Michael Shellenberger joins Joe Rogan to expose Brazil’s secret censorship demands—Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes sought permanent bans for journalists and politicians, sparking protests with Bolsonaro’s support—while critiquing Elon Musk’s compliance with deplatforming fewer than 100 users. They link global elite censorship (funded by Soros, via NGOs like Alethea Group) to COVID misinformation, election narratives, and migration backlash, comparing it to historical suppression tactics. The episode also dissects mental health failures—from San Francisco’s homelessness crisis tied to drug use disparities—to racialized legal enforcement, like Proposition 36’s push to re-criminalize theft. Rogan and Shellenberger debate UAP whistleblower claims, including Pentagon’s "Immaculate Constellation," questioning government secrecy amid potential societal collapse risks if extraterrestrial life is confirmed, while praising independent journalism as a counter to institutional propaganda. [Automatically generated summary]
Three days later, Elon just throws down and starts to attack this main Supreme Court justice, who's the guy that's now banned X. So X is banned in Brazil.
They're in negotiations.
But it was very exciting to be there because, and the Brazilians were just relieved.
They were like, everything that we thought was happening is proven by the Twitter Files Brazil.
This is the most dramatic part is that they were the judge.
This is a Supreme Court justice who's basically the dictator of Brazil was demanding that particular journalists and politicians just be banned, not only from X, but from every other social media platform, which is a tactic that we had seen in earlier censorship files.
We had done something on something called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League with Taibbi, showing this, and it was an early military censorship operation, and they had a list of tactics, and one of them was to get people banned on every platform.
So you're basically like just depersoning people, just destroying their career.
You can't make a career as a journalist or a politician if you're banned from every platform.
So that was one of the most dramatic parts, all in secret, all and you know, open investigations ongoing, and basically nobody, there's no checks and balances.
There's no chance to argue with it.
So that came out, and Elon responded like three days later and was like, yeah, Brazil's like the worst in the world and just starts attacking the Supreme Court justice as like Darth Vader and Voldemort and doing what Elon does.
Fast forward to last month and they had a huge protest in Sao Paulo, one of the largest free speech protests in history, which was itself just amazing and inspiring because, you know, it's a free speech has been something that we didn't really think we had to fight for.
So to see like hundreds of thousands of people in the streets of Sao Paulo was amazing.
I was there with the former president.
He sort of sees me, brings me up.
I'm up on top of the stage.
He's, you know, just, you know, yelling at the crowd.
Everyone's worked up.
You know, he kind of looks over at me and covers the mic and he's like, it's Schellenberger, right?
You know, he's like, Michael Schellenberger's up here.
And the crowds just, you know, they knew about the Twitter files.
Afterwards, we go down and it's just, you know, it's just a lot of emotion and anger, but also hope.
The Brazilian people are, for me, it's like one of the most exciting cultures in the world because they're so expressive.
The president, like while he's speaking, he's like crying.
You know, it's a very like emotionally open culture.
So now, I mean, the question for Elon, and they're having to negotiate this, is do you, out of principle, keep, you know, X banned in Brazil to defend the several dozen people that the government is requiring be banned permanently?
But that means that 20 million Brazilians are denied X as a platform.
Or do you go along with what the government's demanding and hope to fight for another day?
You know, it particularly, you can see every country in the world is particularly obsessed with COVID misinformation and election misinformation.
But to give you an example of how arbitrary and unjust it is, there's one of the members of Congress who's one of the most dynamic.
He's not actually in the party of Bolsonaro.
That's the controversial former president.
He's in a different party.
His name is Marcel von Hoten.
And he got into, he didn't even know this until the Twitter Files Brazil came out.
And then Elon did release, because the House of Representatives, Jim Jordan, asked for these internal files from X, he subpoenaed them.
So we even learned more information from those files.
They showed that Von Haten had, he was supposedly being deplatformed for election misinformation, but it turned out that the video he posted was posted the day after the elections and it had to do with labor issues, had nothing to do with elections.
And that's just really common.
I mean, you just see, it's just arbitrary rule by one guy.
Well, yeah, I mean, for me, personally, the funny thing is, I had this, just coincidentally, I have this deep relationship with Brazil because I lived in Brazil in the early 90s.
I was working, I was actually working towards my PhD in the semi-Amazon.
I went to Rio and Sao Paulo.
I interviewed Lula in 1994, sat across from him, just like I'm standing across from you right now.
I mean, even until the center, I mean, really, even up until the censorship part.
I mean, when you start censoring, you're just like, not to digress, but it's kind of like, you know, back in the 90s, we were anti-war, pro-free speech, and pro and pro-gay rights.
Now the left is pro-censorship, pro-war, and engaged in horrible medical mistreatment of gay children in the name of trans medicine.
I said, and I actually wrote an article for a left-wing magazine at the time.
I said, are you going to try to turn Brazil into Cuba and have censorship?
And he said, absolutely not.
Our socialism is going to be democratic socialism.
And that was my attraction to Brazil, too, was that, I mean, here you, I mean, and to the Workers' Party, into Lula.
I mean, he's super, he had all the stuff that you loved about the left, but he was going to respect free speech.
So I, you know, basically after the Twitter files, Brazil and the Workers' Party, you know, and Lula just start defending censorship, then I start going after Lula too.
And I'm like, you lied to me, and this is, you know, what do you think changes acceptable?
Wow, great question.
I mean, there's a way in which it's the same thing that changed for the left everywhere.
I mean, this is the question we're always asking, which is like, how?
I mean, because, you know, if you read the histories, I've been, you know, I'm now, by the way, we're going to spend three months in Austin every year now because I'm the CBR chair of politics, censorship, and free speech at the University of Austin.
So yeah, I mean, one of the, because of course, if you read the histories of free speech, particularly the last couple hundred years, it's really the right censoring the left.
There's a few exceptions, but I mean, overwhelmingly, all the way back to the original, you know, French parliament where they split, you know, the French congress where they split people left and right became a way to refer to liberals and conservatives.
Conservatives were about protecting tradition, about propriety, don't say certain things.
You know, that was like what conservatives were.
And then if you go to the United States, like one of the most dramatic instances of censorship here is the early part of the 20th century with the Sedition Act, and that's when they were arresting socialists, incarcerating thousands of people.
I mean, it was a crazy period.
And so that was the, that's basically the tradition.
That's why when we were, you know, in the 90s and up until recently, you know, free speech was part of the left tradition.
So what happened?
I mean, what's clear about the censorship that's going on is it's counterpopulist.
So they're going at Jair Bolsonaro, like Trump, is a populist candidate.
So one thought experiment would be, if Bernie Sanders had become president in 2016, would the deep state have sided with, would they have sided with the right, with the Republicans, to censor a populist Democratic Party?
It's an interesting question.
I don't know the answer to it.
Clearly, I mean, I would say, if you look at what the global elite, which is kind of a center-left elite in Europe, Brazil, United States, Canada, it really wants to censor on COVID elections and migration.
And they do the mass migration stuff around hate.
So like if you criticize mass migration, it's hate speech and you should be censored.
So clearly, this is a reaction by the deep state against populism, which clearly threatens them, their ability to be able to wage war when they want to wage war, to move people around.
I mean, it's huge.
I mean, the mass migration that's been occurring under Biden, of course, has been happening in Europe too.
And everybody's like, what is like, what's going on?
I mean, obviously, the story that the traditional story had been that this is compassionate and it's the right thing to do and want to bring people in.
There's so many.
I mean, the Democrats and the Europeans, they went so far with it that it actually hurt them politically.
Like, you know, Kamala may lose the elections because of just the mass migration.
It was like the number one thing 60 Minutes asked her about just now.
You know, in Germany, the AFD, which is considered the far-right party, far just means anti-mass migration.
So they went really far.
I mean, I think there's probably some truth to the idea that Democrats are bringing in folks to increase Democratic voters.
That's not a conspiracy theory.
That's something that John Judas and Ruby Teixeira wrote a whole book about called The Emerging Democratic Majority, where they talked about how Latinos are going to side with Democrats.
And then another part of me just wonders if it's related is that there was a concern that populism, because I mean, the danger, the threat of populism is that it's popular.
You know, so the threat of populism is that the people actually govern rather than these deep state organizations that have constrained, you know, pre-internet constrained what was acceptable.
They narrowed the so-called Overton window.
With populism, you get potentially populations that say, we don't want to go to war in Ukraine.
We don't want to support foreign wars.
We don't want to have mass migration.
And for a variety of reasons, these deep state organizations, by which I mean, you know, Department of Homeland Security, FBI, CIA, State Department, are absolutely freaked out about it, as are the kind of global elite that end up supporting the NGOs pushing for that same agenda.
George Soros, Craig Newmark, Piero Midiar, the people that basically end up financing the NGOs that the U.S. government then comes along and finances, which, by the way, is another thing that we keep discovering.
We'll be in Brazil and we'll be like, wow, these NGOs are doing the exact same thing in Brazil that they're doing in Europe.
Oh, and they happen to be funded by George Soros.
They happen to have a fact-checking groups that come along and fact-check as a pretext for censorship.
They do advertiser boycotts against the social media companies in order to control the social media companies.
Obviously, there was this huge infiltration of Twitter.
I mean, since I saw you last, we discovered what basically looks like a CIA effort to take over the content moderation at Twitter, former CIA people, Alethea Group, which basically was, we discovered these internal memos where they're basically trying to come in and create a special new content moderation, which is, of course, code for censorship.
It's so fascinating because, of course, we can see all the memos and we have it, so it's not a theory.
They were addressing, they basically were in the internal, the sale, the sales pitches from this Alethea group, they were selling the, they were basically hyping the criticisms that Twitter was getting for not censoring enough.
And then they were saying, well, we're going to bring all this intelligence experience.
And, you know, we've got these people that are really skilled at foreign languages.
I mean, they were promising to bring in people that spoke all these different languages.
And there was some internal resistance within Twitter, but it basically was on track to happen.
And then Elon buys Twitter and it all.
unidentified
What do you think would have happened if he didn't buy it?
So do you think when social media first came along, they sort of underestimated the potential and they let it become what it is.
And then once it got so huge, then they tried to infiltrate, like perhaps after 2016, then they tried to infiltrate and kind of realize it's a little too late because there's just too many people like yourself and substack people and podcasters.
Just too much.
Too many popular people on Twitter that have huge accounts that are on it all day long and monetizing it and acting as legitimate independent journalists without any sort of oversight.
They were using social media to support, I mean, CIA, intelligence community, Defense Department were using social media for Arab Spring, you know, for the color revolutions in Eastern Europe.
It was a weapon.
It was part of what they call hybrid warfare.
You know, getting people, you know, mobilizing people in the streets to do regime change, to overthrow governments.
I mean, if you can, the holy grail for, I mean, it's like Sun Tzu, you know, the best way to win is by not having to fight.
You know, so if you can not have to fire any bullets, if you don't, if you, you know, CIA 1.0 after World War II, you know, it's a crude military overthrow of governments.
CIA 2.0 regime change is you put a bunch of people in the street, peaceful protest, get the head of state to resign or call an early election and then overthrow the government that way.
So social media was a tool of U.S. government statecraft for whatever that period was, when, you know, Arab Spring 2011 until 2016.
And then, yeah, I think it was basically Brexit, Duderte in Philippines is another right-wing populist that gets elected, Trump.
And even though I think the evidence is pretty overwhelming that Trump was not elected because of social media, he was elected because he defeated his opponents and his Republican opponents in the debates and then defeated Hillary in the election, mostly through conventional media.
His use of social media and those other things clearly triggered a reaction from these deep state organizations.
I like it.
It's funny.
I just read this beautiful history of the printing press in Oxford history.
And the printing press at first, you know, 15th century, first hundred years, the Catholic Church is just like, we love the printing press.
You know, we're just cranking out Bibles and it's going great.
And then Martin Luther gets a hold of the printing press and prints his theses, which are mostly attacking the church for corruption for selling indulgences as a way to pay for your sins, basically.
