Bernie Sanders warns America’s crises—wealth inequality (top 1% owning more than bottom 93%, Elon Musk richer than half the population), corporate exploitation (NAFTA displacing workers, Maquiladora zone wages of $0.25/hour), and political corruption (Citizens United enabling $270M election spending)—are unprecedented, with decisions now shaping generations. He pushes for bold reforms: publicly funded healthcare to cut stress and close the 7-year life expectancy gap between classes, a 34-hour workweek without pay loss, and worker-owned companies to counter billionaire control. Despite automation’s job threats, Sanders insists democracy must prioritize human rights over corporate profits, framing solutions like universal healthcare as essential safety nets while Rogan cautions about systemic pitfalls. Their debate underscores how technology and policy collide to either deepen or dismantle inequality, with the future hinging on redefining purpose beyond labor in a rigged system. [Automatically generated summary]
I'll tell you what concerns me, the issue of wealth and power.
All right.
I'm kind of old-fashioned, and I believe in democracy.
And I believe that everybody should have a good shot at living a decent life.
And what I worry about right now, and this is an issue, Joe, and it's part of the problem that it just ain't talked about very much.
And I applaud, by the way, you and the other podcasters who give people the time to really seriously discuss things rather than seven-second soundbites, you know.
But if you take a look at where we are as a nation today, this system is not working.
It's broken.
It ain't working for ordinary human beings.
So you have an America today where we have more income and wealth inequality than we've ever had in the history of this country.
That's just a fact.
You have one man, Mr. Musk, owning more wealth than the bottom 52% of American families.
One man, 52% of the American families.
You got the top 1% owning more wealth than the bottom 93%.
You got CEOs of large corporations making 350 times what their workers make.
And meanwhile, in this richest country in the history of the world, working class people are getting decimated today.
And again, we don't talk about it in Congress for reasons that I hope I can get into.
We don't talk about it in the corporate media.
60%, 60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.
Now, I grew up in a family.
I don't know your background, but I grew up in a family, lived paycheck to paycheck.
Man, anyone who lives paycheck to paycheck understands that every single day is a struggle.
You know, you've got to figure out how you feed the kids, rents, cost of housing in America off the charts, healthcare off the charts.
So right now, as we talk, there are people worrying.
My landlord, you know, is going to raise my rent by 20%.
What the hell do I do?
Where do I go?
What schools do my kid go to?
How do I buy decent food for my kids?
My mother is ill.
How do I afford prescription drugs for my mother?
My car breaks down.
If you have money, no one thinks of it.
Your car breaks down.
Go to the mechanic, you got to fix.
You know what?
A lot of people don't have $1,000 in the bank right now.
You don't have $1,000, your car breaks down.
How do you get to work?
If you don't get to work, you get fired.
If you get fired, your whole life is disrupted.
60% of American...
We've always had rich and poor, no question about it.
I attribute it to decades-old attacks on the working class of this country.
I attribute it to horrific trade agreements, which have allowed corporate America to throw millions of workers out on the street and move to China, Mexico, and other low-wage countries.
I attribute it to a corrupt political system in which billionaires have significant control over both political parties.
So that, for example, right now in Washington, the national minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.
So you've got millions of workers today making $10, $12, $13 an hour.
You tell me, how do people survive on $13 an hour?
When we were kids, or at least when I was a kid, you worked for a large company.
You had something called a defined benefit pension plan.
That means you worked with me for 30 years.
When you retire, you're going to get X hundreds of dollars a week.
That's long gone.
Corporations have gotten rid of that.
So you got something like half of older workers in America have nothing in the bank when they face retirement.
So I think, to answer your question, I think you've got a rigged system controlled economically and politically by very, very wealthy and powerful people who could care less for working families.
Now, I don't want to romanticize the old days because that would not be true.
But there used to be a kind of a culture.
If I was a boss and I ran a factory, I had a little bit of concern for you, right?
You know, in general, I would say, I know your wife, how's the casual mom doing and all that stuff?
That's gone.
You got these companies that are owned by other companies, they're owned by SuperNash.
You know, we got involved in my office.
We used to be the chairman of the labor committee, health, education, labor.
So I got involved in a lot of stuff.
