Joe Rogan Experience #2465 - Michael Shellenberger
Michael Shellenberger is an author, journalist, and founder of Civilization Works. He is the CBR Chair of Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech at the University of Austin. His books include “Apocalypse Never" and “San Fransicko."
https://www.public.news
https://www.shellenberger.org
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You know, their national security strategy they put out in November basically just said we've degraded their capacity.
It's a win.
There was no sense in which there would be additional action.
I think it ushers in a new paradigm.
Complete, like, the older post-war era is just over.
Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, articulated that at the World Economic Forum, probably better than the Trump administration did, saying very clearly that older rules-based order is gone.
You saw AOC try to sort of articulate it, but she sort of fell apart at the Munich Security Conference in February.
So this is an administration that is, I mean, and I don't even think they're thinking.
I wrote a piece and I decided not to publish it because I was sort of like, decapitation doesn't really work for regime change, but it's not clear that they're really out for regime change or they're just asserting power, shaking up things.
I mean, some of it's art of the deal, changing the person that we're negotiating with.
That's Venezuela and Iran.
Is it really going to change those regimes?
I don't think most people don't think so, but I'm not sure that that's what they're going for.
They're just going for an assertion of American power in service of American interests.
And then what happens in Iran, what happens in Venezuela, I don't think they care that much about.
The Venezuela thing, I mean, look, they wanted him out forever.
And he definitely stole the election to get in there in the first place.
And he was a dictator.
But at least that one was at least clean.
They go in, kidnap him, get him out.
This one's nuts.
Like, and what's happening in Tel Aviv, it's hard to know what's real and what's not because there's a lot of fake video going around and a lot of weird posts on X.
So it's, you know, when I do peek in, it's hard to know.
And you have to listen to Grok.
And then Grok's dismantling a lot of the fake videos.
I mean, I think the president is - there's been some just, you know, Rubio said something about how, oh, we had to act because we knew that Israel was going to act anyway.
And I think people interpret it.
And then Netanyahu, who's in the White House a lot.
I think this president has shown, whether you like him or not, and there's certainly things that I'm unhappy about and have criticized.
But I think Trump is in charge.
Like he's making these decisions.
There's nobody behind him.
There's nobody, nobody pulling for all of that.
You know, the Russians or whoever, now the Israelis, you know, it's just he's clearly, I mean, Elon gave him, you know, $250 million and he still didn't give him even the electric car credit.
You know, like Trump is in charge.
You know, like, I think that's one of the big lessons from this.
And I don't think that I think that means that there's not a lot of second order thinking here.
Like, oh, what's the move after that?
He doesn't know.
He's just acting.
That's what's so wild about it is that this older foreign policy establishment, which was like, let the experts decide what the right foreign policy, you know, all these think tanks.
And that's just gone now.
It's just irrelevant in this presidency.
And I don't think it'll come back.
Like, if you get a Gavin Newsom or a President AOC, I don't.
And I think that that's what the Prime Minister of Canada realized.
I think that's what the Europeans are starting to realize is that this is a completely different world that we live in than the one we lived in just a couple of years ago.
He was unsatisfied, and just like he was like, I'm not getting anywhere in these negotiations, and I'm going to replace the person I'm negotiating with.
It's just, you know, turn over the table, like change things up.
You're not getting anywhere.
And you could say he was too impatient.
Their view was the Democrats were too patient with Iran.
They kept trying with Iran.
Iran, they weren't giving them what they wanted.
I'm not defending it.
I'm just saying I think that's what explains it.
They haven't done a very good job explaining it because I think that it just sounds to some extent like what it is, which is that they're acting without they're sort of like, well, does it result in regime change in Iran?
We don't know.
They might say that we want that or whatever, but that's not ultimately – they're not acting on the basis of achieving regime change.
If you had a guerrilla conflict break out around those oil facilities, I mean, it's already more expensive because you have to heat up that particular type of, it's really heavy oils.
If you heat it up to get it out of the ground, then you have to heat it to transport.
It's a total nightmare.
And as a conservationist, I would say that would be the last place I'd want to see us getting oil from.
I mean, I've never seen a politician act that independently.
I mean, a president act that independently.
So I'm skeptical of, I mean, I think that Rubio was sort of like, well, they were going to attack, and so we had to, you know, there's some of that, but I just think Trump's doing what he wants to do.
He was also critical of the Democrats' approach, which was the sort of the mainstream IAEA-approved approach, because, of course, under international law, Iran has the right to nuclear energy and to nuclear facilities, including nuclear centrifuges and the enrichment.
Iran has the right to all that under international law.
And Trump doesn't agree with that, and he's not going to let international law get in his way.
I mean, I think we see that these terrorists are able to do an incredible amount of damage with pretty simple rifles.
You know, and sometimes was it the French, the club, that particular terrorist action, there were other people that were using bombs that only killed one or two people, but the guys with the machine guns were able to gun down dozens of people.
So certainly that's scary.
I think that's where a lot of Americans, when it happened, the reason so many people were against it, I believe a majority is against it, is because you're like, great, you know, first of all, is it going to be another endless war?
And second of all, are we going to get a bunch of terrorist actions here?
I think if we did, I don't think support for the war goes up.
I mean, I will say, you know, I was totally, obviously, maybe not obviously, but very much on the left and was opposed to all the stuff Reagan was doing.
I remember even in the 80s.
But it's like he really did.
I'm not going to say he was the only reason.
There was obviously a bunch of weakening within.
But I mean, he really did push back against communism.
He challenged the entire foreign policy establishment on the basic view of just, you know, of just kind of keeping it, you know, keeping the communists where they were.
And instead, Reagan really pushed back against it and said, there's got to be regime change.
It sort of almost had a moral, certainly there's a defense buildup, but a moral argument.
And I think it had a big impact to bring down communism.
So I'm obviously have very mixed feelings about it.
The Iranian regime is just so evil and so awful that every time you see videos of people taking these courageous actions, you're like, somebody bring that regime down.
On the other hand, that country is pretty, the people of that country are pretty radical.
And the Shah in 1979, I just spent last night watching all the old 60 Minutes from the 70s.
They're amazing.
But the Shah was really modernizing the country.
There was a lot of wealth coming in.
There was a lot more inequality.
There was also a lot more state repression from his intelligence services.
But the country was full of radical Muslims who wanted that when all that instability, they wanted to revert back to a radical Islamist regime.
And that's still, now I've seen other estimates that say that the current regime is incredibly unpopular in Iran.
But how that works out, it's really hard to say.
But there is something, I caution my own, I talk back to my own anti-interventionist instincts when I think about Reagan just being like, you know, we're not going to do just containment strategy anymore.
We're actually going to talk back to communism because people deserve to be free.
And now, is everything better for, you know, is everything fine in Russia?
Maybe not.
But I mean, communism was just awful, you know, just a totally soul-killing, you know, crushing, you know, a giant lie.
I mean, it's awful totalitarianism.
So I think we have to kind of keep that in mind.
And especially when you're in a moment of just such incredible chaos like we're in now.
I told my students, I'm like, you get to live through one of the most interesting moments in history, certainly in the last 80 years, because the entire paradigm where the United States had these allies and everything's going to go through the Security Council and we're going to try to make it to the UN and there's got to get agreements and all this stuff, that's just gone.
I mean, it's just, it's gone to the part where they don't even, where you're kind of like, how are you, what's going to happen inside Iran?
They're like, that's not our concern.
We hope that there's an overthrow of the government, but they're not – we're not like going to necessarily commit to that.
And I mean, in this kind of the this beautiful collapse of communism, which occurred so peacefully with the Berlin Wall and the guard eventually just sort of like it's just in the vibes.
And the guards are just like, yeah, we're not guarding this wall anymore.
And it's just over, you know.
And it was just over.
And it was like it was kind of like a moral collapse.
I'm not so sure that they're going to get that in Iran.
Because it's funny because it's funny because it's so Joe, it's just like you just look at all the think tanks and all the white papers and the State Department and the planning and whatever.
And it's just like Trump's just, he's going to listen to Tucker.
He's going to listen to any, and he's going to decide what to do.
I don't know the status of it, but you saw the OpenAI, the head of OpenAI Autonomous, she was the head of Autonomous Weapons, I think.
Don't give me exactly right, but she just quit like a couple of days ago on X, and it was just like a huge story.
So you have a bunch of you have a rift in between.
Now, I think Sam and Elon are both on board and want to keep working with the DOD, but it looks like Anthropic broke and then Hegset was like, well, but then we're going to punish you for this.
That's very consistent with a kind of nationalist vision, which is that, which the Trump administration has, which is that your security strategy, your economic strategy, your border strategy, it's all a single, your industrial strategy, it's all a single thing.
Your trade strategy, it's all a single thing.
And I think for Trump, it's just, you're either asserting power and using your leverage and demanding more, or you're engaged in managed decline.
You're just giving up.
And part of me, I'm of mixed minds on it because on the one hand, I'm with the kind of, I kind of go, let's invest at home.
We have Skid Row to clean up.
We should be focused on that, not on trying to do regime change or bombing other countries or creating other problems.
On the other hand, I think there's something right about defending the West.
I mean, defending Western civilization, defending our institutions, our norms, our liberal values.
And nobody's done that.
And we just had a guy in power that opened our borders, that kind of gave a blank check to Ukraine.
It seems like at a minimum with Trump, you have somebody that is taking responsibility in ways where Biden would be like, well, we're going to work with our allies.
And it was just all kind of like it was like it was all kind of going to be decided in this, you know, what Curtis Yarvin famously calls the cathedral, you know, just the single thing of the media and the think tanks and the academics.
And Trump was like, it's not working.
