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Sept. 26, 2024 - On Brand

02:20:53

OB #77 - Vivek Ramaswamy, Soros-Funded Big Pharma Globalist

Vivek returned for the umpteenth time to Russell's show and so the time has finally come to cover what the smooth-talking alt-right conspiracy peddler has to say for himself. Support us on Patreon! Buy a handmade magnet!

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	This is propaganda live.
	I only suggest how to take him out of the boat.
	Extraordinary cultural moment.
	Already iconic.
	Already iconic.
	We love you.
	You're welcome here.
	Where did this guy come from?
	It looks like he's been doing it for ages.
	He's very confident.
	Plainly, and this is a matter now of fact and record, I'm right wing.
	I feel that Christ may have had a better vision.
	Is this misinformation or is Vivek Ramaswamy in the lavatory?
	That's sort of like a poem.
	Is this Eminem?
	Man, if we didn't come together in that stream, I'm assuming it was just the Pete.
	Now, these are the kind of conversations I think that the legacy media can no longer compete with.
	Win, win, win, win, win, win, win.
	This is On Brand, a podcast where we discuss the ideas and antics of one Russell Brand.
	I'm Al Worth and each week I go through an episode of Brand Show with my co-host Lauren B. That's me, I'm Lauren B. And I am the host that has no idea what we're getting into today, but it's usually bad.
	It's almost invariably bad, which is why we do the good thing before the bad thing.
	And Lauren, what is your good thing before the bad thing this week?
	Wedding!
	It's a wedding!
	I got to go to a wedding back home in St.
	Louis this weekend.
	My friends Josh and Jenny got married.
	And we got to see their new little fucking house.
	Actually, we got to see a couple of our new cute little friends' fucking houses.
	We actually got to see people.
	Because usually when we're doing events and stuff, it's like maybe ships passing in the night kind of a thing.
	The most gorgeous wedding.
	It was absolutely stunningly beautiful, but Josh is a fancy lad, so that makes perfect sense.
	I got to see more people than I thought I would.
	And it was great.
	It was really, really fun.
	And yeah, no notes.
	10 out of 10.
	Nice!
	That sounds delightful.
	I love a wedding.
	Killer.
	And I did not... We were both alive the next day, as best we could be.
	That's not usually me after a wedding.
	I'm usually in trouble.
	Well, I mean, we were, I think that it was, we were, everyone was like, we're just right on the line of responsible.
	There was no open bar, no liquor.
	So.
	Okay.
	Really kind of saved us.
	That's yeah.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	That's a move.
	It really worked out.
	And also a lot of us are like former industry people.
	So like we weren't mad.
	We were like, Oh, that's okay.
	We're old now.
	I don't need.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I feel like in this country that would still go badly, but still, you know, it's a sensible decision.
	Where there's a will, there's a way.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And over here there is a forever will.
	That's the British way.
	I tried to responsibly disregard that stereotype well before this podcast ever started, and y'all have schooled me otherwise.
	Yeah, no, it's a completely accurate stereotype.
	Insistent, even!
	Every livestream, too, I'm reminded!
	It's very fun.
	Yes, yes, there is significant pride taken in that fact, for some reason.
	Caution, yeah.
	Warnings, big warnings.
	Yeah, so what's your good thing?
	My good thing, and forgive me everyone for my voice being a little bit scratchy by the way, I've just got, you know, something trying to attack me, so bear with.
	My good thing this week is, uh, so I've mentioned before, um, that, uh, that, uh, Jeff Porcaro of Toto is one of my favorite drummers, right?
	I mentioned this on the live stream.
	Um, when someone was asking about the intro theme, like the actual snare that he used on Rosanna is what we've got on that intro.
	Um, right there, the actual literal snare drum.
	Um, and I, I like to occasionally- Wait, his drum?
	The literal drum?
	Yeah, the literal one.
	Yeah.
	Like you got that one.
	How'd you get that one?
	So there's a company called Toontrack who have a thing called Superior Drummer.
	And what they do is they will like sample kind of old kits and that kind of stuff from like the 20s or whatever.
	And what they did was they took the entire kit that Jeff Porcaro used for Rosanna, including that specific snare that they borrowed from wherever it was at the time, and recorded it every which way possible.
	So it's all, like, incredibly well sampled.
	I thought you were, like, digging through Toto's garbage, like a creep, and thieving, which I'm not gonna come for you.
	And frankly, that's the story that I wanted to hear.
	It was like, well, I dressed head to toe, I had my little balaclava, and I camped out for a couple days, and then I finally struck while the iron was hot.
	If there was a possibility, I would consider it.
	I would consider it, because that snare is magic.
	But no, as it happens... Okay, alright, I get it.
	Okay, I understand now.
	As it happens, yeah, Toontrack, they make really cool stuff that samples things in incredible detail, and so that's what we've got on the opening theme.
	Anyway, Anyway, he was also an incredibly prolific session drummer during the 80s.
	So you know, he obviously had all the Toto stuff, but he would work with like everyone from Hall & Oates to the Bee Gees.
	He did all of the drums on Michael Jackson's Thriller, like that album.
	That's all Jeff Porcaro.
	So like, if you've heard music from the 80s, you've probably heard Jeff Porcaro's drumming.
	And it was incredible.
	And I was, you know, when the mood strikes I like to occasionally kind of find like deep cuts of his playing just to kind of, just because I like his style.
	And I was looking through like the list of his works and I was scrolling down and I came upon a credit on Pink Floyd, The Wall, which is one of my favorite albums.
	And I was like, How did I never know that Jeff Porcaro was on this album?
	What the hell?
	And so I looked into it and it turns out they brought him in for the track Mother, which is the one that was later used as a meme with Donald Trump.
	I mean, that's a crossover I would listen to.
	But the one that was later memed with Donald Trump with, mother should I build a wall?
	Right, that one.
	Terrific track, but I didn't realize that Nick Mason, the actual drummer of Pink Floyd, always kind of struggled with like changes of time signature, especially like just getting them down and kind of learning them quickly, which in the studio you need to do.
	He was he was struggling with mother because it goes from like five to six to eight to you know um and uh and they were like right well let's let's get in Jeff Porcaro because he does weird time signature shit all the time with Toto because they're you know their back catalog is very prog And so yeah, turns out Jeff Porcaro, one of my favorite drummers, is also on one of my favorite albums.
	And so I've kind of been re-listening.
	That isn't just on a list?
	That's not just like on his, there's not like an IMDB moment where he just has all his credits in one place?
	Oh no, he does!
	He's got, I think, almost all of them listed, but I had never spotted it.
	I had never noticed that he was on that album.
	And now that I listen back to the track, I'm like, oh yeah, no, this doesn't sound like Nick Mason's playing.
	Because there are just little details and stuff that Jeff Porcaro does that Nick Mason wouldn't.
	And I'm like, ha!
	Cool!
	That's awesome.
	So yeah, learning something, a cool piece of music trivia, that's my good thing this week.
	That's brought me no small amount of joy.
	I mean, all that Prague, I'd credit to maybe, you know, having a lot of fun in the 60s and 70s might put some... Turn your brain into Swiss cheese, and sometimes time signatures are tough.
	I'm not mad.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Ask for help.
	That's a lesson.
	Ask for help, friends.
	Yeah, yeah, exactly.
	It's about the village.
	Get Jeff Porcaro in, though he was famously on a lot of drugs all the time.
	Oh, sure, sure, sure.
	Different strokes.
	We all have our strengths, truly.
	We do.
	And sometimes, drugs does not even remotely impinge on those gifts, and that's amazing.
	Certainly didn't with Jeff Porcaro, hot damn.
	Good lord.
	Lucky duck.
	Yes, yes indeed.
	All right, we've got a show to get to, but first let's thank a new patron.
	So, the mysterious graduate assistant, you are now an awakening wonder.
	You are indeed an awakening wonder.
	I'm assuming that is further down on the line from the Mysterious Professor.
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	And this week, I'll let a little look into the Grenfell Tower Block Fire of 2017.
	It was the UK's deadliest structural fire since the Blitz in World War II, and it was entirely preventable, as the final part of the public inquiry has very recently shown.
	And not only that, there are very good odds it could happen again.
	Joy of joys.
	Yeah, that was, that was a tough one.
	That was a tough one.
	But really, really interesting.
	And I think, I think we learned, we learned things.
	Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, I think that the thing to dig into is like the...
	Unfortunately, you kind of got to put the feelings on top of like the dry kind of code, you know, like building code and inspection stuff to make it matter to people.
	Because it is kind of very technical when you look at the issues.
	But then the technical parts don't think about the human cost.
	So if we can put those two together, that's what makes like a society function.
	So yes, exactly.
	Exactly.
	So anyway, head to patreon.com slash ombrand to check that out and the many, many hours of content that we have up there.
	And please note that while you can easily listen to our audio version anywhere, you can find podcasts, you can also watch us on YouTube, or if you listen to the Spotify app, the video will come up there too.
	And right before we get into this week's show, Lauren has a small correction corner for us.
	I do have a correction corner.
	So whenever you, and I mean, obviously there was like a lot last week.
	I mean, there usually is, but there was extra moving parts last week, but like the Morgan Freeman quote thing.
	It's always interesting to see what they like what they being like the conservative kind of like punditry, like the Charlie Kirk of it all like that kind of person, or Ben Shapiro, actually, because he you were absolutely, I mean, as far as I could tell, you're absolutely right that he was sort of like, integral and moving that Very mischaracterized quote around and it started in like 2015.
	I was like, that doesn't sound right to me.
	Like it just didn't sit well in my spirit.
	And I didn't, you know, and I was like, I was like, I can't put my finger on this.
	And like, It would make sense that what you were looking for, like, a lot of the search results in the top were all still, like, seemingly, they seemed neutral, but they fucking super duper weren't.
