||
| What's happening? | ||
| The elite are all about transcendence and living forever and the secrets of the universe and they want to know all this. | ||
| Some are good, some are bad, some are a mix. | ||
| But the good ones don't ever want to organize. | ||
| The bad ones don't want to organize because they lust after power. | ||
| Powerful consciousnesses don't want to dominate other people. | ||
| They want to empower them so they don't tend to get together until things are really late in the game. | ||
| Then they come together. | ||
| Evil is always defeated because good is so much stronger. | ||
| And we're on this planet, and Einstein's physics showed it, Max Planck's physics showed it all. | ||
| There's at least 12 dimensions. | ||
| And now that's why all the top scientists and billionaires are coming out saying it's a false hologram. | ||
| It is artificial. | ||
| The computers are scanning it and finding tension points where it's artificially projected and gravity's bleeding in to this universe. | ||
| That's what they call dark matter. | ||
| So we're like a thought or a dream that's a wisp in some computer program, some God's mind, whatever. | ||
| They're proving it all. | ||
| It's all coming out. | ||
| Now, there's like this sub-transmission zone below the third dimension that's just turned over to the most horrible things is what it resonates to. | ||
| And it's trying to get up into the third dimension that's just a basic level consciousness to launch into the next levels. | ||
| And our species is already way up in the fifth, sixth dimension, consciously, our best people. | ||
| But there's this big war trying to, like, basically destroy humanity because humanity has free will, and there's a decision to which level we want to go to. | ||
| We have free will, so evil's allowed to come and contend, not just good. | ||
| And the elites themselves... | ||
| Believe they're racing using human technology to try to take our best minds and build some type of breakaway civilization where they're going to merge with machines, transcend, and break away from the failed species of this man, which is kind of like a false transmission because they're thinking what they are is ugly and bad, projecting it onto themselves instead of believing, no, it's a human test about building us up. | ||
| And so Google was set up 18, 19 years ago. | ||
| I knew about this before it was declassified. | ||
| I'm just saying I have good sources. | ||
| That they wanted to build a giant artificial system. | ||
| And Google believes that the first artificial intelligence will be a supercomputer based on the neuron activities of the hive mind of humanity with billions of people wired into it with the Internet of Things. | ||
| And so all of our thoughts go into it, and we're actually building a computer that has real neurons in real time that's also psychically connected to us that are organic creatures so that... | ||
| They will have current prediction powers, future prediction powers, a true crystal ball. | ||
| But the big secret is, once you have a crystal ball and know the future, you can add stimuli beforehand and make decisions that control the future. | ||
| And so then it's the end of consciousness and free will for individuals, as we know, and a true 2.0 in a very bad way, hive mind consciousness with an AI jacked into everyone, knowing our hopes and dreams, delivering it to us, not in some PKD wirehead system where we plug in and give up on consciousness because of unlimited pleasure. | ||
| Not because we were already wired and absorbed before we knew it by giving over our consciousness to this system by our daily decisions that it was able to manipulate and control into a larger system. | ||
| There's now a human counter-strike taking place to shut this off before it gets fully into place and to block these systems and to try to have an actual debate about where humanity goes and cut off the pedophiles and psychic vampires that are in control of this AI system before humanity is destroyed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The AI? How'd the pedophile... | |
| Yeah, that's pretty much it. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| That was seven years ago. | ||
| Seven years ago. | ||
| No, seven years ago, no one was thinking AI was going to take over civilization. | ||
| So you can see why the FBI decided to destroy him, which it did. | ||
| I mean, it's just like, what has happened to Alex Jones? | ||
| Is proof that at least some of what he's saying is true. | ||
| Because who is Alex Jones a threat to? | ||
| Did you see that interview with the guy from FBI who was trying to hook up with that dude on a date? | ||
| CIA, yeah. | ||
| Was it CIA? That's right. | ||
| And they were talking about how they can destroy a person. | ||
| Yeah, I think I was mentioned in there, too. | ||
| Were you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there are a couple of things. | ||
| Okay, so, yeah. | ||
| Again, the third dimension, I don't know anything about dimensions, okay, so I can't comment on that. | ||
| But two things he said are true. | ||
| One is that every civilization, every religion, the Greek myths, every single one, including Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, has believed that there is Sort of, that the spirit world and humanity are like, that they're hybrids. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| So that's just a fact. | ||
| Genesis 6. So, you know, I don't think that's crazy at all, given that it has been the belief of civilizations that had no contact with each other. | ||
| I don't think it's crazy, and I also don't think it's crazy to consider it. | ||
| I don't think we have a real map of reality. | ||
| Well, we definitely don't. | ||
| And better put than I explained it, that's exactly right. | ||
| We don't have a real map, and it's not crazy to consider it. | ||
| And it was an entirely conventional view up until fairly recently. | ||
| That, yeah, that the spirit world breeds with people, but everyone thought that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Even the term spirit world is probably a loaded term. | ||
| Of course it is. | ||
| They're all loaded terms. | ||
| Whatever it is. | ||
| How do you say it in a way that doesn't sound crazy, but the whole thing sounds crazy because we don't acknowledge the reality, the actual physical reality of the supernatural and it is real. | ||
| That's the first thing. | ||
| The second point that's obviously true is that weak people, which is a synonym for bad people, come together for strength and safety. | ||
| They act as one. | ||
| The hive mind is specific to a certain group of people. | ||
| Bad people. | ||
| And that good people don't tend to come together, but they're coming together now. | ||
| And I just noticed this. | ||
| I mean, people independently who I know or sort of know in many cases have long despised have come to exactly the same conclusions without talking to each other. | ||
| I know that you have this experience all the time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like, I can't believe you think that. | ||
| How did you wind up thinking that? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And not just on a specific issue like foreign policy or COVID or whatever, but like on a whole bunch of different things. | ||
