Matt Walsh’s Am I Racist? film exposes woke culture’s financial exploitation—like $15K reparations demands and $50K "race training"—while critiquing its obsession with framing trivial interactions as systemic racism, despite progress like Obama’s presidency. Joe Rogan and Walsh debate moon landing conspiracy theories, highlighting anomalies in Apollo footage (e.g., flag movements) but dismissing hoax claims due to lack of credible evidence, though Rogan questions NASA’s secrecy. They also dissect media bias, from downplaying Trump’s assassination attempt to Google’s alleged search manipulation, and warn of propaganda’s hypnotic grip on politics. The episode underscores how ideological extremism thrives in anonymity, polarizes discourse, and risks distorting reality—while free speech battles rage over subjective "misinformation" labels. [Automatically generated summary]
But we kind of went into that knowing what the end was supposed to be, if we could get her.
We came up with that idea.
We went to a bar the night before the interview, and we came up with this idea.
Could we get her to actually pay reparations to Ben, our black producer?
And we had to kind of talk him into it.
And, you know, it was really just like...
In real time, I was there for about two hours, and it was an hour and a half of the most mind-numbing conversation where I'm just—none of that's in the movie because it's just me, like, fluff questions.
And I'm repeating back to her own ideas so she knows that I'm a safe person.
It's a safe space, and then you've got to build to it and build to it and build to it, and then finally you get to a point where you can do something a little weird.
And she'll probably go along with it.
Yeah.
And she did.
I mean, you saw we go through a whole series of exercises we want to do with her.
And she did it.
She was game.
So that was one of the first things we filmed.
So after we got that, we knew that, okay, we have a movie here.
Michelle Obama, when she was first lady, she had multiple stories that she would tell about as first lady being discriminated against because of her race, allegedly.
And one of them was, she was in line for ice cream or something, and someone cut in front of her.
And she told this story in some interview, this very dramatic story about, well, they didn't see her because she's black.
And meanwhile, it's like we've all been cut.
Lady, people have cut in front of all of us.
It's just that if it happens to me at Walmart, I don't think of it racially.
So how do you know what's in that other person's mind?
How can you ascribe motives to them?
It drives me nuts that this is what we do now where if someone does something or says something, someone else is offended by it.
That person who's offended gets to decide...
What the intent was behind the other person's action to the extent that if the other person says, no, no, no, this was my intention, I'll tell you what it was, they don't get to have a say in the intentions behind their own actions.
They are suddenly not authorities in their own behavior.
It was not perfect, but I grew up in a diverse area.
I went to public school.
A lot of people with different ethnicities and races.
We weren't talking about racism all the time.
It was basically fine.
And then something happened in the middle part of the first decade of the 2000s where it seemed like things started backsliding.
And that's right at the time when Barack Obama was elected.
And that's not a coincidence.
A lot of people have noticed that it's odd that we had a black president and then all of a sudden now we're having race riots again.
And I think the reason is that When you elect a black president, I didn't like Obama.
I didn't vote for him.
I think his policies are terrible.
But you would think that at least one positive you could draw from that is that, well, at least that means that systemic racism is not a problem in this country anymore.
I mean, if a black guy could rise to the top of the system and run it, then clearly the system is not racist against black people.
And in fact, was overwhelmingly voted into that position by Americans.
Which is true.
So that is evidence that America isn't systemically racist against black people.
But the race hustlers don't want us to draw that conclusion.
They're worried that we'll look at Obama as president and say, okay, well, racism isn't a big issue anymore.
And that's a problem for them because there's a lot of power, money, and influence to be found in the racism narrative.
So they had to kind of like double up on their efforts to convince us that America is actually racist, which is why during Obama's term, that's when we started getting all these race hoaxes and the race riots and BLM. That's when things like people started talking about microaggressions and all this kind of nonsense.
They needed to tell us that, yeah, you might think that this issue is kind of solved now, but it's not.
Racism is actually worse than you ever imagined.
It's lurking everywhere.
And now we're at a point...
And then not long after that, they started tearing down Confederate Civil War monuments and stuff.
Stuff that's been there for like 100 years, which was always weird because 100 years ago, people could walk by a Robert E. Lee monument and not care.
It wasn't a big deal to them, black or white.
Now, all of a sudden, it's a bigger deal to us than it was to people whose parents fought.
They had grandparents who fought in the Civil War, died in the Civil War.
They were okay with it.
And yet, for us, what, the wounds of the Civil War are fresher or more raw for us than they were for people a century ago?
It makes no sense.
How are we less able to...
Be objective and non-emotional about the Civil War than people who had family members.
There was no one who lived on Earth 100 years ago who we would not consider racist anywhere, of any race.
If you go back 200 years or earlier than that, almost everybody either owned slaves or was okay with slavery as an institution.
You go back 500 years...
And there was nobody on the planet who considered slavery to be wrong fundamentally.
They might have had issues with how slaves are treated in some context, but it took like thousands of years for it to ever even occur to a single human on Earth that slavery is actually fundamentally wrong, which is a crazy thing.
And that's actually an interesting thing you could talk about and think about.
Like, why is that?
How could it be that it's so obvious to us, but some of the greatest minds of history, they never thought of it.
But we can't talk about that because we have to talk about slavery and racism as if they're exclusively white Western phenomena.
Well, I've had friends that have a different perspective on the Obama situation, and my friend Willie was talking to me about this, and he was saying that what happened was when you – look, one thing that we can be sure of is that racists are real.
There are real racists in this country.
There's real anti-black racists, anti-Asian racists.
There are certain people that have hateful ideology in this country, just a certain percentage of them in the world.
Those are real.
And when Obama became president, those people became more emboldened.
And he said that he saw a lot more of that online and a lot more attacks, especially in uncensored online forums like 4chan and places where you can kind of get away with saying whatever the fuck you want.
He said he saw a lot more of that on the streets and he said this is probably why he believed Michelle Obama didn't want to run for president because she experienced so much of that hate while they're in the White House.
Forget about hate for their policies and what you think about them as president and first lady, but the racism hate.
So his perspective as a black guy was like, you had to be a black person to realize how angry people were that there was a black guy who was president because that was real too.
It was real that racism in American racial relations in America had changed radically since the 1960s.
Certainly since the 1920s and 30s and over the years has kept getting better.
But in his mind, there was something that happened where when Barack Obama got into the White House that the real hardcore racist got very vocal and he experienced it.
And I think this is akin in some ways to what's going on with anti-Semitism online because I think there's always been a certain amount of people in this country and in the world that are like deeply anti-Semitic.
And they just don't like Jews.
And when something happens where all of a sudden now it's okay to criticize Jews because of Israel's position in Gaza and what they've done, now you see anti-Semitism just pop out of the woodwork.
I think there's something like that, where people feel emboldened to talk about things.
So, like, maybe we just don't have an accurate account of how fucked up some people are.
But the general population, and whether you're conservative or whether you're liberal, everybody kind of agrees that racism is a stupid thing.
There's amazing people of all ethnicities and colors, and you should judge people, like Martin Luther King said, by the content of their character.
We all agree with that.
But there's a certain amount of people that are always going to be racist.
But when you start looking for it everywhere and saying everything is racist, first of all, it's an insult to real racism.
It's an insult to the people that are the victims of real racism when you consider microaggressions or cutting in line in front of you to get ice cream.
There's people that are real victims of racism.
And pretending that everything is racist just minimizes that and, in fact, probably makes more people racist.
It's going to make a bunch of dumb liberals, like, drop to their knees or give you money for reparations.
But it's going to make a bunch of other people really resentful.
And it just polarizes us and drives people further and further apart.
So there's a reason why they had to go to 4chan or whatever to express those views.
Because you can't come out in public and say it.