And the working class of this country elected me to show strength and to demand a better return on our investment in terms of protecting our allies for our people.
So that part of it, I think, is really overdue and really necessary, an assertion of why the West is special, why we need to defend the West.
Is bombing Iran and replacing the Khomeini with his son?
Mashat, is what's happening in Venezuela.
Is that the right approach to that?
I don't know.
But I think the system was failing.
I mean, the open society system, which is supposed to be this liberal, system of tolerance, it became intolerant.
It became totalitarian.
It created a censorship industrial complex.
They weaponized the intelligence communities.
We started getting ourselves into conflicts that was not clear why we were in them, including Venezuela.
I mean, sorry, including Ukraine.
I mean, with Ukraine, it's like that war only continues because we continue to arm it.
Like, if we stopped, if we just were like, let's just have the, just, you know, just cut a deal wherever the border is right now.
You're just like, that's where it's going to stop.
Then you can, I mean, I don't know, I'm not sure what's preventing that from Trump.
I think he's annoyed with Putin.
But yeah, I mean, my view is like, I don't see an interest in that war continuing.
I don't know how it's in the interest of the working of working class Americans or Americans.
And I have the same questions about Iran and Venezuela and Cuba.
But I think that is a totally different paradigm than the one that we had from 1945 to 2024.
Aaron Trevor Barrett, well, the idea of tolerance with the last administration, that seems just to be a narrative.
It seemed to be a political strategy of keeping the borders open to increase populations in blue states, raise the census, get more congressional seats, and then a path to citizenship where you'd have permanent voters.
That's what it seems like.
And then there's also a ton of Medicaid fraud that's wrapped up in that that we're now seeing.
Like, there was this, it was, you know, part of it, he's so out of it, right?
Like, there were just, it was not clear.
Like, there wasn't clear, there was like a meeting where he was like, yeah, we're going to just do this thing.
They kind of concluded that.
I think Cecilia Munoz, who's one of the more moderate advocates and was in the Obama administration, I think she said something like, Biden just wanted to give the left, just felt like he wanted to give the left what they wanted.
And that's what, you know, the Soros think tanks and the, you know, the very progressive immigration groups have been advocating.
He did the same thing on climate, so it makes sense.
I know Elon talks a lot about how, oh, it's about importing voters and whatnot.
Maybe, but it's not even clear that that's a good strategy that's going to work.
The numbers there are, it's actually more complicated.
Europe is definitely the case that you have higher rates of crime and higher rates of social services among migrants.
Here are Latino migrants traditionally really thrive.
They do much better than mostly Muslim immigrants in Europe.
So I'm skeptical.
I mean, the other statistic that I learned from David Shore, who's like one of the top Democrat pollsters when he was talking to Ezra Klein after the 2024 elections, he was like, if all eligible voters had voted, Trump would have won by 3 percentage points rather than 1.5.
So I always think it's kind of funny because the Republicans are always trying to make it harder for people to vote.
But under that calculation anyway, and maybe it's just Trump.
Well, I don't know if that's necessarily true, but when I see laws like what California has where you're not allowed to show ID, there's only, I mean, I've tried, tried to find some sort of charitable way where that would make sense other than you want to open the door for fraud.
There's nothing.
This narrative that they say, oh, poor people don't have like, you see, Kamala Harris.
I mean, but then the interview that saw that it's an incredible video because then he goes to like, I think he goes to Harlem or he goes to like a black neighborhood in New York and he was just asking black people, he's like, do you have an ID on you?
And it was like, everybody was like, yeah, like, what's the matter with you?
Well, yeah, that was about, that was because the left wanted to control people's behavior.
And on voting, the old, I know because when I talk to my progressive friends about it, you know, and family and friends, it's very much like, no, we can't put barriers in the way of voting because that's what they did during Jim Crow.
I think they just say it because that's the thing that everybody says.
I think it's a group thing thing.
I mean, I think if you sit down with any rational person and no one's watching, you know, there's no cameras on them, and you asked them, does that make any sense?
No one would say it makes any sense.
Most people in this country who are citizens have some form of ID or can get some form of ID.
And it's entirely reasonable to ask people to prove that you are who you are if you're voting for the president of the United States.
I'm just saying that if you make it, I'm just saying you may, the Republicans may, it may result in outcomes that are not the predictable ones that they think they'll get.
Just because Trump was, at least, and Trump is maybe a special case.
But I mean, he's able to turn out reluctant voters.
Yeah, and Americans were on board with closing the borders, and then when it came time to actually asking all the, getting those folks to leave that came in, all the support disappeared, right?
It's showing up at Home Depot and just rounding people up and raiding places and going to restaurants and pulling people out of their houses.
I think people got very uncomfortable with the idea of militarized police wearing masks on the street.
And then when you find out that these guys have only been trained for seven weeks and they get a $50,000 signing bonus, and then you find out that a giant percentage of them are Latino, which is kind of crazy.
You know, like the two guys who shot that guy in Minnesota, they're both Latino.
And then there was the thing with the woman who got shot where you have a guy who had almost been run over just a couple of weeks before and been dragged in his car.
The guy who shot her had been dragged by another vehicle.
But then on the other side, these protests are organized.
They're organized and they're paid for, which is also something that people need to understand.
These are not organic protests.
It's not organic that it just happened to be taking place in the very same place where you found hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud, right?
This is one of the clearest, most obvious distractions you've ever seen In the public arena, like where you have these people who are being paid to protest.
They give them money to go out there and protest.
They give them signs.
They're organizing it.
They go signal groups.
They're doxing all these different ICE workers.
They find out what their license plates numbers are.
They find out where they're staying.
They go to their hotel.
The cops, the local cops are being told to stand down.
So you've got like this convergence of all these factors that lead to chaos.
And, you know, Mike Benz was talking about it.
He was essentially saying it's a mathematical thing and that if you have these things play out, you're going to have a certain amount.
It was Mike Benz, right?
That was saying that?
It was a certain amount of people that are, you're going to have incidences.
You're just playing it out over the numbers.
Certain amount of these protests.
You have organized protests.
You have untrained ICE agents.
You have a lot of chaos.
You have support for people screaming in the streets.
Someone gets shot.
Boom.
And then it moves the needle.
And this is calculated.
They want this to happen.
They want it to happen this way because then this kills all the support for people that, you know, were kind of on the fence whether or not I should be deporting all illegals.
Excuse me.
Excuse me.
Whether they should just go after violent criminals.
And then there's these weird narratives like, oh, only 14% are violent criminals that have been arrested.
But 60% are criminals.
60% of the people plus were criminals.
And by what definition, violent criminals?
Like, what do you, is it okay if they just come in here and rip people off?
Like, are you fine with that?
It's just like the violent ones we need to get rid of?
I think most people don't understand how radical the left in Minneapolis is because you think it's a Midwestern place, but it's actually got a long radical left tradition.
And as you were saying, I mean, Alex Predty, he should have been arrested several days before when he had a gun on him and got into an altercation with the police.
They should have arrested him then, and then they could have, the judge could have done a lot of different things, but they could have taken away his gun.
They could have put a restraining order on him so that next time he showed up and people would know to look for him, then he would have been kept out of the area.
Okay, so he's carrying a gun called a SIG P320, which is notorious for accidental discharges.
I mean, there's lawsuits all over the place.
There's videos of cops in precincts bending over to pick something up, and the gun goes off in his holster.
There's a ton of these.
So I don't know if this is completely accurate because this is obviously the fog of chaos of these type of altercations and situations.
There's a video that many people have reviewed, and it's their conclusion that if you watch the video, when one of the ICE officers removes his gun, even though he does not have his finger on the trigger, has his hand on the gun and his fingers on the slide.
As he's moving off, it appears the gun goes off.
Now, they've zoomed in on it and shown that it does look like the gun's going off, and it does correspond with the sound of a gunshot.
And he's, I mean, he's got a gun in the waistband of his jacket.
It's hidden by the jacket.
He gets into this altercation with the police.
I mean, when I posted about it, I didn't say this, but a lot of the responses were suicide by cop.
People were like, suicide by cop.
I mean, and I'm not making that claim, but I mean, his behavior was, I mean, the recklessness of the gun choice mirrors the recklessness of his behavior in those instances.
And I heard people being like, oh, well, he, you know, he was just defending that poor woman.
There was a police officer engaged in an arrest of a person, and Alex Predi intervened in that.
But it's like – I just don't think that's appropriate behavior to go and get – that's not the tradition of like – I mean I think there's a nonviolent left-wing tradition that's actually quite beautiful and spiritual.
And like Thoreau and Gandhi and King, that's not what was going on in Minneapolis.
It's weird because it does muddy the water and it does fuck with discourse, but it also radicalizes people one way or the other.
It radicalizes people towards the right, radicalizes people towards the left.
It's not good.
And I think this guy, whatever his mental health struggles were, they appeared to exist.
It seems like he was a troubled guy already.
So a thing comes along that defines them, a cause that they're going to stand up for and fight for because their life's probably a fucking mess and their mind is probably a mess.
And they look at this, they look at it like it's this black and white binary situation good guys and bad guys and let's fuck all these fascists and he's kicking taillights and you know and getting involved in pushing matches with ICE agents.
It's like that's crazy.
Like all that stuff can should and can get you arrested.
Yeah, I mean, I think on the organized issue, remember like the civil rights movement was really well organized in terms of people weren't being paid for it.
And so one of them was about actually, I mean, the other thing is that pull back a little bit further.
Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement was about affirming our liberal democratic Western civilization.
Black people wanted to be a part of it.
This stuff where you're like, we want to open the border and defund the police and basically start attacking all of these institutions of liberal democratic civilization.