And he condemns that.
And he literally goes viral.
I mean, when you read that history, you're like, it's eerily similar to social media.
I mean, it's amazing because, well, I mean, long story short, there's like a long period of revolutions and wars and the Protestant Reformation and then the Counter-Reformation.
And they're like the printing presses, they're like hiding them in people's houses.
The church and the government is trying to is arresting people for having printed presses.
The printing presses go to Netherlands.
They're sneaking the printing press into the Netherlands.
And so it's like, you can't help but see it.
You're like, wow, it's like VPNs.
Because in Brazil, when they were like, we're going to ban X, we're like, get a VPN, you know, and VPN in.
Still hard for people to post publicly because that would obviously show that they were on it.
But still, it's like you're always, and this is sort of an argument.
This would be an argument for Elon to cut a deal to get X back up in Brazil.
And I'm not saying that's what he should do.
I'm just saying one argument for it is that, you know, stay in the game.
Don't let them confiscate your printing press out of principle or pride, because at some other point, you're going to be able to find a way to work around that censorship.
They have a line in their Constitution that is extremely strong, that there should be no censorship for social or political issues.
The problem is that their Constitution is so long and it was created by so many people that there's then all these other caveats.
Like you can't engage in racism.
You can't engage in hate.
You can't.
The Nazis are, the Nazi party is banned in Brazil.
So there's all sorts of other things that, I mean, the Constitution is full of contradictions.
It's a huge problem.
It made me, the whole experience, by the way, because, you know, when you're growing up and you grow up and you go to, you know, you go to elementary school and high school and the teachers are telling you the Constitution of the United States is so special.
And you're just like, oh, come on, you know, like, whatever.
But you realize when you get older and you realize the First Amendment, it's so radical.
Because basically every other country in the world, certainly every other Western country, the progression of free speech was you would ask the king for permission.
He's like, oh, King, can we criticize you for this?
And he'd be like, oh, okay, we'll allow you to do that.
But free speech was something gradually granted to the people.
Here, as soon as they get the Constitution done, Jefferson and other anti-Federalists, the people that were pretty skeptical about even wanting a country, were like, we need a first, we need a Bill of Rights, and the first thing up there needs to be free speech.
And it's without qualifications.
So the free speech, I mean, the First Amendment doesn't say, it doesn't say except for libel and defamation and imminent incitement of violence.
Those things were built, those things were Supreme Court rulings in the 250 years after the Constitution was ratified in 1789.
And so that's why it's so amazing is that you just never, I mean, this history I just read of free speech is so amazing because all these battles over how much free speech to have.
Is it just for the elites?
Is it for the people?
Then you get to the United States and it's just a clear moment in history where the founders of this country were just like, fuck it.
Like this is essential.
Like the speech comes before the government.
The government, you don't have a government and then have free speech.
We have free speech as an inalienable right from God or from our creator or just something that we're saying that we have.
And then you make a government based on speech.
So this Orwellian idea that we hear, including, you know, tragically from Barack Obama and now his two secretaries of state, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, and Bill Gates, they're saying we have to have censorship to protect democracy.
I mean, that's kind of run of the mill corruption.
I mean, with Gates, you get into Epstein, right?
So I mean, so I'm not saying this is the reason, but I mean, it is like, this is not a theory.
The current CIA director, Bill Burns, was at Epstein's apartment multiple times.
Bill Gates was there.
I believe the last time I checked, nobody knows how many times actually Bill Gates was with Jeffrey Epstein.
He went out and did this, you know, really, he did this PBS interview where he just looks guilty the whole time in his defense of talking about Epstein.
So the prevailing theory is what most people believe is that they brought these people there under this premise that you're going to be there with heads of state and industry and famous people and scientists.
And this is going to be an amazing place where exceptional people get together.
And once you get there, you get a little loose.
And you start drinking a little and perhaps taking in some party favors.
When he was going through his divorce, the, you know, Melinda, you know, like you see the leaks to the New York Times about Epstein occurred while she's negotiating over the divorce.
And this idea that you have to use, you can't have people talking about inconvenient things that eventually turn out to be true seems crazy to not push back on.
And the fact that he said that and there was no response whatsoever in mainstream media.
There was no New York Times articles written about it.
The Washington Post didn't cover it and talk about how fucking insane it is to say something like that, especially after what we've been through.
And, you know, I mean, I just pointed out that simple fact that I just pointed out the vaccine didn't obviously prevent infection or transmission.
And the crowd, oh, you know, how can you say that?
Or whatever.
And it's like, because everybody knows it reduced hospitalizations and reduced death.
And I agree with that.
I mean, that's fine.
But the point isn't, I'm not arguing about the vaccine.
I'm arguing that it didn't do what they said it did.
And nobody's actually.
And then they just gaslight you as though that were the reason they were telling you to get the vaccine in the first place was to reduce hospitalization and death.
No, they were telling you that it was going to reduce infection and transmission.
Could you, though, if you have 80% of the people that are vaccinated and the 20% that are unvaccinated, are they of a particular political leaning?
And what are the health metrics of that particular political leading?
Has anybody done some sort of an analysis on the people that did versus didn't?
Like what were their health, what was their state of their physical health, their metabolic health before they made these decisions?
Because ideally, what you would look at, if you wanted to find out if it stopped transmission or hospitalization or death, you would want to look at the overall body of human beings.
And then we have a bunch of things that we do know, right?
Okay.
So we know that here's a group of people that died.
Well, what do they have in common?
Well, the vast majority of them have comorbidities.
The vast majority of them are either really old or obese or are very ill, very, very ill.
So we have, what was the actual number of people that died of COVID?
You also have to take into account how many people were put on ventilators who wound up dying, which we now know was a terrible idea.
80% of the people they put on ventilators died.
We know Rem Desivir had terrible health consequences.
We know there's a bunch of things that people are connecting to the vaccine that no one is admitting, you know, and that hospitals and especially employers are very reluctant to say that these mandated vaccinations cause these serious health consequences that we know are real.
And then we have this mysterious uptick of all-cause mortality that everyone wants to conveniently ignore and no one wants to make some sort of correlation or causation.
But I mean, even like saying that in front of Bill Nye, the science guy, like he's saying it prevented hospitalization and death.
By what measurement?
Like, how can someone so confidently say that when we know there's so much wrong with the vaccine, when we know that it didn't stop transmission, and then we found out it wasn't even tested to stop transmission?
But I am a person that has been lied to for four years and so blatantly and so obviously when you look at Fauci talking to Rand Paul and just lying openly about whether or not they funded gain of function research and the fact that he got away with all that.
The fact that the White House tells you for the unvaccinated, you're looking at a winter of severe illness and death, just scaring the shit out of people.
And it seems to me they were doing that to maximize profits because they wanted to keep selling these things.
And a lot of people got extremely rich.
Many billionaires were created because of the pandemic, because of the COVID vaccine.
It's all very spooky to me because I think there's a long history in this country of people doing things for money, knowing that people are going to suffer because of it.
It's just sort of a human thing if you can get away with it.
If it is illegal and you have the protection in place and you know that you're going to profit largely from this, you do it.
I mean we're seeing it on the trans medicine as well.
The Europeans, because it's centralized, socialized medicine, when Britain says you should not give kids puberty blockers, they end puberty blockers across all of Britain.
Well, in that case it was just more like – I mean it was kind of a collective gaslighting where everybody has now – I mean I think it's unconscious by the way.
So can we just take a beat and acknowledge that you've changed your justification for the vaccine, which means that it's motivated cognition.
It's not like you're like reconsidering vaccines now that they – because what you should do is go, OK, the vaccines didn't do what they said they were going to do.
It didn't stop infection or transmission.
Now maybe there's another reason we want them and we should consider it.
But you should take a beat and pause before you just sort of rush ahead to being – to justifying vaccines for some other reason.
Just – I mean the most – you know, Peter – it's just the same as Peter Hotez and all of these guys.
It's very authoritarian.
I mean it's very like – I mean what he calls science is not – what Fauci and Hotez and Bill Nye call science is not actually science because science is a process.
The way they talk about it is more like – A doctrine.
Yeah, exactly.
Or a dictatorship where it's like science is done by scientists.
Well, actually science can be done by anybody.
It's like journalism.
Right.
Like you don't need a PhD to do science.
Like science is something that you do.
It's also not the same.
I mean sometimes you have experiments in labs.
But science in the world of ecological biology is just going out there and counting the number of gorillas or whales.
So this, you know, so they, when they say science, they really mean like, obey me.
You're connected to these pharmaceutical industries, these various institutions that are funding media, so they have enormous influence and power over narratives.
And then you have people like Bill Nye, who's not even a scientist.
Because remember, it comes out, science comes out of Christianity.
It comes out of this desire to understand God's creation.
And then over time, the church gives more and more freedom to these scientists to study things that end up being quite inconvenient, like the earth revolves around the sun, or there's this, you know, there's evolution or all these different things that scientists discover.
It's the opposite of doctrine.
They're discovering things that are counter-doctrinaire.
So it's becoming, I mean, this is where you get to this.
Science is basically, people are trying to make it take the place of a religion.
They're trying to turn it into an authority.
And of course, it can't do that because science is just supposed to tell you how things are.
French philosopher and mathematician believed that he had three dreams in November 10th, 1619, that revealed the basis for the scientific method and his philosophical methods.
He was possessed by a genius who revealed answers in a dazzling light.
He went to bed exhausted and dreamed three dreams.
He envisioned reforming all knowledge, understanding the nature of existence, and how to be certain of that knowledge.
Descartes' dreams are considered a philosopher's dream and are considered to be authentic.
His interpretations of the dreams are supported by biographical material, neuroscientific theory, and psychoanalytic theory.
Descartes' dreams, also the subject of the world according to mathematics, a series of essays that examines the influence of mathematics on society.
The essays consider how mathematics can be applied to civilization and how these applications can be beneficial, dangerous, or irrelevant.
So it came to him in a dream, the idea of it initially.
It's very interesting, right, that human beings lived for so long before the scientific method came along, and now it has become this weird thing that's been captured by people or so-called experts, the spokespeople for the science, which is always dangerous when you have an enormous group of intelligent people, which the United States is.
The United States is 330 million people.
Some of them have degrees.
Some of them are just brilliant people that have spent a lot of time studying things.
And there's a lot of them.
There's a lot of people.
So when you have all these people debating things and you want to maintain control and push a narrative, that shit gets very messy.
And the best way to handle that is to have certain people be the stern purveyors of the science.
That's it.
unidentified
When you criticize Anthony Fauci, you're criticizing science.
That was a wild thing to say, but it's so transparent because it shows how they really think.
That you are, you are, and it's scolding.
You are not supposed to.
It's the same thing that happened when Martin Luther translated the Bible into phonetic languages because no one could speak Latin.
No one had to read Latin.
They're poor people.
But when he translated it into German and all these different languages that people could read and said, hey, this is up to you to interpret what God said, the church was like, hey, fuckface, you're cutting in on our racket.
Like, we need people that are the spokespersons for God.
The people that are going to tell you what God meant.
You don't get to decide what God meant.
That fucking dude is dressed like a wizard.
He gets to decide.
So they're wearing these crazy costumes that regular people don't get to wear, which makes you think, well, he's got the wacky costume and the fish head hat.
He must know more than me, which is a weird play on authoritarianism.
It's a weird, it's a very strange thing that people accept when people have costumes on.
Like if cops were wearing Nirvana t-shirts and board shorts, he'd be like, hey, fuck you, man.
Like, they actually do studies where they, if you put somebody in a white scientist coat or a white doctor's coat or put a stethoscope on them, people trust them more.
Well, as soon as you're censoring people like Jay Bhattacharia and Peter McCullough and Robert Malone, as soon as you're doing that, like, okay, how is what do you these people are rock-solid credentialed physicians?
These are like Peter McCullough has the most scientific papers published in his field in human history.
Like this is a legitimate scientist/slash doctor, and he's telling you.