| They're all coming to the same conclusion and they're coming together. | ||
| And so that does suggest You know, a big change and a battle. | ||
| I mean, it is a battle between good and evil. | ||
| I'm not always convinced I'm on the good side. | ||
| I've been, you know, an instrument of evil many times in my life, and I'm ashamed of it. | ||
| Are you talking about the Iraq War? | ||
| Yeah, the Iraq War. | ||
| I've been cruel to people, probably even already on your show, in ways that are unjustified. | ||
| That's my instinct to do that. | ||
| That's a fault, not, you know... | ||
| Not something to brag about. | ||
| It's something I'm ashamed of. | ||
| So I'm not saying I'm always on the right side. | ||
| I certainly have not always been on the right side. | ||
| I've been on the wrong side many, many times. | ||
| But that doesn't change the fact that there is good, there is evil, they are at war with each other, and we are subject to the effects of that conflict. | ||
| And that we're seeing it suddenly play out in ways that are really, really obvious. | ||
| There's no political explanation for the trans phenomenon. | ||
| Nobody benefits. | ||
| You can see these right-wingers be like, really? | ||
| It's all about the people who make synthetic hormones. | ||
| Yeah, okay, they benefit. | ||
| It's not driving it. | ||
| That's stupid. | ||
| It's not about the money, actually. | ||
| There's no upside. | ||
| It's not helping the kids at all. | ||
| If a child has anorexia, which is pretty common, actually, in this country, and the child thinks she's fat, you don't say to the child, yeah, you're fat. | ||
| You don't do that. | ||
| You give the child help if you can. | ||
| It's hard to treat, but you try. | ||
| If a child comes to you and says, actually, I think I was born in the wrong body, the last thing you do is affirm that it's hurting the child. | ||
| Like, why would you do that? | ||
| If you love the child, you wouldn't do that. | ||
| It's really an exercise. | ||
| Undertaken for the sake of destruction, for the sake of hurting someone. | ||
| There's no real upside. | ||
| What's another phrase description of that? | ||
| It's evil. | ||
| And you see that a lot. | ||
| A lot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And why? | ||
| Like, what is that? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| And why is it so obvious to even a completely secular person like me all of a sudden? | ||
| There's a reason for that. | ||
| History is moving really, really fast. | ||
| We're right in the middle of it. | ||
| And I probably wouldn't have chosen to be born at the time I was. | ||
| I'd much rather sort of reach maturity in 1955. Really? | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| I don't get to choose. | ||
| You know, I don't like drama. | ||
| I don't like change. | ||
| Like, I'm... | ||
| But there was drama and change back then, too. | ||
| There was. | ||
| But people didn't reckon... | ||
| Well, if there was a Cold War, of course. | ||
| There was a Korean War. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But people didn't see it... | ||
| In their face. | ||
| Right. | ||
| In the way... | ||
| I don't think... | ||
| Wouldn't you rather know? | ||
| I don't have a choice, I do know. | ||
| Yeah, I'd rather know. | ||
| I'd rather be right now. | ||
| Yeah, well, Nick, you've got a much better attitude than I. I mean, sometimes I just, my parents got divorced when I was little, and so I kind of like, I don't want change. | ||
| Yeah, I know what you mean. | ||
| It's not up to me. | ||
| I know what you mean. | ||
| You know, I was having a conversation in the green room with a club the other night. | ||
| About this guy from Canada that's HIV positive, that's a trans woman that's taking hormones so they can breastfeed their nine-month-old daughter. | ||
| So a biological male is taking hormones and is now breastfeeding their daughter off of their male tit. | ||
| And I said, if I was Satan, if Satan was real, I would do that. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| If Satan's real, I would, I mean, if Satan was going to do something insidious and unbelievably creepy, he would do that. | ||
| Well, I think he is doing that, obviously. | ||
| But this guy's a real freak. | ||
| And it's like using public money, too. | ||
| But he's a victim, too. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Right, because the thing about evil, the reason that evil is distinct from everything else, it destroys the vessel it's held in. | ||
| The conduit through which it flows destroys the person. | ||
| So that guy, in the end... | ||
| Will not thrive. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He'll be destroyed, too. | ||
| And so that's how you know that it's supernatural. | ||
| In other words, if I, you know, if I steal your iPhone and sell it and I get an extra 400 bucks, like, that's kind of explicable. | ||
| You understand why I'm doing that. | ||
| I want the 400 bucks. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| But if I'm encouraging your kid to castrate himself, I'm not really benefiting from that, actually. | ||
| There's no material benefit to me at all. | ||
| There's no real psychic benefit. | ||
| It's hurting for its own sake. | ||
| And that's evil. | ||
| There's no political category that explains that. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| And then there's clearly money involved in that, too. | ||
| There is money, of course. | ||
| And then there's the gender-affirming clinics that have popped up all over the country since 2007. You see the map of it. | ||
| It's fucking bananas. | ||
| But why would you want to do that? | ||
| Why would policymakers want to do that? | ||
| Why would anybody want to make money that way, right? | ||
| Why would they choose to make money that way? | ||
| It's the most unnatural thing ever because parents, every parent at a certain age feels like, I like my kids. | ||
| I want grandkids. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| And you want to protect your children. | ||
| I want mine to continue. | ||
| From bad decisions. | ||
| So I always think the politicians who push... | ||
| Trani-ism on the country, like their kids are going trans too. | ||
| Yeah, they are. | ||
| Right? | ||
| They're not escaping it. | ||
| It's like they're burning down their own house. | ||
| I would like to see the statistics of people in Hollywood. | ||
| Like how many of their kids turn trans versus the rest of the world. | ||
| Yeah, I know some of them too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But how many of them versus the rest of the world? | ||
| Well, a lot more. | ||
| A lot more. | ||
| Which is a morally corrupt business. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, more than we knew, more than I knew, you know, the entertainment business, it's... | ||
| It's always been that way. | ||
| You know, Tarantino was talking to us about this famous old director that had a bedroom in his office, where he would bed the starlets, and it was just common knowledge. | ||
| If you wanted to be in his movie, you had to fuck him. | ||