And when you're taking criminals and just releasing them from jail and you have no cash bail and you're doing all these things, if you want to put on the fucking tinfoil hat, you would do that because you want chaos, because you want chaos so you can have more rules and tighten down on people and have more control over the civilization.
I mean, I think in that, I mean, I think like it's not empathic to allow more violent crime.
Like, I don't think that's empathy towards victims.
So I don't think, I wouldn't call it empathy.
And not only that, but like when you look at like who these folks are, and I spent a lot of time looking at them and was one of them, they hate Western civilization.
They hate the United States of America.
They hate capitalism.
Like it's an anti-civilization thing that's motivating it.
And that's not to say that like MSNBC watchers don't feel, oh, I feel bad for that person.
But I mean, I always, you know, it's like the people I hear complaining about ICE, they don't know any illegal immigrants.
They've never talked to them other than maybe their server or that, you know, but they don't even really talk to their gardeners or their or their, you know, their maids.
It's like the idea that they have empathy implies a deep understanding of someone's situation.
And so I think it's a misdescription of empathy.
I think in some ways it's more quite the opposite of that, that they're actually not showing empathy for all the people that are hurt by their policies, whether it's open borders or enabling addiction or euthanizing poor and mentally ill people in Canada or transing kids.
I don't think that those things are empathic.
And the person that's doing them, I don't think, is suicidal.
If anything, they're actually quite full of themselves and quite arrogant about what they're doing.
I mean, I use the word pathological altruism in San Francisco, and I say it's close to Monkhausen syndrome by proxy.
Maybe it is Monkhausen's syndrome by proxy, but I don't think it's, I worry about affirming, because I think that's how progressives go.
They go, oh, well, if the homeless are worse off, that's just because we care so much.
I mean, think about like, so San Francisco was like between $100,000 and $120,000 a year per homeless person.
I think LA at a bargain of something more like $25,000.
That's just San Francisco.
That doesn't count the $24 billion that California gave.
So that money's going to single-resident occupancy hotel owners.
It's going to nonprofit service providers who are just bringing food and, you know, alcohol and drug paraphernalia to make it easier for people to do drugs and overdose and live in tents on the street.
It's very expensive to kill that many people that way.
Right, but it's really about the amount of people where that's their industry.
That there is an industry in taking care of the homeless situation and addressing the homeless situation.
And, you know, Koleon Noir, when he was on the podcast, he was explaining to me that he went to San Francisco and he was like, why is it so bad up here?
Do they need money?
He's like, no, no, no.
This guy who's a lawyer was explaining it to him.
He's a lawyer as well.
He was explaining it to him.
Like, no, no, no, these people are getting money to deal with the homeless situation.
And some of them are making quarter billion dollars a year and more, which is just nuts.
And then it's not getting better.
It's only getting worse.
And yet they still keep getting that money.
So it's like there's zero incentive to make it better.
There's only an incentive to make it worse.
And then when you have no accountability, so there's no auditing of the money.
Mostly it's into the temporary, what they call, they call it permanent.
It's a propaganda word.
Propaganda.
It's a permanent supportive housing.
It's neither permanent nor supportive.
It's often warehousing addicts where they die.
I mean, we know that they die at very high levels in those little, this is a little crummy, you know, single-resident occupancy rooms.
They bought a lot of motels that were low-income, you know, low, you know, cheap motels, converting them, having, but they don't really, there's no, I mean, all that money should have gone into a centralized addiction and psychiatric care system.
Cal psych is what it should have been.
And instead, it's just, it's just kind of, yeah, it's just basically incentivizing people to live on the streets and use hard drugs and die in overdose.
Well, I think that's a nice narrative, but I think once you start getting monthly paychecks from the homeless industrial complex, I think your incentive is to keep this party going.
Yeah, he did start walking slowly and then starts that guy started it all.
He pushed that guy.
If you're a security guy, the last thing you want to do when there's one of you and two of those other guys is Deal with a situation that way where you push a guy.
I mean, I don't, for the life of me, none of it makes sense, right?
None of it makes sense.
The the, the mayor, walking off casually and then eventually running.
It doesn't make sense.
The security guy just walked up to those guys and pushed him.
When you're details to take care of the mayor, you should be escorting him around that and getting him away from any potential trouble, like the brazenness of just walking up and pushing that guy where you don't know how to fight at all.
It's very clear when you watch the way they grappled with each other, he doesn't know what he's doing.
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Seven weeks, and a lot of them are financially incentivized.
Because if you can get $50,000, if you're in debt and then you could take this job on, I don't, when they get the $50,000, how long do they have to stay on the job for to have that money, to have that signing bonus?
Or is it one of those things where you get the $50,000 as a signing bonus, but you pay it like a record deal type deal where it's not really your money?
Someone's read it, comments saying they have no personal experience, but they've heard that it's 50K over four years if you're in good standing at the end of those four years.
But for some people that have no job opportunities and nothing on the horizon, that $50,000 looks like, look, it's an extra $25K a year or an extra $25K for four years?
We had a bunch of police shortages after that, mostly by police officers who were just felt mistreated by the society and by their local mayors who said that they were evil.
And then a bunch of police officers were driven out during COVID.
So that was already our security forces have been, you know, and they were just people underestimate how important it is to feel like important in your job and respected.
And it's not just about the money because they would be offering more money.
But I think a lot of people are like, oh, no, I don't want to be in a job where people are spitting at me or throwing urine and not just a job where your life is on the line.
Yeah, your life is already on the line and then you're mistreated by the wider society, which actually creates additional risks, you know, as this chaos in Minneapolis shows.
So yeah, it's just people want to believe that they're doing something that is appreciated by the community.
And so when the community decides that they're against policing, your civilization is pretty far gone.
Right, but this is the difference between policing and this ICE thing.
The ICE thing is a different thing, right?
They're looking at it differently.
It's not like you're watching a violent altercation take place.
The police show up and people are spitting on them.
Like you're trying to break up a violent crime.
This is different.
They're looking at it like in the progressive narrative is like no one's illegal on stolen land and we need to have open borders and illegals or immigrants rather are the foundation of this country and you hear all that those narratives.
If you have illegal immigrants that are responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud, and you know at least some of them are illegal, it seems rational that you would send ICE in to find out who's illegal and who's not and put a stop to some of it.
And there's also this nationwide focus on this one place because of the Nick Shirley videos.
Yeah, though I think that the motivate, my understanding is that the motivation was to motivate people that are here illegally to self-deport.
And so that that's the main part of the strategy is this show of force.
Because of course it's they wanted the publicity.
They wanted people to be scared and self-deport.
They claim that 1.
I think 3 million people self-deported or 1.4 and then another 400,000 or 600,000 deported through the normal channels.
And apparently they're just limited to how many people they can actually deport through the normal channels, but people can self-deport.
They can just go.
Because of course there's this thing called e-verify where you just have the employers have to prove that everybody you're employing is here legally and they don't want to do that.
The Trump administration doesn't want to do that because they'll upset in particular, like the agricultural lobby, but other construction who depend on.
So it's a, it's a funny, it's not great, I don't know.
I'm not saying that there's that.
I have the perfect you know answer to the other one.
But obviously, like politically, the president doesn't feel like they can do e-verify and maintain support from the business community for his political agenda.
So you end up.
But you end up with a kind of underclass that's here illegally but that's protected because they're working in a sector that the president and the administration wants to protect.
But then you're also self-deporting people.
I'm not sure exactly how they're thinking about it, but that appears to be what the heart of their goal is is well, this was always what a lot of people on the left back in the day would say that illegal immigrants was.
This was like a KOCH Brothers thing, this was like a right-wing thing that they wanted this for, for exactly what you just described, and that this is not a left-wing progressive idea, and that what it would do is would lower the wages for the lower class and the middle class of this country, and it would be bad for the citizens.
And so you don't want unchecked illegal immigration.
Unchecked illegal immigration would just be for the right because they're the ones who own these massive corporations that are profiting off of illegal labor.
They don't have to pay them benefits.
They don't have to pay them health care, any of the things that are, you know, that cost money.
Yeah, I mean, the left was always balancing a sort of open society.
You know, they wanted, the Soros Foundation always wanted to have a free movement of people.
That was sort of their view of part why the Holocaust occurred is that you couldn't move people, you know, or at least the persecutions, you couldn't move people as easily.
But then you had the working class, you know, who were negatively affected by bringing in migrants who would push down wages and unions who are a big part of the Democratic Party.
So the Democrats were sort of divided on it for a while, but they managed it.
And Hillary and Obama would sort of, if you look at when they were competing in 2008, they were very carefully, like there was a whole thing around like driver's licenses, whether she would give them or not.
And Obama accused Hillary of kind of playing both sides of it, you know, typical thing.
But they also both spoke out strongly against mass migration.
Fast forward 10 years, you know, fast forward much more than that.
It was at 16 years into today, and now you've got a much more working class Republican Party who's unified around keeping the borders closed and restricting the supply of low-income, unskilled workers.
Because, I mean, it's just obvious.
I mean, it was really weird to watch people that are always defending supply and demand and economics and economic policy then say, oh, no, but having open borders and having all these working class people come in is going to have no impact on wages when obviously it would.
And I think that's now, that's also now gone.
I think that's another thing that's just Trump has just changed.
I don't think you're going to see Democrats going back to advocating that kind of mass migration again.
But you could see a world where they would push back against what has happened, what they would say the barbaric nature of some of these ice raids and then saying – there's a filter of ice water in that too if you'd like.
There's a little bit of that, but there was also the idea that you're going to juice up the congressional seats because you're going to change the census.