He's telling you.
He's using the actual methods that you're telling people trust the science.
He's actually doing it, and he's got a whole list of credentials to his name.
He's a very accomplished person in this field, and yet they're censoring him because what he was saying was going against narratives.
So you're stifling debate, which is everyone knows is the wrong way to do it.
Even if he's wrong, the correct thing to do is to get him publicly to talk to someone who is right and have the world see how this person who is right is going to correct him on the errors of his analysis.
And then we all learn.
But instead, what do they do?
They try to get him booted off of social media, which is very sketchy behavior.
Well, Francis Collins said we need to do a devastating takedown of these fringe epidemiologists, referring to the Barrington Declaration of Bhattacharia and the two other and Martin Koldoff and then I can't remember, Sinitra Gupta from Oxford, I think is the third.
But yeah, I mean, but I mean, even a more dramatic example is like, you know, a lot of the people that did the early pioneering work showing that COVID escaped from a lab were like anonymous people on the internet, anonymous sleuths.
That is legitimate.
I mean, the idea, like credentialism is the enemy of science.
The idea that you need to have some established credentials, in part because the system reproduces its own ideology.
Professors give, they hire people and give tenure and give PhDs to people who agree with them.
That's how they feel like their legacy will continue.
They don't normally promote people, the younger generation, if they have radical disagreements for them.
So they're necessarily going to come outside of the establishment.
And it's even more dangerous when it's in the health and medical context.
I'll give you another example.
I mean, American Academy of Pediatrics, my friend Marty McCarry just came out with this amazing book called Blind Spot, yeah, Blind Spots, where he looks at American Academy of Pediatrics.
Look at what they did.
They recommended letting babies sleep on their stomachs.
That resulted in the sudden infant death syndrome.
They ended up making – and it's an incredible story because – Do you know the other theory of why there's so many peanut allergies and so many allergies in general?
Obviously, I'm not an expert in any of these things that I'm talking about.
But the theory is that when you're vaccinating children and you're using aluminum, which is, so you have the inert virus, you have the dead virus, and you have this agitator, this thing that causes people to have this reaction, and then they find the inert virus, they develop antibodies for it.
That's how vaccines work.
But that aluminum causes severe allergic reactions and can cause you to become allergic to various things, including peanuts.
This is, I'm butchering this for sure, but Brett Weinstein has made this argument.
And he believes that's possibly why he has a severe wheat allergy.
I mean what's so amazing about that – assuming that Marty's account is correct, what's incredible about that story is that you had – so first of all, something like over 14 years went by before they did a study showing that depriving the kids of peanuts at a young age was creating the allergies.
But everybody, there's a whole field called immunology, and there's all these immunologists who were watching this happen, and they would know from their basic theory, which has been around for thousands of years, that you would end up creating allergies by not having that early exposure.
So one of the crazy, so you're always like, another case of this is like we're working on, I'm working on this study of like the last Harvard president who came to power, Claudine Gay, who ended up leaving.
And then some crazy things about someone commissioned with plagiarism to go after her because of that.
But what's amazing, when you look at it, Chris Rufo surfaced this glossary, this DEI glossary, diversity, equity, and inclusion glossary that was all these words that you were supposed to use.
Basically woke language you're supposed to use.
And she was the DEI going around and making the professors and the faculty all use this language.
I mean, it's Orwellian.
How is it that like these power, you're a Harvard professor.
You're like this accomplished person.
You've achieved a lot.
I mean, maybe you're, you know, maybe you're actually part of the problem in some ways, but how is it that you would just, some faculty member gives you a list of a glossary and you just go, oh, okay, I'm going to use your words?
It's like something's going on in these institutions where people are bullied into things that they know are wrong.
You know, and so it's a failure.
It's not just an intellectual failure.
It's like a failure of courage as well.
So that you just end up going along with it.
I don't want to be the guy that is accused of being a racist.
I don't want to be the person accused of causing childhood peanut allergies, even though that's the thing.
There's all these things going for you, but it's classic Emperor's New Clothes.
Where everybody in the room is like, this glossary is racist and insane.
Or telling parents not to give kids peanuts is insane because we've never had more allergies since we started banning this.
How did it go on so long?
I think that's one of the things that, you know, that is one of the remedies, I think, of the internet age and having these alternative media.
That is a remedy to basically have people calling bullshit on it from outside those institutions.
Because, I mean, this is American Academy of Petrie.
If you're just an ordinary new parent and you're, you know, oh, the other one, by the way, is infant formula, recommending seed-based, AAP recommended seed-based infant formulas, which were terrible for kids.
And of course, we know that breast milk is superior for all these reasons and the antibodies and creating the immune system response.
So, I mean, here you have the major organization recommending how to take care of kids with not one, but four separate health scandals that it helped to create.
Why should that organization even exist anymore?
Right.
You know, and that's just like literally one of the institutions.
But if you kind of just go down, you know, Harvard, New York Times, you know, American Medical Association.
And, you know, how about COVID?
I mean, most Americans agree now that COVID was invented in a lab in China, escaped from the lab.
So you have another case where these institutions are actually creating the problems they claim to be solving.
Last time I was here, you asked me what the new book was, and this is what it is.
Pathocracy is the new book.
Why elites subvert civilization?
And that's the big question is how is it that the institutions, and we're taking this concept of iatrogenesis where the classic example is you go to the hospital for some ailment and you end up getting an infection and die.
That's considered that when the healthcare system creates sickness, taking that and looking at a whole bunch of other institutions, why, you know, when the news media demand censorship and create propaganda, the FBI creating crimes and entrapment, potentially, you know, with informants and others, you know, how is why what's happening in these institutions that they end up creating the problems that they're trying to solve or that they're claiming to solve?
The crazy thing is it seems to be an emergent behavior pattern.
When people get into power, when people have power, they always go in this very particular direction of control.
And this was what the founding fathers of the Constitution, the people that founded this country, when they were laying it out, they were trying to prevent that from taking place.
And they had this very elaborate plan to sort of subvert normal human behavior, to stop it from taking root in this country and to make this a better experiment in self-government than what they'd experienced under dictatorships.
And people always want to get it back to where they're comfortable, which is being a dictator.
And, I mean, there's this famous, I can't remember if it was Jefferson or somebody who was one of the founding fathers that was like, we need a revolution every, you know, 50 years or something.
That's clearly, we're overripe for massive reform.
And we, in 1975, we had the church committee hearings, which is where we found out about the CIA assassinations and MKUltra and the, you know, the poisons and all the stuff that the CIA was doing.
And I think when you're, if I was an intelligence agent and I was trying to do this kind of stuff, I would find people already out of their fucking minds.
Well, and then unfortunately there was a bunch of conspiracy theories that he was his lover and he was in the house.
But if you see the guy while he's talking to the cops and holding the hammer and Paul Pelosi is trying to hold on to the hammer, the whole thing is mad.
Like why is Paul Pelosi still have a drink in his hand?
Like, dude, you're in a mortal struggle with a man who has a fucking hammer in his hand and you're holding the hammer with one hand because you want to keep your drink.
It didn't seem like Paul Pelosi was, he wasn't screaming or in danger.
He seemed very calm.
He's probably trying to slow this guy down and relax him and calm him down while the cops were arriving and just didn't ever feel like he was going to get hit in the head with a hammer, which is what wound up happening.
The video is so disturbing.
But if you look at the man in the video, he's clearly out of his fucking mind.
I think both sides, both left and right, often attribute political motivations to mentally ill people who, if you go through, like if you go through that guy's David DePop, I think was his name, if you're going through the stuff that he was posting, it's just a mix of crazy left-right stuff.
I mean, look, we're in this, I mean, look, we're in a mental, I mean, we've been in a, our country is just in a bad way in terms of mental health, right?
We're just not taking care of it.
I mean, no country.
I mean, we have a lot of guns, and then you have no proper psychiatric or mental health care system, which is crazy because now you have telehealth and we should have a bunch of ways to deal with it, but it's just not who we are, I guess.
And, you know, and then also the treatment, especially in terms of things like SSRIs, they have to try a bunch of things on you.
It's not as simple.
Everybody has a different level of mental illness, right?
And so there's also different causes of this mental illness and there's different medications at work.
And they don't really know until they try it on you.
And then we find out now that the entire theory that it's based on, which is that there is some sort of chemical imbalance, is incorrect.
It's not true.
So then, okay, well, we have to take this holistic view of the body and the mind and the health of the individual based on lifestyle and choices and community and friends and all these different things that we don't want to take into consideration.
Instead, they're just giving people pills.
And they give people pills and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.
And sometimes it causes a dissociation effect.
These dissociatives, these weird drugs that people take where they don't even exactly know what the fuck they're doing while they're doing it.
Well, in some, I mean, I think also, I mean, yeah, 100%.
And, you know, we also, unlike Europe and whatever, we don't, we don't allow, we don't coerce, we don't mandate antipsychotics to people with schizophrenia or those kinds of treatments.
You know, I mean, this guy, particularly, the Pelosi guy, I actually, I can't prove it, but my theory would be that there may not have been an underlying mental illness.
He had a rough life.
He did a huge quantity of drugs.
You know, there's just a set of people, as we've known from LSD over the decades.
There's some people that take LSD.
We're now seeing it with merit with the high-potency marijuana.
And it's probably, they already have a propensity for it.
The thought is that I forget what percentage of the population, I think it's 1% as a tendency towards schizophrenia or will eventually become schizophrenic.
Well, this is Mark Andreessen, who you had on, was making this point about ayahuasca, which is very fashionable among the elite set.
And I think the point that resonates with me is, you know, when I was working in San Francisco, after the summer of love, 1967, when everybody shows up in San Francisco and they're tripping out on acid, the privileged kids, the educated elite, they go back to Yale and Harvard at the end of the summer.
But the working class kids, the kids that were not as educated, lower middle class, they hung around in San Francisco and got addicted to speed and heroin.
And that was the early beginnings of the homelessness crisis.
Is that we don't develop human beings with a level of self-control and a level of discipline.
And we don't encourage discipline.
We don't encourage, and I don't mean like disciplining a person.
I mean self-discipline.
We don't encourage this concept that to be able to force yourself into doing difficult things.
You empower yourself and then strengthen, you strengthen your mind and your resolve and your spirit.
And if you genuinely gravitate towards positive results, positive results in your social life, positive results in business, positive results in artistic endeavors.
If you genuinely gravitate towards those things, like that is probably going to keep you on the right path in life.
And that we should really look at things in that way.
But I mean, I just, we have this beautiful philosophy called stoicism.
You know, it's amazing.
It actually was, we now understand now that it was part, it became part of Christianity for, that's why, because Christianity, the correction to Judaism, of course, is that it's all about compassion and care.
But when you lose the stoicism part of Christianity and it all just becomes compassion, the whole society gets started around compassion, that's where you get victimhood ideology.
You should absolutely should be teaching, because of course, I mean, the problem with the focus on the trauma, you know, is like you start to, everybody suddenly has trauma and you can sort of become obsessed with it as opposed to like, no, the whole point of becoming a full human being is overcoming adversity.
It's going through that process.
Stoicism is a philosophy that gets you there, but it's been absolutely denigrated.
You know, like when I was doing it's considered right-wing, of course, it's the most emancipatory.
It's the most liberating philosophy because it says it's all about your mentality.
It's all about what you do when you get up in the morning.
He's not saying, you know, there's other people like Nietzsche, which would say, hey, most people can't cope with the seriousness.
But they're saying everybody has this internal potential.
It's a completely liberal.
It's what leads to the human potential movement, the self-help movement.
You get to like, you know, I was looking at, you know, 1964, they passed the Civil Rights Act.
Within a few months, Lyndon Johnson goes and gives this famous Harvard, I'm sorry, Howard University speech where it's like, I was just shocking how quickly it occurs, where it's just basically about all the problems of the black community and how we still owe this debt to the black community and how the black community has been victimized.
Here's this moment where you could be like, hey, look, we've just leveled the playing field.