	Like, even these, like, little, you know, not the epic times, but...
	Or like the Washington Times, there's renamed publications that are named close to a popular publication, but they're not kind of covert.
	And that was around 2015, somebody got a hold of that clip from the Mike Wallace interview.
	And I also think what got... I do want to point kind of why I'm like, Stop the presses.
	The point that got lost, I think, when we were talking about it, first and foremost, All of these dudes took one out-of-context quote from one black actor.
	The thing that's wrong to do is to make one black actor speak for all black people.
	That's already racist.
	Yeah, that's already fucked up.
	Already racist.
	And I think that these points kind of got It was like squishy and amorphous and I just wanted to give form to these points right and kind of clarify because it just was a it was weird and I think.
	And that's why when I was asking, I was like, wait a second, in 2005?
	You're like, yeah, 2005.
	I'm really glad I asked, because I could find the actual Mike Wallace interview from 60 Minutes with Morgan Freeman.
	Because if I just looked it up without singling out the date, I would've gotten all this 2015 stuff.
	And oh, the mischaracterization is gross.
	And it's universal, kind of like white supremacist dog whistle undertone.
	And also I just liked some of the quotes.
	I actually found the interview and he said some really cool stuff that I like and would have, I don't know, I feel like it fits in in several of our episodes.
	One being when asked about the Confederate flag thing, right?
	And he said, so Morgan Freeman said in the interview, That flag has always represented, quote, that flag has always represented, number one, treason, and number two, a separation of white people from Jews, end words, and homosexuals.
	And you can't change that.
	You can't tell me I'm never going to be able to look at that flag and think, ah, it's my heritage, my, you know, never.
	Like, so that's kind of, he was like, absolutely not.
	He was like, this is very clear.
	Messaging very clear.
	Let's be clear.
	And let's see.
	This one actually, the Black History Month And if you hear his tone when he's talking, it's just really interesting.
	Like he says he finds Black History Month ridiculous, right?
	That's a lot of the headlines that you get from 2015.
	Right, yeah.
	And the first thing he said is like, you're going to relegate my history to a month?
	I don't, I mean, he's saying, he's making a point.
	He's like, I don't want a Black History Month.
	Black history is American history.
	That's what he said.
	And so like, He thinks it's ridiculous.
	I was sniffing around, and we didn't have enough information really to work with in the episode, but I just didn't sit right.
	And I think that that makes way more sense as far as how he was... I mean, it's also really interesting to see the 2015 reclassification of using this one token quote from the one token... I mean...
	The man drove Miss Daisy.
	He's been in the conversation for a long time, you know?
	This is a very important kind of... He doesn't paint himself in any way as a civil rights figure.
	That's not his brand.
	But, I mean, there's been a lot of conversation that he's been the middle of for... Anyway, I don't know.
	I think there's a degree of kind of like, Keeping that in mind, and I actually, I looked into, anyway, oh my god, I'm getting ahead of myself.
	So the, um, kind of the big offending quote of like, stop talking about it.
	Here's the whole quote, and I'll try to recreate, listen, I, I'm never gonna get cast as Black God in a film, please do not hold me to that.
	To the gravitas of what he would say.
	He does say, stop talking about it.
	Here's the thing.
	He's interviewing and making a point, and I do this, oh, every week.
	I don't say enough, and then I don't make sense.
	So I'm not coming for anyone to say maybe the slightly wrong worded thing to be making this point.
	Stop talking about it.
	And I think what I was kind of sniffing around for, I feel, comes through in the whole quote.
	So he says, I'm going to stop calling you a white man.
	Also, picture Morgan Freeman being a little sassy in an excellent way.
	I'm going to stop calling you a white man, Freeman says to Wallace.
	And I'm going to ask you to stop calling me a black man.
	I know you as Mike Wallace.
	You know me as Morgan Freeman.
	You wouldn't say, Well, I know this white guy named Mike Wallace.
	You know what I'm saying?
	So, like, white guy is the default.
	Saying black guy is what makes an exception.
	And specifically that, like, rubbed me the wrong way to hear it when we were recording because...
	I've been in a situation where, professionally, I'm like, you walk in the door, I'm the only femme-presenting individual in the room, and, oh, I want to get tattooed by a girl.
	And I was like, well, when you want to get tattooed by Lauren, you can call me.
	How about that?
	If you want to get tattooed by a girl, talk to Josh.
	That's literally the service I know that you want that you're going to get.
	Thank you for telling me.
	I'm going to help.
	Like that's because like that kind of, um, and I looked into a little bit, like, He was born in Memphis in 1937, because later in the same interview they talk about this and it just was illuminating, because he's not a civil rights figure in the classic kind of sense that we would think of, like his short bio.
	But he was born in Memphis and raised in Mississippi.
	The Mississippi of that famous film, Mississippi, where everybody got along great.
	Oh no, it was Mississippi burning.
	And I try to look up the amount of lynchings from the area where he's from.
	And that's a sad amount of lynchings.
	It's a very intense place to live and grow up.
	And that's 100% where that person is from.
	And I have visited Clarksdale, Mississippi, because it's also where the most famous, because obviously all these things are disputed because it's apocryphal, but the famous Robert Johnson Crossroads is.
	Delta Blues is kind of Centered in Clarksdale, Mississippi.
	And I'm also, you know, like the history nerd that will go to the dingy little museums.
	And there's like a whole lot of horror that he obviously, like very obviously grew up around.
	And what I didn't realize, because later in the same interview, he had Him and a business partner had been operating this club that we went to called Ground Zero at a loss, and he was already in it for like five years in 2005 in the interview.
	Yeah, it's this tiny little club, but basically it's like...
	Literally, the place, kind of sometimes the only business of a handful that is open in Clarksdale, Mississippi, operating at a loss because he still has, I think they have a family home.
	Him and his wife, from what I saw in the interview, you can't really check up on someone's living situation, but I'd imagine it's the same because the club is still open.
	I can't imagine that they have been in the black.
	I've been there I've seen it sometimes it's happened because they have festivals but keeping it open like most nights of the of the week he's like.
	Contributing back to that exact place and to that area and that is something that like you don't really hear about much like your total excursion.
	You don't always, it's not the most popular thing that they talk about, but there are musicians and there are actors and like, you know, some famous people that are pumping money into that area and keeping it alive.
	And so, I don't know, especially like the kind of like the rich guy stuff was like unfair, I felt, but not unfair if you read the characterizations that were like, readily available and especially like the quotes being taken out of context.
	And I just it didn't sit right with me because I'm like, I don't think that like Morgan Freeman is going to be that like detached dude.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And he's the numbers bear out.
	He is absolutely not.
	So, yeah, no, I don't think any Yeah, no, I don't think anyone who is operating in good faith could ever suggest that Morgan Freeman believes racism has been fixed and that no one should ever discuss it, you know?
	I don't think anyone who's operating in good faith would make that argument.
	But it's good to have some clarity, you know?
	Yeah, well in 2005 I think that, and it's also why I asked, well there was like a distinct shift when Republican conservatives blah blah blah kind of like got real bold about co-opting MLK quotes.
	Like they really like leaned into it in a more like it's it's it really like kind of ramped up and including that like don't judge me on my skin of the content of my character kind of quote like I bet that's how Morgan Freeman kind of meant it originally and so anyway I I just wanted to clarify that because um And also, oh my god, go visit Clarksdale if you can.
	It's a spectacular little town and has a lot of history.
	And it's really important to learn because he's right.
	Black history is American history.
	Absolutely.
	End of thought.
	Way more than we'll even ever know.
	Because a lot of those ideas and the fruits of their labor were stolen.
	Yep.
	Centuries.
	Yeah, there's there's a lot of repair to be done.
	So anyway, I just wanted to take my little take my little moment and kind of like illuminate because that just didn't it didn't sit right and I and it's it that's I've I've reset it.
	That's good.
	Yeah, it's it's yeah, it's it's nice to have the full picture.
	I think.
	All right.
	Yeah, cool.
	Okay, so Back to this week.
	It was a busy one for Russell.
	He interviewed Michael Schellenberger and Jimmy Dore, neither of which we'll be looking at today because both of them were stunningly boring.
	We'll be taking a look at an entirely different guest.
	But first, I did want to start the show off a little bit differently with a video Russell put out that amused me.
	He put this video out on both his locals channel and his socials.
	So let's take a look.
	I don't know about you, but sometimes I feel tainted and I feel dirty.
	My teacher Jaijan told me that I am valuable to God and God will always value me and he used this technique to demonstrate it.
	What is this worth?
	Well, with inflation, it could be worth nothing at all, but it's also worth £20.
	That's what this is worth.
	If I take it, throw on the floor, stamp on it, grind it into the filth, make it dirty, what's it worth?
	It's still worth £20.
	If I screw it up, scrunch it up, put it through hell, slander it, smear it, annihilate it, what's it worth?
	It's still worth £20.
	Oh, actually I've damaged it quite badly.
	But I still feel that ultimately the value of this note is £20.
	I'm so sorry, Your Majesty.
	I'm still not over the loss of her.
	In God's eyes, our value remains the same.
	The Lord loves us, values us the same way that he did when he knitted us together in our mother's womb.
	You are valued by God.
	I am valued by God.
	We all feel dirty, but the hyperinflation that our economic and political leaders are marching us into does not apply when it comes to our value with the Lord.
	God bless you.
	And God bless you, sir.
	God bless you, mum.
	Let me know what you think in the comments and chat.
	Okay.
	So, religious and inflation-related stuff aside, like, the message here I actually agree with, right?
	The idea that if you're going through it and life is really throwing it at you, that doesn't devalue you in any way, right?
	You're still worthwhile even if things are tough, right?
	Very self-helpy, but a wholesome message at its core, you know?