And if you do, it'll be like the end of whatever your career is.
It's probably the end of it.
And that's kind of...
As you said, there's never going to be a time when there's no racists in the world.
So the most you can do is, okay, we're not going to have this stuff systemically.
The system is going to treat everybody equally.
Great.
We crossed that off the list.
We've already done that.
Actually, we've gone too far because you've got affirmative action where now you're discriminating against white and Asian people.
So anti-black racism is out of the system.
Fantastic.
That's good.
It's not accepted by mainstream society.
Great.
And then...
So that's kind of it.
I mean, what else can we do with this?
You can't get inside people's hearts and make them not feel things.
Those people are going to be out there.
They know that it's not accepted in mainstream society.
And I kind of think you can sort of move on from it culturally to other issues.
It's not a major issue anymore.
But they won't allow it.
And you're right that then it's got this pendulum thing where, okay, well, if you go after white people and you demonize them relentlessly, and you do it practically from birth now through the school system, some of those white people are going to end up being stricken by guilt, and they're going to walk around feeling like they're guilty for something.
That's the white guilt liberal thing.
But then you can have others who...
Kind of become exactly what you accuse them of being, because they're like, oh, you know what?
If you're going to call me racist anyway, then, you know what?
Fine.
And there's going to resentment that builds up, and you actually create more of it, which I think they're happy about.
If actual racism is increasing in society, I don't know if it is or not, but I think the people that call themselves anti-racist are quite happy about that.
But the other thing is, think about Robert D'Angelo, who you said just lives in her own bubble and really didn't know who you were and didn't catch on at any point in time that any of this stuff was ridiculous.
Like, these people, if that's all you think about, and that's all you...
Like, I have friends that live in California, and every now and then I'll talk to them, and some politics issue will come up.
And they give me this fucking CNBC, they give me this MSNBC, this fucking propaganda viewpoint on something that's so wrong.
And I just go, okay, I can't.
Like, you're in.
In your bubble, there's no real discourse.
There's no discussions about whether or not what these people are saying is correct.
It's just, you're a part of this tribe, and this is what you believe.
I think that's the case with these anti-racist people too.
Some of them might be like just hardcore grifters.
Like they could be playing three card money or they could just get corporations to give them money by saying that everybody's racist.
There's some people that are definitely like that.
But there's other people that are just, that's their friend group.
Like, that's their social circle.
Their social circles, all people believe this stupid shit.
And they all yap it to each other, and they say it like it's a mantra, and they pray five times a day with it.
The more interesting thing is, what about the people who go to those people And consult them as moral gurus.
I mean, in the movie, we have this race to dinner where you got these white women who sit around a table and they invite these other two women, Cyra Rao and Regina Jackson, to come to dinner.
They pay them to come to dinner and call them racist for two hours.
And it's like, why would you subject yourself to that?
It seems like the most miserable experience to volunteer to be broken down and insulted and degraded, which is what happened to these women.
I mean, I saw it.
It's like two hours of them just getting...
You're racist, you're racist, you're racist.
They go around the table, confess their racist sins, and then they each go and they say what their racist sin, like, what's a racist thing you've done recently?
They all confess, and I'm listening to it, and it's like, none of you have actually done anything racist.
I listen to all your stories.
None of that is racist.
There's a woman who said that she's married to a black guy, and she...
He's loud and she tells him to quiet down sometimes.
You know, I talked about this before, but when my kids were young, like my youngest was pretty young when they started doing this anti-racism thing at the school where they said it's not enough to be not racist.
This is actually right after we left.
So it was right after like the George Floyd things popped off.
You're saying a six-year-old has to be an anti-racist?
Can't they just play with their toys?
Can't they just go to the park and hang out with their friends?
Can't they just play sports?
Can't they just enjoy each other?
Six-year-olds don't give a fuck what color somebody is.
They don't.
They all just play together.
They just want to play with the people who are nice to them and who they have fun with and laugh with.
And here you've got some fucking grifter who latches themselves onto some school system that's filled with all these terrified liberals that are just terrified of being called out for anything.
And all the rules are changing and everybody's like, oh!
But then you give them this complex from such a young age, which is so unnecessary.
And that's why...
I mean, I remember when my oldest daughter was five, we were at the mall or something, and a black family walked by, and she pointed at them and said...
Why are people black?
Why is their skin like that?
She wanted to know, why does skin color exist?
How do some people have different skin color than other people?
And of course, I told her, to be polite, we don't point at people in public, so I told her that.
But then we talked about it.
It's okay to wonder that.
It's okay to notice that.
I think with these anti-racist people, if I was listening to them, I should have...
This would have been an opportunity for me to give her a whole lecture about racism and make her feel really bad for noticing that and asking about it.
Yeah.
And then you create this complex.
And yeah, fast forward 20 years and she's one of these women at a race to dinner.
When that's the threat, when being called racist is a threat, you can get them to do anything.
Spoilers or whatever, but the last thing in the movie when I do my own anti-racist workshop with these people, and they're all real people, and we get them to join in on some things that are really morally repugnant.
Because they're terrified of being called racist publicly.
If you have a thing, like you're telling the kid they have to be anti-racist, well, some kids are going to use that as a platform to increase whatever social cred that they have, and they get feedback from it.
It's positive feedback, and they get very vocal, and the more vocal, the more people are impressed, and the more work they do, the more people are going, you're doing great work.
And then you get what's essentially like the racial version of Greta Thunberg, Like, what is that lady?
That lady's moral outrage at, what have you done?
How dare you?
And everybody's like, yes!
We like what you just did.
And so now you do it all the time.
And so now, somehow or another, a 16-year-old kid travels all over the world telling everybody they're bad.
Flying around in jets, telling everybody they're bad for ruining the environment.
The moment they're out of their house, the moment they don't have their parents telling them what to do anymore, now they can tell other people what to do.
It's one thing that you see online from people who have been bullied in the past.
The people that have been picked on and fucked with, boy, they like to do it to people, like online, on Twitter mobs.
They like to jump in.
And I know a lot of people that have...
I've known a lot of people that have engaged in these things.
I know them personally.
These feeble, weak, terrified men.
And they say the most heinous things about people.
Like, uncharitable, not knowing what kind of response these words are gonna have in that person.
And they bully these people because they've been hurt.
You know, it's that hurt people, hurt people thing?
That's what it is.
But they don't think it's as bad as bullying, like in real life, bullying is terrible.
You're going to hit somebody?
How dare you, you fucking monster?
Well, you're emotionally scarring people online every day, and you think you're doing it through this...
It's like one of the things, Elon's talked about this, that one of the things that woke does, it allows really mean people, this ideology allows Really mean, shitty people to have a virtuous way of expressing that.
I mean, the whole idea that the internet isn't real.
We hear it all the time.
That's why I hate it when people say, well, Twitter isn't real life.
And I understand what's meant by that when people say that, but it actually is real life because...
These are human beings who are communicating with each other.
Now, there are bots too, but if you're a human being on Twitter saying something, that's real life.
It's not fake.
This isn't happening in some kind of dream world.
Right.
But then people think that, well, okay, if I just say this on Twitter, I put it in a YouTube comment section, and it's this heinous, awful thing, it doesn't count.
It doesn't mean I'm a bad person because it's not real life.
Which is like, that's like...
Writing on a loose-leaf paper, calling someone a piece of shit and handing it to them, and then they get mad at you, and you say, hey man, it's the paper, it's not real life.
It just happened on the paper.
It's a method for communicating, and so I think people have been...
It's a condition that in this world it's like a moral exception so you can do and say whatever you want and you don't have to feel bad about it.
And then it turns people into sociopaths after a while, I think.
And I also think it ramps up anxiety in a huge way for the people that are actually engaging in it.
You know, the people that actually do it, I think they're just fully anxious all day long.