We've got the Civil Rights Act.
It's going to end racial aggregation.
That's all behind us.
Now it's up to us as individuals.
Instead, they come out and they go, now we've got to go and we pity you and take care of you.
It's really toxic discourse.
It's awful.
And it then has just expanded to everybody, including children, where like that part of the over-involved mothering of children is to treat children as though they're victims.
The reason why I brought up trauma before is I think that's one of the legitimate uses of psychedelics that I think it's pretty provable that there's positive outcomes, particularly MDMA for soldiers.
This is what MAPS had been working on.
And when you ask people in the service of their country to go overseas and kill people and become a part of a war and get shot at and see their friends die, those people are going to come back with unimaginable strain on their psyche.
Unimaginable.
And the one thing universally that these people have sought help with that has helped them has been psychedelics.
And it's huge in the special operations community discussions of not just ayahuasca, but Ibogaine in particular, which is absolutely non-addictive.
I mean, apparently, I don't have experience with it, but apparently an unbelievably brutal introspective experience where you see your entire life and sort of laid out why your behavior patterns exist and the way they exist.
And oftentimes they combine the Ibogaine experience with another psychedelic, whether it's psilocybin or 5-MeO, DMT, or there's a bunch of different ones that they try.
And all of it has to be done in other countries.
A lot of them, it's done in Mexico because it's illegal in the United States.
But I have personally talked to people.
I have Sean Ryan on the podcast the other day.
A personal experience of how it changed his life.
I know multiple soldiers where it's changed their life.
And this is illegal.
And this is something that we should be looking at every single tool available to help people.
Stoicism, absolutely.
But soldiers are the most stoic motherfuckers.
Those Navy SEALs, they're the most stoic fucking get shit done people you're ever going to run into in your life.
And if they're still struggling, maybe these things are tools.
I agree with you that both marijuana and real psychedelics, hard psychedelics like LSD, I think there's certain people that shouldn't do anything.
And I think the only way we find that out is we run real studies and do real tests and really try to understand what, get some real science behind the mechanism behind these things and what is wrong with these people that are freaking out.
And what is the cause of these psychotic breaks?
What is the cause of schizophrenia?
Like, especially when someone doesn't have it and then develops it.
So there's some biological mechanism.
There's something taking place in the body that all the wires get crossed and now this person thinks they're getting Satan's talking to them.
And so, you know, it's like you have PTSD, you had trauma from, say, fighting a foreign war, you were abused as a child or you were raped as a woman.
And I think those, you can get some insight, spiritual insight, existential insight to confront your demons, but you're still going to have to get up every day and confront those demons.
That's true, but I think it's a tool in the toolbox.
And I think to demonize that tool because some people have a bad effect on it, it's like to demonize all the things that people enjoy that you could consider legal vices, like gambling.
I do not think you should outlaw gambling, but I think some people should not fucking gamble.
I, you know, I grew up, well, in my 20s, my early 20s, in a pool hole.
And, you know, I played pool like eight hours a day.
I played competitively, and I was around a lot of gamblers, a lot of gamblers.
And it is a disease like anything.
It's a disease like heroin.
It's a disease like alcoholism.
Like these motherfuckers can't stop.
Those people shouldn't gamble, right?
Like they are gambling addicts.
And there's some people that should not do marijuana.
There's some people that should not drink.
There's some people that there's a lot of things they shouldn't do.
They don't have whatever it is that allows you to pick up a glass of whiskey, have a drink, and then the next day, boy, oh, I feel like shit, I'm going to the gym.
And then you don't drink again for a month.
There's some people that realize like there's certain vices that you can do in moderation and they're fine.
A couple glasses of wine at dinner and everyone's laughing and having a great time.
Nothing wrong with that.
But there's certainly some people that cannot handle that.
And I think we need to give those, if you want a better, stronger society, we need to develop tools for all people to follow that will give you a better life, including people that have issues with alcohol and gambling and sex and, you know, fill in the blanks, drugs and whatever it is that you're interested in and that you're addicted to, rather.
And I think there's a bunch of tools that can be used if used correctly.
Just like I used to say, like you could take a hammer, you could build a house with a hammer, or you could hit yourself in the face if you're fucking crazy.
It doesn't mean that we should get rid of hammers.
It's like some people have used psychedelic drugs and had incredible insight and it's completely changed their lives and now they're better for it.
And then there's some people that we can point to that lost their way and they're gone now and we might not ever get it back.
I mean, Howard Stern talked about it famously.
He took acid and he was really fucked up for a long period of time where he really thought he was going crazy.
And I think in that case, it's very dangerous.
There's also, there's a dosing thing.
When you're taking something that's made in some fucking hippie's bathtub while he's listening to the Grateful Dead, like what are the odds that you know exactly what the dose is?
Like what are the odds that this is pure?
Especially if you're doing a drug today, because if you're doing a drug today, you're rolling the dice on whether or not you're going to die of a fentanyl overdose.
Even if you're taking something that you would think would be completely benign.
But there's other stuff that people are taking, like MOLLI.
They're taking Molly, and it's not really MOLLI.
It's laced with fentanyl, and they die.
They're taking street drugs, like anti-anxiety medication, that are forged drugs that are actually laced with fentanyl.
And they're dying from that kind of stuff.
There's people that, you know, maybe they developed an addiction to benzos and then their doctor says, look, I'm cutting you off.
And then they fucking find it on the streets and they die from fentanyl overdoses.
So I think there's tools that could be used.
I think this panacea, this idea that it's a one-shop fits all, you go do ayahuasca and now you're a better person.
I don't believe that.
I think there's a lot of work to be done.
I think there's a lot of work to be done.
And I think there's a process as we are growing as human beings.
You start off as a child where you don't get to pick your parents and they bring with them a bunch of baggage because they were raised by people in the 1940s and they didn't know what the fuck they were doing.
And they were raised by people who literally came over on boats from Europe to escape tyranny and chaos.
And they came over to America to do the most desperate wage work you could possibly get.
Dock workers, steel workers, factory workers.
They would do anything.
They were desperate.
They would take any jobs.
They would work on railroads and whatever the fuck they could because they just wanted to be able to eat, right?
And they raised your grandparents.
And then your grandparents raised your parents.
And then you're here going, okay, what are we doing?
And there's some tools.
Stoicism is a great tool.
It's a great tool.
Discipline is a great tool.
I think we are blessed in this time that you can hear a lot of speeches from brilliant people.
There's a lot of great, brilliant people that have talked about various ways that they've overcome their problems on YouTube and on podcasts.
And you can learn a lot.
And some of them use different tools.
Some of them use the tools of meditation and yoga.
Some of them use the tools of fasting.
And some of them use stoicism.
Some of them use martial arts.
Some of them used, there's a lot of different things that people do to make themselves a better person.
And I think to discount one, like psychedelics, because there's a bunch of people that abuse it and get fucked up from it, I think is foolish because the profound effects that these things have should not be minimalized.
They shouldn't be dismissed because they're illegal.
They shouldn't be dismissed because of ignorance.
And they certainly shouldn't be dismissed by people who have not experienced them and have not had those profound changes that take place in their perspective on life because there's a lot of people, a lot.
And I think it's probably been going on through the course of human history.
It's probably what caused us to consider democracy in the first place.
I mean, if the whole, have you ever read the have you ever read the Brian Murrow rescue book, The Immortality Key?
It's all about the Illusinian mysteries and what these people would do.
They were taking drug-laced wine, and they were coming up with concepts of democracy, and they were trying to figure out society in a more equitable and even peaceful way.
And the philosophies that they were coming up with to this day, people read their stuff and it's profound.
Okay, so if you have 30% THC and you take one hit, oh my God, I'm so high.
If you have 15% THC, you take two hits.
But if you're a crazy person and you take 30 bong hits of 15% THC, you're going to get fucked up.
You're going to get fucked up.
No matter what, no one's controlling the amount of pot you smoke.
Snoop Dogg smokes pot all day long.
When you hang out with that dude, that dude sat there, he rolled like eight blunts in the course of a three-hour conversation.
He just kept rolling blunts.
He had a disco machine.
The guy's awesome.
But I mean, whatever tolerance he has is preposterous.
And it's not that guy who, you know, he's in grad school and he does some bong hits from his friends and has a schizophrenic break and thinks that the government has put a recording apparatus in his pencils.
You know, like people lose their fucking way.
And it's not everybody.
And I think we have to figure out what is causing it, not eliminate it for the vast majority of people who don't have that effect.
Every kid gets together in parties and they all figure out a way to drink.
But my point is, if alcohol, if prohibition had succeeded, okay, in the 1920s and we had illegal alcohol in the United States, no one would know how to drink.
No one.
It would be just, and you would never know what the fuck is in the drinking.
You'd be still buying drinks.
People would still buy drinks.
There'd be jails filled with people who sold and bought alcohol.
And there'd be a bunch of people that died because they got poisoned drinking.
Because they got drugs for, they got their alcohol from the cartel.
But this is where it gets to be a really interesting question, right?
Because why not?
Like, you shouldn't buy it, but why should it be the only criminal sell it if we absolutely know that there's a market for it?
Well, because should we allow people, if you listen to Dr. Carl Hart, who to me is the most brilliant person that I've ever met that does heroin all the time.
I don't know if he does it all the time, but he says it's wonderful.
He's done it before.
And you also have to take into account that he was a straight-laced clinician.
He was not a drug user.
He was a guy that was studying the effects of these things and realized that there's a bunch of gaslighting as to what their actual effects of the pure versions of these things are.
And that this concept that they are unbelievably addictive and you can't stop yourself, he thinks is false.
He's smarter and more educated about that subject than I am.
But could you see how you could say the problem in our society is that a bunch of people are saying things that are incorrect, and the only way to stop that is to censor them.
The problem in society is that some people are drinking too much.
The way to stop that is to moderate their drinking and control them.
The problem with people that are addicted to drugs is we need to make drugs illegal so no one can become addicted to drugs.
But it doesn't work that way because humans don't work that way and humans don't like other humans telling them what to do.
If it was just you, me and Jamie on an island and I decide that coconuts are illegal and I'm going to put you in a cage that I created out of bamboo if you drink coconut milk because I think coconut's bad for you.
And everybody else is saying, I fucking love coconut.
This guy's an asshole.
Well, that doesn't make any sense, right?
Because I'm a grown adult and I'm telling another grown adult to stop doing something.
That's how I feel about almost everything that doesn't hurt other people.
Look, it all started with the Sackler family, right?
It all started with oxycodone and all that stuff.
But the reality is that there's a bunch of people that are addicted to these drugs, and the way they're getting them is by getting drugs that are tainted with fentanyl.
And that's a primary cause for the people that are overdosing.
Listen, it is, because if just those opiates, pure opiates, were available, you could make an argument that those 75 percent would still be alive if they died from fentanyl overdose.
This is part of the problem that we have in this country.
And we accept all sorts of socialized things, like the fire department.
That's basically a socialist idea.
We're all going to contribute.
It's all equal.
The fire people work for everybody.
And they put out fires because we all need firemen.
Right.
And sort of with public schools.
Very similar.
But when it comes to medicine, we're very wary about that.
But the problem is then people profit off of how much they can sell you.
And when you have some monsters like the Sackler family and what the fuck they did, that's how you create this opioid crisis.
Let's imagine that wasn't the case.
So let's imagine this sweeping act in 1970 does not take place.
And all these psychedelics, whether it's psilocybin, including marijuana, which was made illegal because of prohibition, prohibition went off and then they started, you know, they went after marijuana.
That was a new thing.
And, you know, William Randolph Hearst and Harry Anslinger, it's a long story, but it was really more about hemp as a commodity than it was actually about the drug.
That's why they even called it marijuana.
Marijuana was a name for a slang name for wild Mexican tobacco.
Didn't have anything to do with cannabis.
So when they passed that, they made everything illegal, all these things illegal.
And so then when the government comes along and takes this incredibly dangerous and addictive substance like oxycodone and says, let's say, you guys want to sell it?