| And you'd go into his office, he had a literal bedroom in his office. | ||
| We had some of that in television, yes. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| Yeah, quite a bit. | ||
| Yeah, and I didn't really understand. | ||
| I didn't, you know, obviously partake in it or you would know because all my text messages went up in the New York Times. | ||
| So I'm not hiding any of my own behavior. | ||
| But I mean, I will say, if I'm being honest, it didn't really register with me. | ||
| I was like, yeah, that's kind of wild and crazy. | ||
| I just didn't. | ||
| You know, like my wife, I didn't want to blow up my family. | ||
| I didn't do anything like that, really. | ||
| But I certainly saw a lot, like a lot of it, like a lot. | ||
| And I just didn't really see it as like horrifying. | ||
| I just saw it as kind of like, well, you know, creative people are this way kind of thing. | ||
| But I look back and I'm like, it was really dark. | ||
| Well, especially the producer thing, right? | ||
| Like the Weinstein thing, the way they ran the business. | ||
| That's how it was pay to play. | ||
| I worked for Harvey Weinstein for a year. | ||
| Did you really? | ||
| Yeah, I did. | ||
| When? | ||
| 1999. He had a magazine with Tina Brown called Talk Magazine. | ||
| I was the head political writer for it. | ||
| And they had an office at Carnegie Towers in New York right below the park. | ||
| And I remember he was a pig. | ||
| I was not like an intimate friend of his or whatever, but I certainly dealt with him. | ||
| And the big controversy was he was smoking in elevators. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And I've kind of supported that, if I'm being honest. | ||
| But he was considered incredibly insensitive and just, like, vulgar, just like a pig. | ||
| Well, he looks vulgar. | ||
| Yeah, well, that was certainly what everyone thought of him where I worked. | ||
| Harvey's just a pig, and his brother Bob was a little bit less that way. | ||
| He was also involved. | ||
| But, yeah, people knew that he was a bad guy, but, like... | ||
| But he made awesome movies. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And also, but he was just powerful. | ||
| It's like Harvey Weinstein. | ||
| Like, you want to fuck with Harvey Weinstein. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| I mean, I didn't really think about it too much, to be completely honest. | ||
| I was just a guy I worked for. | ||
| But I don't know. | ||
| I didn't... | ||
| I certainly, if you'd played the Alex Jones clip for me in 1999, I would have been... | ||
| And I did see Alex Jones clips in 1999. And then in later years, where he was talking about Building 7, and I was... | ||
| Very offended. | ||
| I was, like, outraged that he would be suggesting that there was something about 9-11 that wasn't above board, that there were, you know, things we didn't know that were being hidden from us, and I was, like, mad at Alex Jones for saying that. | ||
| I remember that really well. | ||
| How dare you? | ||
| The Building 7 one is wild. | ||
| Well, it is wild. | ||
| It is wild. | ||
| I mean, all I know is 21... | ||
|
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What? | |
| I don't even know what year it is. | ||
| 23 years? | ||
| Could it really be 23 years after 9-11? | ||
| 23 years later. | ||
| What's the justification for classifying any document around 9-11? | ||
| There's no justification. | ||
| Well, the same justification in classifying the documents about the Kennedy assassination. | ||
| Well, exactly. | ||
| 61 years later. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or releasing the COVID vaccine data 75 years later. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, it's, of course, look, secrecy is different from privacy. | ||
| Privacy is necessary for the dignity of this. | ||
| That's why you've got a door in the bathroom in your bedroom, right? | ||
| You know, you need privacy, you need private thoughts. | ||
| We have no privacy whatsoever. | ||
| None. | ||
| No privacy at all, thanks to the iPhone and government spying on us all. | ||
| So there's no privacy, but there's massive secrecy. | ||
| Secrecy is different. | ||
| Secrecy of bets lying. | ||
| The only reason to have secrecy is in order to do something that you're ashamed of other people knowing about that's That's immoral and probably illegal. | ||
| And there's more secrecy than ever. | ||
| And that means that there's more lying than ever. | ||
| There are more crimes being committed than ever. | ||
| That's the surest sign of it. | ||
| Why are there a billion classified federal documents in a so-called democracy? | ||
| Because they're lying to us. | ||
| That's why. | ||
| But 9-11, like, what is the justification for that? | ||
| I don't know the answer. | ||
| I really don't know the answer. | ||
| But there is one. | ||
| That's for sure. | ||
| It's not methods and sources. | ||
| You think it's methods and sources? | ||
| Trying to protect their Saudi sources? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| You know, the wildest thing about Tower 7 is that if you just say it looks like a controlled demolition, people get mad at you. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| Because I'm not saying that it is a controlled demolition. | ||
| But I'm saying if you watch it, It looks like a controlled demolition. | ||
| But that happens all the time. | ||
| Buildings catch fire and they just implode in on themselves. | ||
| I think that happens every week, right? | ||
| All these poultry plants and manufacturing plants that keep getting burned through fire. | ||
| It's the way it went down. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I say, why do they respond that way? | ||
| And of course, I responded that way. | ||
| So when I think looking back, the reason that I did was because if you call that into question, you had to ask a lot of other really obvious questions you didn't want to deal with. | ||
| And you might arrive at the conclusion that a lot of your most basic assumptions are false and that you've been had. | ||
| And it's just too destabilizing, maybe. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Well, the real problem with Tower 7 is they go, well, okay, if it was a controlled demolition, how was that engineered? | ||
| Did they just decide to do that before September 11th? | ||
| And you know how long it would take to rig a building like that? | ||
| Or was it built into the building? | ||
| And how would they know it would even work? | ||
| And how would they do something like that? | ||
| And how would there not be a record of it being built into the building? | ||
| Like, for someone to engineer the collapse of a tower. | ||
| And where's the sound signature on the tape? | ||
| There would be a sound of the explosions going on. | ||
|
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Yeah, bang, bang, bang, bang. | |
| Which is a fair question. | ||
| Yeah, so a lot of fair questions. | ||
| And has there ever been a building that experienced a tremendous amount of damage because two enormous skyscrapers fell right next to it, damaged it, and then massive fire started, and then there's diesel generators. | ||
| That are in the basement. | ||
| So they have all this fuel. | ||