	Yeah, that's vintage youth group shit, dog.
	Right, right, exactly.
	I guess Russell went to a junior high youth group.
	That's classic.
	That's classic 90s youth group shit.
	His teacher, what, J. John, was it?
	I'm going to assume this is a religious teacher of some description.
	I like having a name, though.
	We'll write that shit the fuck down.
	That is helpful, isn't it?
	Yeah, like, I do agree with the message, like, you know, having tough times doesn't devalue you in any way, right?
	And the message is completely fine, but the fact that he then takes the £20 note in this metaphor and accidentally fucks it up so badly, destroying it enough so that nowhere would possibly accept it as legal tender, that sends a hilariously different message.
	You just tape it!
	That had holes in it.
	And the problem is, right, the reason he's fucked it up is I think he could have done this with the old money, but these are new notes that are like made of like basically plastic, so they're really quite brittle.
	That's weird.
	It is weird.
	I don't like it to be perfectly honest.
	But like, yeah, our old money was a bit tougher.
	It was kind of, you know, papery but fabric-y, you know, kind of situation.
	Yeah, there's a proprietary amalgamation that makes money a very specific thing.
	Exactly.
	Whereas the new money I think is more waterproof, but yeah, you can really fuck it up and that's now just destroyed.
	Yeah, no matter what I do to this.
	Well, actually, this is worthless now.
	Shit.
	Okay.
	Right.
	Okay.
	Well, I think it's like something like if you still have 60% or something of the note, you can still use it as legal, at least here.
	Oh, okay.
	And you can tape it.
	It's not, it's not torn completely.
	If you have all the parts, you can tape it.
	Don't throw money away.
	Oh my God, everybody.
	No, that still works.
	But yeah, tape is a little much.
	That was a real Lucille Bluth being a little disconnected from money, I guess.
	Yeah, I would say so.
	But yeah, that tickled me anyway.
	Oh, and another tidbit that you might be interested in from another one of his social videos this week.
	He went to church the other day and participated in the Eucharist, had the wafer and all that stuff, which only in this country, it'll be only Anglicans or Catholics that'll be doing it.
	So it's one of those two.
	So many rules.
	Lots of rules.
	Right.
	All right.
	So now we're going to get into the guest from this week.
	There's no big introduction, particularly as I've ripped this one right from the locals channel.
	It's not been put up on Rumble yet.
	But all I'm going to say is we're dealing with someone whose name rhymes with cake.
	All right, let's let Russell leap into the first question.
	Still?
	Yeah, yeah, he's back.
	Let's let Russell leap into the first question.
	Vivek Ramaswamy, thank you for joining me once again on Stay Free with Russell Brand.
	Good to be back, Matt.
	You must be at some point accepting that you may take on the mantle of soothsayer as well as disruptor with some of your predictions, notably that Biden would drop out of You've been kind of perspicacious, but I suppose you'll say that's just because you were looking at evidence and circumstances rather than trusting intuition.
	On that basis, I wonder how you see the rest of this campaign going, with one side relying on celebrity endorsements, the other side relying on assassination attempts.
	What can we look forward to in the next 50-60 days?
	I think the next 50-60 days could get strange, but I think it's going to be a barometer of the following, Russell.
	And I'm just, again, following historical facts and evidence, and combine that with a little bit of trained intuition, okay?
	I think that the more that you see Donald Trump surge in the polls, the more likely there are going to be very unusual and strange things that happen and continue to happen.
	If that doesn't happen, then I think you won't see as strange of things happen.
	So I think it's a direct function of what the polling looks like between now and the election.
	Okay, so immediate conspiracy theory right off the bat.
	Or he just didn't say anything.
	Like it could happen or not.
	Yeah, basically.
	So the idea is anytime Trump is looking successful in the polls, there's going to be assassination attempts and other strange things will be happening.
	Whereas if he's doing badly in the polls, then nothing will happen.
	That's the idea.
	Cool stuff.
	Except Trump's poll numbers have been pretty much stable, varying in either direction by two or three points since basically forever.
	Shockingly considering current events and recent events.
	Yes, and we will be getting to those in a bit.
	I bet.
	But yeah, this concept doesn't really track for me.
	All right, so Vivek Ramaswamy.
	Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait.
	He said trained intuition plus evidence?
	Guys, that's an opinion.
	And it's fine to have an opinion.
	Call it an opinion.
	That's just a fucking opinion.
	Churching up a goddamn opinion.
	Fucking forensics club debate.
	Pretty much.
	Pretty much.
	Okay, so I had said that I wasn't going to deal with Vivek Ramaswamy until he had picked a lane as either a politician or a pundit.
	And he has done that because he's got a new show with Fox News called Truths with Vivek Ramaswamy.
	Is that why Russell had him on?
	For a final showdown?
	Oh my god.
	I'll be damned if that's not an ironic title.
	Well, it's almost True's.
	Like, wow, I do take my fucking show name.
	Couldn't think of one yourself?
	Bring it on!
	Yeah, Vivek also has Matt Taibbi on the panel with him for that show, so tight.
	Looking forward to watching it.
	I made a frog face for listeners.
	This is his fourth or so appearance on Stay Free, and finally there's actually something worth talking about in one of his interviews.
	For anyone who doesn't know Vivek Ramaswamy that well, for the last couple of years he's basically been a smooth-talking vehicle for alt-right talking points, all while being a convenient brown man and second-generation immigrant, which is handy for Trump, who is regularly called out for being a racist piece of shit.
	So it benefits his image at this point to put Vivek on a stage with him, which he does so frequently.
	Which is not to say Vivek hasn't garnered his own popularity throughout his presidential campaign and all that, because he did.
	I won't take that away from him.
	He was worryingly successful.
	He has worryingly large amounts of money.
	That helps a lot, doesn't it?
	Yeah, funny that.
	The thing to bear in mind about Vivek, I think, is that much like Elon Musk, these guys should hate him.
	Like, he's brown and a second-generation migrant who was raised Hindu, sure, but not only that, the main way he made his fortune is through a biotech and big pharma company.
	And before that, after graduating Harvard with a degree in biology, he was awarded a postgraduate fellowship by the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, which he used to attend Yale Law School.
	So, Paul Soros is George Soros' brother, so essentially, Vivek is a Soros-funded big pharma guy.
	They should hate him!
	Like, they should hate- Ron DeSantis.
	Like he got college because of George Soros.
	Yeah.
	They don't care.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	They should though.
	I think that's instructive.
	If they were consistent.
	To point out.
	Yeah.
	Anyway.
	Consistencies are always more extreme than you think.
	Yeah, just like with Elon.
	You know, he wants to put microchips in everyone's brains.
	Shouldn't trust that guy.
	They should hate him.
	Also, while at Yale, by the way, he befriended now vice presidential nominee J.D.
	Vance, and they've been good buds ever since.
	Busy fuckers.
	Yeah, oh dear.
	Creatures like to hang out together.
	So yeah, makes sense.
	Indeed.
	They're rich.
	As for the reasons that we shouldn't like him, yeah, that's part of it.
	So his views are already not great, given that he literally parrots alt-right talking points all while complaining about, quote, new secular religions like COVIDism, climatism, and gender ideology, unquote.
	But I want to cover what he was doing before that for a moment.
	So in 2014, he founded the biotechnology firm Roivant Sciences.
	The Roi, R-O-I in the company's name, refers to return on investment.
	Just tragic.
	The company was incorporated in Bermuda, a tax haven, and received almost $100 million in startup capital from QVT and other investors, mostly VC and hedge fund managers, right?
	Weird that a guy who supposedly loves America so much, and he will say so repeatedly in this interview, doesn't seem to want to pay taxes.
	Fascinating.
	Roy Vance's strategy was to purchase patents from larger pharmaceutical companies for drugs that had not yet been successfully developed, and then bring them to the market, right?
	In 2015, Vivek raised $360 million for the Roivant subsidiary Axovant Sciences in an attempt to make intepidine as a drug for Alzheimer's disease.
	See, before that, in December 2014, Axovant had purchased the patent for Intepidine from GlaxoSmithKline, where the drug had previously failed four clinical trials.
	And Axovant got it for $5 million, which is a small sum.
	That's a friggin' steal, right?
	For that kind of thing.
	If it worked!
	If it works, right?
	Vivek comes in thinking he's got a bargain because Axavant have bought that thing and he's now bought Axavant, so he's got the thing, right?
	And so he then folds, he buys Axavant and folds that into into Roivent with the idea of, hey, this is going to be great.
	I'm going to make some cash here.
	Vivek appeared on the cover of Forbes in 2015 and said his company would be the highest return on investment endeavor ever taken up in the pharmaceutical industry.
	And then before new clinical trials began, so before they actually began testing this new drug that they bought, he engineered an IPO, an initial public offering with Axavant, right, which then became a Wall Street darling and raised $315 million.
	The company's market value initially soared to almost three billion, although at that time it only had eight employees, including Vivek's brother and mum.
	So Vivek then took a massive payout after selling a portion of his shares in Roivant to Viking Global Investors.
	So he sold a bunch of his shit off, right?
	And he claimed more than 37 million dollars in capital gains in 2015, for instance.
	He said his company would be the Berkshire Hathaway of drug development and touted that the drug would be a tremendous opportunity that could help millions of patients, prompting some criticism that perhaps he was over-promising.
	In September 2017, the company announced that Intepidine had failed in its large clinical trial.
	And the company's value plunged, it lost 75% in one day, and continued to decline afterwards.
	Shareholders who lost money included various institutional investors, such as the California State Teachers Retirement System Pension Fund.
	Vivek, however, was insulated from much of Axavant's losses because he held his stake through Roivant, right?
	So he didn't have anything left in that.
	And then the company abandoned Intepidine and Axavant, later attempted to reinvent itself as a gene therapy company, but ultimately dissolved in 2023.