And I think it's terrible for mental health.
Even if you're like quote unquote winning these verbal battles online that you're engaging in, I think it's terrible for everybody.
It's really terrible for the people that are just like all day long negative.
Like there's an arguing with people.
Like why do you want that in your life?
That's a very unusual position to be in where all day long you're in conflict.
That's only war.
In the real world, most of the day, there's no conflict.
That's why conflict is so uncomfortable because it's so unusual.
If you're used to conflict with people all the time and you see some guy and he's like, fuck you, no, fuck you.
But if you're not used to someone saying, fuck you, and then all of a sudden, hey, fuck you, and you're like, what?
Like, you're terrified.
You're freaked out.
Like, what's going on?
Oh, my God, this is conflict.
The kind of conflict, verbal conflict, that people engage in online all day long has the same sort of effects on your psyche.
You are perceiving the world to be this—this is one of the things that's so polarizing about this particular election, right?
That people are willing to accept propaganda because it feeds into their view of the world, which is that they're engaged in this moral battle, good versus evil.
And both sides think they're good, and both sides think the other side is going to be the end of the world.
And it's accentuated heavily by mentally ill people that are on Twitter all day long.
The problem is if you do, and you do it just once, and then you get feedback, and then people say, hey, I really like what you posted.
And then all of a sudden you're connected.
And then you're looking for this feedback, so you're trying to post things to get likes, and you're trying to post things to get reposts, and get comments, and you're engaging in the comments, and now you're fucked.
Now you're locked into this weird ecosystem with these people you don't even know.
They might be all stupid.
They might be all really annoying people that you would avoid in real life.
Like if you work with them, you're like, oh, there's Tom.
Let me get the fuck out of here.
And you go to the other side of the office.
But now you're engaging with them.
People that you avoid having conversations with, you are now in mortal combat with words on Twitter.
I mean, you're the product of what you take in, even if that information is, like, low impact.
It's not the same impact as being there when the hitmen show up and gun the guys down in front of the cafe.
I've seen these videos where it's just mass shootings.
This one video I saw the other day of some gang violence situation.
These guys drove by, gunned these guys down, and then the guys started shooting back, and they were all shot while they're shooting back, and then the car backs up, and then they gunned them down more.
It's fucking crazy!
But it's not the same as being there.
If you were there, that would haunt you for the rest of your life.
If you were across the street and you watched that happen, you watched these people die, it would haunt you for the rest of your life.
But you get a little blip.
Instead of getting a 100% dose, you get like a little 1% dose, a little 1% dose, and you get them all day long.
And by the end of the day, you're just like, what the fuck is the world?
But it's like Twitter in that it's not a full experience.
Like if you were having the kind of exchanges that some people have with each other where they're just ruthlessly insulting and shitty to people, if you were having those in person, there's a high probability that that's going to lead to violence.
Actual violence like if two men are in a room and one man starts insulting this other person like really like viciously and Talking about their life and their family and all kinds of crazy shit that people do online.
There's a probability It's more than zero percent that this is gonna result in violence, but there's zero possibility of it online It's just it's just free.
It's a free shot And that's a part of the problem as well, is that it's not a real human interaction.
So you're getting like these little doses of shittiness from people, but you're not getting this one burst where you and this guy are about to throw down.
Because he's insulting you to the point where this person is actually dangerous.
This person hates me.
This could be a real bad situation here.
And I think much like that exists on Twitter where you have these little shitty interactions.
It's like 1% of real hate and it just adds up over time.
That's the same thing as seeing violence, seeing all these executions, seeing all these botched robberies, seeing all these people that get murdered in some third world country.
You just get a little tiny piece of it all the time, and it normalizes it.
And at this point in time, we have to accept the reality of propaganda.
And that there, you know, we've talked about this ad nauseum, but I'll say it again.
There was an FBI former analyst did some sort of a study on Twitter, where he was estimating the amount of bots versus, this is like right around the time when Elon was saying that it's more than 5%.
He said he thinks it's about 80%.
He thinks 80% of the accounts, yeah, 80% of the accounts are fake accounts.
Which, just stop and think about if you're in a country, okay?
Let's imagine you want the politics of America to swing in a certain direction, because we most certainly do this in other countries.
I mean, we don't have to educate people on the long history of interventionist foreign policy, where we have gone in and installed new Leaders of countries and organized all kinds of shit.
So we do it, and we do it, and we know they do it, but isn't it like the cheapest way to do it?
Wouldn't it be to do it on social media?
And if you did it, why would you do it like one account?
Why wouldn't you have a million accounts?
I would have a million accounts.
Like, just gotta get a computer that keeps making new accounts.
And you run a program, it's not the most difficult thing to do.
For people that know how to actually code operating systems, you don't think there's someone out there that can code a computer program that can operate millions of different Twitter accounts and you run it through some sort of AI that you've developed, some large language model on things to say about MAGA or things to say about abortion.
Or things to say about conservatives.
Or things to say about liberals.
And you put a fucking American flag in your little bio.
Or you put a pronoun thing.
He, her, these are.
Whatever it is.
And then you just flood the internet with fake anger and fake discourse.
And you lie about people.
And anytime there's a post about anything controversial, you insert something in there that gets people even more riled up.
You could get people, you could swing the vote.
You could swing the vote in one way or another, especially with fence-sitters, with people that are not sure, like, I don't know, is Trump really the answer?
And then you get online and you see all this hateful shit, or you might get on a MAGA forum, and you go, oh, they are eating cats.
He was telling the truth.
ABC's biased and you could swing it one way or the other and I think they're all trying to manipulate it.
All these foreign governments and I think internally in the United States, I'm sure there are groups that are doing it too, that are manipulating things in one way or the other in a disingenuous way because it's available.
And I don't know how to stop it.
I think the only way for you to not personally be really Affected by it is you have to understand that it exists, and then you have to recognize that some of these takes are not even real human beings.
So instead of saying, Jesus Christ, people would think that way, go, maybe not.
Maybe there's a few people that think that way, but you're being led to believe that it's a huge movement of people.
When it might not be.
But the problem is when it, even if it's fake, people are so stupid that even if it's a fake thing that becomes a bit of a movement online with fake, dumb people will jump in there and then it'll become a real thing.
Well, it's just people that really are not educated.
That's number one.
And people that believe that there's a collusion that's so large that all of the space agencies from Japan, from China, from Russia, all of them are liars.
That all of them are colluding together to hide the true shape of the Earth, because if we really knew the Earth is flat, then it always is connected to some sort of a Bible thing.
Like, it's the firmament, and they believe that we're hiding the fact that God is real, and somehow there's some mass conspiracy that all these world governments and every person that ever was involved in the space agencies, they've all hid from us.
The main thing is what you just said about the Earth.
The vastness of the conspiracy that would be required to fake that, it's so vast that it's a lot more incredible to believe that we faked it than to believe that we just went...
And going to the moon, it's a massive achievement, but I think the greatest human achievement of all time.
But even so, to fake it, would he be even more massive?
Because not only would you need all of these space agencies and all the different whatever people in American institutions to be colluding, but you'd also need foreign governments, including adversarial foreign governments, who at this point certainly would know we faked it, And for some reason haven't blown the lid on it.
So they're letting us take this achievement that they know.
I don't argue with any of the things you're saying.
But one of the things that I think you have to consider is...
If it's not possible for human beings to safely go through the Van Allen radiation belts and out into deep space without much protection and face the temperatures that are on the surface of the moon, which get up to 250 degrees and 250 degrees below zero in the shadows.
There's no environment there.
It's hostile beyond belief.
Micrometeorites are flying into the moon all the time.
They're flying through space all the time.
We've never had a single biological organism go out into deep space, pass the Van Allen radiation belts, and then come back to Earth and come back alive, except human beings during the Apollo missions.