That initiative, the billionaires tax, is an SCIU initiative.
So, meaning it's the union that covers healthcare workers, like nurses.
They're very radical, very radical left.
And the money is to provide Medicaid for undocumented immigrants.
That's what they want it for, right?
So that's the whole thing.
And so you literally get the this is like this is what people worry about democracy.
You get all the, it's very democratic, but you get these powerful unions and they're able to change the laws like that.
I mean, it's called the Curly effect because there was a Boston mayor named Curly who made everything so bad for his political opponents that they left.
But the consequence was that he ended up gaining more power.
So all of when everybody moves to, you know, when all the like moderate Democrats move to Austin or Miami or Denver or wherever, California just ends up locked in more to a progressive agenda.
It's hard to say, but it does look like, because I mean, look, there's plenty of the tech community only woke up politically in 2024.
That's how long it took.
And it really took things getting so bad where they were telling Mark Andreessen, as he said to you on your show, that they were shutting off whole parts of AI.
The Biden administration was openly threatening AI and this huge new.
And, you know, there's concerns.
I'm not saying that there's not, but I think at some point the tech community, which had been, you know, either leaning Democrat for a long time since the Obama era, you know, or wanted to stay out of politics because they just wanted to focus on their machines and their investments.
They don't really want to be involved in politics.
But they woke up in 2024.
And so hopefully, because it's not, I mean, when you see what Soros has done and you really appreciate the power that one billionaire can have, you kind of go, why is there nothing like that, you know, on the other side?
Why is it so dominated by Soros?
And so I hope that that's starting to happen.
But yeah, when you start to chase out the billionaires and the billionaires just give up on California, then it's got to be whoever's remaining to try to put the money behind the guy that can get some change there.
I mean, say Matt Mahan or somebody more moderate gets in to be governor, Rick Caruso runs for L.A. mayor again.
I mean, honestly, like, if somebody can't defeat Karen Bass after she let Los Angeles burn away, which is now, we now know for a fact was just totally preventable, absolutely preventable.
I was saying at the time, but now we know.
They tried to rewrite the report, but it's clear it was totally preventable.
Well, the report, you know, said, here's all the things that the fire department should have done that didn't happen.
And ultimately, you know, the mayor is the one that chooses the fire chief and fires the fire chief.
And the mayor was warned.
They were warned.
And she goes to flies to Ghana for this little junket presidential inauguration, palling around when she should have been in L.A. with a command headquarters.
And if she wasn't, then Gavin should have been.
Schwarzenegger, towards the end of his administration, they would just mobilize planes full of water, those huge cargo planes full of water, before there were fires, just to start to circulate, just to get ready to put stuff out.
This idea that there was this idea promoted that it was inevitable that the fires that, oh, eventually it's just no, like it's absurd.
Like, of course, you can protect it with adequate fire.
People, oh, the pipes weren't big enough.
No, like, maintain your reservoirs, have water in them.
Even the one that was like, was like not repaired yet, which should have been repaired, they could have kept, they could have air-gapped the pipes so that it didn't contaminate the water supply, but left it for firefighting.
They didn't do that.
They didn't station the engines where they needed to station.
Nobody was on, you know, it's like they're not taking responsibility.
Like, they weren't taking responsibility for it.
So, anyway, to the point being, get a new governor, you get a better mayor of LA.
You've got a guy in San Francisco now who I think still has a lot of potential.
I mean, this latest video, you know, showing the chaos there.
Yeah, so I mean, I think there is a way for California to come out.
And my view is like, look, you've got, it's on the tech billionaires.
And I know some of them have left, and obviously they don't need it, but there's still a lot of billionaire rich guys in California that are perfectly capable of financing an alternative effort.
Remember, 75% of San Francisco voters want to arrest people using fentanyl in public.
They want to arrest them.
That sounds so taboo in progressive.
That's 75% of San Francisco voters.
So the voters are not the radical left.
Some ways they're radicalized in their hatred of Trump and the Trump derangement syndrome.
But I mean, everyone like Caruso and Mahan and anybody else there will all just be able to say they hate Trump like everybody else.
People are really, it's not like anything has changed that significantly.
They will, in fact, when I interview people in San Francisco, they're a little reluctant to admit that's gotten better because I think they don't want to take any pressure off the politicians.
So, I mean, I do think it's rescuable, but it's hard.
Now, you see a little, you see more of that sort of thing that we just saw in the video where there's like, I call them like a little more of like a nest.
Have you seen this video where this guy does this description of what's going on in Oakland and then drives across the county line into the next place and it's immediately all done?
And you just see what the difference between two different forms of government and how it works.
And then they and then the voters fired their city council member who represented them, who was total, crazy radical, Chesapeake-level radical, and replaced him with a more moderate person.
There was a comic from the comedy store that filmed something.
He went like undercover and he had, like in his past, he had some, I don't think, I think currently he was sober when he did this, but he decided to go there and film and stay in one of these encampments just to show what it was like.
And this is like 2006-ish, six-ish, somewhere around there.
And it was fucking nuts, even back then.
And, you know, we talked about the story of how Skid Row with the whole Jerome Hotel and how it all started.
Skid Row was the place where they would take all the homeless people and all the people that were problematic and they would move them there and keep them there.
And the idea was that you just keep them out of Beverly Hills, keep them away from Hollywood.
We're doing movies and we've got famous people walking around.
We can't have homeless people.
So you just snatch them up, take them downtown, and contain them.
So they had them contained in this area and they called it Skid Row.
It's not that different from the tenderloin in the sense that those are places where the single resident, those are the places where the really cheap hotels were.
They were like often for like working, you know, like working people that were in town temporarily, like temporary hotels.
Some of them would just be cages.
There were no walls.
Like you would just get your own little, that was how primitive they were.
And then it just evolved over time and then they became, all of them became subsidized for the homeless.
But yeah, it's, I don't think, I think California, I think it's important.
I think with Trump, and again, like him or hate him or disagree or whatever, you see the potential of this country in particular to make a big change.
And I think that it's ultimately resulted from an unleashing of, you know, social media made it all possible.
It allowed for people to get, you know, accurate information for the first time in a different paradigm.
But you can't be so, I mean, we should get into Epstein files too, because I do think I have a different view of Epstein now.
But look, I just think we've been asking for more transparency like we had in this very brief period in the mid-70s with the church committee hearings.
It really took a whole watergate.
It took something big.
It's been over 50 years.
We got a lot of Epstein files.
Yes, there's some missing, but we got JFK files, Amelia Earhart files, and now we're going to get some UFO files.
Is it going to be everything?
Of course not.
There's just no way.
But I don't think we should hold both.
We should be happy that there is an acknowledgement that there's a lot of government files and that there's some commitment to release them.
Because I do think it's easier to get new Epstein files released after you have some Epstein files released than if you have none.
I mean, it must have been within the last year or so.
So like they're not – we do see – they do release warfare.
Various times they do release things and you can kind of go, OK, that means that we have – I don't think – what I'm saying is the main excuse has been not to reveal our methods for getting – we're just talking about UAP here, getting photographs and video.
We know that a huge amount of it exists.
They haven't even released the full, you know, gimbal and go fast videos.
I believe that there was, so there's three videos, right?
It's gimbal, go fast, and then what was the one where it moved, the tic-tac video, it moves out of the frame.
My understanding is that there's significantly more video for all of those.
And then I also, my understanding is also there's just a lot of other videos, particularly from those two incidents, certainly have.
There's so much more sensor data from, because we know those incidents had a lot more going on, right?
And just was filmed by those videos.
So I think that now there is, I was going to say the UAP community, there isn't really an organized one, although Jesse's doing an amazing job of organizing it.
We should be really specific and say, you know, here's what we want.
I did a piece with John Greenwald.
Representative Nancy Mace wrote an open letter to the intelligence and military community saying, here's a set of documents that we want to release.
So I think the good news is we're like, look, the president has said he wants this.
We've identified a bunch of documents, identified a bunch of videos in film.
Okay, so I think they make a really good point in Age of Disclosure that if they did release things, the real problem is misappropriation of funds lying to Congress.
And the fact that some of these, you would assume that the way these things are being handled, if they do have crafts, if there is some sort of a back engineering program, that back engineering program is going to be held by a military contractor.
So whatever the contractor is, whether it's Rocket Dyne or whoever has it, right?
You would imagine that the other competing groups would be very pissed off that they didn't have access to this thing and they could sue.
The misappropriation of funds lying to Congress, people could go to jail.
Also, most likely fraud.
There's got to be tons of fraud.
If there's so much money that's being shuffled away into these black ops projects, if there's no oversight, then who knows where the money's going, right?
And so there's a problem there.
If you open up the books and people go, well, why was there $100 million check written here?
But he was sort of talking about, because I think Eric Weinstein was asking these really hard questions, like, okay, well, like, how many people are in this reverse engineering program and what is it?
There is a like, yeah, I just definitely think there's a lot more than they've revealed.
I think my skepticism on the reverse engineering stuff, I mean, obviously there's crash retrieval because they're just retrieving, it could be foreign or they're retrieving something.
The reverse engineering, I mean, if it's advanced tech, nuclear just took so much.
I mean, I'm just familiar with the history of nuclear, just so much effort to create nuclear energy.
And you'd have these huge, it was a huge enterprise, thousands of people.
If they're not, I mean, that's why I kind of go, and I mean, a whole other form of propulsion.
I mean, it's just really, it would require so many, so such a big bureaucracy.
That's where I'm a little skeptical that that exists because I don't know how you maintain a cover-up that long.
But I could be wrong.
I mean, as you know, as people have pointed out, they've maintained secrecy of a lot of things for a really long time.