And when workers weren't on strike, we would call up and see what was going on, see how we can help.
So we'd call up to the company and we'd say, you know, why are you cutting back on health care for your workers?
Well, we don't make that decision.
It's owned by somebody else.
Call up somebody else.
Well, we're owned by somebody else.
You know how it is.
It's just huge.
These huge conglomerates own the bloody world.
And these guys don't give a damn about the needs of working people.
So I would say that the economy becomes less and less personal.
I have no reason.
You're my worker.
I have no care about you because right now I'm owned by an international who doesn't know that you exist.
And when you're dealing with these enormous corporations, like we're talking about, this diffusion of responsibility, the people that are doing it, it's like, this is what I have to do.
And it shows the impact of a corporation taking all their factories, moving them away like that with no warning, no recourse, nothing anybody can do, decimates basically all of Detroit.
I mean, look, if we are, and again, gets back to what we wanted as a nation, but you had corporations saying, hey, back then, not now, I could pay workers in China 25 cents an hour.
Why the hell do I want to hire you for what it was, that $5 an hour, whatever.
And I'll never forget, Joe, early on when I was elected to Congress, this was when we had the NAFTA agreement, I went to the Maquiladora area.
You know what that is?
It's a special zone in northern Mexico, near the border, where the government there, this is back decades ago, allowed American and other European corporations to settle and got tax breaks there.
So it attracted all these corporations.
So I went there with a congressional delegation, and this is what I saw.
You saw these beautiful new factories.
Now, this is 25, 30 years ago.
And then we said, all right, I want to see where the workers live.
And I'll never forget this, as long as I live.
Do you know those large cardboard boxes that refrigerators come into and stove so big?
That's where people were living.
They were living literally in cardboard boxes, making, I think at that point, now this is a long time ago, 25 cents an hour.
So workers in America were thrown out on the street, and people in Mexico exploited in a horrible way in these big, shiny new factories at the time.
So what you got, and I believe this strongly, you asked me, you know, how does it happen?
Why does it happen?
I think especially right now, and for many decades, you have the prevailing religion of the oligarchs and the corporate world is greed.
That's all.
I want it all, and I don't give a shit if I have to step wall over you, throw you out on the street, take away your Social Security.
I want it.
And to hell with you.
And that's why you end up with a situation in America where, you know, the top 1% now owns more wealth than the bottom 93%, and millions of people struggle.
When we talk about, it's not only income and wealth inequality that bothers me.
It's concentration of ownership.
So right now in America, in virtually every sector of our economy, whether it's agriculture, transportation, financial services, whatever, you've got a handful of giant multinationals controlling that sector.
But here's another amazing fact.
Who do you think owns these corporations?
You know, you remember there was a day where somebody actually owned General Motors or Jones Ford.
They're now owned by Wall Street firms.
You've got three Wall Street investment firms, BlackRock, you're familiar with BlackRock.
And the problem I think that we face as a country is not just economic disparities and all the stuff that we're talking about, the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.
It is political power.
Right now, and I doubt that there are many Americans, whether you're a progressive as I am or a right-wing Republican, I don't think people can disagree that we have a corrupt campaign finance system.
And this guy, as I am, is opposed to this war in Iran.
Just yesterday, Trump gave a long post about how they're going to primary this guy.
And what bothers me is you would hope that there would be respect enough for members of Congress that you can vote your own conscience, you could represent your constituency.
Every district is different than America.
But right now, anybody stands up and says, well, you know, I disagree with President Trump, bam, you are finished.
We're going to primary you.
We got all kinds of money.
You're out of there.
That happened to Massey yesterday.
But let me go back to the Democrats and tell you where the problem is.
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Can I point something out?
Don't you think that there's a Streisand effect to that?
Don't you think that there's a blowback for that kind of thing when people recognize that this guy should be allowed to have his own opinions and make some reasonable points and that people are going to reject this idea?
Maybe.
And that it's not as simple as – I think the whole MAGA thing right now is very divided, particularly because one of the things that they voted for was no war.
And it's quick.
We're six months in, and that's already popped off.
And then people are very concerned with now what happens to our troops overseas that are in these bases, that are in vulnerable positions, and what happens with, I mean, there's supposedly documented terror cells that got in through the open border over the last four years.