| So they have this incredible inferno in the basement that weakens the structure. | ||
| Is that why it collapsed? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Totally possible. | ||
| A lot of building engineers disagree with that, as you know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they don't think that could have happened in the way you just described. | ||
| I'm agnostic on it. | ||
| What I know, because I don't know the answer, and I have no way of knowing. | ||
| All I know is that there's no justification for keeping those documents secret that I can think of. | ||
| And if there is, tell us what it is. | ||
| No one has bothered because nobody presses. | ||
| And it's, you know, I'll add that to the list of outrages. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And then it gives you this feeling of helplessness because there's so many of those. | ||
| They just pile on. | ||
| There's always another one. | ||
| Well, the U.S. government spied on me, broke into my phone and spied on me, and I couldn't get a straight answer to that. | ||
| And I'm not a felon. | ||
| Well, not only that, they got into your Signal account, right? | ||
| Yeah, and then they leaked it to the New York Times, what they found there. | ||
| So it's one thing to say, okay, we picked up your text exchanges with a foreign national, which is true. | ||
| I text a lot of foreign nationals because of my job. | ||
| Like, why wouldn't I? And it's my right. | ||
| As far as I'm concerned, that's not illegal. | ||
| But we picked up your text exchanges, which I think itself is a lie. | ||
| I think they were targeting me. | ||
| I think they are now. | ||
| I'm pretty positive they are. | ||
| But whatever. | ||
| Leaving that aside, we spied on you. | ||
| We think we have justification. | ||
| Is there a justification for leaking the contents of my private conversation to a news outlet in order to discredit me? | ||
| No, there's no. | ||
| That's secret police shit, okay? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm not whining. | ||
| Ooh, I'm a victim. | ||
| I'm certainly not a victim. | ||
| But what was infuriating was, and I got members of Congress involved because I was pissed and I felt threatened. | ||
| I couldn't get a straight answer. | ||
| They were just like, we're not answering those questions and what are you going to do about it, bitch? | ||
| What are you going to do about it? | ||
| I don't possess a drone fleet. | ||
| There's nothing I can do about it, actually. | ||
| That's the truth. | ||
| So when the system breaks down and things like, I don't know, honesty, justice, the law, none of those apply. | ||
| The people in charge decide, well, that doesn't apply to me. | ||
| You are literally powerless. | ||
| Bizarre that the New York Times wouldn't have an issue with that. | ||
| Well, the New York Times does that all the time. | ||
| But bizarre that they wouldn't have an issue with the government tapping into your phone. | ||
| They work for the government. | ||
| Are you kidding? | ||
| The New York Times? | ||
| Yeah, the New York Times is a conduit for the lies of government. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| It's their tool. | ||
| And they're perfectly aware of that. | ||
| I mean, I used to write for the New York Times as a freelancer. | ||
| I mean, I've been around the New York Times a lot. | ||
| And yeah, there are a lot of really smart people there, for sure. | ||
| Even now, less so now. | ||
| But there's still, I think, smart people there. | ||
| There are. | ||
| I know some. | ||
| And they know. | ||
| But they think that, you know, it's worth it because they're bringing information. | ||
| I don't know what they think, actually. | ||
| But no, they're tools of power. | ||
| And that's like the one thing that you're not allowed to be. | ||
| Even if you think the power is good, like maybe they all support the agenda of the U.S. government, destabilizing the world and impoverishing their own population. | ||
| Maybe they're on board with that. | ||
| Even if they are, they shouldn't do it because the job of the media, the press... | ||
| Is to keep power in check. | ||
| You are kind of like the seatbelt, right? | ||
| You make sure that things don't go too far. | ||
| So and they're not doing that. | ||
| They're acting as a willing handmaiden. | ||
| When do you think that's switched? | ||
| I think it's been the case for a long time. | ||
| I mean, if you look at what happened to Richard Nixon, which I, of course, did not understand at all. | ||
| Richard Nixon was taken out by the FBI and CIA and with the help of Bob Woodward, who was a Washington Post reporter who had been a naval intelligence officer working in the White House, working in the Nixon White House. | ||
| And then he shows up like a year later and he's this brand new reporter. | ||
| He'd never been a journalist at all. | ||
| He's a naval intel officer. | ||
| The famous Bob Woodward, we all revere. | ||
| And he's at the Washington Post and somehow he gets the biggest story in the history of the Washington Post. | ||
| He's the lead guy in that story. | ||
| Well, I worked at a newspaper. | ||
| I've been in the news business my whole life. | ||
| That is not how it works. | ||
| You don't take a kid like his first day from a totally unrelated business and put him on the biggest story. | ||
| But he was. | ||
| He was that guy. | ||
| And who is his main source for Watergate? | ||
| Oh, the number two guy at the FBI. Oh, so you have the Naval Intelligence Officer working with the FBI official to destroy the president. | ||
| Okay, so that's a deep state coup. | ||
| How would you describe that? | ||
| If that happened in Guatemala, what would you say? | ||
| And yet the way it was framed and the way that I accepted for decades was, oh, this intrepid reporter fought power. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| This intrepid reporter, Bob Woodward, was a tool of power, secret power, which is the most threatening kind, to bounce the single most popular president in American history, Richard Nixon, from office before the end of his term and replace him with who? | ||
| Oh, Gerald Ford, who sat on the Warren Commission. | ||
| Now, how did Gerald Ford get to be Richard Nixon's vice president? | ||
| Well, because Carl Albert, the Democrat Speaker of the House, told him, you must choose him. | ||
| We will only confirm him when they sent the actual elected vice president away for tax evasion, Spiro Agnew of Maryland. | ||
| So you have a complete setup. | ||
| Gerald Ford, the only unelected president in American history, actually sat on the Warren Commission. | ||
| Something else that I accepted at face value until I looked at it, I was like, that's completely insane. | ||
| You didn't want to interview Jack Ruby in your investigation of the assassination? | ||
| Okay, you're fake. | ||
| Yeah, he was on the Warren Commission. | ||
| And so, sorry for the long story, but the point is, like, that happened in front of all of us, but the way it was framed cloaked the obvious reality of it. | ||
| The people who broke into the Watergate office building, from which the name is taken, Watergate, I think it was six of them or seven of them. | ||
| All but one was a CIA employee. | ||