Well, especially when you're dealing with government contractors and military contractors, they have a long history of keeping a tight lip when it comes to all sorts of top-secret projects that they're working on.
I mean, it's weird because if you look at the UAP Task Force, which was created by people that had, you know, it was that comes out of, they have OSAP and then ATIP and then UAP Task Force, and then they create Arrow, which is much more like what Blue Book was, which is their whole point is to debunk and dismiss, I think.
That's the whole point.
It's just to say we looked into it and there's nothing there.
So then they cherry-pick the cases.
Like they don't actually deal with stuff that they can't explain.
That's what Arrow's point is.
But the UAP Task Force was people that seem genuinely interested in it, and they have potential explanations and three separate things.
So that means that they didn't know themselves.
And so I would think that if there was some reverse engineering program, then you would have a better idea than just three potential explanations.
Yeah, I mean, if they open themselves up for, if they do have access, then you open up those questions, misappropriation of funds, lying to Congress, military contractors having access to these vehicles.
I find when you start kind of like, well, what is it?
And how many people kind of, it's a lot of like, you know, I mean, that's how I, that's how that was my interpretation of this.
I think that it's I'm much more with Jacques Vallée's view of the phenomenon, and I think that they don't know what it is.
I think they have a lot more photos and videos showing, demonstrating this incredible phenomenon, but I'm not sure that they know what it is.
And I'm pretty skeptical that they have a secret reverse engineering program just because I don't see how they would have carried it out for this long.
Because Jesse's theory, of course, is that it would date back to the 50s.
Well, one of the things that Bob said is he thinks some of the documents that he was shown were horseshit, and he thinks it's on purpose.
He thinks that those fake documents, that the fake narratives are a hook.
So that if somebody does spill the beans, they know exactly who would, who was doing it, because they could point to, like, maybe if you're involved in, you know, X program, they give you some bullshit narrative on top of the real truth, right?
Look, I would say most ufologists think it's fake, so it's not even me.
What's incredible about it, they show like, you know, like the old books from the library, they'd show who checked it out.
They had all these names.
So then you kind of go, like, the only people really, I mean, it seemed like the level of sophistication to create this would have been the government.
And so then you're sort of like, well, why would they have done that?
One of the answers is it was just this is called passage material to be able to detect counterintelligence activities.
I'll tell you another one that I can't quite figure out.
I mean, for me, it says a lot of effort to, and why that narrative, I mean, like, another thing I was told people say is they'll go, well, they're using the UAP stuff as cover for secret weapons programs.
And you're like, well, why would that work as cover?
And they go, well, because then it's a way to distract attention.
I was like, but why would that distract attention?
Wouldn't that attract attention?
You go, as opposed to like within the military, you're like, look, we don't, this is secret research that's really important to national security.
We don't pay attention.
Instead, they're like, oh, no, this is UFO crash retrieval, so don't pay attention to it.
That seems like you're a recipe for creating more interest in UFOs.
So there's a lot of things that the government has done where you're like, it's almost like, assuming that is, by the way, we know that the government, the U.S. Air Force, did, you know, in the early 80s, make this guy Paul Benowitz go crazy who was seeing things over Kirtland Air Base.
And then this guy, Richard Doty, you know, was they would be feeding him all this information, convincing him of an alien attack.
And he basically ended up going crazy from it.
It's this amazing story told by this by this book, Mirage Men, also a documentary.
And you look at it and you kind of go, and they go, well, it was to cover up a secret weapons program at Kirtland Air Base.
And it's like, it's like, I'm not even disbelieving it, but it's like, that's just such a like, why would that be the best way to do that?
And why would you be so sure that that wouldn't attract interest from people rather than distract it?
So there's a bunch of things that don't make sense.
And so even if it is all, you know, which is the skeptic view, you know, is that it's some combination of government disinformation, sci-fi, you know, dreams, hypnosis, hypnagogic states, and then kind of the power of belief.
You know, I just reviewed this new book on Barney and Betty Hill, where the author thinks that it was that really was a combination of her stress of being an interracial couple, her nightmares, and then hypnosis, where they then confabulate this whole story.
That's the basic skeptic view is that it was sort of, but the government's involved in it, and that's always strange because you're like, why is the government involved in that?
No, no, in the UFO in creating in these UFOs, assuming that they did the MJ-12 or somebody did the MJ-12, but certainly in the case of the organizations, why would they have anything, right?
Why would they have why would you be doing things?
Like the thing with the Paul Dotie and the Paul Benowitz or the Richard Doty and Paul Benowitz is like, why was that the best?
I mean, it's just, why was that the best way?
Like, if somebody observes strange activity over Kirtland Air Base and they discover this, why was that the right approach?
I don't follow it.
And you had AJ Gentile on, who did the stuff on crop circles.
They saw military disinformation around those activities in Britain.
That's what's really as much precision as you can get by folding over wheat.
But when you look at it like from above and you don't get to the micro, you're looking at these things that they really do scale in a fractal way.
It's very fucking strange and difficult to reproduce.
You would imagine something like that would take a long fucking time to plot out and plan.
It would take multiple people.
You'd have to measure and remeasure.
You'd have to have some sort of tools and instruments, not just to fold over the wheat, but if you're going to interweave the wheat, like what is your method of doing that?
And how are you doing it where, you know, this one is one dimension and then the next one is precisely three-fifths of that dimension.
It was apparently, I'm pretty sure it's the first time that it was a visual explanation of pie.
That's my understanding of it.
Now, maybe there's someone, I haven't seen anything earlier than that, but that's like on its own is really amazing that that was the first time that they had created a visual representation of pie.
But yet you get almost at least you could say, oh, I could understand how they would be describing it this way, but it's kind of the same thing that other people have been describing.
Like the Zimbabwe story, a lot of these other stories, it's kind of the same story over and over and over again, which makes you go, okay, well, what, does it have to be from outer space?
Or is it possible that there is something here that is like far older than us that has somehow or another removed itself from our view.
And people, I mean, I'm always struck by it's always like the aliens always are like, oh, protect your environment and avoid nuclear war.
It's like, oh, thanks.
Like we didn't know we needed to do those until you guys showed up.
And it makes more sense as like you could see it as a, I mean, I got very into, I haven't interviewed her yet, but I'm about to.
There's an anthropologist at Stanford named Tanya Luhrmann.
And she's done this incredible work on religions where she, like anthropologist, a good anthropologist, and also this guy, Bowman, like they, they're agnostic on whether or not like those beings are real.
Like they're just like, we're really interested in like the culture and the psychology and the experience of it.
But she had this, she, she was like, did her field work with magicians and witches in England?
You know, like, you know, like modern witches and not magicians like magic tricks, but like the old, who's the famous magician?
Like, but they were like, so she didn't really believe in it, but she would, they were like, you have to practice witchcraft in order to do this.
And she had like multiple anomalous experiences.
One of them that she woke up and there was five druids in her room beckoning to her.
And people were like, is it a dream?
And she's like, no, it's not a dream.
She had another instance where they were trying to like conjure energies to like turn off, to like shut down her watch.
And she felt a huge energy surge through her and shut off her watch.
And her point is that she thinks that the practice, we put too much focus on the beliefs, but she says like the practices themselves, I don't know if she would say conjure.
I also interviewed Diana Pasulka on it.
They would say more like reveal these different realities.
So they're much more, it's a very interesting set of work because they're not trying to answer the question of whether the druids were really in her room or not.
I mean, the watch thing, you know, apparently definitely happened.
My favorite one is the black guy talking about Yahweh, who where the local ABC newscaster goes out, and it's going to be one of those, haha, this guy thinks that he can conjure UFOs.
There's a second guy, white guy, that also does it.
And Reuters did a whole story on him because apparently there's a whole bunch of people around that they saw it.
And of course, Jake Barber, who's this former, you know, contractor, helicopter pilot, contractor for Special Forces, announced that he was going to go and conjure UFOs and bring one down.
We met up with Prophet Yahweh, seer of Yahweh, at Doolittle Park off Lake Mead.
unidentified
We picked the day, we picked the time, and we picked the location.
Which is sort of like, I asked Diana, I was like, how is that different from God?
Because he's sort of a control system that is his view is that there's a control system that's evolving human consciousness and it will manifest different things or in relation to the humans over time.
And so he looks at the apparition, the Maria or St. Mary apparitions in Spain and the airships of the late 19th century where people saw these things that looked like Zeppelins, even though they hadn't been invented yet.
All of these things, he says, his view is they're sort of being sort of produced in some relationship as well with our culture.
I mean, I like again, this anthropologist Luhrmann, you know, she says, you know, William James is this famous Harvard psychologist who wrote a book about the varieties of the religious experience in 1902.
And he says, everybody wants to kind of be like, is it real or not real?
Is like this world just what we see?
And he says, I think there's something more.
There's not, so this very, you know, skeptic or debunker thing, which is like, oh, no, it's just got to be a, that thing's got to be a bird.
And it's like, well, but it really, you haven't just calling it that.
And as they point out, it's like they showed up when they wanted to.
I mean, it's a pretty amazing, if it's just a coincidence, it's a really amazing one.
And so I think for me, it's like, because I am a Christian and it is hard to believe in an all-powerful and all-good God because he obviously allowed the Holocaust to occur and allows terrible things to occur.
But I love that segment.
And I love, there's another one I love right now.
I was like a British woman in the 50s doing an interview about seeing what she calls a Mexican hat UFO over her house.
And the kids saw it, and everybody in the village made fun of her and they ridiculed her.
And she's like, but it's, you know, but it's, I saw it, and it was real.
And it was like, it's like, those are like our, those are spiritual experiences, I think.