So in the Republican side, you have money and insurance saying you speak up against Trump, you're out of here.
In the Democratic side, you speak up against the Netanyahu government, you're out of here as well.
And they have been successful.
You have super PACs like AIPAC spending a fortune.
And they have already knocked off a number of members of Congress, good members of Congress, and they will do it again.
So all I'm saying is you've got a corrupt campaign finance system on both sides, which is rejecting the will of the American people and end up supporting powerful special interests.
And if we do not get a handle on that issue, I worry very much about the future of American democracy.
So we have been running around the country doing what we call the fighting oligarchy tour, which is why I'm here in Texas.
We were in Fort Worth last night.
Had a good turnout.
And I think, interestingly enough, Joe, it's not most of the people.
We know the people who come out to our rallies.
You know, we have a big list of millions of people.
But a lot of people are coming to our rallies that we don't know.
And I think we know that some of them are Republicans and some of them are Independents and many of them are Independents.
Because I think across the board, there is growing dissatisfaction with the current politics in America, both bodies.
And people want a new vision for America, which is also something we don't talk a whole lot about.
So, you know, the issues that we talk about is in the richest country on earth, why don't we have the best health care system in the world?
Why do we have 85 million people who are uninsured or uninsured?
And as you were mentioning a moment ago, I mean, he deals with the insurance companies and the drug companies.
And the function of the current health care system is to make these guys very rich.
And it works.
They make zillions of dollars.
And every place you go, in my state, the cost of health care has gone up this year like 10, 15 percent.
People can't afford it.
And we lose thousands of people every year.
People get sick.
They can't afford to go to the doctor.
They die.
So, you know, one of the fights that I hope we can win is to have the United States join every other major country on earth and guarantee health care to all people as a human right.
Well, we've talked about that a lot on this show: that if you view this country as a community, the most important thing is to protect the most vulnerable members of your community, period, right?
I agree.
And if we spend insane amounts of money on all sorts of things that people don't agree with, and I think generally most people would agree on some sort of a national health care system.
If you want to make America great again, less losers.
How do you make less losers?
Don't stack the deck against them.
One of the first things that you'd have to do is figure out why these communities and these cities have been the exact same way for decade after decade.
Back to Jim Crow and the red line laws and all these different.
Why is nothing being done to fix that or to correct that problem?
And it becomes this political beach ball that they just bounce around the air at a concert.
And everybody, it's like there's certain things that just keep coming up that make you just go, well, how are we still talking about gay marriage?
Right now, for economic reasons, when I was a kid, by the way, and this is not to shock some of your younger listeners here, there was one worker in a family could actually bring home the bacon and pay the bills.
But getting back to this issue of education, which I think is key, if you were rationally thinking about the future of America, if you loved America, as we all do, you're going to have the best childcare system in the world so the kids will do well in school.
Right now, in childcare, you have workers out there making $15 an hour.
And you have families that cannot afford childcare.
In my state, I don't know, it's about $20,000 a year to send your kid to childcare.
So you're making $50,000 a year?
How do you pay that?
$60,000?
You can do that.
And then education.
You've got kids who want an education.
They want to go to college.
They want to go to trade school.
We desperately need, here's something that really drives me a little bit nuts.
In America today, Joe, not only is our health care system failing us, it's based on greed, not on need, but we need more doctors.
All over the country, people have to wait, you know, sometimes months to get to a doctor's office.
We have a massive nursing shortage.
We need more dentists, big problem in dentistry.
We need more mental health counselors.
We need more pharmacists.
How come in the richest country in the world, we don't have enough doctors and nurses?
Yeah, I'm not, you know, obviously it varies per person, but it is not unusual for guys, you know, people, working-class homes, go to medicals, come out $500,000 in debt.
Like, imagine you hadn't gotten derailed and they hadn't conspired against you and you actually became the Democratic candidate for president and you won.
You think this should be when you get a certain number, you just get a certain allotted amount of money that you could use for your campaign and everybody gets the same amount?
But you asked me on my first day as president, well, I'll have you drop in, say hello, have a cup of coffee.
All right.
Good.
And then I think we'd declare something like our health care system as an emergency and figure out ways that we can do what every other major country on earth does, and that is guarantee health care to all people.