| That's real. | ||
| It's like, look it up on Google. | ||
| So the whole thing, Richard Nixon was elected by more votes than any president in American history in the 1972 election. | ||
| He was the most popular by votes, which is the only way we can really measure popularity, the most popular president in his reelection campaign. | ||
| And two years later, he's gone. | ||
| Undone by a naval intel officer, the number two guy at the FBI and a bunch of CIA employees. | ||
| You tell me what that is. | ||
| Those are the facts. | ||
| Those are not disputed facts. | ||
| That's not crackpot shit. | ||
| That's just look it up. | ||
| So why did they want to get rid of Nixon? | ||
| You know, there are a lot of theories on that. | ||
| I mean, we don't – first of all, we don't need to know motive to know what happened. | ||
| They, meaning unelected federal employees, got rid of Richard Nixon, which is the most anti-democratic way to make a leadership change that there is. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| I should just say at the outset, I actually kind of believe in democracy. | ||
| Obviously, it's not working well. | ||
| Obviously, it's ending globally. | ||
| There will never be another liberal democracy, unfortunately. | ||
| But I'm attached to it because I was born here. | ||
| I really believe in it. | ||
| And it's better than any other system. | ||
| So that's why I'm pissed. | ||
| What was their motive? | ||
| There are a lot of theories on this. | ||
| There's an amazing conversation. | ||
| It's on tape between Richard Nixon when he was still president, I think it was in 1973, and I think it was Richard Helms, the head of the CIA, though I may have fucked that up, but it was the head of the CIA. I think it was Helms. | ||
| And Nixon says, I know why they killed Jack Kennedy. | ||
| So Nixon was a student of history, obviously a flawed and complicated person, but a very, very smart person. | ||
| And he was really interested in why this guy who'd been president, just one president before him, was murdered. | ||
| And he didn't think it was a lone gunman who was mysteriously assassinated two days later by another lone gunman. | ||
| Like, it's so obviously bullshit. | ||
| And he knew that. | ||
| And he said to say a director who, and you can listen to the tape, it's on the internet, is totally silent on this question. | ||
| So I think there was the impression, I don't think I know, that Nixon understood that the bureaucracy was really in control of the country. | ||
| It wasn't elected officials. | ||
| And that's a massive threat. | ||
| Because it's true. | ||
| And there may have been other reasons, too, that I'm not privy to. | ||
| Look, and by the way, I didn't even know any of this, despite having moved to Washington in high school and been around this stuff a lot, a lot, a lot. | ||
| I didn't know any of it. | ||
| And I know Bob Woodward, personally. | ||
| And I know Carl Bernstein, personally. | ||
| I even worked for Carl Bernstein, briefly. | ||
| So I knew some of the actual players in this, but I didn't connect the obvious dots because they weren't framed that way. | ||
| That's the point I'm making. | ||
| It's the way that you frame things. | ||
| You can have all the information available on Wikipedia, which is also controlled by the intel agencies, but there's still information on there. | ||
| The information can be out there in the public domain. | ||
| It's a matter of seeing it for what it is, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So Nixon said that he knew why they killed JFK. Did he elaborate? | ||
| Nope. | ||
| And it's worth listening to. | ||
| It's a very weird conversation. | ||
| It takes place in the Oval Office, which famously had tape recording devices in it. | ||
| Obviously, this became a big feature during the Watergate hearings. | ||
| But yes, that conversation, and I may be mangling it slightly, but it's on the internet and absolutely worth listening to. | ||
| And The CIA director has this kind of sinister silence. | ||
| So, like, if I'm the president and you're the CIA director and I say I know why the guy who was just president 10 years ago was killed, the obvious answer would be like, well, why? | ||
| What? | ||
| You know why he was killed? | ||
| You've got insight into the assassination of the U.S. president? | ||
| He doesn't say anything. | ||
| It's like a very weird response. | ||
| Like, what? | ||
| Just kind of throw that out there? | ||
| Like, if you say to me, you know, we're taking a leak, you're at the next year, and you're like, I figured out the secret to life. | ||
| And I'm like, huh, okay. | ||
| That's like not a good response, right? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| It's a telling response. | ||
| You hear Trump's take on the JFK assassination, why he didn't release the files? | ||
| Yeah, I know what Trump's take is. | ||
| He said that if you knew what I know, you wouldn't tell people either. | ||
|
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What? | |
| Which is crazy. | ||
| Well, that's his position on the UAP thing as well, actually. | ||
| And that's a lot of people's position on it. | ||
| I mean, Trump is saying, of course, the CIA had knowledge of it. | ||
| That is known. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| I mean, the whole thing. | ||
| It's so funny. | ||
| There's so many levels and there's so much I don't understand. | ||
| But the whole JFK conspiracy industry, and it really is an industry, more books written on that than almost any historical topic, is filled with wackos, right? | ||
| There are a lot of wackos in there. | ||
| But that fact obscures the larger fact, which is the facts themselves tell an unbelievable story. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so, whatever, I could get into it at great length. | ||
| But yeah, they're still classifying documents. | ||
| 61 years later, both Trump and Joe Biden have, in violation of my read of federal law, kept those documents secret. | ||
| There's no living person connected to the Kennedy assassination. | ||
| It was a couple generations ago. | ||
| There's no one person whose secrets are being protected. | ||
| It's an institution or maybe countries. | ||
| There may have been countries involved too. | ||
| I mean, I don't know the answer, but there's clearly something worth... | ||
| And I know that when I... I spoke to someone who'd seen the documents, okay, two years ago, and I got one fact out of them, which is, yes, the CIA was involved. | ||
| And by CIA, CIA is a huge organization, but James Jesus Angleton, the head of the operations directorate, had knowledge of this, which I think is well-known. | ||
| But that's the view of someone who saw the documents. | ||
| So I thought that was news, so I went on TV and said that. | ||
| The next day, I'll never forget it, I went quail hunting. | ||
| And I was driving back, and I got a phone call from Mike Pompeo's lawyer. | ||
| Mike Pompeo was the Secretary of State, but before then, he was the Director of the CIA. And in that position, he... | ||
| Plotted the murder of Julian Assange. | ||
| So he is a criminal as far as I'm concerned. | ||