We'll make sure the guys that are deciding whether or not you could sell it get a cushy job in the pharmaceutical drug companies afterwards.
We'll hook you up if you hook us up.
And then that's what created the opioid crisis, not opioids being illegal.
I mean, you have to make a decision as a society because, I mean, look, so Carl is right that most people that do opioids or heroin don't become addicted.
The people that do become addicted, most of them are able to quit on their own.
So only a small percentage of people become so addicted that they die from it.
But that's 112,000 deaths a year.
So are we going to just condemn the most vulnerable people?
In other words, the 112,000 people that died of drugs and drug poisonings and drug overdoses last year are by definition the most vulnerable to those drugs.
So are we just going to sacrifice 112,000 people from drugs so Carl Hart can get high on heroin?
The curve goes up when they start giving people prescription pills and telling them they need it after an accident.
If you just had heroin available, do you think without recommendation people would gravitate towards heroin?
People generally learn.
This is one of the reasons why you learn from other people's failures.
Like, there's not a lot of people that are crack advocates because crack didn't really work out good for fucking anybody.
But no one's out there telling people to take crack.
But if the government came out with some sort of, or not the government, a pharmaceutical drug company came around and the FDA approved it, and it was some sort of a medication that gave you the exact same effects as crack, but they told you this is a great drug for people to overcome timidity.
Like, you could do that because that's essentially what they did with pain.
And that's how they snuck in heroin.
But it wasn't heroin.
It was synthetic.
But using that synthetic heroin and using it so ubiquitously and prescribing it is what caused that epidemic.
You tricked people into getting addicted by telling people it wasn't addictive and then telling people they need it because of pain.
And then, of course, your whole body's in agony because it's addicted to this stuff.
And when you get off of it or you try to get off of it, you're in terrible, terrible pain.
So the key is just stay on it.
That's the trick.
So if we didn't have that happen, and in 1970, they didn't pass this act that told people that things like ibogaine that cure people of addictions actually rewire the mind in some substantial way that stops all those addictive pathways and stops people from wanting to engage in these self-destructive behaviors because it makes you so aware of why you're doing it in the first place.
We made all of those illegal at the same time.
If that hadn't been done, we would have a much greater, if they hadn't been done, and if all of these compounds had been pursued under the name of real science, and we actually studied them openly, and you had the brightest and most brilliant minds running tests and studies and trying to figure out what's going on and what's good and what's not good and what's the right way to take it, what's the wrong way to take it.
You wouldn't have the influence of the cartel because you wouldn't have this insane, I mean, who knows what the actual numbers are, but it's hundreds of billions of dollars that are being earned south of our border by these ruthless, murderous gangs who control the drug trade because it's illegal in the country that has the most demand for it.
So, I mean, I'm not denying any of like, yeah, I mean, ultimately, kids need to be raised right.
You need more self-control.
You need more delayed gratification.
100%.
I also support marijuana decriminalization.
I mean, drugs have two dimensions, right?
There's one dimension, which is the inherent toxicity of the drug, and the other dimension is how you use it.
Marijuana, nobody's ever overdosed from it.
Nobody ever dies.
You do get psychosis, but I mean, really, compared to other drugs, marijuana is fairly low toxicity.
Alcohol, you know, actually when you read the history of alcohol prohibition, it did actually have health benefits, alcohol prohibition, because people drank less.
But I agree.
I agree.
I mean, I think alcohol, like, I think it should be legal.
I like the Dutch model.
I like the restrictions because I think it does, it doesn't prevent people from getting it, but it just is constantly saying, hey, be careful with this.
But meth, heroin, fentanyl, I think absolutely illegal.
Do what they do in Holland.
I mean, they chase people down.
They chase cocaine.
Is there no cocaine in Holland?
Of course there's cocaine there.
Is there heroin?
Sure.
But they chase it, makes it more expensive because it's less available.
Now, you get to kind of go, well, okay, so then you get to, we have a real world case, which is marijuana.
We've legalized marijuana in California and many other states.
The criminal element controlling the marijuana growth and industry in California is larger and more violent and more dangerous than it was before we decriminalized it.
Well, I mean, I think it's mostly because the market for black, the black market for marijuana is still much larger than the market for legal.
In other words, you can buy marijuana for much cheaper, you know, informally through your dealer on the street than you can if you go into the store.
And some of that's, I will grant you that it's because the California, you can imagine when California decides to make marijuana legal, it's going to add a huge amount of tax and it's going to require a set of cost that legal marijuana is just much more expensive.
And they found out that cartels were growing in national forests.
So because they made marijuana legal, growing it illegally was just a misdemeanor.
So because of that, 90% of all the marijuana that's grown to all the places where it's illegal, all the states that it's illegal, comes out of California.
And it is made by the cartel.
So it's the same sort of a situation.
Even though it's legal in California, There's an illegal market, and this is the safest place to grow it because it's just become a misdemeanor.
And we are also a very unique country, and we have these wide swaths of land that are public that people could just go out on and just go for a walk in the woods.
There's no restriction.
It's ours.
It's yours.
And so they go out there and they set up shop and they use unbelievably toxic poison pesticides and herbicides.
And that shit gets in your illegal marijuana.
It's the same thing.
It's because it's illegal that is causing all the violence.
It's not necessarily because it's being taxed and because there's a black market.
The black market is because it's illegal in other states.
It's not because people don't want to pay taxes on weed.
Texas, it's illegal, but it's decriminalized in the city of Austin.
And then the Attorney General Ken Paxton apparently doesn't like that and he wants that to stop.
I think most of the people that want marijuana to be legal don't necessarily use it and don't necessarily really understand what it does.
And there's this idea that it makes you lazy, which is my favorite.
Like, I know some of the most motivated people ever, and they smoke weed all the time.
I think it makes you more compassionate.
I think it makes you more creative, more considerate.
It makes you think about things in a different light.
Carl Sagan was a famous cannabis user, and he has a very famous quote about cannabis, about there's states of mind that are achievable in cannabis that he doesn't think are achievable any other way.
Yeah, and I think it would be smart for parents to explain to kids that there are some drugs that are really fucking dangerous.
And don't just say all drugs are bad.
Just let them know.
And if you have a history of mental illness in your family, which many people do, mental illness seems to be something that's inherited, that some people have a tendency towards certain mental states.
There's a lot of arguments about that.
I'm not the one to say yes or no, but maybe you should not do these things if your family has a tendency towards schizophrenia.
If you've had your own mental struggles, if you've had moments where I know people that have had schizophrenic breaks or they've come back.
I have a couple of friends that had real problems and now they're normal again and not with medication.
I mean, we're dealing with the, I mean, I think it's always so important to remember that you're when you're where the people that have the worst problems are definitely a small minority.
But the question is, how many people are we willing to sacrifice?
Well, Noog, in Vancouver, they had this experiment where they said, we're going to go give hydrohydromorphone, which is an opioid, as a harm reduction to people that use fentanyl and heroin.
And it's been a total nightmare because it gets diverted and people sell it in order to buy fentanyl.
Kids end up with it.
I mean, I think you have to remember every time you add drugs to the drug supply, you add, you increase supplies.
There's laws already that prevent you from doing that if you want to follow the law.
So it's not, it's people that are willing to break the law and do this.
If there's a reasonable law that gets put forth in terms of age of use, age of discretion.
And it probably honestly, I mean, it's no one's going to buy it, but it probably should be 25, right?
Especially for males, right?
That's when the frontal lobe fully forms.
And, you know, your decision-making is all fucked up.
And if you're hitting the bong every day while your brain is forming and this frontal lobe is under development, of course that's going to have an effect on it.
It's going to have an effect on if you're on Prozac.
It's going to have an effect on if you're drinking every day.
There's a lot of substances in this country that can do you wrong.
And food is one of them.
And I don't think that we should be telling people what they can and can't do.
I think we should be explaining what you should and shouldn't do.
With food, I would say the tobacco model is wonderful.
I mean, we did an amazing job with reducing tobacco use in the United States just through, I mean, there was some reduction in availability, reduction in advertising, and then moralizing against it.
So in other words, should you be free to commit suicide?
I think you should.
That's different from having a government program to assist it because you would say, well, it always starts with the go, we're not going to promote it.
But in fact, the people that are involved in assisting suicide are basically selling it.
There's this amazing BBC clip of this woman, this doctor that's been assisting people with their suicide.
And it's impossible to listen to her and not feel like she's promoting it.
Yeah, I don't know what the solution to all of these things that are very complex.
And I see your perspective.
I really do.
But I think unfortunately you could apply that perspective to almost everything that people do that's dangerous and tell people they can't make these choices anymore because we're going to lose people.
And I think you really want to be honest about that one.
The biggest one is food.
And no one wants to tell people you can't eat cookies.
But the reality is that will fucking kill you.
And, you know, what should we do about that?
What should we do?
Should we educate people and tell people about the benefits of healthy diets and exercise?
Yes, yes.
Do you think we should do that with all the above?
I think we should do that with all the above.
I think we should do that with marijuana.
I think we should do that with psilocybin.
I think we should also take into account the people like these veterans like Sean Ryan that I was telling you that have had these experiences from psychedelics that have changed their life in a huge way.
And for these people that sort of dismiss that and poo-poo that and say, oh, Carl Hart just wants to get fucked up, I don't think that's really fair.
And I think you have to apply the same ideas of freedom where we have it with speech to especially behavior like drug use where it's not affecting anyone but yourself.
And we already have laws that you're not allowed to drive intoxicated.
And if someone does something and commits a crime while they're intoxicated, that's also illegal.
We have laws that prevent bad behavior.
And that bad behavior, those laws, it's already criminalized.
So I think the real problem is not these things.
The real problem is like all things that people get to try out.
There's a lot of people that are going to fuck up with everything.
I mean, I don't think Carl, I read his book and I interviewed him.
I don't think he's honest about the trade-offs.
I think he sells it as though it's just an injustice that we don't have legalized drugs and then dismisses this very well-established reality that greater drug availability results in more addiction.
Yeah, you could have a couple of drinks and you're definitely not going to die, most likely.
But I think what Carl Hart is kind of saying from his own perspective is that he had a very different opinion of what they did and the dangers of them before he started researching them.
And then once he became a clinical researcher, then he realized like, oh, this is not.
I have these two addicts telling a story about how they recovered.
One of them was white, one of them was black.
The black guy, Jabari, is arrested multiple times from when he starts his criminal career as a teenager all the way into his 40s.
And they keep letting him off because they're racist, actually, and they're saying, oh, you're a victim and whatever.
Basically, is getting to a place of just very serious addiction, finally gets arrested in a way so that he can get into recovery.
The white guy gets arrested once, and because they're not lenient on him, he ends up getting into recovery right away.
So I think that, I think back to, I think if we can find some common ground, it would be that you would enforce some basic laws so that if you're out there on the streets dealing drugs or you're sleeping in a tent on the sidewalk after you've been told multiple times or the EMT has to come out and revive you 20 times from your fentanyl.
I mean, how many times do, just even if you don't care about the guy, how many times do taxpayers want to pay to send the fire trucks out?
I mean, it's like often a fire truck and an ambulance go out to revive a dude who often has already been revived.
I mean, one time I saw it was with the Times of London reporter.
Guy overdoses in front of us.
They get him Narcan.
The fire truck still has to come.
The ambulance still has to come.
I mean, how many thousands of dollars of staff time and medical time is that to revive that guy?
Instead, arrest him, you know, or get him in the system.
And then if you do it again, then you've got to choose between rehab and jail.
I think that's how you end up dealing with it.
So Carl Hart, yeah, I mean, I don't want to send the police into arresting Carl Hart.
Well, first of all, shut down the open-air drug markets.
Don't have this thing of repeated, if you overdose and the system has to come out to reverse the overdose, next time they come out, it should be a choice of jail or rehab.
Like, that's it.
You've got to go to rehab or you go to jail.
That was the system we had.