Every single space station mission, every single space shuttle mission, All of them are inside 350 miles from the Earth's surface.
The only time human beings have ever been past that, and through the Van Allen radiation belts, was the Apollo missions.
And we were the only humans that were ever able to do that.
The Russians never figured out how to do it.
No one else figured out how to do it, but the Apollo astronauts.
And we did it seven times, six successfully, from 1969 to 1972. If you said to me, do you think that they could fake the moon landing today?
I would say no.
I would say no, no, no, no.
People are going to be able to track it.
It's very easy.
They have satellites.
They're going to know everything.
But in 1969, the technology was so crude that when they first showed the Apollo 11 landing...
They didn't even show a direct feed to the networks.
So like if you're on CBS News, you don't get a direct feed.
What you do is you point a camera at a projection screen.
So that's why the film looks so shitty.
The camera is pointed to a projection screen where you see the astronauts jumping around on the moon.
And you see this weird, grainy, third-generation image, right?
And we did it, and we have never done it since.
And we've always said we're going to do it, and no one's ever even come close.
No one's ever even gone into deep space since 1972. We also haven't been trying.
We haven't been trying.
But we always talk about going back, including Herbert Walker Bush talked about going back, George W. talked about going back.
They all talk about going back, but nobody ever gets anywhere.
The evidence that they went to the moon, there's a bunch, right?
There's moon rocks, that's one.
There's lunar reflectors that they placed on the moon, that's another.
And there's a couple problems with those.
First of all, the Soviets put laser reflectors on the moon as well.
And also, the moon itself, in many places where you shine lasers on it, it bounces back by itself.
The reflective quality of the moon, the reason why the moon is so bright and white in the sky when the sun hits it, you get a certain amount of bounce back off of different things with lasers.
There's some photographs that are interesting.
Was it India?
What was the one where they got the most high-resolution photos of the lander?
There's a documentary called The Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon.
This guy, Bart Sabrell, he's been obsessed.
He was a guest on the show, too.
Been obsessed about this his whole life and absolutely believes that we never went to the moon.
And there's enough shit that you go, okay, if he's right about any of these things, it's weird.
One of the things was some of the photographs of the moon, they ran through one of those AI detectors that can tell you whether or not something's false or artificially generated.
And it showed different images from, I think it was a Chinese satellite of the moon.
They said this is legitimate.
But then it got to these Apollo images and they said these have been doctored.
Again, this is not saying that we didn't go to the moon.
It could be, and this was a fact with the Gemini 15 program, where Michael Collins, there was a photograph of Michael Collins that they took in one of his training exercises, where he had those packs that they put on where they can move around while they're doing moonwalks Not moonwalks, spacewalks, where they're connected by a tether.
And he was in this harness and manipulating this device.
And what they had done is taken a photograph of him training, and then someone, probably some overzealous PR person, had taken that photograph and then blacked out the background and tried to pass it off as a really clear photograph of him training.
Out there on a spacewalk, which is probably very difficult to get, right?
You'd have to have another person at the camera frame it right.
They had this photo.
They're like, look, he did it.
Let's just pass this off as the real thing.
Which is, you know, you're also talking about the Nixon administration, where they were just full of shit constantly.
Well, there's actually a psychological condition that they talk about, this sort of understanding that we're all connected.
It's akin to a religious experience that many astronauts get when they go up to the space station and look down at the Earth and go, oh my God, what are we doing?
We're all together in this thing, and we're so alone in the universe.
And for us to be fighting over these trivial differences and these stupid lines in the dirt that we draw, when we are just clinging to this ball in the middle of everything.
Because yes, there are things that I'm skeptical of that are claimed.
I don't really have evidence that the thing didn't happen or that it didn't happen the way they say, but I'm still skeptical.
So I get that.
But it feels different to me because the JFK assassination did happen.
The question is, how did it happen?
But if we're going to assert that a major historical event, probably the greatest, the most significant historical event in history over one of them, did not happen at all, no one did it, then, like I said, that's...
So what you're actually claiming is that some other thing, this...
They went somewhere and they pulled off this hoax and they planned it and they did...
Real evidence would be some sort of documentation, some sort of a way to go over...
Like, there's a binary code that shows the distance between the Earth and the lunar module at every stage of the journey.
But that's missing.
That stuff's missing.
All the tracking data, they can't find it.
All the original footage is missing.
And it could just be people are really bad with historical items.
That's possible.
But to say that...
Faking the moon landing would be a bigger achievement than actually going to the moon.
I would say only if people could actually go to the moon.
So here's the question.
Can we really...
Everyone wants to dismiss it.
Can we really send a biological entity into space, go through that radiation, which is thick, covering the earth, and have it come back alive?
Well, supposedly...
This is the only time people had done it and supposedly the way they did it was by going through the top area of the earth where the Van Allen radiation belts, it's kind of like a donut that covers the earth.
It's not uniform and there's an area at the top where you can go out.
But according to Bart Sabrell, they didn't go that way, because he would have had to launch from Antarctica to do that.
It's not really possible that that happened, that they went that way.
So he thinks that if they did go through that, there is no other examples of living things that have done that and come back alive.
And they've known that this is an issue.
They've known that this Van Allen radiation belts, which is this band of heavy radiation that covers the earth and protects us.
They've known that it's out there because they tried to blow it up once.
There was a thing called Operation Starfish Prime where they launched one of several nuclear bombs into the radiation belt to try to blow a hole through it.
And, you know, you've got nuclear bombs, and you can't blow people up, but you're still doing studies.
So they're doing tests all throughout Nevada.
I mean, that's what killed John Wayne.
John Wayne got cancer because he was working on a set doing a Western.
Right next to where they were blowing up nuclear bombs.
Like 200 people on the set got cancer.
Starfish Prime high altitude nuclear test conducted by the United States, a joint effort of the Atomic Energy Commission and the Defense Atomic Support Agency, July 9th, 1962. So this is like while Kennedy was in office.
They were trying to figure out how we will get to the moon, not in this decade, but in the other, or whatever he said.
High-altitude nuclear tests.
So the thing it did, unfortunately, was it supercharged the bands, and it made it have much more radiation.
Not only that, it blew out power in some parts of Hawaii, I think.
If we found out that we didn't have to dig for lithium, that we could just go to the moon and pull giant chunks of it out and not have slave labor and no one has to feel bad about using your iPhone, you don't think that they would do that?
Of course they would do that, if they could.
If you could have a mining station on the moon, no problem at all, totally safe, of course they would do that.
But then now you have supersonic jets like 100 years later.
Now you have insane capabilities of like Air Force fighter jets.
Unbelievable power and maneuverability far beyond anything anybody would have possibly imagined when Orville and Wilbur had that stupid fucking bird-looking flimsy thing.
Not every facet of technology is going to continue at that pace forever into an infinity.
So I think it does take...
Especially if you take a historical perspective, a longer-term historical perspective, it just takes a while to get from one thing to the next.
It hasn't even been that long.
I mean, 1969 was not that long ago from the historical perspective.
And especially if you want to do the next thing.
I mean, what's the next thing?
The next thing is to go to Mars, most people agree.
That's so much far, exponentially farther away and harder to do.
And so if that takes, if it takes decades more to figure out how to do that, that doesn't seem that crazy to me.
And the second thing I'll say is that I do think, I get your point about resources on the moon, there's a reason to go back.
I agree, you know, Practically speaking.
But it's just true that it requires a society that deeply values exploration for its own sake and is willing to make the sacrifices, is willing to send people off to do things just for the sake of exploration, knowing that they might die.
I think we have almost no appetite for that now.
Maybe the Challenger explosion, you could point to that as the time when we sort of just...