	Vivek remains the sixth largest shareholder of Roivant, retaining a 7.17% stake.
	Roivant itself has never been profitable, and yet he's made a shitload of money.
	That's interesting.
	Hmm, doesn't seem like that system's working too well.
	In early 2022, together with his high school friend Anson Frerichs, Vivek co-founded Strive Asset Management, a Columbus, Ohio-based asset management firm.
	The firm raised about $20 million from outside investors, including Peter Thiel, J.D.
	Vance, and Bill Ackman.
	Strive has branded itself as anti-woke, And it's funds as anti-ESG.
	Remember that thing that focuses on sustainability and making sure child and slave labor isn't a part of the supply chain?
	Yeah, anti-that.
	Vivek specifically said that Strive would push energy companies to drill for more oil, frack for more natural gas, and quote, do whatever allows them to be most successful over the long run without regard to political, social, cultural, or environmental agendas.
	Unquote.
	Fuck, okay.
	That's just nightmarish.
	So, essentially, failed businessman, intentionally failing businessman, who has made his money by, like, lying, not paying his corporate taxes in the US, and making sure that he's insulated whenever his companies fail.
	And on top of that, he's also just a real asshole to boot with this other company.
	So, yeah.
	Yeah, that's why we should- Because the producers is the best way to make money for the last 15 years.
	Right, exactly.
	Not good.
	Exactly.
	That's not a good system.
	Yeah, he's basically a Theranos.
	And I've heard him conceived of as basically on the level of Elizabeth Holmes, but none of the bad press.
	So he just skated on being a Theranos type.
	Promising shit that was never possible on nothing.
	Yeah, I feel like springtime for Hitler in Germany should not be an economic model, you know?
	I don't think we should be relying on that.
	I don't think that's good.
	It's just stealing.
	It's just stealing.
	It's fraud.
	Fraud.
	Fraud.
	It's fraud is what it is.
	Fraud.
	It's fraud.
	Oh, that's how you say that.
	Yeah, he's a skimmer.
	It certainly feels a lot like it, doesn't it?
	No, it's just the truth.
	It doesn't feel like it.
	He is a scammer, but he's allowed to do it.
	Yes.
	Because question mark.
	Absolutely.
	All right.
	Let's get to why Vivek thinks that strange things are going to happen in the next few months, right?
	Now, why do I say this?
	I say this because the evidence supports it.
	When Donald Trump has surged in the polls, strange things have happened, up to and including the swapping out of his main opponent for this race for the presidency of the United States of America.
	And other unprecedented things, I mean, of a kind, Russell, that we haven't seen in a generation in this country.
	One of the things that's most alarming about the assassination attempts, just as a citizen, was watching this.
	is the fact that it has become almost normalized in the way that this has been covered.
	And I think that's the saddest part about this.
	Just over two months ago was an assassination attempt.
	As recently as several weeks ago, it was not even talked about really anymore.
	And then there was a second assassination attempt.
	And as a matter of days later, it's not really discussed anymore.
	When these should be exceptional, appalling, rare historical events that'll be in the history books for kids a century from now, and yet, forget about a century from now, even days from then, it's almost as though it's forgotten, as though it's not in the social media cycle anymore.
	And I think that type of normalization, that type of anesthetization of our response and instincts, I think bodes poorly where it means that we'll take something even more strange or odd or bizarre in order to actually cause people to halt and say, what the hell is actually going on in this country?
	Yeah, they're all big mad that these assassination attempts aren't doing anything to move the needle in the pulse.
	I'd be so uncomfortable if I heard this wishcasting about my ultimate demise.
	I really would.
	I'd be upset.
	From one of your closest kind of advisors for a little while as well.
	I'd be like, that doesn't feel right.
	I'd seal my shit in a bunker, dog.
	No, no, no.
	I'm eating MREs for the next five.
	Nope.
	That's fucked up.
	That does not feel great.
	Firstly, as well, Joe Biden did not drop out because of Donald Trump's polling.
	Joe Biden dropped out because of Joe Biden's polling.
	That's what happened there.
	The synapses had a lot to do with that.
	Yes, indeed they did.
	And that's fine!
	That's responsible to treat an elderly person with dignity and not trot them around and make them do things they can't do.
	That's mean!
	We shouldn't weekend at Bernie's this guy.
	Back to the assassination stuff, I will say it does feel odd, like it feels odd that we collectively kind of don't give a shit.
	But Actually, America has something of a track record of this.
	For instance, in May 2023, a neo-Nazi from St.
	Louis attempted to kill Joe Biden and drove a rented box truck into the White House barrier.
	We've all kind of forgotten about that.
	There were at least five attempts on Obama's life and at least a dozen conspiracies to assassinate him that were foiled before they were able to be enacted.
	There were also attempts on George W. Bush's life and Bill Clinton's, and there were actual attempts on Trump's life, not even the ones that were made up, while he was in office as president.
	And even all of these alt-right chocoheads appear to have forgotten that, because it's just like, yeah, we're so, like, as a society, America is just so fucking used to it, because it's not a new phenomenon.
	Like, it happens with every single president, and often candidates, And sometimes they do actually get shot and injured and sometimes they get killed.
	We've seen that happen too.
	It's not new.
	And so now the US just collectively yawns.
	It's why they have to be there all the time.
	Exactly.
	It's why they should have fucking checked the fence to begin with.
	And we never would have even heard about this like Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd cartoon, like gun coming through a fence.
	Like the capertubing bit from Gunslinger, Mystery Science Theater, is the first thing I thought.
	I'm like, oh, okay.
	Dude.
	Oh, boy.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And so, you know, unless someone actually, you know, manages to achieve some kind of strike somewhere, the whole US just goes, meh.
	All right, you know, let me know when something happens.
	They also don't advertise, like the Secret Service, and they don't advertise when things are foiled because that will create more attention and a potentiality for copycat behavior.
	It's like, oh, if we can try.
	I'm going to try.
	Yeah, exactly.
	You don't want that.
	It makes perfect sense as to why we do not advertise the plots that are foiled.
	It really If you think for a second and a half, it makes perfect sense as to why we don't hear more about it.
	Yeah, and to why you don't want to publicize this all the time.
	It feels like UK politicians, you know the Prime Minister over here, doesn't get as many kind of assassination attempts, but I don't know that.
	I could not say that for sure, because I'm possibly just not told about them, which would also be responsible.
	They could be batting down Yolanda's every day.
	You don't know.
	You don't know!
	There is no way to know, and that's on purpose.
	I hope not.
	Sounds stressful.
	Yeah, no, absolutely.
	And also, for a different example, I imagine plenty of people have tried to assassinate Vladimir Putin over the years.
	He's changed his whole staff out for those kinds of reasons.
	You know, 600 staff or whatever.
	We'll never know.
	But we'll never know.
	No one will ever know.
	Yeah, that's a black box.
	Exactly.
	We can only speculate.
	Right.
	So next, Russell has some complaints about the BBC's reporting.
	Thank you.
	I've just noticed a tendency with our own content that I imagine is close to universal.
	What I suspect is happening is that legacy media will report on an assassination attempt or an event that could be favorable to the Trump campaign that might engender or inspire sympathy, interest, be a kind of tacit endorsement of anti-establishment credentials.
	The legacy media will report on it, whether that's the BBC in my country or MSNBC or CNN in yours, in a particular way.
	Like the BBC report began with, Donald Trump is safe and well after an assassination, after a failed assassination.
	I was like, oh my God, that's so extraordinary.
	I mean, it's extraordinary to you, Russell, because what the BBC were doing there was intentionally desensationalizing their own content in order to be responsible and not just throw up a clickbait headline of shots fired at Trump, right?
	They were like, Donald Trump is fine.
	Does he say why he thinks it's interesting?
	Yeah, your version's the correct one.
	Obviously!
	Yeah, he's been harping on about this for a while.
	He thinks that it's to try and like downplay it, you know, and make everyone think that this is normal and all of this.
	He does elaborate a little bit more in just a second.
	But, Russell takes quite the different approach, and I'll tell you what, I'm gonna send you some titles of his recent videos on this subject.
	Ooh!
	So, for you to read out, right, immediately after this second shooter thing happened, Russell's video title was the following.
	I should read the caps.
	Yes.
	They tried to kill Trump again!
	Reaction, as suspect named!
	Links to Ukraine slash CIA.
	Yeah, so that was title number one.
	See, when auto, like when voice detects, starts to learn caps, it's over.
	That's exactly what is going to happen.
	You should call me to train it.
	I'll work it out.
	Yeah, right.
	Very effective, all caps there.
	So the one the day after, right?
	This was the next one.
	Hillary comes for Trump after second assassination attempt, plus shooter's BlackRock connections.
	Connections!
	Exclamation point.
	Connections, yeah.
	Okay.
	Yep, yep.
	Or just a couple of days ago, we had this one.
	They're lying about him!
	Oh my god.
	The hidden truth behind the Trump shooter that nobody's talking about.
	Yeah.
	The fact that he had his phone with him the whole time?
	That's the most amazing little snippet I found out.
	Bad OPSEC dog.
	He was like scrolling Facebook.
	Just awful.
	Just awful.
	And that specific video was the worst as well.
	He had Fucking, it was Mike Benz, it was Kim Iverson, and it was Max Blumenthal.
	He had all three of them on at the same time to talk about this, and it was just so much nothing in one conversation.
	It's remarkable.
	Oh dear.
	Anyway, yeah, bit of a different editorial approach from Russell there when it comes to the headlines.
	Really?
	I feel like all of his, the names of his videos are buck wild.
	Like, Oh, they're insane.
	They're insane.
	They seem like parody.
	Yes, they do.
	Definitely not de-sensationalizing, are they?
	All right, so Russell's not done on this subject anyway, and he pivots from complaining about the BBC to spinning a conspiracy theory off his own.