So I don't know that, like, I want the files released from the government.
I'm also skeptical that it's going to tell us what it is because I think at some level, we're not supposed to get more, much more information about what it is.
I think it's something else is going on.
Or maybe it's having a positive effect.
I think it's, I think, one of the, sometimes people get really mad at UFO believers.
Like, skeptics get really like angry.
Like, how do they, well, they're so, you know, whatever.
They get so mad.
And I'm always like, but like, how often do you see them causing real harm or problems?
I mean, we had one cult where they, you know, like a few people killed themselves, but for the most part.
So, you know, UFO, like for the most part, UFO, people who are interested in UFOs are dreamy seekers, spiritual.
And I think it's, I think it's wrong to, I think it's lovely and wonderful.
And it reminds us of, you know, that we're small.
On the one hand, we're humble about our knowledge and there's just surrounded by mystery.
I mean, you're so much of your career and this platform has been to allow us to talk about things that are unexplained and that, or where the explanations don't really seem to explain it.
They're more silly than the believers because this idea that, like, look, if there is a, if you have a completely novel experience, like say if you are Commander David Fraver and you encounter this Tic-Tac-shaped object that's hovering over something that appears to be a ship that's under the water, this thing takes off at an absolutely preposterous speed that is documented both on radar and visually and on camera, right?
So they've got video of this thing moving.
They say that it went from above 50,000 feet above sea level to sea level in less than a second, which would require more energy than the entire United States produces in a year in order to get an object to move that quickly.
And it does that with no heat signature.
Okay, if this is all true, just that alone.
Now imagine you have this completely novel experience.
And because I haven't had it and you haven't had it, and Jamie hasn't had it, well, it's very simple and easy to dismiss it.
But if this happened, what do you expect the person to do?
Would you expect a decorated pilot in the Navy, a guy who has a rock-solid record, who is, there's nothing about him that screams that he's a kook or he's mentally ill.
And when you talk to him, he's incredibly meticulous, very intelligent, very disciplined.
His face, it looks like he had a spiritual experience.
There's a smile on his face.
I went to the, when I was in Delhi, I went to the Jain temple and I went to the Hindu temple.
And I'm not Jain, I'm not Hindu.
But I had a look on my face that reminded me, that sort of, that sort of, that sort of like that starry eye, the look in your face where you've experienced the wonder and the awe of being alive and we're on this planet and we don't really understand it all, but it's beautiful and it's okay.
And I think that that's the spiritual, I mean, that's where it's like he's been touched by, I don't, you know, I'm not imposing this, but he's sort of touched by God in some way or touched by something.
Well, what I could imagine is that they have acquired both eyewitness, video, radar, all the various sensors, data.
And they've done this with multiple instances of these things.
And they are trying to assess what this is.
And they have a long-standing study of these things that would both be disturbing and confusing to a lot of people and disruptive to society.
I'm sure you're well aware of Hal Putoff and what happened with him during the Bush administration, where they brought him in.
And they essentially told Hal Putoff.
Now, this is assuming Hal's telling the truth, and I have no reason to think he's lying.
They brought him in and a bunch of other scientists and a bunch of other thinkers and said, I want you to create a chart on one side, list the positive aspects of disclosure, and the other side, what are the negative ramifications of disclosure?
Government, religion, the finances, all the different things that could happen in the world.
And the negatives outweighed the positives, and they decided not to disclose.
But the premise that he was brought in with this was saying, we have acquired physical crafts that are not of this world.
We have biological entities that are not of this world.
And we are part of some sort of a back engineering program.
If he was in office and that was the case and they came to him and, you know, and someone like Tucker or someone that's influential to him could sit down with him and talk to him, and he thought it would gain their favor, he might just release it.
I mean, it's wild because on the one hand, it looked like it was spontaneous, but on the other hand, you know, Laura Trump, who's like someone that's like a trusted family member who's like really competent, like they sent her in to like take over the RNC and fix it and fire all the people and get their loyalists in there.
She was out there talking, saying that, you know, oh, the Trump is I was hearing a lot of noise, but it wasn't from people that I trusted, so I didn't report anything on it.
But I was hearing a lot of noise too that the Trump administration was considering doing something, but you didn't know.
I didn't know if it was circular reporting.
But I thought the Laura Trump thing was interesting because I don't think, I don't see her as sort of a, she's not just speculating or bullshitting.
You know, she's a trusted, you know, kind of trusted source for that.
So she said that, and then Obama was asked about it, and then Trump made that announcement.
So I don't know what they have planned.
You know, we were pushing on the intelligence community privately to release the stuff and it was going nowhere.
I mean, and he told, Obama told one of the late night hosts, I can't remember if it was Kimmel or Colbert or somebody, but he said they said something like, tell us what you know.
Well, before we get into that, you know, Tucker's thoughts on this whole UFO UAP thing.
He thinks they're like angels and demons from the Bible, and he thinks that they've always been here.
And, you know, I'm sure you're aware of like the book of Enoch, the book of Enoch, which was one of the original biblical texts that wasn't included in the canon, but just because of a few rabbis decided it didn't jive with the Torah.
And they found the book of Enoch along with the book of Isaiah as a part of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
And when you find out that there was a biblical text that was contemporary to books that did make it into the Old Testament, and that they talk about the watchers who come from above and mate with humans and create this race of giants called the Nephilim who destroy everything and consume everything.
And you're like, what the fuck is this?
Like, what is this?
And just stop and imagine if those rabbis hadn't disclosed, like, if that hadn't been excluded.
Like, Wesley Hoff is great talking about this stuff.
He's a real historian when it comes to, you know, really understanding the history of these biblical texts.
And, you know, and he's absolutely fascinated by it.
And he's like, yeah, it is kind of crazy that they just decided to not put that in the Bible.
Imagine if they did.
And part of when you're going to church and they're going over the Old Testament, like, okay, this week we're going to go over the book of Enoch and we're going to figure out who the watchers are.
Like, what is that?
Like, what is that story?
The crazy thing that Wes Huff told me was that the book of Isaiah that they found in the Dead Sea Scroll predates the oldest version of the book of Isaiah by more than a thousand years.
When they found it, they found out that there was a book of Isaiah that is a thousand years older than the one they thought was the oldest one, and it is verbatim.
It's verbatim from the one that's a thousand years later, which is kind of crazy.
Like, it's like, well, no, now, like, we've been around for, you know, humans around for like millions of years, but the last 150 years, we really figured it all out and we figured out that all human knowledge before, you know, whatever, some recent time period is nonsense.
It's very arrogant, but look, I'm a believer that history is far older than we think it is.
And I think the more time goes on, the more that gets revealed.
So when you're talking about something that's 4,000 or 5,000 years old, I think really you're talking about a retelling of a far older story.
And I think It's very difficult when you're dealing with people that don't have an understanding of science.
The written language is fairly new.
It's an oral tradition for generations before it's ever written down.
So, my question with all this is always like, what were they trying to talk about?
What were they trying to say?
What was the original experience that someone documented in story?
And then that story was relayed over and over and over again, generation after generation, until it's eventually written down.
And then they study it and take it literally.
And then also translating it from Aramaic, which is the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient Hebrew, all these different languages to Latin and Greek and eventually English.
But what's the original story?
Like, what are they trying to document?
What is this important knowledge that they want to share?
And how screwed up would that get over the generations and generations of talking about it?
But what ultimate truth is in there?
Like, I'm absolutely fascinated by the story of Jesus Christ.
Because if you wanted to come up with a way that people would live that would absolutely be far more beneficial than just going on natural instincts and tribal behavior, and you would follow Jesus' teachings.
Like, I can't find a flaw in the way he tells you to live life.
There's a lot of religions that involve, you know, torturing non-believers and raping infidels and being able to do terrible things to the people that don't believe your religion.
There's none of that in Christianity.
It's all forgiveness.
It's all treating your brother and your neighbor as if they're you.
And I do believe that if you follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, you will live a better life.
I really do believe that.
And one of the things I talk about is like the people that I go to church with are the most fucking polite people I've ever met in my life.
They're so kind and so nice.
And everybody lets you out of the parking lot.
Everybody's like, Hugo, Hugo.
It's like the one, like it works.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, if people are trying to find an idea, does that mean I believe people came back from the dead?
Does that mean I believe Moses part of the Red Sea?
Not really.
No, it seems like that's most likely a story where people are telling it generation after generation after generation, but there was probably something happening.
There's probably some truth to it.
Then you take into account some of the stories from the Old Testament, like the book of Ezekiel, which I'm absolutely fascinated by.
Book of Ezekiel and his account of the wheel within a wheel and the fire flashing forth continually and in the midst of the fire as it were gleaming metal.
Like, what the hell is that?
Like, what is that?
Like, what are these stories?
And in the midst of this gleaming metal, there's the likeness of four living creatures.
Like, okay, they darted to and fro like the appearance of a flash of lightning.
Okay, what is that?
Like, what are they, what were they trying to say?
And what was the original experience that people documented that was so important?
The Christian story is so beautiful and so important.
You know, Rene Girard's view of Christianity as really stopping the cycle of scapegoating.
You know, scapegoating where, and I'm seeing it right now as part of the reason we've been pushing back against the moral panic on Epstein, is that you scapegoat the thing.
You know, traditionally it literally was a goat, but you scapegoat the person or whatever.
Yeah, but I mean, so Christianity puts an end to that.
It says, stop scapegoating.
I mean, they scapegoated Jesus, really.
I mean, you kind of go, you scapegoat.
The purpose of the scapegoating was for the community to unite the community and scapegoat to put all of its sins on one thing and then kill it or get rid of it.
And that was the way the community would restore unity.