California's about to reform the law that changed that.
You know, we had Prop 47, which made shoplifting up to $950 legal or decriminalized, I should say.
Same thing with three grams of hard drugs.
Californians are going to vote in November to reverse that.
I think that's the one that people don't want to say, especially people that fancy themselves intelligent.
I think a big part of our problem is we have lost all sense of religious virtue and values as a culture.
And we've rejected them under the guise of you being too intelligent for religion.
And the results of that is like if you just look at the results in terms of the way people feel about life.
If you really do believe in God, you will feel about life like that it is a gift and is a miracle and you will live a more righteous and just life.
It will benefit you.
It actually will.
And I don't know if it's true, but I know that if you believe it's true, and Jordan talks about this, but whether or not he won't say whether or not he believes in God, but if you act as if God is real, you'll have a much better life.
And that's a fact.
And people know that.
They know when you meet like a really good Christian person who does charitable things and this wonderful, lovely person who actually lives by the Bible, not a hypocrite.
You're like, wow, what a cool guy.
Like, I really love that guy.
He's awesome.
Like, because it's a great value.
It's a great virtuous way to live your life.
And we've rejected that because we're too smart for it.
And in the absence, in the void of this, this thing that I think we all need, you fill it with this new religion, whether it's wokeism or whatever it is, fill in the blank.
So on both free speech and on homelessness, my best allies are Christians.
They literally just have shown up.
There's all these people that are secular that are like, yeah, we're with you, but they don't actually do the work.
Like the Salvation Army, when I did a fentanyl protest in Los Angeles, the Salvation Army shows up and they're effective on the free speech issues in Europe.
There's a group called Alliance Defending Freedom.
My best supporter of our nonprofit for years, just a Christian, has just gives us support.
He's like, I trust you.
Go do it.
I mean, when I look at my grandfather, who was a farmer in Indiana, lived to 101.
After he died, I interviewed his neighbors and I was like, what?
Like, why does, and they were like, oh, yeah, that neighbor over there is 98 and that neighbor is 97.
And I was like, why does everybody live so long around here?
And they just go, right-living.
And I was like, well, what's right-living?
And they were like, didn't smoke, didn't drink, you know, ate right.
I mean, they ate great food, obviously.
They're on the farm.
But also, he had no choices to make.
I mean, there's this really interesting book by Leah Greenfield that argues that the increase of mental illness in Western countries over the last several hundred years is just this incredible pressure on the individual to make all these choices.
You know, like my grandfather was like, there weren't that many young women to choose from to marry.
He didn't choose his religion.
I mean, it's like absurd.
Like, we choose, we tell our kids, it's like, can you imagine?
You can believe whatever you want to become Jewish.
Well, no, I mean, because of course you and I would hate that.
We're libertarian.
Like we want, we love our choices.
I mean, because you were saying it's not just that there's two things that are going on.
First, people just, the church didn't explain the world very well.
Like suddenly you have these scientists that are like, well, actually, the earth revolves around the sun, guys.
And, you know, it looks like, and then there's a story about evolution, which may not be correct, but nonetheless, the scientists had a much better story of reality than the church did.
And then the other thing is that just as you get wealthier, you just have more money.
There's more choices.
There's more things to do.
And you're sort of like, why am I going to go along with what some priest tells me to do?
I mean, the Europeans somehow, I mean, the Dutch, for example, they're very secular.
I mean, these Western European societies, they have far less belief in God than in the United States.
And yet somehow, you know, they keep raising their kids to be more disciplined than we're raising our kids.
They don't have as they have, you know, their cultural philosophy.
There's like an inner, I do think it's a stoicism in the sense that it's, it's, you know, it's like when I would, my, my parents, it's funny because Jonathan, you know, Jonathan Haidt at one point, he was asked, I think by, I can't remember who, someone asked him, like, who's better parents, left-wingers or right-wingers?
I mean, my parents who are very, my mom and dad are very left, but they raised him more conservative.
And the way they would do it is they'd be like, you know, be like, oh, well, that's not fair.
And they'd be like, well, life's not fair.
That's like a conservative view.
Life is not fair.
And then you'd be like, well, why don't you, can you, will you get me some food?
They would teach you, they would teach us how to like push a chair next to the kitchen counter to climb up and get your make your own food.
They had a philosophy that was, if the kid can do it, the kid should do it, as opposed to now it's like, I think there's just these over-involved parents that are like, oh, I want to, I want to take care of you.
And so the kids end up getting coddled.
Somehow, for whatever reason, in Europe, those core values of self-reliance, you know, it gets when you, when I interviewed like the progressive homeless service providers in the United States, they were in San Francisco and other places, they would say things like, oh, that's the whole buy your bootstraps philosophy, which is just so oppressive.
It's like, no, actually, it's completely liberating to be told that you have the power to do these things.
I mean, that's basically what Anthony and Tony Robbins is telling people all the time, right?
Is that you have the inner resources, the inner power.
But this thing where like, you know, after the George Floyd, where it's like the Obamas are and affluent, you know, black families are saying, oh, yeah, I'm worried about my kids.
Like, what are you telling your kids that they're like, that they're going to be victims of the society, that police are all racists?
I mean, these messages are constantly being told to people that the system, that basically the broader society is essentially unfair, as opposed to telling them that really the playing field is more level than it's ever been.
People that don't, a lot of people do, but, you know, because there's a sort of a political incentive to communicate that way and to promote this idea that it's everybody's fault.
And everybody goes, oh, and then you get white guilt involved.
Like, it's not my fault.
I'm an ally.
And then they jump in.
And next, you know, people are looking for racism everywhere.
We're like, racist Columbos.
It's weird.
It's weird how it shifted because when I was a kid, racism was bad, period.
No one cared.
It got to this weird point somewhere around 2012 where it was everywhere in society, and you had to encounter unconscious bias and unconscious racism training in the workplace.
So then you get these grifters who their only jobs to tell you that everything is racist.
And their only job is to berate you and scare you into you have to give in to whatever their demands are in terms of the numbers of employees that have to be X, Y, or Z. And they develop these very rigid rules that you have to follow.
No, they're in control.
No, they're controlling what you're allowed to say, the way you're allowed to discuss things.
If someone says anything about a person that is of a particular group, that becomes either homophobic or transphobic or racist or you're not taking into account all these other factors that led that person to be, you know, it's not equitable.
There's all this nonsense talk that's used by grifters.
But that's actually a tragedy, especially for young black men in this country.
This idea that he does once in a while, he'll say something about it.
But I mean, the whole Black Lives Matter movement, which was, you know, just a tragedy, you know, where the grotesque exaggeration of police killings of unarmed black men, he was in a position to push back against that.
And they didn't do it.
And he hasn't done it since he left office.
So that's why I say I blame him just because of what he hasn't done.
But that's still a lot of people that died that didn't have to die if the police weren't incompetent or if they weren't racist or if they weren't fucked up on PTSD because a lot of them are.
But if you calculate the number of the increase of the number of black people killed because the police pulled back in reaction to Black Lives Matter, what we call the Ferguson effect.
And then you get a wake-up call a few years later where people are like, we need to refund the police.
And that's what happened in Minnesota.
And it's happened in a lot of places where people are up in arms.
Like our communities are more fucked up now than they've ever been before.
This didn't help anybody.
And you didn't even fill the void.
It's not like you defunded the police, but figured out some new strategy that's more effective and implemented that.
No.
You just created this bizarre environment where you allow people to steal.
If you make a law that makes, allow people to steal up to $950 worth of shit, they're just going to steal $950 worth of shit every chance they get.
And then you're going to see all these businesses closing down, like in San Francisco.
You know, Chamath was on the podcast recently, and he thinks that San Francisco is going to experience a rebirth because of AI.
And his perspective is that the super nerds are like more in charge of San Francisco now.
And so these sort of mid-level grifters who are into virtue signaling, which is like how you got ahead in a lot of these businesses where you're not really exceptional as a person, but you fit a good quota and you're kind of a DEI hire.
Next thing you know, the CEO of a big company.
And it's nuts and it happens.
And he said, that's not going to happen anymore.
He's like, AI is going to essentially revitalize that area because there's going to be so much money.
And the people that are going to be running it are going to be the actual geniuses again.
There's brilliant, brilliant people who are finally expressing themselves.
And I think that's so huge.
And Mark and Chamoth and all these folks that are doing that now, it's courageous because if you step out of line with the ideology, what the ideology supports, you get attacked.
I mean, I can't prove it, but I assume that that's the case.
Yeah, they went along with it.
I mean, only Elon stood up against it.
So, I mean, Facebook has just engaged in a huge amount more censorship.
You know, the fact checkers, they outsource their brain to these fact-checkers who are then funded by all these bad actors.
I think the thing about the Brazilian shows is, you know, they froze Starlink's bank accounts and they seized its assets.
So, you know, because people point out, you know, Elon's incredibly powerful, richest man in the world.
I mean, Starlink is this incredible innovation.
I've seen you talk about it.
But at the end of the day, it actually makes him somewhat vulnerable because then they can just, you know, it's not just about X. Like if the Brazilian government can come in and seize Starlink assets in a country where Starlink is absolutely essential because the Amazon, you know, it allows for this incredible connectivity.
So it really, for me, it's just, you still need a free speech movement.
Like you need to re-inculcate.
And I think the other thing that I've realized in the last year and a half of doing the Twitter files and other censorship files is that, because I used to think that my support for free speech, that our support for free speech was sort of like natural or something, but I realized it was taught to me.
Like I remember my father teaching me about SCOGI and telling me that the ACLU had defended the right of Nazis to march through a neighborhood of Holocaust survivors.
And I remember being horrified by it as a very, you know, woke kid and being like, that's very insensitive.
And my dad kind of being like, well, yeah, but here's why we do it that way.
And it was because actually censorship would then be used against other people.
And he would also make this point.
And I was making this yesterday to my future students at University of Austin, is that you want to know who the Nazis are.
You actually want to know who the Nazis are and you want to argue with the Nazis.
This idea that we're, there's a fantasy, people say, oh, well, if we had, if Germany had like censored the Nazis, then they wouldn't have come to power.
They did censor the Nazis.
Like they had imposed a censorship regime before the Nazis came to power.
They were censoring them.
They came to power, reinforced that system.
So much better to defeat these bad ideas in the realm of free speech.
But I do think there's a whole younger generation that never got indoctrinated into the religion of free speech in the ways that we as Gen Xers did.
Let's say if you're one of those people that said the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation and you signed off on that, what are the ramifications?
What's the result of that?
Do people still call on you for suggestions and questions?
Like people that were involved in Russia Gate with Trump that promoted that idea, how come they still get to talk on CNN?
Unbelievable.
The whole thing is very bizarre.
It's like if you really are against misinformation, you have to stop it everywhere you see it, including from yourself.
So if your own organization is a purveyor of misinformation and you're acutely aware of it and you hide it and you dismiss it and you gaslight everybody and then you say we have to stop misinformation online.
Well, what about yourself?
How about start with you?
You have to clean up your own fucking yard before you come to us.
Well, this was, and that was in the Facebook files, where the Facebook's top researcher says to the White House, they go, hey, our research shows that if you censor true stories of vaccine side effects, shocking as it sounds, people will become more suspicious of the vaccine.
So it's actually, yeah, they do contradict themselves in that sense.
I think the other, you know, the Hunter Biden laptop story, we talk about it a ton, but what was so important about it is that the disinformation campaign comes before the censorship.
They go out and they say, and this will be a segue to our conversation about UFOs.
The FBI gets the laptop in December 2019.
They know it's Hunter Biden's laptop.
They know it's not Russian disinformation.
Aspen Institute, which is funded by the U.S. government and very close to the intelligence community, then goes and brainwashes journalists and the social media companies into preparing that there could be a hack and leak coming around Hunter Biden's laptop.
And of course, Mark Zuckerberg made history here with you when he told you that the FBI had come to him in the summer of 2020 warning of a hack and leak operation.