So one of the things you do is say, okay, we need tens of thousands of more doctors and hundreds of thousands of more nurses and dentists and so forth and so on.
And we're going to move aggressively to make sure that in America, everybody in this country has health care as a human right.
So I think that's number one.
Number two, at a time of massive income and wealth inequality, you don't give tax breaks to billionaires.
You demand that they start paying their fair share of taxes.
And one of the problems that we have, it's not just an American issue, it's a global issue.
A lot of these zillionaires are hiding their money in tax havens in the Cayman Islands and elsewhere.
And that's an international issue.
But I think we have to have a fair tax system which says that individuals and corporations that are making a whole lot of money start paying their fair share of taxes.
But the other thing that I would do, and look, you've got to deal with this climate change issue.
And I know that there are some people who think climate change is a hoax.
It ain't a hoax.
I think the last 10 years have been the warmest on record.
And we can create millions of good paying jobs, transforming our energy system away from fossil fuel to energy efficiency, to solar, to wind, and other sustainable energies.
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I think the climate change issue is very complicated.
And I think, did you see the Washington Post piece that they wrote where they did this long-term view?
First of all, the reality is that the Earth's temperature has never been static, right?
We could both agree on that.
It's always been up and down.
There's been ice ages and heat waves.
And then the Washington Post looked at it.
What was the time period that they looked at?
That essentially they found that we're in a cooling period, that the Earth over the past X amount of years, and this was like a very inconvenient discovery, but they had to report the data and kudos to them for doing that.
Scientists have captured the Earth climate change over the last 485 million years.
Here's a surprising place we stand now.
So look at the far end of that graph, and you see we're in a cooling period.
Because scientists that are in agreement, there's all these entanglements.
Whenever someone's discussing something, whether it's economics or whether it's health issues or pharmaceutical drugs, there's financial entanglements.
I think we both agree with that, right?
And I think this is part of the issue with this whole climate change emergency as well, because it's not just that we could all agree pollution is a major factor.
It's a huge issue in the world today.
We could all agree with that, right?
I think one of the things that we have to recognize is that whenever there's an issue that everyone can agree on, you're going to have a bunch of people that capitalize on that issue and they look to gain more money.
They have financial issues that they push forward in order to capitalize on this issue.
But then also power and control.
These things like they're trying to institute in the UK where they have these 15-minute cities, this concept where you're not allowed to travel.
They'll be able to look at your carbon footprint.
It's, yeah, see, that's the problem.
The problem is giving people that are in power, these people that we've all discussed that have so much money and so much control over our societies, multinational corporations, giving them more control over citizens.
And this is a vehicle for that.
And this is what's dangerous about this whole climate change emergency, because it allows these fucking creeps that have been controlling people and controlling what you do and what you say and how you spend your money with people that already live in check-to-check.
And you put additional constraints on them and you make them even more scared.
And then you put additional measures where you can look at their carbon footprint.
You can look at the amount they travel.
Put a carbon tax on these people.
Let's figure out how to extract more money from them.
That's what bothers me about this climate change emergency.
Not that we can all agree pollution is a terrible thing.
Everyone should agree to that.
The beautiful earth that sustains us and all life on this planet is being poisoned as we speak.
We're killing all the fish in the ocean and sucking them out in giant numbers.
94% of all the big fish that are in the ocean are gone over the last, you know, whatever it is.
You know, you asked me when I ran for president, one of the interests, it's something else to run for president because you get around, you meet all kinds of people, and you learn all kinds of things.
And one of the things that I did, we went to a lot of, we met with a lot of Native Americans.
And one of the reasons is, you know, their tradition was going from way back, respect for nature.
That they understood back, way back when, that you kill off all of the buffalo, you ain't going to have nothing to eat, right?
And one of the reasons they are angry is that over the last, just give you one fact here, last 52 years, you and I understand, everybody in the world understands.
There's been a huge explosion in technology, correct?
What we're doing today never could have happened 50 years ago.
Factories far more automated, offices far more automated.
In fact, there are studies out there that suggest in real inflation accounted for dollars, wages are actually lower now than they were 52 years ago.
And during that same period, there's a massive transfer of wealth from the bottom 90% to the top 1%.