Christianity said, no, we're not going to do it that way.
That's immoral.
And so, you know, he with the, you know, without sin should be the first to cast a stone.
Jesus wasn't saying that prostitution was good or anything.
He was saying that we should not be scapegoating.
You know, you've got sins too.
So don't scapegoat this person.
That's a really radical moment in human history.
And it really is what allowed humans to spread.
It creates a universal.
I mean, Christianity is the first universal.
It's really universal religion.
Maybe it's not the only, but it's a universal religion.
It says everybody is a child of God and it's evangelical and it wants other people to become Christian.
That's very, that's different from other.
Other religions where we're like, this is my God.
I've got my own God here and we're the best and you suck.
And it's not to say that Christians, you know, obviously there was fighting the Muslims and there's some interesting revisionism there, but it's a beautiful religion.
And if anything, if he's not the Son of God, if this was an actual historical figure, what an insanely wise human being who didn't have these thoughts that are inherent to all of us of vengeance and lust and greed.
And Tucker thinks that this whole UFO thing is somehow connected to the spiritual realm and that we're – Well, because we've been told for so long that there is no spiritual realm.
But the problem with the people that tell you that are all mentally ill.
They're all very unhappy.
Like, atheists, like secular, like hardcore atheists are some of the most unhappy, depressed people I know.
I don't see like incredibly happy, unless they do a lot of mushrooms.
And those people tend to not be atheists anymore.
That's the one weird thing.
People that have had like intense breakthrough psychedelic experiences, one of the first things they go, maybe there is a God.
Like maybe I don't know what I'm talking about.
Because if I just experienced that and that's a real thing that you could have while alive on earth where you are confronted with divine wisdom and love in some weird, strange form.
You know, when there's a lot of people that believe that that's the source of a lot of religious experiences.
And instead of alienating and making those things illegal, we should study them and make them a part of the religious experience because it's probably what they were originally.
And so now that people are having spiritual experiences with UFOs, it's wonderful.
And they should talk about them and kindle them.
I think the thing about psychedelics that's so interesting is that, at least my experience with them, was that you become, you don't become so attached to your ideas and your beliefs.
And so, which is a big problem in our society, is people that get too attached to their egos get attached to their beliefs as opposed to like, oh, I thought that.
I mean, I've made my whole career out of being wrong about things and then correcting them.
But I think it's hard because you do, it's really great quality.
It's thank you.
It's a very, but it's still, I hate it.
I hate being wrong.
It's totally natural to hate it.
But I do think like having a practice that makes you go, you are not your beliefs.
There's something there.
You have an existence separate from the things that you wrote on your blog or you wrote on X, and just don't be so attached to them.
And that it's, it's, it's actually, there's something really quite, there's an awful part of when you feel like you got something wrong.
But then there's another part where you're like, oh, it feels good to get it right.
And you feel clean.
And that's like, that's what, that's what we should be going for.
But it does require, for me, being humble about my limitations before some higher power is really important place to begin.
Because if you think there's no higher power or that the other one is like souls, we don't talk about souls enough.
A new friend of mine at the university was talking about how important it is to really care for your soul and to care about other people's souls.
That's one of the things that Christianity is so good at: that you have something divine inside of you connected to something divine outside of you and that your behaviors affect its treatment.
And when you tell people that you're just, you know, a meat suit and you're just worm food and your life doesn't matter and that it's all just random and pointless, that's a terrible story.
It makes people feel terrible.
But when you kind of go, no, you have, there was one of the most beautiful, I loved all the Charlie Kirk videos that went out after his death because there were so many ones where he had these beautiful moments.
But he's talking to these women that are doing the OnlyFans.
Did you see that one?
And they're describing, they're trying to shock him and saying just really kind of crude things about their sexuality and how like the sex they have, it doesn't matter to them.
And he was like, I just don't believe that.
I think you have a soul.
I think God has a purpose for you.
What a much lovelier way to engage somebody.
And it wasn't a, he didn't feel like he was morally condemning them.
And so for me, Christianity brings, if that is the part of Christianity that I think is so special.
But it is hard.
I mean, one of the things that this anthropologist that I'm really into is talking about, she says, it's the more the God, the more different the God is from humans, the harder it is to believe in them.
And so people like Christians in particular, she would talk about their, even evangelical ones, are always complaining about not believing enough and not having enough faith.
Because it is so hard, because you do have the Holocaust problem, the problem of evil.
Why, if the God is all powerful and all good, is he allowing the Holocaust?
And part of the answer for Christians has been, well, because he wants us to exercise free will and to be in touch with our better sides and to realize our potential as moral humans and moral souls.
I'm fascinated by it because when I go to church and I listen to them talk about various passages in the Bible, my mindset is always like, what was the real experience?
Like, what are we missing out of these tales?
What are we missing out of these recounting of these experiences?
What happened?
I don't think it was nothing.
I really don't.
Do you think there's something real to it?
And again, it works.
That's the main one for me.
It's like, you want to live a better life?
Like, if you live as a Christian, you'll have a better life.
You'll have a more love-filled, more wonderful life.
That's real.
And this idea that, oh, it's fairy tales.
Is it if it's a method for life that gives you a more rich and loving and peaceful life, isn't that better for everybody?
Isn't that a real thing?
That's a real thing.
There's no way you can know whether or not any of the stories in the Bible happened exactly as described.
We can't know.
So you have to have this leap of faith.
You know, and it gets weird.
Like, Jesus comes back on a white horse.
Like, hey, slow down.
You know, like Revelations.
Book of Revelations is weird.
But it's like, what's really weird is some of these people that think that what's going on in Iran is to light the fire to bring, to have Jesus return, to light the signal fire.
Like, did you hear those recountings by these non-commissioned officers that went into these briefings, combat briefings?
So then I did a – I did – I had read this article about code words in the Epstein files and I did the shrimps.
And then I had some stuff about pizza and grape juice in there, about grape soda.
And my co-author, Alex, was like, dude, you can't go.
If you can't go full Pizzagate, you got to like, so we kept it out.
And then the Times mentioned the pizza thing.
So I wrote some on X about it, but I ended up taking it down because I was like, I don't really know.
This one, I mean, what weirded me about the pizza one was where his urologist was like, take your erection dysfunction pills, and then we'll go out and get pizza and grape soda.
And I was like, that is creepy, you know, as hell.
I don't want to believe that these people, these multi-millionaires and billionaires that go to this island and engage in all this crazy shit aren't doing something like child sacrifice or cannibalism.
Well, let's start with the thing that I think a lot of us thought it was, which is that it was an intelligence community sex blackmail operation.
That's what made it for me a story.
I mean, a creepy guy doing creepy things.
There's just, that's, we call that a dog bites man story.
You know, what makes it a man-bites dog story is like, is that you kind of go, wow, it's like Mossad and CIA running a honeypot.
I mean, that's the premise of Whitley Webb's two-volume book, One Nation Under Blackmail.
But when you look at it, like, we don't see that.
We see one case where Epstein emails himself something that sounds like it's in the voice of the Bill Gates science advisor, Boris Karsich, I believe is the name.
And in it, they talk about, oh, you know, it's the famous email where he says, oh, you know, I got STDs.
It says you got STDs from Russian hookers or from Russian women, and then you tried to slip antibiotics, or you wanted me to slip antibiotics in Melinda's drink.
And Melinda, like, asked her about it.
It was awful.
It doesn't like, that's not, it's weird what that is.
Just from the email, we know that there at least implies that he's got dirt on people and that he is exercising, is doing something with this dirt that he has on Epstein or on Bill Gates, rather.
Because we just have emails between him and other people.
Inside those emails, we find a lot of creepy shit.
We find that one description where he was talking to this woman where she said, I'm doing and investigating a story about an island where they bring children for sex.
And he goes, she almost had a heart attack when I told her that person is me.
I just think what we see from the files, and I think Mike Bence has sort of pointed out the ways in which Epstein might have been a contractor or a financier or somebody hiding money for the intelligence community.
Beyond that, I don't see any evidence that he was doing much for the intelligence community, if at all.
So, first of all, I think the picture is of a guy that is fully in charge of his life.
And he's doing, he's like, he is like amazing at getting people to love him and care about him.
People call him their best friend.
In Florida, clearly he was abusing girls and was busted for that.
I think he was doing that because he's a pervert.
I don't think I didn't see, I don't see blackmail coming out of that.
And then you get to later, and you've got, okay, you've got the Bill Gates thing, which doesn't even appear to be from Epstein.
It appears to be for Boris.
And remember, Boris, the science advisor, wanted Gates to pay for a bigger apartment for him in New York.
It appeared to be part of him threatening Gates to get something that Boris wanted.
So maybe Epstein was advising him on it.
But I mean, to have a the other thing I'm struck by these emails, Joe, is that there are so many different attorneys, people of the FBI, people in the Eastern District, the Southern District, the Florida Southern District.
Well, it depends on who are the powerful people that are implicated and what kind of influence they have over what gets released and what doesn't get released.
Clearly, names were redacted that are powerful people that are not victims.
So that shows you right there that there's some influence.
Yeah, I mean, the redactions, I mean, they were making them.
I mean, it was like powerful people's names.
Yeah, but I mean, I mean, look at, like, we're in the midst, I mean, literally the people that are being canceled for this, like Peter Attia, these people are like victims of a, we're in the middle of a complete, you know, you know, moral panic.
I mean, we're now, it's like Me Too version two.
I mean, people are having to leave boards.
I mean, look, these are people I don't like.
I'll just be honest.
Like, if part of me hesitated because I don't like Larry Summers.
I don't like Bill Gates.
I don't care about Sarah Ferguson.