| But his lawyer called me and said, you know, you should know that anyone who tells you the contents of classified documents has committed a crime. | ||
| He's threatening me. | ||
| He's in my car. | ||
| I'll never, with my dog sitting next to you, I'll never forget this. | ||
| And I said, are you really saying that to reveal that the U.S. government had a role in the murder of a democratically elected president, to say that out loud, that's the crime? | ||
| What about the actual crime, which is murdering a president? | ||
| Like, you're covering up for that, Mike Pompeo. | ||
| He had no response at all. | ||
| And so Mike Pompeo is the one who pressed Trump to keep those documents secret. | ||
| And so it's like, what's crazy to me is not just that Pompeo did that. | ||
| I think Pompeo is a really sinister person and a criminal. | ||
| I think that. | ||
| I think that because the facts suggest that. | ||
| He was caught... | ||
| Yahoo News, Mike Isikoff wrote a long piece on this several years ago. | ||
| His employees went to Mike Isikoff and said, hey, Mike Pompeo is plotting to murder Julian Assange, who's never even been charged with a crime in the United States, as CIA director. | ||
| That's illegal. | ||
| You're not allowed. | ||
| Federal employees are not allowed to just kill people they don't like, okay? | ||
| Just to set the baseline here. | ||
| So... | ||
| That's who Mike Pompeo is. | ||
| But he somehow intimidated Trump into not releasing this. | ||
| Well, okay, that's all bad, right? | ||
| I think it's criminal behavior. | ||
| What's crazy is how Mike Pompeo is treated. | ||
| He's treated as like a Republican poobah in good standing. | ||
| He fully expects to become the Secretary of Defense in a Trump administration, which is like completely insane. | ||
| Why would you take a criminal and give him nuclear weapons? | ||
| Okay, that's my view. | ||
| I think it's a common sense view. | ||
| And like he goes to fundraisers and dinners and everyone's like, hey, Mike Pompeo. | ||
| It's like, no. | ||
| You're the guy who kept information the public has a right to no secret. | ||
| You're the guy who plotted the murder of someone who committed no crime. | ||
| You are the outlaw. | ||
| You are the bad guy. | ||
| But no. | ||
| He's treated as like, you know, like a pillar of Republican Washington. | ||
| I think that's, I think it's mind-bending to watch that. | ||
| And by the way, you know, whatever. | ||
| That's all I'll say. | ||
| By the way. | ||
| No, I mean, you know, people don't say that because they're worried about getting punished. | ||
| They're worried about someone putting kiddie porn on their computer. | ||
| Members of Congress are terrified of the intel agencies. | ||
| I'm not guessing at that. | ||
| They've told me that, including people on the intel committee, including people who run the intel committee, the people whose job it is to oversee and keep in line these enormous secretive agencies whose budgets we can't even know. | ||
| They're black budgets. | ||
| They're the parents. | ||
| The agencies are the children. | ||
| They're afraid of the agencies. | ||
| That's not compatible with democracy. | ||
| Democracy is a really simple system, even representative democracy like ours. | ||
| The people rule. | ||
| They do so through elections. | ||
| They express their preference through voting. | ||
| They send their people to the capital city to run the government on their behalf. | ||
| Whenever you have unelected people who are not accountable to anyone making the biggest decisions, you don't have a democracy. | ||
| You have something else, another system. | ||
| I would call it a tyranny or whatever you want to call it. | ||
| It's not a democracy. | ||
| So that's like super obvious. | ||
| It's playing out in front of everyone and no one cares and no one does anything about it. | ||
| And I think the reason is because they're threatened. | ||
| And if you look at the committee chairman who allow this shit to happen year after year, they're all... | ||
| And I don't know... | ||
| People say, oh, they're compromised or being blackmailed or whatever. | ||
| I don't have evidence of that. | ||
| But I know them. | ||
| And they all have things to hide. | ||
| I know that for a fact. | ||
| And so it's not a stretch of imagination to imagine that... | ||
| You know, some committee chairman who's allowing warrantless spying on Americans to continue or whatever abuse they're allowing, knowing fully or hiding the truth about UAPs, ignoring the UAP Disclosure Act of 2023. Why are they doing that? | ||
| It's not impossible to imagine that some guy with a drinking problem or a weird sex life, and that's very common, very common up there. | ||
| That's why they're doing it. | ||
| Because they don't want to be exposed. | ||
| I don't have evidence of that. | ||
| I don't have proof of that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But that's not a crazy thing to assume that that could be happening. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I said to somebody, a very powerful person, the other day in a conversation in my kitchen, an elected official holds a really senior position, a very famous person. | ||
| I was going crazy. | ||
| I was so mad about all this stuff and about the warrantless spying and about the funding for these insane wars. | ||
| And I said to the guy who serves in one of the legislative bodies, I got so mad my dogs were afraid. | ||
| They're like, Well, why are you yelling? | ||
| Because I don't yell at home. | ||
| But I was like, all these people are controlled. | ||
| They're all, you know, got weird sex lives and all these things are hiding and they're being blackmailed by the intel agencies. | ||
| And he said, and I'm quoting, I know. | ||
| Okay, so at this point, we're just sort of admitting that's real? | ||
| Why do we allow that to continue? | ||
| Having people compromise, God, that's an old story. | ||
| It's the oldest story. | ||
| J. Edgar Hoover. | ||
| It's all of them. | ||
| It's Epstein's Island. | ||
| It's everything. | ||
| But look, I don't have any... | ||
| I'm telling you... | ||
| What's the phrase the finance guys use? | ||
| Open kimono? | ||
| Like, I'm actually telling you all I know. | ||
| I don't know anything else. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I know that the publicly available facts tell a really clear story, which is the government is not acting on behalf of the population. | ||
| And so it's inherently illegitimate because its only legitimacy derives... | ||
| From the citizenry. | ||
| The only reason the government can do things that it does, kill people, collect money by force, all the powers that it has come from one place and that's the consent of the governed. | ||
| That's the only legitimacy they have. | ||
| And that's where it's fascinating this concept of good and evil. | ||
| Because when you think about it if this is true and if these people are compromised because they're secretly Perverts and creeps they are though and they're corrupt and they they steal money or they all these different things are evil things lying controlling people Engaging in unnecessary wars that are gonna cost thousands of lives for profit all these things are evil things So if evil is real Evil would want those | ||