	Then, the other component, and this is very recent, is that online spaces, notably Google, are for sure de-amplifying universally independent media content that's covering your party's campaign.
	What that will do, of course, initially, is it will mean that the messaging that's somewhat favourable, or at least sympathetic, to the new alliance that's coalescing around you, Trump, Tulsi, Bobby Kennedy.
	It means fewer people will see, obviously.
	But secondarily, independent media content creators are dependent on the revenue.
	So they will select against making this content, ultimately.
	When we used to make content on Trump events, we would see spikes, particularly if there was an event.
	Now they're clearly de-amplifying it.
	So people will start to make different types of content.
	Cynical little world out there.
	So that I see is a real strangle and choke on this type of content.
	So Russell's making less money than he used to on covering Trump.
	So it's, I'm making less money than I used to when I covered Trump events, therefore it must be that Google are deamplifying and minimizing alt-right creators when talking about Trump events in order to disincentivize them financially from talking about it.
	It couldn't possibly be that people are bored of Trump rallies.
	It couldn't.
	The further you get from movies, Russell, the bigger the pond gets you're swimming in.
	Also, lots of Christians.
	You're not doing anything super special here.
	You're, like, jumping on a number of very, like, well-trod bandwagons.
	And I'm not talking about, like, the things that rhyme with the 90s and the aughts and all that stuff.
	Like, no, yeah.
	You abandoned... Like, Russell, he abandoned kind of, like, the content that he could... Like, the unique Product he could offer the market.
	Yeah.
	And he traded it out for this, like, very, kind of, like, well-worn, like, kind of, boro snoro shit, man.
	Yeah, it's like, I'm one of you now.
	Like, oh, well, sucks.
	Yeah, guess who's Christian in fucking America?
	Like, everybody.
	Like, fucking, okay.
	Exactly.
	What else is new?
	Not excited by this content.
	Yeah, it's not surprising.
	And also, like, I would be curious to see whether the numbers he's counting are kind of within the last year or whether they go beyond that, because obviously within the last year he's been demonetized on YouTube and probably is not, you know, YouTube's best friend.
	So I would wonder whether that's had a kind of impact there somewhere.
	Well, if YouTube really didn't like it, he'd be gone.
	So I think that YouTube is perfectly fine cashing those checks.
	Yeah, we'll come to the subject of YouTube in a little bit, actually.
	Within the bounds of whatever, yeah.
	They're not gonna really do anything.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Alphabet are still making money and that's all they really give a shit about.
	Alright, and so, with all this, Vivek, given that he loves a good conspiracy theory, he takes all of this a step further.
	And I think, Russell, that last point you made, it's actually a really interesting observation.
	It is a profound point, because I think people worry very much, rightly, about the way human beings at these tech companies are training their AI and their algorithms.
	But the last step that you just identified is actually the most devious of all.
	It's the way the AI and the algorithms are actually training the human beings.
	So the ultimate AI in this is the incentive structure you create for, as you said, independent journalism, content creators, whose revenue models depend on what is or is not amplified or monetized.
	So in some ways, it's the human beings at the tech companies that have trained the algorithms.
	One of the things the tech companies learn, let me just walk through the cascade here.
	In the last several years, they've learned that actually outright censoring, outright banning, outright locking accounts, Isn't a good thing for them to do.
	Not just because it's morally wrong or because it's anti-American or runs against their stated principles of supporting a free internet.
	Not just for those reasons.
	But pragmatically, it's a bad idea for them because it creates a level of public ire, potential headlines that later follow.
	And so they've realized the way to carry out censorship is not through bans, not through terminating accounts.
	That was the sloppy way they used to do it way back in the stone ages of 2020.
	The way they do it now is almost exclusively through amplification or suppression of the desired forms of content being amplified, whereas the undesired forms are de-amplified, if not outright censored.
	It is a form of censorship, but this allows them to call it something other than censorship.
	Hmm.
	Okay.
	Firstly, that's not happening.
	And you only have to spend about 30 seconds clicking through videos on YouTube to figure that out.
	So I have my history switched off on my YouTube account due to the nature of the things I have to look at every week for this show.
	So it doesn't track any of what I'm actually looking at.
	So instead I went to the trending bit and clicked on the top trending video, and from there the immediate next videos were James May driving a cyber truck, a video of when delusional woke feminists get destroyed, and Chris Harris on Joe Rogan.
	I click on the James May video, the top one, and then the next top three are a Cybertruck durability test, because of course, a video called, I Drove These New Electric Cars Until They Died, and then one called, How the Most Elite Spy Agency Operates, with the thumbnail making it clear it was a Mossad puff piece.
	Yeah, the alt-right is alive and well on YouTube, as are the Zionists apparently, and that's all just coming straight through the algorithm there, so.
	I'm not too worried about this de-amplification, you know?
	I mean, those studies have been done for decades.
	Yes!
	100%!
	And I love, also, the thing is, those results can be so easily repeated.
	There's people I listen to, other commentators I listen to, they're like, man, I was off Twitter for a minute.
	Or like, oh, I restarted just another account on Twitter to see what would happen.
	Very obvious.
	It's remarkable.
	It's remarkable.
	And YouTube itself demonstrably veers towards white nationalists, misogynists, like just the worst fucking corners of humanity every time.
	I don't like citing.
	Indeed.
	So this is some bullshit.
	But also, really interesting how a self-declared libertarian and promoter of neoliberalist unchecked free market capitalism would claim that YouTube doing whatever it wants on its own website is censorship.
	Oh, that's what I heard.
	By your own rules, Vivek, like this is a private company exercising its rights to do what it wants.
	You know, it's just what the market's deciding, right?
	So to think otherwise would be, you know, getting government involved in a private company, which I think would leave him in a bit of a quandary, philosophically speaking.
	Or does he want to have a conversation about monopolies?
	Because we can have that conversation, but I don't think he wants to go down that road either, you know?
	I mean, the government has structured VC funding in such a way that protected him from any repercussions of just absolutely scamming giant buckets of money.
	I don't know, Vivek, maybe it'll fucking work out again for you.
	That's exactly what I heard, was like, Russell.
	And now, Russell, your branding was, you know, many moons ago, was Against and not in favor of capitalism, because you were like, well, this is obviously fucked up.
	Yeah, because of the inevitability of the profits to fall off over time.
	That's what's happening to you.
	It's going to be harder to make the same dollar, baby.
	That's capitalism.
	Sorry!
	Yes, indeed.
	That's so, like, obvious.
	Yeah.
	Come on.
	So next, Russell airs his grievances about intellectual liberals.
	I'm still astonished by, say, intellectual liberals, some of whom I stay in touch with and I still read their content really to understand what the purview is, are able to say, like I saw recently a celebrity endorsement of Kamala Harris saying that if you believe in democracy you have to vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz because of the terrible project 2025.
	The management of the information sphere is becoming extraordinarily adept and other than outliers like Our Platform Rumble and Elon Musk's ex, there's a complete management of information that means that something that would, I would say, at the beginning of this campaign, even though you're
	You know from a capitalist and entrepreneurial and somewhat libertarian, you tell me what you are, perspective it seems like anti-establishment and Bobby Kennedy in the way that I've described is anti-establishment, I would have thought it very unlikely that you guys would be campaigning together So in a sense, doesn't that show that there's an emergent anti-establishment consensus?
	And how can the sort of liberal centrist globalists maintain this kind of narrative that they are the outsiders and we've got to turn the page and we've got to fight against this establishment?
	I don't understand how they can manage it.
	You know, it's interesting.
	There's a funny dynamic.
	I'm enjoying this conversation, Russell, because your insights are spot on here.
	The only thing I would say is, I don't think you're ever going to see a political party represent that because the nature of being anti-establishment or the nature of having an independent streak is remaining independent, right?
	And so here are things that are true about the likes of some of the people you mentioned, from Tulsi, Bobby, myself.
	We don't agree with 100% of what each other think.
	We don't agree with 100% of what Donald Trump thinks, and we're not afraid to say it.
	But actually what we are against is the rise of this managerial class and this machine that in some ways is managing not just the government, unelected bureaucrats managing the government, they're managing every sphere of our lives, right?
	From corporate America to our universities to nonprofits.
	It's the bureaucratic class, the committee class, the managerial class that effectively is protecting its own continued existence at the expense of the institution they're supposed to safeguard.
	And in the government, that's the case of representative democracy.
	We've been thinking about this a while and there's another way to define the class he's talking about and that's middle.
	Vivek Ramaswamy has been leading something of a war on the middle class through his and now Trump's campaign.
	Like he'll call them the managerial class or the bureaucratic class or the committee class but what he's actually referring to are the middle class uniformly across Government, corporations, education, and non-profits.
	And it makes sense.
	Republicans have a long and storied history of taking advantage of the working class for their votes while propping up other incredibly wealthy Republicans and completely eviscerating the middle class with every chance they get.
	Previously, they've had to pretend to want to do good things and revitalize the middle class of America and blah blah blah blah.
	But with this recent reframing of, like, the managerial class, like, the gloves can kind of come off.
	Like, fuck them.
	Like, the only good people are the poors, the working class, and the billionaires.
	And there's no one in between.
	It should stay that way.
	Yeah.
	Oh, what I heard was, like, deep state and, like, government bureaucrats.
	There's that as well.
	Yes.
	That's what I heard.
	Yeah, yeah, no.
	He's like very thinly veiling like a really crazy kind of like conspiracy.
	Right, right.
	It's coming off in that same way.
	He's almost extending the kind of deep state narrative across all the entire of America, basically.
	You know, he listed corporations, education, you know, institutions and non-profits.
	Like, he's just listing everything as having this problem.
