Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan explore Project Aqua and Kona Blue, leaked U.S. programs analyzing deaths and brain injuries linked to UAPs, with Carlson dismissing extraterrestrial claims but proposing supernatural origins tied to ancient texts like Genesis 6. They critique government deception—from AI risks to the Turner-Himes bill, which legalizes warrantless surveillance—while debating moral struggles in politics, from Ukraine funding hypocrisy to leaders like Biden and RFK Jr., questioning whether systemic corruption reflects a deeper battle between good and evil. Rogan’s early podcast origins contrast with Carlson’s hope that independent media resists cultural collapse, even as fringe theories like Alex Jones’ pedophile-elite conspiracy enter the fray. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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?
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,
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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 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.
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...
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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 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, 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.
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.
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...
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.