| kind of people to be in a position of power. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And here's... | ||
| Evil would want men to breastfeed their children. | ||
| Here's the like... | ||
| Here's the illusion that we fall for time and again. | ||
| We imagine that evil comes like fully advertised as such. | ||
| Like evil people look like Anton LaVey. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Black cloak. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Sickle. | ||
| Evil... | ||
| Is an independent force that exists outside of people, that acts upon people. | ||
| I really believe that. | ||
| I've experienced it a lot. | ||
| And it's obvious. | ||
| And what vessel do they choose? | ||
| The weak. | ||
| It's weak men and women who are instruments of evil. | ||
| The weaker the leader, the more evil that leader will be. | ||
| And unfortunately, we've reached a time in American history where Every leader is either a woman or a weak man, pretty much. | ||
| And so there's—I'm sorry to say it, that's just true. | ||
| And the weaker the leader—that's what Mike Johnson. | ||
| Everyone's like, oh, Mike Johnson's such a nice guy. | ||
| Well, I know Mike Johnson, and he's a perfectly nice guy to the extent that he's, like, polite and seems kind of meek and restrained, and he's not saying motherfucker ever, you know what I mean? | ||
| I mean, he's got like very sort of buttoned down affect, but he's a weak man. | ||
| And that's the man you should be afraid of. | ||
| The people who you shouldn't be less afraid of are the, you know, headstrong, loud, don't care what anybody thinks. | ||
| Yeah, those guys will go off track, but they're probably not going to a bit, you know, genocide or blow up the world in a nuclear exchange because they might they may be obnoxious, but they know who they are. | ||
| Weak people just become a host for evil. | ||
| You know, an open, empty building that evil occupies, possesses even. | ||
| And that's exactly what's happening to Mike Johnson. | ||
| It's like absolutely crazy what Mike Johnson is doing. | ||
| But it's not because he's evil. | ||
| It's because he's weak and therefore susceptible to evil. | ||
| It's a meaningful distinction that I have noticed. | ||
| It is a very strange thing how many weak people wind up being leaders in this society, and particularly because so many people don't want their lives exposed. | ||
| They don't want that eye of Sauron gazing down upon them if they try to run for president. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| Or the physical threat. | ||
| Yeah, physical. | ||
| I mean, look at what's happening in the RFK. Where the Biden administration, for the first time ever, denied him Secret Service protection as a legitimate presidential candidate. | ||
| Well, it's absolutely nuts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, how is that? | ||
| I mean, it's hard. | ||
| You realize that a lot of the things that we took for granted were actually voluntary. | ||
| Like, people just didn't do things because, like, that's just wrong. | ||
| That's not fair. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| That's bad sportsmanship. | ||
| Like, there was a lot of, like, self-restraint involved in running a functional society. | ||
| You can't just make an infinite number of laws and enforce them. | ||
| That's impossible. | ||
| You rely on people to just not do bad shit because, like, I'm not the kind of person who does bad shit. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| And once the people in charge decide, well, I'm just going to do whatever I want, not a lot you can do about it. | ||
| So the Biden administration denies some Secret Service protection, and you're like, how can you do that? | ||
| They're like, well, we're doing it. | ||
| What are you going to do about it? | ||
| Bitch. | ||
| And the answer is nothing, actually. | ||
| What is this most recent bill that they're trying to pass about the ability to monitor phones? | ||
| Well, it's just the nightmare scenario. | ||
| It's something that they're already capable of doing because they did it to you, and they did it through an encrypted app. | ||
| Oh, they do? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| How do they do it? | ||
| Do you know how they got into your phone? | ||
| Well, there are two ways to—it's interesting, and I was with Ed Snowden in Moscow and talked a lot about this because he's got the technical—he's, first of all, an excellent and principled person, and his ex-feet is a really good place to start for people to understand what's happening here. | ||
| He's paid a huge price for being—obviously, he's literally exiled to Moscow— Involuntarily, but there are a couple ways to do it. | ||
| One, you know, you could hack into Signal, I guess. | ||
| It's open source. | ||
| It was created with CIA money, as I'm sure you know. | ||
| I'm not sure that's how you... | ||
| I don't think you need to do that. | ||
| You just capture the phone itself. | ||
| You just capture the phone. | ||
| And the bottom line on digital security is that nothing is safe from state actors who want to spy on you, period. | ||
| There's no electronic communication that they can't monitor, period. | ||
| What about these things like Eric Prince has some new phone out. | ||
| I think it's called Unplugged. | ||
| Yeah, Eric is a good friend of mine and I have a couple of those phones. | ||
| I've talked to him a lot about it and he's really a wonderful person. | ||
| One of my favorite people actually. | ||
| But that phone is designed for a different purpose, I think. | ||
| I know. | ||
| And that phone is designed to keep Apple and Google from tracking you, which is sort of a separate category. | ||
| Was this Jimmy? | ||
| I believe I think The one you were talking about? | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Yeah, so that's it. | ||
| So let's just roll down to what you highlighted. | ||
| So this is like a perfect example. | ||
| So the Turner-Himes bill... | ||
| Congressman Mike Turner and Jim Himes. | ||
| So who are Mike Turner and Jim Himes? | ||
| It'd just be funny. | ||
| Both those guys are the most—and who knows why, and you can sort of fill in the blank on motive. | ||
| I'm not going to. | ||
| But those are two of the most reliable water carriers for the intel agencies and for basically the federal bureaucracy in the Congress. | ||
| Like, these are not people who are working for their constituents. | ||
| These are people who are working for permanent Washington. | ||
| I would say these are two of the most sinister people. | ||
| I know more about Turner than Himes. | ||
| So it's not surprising they're doing this. | ||
| It would permit federal law enforcement to also force any other service provider with access to communications equipment to hand over data. | ||
| Anyone with access to a Wi-Fi router, server, or even phone, anyone from a landlord to a laundromat, will be required to help the government spy. | ||
| So that's the story right there. | ||
| So basically... | ||
| Warrantless. | ||
| Oh, of course warrantless, absolutely. | ||
| And in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, as if anyone cares anymore. | ||
| No one does, clearly. | ||
| But I just remember when I was a kid, and we're roughly the same generation, you remember this too. | ||