	Oh, I thought he meant, like, the regulating of all those, like, limiting by regulating all those things and making regulations and bureaucrats and, you know, the things that keep your house from burning down.
	Yeah, right, right.
	Well, yeah, no, he hates regulations too.
	That is, yeah.
	Yeah.
	Oh dear.
	Where'd your money come from, Vivek?
	Dude.
	Oh, okay.
	Terrific question.
	But yeah, I did like the bit about him being like, I mean, you can't have an anti-establishment party, Russell.
	That Inherently just doesn't work.
	Like, yeah, conceptually, the things you're saying are dumb, but I'm going to use that to make my point.
	But I did like that.
	That point rings through history.
	It does, doesn't it?
	Yeah, it's been attempted many, many times over, and it's always embarrassing.
	But at least they fuck a lot of shit up before they finally piss away into the ether.
	It's always interesting to watch.
	Oh, and Vivek never has and never will stand up to Donald Trump.
	He purposefully avoided ever criticizing Donald Trump while he was running for president, specifically so that he could jump on the Trump train after.
	Like, DeSantis and Haley he would rail against all day and all night, but Trump?
	Not a fucking word.
	Oh, we're not afraid to stand up to him?
	Yeah, sure thing.
	Sure thing.
	I would love to be in that room.
	Oh dear.
	Okay, so now we get one of the worst defenses of hate speech.
	So, part of the imbalance here, and what we have going against us, if you will, in an anti-establishment current, is that just by our very nature, we're not wired to form a political party with structure around that current, because create a new establishment, and that would create a new layer of bureaucracy and a managerial class, and that's in some sense what we find antipathic.
	But it's also I think what makes this movement in this moment that much more powerful because I think people across the country and even people who you'd call former liberal intellectuals, some of them at least, and I think even the others, I hope there's an awakening still yet ahead.
	You've seen movement where I think people agree in this country that I may not want the policy that some congressman votes for, but I still want it to be the people we elect to run the government, for God's sake, to be the ones who actually run the government and make the decisions, rather than somebody who I could never fire at the ballot box.
	That's just what it means to live in a constitutional republic.
	It's what it means to live in a representative democracy.
	I may not agree with a heinous opinion that's expressed on Rumble, or on Facebook, or on X, or on TikTok, But I still believe in the right of the person there to express it, because if I don't, that means that tomorrow it's going to be my opinion that's suppressed when the same shoe fits the other foot.
	Aha!
	So we should let these people say... Shoes famously fitting two feet!
	Yes, that happens all the time.
	So his principle here is we should let these people say what they want, because what if it's me saying hateful things tomorrow when I get banned?
	Like, well, heinous was the word he used.
	And the answer is very, very straightforward.
	Don't engage in hate speech.
	Like, we have legal exceptions on freedom of speech for a reason.
	And literally all of the online spaces he was mentioning there are private companies who have their own terms of service when it comes to that sort of thing.
	Case in point, on Rumble and X, people whine about there being too many blacks and too many Jews.
	And that's considered fine.
	It's remarkably easy to find.
	Other platforms like Facebook and TikTok may take a different view on that one, for instance.
	Though they are by no means perfect either, you still aren't allowed to say men are trash on Facebook, for instance.
	Despite there being overwhelming evidence to back that statement up, you're not allowed to write that.
	Okay, fine.
	Before that, what Vivek was saying was the incredibly dumb idea that we've covered elsewhere before, that everyone in every level of government should be elected and not appointed, or their jobs should simply be cut.
	So as of September 2023, there were 2.95 million employees in the US federal workforce.
	If he wants to extend that to individual states as well, we hit 20 million people.
	So we'd be looking at a minimum of like 3 million elections, right?
	I don't want anyone who's in government who I can't remove at the ballot box, that's what he said.
	Or, more likely, given Vivek's point of view and his previous form, he'd just want to fucking fire everyone and destroy federal government at large.
	I think that's more the side of it he's interested in.
	Yeah.
	And here's the thing, ballot box for these, like, I'm hearing a lot, right?
	Like, I'm picking up on a lot of stuff, because Vivek is not dumb.
	There's a lot of things Vivek is.
	Stupid ain't one of them.
	He did not fall off the turnip truck yesterday.
	No, no, he went to Harvard and graduated summa cum laude in biology.
	You can't be terribly dumb.
	Well, yeah, Harvard has its own issues, but anyway.
	Well, no, no, I'm not.
	That's fine, Herb, or whatever.
	Your major, whatever.
	I'm saying what he's saying.
	Also, biology doesn't help you talk slick to people.
	No, no.
	Biologists?
	Where are my biologists at?
	Yep.
	Cool.
	Not feeling seen by Vivek?
	I thought so.
	So yeah, that like he's I think the managerial like I'm listening to the managerial because he's like lumping a managerial class with bureaucracy when I feel like especially a narrative in America, much like we're all temporarily embarrassed millionaires. that like he's I think the managerial like I'm listening Everyone's poor, like unless you are extreme, like because you can always look to someone who is above you.
	Right.
	So like, well, I've got it tough.
	I've got it bad.
	I don't have nearly as much as this person who appears to have more than me.
	So I can excuse my behavior because someone is an echelon above me.
	And it's the same thing.
	Everyone's got a manager that they're mad about.
	Either it's their manager at work, Or they're a manager and it's the manager above them, or it's your, like, county zoning board, or it's your, like, or it's the IRS making you, like, pay your fair share of taxes in your business.
	Everyone has, it's that, like, no matter what, there's gonna be someone, or Uncle Sam himself is, like, you know, or, like, the Bureau of Land Management, goddammit, isn't letting me destroy, anyway, okay.
	But yeah, that, like, There is a manager that like it's such a it's it's the astrology it's like it's it's the star chart of Hatred towards authority.
	You can fill in any manager you want because everyone has one.
	I don't know if it's smart or lazy.
	Maybe it's both.
	Letting people fill in the gap with their own fears and hatreds is the most effective way to get a large swath of people on your side.
	It's also realpolitik, because whenever they get in the same room, they're like, oh, what are we talking about?
	Oh, I was talking about my manager.
	I'm like, oh, well, I was talking about the zoning board.
	You know, like that kind of idea.
	It's like, oh, well, was he talking to me?
	No, he was talking to all of us.
	Oh, OK.
	So that kind of like, I don't know.
	I have noticed that Vivek is always adept In that very, like, Kinsey, like, McKinsey way, like, he has, he does have the gift of gab, and using, he's almost like a Chris Rufo type, that he's like, he's always working on words in a way that, like, they don't necessarily stick.
	I think he's very ambitious, as far as what he wants to stick.
	But it's a new way to say campus crazies.
	It's a new way to be anti-intellectual if you're anti-college.
	So all these college students protesting are stupid monsters, and how dare they?
	And DEI, like Thomas was talking about last week.
	That kind of like, you can demonize intellectuals.
	You can demonize like the college professor with all of these ideas.
	And it's a nice like blanket term that he's throwing out.
	Everybody's got a manager they hate.
	Everybody's got someone in charge of them that they're annoyed by.
	Yeah.
	And so that's like, it's such a blanket term.
	I'm going to keep an eye on that, I feel.
	Yeah.
	Or maybe that's already happening, but also like removing at the ballot box.
	He wants everything to be up for a popularity contest that statistically overwhelmingly is won by someone with the most money.
	Yeah.
	It's a terrible idea for so many reasons.
	It's far more corrupt.
	Yeah.
	If you are voting rather than hiring people that are qualified for the, for the position that can be fired, you can like, you can remove, An appointed official, in theory, by filing a complaint, like especially like a public, like anyone that's public facing, you can file a complaint and if they are not, like if they're derelict in their duty, they can be removed.
	Yeah.
	Easier than a private company.
	I mean, obviously in theory, but still like the, it's not just like firing them at the ballot box is a false dichotomy.
	You know, it's like, it's not just either vote or nothing.
	It is crazy.
	And it is interesting how I've only ever heard this idea from people who have a lot of money.
	That is curious, isn't it?
	Uh-huh.
	I want to buy that job.
	Which they do anyway.
	Yeah, that's 100%.
	He's bought this job, right?
	Yeah, the whole thing about everyone being poor, even the very wealthy, that's definitely a thing over here as well.
	I remember a couple of elections ago, there was someone who was earning £80,000 a year, which at the time was in the top 5% of earners, and he was like, I don't have enough money.
	I am poor.
	And the panel that we're talking to, and we're like, ah, you're in the top 5% of earners.
	And he was like, no, I'm not.
	I was like, yes, you are, I'm afraid.
	Yes, you are.
	We can go through all the reasons it doesn't feel like you are.
	That's a different conversation.
	But statistically, yes, you are, I'm afraid.
	We need to structure a better society.
	Yeah, right.
	Exactly.
	This is capitalism.
	This is capitalism doing exactly what it's supposed to, is to make everybody feel.
	Exactly.
	Yep, it's very effective.
	So from here, Vivek tells us about the Trump campaign being values-based.
	So I think those principles, so what we're seeing, what you call anti-establishment, and I think it's a fine word, but there can be different kinds of establishments at different times, I call maybe more of a principles-based rather than a politics-based or principles-based movement.
	What are the basic rules of the road, right?
	We might each drive different cars on that road.
	You know, every one of the individuals you mentioned, from Bobby to Tulsi to Donald Trump, I'll spar and disagree with them on a wide range of topics.
	Those are like different cars you might ride on the road, okay?
	But we're not talking about which car you're designing on the road.
	Right now, we're talking about the basic rules of the road itself.
	And we are deeply aligned on those basic rules of the road.
	We believe in free speech.
	We believe in self-governance.
	We believe in merit.
	We believe in reviving a sense of pride and identity that we're missing.
	And we're against totalitarian overreach.
	We're against the culture of censorship.
	We're against the suppression and silencing of even our own opponents.
	Those are rules of the road.