So that's what technology has done over the last 50 years.
There was a study.
I don't know if you saw this.
It blew me away.
I can't remember who did it.
Kaiser, some reputable guy, people did it.
This is what they said.
They do a poll to the American people and they say, Americans, do you think you are better off today than somebody in your situation, middle class, whatever you may be, was 40 years ago?
Okay?
Are you better off today than somebody in your circumstance would have been 40 years ago?
Well, again, we'll go back to polls again because I don't necessarily believe that polls are totally accurate.
But I do think that the issue with It being virtually impossible for one person to sustain the entire family these days, one worker, the father or the mother, whoever it is, to sustain the entire family.
That's a giant issue.
All these issues when it comes to labor, when it comes to minimum wage, I think you and I are in agreement on all these.
I think the minimum wage in this country is ridiculous.
First of all, there are a lot of people that are very unhealthy, physically unhealthy.
I think metabolic health is a gigantic issue in this country.
There's a lot of people in this country that feel completely disenfranchised, and so they turn inward.
And then technology invites them to do that.
You get online, and you spend your time staring at a screen, having communications with people, arguing on Twitter all day, changing the flag in your bio from Ukraine to Palestine, and now you've got an Iranian flag.
You're just like in a constant state of anxiety and chaos.
You're dealing with the entire problem, the problems of the entire world.
You're dealing with 8 billion people's worth of problems every day.
I think that's unsustainable.
And then that's also a function of technology because this interaction that we have is unprecedented.
The interaction with the news, with each other, all this stuff we're not designed to handle.
And it gives you massive anxiety, particularly for young people.
Particularly, Jonathan Haight's written about this with young girls who have the biggest problem with social media comparing themselves to other people, massive increase in self-harm, suicide, suicidal ideology, depression, anxiety, all this stuff accentuated by technology and our unchecked use of it.
When it becomes a problem where you have massive automation of almost all jobs, which is something that, especially when you deal with a corporation that is entirely based around making the most amount of money possible, well, what better way when you don't have to pay them anything?
First of all, we make the determination that we are not going to let a handful of CEOs make these decisions, that they are going to be made by the American people.
What does that mean?
Bottom line, it means that technology is going to work to improve us, not just the people who own the technology and the CEOs of large corporations.
There are companies around the world that are doing it with some success.
The UAW, the United Automobile Workers, they had a big strike a year ago.
You remember against the Big Three, you remember that?
And they won a very good contract, and I'm a big fan of the trade union movement.
I think workers need that.
And one of their demands, interestingly enough, and people thought that Sean Fane, who was the president of the union, was crazy.
But Sean said, you know what, we want a 32-hour workweek because our people are producing more.
People thought he was crazy, but the idea is catching on.
So first thing to say is let's use technology to benefit workers.
That means give you more time with your family, with your friends, you know, for education, whatever the hell you want to do.
You don't have to work 40 hours a week anymore.
second thing I think we have got to do is take a look, as you just said, you said it better than I said it, is what does it mean that we have so many young kids living on the internet?
In Vermont, again, somebody told me that there's a teacher now who does, he demands that his students write with a pen in blue books now because he doesn't trust what they're sending in, that it's not artificial intelligence.
So if I say to you, Joe, tell me what happened in the American Revolution, you go to the chat box, you give a wonderful essay that you know nothing about, right?
And like you're balancing it out in one way if you are a corporation, like imagine you're an automobile manufacturing corporation, you're Ford.
Ford is struggling right now.
There's a giant issue with Ford, right?
So what does Ford do if all of a sudden something comes along that allows them to be more productive, they're more profitable, these machines can work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, they don't need time off, and you're going to make a better product, you're going to make more money for your shareholders, the corporation succeeds, but you don't need X amount of workers anymore.
Instead of thinking of them as workers, should we think of them as, look, there are people that make the decisions, there's the executives, there's the corporation itself, but without the people that worked on those assembly lines, you have nothing.
You couldn't have done any of the things you've done without those people.
But those people are replaceable because it's skilled labor that you could teach another person to do, and they're replaceable because there's plenty of people that want those jobs and there's a demand.
So you file them in, you file them out, which is why they developed unions, right?