So they do that, and then they come out, and then when the laptop comes out, they demand that it be censored.
But the key thing there is that there was an organized disinformation effort around that laptop by people that were fed that by the FBI.
This is why I'm so confident now in saying that both the FBI and the CIA interfered in the 2020 election because they ran this disinformation campaign, whereby censorship was one part of it, but it was actually the part that came after the disinformation.
It's disinformation because they knew it was not true, right?
The other one, and then the CIA, remember, Gina Haspel was director of the CIA for Trump.
She was part of it because she approved the letter from the 51 former CIA directors and leaders that said that it had all the earmarks of a Russian information operation.
She approved that letter within hours.
All she had to do, I mean, look, I mean, assuming she didn't know, all she had to do was to call the FBI.
I got to segue a man because here's the craziest thing.
That Aspen Institute Hunter Biden disinformation operation was run by two people, Vivian Schiller and Garrett Graff.
Vivian Schiller is this just wild.
She was New York Times, NPR, Twitter executive, high-level executive, now runs Aspen's Digital Initiative.
Garrett Graff is this acclaimed nonfiction book writer.
They did the Hunter Biden disinformation campaign where they programmed and brainwashed these journalists and the social media platforms in advance of the release of the Hunter Biden story.
Well, guess who wrote the big book dismissing UFOs earlier this year?
You should invite him on your show and ask him some questions.
Why did he decide to do a book about UFOs?
So here you have people that I feel very confident saying were part of an FBI-run disinformation and censorship initiative on Harrow Biden's laptop.
Then turning around, they then did an interview.
She then interviews him at like Aspen Institute, you know, classic YouTube.
So I saw it on YouTube.
She's interviewing him.
There's this moment.
It's so crazy.
She goes, there's something like, they both kind of go, well, you know, the reason this is just UFOs are obviously a conspiracy theory is because the government is incompetent and can't get away with this kind of thing.
Well, that is madness because, of course, the U.S. government is actually very good at keeping secrets.
You know, from the making of the atomic bomb until today, there are a lot of secrets that the U.S. government is actually quite capable of holding.
And nobody knows that better than Vivian Schiller and Garrett Graff of the Aspen Institute, who ran the Hunter Biden operation.
So what they're doing is they're deliberately, it's a psychopath.
I mean, I just use a psyop or whatever you call it, because a lot of people, our experience of ordinary normie experiences of government is going to the DMV, right?
So you go, wow, the DMV, yeah, that's the government.
The people that are working at the CIA and the FBI at those high levels are best intelligent.
They're like some of the smartest people in the world.
I mean, these are people that they're recruiting them out of the Ivy Leagues.
The idea that these agencies are incompetent, and I'm not saying that they're always competent, but these are some of the premier spies that have ever existed.
And the idea that somehow the U.S. government can't carry out these operations or keep a secret, that's obviously wrong.
And then we have all these whistleblowers coming forward.
That's the all-domain anomaly resolution office that was created by the Senate that came out with this very dismissive report about UFOs.
And then he left, the head of Arrow left and has now just been ridiculing and attacking all the UFO whistleblowers, including David Grush and Lou Elisando and all these folks.
But the book is, so basically, this is a book of the history of UFOs.
And it basically just goes through every single major case and shows you why it's just not, it's not a UFO.
I mean, basically, it's showing or why it's a nationalist.
It's absolutely an extension of it's really and then remember in 1953 the CIA created something called the Robertson Panel and the Robertson panel comes out and says the U.S. government should just focus on debunking UFO cases and including ridiculing people, which is a very cruel treatment of people because it's such a devastating, socially so devastating to be ridiculed.
And then you get the Condon report, the Condon Committee, which is the University of Colorado 1966 to 1968, same thing, dismisses this, suggests it's all kooks.
Garrett Graf's UFO book is more sophisticated.
It's actually a little bit more gentle in the sense that it's dismissing all these things.
It's also talking about like these may be natural phenomena.
It might be plasmas or ball lightning.
And then they kind of go to the psychological explanation.
But the whole book is aimed at just absolutely dismissing the phenomenon.
I think some of the phenomena should be dismissed.
I think that's one thing that we really need to accept when we try to develop an objective sense of what's really going on, that ball lightning is real.
For sure.
Plasma is real.
There's a lot of real natural phenomenon.
Ball lightning is bizarre.
And if you ever see ball lightning and you imagine you're a person alone in the forest and you saw ball lightning, you would 100% shit your pants.
You'd be like, oh my God, there's a fucking alien here and they're going to get me and take me like Travis Walton.
I also think there's something going on with the government.
I believe that they have, and this is a pure guess based on no evidence at all.
I think they probably have some super sophisticated propulsion program that's based on something that is an entirely new set of physics.
It's probably based on some sort of gravity propulsion.
There's long been speculation that eventually there'll be an ability to create something that does not rely on conventional propulsion.
There's long been some sort of an understanding of a manipulation of gravity.
In fact, there was an article, like some science journal from like 1957 that was talking about the new wave of gravity devices.
They're going to start coming.
It's going to be gravity planes and we're not going to use propulsion anymore.
People have always wondered if we're eventually going to crack that.
And if they did crack that, I think the problem is I think a lot of these things are drones.
And I think the problem is biological life can't survive those speeds.
I think those things are moving at these insane rates of speed because there's nothing alive that's piloting them.
And so that's why humans can survive.
And that's why, you know, no humans can survive that kind of G-force.
So there's no one in those things.
It's probably alien species that also visit us.
I don't think that's outside the realm of possibility either.
I think all those things are happening.
I think that one has been documented clearly throughout human history.
There's been these experiences, and you've got to chalk some of them up to bullshit, lies, hysteria.
There's a lot of, but there's too many that are too similar.
Apparently, I didn't know that when I picked this one up.
But Dimensions is one of the things that he does in the book is he has eyewitness accounts of UFO events throughout history, like going back into the 1700s.
And he also makes this argument that there's a cultural context as to what people see, and that a lot of these people that live in Ireland, they see, you know, leprechauns and elves and fairies.
And that it's quite possible that this is not from another planet, that this is some sort of extra-dimensional experience, that these things come from somewhere that's here but not here, and that this is why they've existed forever, and this is why there's no evidence of them, and they just, they come and go as they please, and they're probably a completely different type of thing than what we are, this bizarre carbon-based life form that we are.
They're probably some parallel evolution that took place somewhere else that's probably gone on a million years past where we are.
Or that's just guessing.
You know, who knows what it is?
But there's something else to it.
There's some sort of a spiritual element to it.
It's not as simple as a metal ship comes from another place and lands here.
But I also think the metal ship coming from another place might be real too.
If you just take into account the sheer vastness of the universe and the unbelievable possibilities of the variety of life, you would think there's got to be intelligent life.
And if we do have some sort of super sophisticated drone technology that doesn't rely on conventional propulsion systems, which there's evidence of.
Okay, if you look at the GoFast video, if you look at the FLIR video and David Fraver's experiences with the TikTok, where they got video of that thing, they got radar of that thing.
So we know something can move that way that fast.
Something can.
You would think that if that's here and it is real, and there's video footage of it, so we know that a real phenomena took place.
So that means someone, whether it's here or someone where else, can figure that out.
So now we know that can be done.
So if that could be done today in 2024, and back then it was 2004, which encountered that.
Who knows if it's ours or from another planet or whatever the fuck it is.
It was a thing that existed that an intelligent creature had created.
It just makes sense that the sky is littered with that.
Probably littered.
There's probably millions and millions and millions of planets that have intelligent life on them.
And a bunch of them probably are capable of interstellar travel.
And probably a bunch of them aren't even biological anymore.
They're probably some sort of super sophisticated AI that ran amok and took over.
But when the government wants to dismiss all of them as being explainable and nonsense, and it's the same people that dismissed the Hunter Biden laptop story, yeah, you should get nervous.
I saw one time I saw three lights that were, I thought they were stars, and then they, and then the one on the, they were all just like, they looked almost like Orion's belt, like three stars.
And then the one on the far left just broke away from the other two and then did, and it was weird.
I'm, this is going to sound really weird, and so I don't know.
It just, it really, like, literally, if it felt like it was pulling my left eye, the left, like I was looking at them and it felt like, you know how like, like it's almost like you're being cross-eyed, but it felt like it was literally pulling my left eye.
And then it just did a set of squiggles like that.
And then a cloud bank came over and covered it up.
And then the other one I saw was actually in a suburb of Houston or was it Dallas?
And I was running at night and there were these two guys there, two black guys, young guys, that had just gotten out of their car and they were, they were, and I had seen these orange orbs and then they were filming them with their cameras.
And I went over them and I was like, what are those?
And they're like, we don't know.
I mean, they looked a little bit like, at first you thought they were Chinese lanterns, but there was no paper bag, you know, that the lanterns were no like, there's nothing there.
So they looked like, and they also kind of looked like there was some translucent thing around them.
And they just, they looked, I couldn't also tell how big they were.
Couldn't figure out where they were coming from.
I went and ran around the neighborhood trying to figure out where they were coming from to see if maybe somebody was sending off how fast were they moving?
Shockingly slow.
Like they were sort of floating.
They were kind of blue.
They felt like they were floating.
unidentified
So I'm not saying, again, I don't know what happened with them.
They just kind of would appear out of nowhere and then they would, they would like it was in this residential neighborhood and then they just drift off.
And they would float over.
We watched them at one point float all over downtown.
And the part of me that's skeptical of it is because I know a lot about nuclear energy and nuclear power, and it took a huge amount of effort to build the bombs.
Huge amount of effort, huge number of people.
So the idea that anti-gravity was then sort of like, oh, yeah, we just did that in like a couple of years or something, that strikes me as really improbable.
It gets weird because there's a bunch of inventions they attribute to crashed retrievals where they back-engineered stuff.
You know, I would imagine that if I was a super sophisticated society from another planet and I saw these struggling apes, I would give them some hints.
Because there's some sort of a program that exists that they want to hide, and the best way to hide it is to continually bring up and then debunk these fake programs for crash sites, for dealing with aliens.
I would make a bunch of things that are absolutely provably untrue that could eventually be proved as untrue, attribute them to these people, and then have everything else that gets said about the subject get reduced to nonsense.
Because that's essentially what it does.
If you start talking about UFOs and UAP programs, you're a cuckoo.
You're a kook.
Until you show me some hard evidence, I've got bills.
I've got a family.
I don't have time for this.
And the people that do get really wrapped up in it are kind of kooky.
And the best way to keep that kookiness going is to give them a little bit of taste.
So they told him something that he says has not been made public to the American people.
So my view is: look, if you think it's either a secret weapons program, that it's a government disinformation program, that it's just missidings, then I want the government, they have an obligation to tell us.
Yes.
The first article of the Constitution is congressional oversight of the executive branch.
That is why we are a democracy.
If you have an executive branch that is even covert operations, secret weapons programs all must be shared.
It doesn't have to be the whole Congress.
They have the gang of eight, which is the heads of the military and intelligence committees plus the ranking member plus the speaker and the senate and the minor release.
No, I'm not denying that it's absolutely illegal, but I'm saying that if it is illegal and has been done this way for so long, the odds of you untangling that are very, they're going to fight against that with tooth and nail because that's going to put a lot of people in jail.
It's going to get a lot of people fired.
A lot of people are going to lose their careers if they lie to Congress, if they misappropriated funds.
There's a lot of weird stuff that gets attached to that.
And so I think there is some sort of whether it's the government, whoever's doing it, there's some sort of sophisticated disinformation campaign that's essentially tied to everything.
There's a disinformation campaign that's tied to medicine.
There's a disinformation campaign tied to fluoride in the water.
There's a disinformation campaign that's tied to almost everything.
The idea that there wouldn't be for UFOs is kind of crazy.
And I think they have infantilized us for so long that to give up the reins of that is the same thing that people, like why they don't want to give up the reins of free speech.
They're in control of the power.