	We're against the assault on religion.
	Stand for the free exercise of religion.
	And I think that that's one of those moments.
	That's part of why I say it's more of a 1776 moment right now.
	I know you come from the other side of the pond, so with all due respect, you know, in a very American-centric sense, a 1776 moment in our own country.
	Yeah, fuck off, you limey.
	I mean, like, I will say, like, I'm willing to give a little bit of leeway here to this 70-76 moment rhetoric because, like, the last time their team did attempt a coup of the US government, you know, credit where it's due, that is a little bit 17-17-60.
	Not in a good way, but, you know, it's attempting to overthrow a government.
	I'm like, well, Vivek also doesn't want to pay taxes.
	That's very 1776-y.
	Had he been there, I'm sure he'd have been all about the Boston Tea Party.
	See, they hadn't figured out tax havens back in the 18th century yet, so, you know.
	Oh, they absolutely had.
	They looked very different.
	Yeah, it was actually... Pork Features was actually kind of... It wasn't even Pork Features, right, but yeah, it was...
	It was still there.
	But yeah, but it certainly looks very different.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Like, can we put to bed this, like, we are still upset about the Revolutionary War in 1776?
	I don't start every episode of this podcast slyly apologizing, like, sorry, not sorry, like, one or whatever.
	Bitch!
	They've been dead for hundreds of years, and our countries have colluded to inflict nightmares on this world, and there's no signs of stopping.
	That's never ended.
	We speak the same language.
	Like, come the fuck on!
	And even certain British figures throughout history was like, America never won.
	And we're like, we know!
	Just a couple guys at the top wanted to make a lot of money!
	That's, like, the whole plan!
	It's just stupid.
	Can we just stop those fucking jokes?
	Ugh!
	After the Revolutionary War, like...
	America's closest ally was Britain.
	Because King George was like, all right, we're done fighting now, let's be friends, it's fine.
	There was an active, obviously France as well, but there was an active- Well, it was France for a while, but the money talked, and then the bullshit walked.
	Yeah!
	It was never that 1776-y to begin with.
	Baby, those are plays we did in grade school and probably shouldn't have.
	This is a myth that was constructed.
	This is this is like a fun story to tell yourself which also like I would have read still the pride in the but no one ever told you that you can't play pretend for yourself every single day.
	Yeah you can go for it no one's fucking stopping you you baby who cares.
	Yeah, yeah, talking with the... There's a very specific self-importance of like a CEO, you know, of like, you should listen to everything I say because it's going to be really important.
	That's the thing that constantly grates on me whenever I have to listen to Vivek, and it's, yeah, it's a bit much.
	I would also be curious... I'd say that goes beyond CEOs, but sure.
	Yes, yeah, fair.
	I'd also be curious to test the whole, you know, freedom of exercise of religion thing.
	Like, Vivek has been Christian, I think, since going to Catholic school, but I'd be deeply curious, like, what would happen if we tried to put some statues to the Hindu gods, Brahma or Vishnu, in state schools, and see if he's just as cool with that as he is the Ten Commandments, because that's what he was raised on.
	Like, that's what he was raised with, and presumably his parents still follow that, I'm not sure, but like, yeah, he should be cool with that as well, right?
	Yeah.
	You'd think.
	Well, here's the thing.
	He'll just say whatever works in the room he's in.
	Because he'll say, like the concept, he'll be like, free speech, of course that should happen, but then...
	I mean, it's like what Elon is doing.
	It's like, it's what Elon is doing with Twitter.
	It's like, I'm a free speech warrior, except for all these people that are more heavily censored than, like actually censored than ever.
	Except for all the people who disagree with me, who I will ban.
	I will, yeah.
	I will fire into a lake.
	Yeah.
	With a cannon.
	It's 100% that.
	It's free speech for me, not for thee.
	And same with exercise of religion.
	It's for Christianity and everyone else can fuck off, right?
	So he'd probably agree with that if it came out of Russell's mouth, but if he was on TBN talking to Jim Baker, he'd be like, absolutely not.
	Yeah, of course.
	Yeah, no, exactly.
	It's a fascinating thing.
	That's also why you don't be the token in the room.
	You're going to be put in those positions constantly.
	And if you bring it on yourself, I don't have sympathy for you.
	No, it doesn't seem like a lot of fun.
	OK, so now for a couple of shots at Joe Biden.
	Where this isn't about, you know, bickering over the tax rate being 1% higher or 1% lower.
	And, you know, we may have our disagreements between the parties on that.
	This election isn't about that.
	It's about the basic rules of the road.
	And, you know, as Orwell once said, the best way to actually control a society is to first control its language.
	That's what you see from the other side where they've owned the message of protecting our democracy.
	We think about what's a threat to democracy?
	A threat to democracy is telling your political opponents they can't speak.
	A threat to democracy is saying that the people who run the government aren't actually the ones who we elect to run the government, aren't the ones who run the government.
	There's no doubt in anybody's mind that Joe Biden is not, in any sense, running as the President of the United States today.
	He's not functioning as the President of the United States today.
	Nobody in America believes that he is, and yet we hold out this artifice that he's actually the U.S.
	President.
	So those, I think, represent real threats to democracy, not the histrionics that we hear Part of the problem is, you know, we as human beings, we always do.
	We always have.
	It's our nature.
	We fall for narratives that are sold to us.
	But there's also a part of us that hungers to rebel against those narratives.
	And so this anti-establishment current that you're describing, our duty, our job right now is to awaken the side of each of us.
	That wants to reject what we're force fed rather than just swallowing it.
	And every human being, every one of us has both impulses in us.
	The question of the leaders of this new movement is how are we going to awaken the rebellious instincts at a moment where the future of our country depends on it?
	And that's what I'm trying to do my best on in the next few weeks and months left.
	He's honing his propaganda skills, is what I just heard.
	He's like, how do we awaken that and then wield it for our purposes, which is why I'm here and what I do.
	Exactly.
	It's the quandary of like, how do we awaken the rebellious spirit in people to then use it to support the Empire, you know?
	Like, we want people to awaken- Yeah, to work against their own best interest.
	Yes, we want people to awaken and rise up in order to become stormtroopers for the state.
	That's what we want.
	You're like, ah, okay.
	That's clearly the only thing he could have meant in that statement.
	That's chilling.
	That's some star fucking trooper shit.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Fake?
	Which, yeah!
	It's a lie.
	He stays on message, I'll tell you what.
	Like, I've never heard an incongruous word come out of this person's mouth.
	It all adds up.
	Scammy huckster.
	Old snake oil salesman person.
	Jeez, EP.
	Okay.
	That is entirely fair.
	As for Joe Biden, I mean, he is the sitting president.
	Like, he's probably not doing the best job right now, having COVID and whatever else, and reduced duties and whatever.
	And based on his recent public appearances, he seems to have just stopped giving a shit, which I enjoy.
	But he is still the president.
	Like it or not, from a legal perspective, there are certain things that only he can do that only fall to him and can be executed by him.
	And to pretend otherwise, or that someone else is doing them for him, is completely insane without some kind of evidence to back that up.
	Yeah. - And to pretend that if anything else falls away from Joe Biden, the petty bit will remain.
	That is the core of his being.
	And when you can weaponize that for you, it's tight.
	Like, I'm here for that.
	But he picked the wrong side with a lot of the pettiness, historically and currently.
	So fucking yeah, let him nap.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Tip-toe.
	Don't wake him up.
	Don't wake Daddy.
	No, no.
	That's fine.
	Daddy needs to sleep.
	Alright, so next Vivek paints a picture that us lefties should be really grateful about how progressive the Republican Party is today.
	What's happened right now is really interesting.
	Demonize the likes of George Bush and Dick Cheney for their strong pro-life, anti-gay marriage views, etc.
	What do you get now is you get a Republican Party that the Democrats from back then would have only wished for.
	In the policy views of Republicans.
	Right now, Donald Trump, I mean, the Republican Party today has no opposition to gay marriage.
	It is opposed to a federal ban on abortion.
	It does believe it should be a state's right to choose a pro-life view, but no federal ban on abortion, no federal or state constraints on gay marriage.
	And so it's precisely when supposedly the evil views of the Republican Party no longer are the actual part of the policy platform of the Republican Party, that they've now resorted to other histrionics, where the political field has now realigned itself.
	What they now want is actually the people who just want government to retain control, period, right?
	The Dick Cheney's of the world, but also the Kamala Harris and the Joe Biden's of the world, say that, okay, we might disagree on some of those other cultural questions, but we do agree that people can't be permitted to speak or express their opinions.
	We do agree that the government needs to be able to surveil everyday citizens to make sure that they're not expressing those opinions and causing wreaking havoc or danger.
	We do believe in the importance of the United States, meddling and interfering in random countries' affairs even when they don't advance the interests of the United States, as long as it actually enhances the power structure of the people who are doing the meddling.
	That actually is a deep alignment between the Kamala Harris, Joe Biden wing of the Democratic Party and the Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney wing of the Republican Party.
	So that's an alliance that actually runs deeper than what was their former antipathy on issues relating to gay marriage abortion.
	Meanwhile, you got Donald Trump leading a Republican Party right now that has opposition to a federal ban on abortion.
	The Republican Party does not favor, under Donald Trump, a ban on abortion, a federal ban on abortion.
	That was also my position during the presidential campaign, by the way.
	And you also have a party that's completely open to same-sex marriage, to really the kinds of freedoms that many libertarians would at least appreciate.
	Yeah, libertarians are not liberals, buddy.
	I'm not left-wing, not anything.
	So yeah, also like your state's rights approach to abortion is killing thousands of women across the country right this moment, right now.
	And yeah, as for gay marriage- Yeah, but that talking point is fucking working.