So they developed unions to keep people from being exploited.
And then the problem becomes the unions get exploited.
And then the unions have a lot of money.
And then there's a lot of influence.
And then they decide, okay, fuck these unions.
Let's go to Mexico.
And these laws that Ross Perot famously talked about, the giant sucking sound headed south.
Well, I'm sorry, Mr. GM, and I'm sorry, Mr. Ford, because this country is more than just your profits.
We are human beings, and you're not going to throw people out on the street, many of whom will have a hard time getting health care, et cetera, et cetera.
So let me reframe the question again, of which admittedly it is complicated.
I don't have the magic answer.
How as a nation, forget Ford, forget General Motors, how as a nation do we deal with this exploding technology so that it benefits all of us and not just Mr. Ford and Mr. General Motors?
That's the question, I think.
And it's going to require radical solutions.
So for a start, it gets back to something we talked about a little while ago.
If you had health care as a human right, right?
All right?
As people in almost every other wealthy country have, and not attached to your job, that would be a major step forward, right?
I mean, so the and again, please, these are complicated issues.
I surely don't have all the answers.
But I think we throw on the table, you've got all of this technology.
What is our goal?
So, all right.
Our goal is: if we're going to create all of this wealth, that we have a healthcare system that guarantees health care to all people.
And by the way, we have drug companies whose function is to come up with cures to diabetes and dementia and Alzheimer's and other terrible illnesses rather than just make huge profits for themselves.
All right?
You have a publicly funded health care system that guarantees health care to all people.
Just doing that would lower the stress rate in this country enormously.
What does it mean that all, you don't have to worry.
You're a working dad out there.
You're worried that your kid may have a lower standard of living, then your kid can't afford to go to college.
You don't want your kid leaving school $50,000 a day.
We say education is a human right.
God, you know, you mentioned public education a while ago.
That didn't happen by accident.
You know, back in the early 20th century, a lot of people, working class people, thought and said, you know what, we don't only want the rich kids to get a decent education.
We want our kids.
And that's how public education began, right?
So it said, okay, everybody in America, you know, state by state, started in Wisconsin actually, is going to have public education from first grade or kindergarten to 12th grade.
So what I'm saying here is let's take a hard look about how we utilize this technology to improve life for all people.
Our goal should be, instead of bombing Iran, our goal should be right now, Joe, our life expectancy in America is lower than it is in other major countries.
You know that?
Yes.
Four years shorter lifespans than other wealthy countries.
If you're working class in America, you live seven years shorter life than the 1%, which is, to me, just outrageous.
All right.
So here's the thing.
Instead of bombing Iran, how do we increase life expectancy so that we're living the longest lives of many people on earth?
You know, you would think, how hard is it to say, if you have a bottle of soda or you have a food product, tell people in English what is in the damn product, right?
Do you think anyone, right now they have any grams?
Do you think anybody in America knows what the hell a gram is?
I mean, it just, that's how ridiculous it is.
So I want parents to know that if the food that they're serving their kid could lead to obesity, which is an epidemic in America, could lead to diabetes, which is an epidemic, a terrible illness, costing us hundreds of billions of dollars.
In my state of Vermont, all over this country, family farmers are, you know, they're just being driven off of the land.
And that to me is a real tragedy because, and again, Vermont is one of the most rural states in America.
Growing up, if you talk to people who grew up on farms, they say, you know, Bernie, that was a pretty good way of life.
And we're losing that.
So how do you create an economy in which we, once again, put an emphasis on family-based agriculture, not corporate agriculture, family farmers who are growing good, in many cases, organic food for our kids, rather than corporate agriculture?
And these are the same corporations, unfortunately, that were in charge of tobacco.
You know, this is where it gets really weird.
They bought out all the major processed food corporations, and they make this stuff that's unbelievably addictive because it's engineered by scientists.
We've got the brightest and the best who figured out what's the best way to get these people totally addicted to whatever, you know, fill in the blanket.
And this is also a function of corporate America, right?
This is a function of wanting to do better in each quarter, you know, having this endless endless growth cycle where they never say, hey, we make X amount of money every year.
This is perfect.
That's right.
Let's concentrate on doing better for our company.