It wasn't, but unfortunately, but politicians are the ones who decided.
People vote for those politicians, and unfortunately, there are a lot of Americans who are basically okay with sending money to Ukraine, which they shouldn't be.
I agree with you, but what my point is, is that if you had a skillful politician who got on television and explained that we have found a solution to all of our energy problems, and it's mining on the moon, and through this mining on the moon, we are going to increase the overall Way of life for every single human being on on America's soil.
We are going to raise everybody above the poverty level.
There'll be no impoverished people because we have literally found trillions of dollars in very very valuable minerals and by using our United States taxpayers funds to Fund this program and to finance it.
We are going to allow the entire country to share in some of this wealth, and we're going to change energy distribution and consumption in this country in an incredible way.
It's going to be beneficial to everybody, and it's going to make a bunch of people really rich, too.
But it's going to change the quality of life for every person in this country, and this is how we're going to do it.
Right, but you could make that case with the amount of minerals and the amount of valuable resources you can get, not just from the moon, but also from mining asteroids, which they're attempting to do now.
If you can get people out there, if you really can get people out there...
So here's the question.
If you couldn't do it, if they knew they couldn't do it, but they wanted to show that they could do it, could they Compartmentalize things.
Could they feed a computer program that is, instead of the actual binary data that shows the distance between the lunar module and the surface of the Earth at any given time, could they just calculate that out with computers?
Of course they could.
Yeah, that's possible.
Could they, if they couldn't get human beings into deep space and have them come back alive because they couldn't figure out a way to get through the Van Allen radiation belts and survive micrometeors and all the other shit that you deal with, could they Get enough people to shut the fuck up because it's in the best interest of national security.
Of course they could, especially in 1969. People were fucking terrified.
They had just killed the president six years earlier.
People were absolutely terrified of getting Under the sites of the intelligence agencies, and if you have top-secret clearance, if you're involved in some sort of a project, look at the Manhattan Project.
People kept their fucking mouth shut.
They knew they were working on something of importance that was above and beyond their need to yap about shit.
I don't know if you would, because you actually have a real space program.
So the space program's not fake, right?
So let's just assume I'm a non-believer.
I would tell you that the space program was absolutely real.
The Saturn V rocket was absolutely real.
The modules, the way they were able to parachute down into the ocean, 100% real.
They did go into space.
But how far did they go?
This is the real question.
Sybil, the guy who made this documentary, he asserts that they went somewhere into Earth's orbit, like, you know, in space, but not through the Van Allen radiation belts and not to the surface of the moon and back.
And that they had video footage that they had done in some scenario.
Some people think it's in the Nevada desert.
Who knows what it is?
But they had this footage of people bouncing around and they said they got it on the moon and then they brought this back.
Well, he has a bunch of different things, and one of them is the one that's very hotly debated, and it's the different light sources in the photographs.
So a lot of the photographs from the surface of the moon have intersecting shadows.
So you have a shadow that's going this way and another shadow that's going that way, indicating more than one Light source or a close-by light source that's you know coming in not something that's you know thousands millions of miles away like the like the Sun There's those there's the photographs there's the photographs that run through AI he has this other video of what looks like them filming the earth through one of the round portal windows with everything blacked out in the cabin and And then they pull down the things that were blocking
off the other light sources and the cabin floods with light and it looks like they're in near-Earth orbit.
And it's very confusing.
Because you're like, well, what is that video?
What exactly is going on there?
Because if they really are in deep space and they really are filming this small image of the Earth because that's all they can see from 200,000 miles out...
Well, why, when they take those things down, does it look like the whole cabin is filled with light?
Why does it look exactly like they're in near-Earth orbit?
Yeah, because we're in the middle of this stupid conversation.
It's a fun one.
It's one of the most fun of all conspiracy theories.
Because if they did it, wow.
First of all, if they killed the president, wow.
And it seems like they kind of did that.
So if they did this too, like what else did they do?
Like what other hoaxes were played on the American people if this is real?
That's why it's fun.
I'm not saying it's real.
But it is a fun one.
It's not as simple as the earth is flat.
That's a stupid one.
But this is a fun one.
This is a fun one because you're dealing with the kind of power with complete control over the media, complete control over newspapers and what they reported, the interest of national security, the Cold War with Russia, the space war with Russia.
We wanted it so bad, we brought in some of the most heinous human beings that have ever lived to run our NASA program.
And you can look at, for the sake of discovery and exploration, you can look at what other men have done hundreds of years ago that arguably is more impressive than going to the moon.
Take any famous explorer from the 1500s to the 1800s, and whether it's Magellan or James Cook or Christopher Columbus or any of them, What they were able to do, navigating this vast ocean, going to places, having no modern technology at all, being able to go from where their starting point hit some little tiny island somewhere and then go around and navigating a world that they don't even know what it looks like.
They have no maps.
They have no GPS. They have nothing at all.
I cannot conceive of...
How they could have ever done that.
I don't know how in the world, not knowing what the world looks like, having no map, having no GPS, having no modern navigation whatsoever, how in the world could you possibly get on a ship launching out of France or Portugal or wherever and make it anywhere across the ocean?
But it got better right after each one did it because they had maps now.
And then they also used their sextants and they understood constellations in a way that most people don't today.
And sextants, if you actually use them correctly and you understand which way the tides go and which way the water currents are going, Which way the flow is happening?
They had a deep understanding of the currents of the Earth.
They knew travel lanes, and they knew which ways they could go with ships.
So applying that to the open ocean, applying that to these continents they weren't even sure were there, was very iffy, very dangerous, very courageous.
But once they did it, Then everybody else could do it easier.
And then they started doing it better and better, and then people started coming to America, and then ba-ba-ba-ba-ba, and now here we are.
And now anybody can get in a boat.
Anybody with enough resources can have a boat that can travel those routes.
No one can just say, I want to go to the moon today and get their private moon craft and fucking shoot off into the atmosphere and land on the moon.
So, no one's done that since 1969. That's a recent occurrence in terms of like human history, but not technologically.
The technology from 1969 is not even, it's like cave people shit compared to what we have today.
So you really can't compare The courageous, amazing deeds of these early explorers.
Because what they did was absolutely fantastic.
But they left a clear record of how to do it, and then each person improved upon it, and now it's easy to do.
He and I will watch it with the sound on and we'll tell everybody else to just go to the website or go to the YouTube video so we don't get pulled off of YouTube.
We'll watch it and we won't say anything and then after it's over we'll come back.
I'm saying they most certainly are manipulating you in that video.
That video is not just the video.
So what I would rather have is just the video and watch that.
that.
But we do get to see them say the distance they are from the Earth.
Here's a couple of questions, right?
What does it look like?
What is the shine from the Earth from 200,000 miles out?
And maybe in order to be able to film that, you have to block off the light from all those other windows, because even though it's 200,000 miles out, just like the moon lights up the sky on a a night where there's a full moon and you're outside it you can see Like a really good full moon with a clear sky, you can see the ground.
It lights it up.
And the moon is one quarter of the Earth's size and the moon is 250 plus thousand miles away.
So if something is four times bigger I mean, it is a potent reflector of sunlight.
So you could say that he's just ignorant about how much reflection you would get from the surface of the Earth from 200,000 miles away.
And even though...
They are filming it by blocking out all the lights and filming it through this window.
That actually is the Earth.
That's actually what it looks like when you're in deep space.
You could say that too.
You just don't know.
It's hard to figure out what's what.
It's hard to figure out what's what.
But when you see a video like that, you just go, hmm.
Okay, what is that?
And I don't think it's impossible to fake people going to the moon.
I think it'd be very difficult.
It would require a lot of people to be on board.
But I also think it could be compartmentalized.
The people that make the rockets, what you're doing is you're making a specific part and this guy's making another part and you have the engineers put this thing together and you launch this thing into space.