If you really do have knowledge that we are not alone and you're hiding that from the American people, well, you've already made a terrible choice, and you've been probably making this choice for decades.
Why would you change that now?
And what are the repercussions?
Are any of them positive?
It doesn't seem like they are for your career.
I think the best way forward, if you're just one of those people that wants to protect their career, which most of them are, right?
Which is what the whole Hunter Biden laptop thing was about.
People protecting their career.
Trump gets into office and everybody here gets fired.
So they protect their career with lies.
This is just what people do.
So if you're asking them to disclose stuff that they've been hiding for so long, good fucking luck.
Good luck.
And if you wanted to create a misinformation campaign or you wanted to confuse the waters even more, I'd have a bunch of fake whistleblowers.
I'd get agents to say a bunch of crazy shit about biological entities and mind control and shut down nuclear power plants.
I'd have them say all kinds of crazy shit that's provably untrue.
I had a friend just send me a similar video from Ohio where his mom took and thought it was some orbs flying over, and it looked honestly weirder than this.
And he found out a couple hours later it was a memorial service and it's a bunch of lanterns that got left up.
Um, so I'll just, uh, See if you can find video of ball lightning.
Ball lightning is wild, man.
If you didn't know what that is, if you didn't know that this is like tectonic plates shifting against each other and they release energy and you see this stuff flying into the air, it's so crazy looking.
This whistleblower says that the other part of the story is the description of the database.
And they say that there is this very large database of high-quality videos, still photos, and also other sensory data that has captured atmospheric effects of UAPs.
Christopher Mellon had said that the Pentagon has much better quality video evidence than has been released.
And they describe one case of an F-22, which is an amazing fighter jet, being escorted by a set of UAP orbs out of its target mission area.
Another case of a UAP declining from very high up in the atmosphere and coming right over an aircraft carrier that the entire crew saw.
So some incidents that have not been reported.
The report is in the hands of members of Congress, and this is a critical time because, again, if you are a skeptic, if you're a debunker, whatever, you should not want the government spreading disinformation on this.
If you want to get to the bottom of it, we should get to the bottom of it.
We need Congress to hold hearings.
And then the other pitch I'd make on this issue is that these people that I'm interviewing, first of all, if they're actors, they're incredible because they are genuinely terrified when I talk to them.
They're genuinely scared.
You know, most actors aren't very good actors.
So I'm always like, these guys are the greatest actors I've ever met, these people.
So they need better whistleblower protections.
And if you interview congressional staffers, members of Congress, they will acknowledge that whistleblowers do not have proper protections, whether for UAPs or anything else.
All I'm really confident in saying, because in other words, I'm very much an incrementalist in the sense that I like my stories to move the ball forward.
It's been over a year since I've done a story on this.
And I was always like, I'm not going to, I'm not somebody that wants to just, I mean, on some things, I'll write a similar story, like free speech or whatever.
But on this issue, I'm like, I'm not going to write a new story unless I really have something.
I'm very confident that the government is not revealing all that it knows and that Arrow, the organization that the Congress created to reveal what the government knows, did not reveal what it knows.
And that really it was engaged.
Because look, it's one thing to be like, hey, we didn't find anything.
It's all good.
But then for the guy that was running that program to come out and actively disparage people in the ways that they're doing, that's character assassination.
That's the ridicule strategy.
I object to that because I don't think that that's conscriptable.
I think you can be like, look, that person misinformed it or whatever.
You thought that the orange orbs were something that they weren't or whatever.
But to go out there and actively disparage people, that really, I think it's very concerning.
I mean, I think that if you read through the histories, so I mean, I just think the problem is that there's so many possibilities of what's going on.
Like I said, I'm a little skeptical that we've mastered anti-gravity because that would just be so game-changing, and I think it would just take a huge amount of effort.
On the other hand, I have interviewed people that are not comfortable coming forward yet that say that we have and claim direct evidence of that.
And it's just not, I can't unfortunately say much more about it.
And these are folks that want stronger whistleblower protections to be able to come forward.
But I find it hard to believe just because of my knowledge of nuclear that we've got those capabilities.
I also, you know, like what's amazing is like the most, for me, one of the most amazing parts of this is when you just go into the newspaper archives and you're reading stories from the 40s and the 50s and the 60s and 70s and you're seeing, and that's part of the reason I'm also with you, I'm skeptical that we are getting any closer because there's a way in which like you read New York Times magazine stories from the 1960s and 70s that actually treat the subject not with ridicule, but treated seriously.
And they actually were reporting on government programs and whatnot.
Which, by the way, if you watch that original press conference where he says it could be swamp gas, which I think it was a Michigan sighting, the whole room just goes, oh, they're like, the whole room is so convinced that it's not swamp gas that they're like, it's like journalists.
They're like all, they're all, they ridicule the idea that it's swamp gas.
So there's definitely moments in history where you have elites, you know, media elites, government elites, and others, who are like, this is a real phenomenon we need to take seriously.
I think we're in that moment again now.
Congress needs to do more.
We need to have those protections for whistleblowers.
They need to pass this disclosure legislation.
And anybody who, in my view, who anybody that's like a debunker or a skeptic or whatever who says that we shouldn't pass legislation to disclose what the government knows, for me, that person is acting in bad faith.
Because if you're really sure that there's nothing there, then you should be first in line to demand disclosure.
Do you think there's a genuine fear in giving people this information and having a collapse of society if it turns out to be true?
If a genuine, if we, there was a full disclosure and all this top secret video that has been hidden that's really high resolution, all that stuff gets released and the government says, this is what we know.
I'm sorry, sorry, we've been keeping this from you, but if we, you know, give immunity.
Well, I think the society collapses because we're faced with an intelligent being that's been able to visit us for ages whenever it wants, and we weren't aware of it.
And the illusion that anyone of human race is in control of this earth and can lead us from some sort of a position of knowledge and strength in the face of this overwhelming force from another planet, that would be a collapse of rules and of society, the like that we have never seen before.
Because no one would listen to anyone anymore because there would all of a sudden be a new daddy in town and people would want to figure out what the new daddy wants them to do.
Not if, I mean, if the government's like, look, we've been in contact with them for decades, and here's what they want.
You know, they just want to, you know, they want an earth base and they want some of our, you know, whatever.
I mean, I think if they were like, actually, the abductions are all real and we signed a deal to trade technology for abductions, that could be problematic.
To keep everybody fucking clueless and guessing and keep all the infighting going on, wouldn't you release a bunch of shit that's not necessarily true?
I would.
If I was really running a secret government UFO retrieval program and we were in contact with extraterrestrials, I would release a bunch of nonsense all the time that makes it look stupid.
You could say it might be a secret weapons program.
Yeah, maybe.
But it might be we get visited by fucking aliens from outer space because space is goddamn huge and life is here.
So we know intelligent life exists in our solar system, which is one of hundreds of billions of solar systems just in this galaxy alone.
And there's hundreds of billions of galaxies in the known universe.
The odds that this is it are fucking dumb.
That's a dumb thought.
So are we visited and does the government know?
This is the question.
And if they did know, and they've been protecting us all these years, because especially back before they had any control of when they had all control, rather, of any narrative, whether it's newspaper, television, the government had complete and total control.
I mean, and the real argument is after Kennedy was assassinated, they've had control over everything, including the presidency, right?
So you can say whatever you want.
Why would you tell people?
Why would you tell people about UFOs and complicate your life?
Just say it's bullshit.
Hire a guy to tell everybody it's bullshit, and then a few people know about it.
And those few people are the privileged few, and it feels kind of cool to have some inside information.
And every now and then you get a little whistleblower, and that guy's a kook.
Bob Bazar.
Come on, Bob Bazar's a loser.
That guy, you really think we'd have him work on our programs.
Oh, he's on the list of the employees at Los Alamos Labs.
That's a fucking bullshit.
So he knows the inside of Los Alamos Labs by heart.
He can walk you around.
He knows the security guards.
They know him by name.
They remember him.
He can tell you where the stations are.
He tells you exactly how these things move.
And then the GoFast video, you see the fucking thing turning sideways and moving exactly how he described it.
So if that's real, if that guy really was working on a retrieval program, and that was in 1987, 86, what?
How long has this been going on?
And if it has been going on for a long time, why would they tell us now?
And I don't think they would.
I think there's a long, if it's real, if it's a real phenomenon that the highest levels of the government are aware of, I think it's been kept under wraps for so long, it's almost impossible.
It's like a person coming out of the closet.
Like you're 58 years old.
I don't want to do it.
I don't want to do it.
You know, it's like it's been so long you've been lying.
It would cause so many problems if you came out and told the truth.
And I think it's very difficult for people that have been lying to hundreds of millions of people about one of the biggest questions that humans have ever had.
I mean, remember Mike Pompeo, Trump's CIA director, when he was asked why they didn't release all the JFK files, he said because some of the people involved are still alive.
So that is potentially a plausible reason if we assume Mike Pompeo was telling the truth about why they didn't release all the JFK files.
Sure, well, especially all these people that have been lying to Congress and misallocating funds and are a part of these programs that are hidden programs.
You could go to jail for that.
You could lose your career if they blame one person or blame a group of people and they decided, well, it was Mike's idea.
And Mike's in trouble.
Mike gets brought in front of Congress and like you're shit.
And this thing was, you know, you mentioned the Bob Lazar case, and I don't know if it's true or not, but I think the ad hominems, like when you see them using that hominy, character assassination, you're like, well, wait a second.
Or it's more advanced and doesn't want us to be aware completely of its presence, and it's monitoring these psychotic monkeys who have this propensity to be constantly intoxicated, who are also in control of thermonuclear weapons and are enforcing magical lines they drew in the dirt.
We observe – But we observe – but the other thing – like we observe – remember, it's interesting because the study of gorillas was always part of actually protecting gorillas.
Well, the reason why my club, the rooms are named Fat Man and Little Boy, is because those bombs that they dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that started a whole wave of UFO sightings.
I had a woman on here yesterday that works with wolves.
This is her boy.
Yeah, Diane Boyd, woman among wolves.
Her entire life has been tagging wolves, releasing them, studying their behavior, finding out where they go.
Of course they would do that with us.
We do that with wolves.
Of course they would do that with us.
We do that with butterflies.
We study everything.
Humans are interested in other things and acquiring information.
We're curious.
If you're going to be the type of thing that can figure out how to get here from another planet, you're going to be really fucking curious.
The curiosity that is required to allow you to figure out interstellar travel is pretty bananas.
You've got to be super fucking curious.
And I think they probably are.
I think they're probably aware that there's an adolescent period that every intelligent species goes through when it has the power to blow itself up and it doesn't have the wisdom to not do it.
Because there's clear examples right now, every day, all over the world, of people killing people, blowing people up.
You can see it in the news every day with what's going on in the Middle East, what's going on in Ukraine.
It's really clear that we have the power, but we don't have the wisdom.
And so there's probably an evolutionary period where this intelligent animal adapts and learns from its mistakes and eventually gets past these base primate instincts of greed and envy and lust and anger and retribution, retaliation, gets past this territorial instinct and recognizes that we are truly all connected.
But it takes a long time biologically.
And I think the thing that helps it along is technology.
And I think there's this furious battle of trying to claim ground and control technology's influence on people because we know it's an overwhelming influence.
And we know that the technology that has allowed people to have truth, maybe for the first time in human history, where anyone like yourself can come on a podcast like this, an independent journalist, and you can reach millions and millions of people.
That's never happened before.
And that's changing things.
AI will change things further.
And then sentient AI will change things in impossible ways that we can't even imagine.
There's not a science fiction author around that's right now got an accurate idea of what 100 years from now looks like.
It's all 100% guesswork.
If you lived in 1500, 1600 wouldn't that much fucking difference.
Everybody's got a musket.
Everybody's on a boat.
Basically the same shit.
The difference between 2024 and 21, 2024 is going to be bananas.
It's a great time for real journalism because you're confronted with so much bullshit and propaganda and that people reject that bullshit and propaganda and they're turning towards real journalists.