I mean, so I think this is, you know, it almost gets back to the need to revitalize American democracy and say to large corporations, you know what, you can't poison our children.
I don't think that's a terribly radical concept.
You can make money, fine, make money, but don't poison our children.
Say to large corporations, technology is coming, that's good, but you're not going to use it just to throw workers out on the street.
And what was really fascinating was during these ICE riots, they were lighting those things on fire.
And I was like, I disagree with that, but I also think it's directionally correct.
You know, I mean, that's your enemy.
Your enemy is automation, the enemy of the human being, a human that lives in this functional society and everybody has a task and get paid for the task.
Automation is going to take all that away.
So if you do say this, okay, we're going to lower your work week, what if there's no job left for the human being to do?
If the entire assembly line, we talked about this about China and some of their coal factories.
There was this video that I watched of this coal factory in China, which is entirely automated every step of the way.
And it's not sitting around watching TV 24 hours a day.
So I think you raised the quite, I would say the simple answer, and then you've got to go a lot further than that, is to say that under those circumstances, of that kind of technology, everybody has at least a decent standard of living.
Provide a fund that's a universal basic income fund.
If you're going to replace all these people with robots and you're going to be even more profitable, share some of that profit, then you'll be more profitable than if these people just stayed working doing nothing, right?
You know, I think somebody once wrote, you know, you think about what are the deepest things, what's the goal in life?
So somebody says, work.
And I believe that.
I think people, you know, one of the sad things that's happened, you know, we talked a little while ago about the decline of, we mentioned Detroit and other communities where people worked hard, they were proud of what they produced, right?
And, you know, when we talk about, you know, one of the things that I, you know, we didn't talk about Trump much, but it bothers me is trying to divide us up.
You know, we've got to bring, for so many reasons, whether it's all of these issues that we're talking about and everything else, pandemics, you know what?
By the way, I want to tell you that when people say, like, why were you a fan of Bernie Sanders?
I point to a photo of you getting arrested at a civil rights protest in, I think it was 63. Sounds right, in Chicago.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You've always been at the forefront.
You haven't changed.
You know, and people always try to accuse you of that, especially because you've made some money off your books.
But you haven't changed your positions through the entirety of your career.
I think that's very admirable because there's not a lot of people that serve in Congress for as long as you have and become a very prominent public figure that don't just cash in.
You know, when you have people that are public servants that are making $170,000 a year and yet they're worth hundreds of millions of dollars through some magical way that no one can explain, and you haven't done that.
But we're making gays are taking over the school system, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So it's, you know, we've made progress.
But what we've been talking about is if you create a society where you have massive technology that can produce all of this wealth, how do we live, right?
That's the question you posed.
And I think one of the ways, one of the goals has got to be to bring this world together.
we should not be having wars right now.
Where countries have disagreements, there are bad news guys out there, no question about it.
But bring them to the table, arguing it out.
We don't have to go around killing people.
Right now, what's going on in Gaza breaks my heart.
I think this is something the entire country could agree to.
The question of meaning, like giving meaning to people, like just and then my fear is also the same fear that I had when I'm talking about climate change, that it's going to be exploited.
Once people are entirely dependent upon the state for universal basic income, then it becomes the question of like now your entire life, like all the money that you get being from the government.
The problem is if you step outside the lines, if you do anything that the government doesn't like, if there's a new administration comes in and says, you know what, this is unprofitable.
These people have to figure it out for themselves.
The United States is really $37 trillion in debt.
We can't sustain this.
People have to do the, you know, you have to adjust, learn to code.
So if you have what Andrew Yang was talking about, this giant epidemic of automation in this country, and the solution being universal basic income, but that's not the solution for meaning.
And how do we convince all of these people that they have to not just take this money from the government, but also take action to give themselves meaning in their lives?
If all you're doing is just getting a check and you can just stay at home and stare at the TV and the money keeps coming and then you eat processed food all day and it's all subsidized, what is life?
Like, how do you re-educate a giant percentage of our population to find meaning, external meaning?
Find something else.
Find a thing that you can do that not maybe even that's profitable that these computers can't do.
And to me, I have some answers for that one, and that is that you ain't going to throw millions of truck drivers and taxicab drivers and Uber drivers just out on the street.