The people that would have to know are the people that are actually charting the trajectory of the Apollo mission.
The people that are actually talking to the astronauts and explaining to them what to say during the press conference.
The people that are engineering the whole thing.
And you could probably get away with doing something like that with a few hundred people.
And you could get a few hundred people of high-ranking people that have top-secret clearance to keep their mouth shut.
I would need some kind of solid evidence of that to believe that's true.
Yeah, me too.
There are some things that we call conspiracy theories that I think are clearly true.
There are some things that we call conspiracy theories that I think are maybe true.
But there are conspiracy theories that, to me, are just that.
They're not even theories, really.
They're just kind of like fanciful, whatever, projections.
And the ones that I don't find convincing are where they usually start with, There's a so-called official narrative of a thing that happened.
There's a couple of things about what actually happened that are kind of weird.
And we look at that and go, that's a little bit weird.
And then the conspiracy theorists in that case, they come in and they find these little tiny cracks, if you want to call it.
And then inside the cracks, they shove this whole, like...
Hollywood cinematic narrative that they have created to explain what's actually like a pretty tiny crack.
You don't need this whole thing to explain that.
So with the moon thing, I mean, one of the first weird aspects of the moon landing that I think started kind of the conspiracy theories about it was the flag, the fact that the flag's moving in the picture.
And so, yeah, it's like when you look at that, you don't really understand.
Well, that is weird because there's no wind on the moon.
But then you understand that, okay, for example, when you put the flag down, it creates reverberations.
It makes the flag move.
It's going to move for longer because there's no gravity.
So there's an explanation for that.
But if you're the conspiracy theorist, then you take the flag moving and you're like, nope, the whole thing is bunk.
Everything you're saying is entirely reasonable and correct if they actually can get through the Van Allen radiation belts.
If they can, this is stupid.
This whole thing's stupid.
But if they can't really do that, and they never have done that, and the only time they say they've done that is these missions, it gets real weird.
And since they haven't done it since then, it gets real weird.
And it's not just that.
There's other video footage.
It's not just the one where the guy's hopping by the flag.
It's other ones where it looks like they're on wires, where they're being pulled up, where they fall down, they're being yanked up.
The whole thing is weird.
There's a lot of weirdness to the footage.
The physics don't line up exactly the same.
If you go to the early days of the Apollo 11 footage and you look at the difference between when they were playing golf and jumping around the moon, they move different.
They cover more distance.
It's like it looks different.
They got better at it.
They get better at filming it.
They got better at whatever they're doing.
And then there's the other question.
Maybe they actually did do it, but the cameras weren't able to handle the radiation and the film, which, you know, you wouldn't even be able to send your film through the radar detector at the airport back then, because it would get fucked up.
You'd have to put it aside.
Maybe the radiation space fucks up the film, so even though they did do it, they show you recreations or show you these test runs that they did, and they film it because the actual film footage is impossible to obtain.
That's possible, too.
Hasselbad, who made the cameras, didn't put any special protection in these cameras.
There was nothing about them that was unusual that would be able to withstand that kind of radiation and that kind of heat of deep space.
So that might not have actually happened on the moon, okay?
That might be footage that they filmed in the Nevada desert, and the footage they got on the moon got all fucked up, and so they tried to pass that off on people, and they thought no one would know.
It doesn't necessarily mean we didn't go to the moon, but that does look weird.
And it's just not one thing.
If that was the only thing, you'd be like, oh, well, who knows?
I'll tell you what would convince me to, not that it's a fake, but at least would make me open to it.
One thing that would shake my faith considerably in the moon landing, if Elon Musk were to come out and say, yeah, I don't know about this moon landing thing.
Then, okay, fine.
And I'm not saying this is my whole reason for believing it happened, but Elon Musk, first of all, if the moon landing was fake, he knows it was.
There'd be no reason for him to continue that narrative if it was fake.
In fact, he could even say, you know, they faked it.
I'm going to do it for real.
I'll be the first one to go to the moon because they faked it.
And he hasn't said that, so I also find that to be pretty compelling, the fact that he, as someone who wouldn't know, the problem is that you and I, most people that talk about this, we have no direct access to knowledge about space.
This is all being given to us by other people.
So you've got to go to people that are actually working with this stuff.
And so the fact that he has no time for this theory at all, I also find to be...
But also, he has a contract with NASA, and he has to be very careful about what he says and does, and for him to say something incredibly insane, like we never went to the moon, even if he believes it.
That would be a big risk with zero reward, because there's no way to prove, as you've said, there's no way to prove that we didn't go to the moon.
And to say that we didn't go to the moon is a kook take.
What the fuck is wrong with you?
You can say stupid things like that when you're a comedian who's a podcast host.
But if you have contracts with NASA and you run SpaceX and you are legitimately making some of the greatest breakthroughs in space travel that human beings have ever known, like what they're doing with those falcons when they have them land, fucking insane.
Insane.
Come back and land.
I mean, we've never been able to do that before.
And it's all because of Elon.
I mean, if he really is going to get people to Mars, something has got to be addressed eventually as to, you know, if they do it and they pull it off and it's easy and comfortable, okay, we probably did it in 1969. If they go to the moon and there's no problem going through the Van Allen radiation belts with no particular insulation other than what the spaceship had, maybe.
I would tell you that one of our greatest achievements is faking the moon landing.
I think it's an amazing achievement.
I think it's an amazing achievement.
It's akin to turning Kamala Harris into the most compelling presidential candidate since Barack Obama.
Like, there's things that they can do with propaganda and spin that are truly amazing.
And watching her become this, like, celebrated character when just a few months ago everybody was upset that she was on the ticket and, oh my god, if Joe Biden dies and she becomes president, people are freaking out.
Now all of a sudden everybody's like, yes, she should be president.
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I mean, they are full of shit, but also it would not shock me if, because we're so easily distracted, if people really did just forget and don't care a week later, two weeks later.
Not only that, think about how perfect it would have been for a plan to assassinate someone if you do get this lone, crazy kid You give him whatever, I mean, there's been no toxicology examination of his body that's been released, right?
So who knows what the fuck this kid's on?
If you're gonna try to convince someone to go shoot the former president, you'd probably dope him up with some crazy shit, right?
And then that would be in his system, and then it would be like, be able to trace, okay, how do you get this?
Let's talk to all the people that are on his cell phone, all the people that are in his email, let's investigate and find out where the fuck he got this stuff that he's on when he shoots at the president.
You don't hear a peep out of that.
So this guy, somehow or another, figures out how to get on the roof, take these shots, and then they kill him.
Now, if he shot and hit Trump, if Trump didn't turn his head at that pivotal moment where they talk about it, and it's a headshot, Trump is dead, the world's in chaos, and this kid's dead seconds later.
And then it's like that.
Crazy kid who shoots the president, and that's it.
And then, okay, now who's going to run as a Republican?
The world's in chaos.
It would have been a perfect plan if that kid just pulled it off.
And the fact that it went away is even more insane.
And the fact that there was a brief moment where even Biden was saying that we have to stop being so polarized and stop attacking each other and just try to help this country heal.
But I also think part of it, the fact that America seems to have moved on is nuts.
Part of it, it's a political mistake.
A lot of it's the media.
Of course, they have no interest in talking about it.
Some of it goes to the Republican Party.
You had the Republican Convention, which was like two days later.
So the timing is nuts.
And...
Even at the Republican convention, I just felt like the fact that this guy was almost killed two days ago should be like the centerpiece of this thing.
I mean, you've got all the cameras on you for four days.
And so everything you were planning for the convention should change now because of this.
And it should take on an extra seriousness and just the whole tone should change.
Well, I think you only want to address it once, and it's probably...