| People would be like, oh, East Germany! | ||
| Like, there are more spies than there are people. | ||
| East Germany was like the most elaborate surveillance state ever created, and of course it collapsed. | ||
| But we'd always make fun of East Germany, or North Korea. | ||
| Who has more privacy, the average North Korean or the average American? | ||
| Well, obviously the average North Korean, because there's less technology. | ||
| The US government spies on its own population more than the North Korean government spies on its. | ||
| That's just a fact. | ||
| I'm not saying North Korea is preferable. | ||
| I'm not moving there. | ||
| I'm not carrying water for North Korea. | ||
| What I'm doing is criticizing my government, because I live here, because it was better, it can be better, it should be better, and it only will be when we demand it. | ||
| And it's not some fucking esoteric, like you have to be some crazy civil liberties lawyer or something. | ||
| Like every person should demand, just as a starting point, a baseline, that no, you're not allowed to spy on me. | ||
| I didn't do anything wrong. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Like what? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| No privacy, no humanity. | ||
| You can't be fully human without privacy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And you also have to take into consideration that these people that are ahead of these intelligence agencies that are requesting these data, they're just human beings. | ||
| They're human beings requesting data from other human beings without going through a court, without going to a judge and getting a warrant, without stating a case, without having like some clear national security mandate, something... | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| And there's no justification. | ||
| I mean, by the way, we've had the FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, since, I think, 1977. So it predates 9-11. | ||
| Did it stop 9-11? | ||
| Oh, I don't think it did. | ||
| Shut the fuck up. | ||
| You're not protecting us, actually. | ||
| You open the southern border to anyone who wants to come. | ||
| You're not checking IDs. | ||
| You're not doing any kind of biometrics. | ||
| You're not even screening for COVID. So clearly you don't care about my safety. | ||
| Stop telling me you do. | ||
| You don't. | ||
| You're a criminal. | ||
| Stop this charade. | ||
| You don't care about my safety. | ||
| So using my safety as a pretext for spying on me is not going to fly, because I'm not that stupid. | ||
| I may be kind of stupid, but I'm not that stupid. | ||
| No, you're doing this for one simple reason, because this is what organizations do. | ||
| They protect themselves. | ||
| They exist for their own benefit. | ||
| All human organizations, from the Church Bake Sale Committee, To the Department of Justice, they all are the same. | ||
| They're an organism, just like any other. | ||
| And an organism's main goal is to survive and reproduce, to get bigger. | ||
| And you just see this throughout the federal bureaucracy. | ||
| Well, it just so happens that the largest human organization in history is the federal government of the United States. | ||
| And so all of this stuff, it accrues to its own power. | ||
| Let's say you believed every, quote, piece of science or scientific claim about global climate change. | ||
| You would not reach the same policy conclusions. | ||
| You'd be like, well, the first thing we need to do is ban private air travel because obviously that doesn't make any sense. | ||
| And then the second thing we need to do is, you know, whatever. | ||
| You'd look at it rationally from a scientific – if you bought the premise, which I don't, but if you did, you would. | ||
| No. | ||
| You go through every climate, quote, climate demand. | ||
| Not one of them disempowers large organizations, whether it's NGOs or the government of the United States. | ||
| Not one of them. | ||
| They all make the government more powerful, and they all make you less powerful. | ||
| So that's when you know it's not really about the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere. | ||
| It's about making them more powerful and disempowering you. | ||
| And it's not about who runs those agencies. | ||
| The bigger the agency, the more effective it will be in doing what all human organizations do, which is protect themselves and increase their power. | ||
| It's fundamental. | ||
| I guess that's what I'm saying. | ||
| It's not about, oh, elect Trump, it'll change. | ||
| No, it'll only change when, like, we're just eliminating the CIA. And we're going to have like a small intel gathering service that feeds the president relevant information so we can make informed foreign policy decisions. | ||
| But we're not going to overturn elections in other countries in the name of democracy because that's insane. | ||
| If we believe in democracy, then we're going to let people vote for their own leaders because we believe in democracy as a principle. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Like, you just get rid of all this shit, because it's not helping us. | ||
| It's only hurting us. | ||
| And it would take someone, you know, who'd be willing to be assassinated to do anything like that. | ||
| And so, as you're choosing your leaders, ask yourself, does this person mean it enough? | ||
| And that's the same question you would ask about your own dad. | ||
| Does he love me enough to die for me? | ||
| About your own husband? | ||
| Does he love me enough to protect me from a home invader at risk to himself? | ||
| Like, the basic prerequisite for leadership is love of the people you lead and the willingness to die for them. | ||
| And if you don't have that, you shouldn't be leading, period. | ||
| It's true in the military, it's true in business, it's true in your home, and it's true in the government. | ||
| And so no president will fix this unless he's, like, literally willing to die for it. | ||
| And short of that, it can't be fixed. | ||
| I can think of no better way to end this conversation than that. | ||
| Joe Rogan, ladies and gentlemen! | ||
| You just nailed it. | ||
| Well, listen, man, it's been very fun getting to know you. | ||
| I think you are a... | ||
| Very... | ||
| You're a controversial character in the world, but you're misunderstood. | ||
| And I think if people pay attention to your actual work and the things that you talk about, I think you're generally a force of good. | ||
| I really believe that. | ||
| I feel like I'm the most conventional person who's ever lived. | ||
| I don't think I'm radical at all! | ||
| I'm the opposite! | ||
| In this crazy time, someone who's conventional and wise seems radical. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| I'm hoping for a better time. | ||
| Yeah, I think a better time is possible. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| I do. | ||
| It's just, we're in for a rough ride. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not disarming anytime soon. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Thank you, Tucker. | ||
| Thanks, Joe. |
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