But right now, I mean, for a start, I think getting back to the, I think you tell those workers you are going to have health care as a human right, you are going to have education as a human right, you are going to have a decent income as a human right, and we are going to lower, substantially lower, the work week.
So we'll have in this process, we're going to have everybody working.
If you're working 20 hours a week, you're working 20 hours a week.
What happens later when even more work is eliminated and what the purpose of human life becomes, that is a very profound question.
Which gets back to things like tax reform, like making sure that in America we do not have the massive levels of income and wealth inequality that we currently have.
Because I think it ties into everything else that we're talking about.
You know why I believe in democracy and why I believe among what we didn't talk about is we brought in some money to Vermont and elsewhere, I think, for helping workers own their own companies.
So I think as a nation, we should be talking about moving toward allowing workers more power.
But getting back to government itself.
The corruption is, in my view, that government is very far removed from the needs of ordinary people because it is largely controlled by billionaires in both political parties who have their agenda.
One of the things that I do, what my campaigns, Sir President, were about, what I'm doing right now, we're doing what we call the fighting oligarchy towards Swan and Texas, is to try to say to people out there who are mostly working class people, you've got to get involved.
I know it's hard, people work in long hours.
You got to get involved in the political process.
You've got to make demands on government that it serves you, not just the very wealthy.
So to answer your question, I think one of the goals, not only we've talked about how you deal with the exploding technology and how people gain purpose, the other thing is I want people to be able to take control over their own government.
We can argue What the government should or should not do.
But I don't think we can allow a handful of people, handful of people, with incredible wealth to control both parties.
And they wrote that having just fought a war and won a war against the most powerful despot on earth, the King of England, right?
And I think in the back of their minds were saying, all right, we just beat the King of England, absolute power.
How do you create a new country which has checks and balance so that nobody ever has that power?
And I got to say, I mean, one of the things, and there's a lot of arguments about Trump, that worries me very, very much is this movement toward authoritarianism and going after media, suing media, taking away the authority that Congress has.
He is suing the Des Moines Register because of a poll that came out during the campaign that he didn't like.
He is suing CBS for this Kamala Harris interview.
So do I think how many, I cannot tell you the number of stories done about me that were based, that were not good stories, that were dishonest stories.
But what about the other lawsuit with the conversation that they had with Kamala Harris, where they edited the answers that she had to make it look more precise?
But that's not investigative journalism if you change someone's answers.
If you ask her a question and she comes with a rambling answer that doesn't make sense and you edit that out and insert another answer to a different question that seems more coaching.
Well, my concern is when you have media organizations that are purported to be objective, and then they say things that are defamatory and factually incorrect, and they should know that before they say it, what other course does a person have other than a lawsuit?
And isn't it important that you shine the light on what is a political bias from an organization that you would hope would be objective?
The problem is, the more people do stuff like that, if you don't have any consequences to what you're doing, you're going to continue that path.
And most people only see that.
Like if you're a left-wing-leaning media organization and you print something that's factually incorrect or you say something on television that's factually incorrect, your viewers who are left-leaning are most likely not going to see Trump's rebuttal in some speech that he does in the middle of Pennsylvania.
And I appreciate, by the way, one of the, you know, we talked about media and the bifurcation of media, you know, right-wing people talk to right-wing people, left-wing people talk to left-wing people.
I happen to think that the development of podcasts is a really positive step.
Because I can tell you, I've been on a million TV shows.
All right, Bernie, literally you've got seven seconds to explain the issue.
And the fact that you give people a couple of hours to sit here and have a good discussion and be a good host and trade ideas, I think that improves life in America and helps people think about things.
And I think that one of the things this conversation highlights is that there's a lot of issues that all Americans agree on.
And this ridiculous position that we find ourselves in, where you have to be ideologically opposed to one thing because your side supports the other thing, it's just terrible for all of us.
And if we looked at the issues that really face our country and our citizens and our human beings that live here as a community, we agree on almost all of them.
We agree that you should have a better life, that you should have healthier people, we should have health care and education, we should have safer streets, we should have a community that lets people do what they want to do as long as they're not harming other people.
And I think the divide that we have in this country accentuates the farthest ends of each end of the political spectrum, not recognize that most of us exist in the middle.