Look, he's got a great ability to push things aside, and it's one of the reasons why he didn't age like everybody else ages when they get into the White House.
He kind of aged normal.
He didn't seem any older when he got out as when he got in.
He was the same guy.
And I think he's got this ability because so many people have hated him for so long and he gets attacked so often, he knows how to just shut it off and shut it out.
And I think he probably did that with the assassination attempt too.
It's one of the reasons why he said, I'm going to talk about it once and I'm not going to talk about it again.
And he's basically held to that, other than briefly mentioning it, that he thinks he got shot in the head because of the way they talk about him, which I would agree.
I mean, we've watched that footage right before the podcast of Trump on the Colbert show that apparently never aired.
But Jamie says you can get it on Colbert's website.
No, no, no, but it's just saying that it never aired.
You know, Robert Epstein has done all that work on Google and these ephemeral instances of interacting with Google where it shows you with search results and with news stories that get brought to your feed that they're temporary.
You don't record them.
So he records all these.
And what he has found through his research is that, especially with people that are on the fence, Like people that are 50-50, you could swing 50-50 to 90-10.
Like people that don't know who they're going to vote for, you could make it 90-10 just through these interactions with Google.
90-10, like say if you want Hillary to win or you want Trump to win, whatever candidate you choose, if you manipulate the search results, if you manipulate just the fill-in, you know, the suggestions, is Matt Walsh A, and then it just fills it in.
Just through that, just through the suggestions, they can manipulate it to a significant difference for people that are on the fence, that are independents or that are undecided.
And he said you can take 50-50 and turn it to 90-10, which is fucking stunning.
And one of the things that happened was after Trump won in 2016, there was some sort of a meeting at Google where they were openly talking about this.
And they were talking about, we can't let this happen again, which is such a crazy thing to say, that we can't let the people decide who they want to be president again.
If that is what they said, if that is what they, and let's find out what the actual quote was.
I could see how someone would say that if they worked at an insurance company and they're a pro, you know, a diehard Democrat, blue no matter who, and they were like, we can't let this happen again.
I could see how you say that if you're just an individual voter who doesn't really have an impact.
But if you're someone who can shift undecided voters from 50-50 to 90-10, as Robert Epstein is alleging, if that's true, That's a crazy thing to say.
Because you're deciding you're going to decide the result of the election.
And you don't give a fuck about debate and free speech and people being able to decide for themselves because you think that you're right.
And you think everybody else should agree with you.
When I talk to some of my hardcore lefty friends that are still left in LA that I was telling you about before, they say we.
They say we all the time.
We have to win this.
They say that all the time.
We can win if this happens.
They say that kind of shit.
And they talk about it like they're talking about the Dodgers.
They really do.
They talk about it like they talk about our team.
And they're connected to all these other people in the community and they're all on this team.
And it's weird, man.
It's a weird little hack that it's just like hypnosis.
It's weird that you can just do that to people.
It's weird that you can get people to just ideologically be captured and join this team and lose all ability to look at things objectively and just understand nuance and understand the influence of propaganda and like how many people are spending money on this and like.
Why does all the news have this one specific narrative?
And I don't mind, because you can go back farther in American history and you can find, like back to the beginning, and they're in Congress, like beating each other over the head with fireplace pokers and that sort of thing.
And I don't, you know, there's an argument to be made for that kind of, it certainly makes C-SPAN a lot more interesting.
But that shows a certain passion for the issues, I suppose.
But that's, it's, what we have now is different from that.
It's much more, I mean, there have been multiple cases recently of congressional hearings where they start screaming at each other.
Marjorie Taylor Greene and AOC. And who's the other one?
Jasmine Crockett, I think.
And it's like a Waffle House.
It's like, you know...
No respect for each other, but also no dignity at all, no class.
One of the things that's always interesting to me is that they are so desperate to stop Trump and that they act like it's, you know, the future of the planet hangs in the balance.
Meanwhile...
They still own everything.
I mean, they own all the institutions, Google, you know, the federal government.
So the truth is that Trump could get into office We're good to go.
That's the problem, is that even when Trump gets in there, he's handicapped in his ability to do anything because the entire federal government, he might be at the top of it, but everybody underneath him despises him, and they're all leftists.
They could just reverse it the second that he leaves.
And yet they still act like if he's in there, it's the end of the world.
They still can't.
You'd think they'd almost have an attitude.
They're like, yeah, whatever, fine.
Let him have it for four years.
It still won't matter because we're still going to be in charge of everything.
Did you see the conversation where this woman was talking to someone from Trump's team, saying worried that he was going to weaponize the judicial system once he got into office, that if he got into office, he would weaponize the judicial system and go after his enemies?
Yeah, probably, when you think about what he actually did when he was in office.
But that's why it gets weird.
It's like, because they can say something, and it can be not true, but yet enough people repeat it, and then it just becomes a narrative that everyone just...
I mean, like, it's true that he's a convicted felon now, but is it true that it makes any sense?
No.
For you to say that he's a convicted felon, like, okay, right, but what did he do?
Do you know what he did?
What he did is a misdemeanor.
And also, it lapsed the, you know, whatever the fuck it is where you...
And the funny thing, these are also people who otherwise would say that the court system is entirely corrupt, that just because you're a convicted felon, it really doesn't mean anything at all, necessarily.
But this one was really interesting because you see this guy combat it.
And the way he combats it is so interesting to see her squirm.
Because, yeah, that's exactly what they're doing.
I mean, it's not a terrible crime that he committed.
And you're making it seem as if it's...
Something that he deserves to be in jail for the rest of his life for.
And that's crazy.
That's a crazy thing to say.
And that might actually happen if he doesn't become president.
If he doesn't become president, they might actually lock him up for 25 years for that, which is essentially the rest of his life will be behind bars at Rikers.
That's the conventional wisdom, at least the people I talk to, that they say, well, if Trump doesn't win, he's going to jail.
And so he's got a lot on the line here.
I kind of think, are they really...
Maybe it's naive of me to think, but would they do that, or would they rather just, he loses, Kamala wins, and then they'd want Trump to just fade into obscurity and never talk about him again?
If Kamala wins and then they really go after Trump and try to put him in jail, and if they actually do put him in jail, I don't see how it helps them politically.
I think that's just going to radicalize people on the right even more than they already are.
But if he does get in office, then it gets very interesting.
Because then it's like, what can he do now?
Like, how much different is his take on it now?
Because one of the things that he said is the first time he got in, he didn't know anything about governing.
He's like, I had to find people, and I picked some of the wrong people, but I know better now, and I could do a better job of it now, which kind of makes sense.
Because if I wanted to talk to him, one of the things I really want to ask is, what is it like?
When you actually get in there, they don't think you're going to be in there, and now all of a sudden you're the actual president.
What is the resistance like?
What are the communications like?
What can you say about how you have these conversations with these people and how you govern, how you get things done?
Because we all have this sort of mystical view of what it's like to be the actual president, but very few people and only one ever that's not a part of the system has ever snuck through and attained that position.
Yeah, I'd be interested to hear his answer to that.
It wouldn't surprise me if, in a weird way, when you become president, you You feel very powerless once you're sitting there because you realize that you're overseeing this gigantic mammoth thing that's just so unwieldy.
There's no way to really control it.
And especially in his case, you've got so many people within his own administration plotting against him, so...
What's also going to be very interesting to see, what do they do to try to prevent this from happening in the future?
Because one of the things that has been discussed is cracking down on misinformation, and that free speech doesn't include misinformation, which is a wild thing to say after what we just went through with COVID, where what people were saying was misinformation turned out to be 100% true.
And not just about COVID, but about a bunch of things.
Hunter Biden laptop story.
There's quite a few different things you could point to.
Like, who the fuck gets to decide what's information?
Only the government?