You know, I didn't say anything.
Then they came for Peter Attia.
You know, it's a little bit like Peter Attia, like, he didn't do anything wrong.
He just lost his job with CBS.
And, you know, he's sort of now there under this cloud.
And people go, oh, but he was in the hospital and his wife was, or he was with Epstein.
His wife was in the hospital.
We don't, like, what are we doing here?
Like, we're getting involved in Peter Attia's personal life.
And so, but he has to get fired for that.
I mean, it's gone way too far.
Sarah Ferguson had to step down, even though she said terror.
I mean, these people, I don't like them.
Like, these are not people I agree with or think their behavior is, but I don't see.
I think like, you know, they were, I mean, I'm glad the files were released.
There was definitely problems with the redactions.
There was also a case where the members of Congress were trying to get stuff redacted.
Names got redacted of people that, like, I know in one case, there were people that were getting licenses for guns that had nothing to do with Epstein on a list.
In another case, other people's names were revealed who were not guilty of anything.
So that's why you protect those people.
I think you go, everybody, the logic right now is that anybody who had any interaction with Epstein had to have known of all the abuse he was doing and are somehow responsible for it.
And, you know, Mike, I mean, when Mike Benz was in here, and Mike has done a deep dive, this, he's sort of like, look, at best, you get Epstein tied up with intelligence with the Iran-Contra stuff.
But he wasn't, I mean, there's two things to see here.
With his relationship to the intelligence community, he was at best a contractor financier, which means he's not an important player in deciding covert clandestine operations.
Or maybe it did work and it's problematic that it does work because it kills all these people that have all this other money in various energy modalities.
I just, I mean, I go, fusion is like a whole, I mean, the idea that we have a secret, that we've secretly tapped cold fusion and are hiding it for some reason.
Well, Larry Summers was, you know, he had to step down because he made those remarks about women as president, and then he just had to step down as professor.
And I say this, look, I say this genuinely, as someone that is not a Larry Summers fan, I don't think, I think it's ugly what he did.
It's terrible.
He was trying to get advice from Larry Summers about how to bet a Chinese economist, and they were gross in their emails, and it's terrible.
But I don't think that you lose a job at Harvard over that.
I don't think that Peter Tia should lose his job at CBS over that.
He took a lot of credit for Santa Fe Institute, which was a lot of other people.
I mean, he's really, he's really interesting and smart.
Like, he gave a thing to Bannon, talking to Bannon about it.
That was really interesting.
But he was also, Steve Pinker talked about him as a kibitzer, like a kind of a bullshitter.
And he was like, we also saw in the files, I think it really overlooked.
We saw how he made his money.
Like, he needed to get a deal with the Department of Justice for his client, Ariana de Rothschild.
He hires Catherine Rumler, who was Obama's White House chief counsel, and she goes and makes a deal at the Department of Justice: $45 million fine for the Rothschilds, $10 million for Catherine Rummler, $25 million for Jeffrey Epstein.
Everyone's like, where did his money come from?
Doing deals like that.
Like, you realize, I mean, one of the things, Succession actually had a little subplot about it.
Like, there's a few people in the world that do these crazy, high-level deals, like often like mergers and acquisitions, that have these obscene fees because they're taking some tiny percentage.
Epstein was operating.
I think the thing we didn't realize is that when you read the files, is the levels at which Epstein was operating.
I mean, his social and emotional intelligence is just off the charts, which is often rare among somebody that's that good analytically, someone that really understands like investments in the economy to be so.
I mean, he was a master manipulator.
So I don't think it's fair to say to people, you had an association with him after he was convicted of this crime.
Rich guys, look, we have a totally separate system of justice for rich people.
I think we've known that for a really long time.
It's terrible.
I condemn it.
We should find solutions to it.
That's what Epstein used to get out of it.
I don't see any evidence that intelligence helped him.
You know, we got other problems.
The victims, Virginia Jaffree.
She claimed that she had sex with Dershowitz.
She then goes, oh, I was wrong about that.
I mean, there's a lot of those victim testimonials that are untrustworthy.
So you get yourself in a situation where you start to put like, oh, some of them are probably prostitutes.
And that's the other one: I did some reporting where we helped to, we found a 14-year-old girl who was being trafficked on the streets.
She had turned 15 in the process of us reporting on it.
You know, we're recovering these PIs.
They get the police involved.
The police go get her.
She's orphaned.
She goes back and lives with her aunt.
She's back on the street, voluntarily back on the street.
Nobody wants to talk about it.
It's like you go rescue people and they're in that world.
So these situations are much more complex.
I think the final thing on Epstein that kind of made me question is that I, like a lot of other people, had assumed that someone murdered him.
But you start looking at the evidence for that.
Look, maybe there more will come out.
And even this last round, last few days, there's some new things that people point to, but they actually are not actually evidence of it.
They said, you know, Epstein's brother's attorney or Epstein's brother's examiner said that he broke his hyoid bone, and the hyoid bone is not usually broken in hangings, only in strangulations.
Actually, it is broken in hangings, particularly for older people.
Because if you do have a guard, and all of a sudden this guard acquires several payments, she made several deposits.
One of them was $5,000 just 10 days before he died.
And then the cameras are cut, okay?
And then they mysteriously don't pay attention to the cell of one of the most important defendants of any case, any gigantic public case involving enormously famous public figures.
Why would you put a guy who's one of the most high-profile defendants in any case ever in a cell with a hired killer who's a giant gorilla, like this huge fucking jacked Italian guy?
I don't know if there's, I don't, I've never seen him say it, but I do know that he said that guy tried to kill him, and they found him unresponsive 18 days before.
Yeah, I knew that story, but I mean, he didn't have a cellmate at the night of his death, right?
That was one of the mistakes they made is that because he was on Supposed Me on Suicide Watch, he was supposed to have a cellmate, didn't have a cellmate.
And wouldn't you imagine if you're dealing with multiple billionaires that may be compromised by the evidence that this guy's going to relay in a trial, that that would be one of the times that they would want to exert that kind of influence?
It's not much of a stretch that that guy killed him either if he's telling the truth that there was a report 18 days before that that guy tried to kill him.
And the change for me is going from really looking like a homicide to really not knowing because there's some evidence that I had not considered before that.
Epstein denied suicidality and stated, I have no interest in killing myself and that it would be crazy to take his life, although he was depressed and unhappy about his current legal situation.
He was told he will remain on psychological observation in the near term.
Yes, but you're dismissing these major factors of him being a cell with a contract killer, him saying 18 days before the guy tried to kill him, then finding him unresponsive, that someone tried to strangle him 18 days before.
I certainly can, but at a certain point in time, when enough circumstantial evidence, it's fucking weird, like the cameras being down, the guards being asleep.
Did you find the email where he's talking about the lady on the island where she's saying that we brought children to an o that someone brought children to an island?
you guys have moved around so if you kind of go so for me if i go if i go we don't know if it was a homicide or suicide um The intelligence community work was, appears to be of a long time ago, and he was a contractor.
We don't have any other evidence of a sex blackmail operation other than that email.
Now, there is one other thing that I thought was one for the theory that he's a blackmailer is that he put he's like we have emails of him putting cameras in Kleenex boxes hidden cameras in Kleenex boxes with motion detectors was that in order to engage in a blackmail operation or was he just a pervert to blackmail people Okay,
I don't know about you, but if I was sending an email and I was talking about someone researching someone who's sending children to an island for sex, I would also include that I let her know that that was bullshit.
Well, she ends up coming in and meeting with them, right?
You've seen the follow-up to this?
No.
So she ends up coming to meeting with her, and I don't know if he gives her money or something or funds her, but it's like, yeah, I mean, the only thing is that, like, without justifying, I mean, I think that after 2008, there's not, I don't think there's any evidence, and I could be wrong, there's not a lot of evidence that anybody under age came to, you know, that Epstein, you know, abused anybody under 18.
And I'm not defending abusing women over 18, but that did seem like a pretty big change.
Well, he also doesn't need blackmail in order to be able to get people to do things and influence them.
And if you have video of people fucking people and doing things they're not supposed to be doing and you're giving them drugs and he got them on this island for these wild parties, they're more inclined to do things that would do stuff for you.
Visitors describe a bathroom reminiscent of James Bond movies, hidden beneath a stairway, lined with lead to provide shelter from attack and supplied with closed-circuit television screens and a telephone, both concealed in a cabinet behind the sink, wrote the Times.
The townhouse is now reportedly owned by Wexner's even more mysterious protege, Jeffrey Epstein.
So, but Epstein, I mean, in other words, if you use it, like if you actually like use your blackmail, I think it's very hard then to maintain your reputation as somebody.
Now, maybe it was sort of hovering, never articulated.
He was attracting people.
I mean, what's so striking about it is he's attracting people to him.
He's got all this Bonhami.
Oh, come hang out with Chomsky and Ehud Barak and all these people.
It's like a really good time.
You know, I think then being like, oh, I have blackmail material on you and you need to do it.
I mean, he's getting people to do what he wants them to do for money, you know, for feeling like good vibes, being in on some Israeli peace talks.
I don't then see him going around.
And maybe, look, again, like, I totally confess.
Maybe I just haven't seen the evidence then that he's going around being like, oh, I have blackmail material on you.
I mean, Mike also points out that he was leased this incredible mansion in New York by the State Department, but then the State Department like sued him.
I mean, my interpretation, one interpretation of it is that, yeah, he's freely admitting on an email that he's trafficking children.
I find that difficult to believe.
That you would put that.
I mean, if you're going to say that, well, he doesn't put the blackmail stuff in email, but he's going to put in an email that he's bringing children to the island.