You guys?
The people that have lied about basically everything?
Like, this is a crazy thing to say and to be running on that and to get people to support that.
Just the lack of understanding of what it means to be able to freely express ideas and communicate and whistleblowers.
Whistleblowers from corporations that are telling you about something they're doing, it's illegal.
Whistleblowers from government agents that are telling you they're spying on you when it's illegal.
All that shit.
To have that big filter through the government is an insane position.
And yet, that's something that they talk about, and this is something, bizarrely, that the left supports.
Well, even if, because even if it is misinformation, most of the stuff they call misinformation isn't, but in the case when there's something that is misinformation, it's just not true, plenty of that goes around the internet, that's still free speech, too.
You have the right to say things that are not, as long as you're not slandering somebody, You have the right to make claims about the world that don't happen to be true.
So the idea that that doesn't qualify as free speech is, of course, absurd.
But then that also requires some central authority to be the arbiter of what is true and what is not.
Because one of the only ways that people find out if something is correct or not is let someone say something that's incorrect and then someone who knows a lot more comes along and corrects them.
But wrong about a lot of the things that he thinks he's right about.
I brought him in with Eric Weinstein.
And Eric Weinstein, who's a genius, like a legitimate genius and a mathematician, explained him, like, very patiently and carefully, this is why you're wrong, and this is what you need to know, and you've got some good ideas, but you're off on all these different things.
I'm an actual expert.
And let me help you out here.
And so anybody who saw Terence Howard talk on the first podcast had this idea.
Like, oh, wow, maybe he's right about all these things.
Anybody who saw the second podcast with Eric, where Eric clearly corrects him and actually knows what he's talking about.
He's a brilliant guy.
Now, that's what free speech is supposed to be about.
That's what it's supposed to be about.
An actual expert comes in and corrects everything.
And then you have this look at it like, okay, now I see.
But it's not silence Terrence Howard because he doesn't know what the fuck he's saying.
No, it's like, let him talk.
Now let someone who really knows what they're talking about explain to him why he's wrong.
That's the benefit of free speech.
And everybody who listens to that has a better understanding of all these different really weird complex things that they're discussing that maybe otherwise you would never have illuminated in that way.
Yeah, it's complicated, and this childish idea that just handed over to the government to clean it up, that's not the answer.
It is complicated.
There are going to be people that say a bunch of things that aren't true.
But the way to combat that is not put the government in charge of what's true, especially when they've been wronged so many times, or they just out and out lied so many times.
That's a crazy position for the left to take, the ones who are supposed to be the party of science and reason, and the ones who are supposed to be the most educated.
It's just a bizarre perspective just because you don't want Trump to win.
And it implies that all hatred is automatically bad, or at least it puts the people in power in a position where they can decide what kind of things you're allowed to hate and what you're not.
And a lot of times when they say that the rocket malfunction or something is actually doing exactly what it was supposed to do, this is a test run or whatever.
It's like the Teddy Roosevelt man in the arena speech.
You need people in the arena who are actually trying to do stuff, do important things.
You need people like that.
Yeah.
Of course, social media gives a platform for people who are not doing anything at all to just sit and snicker at the few people in the world who are trying to achieve something.
If that's what Stephen King wants to do today, let him go.
Who cares?
It's interesting to watch.
All of it is interesting to watch.
You know, there's a lot of people out there that are fools, and they serve as education to others.
You see the folly in their actions and behaviors and how stupid they look and how ridiculous this whole thing is, and it's there for you.
You learn from those people.
You have a better understanding of human behavior.
You have a better understanding that people are capable of, you know, being really interesting, intelligent people, but also being buffoons at the same time.
And that, you know, we're all subject to all these various influences.
And especially through the use of social media, which just, like I said before, it's an anxiety-creating machine.
And there's so many of these people that are attached to it that are so deeply rooted in these online conversations and so disconnected from the natural world.
And it's odd.
It's odd to watch.
But they're there for you.
They're there for an education, an understanding, a greater understanding of the weird nuances of human thinking.
Because that's genuinely what this whole thing is all about.
All the ideologies and all the, you know, left and the right and the immigrants are great and immigrants are terrible and they're eating ducks.
All of it is just human thinking, trying to figure out what's the correct and incorrect way that we all cohabitate and what's the best way for all of us to sort of get along.
I mean, that's the catch-22 of social media because it could be...
If you use it exactly the right way, it does give you access to all these human beings and the way that they're thinking about things, which can be quite enlightening.
But as they get into the high school ages, I think it's a new world.
We're navigating it.
They should learn how to navigate it, too.
I think it is very addictive, but also there's people that know how to walk away from it and know how to self-regulate, and I think that's a valuable skill that I think everyone's going to have to learn.
I think we're going to look at it 20-30 years from now the same way we look at people smoking.
I think we're going to think, what were we doing?
What were we doing giving kids those goddamn phones?
What did we do?
We don't even know what the kids of today who are on the internet who are subject to the same sort of horrific images that you and I are talking about earlier.
What is that doing to people long term?
I never got exposed to anything like that when I was seven.
How many kids are getting exposed to murder videos when they're 10 years old?
I mean, the kind of thing you're being exposed to, how often you're being exposed to it, how ubiquitous it is now, how readily available it is, it's not at all the same.
And the addictions to phones, which we all have, then the addictions to social media, which a lot of people have, and then you get these weird insulated groups that live in echo chambers, and that's, I think, one of the things you highlight the most about this show, this Am I Racist film that you made, is the struggle sessions, where these people all get...
The first scene where you...
Before they know who you are, when you're going and it's sitting there and talking to these people about these things, like, who are you?
Like, where do you live?
How do you think like this?
Like, what is going on in your life that you've been exposed to this version of the world that seems so ridiculous to someone who's not in that bubble?
And that in particular is like a support group for white people who are struggling with their white grief because they have privilege and they're grieving their whiteness and their privilege.
And there's this woman, Bershia Wade, I think his name is.
A black woman.
She'll do these sessions with white people where she'll kind of like talk them through their whiteness.
And people pay money to go and sit around and talk to her.
And that was another one.
That was like an hour and a half, two hours in the room in real time.
That was, for me, making the movie the most shocking thing to me that happened, that really took me back, was in that moment and the way they responded to it, which I was not expecting.
I don't know if I... I can't say I did anything to develop it.
It's more just...
I just know what...
We're making a movie, so I'm aware of that the whole time.
Obviously, if the cameras weren't rolling, I wouldn't be reacting the same way.
So I'm just kind of keeping that back in my mind.
Like, this is what we need for this scene.
And also...
But the main thing is we want to...
With both movies, the whole point is to create an environment where the other person feels comfortable saying what they actually think and what they really believe and doing what they would really do And that means not react because if you laugh at them, they clam up.
If you argue with them, if you show any real skepticism, they clam up.
They're not going to tell you what they really believe.
And then it's a boring movie because all you're getting are the talking points.
And that's especially the case we found in this.
That was the case with What Is A Woman.
We're talking to the trans activists.
But in this, when you're talking to the race hustlers...
They've been doing it for a lot longer.
The race hustle's been around a lot longer than the trans hustle.
And they're pretty good at what they do.
And they're usually pretty sensitive to detecting when someone's being skeptical.
And if they get that, then they're...
They kind of go into a different mode.
And they go into this kind of HR, DEI mode where everything's very sanitized, very surface level.
They're not going to tell you this stuff about how all white people are inherently racist.
They're not going to get into the really brutal, terrible, racist stuff.
So we just thought making this movie, how can we just create an environment where they'll really be themselves.
And I think it's a great way to expose how ridiculous some of this shit is.
You can expose it by being angry and yelling and arguing with people on Twitter, but to do it the way you did it and just make it a hilarious hour and a half movie is really good.