	And it chills me to hear How effective that like oh well it's like that is the most effective kind of like buck passing like glad handing kind of like whitewashing I've ever heard yeah since they came up with pro-life like that's That is such an excellent obfuscation.
	I mean, and there's a lot of people that have woken up to that tactic, but they're mostly childbearing individuals, and those voices don't really get heard in the same way.
	Unfortunately.
	No, they do not.
	Or else we wouldn't be here.
	No, exactly, exactly.
	And as for gay marriage, which you rightly balked at, here's a little piece from GLAAD on this, right?
	Quote, Project 2025 very clearly aims to gut protections for the LGBTQ community, which its organisers believe exists in opposition to the traditional American family and its Christian nationalist underpinnings.
	The project would prioritise families comprised of a married mother, father and their children, and would eliminate any federal policies that promote LGBTQ equality or that assist single mothers.
	The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism reports that the project claims falsely that only heterosexual two-parent families are safe for children, and that all other family forms involve higher levels of instability, the average length of same-sex marriages is half that of heterosexual marriages, financial stress or poverty, and poor behavioral, psychological, or educational outcomes.
	The data on the length of marriages is, of course, false." Unquote.
	So, yeah.
	Project 2025, like the Heritage Foundation wishlist for Trump's second term with input from former Trump officials, doesn't seem to like gay marriage very, very much.
	And with the current makeup of the Supreme Court, there is a lot of concern as to whether they will attempt to overturn it at some point in the imminent future.
	Like, Could happen any fucking moment kind of thing.
	There are people really, really concerned because, yeah, they hate gay marriage.
	They always have.
	They always will.
	Yes.
	And then they're going to come for, like, interracial marriage next.
	Yep.
	That's what's so fucking crazy is, like, y'all have no idea the boulder that has been pushed down the mountain And it blows my fucking mind when some, I mean, listen, it blows my mind.
	And I'm not mad.
	I'm glad you're here.
	When I see someone just like kind of come to this realization, like, how have we not been seeing this?
	How like Supreme Supreme court justices in interracial marriages are saying, nah, that's bullshit.
	Like the hypocrisy is like, so beyond like, even like we have to point it out, but also.
	Temper your fucking expectations as much as you possibly can with that pointing out of the hypocrisy it's unreal and I mean his whole proud American kind of like supporting American business blah blah blah.
	Then why is your company registered in the Bahamas?
	Maybe you're a proud Bahamanian, not a proud American.
	It's just absolutely bonkers.
	The kind of person, the persona that gets to talk.
	Is so removed from the real human doing real things and real harm in the world.
	That is genuinely, I mean, as you pointed out earlier, his kind of incongruous stance on religious freedom.
	Yeah, man.
	You're clearly just saying what you need to say in every room that you need to say it to make money and secure your bag.
	And that's literally it.
	Yeah.
	That's what we were talking about.
	Classic CEO shit.
	Like, that's the whole thing.
	Well, and off-brand, too.
	Yeah, like, I mean, well, CEOs also didn't used to be like that.
	They used to have to start a company and do work.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And genuinely, both sides of the aisle have allowed us to get to this unregulated fucking free-for-all ass point where stealing is business almost exclusively.
	It always has been, right?
	Like exploitation, extortionate kind of like practices, especially colonialism.
	Sure.
	But like, they at least stole a product to make tires.
	This is different.
	It's just making up fake money to steal it.
	He's gonna love AI.
	Training AI, yeah, that's fucking stealing.
	You should be about it.
	Turd.
	God.
	Yeah, and ultimately, don't try and tell me that this Republican Party is somehow more progressive than the ones before it.
	I don't.
	That was Charlie Brown's teacher to me.
	I couldn't even process that as a sentence in the world.
	I'm sorry.
	Do what now?
	Yeah, you just say whatever.
	They just give words to anybody, don't they?
	You just do whatever you want.
	Yes.
	Rustle around in a bag and throw them anywhere.
	Okay, great.
	Rustle around.
	I like it.
	Okay, so speaking of all this Project 2025 stuff, Russell has some thoughts on it here.
	I wonder, Vivek, how your opponents will be able to continue to say that Project 2025 and the idea that there is some kind of a Handmaid's Tale style Christian patriarchy or mass authoritarianism leading to mass deportation Control over women's reproductive rights, winding back the clock.
	When it seems now, to me, sort of evident, just because of legislation, because of public rhetoric, because of the increasing of surveillance, that the greater threat is this bureaucratic technological feudalism, rather than militaristic, patriarchal, old-school, strongman, 2025 stuff.
	I wonder how these arguments are going to be rebutted and I wonder what your position is on something like 2025 and if you can give us some insight on why social democracy tends towards totalitarianism.
	Yeah, look, I think that, well, there's a deep philosophical reason, I think, why social democracy tends to lead to totalitarianism.
	But let me say a word about even just the, you talk about Project 2025, let's talk about Project 2050, which is effectively what the Great Reset, on a global scale, is really all about.
	And you want to know one of the vectors that they're using to achieve that, not as some theoretical policy construct, it's constraining people today, is the climate change agenda.
	This is, A third rail you're not supposed to touch.
	I actually, in the book, the book's coming out, the book that's out this week, this is a core topic that I hit, Russell, because this is a third rail where if you veer even from factual terrain to miss some sort of fact here or there, you're done.
	Yeah, he's got a new book out, and he's saying that talking about the Great Reset is some big third rail there, specifically that he has to be very careful about.
	And why is that, Vivek?
	Is it because the underpinnings of the alt-right Great Reset conspiracy theories are inherently anti-Semitic and hark back to protocols of the Elders of Zion?
	Maybe there's a reason people don't want to fuck with that rail.
	But yeah, he's written about this in his book.
	Oh, so the third rail isn't climate, he just threw climate change in there?
	No, no, no, that's, yeah, that's just a section of the Great Reset, yeah.
	Yeah, because it's mentioned.
	Baby, Viv.
	We do talk a little bit more about that, yeah.
	You're the part of the, you're, you're brown, dog.
	The Great Reset is not a good place for you to hang out in, right?
	Yeah, no, I wouldn't go playing around in these theories if I looked like Vivek either.
	But here we are.
	Yeah!
	That's amazing to me, man.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And yeah, I liked a little bit at the end of that question, Russell just throwing in like social democracy, like, oh, yeah, which is the system that most of the world lives under that apparently tends towards totalitarianism.
	Why does that happen?
	And for deeper philosophical reasons, according to Vivek.
	And the thing is, like, I can't help but think that, like, you and I and Vivek and Russell would be coming at this same problem from very different directions.
	Like, I could discuss how social democracy leads towards totalitarianism through capitalism and oligarchy, right?
	You could make an argument from that direction, but I don't think that's the part that they're complaining about.
	I think they're complaining about regulations.
	I think that's what they're whining about.
	That's their version of totalitarianism.
	I don't like being told what I can and can't do.
	Yeah, the social democracy part agreeing that fascism is bad and all the steps towards fascism need to be heavily curtailed.
	That was a crazy fucking thing to say.
	Russell said a crazy thing and Vivek was like, yeah dog, I'm cruising, let's cook.
	That's also why I know all of these interviews are fake.
	All of these interviews are always fake, because if any, I think, regular person heard Russells tack that at the end, be like, I'm sorry, what?
	Like, you would- Because it was also like, just like a totally, like, it was such an addition.
	Like, okay, if nothing else, that's a different, it's not like, yeah, and like, that's why, that's why we know that they're improv and they're riffing because like, okay, those are two very different topics to address.
	Why would you say that at the end?
	Yes.
	You've been on mic your entire adult life.
	Control those intrusive thoughts, Russell.
	Or let's deal with them separately.
	Listen, I get it.
	I struggle as well.
	Maybe medication would help, Russ.
	Maybe a little bit.
	Maybe a little bit.
	Kind of behavioral therapy would keep those fucking intrusive thoughts in a little.
	You don't just inflict them on people.
	They're on your show!
	I think, like, a reasonable human being's response to that would be, I'm sorry, can we just unpack what you just said for a second?
	You know, that's what would be, let's just, let's approach this step by step, yeah.
	Totally.
	Yeah.
	And I do want to make it- You're like, wait, whoa!
	Two different things!
	Two different things!
	Yes.
	Hang on.
	Because I do want to make it crystal clear as well.
	Russell was at the start there saying that censorship in online spaces is more dangerous and a bigger threat than Project 2025 in a second Trump term.
	That's the argument he's trying to advance.
	Like, there's minimizing the whole thing, and then there's that.
	I'm like, holy fuck.
	Okay, sure, sure.
	You being demonetized on YouTube is the same scale of problem, is it, Russell?
	Fucking idiot.
	But he also can't engage with like most of what Project... he also doesn't say Project 2025.
	No, no, no.
	He just says 2025.
	He mostly says that, yeah.
	I think that's...
	Like, he just doesn't say the words that are inconvenient.
	I mean, gaslighting, but smart if you're a gaslighter.
	Okay, cool.
	He's practiced.
	He's very practiced.
	Yeah, I just don't want to pretend that these interviews are, like, because yeah, Vivek's got a book coming out, whatever.
	Like, either you're very concerned with public affairs and foreign, you know, like, foreign affairs and the news, or You're Jimmy Kimmel, and you're interviewing a person with a book.
	This is fluff.
	It sounds very dire and very grave because of what they're talking about, but it's just two dudes that want to make money riffing on a show and a book.
	That's it.
	He's on the couch with Carson.
	That's it.
	There's a part of me that blames Bill Maher for some of this.
	I mean, he can be blamed for a lot of things, I think, but yeah, in terms of crossing the streams in this specific way, I'm like, eh, this feels familiar.
	I don't like it.
	Well, I mean, that's a hoop dream of mine.
	It's incredibly common, right?
	What's interesting is when I listen to interviews, like, listen, people have a new book and they talk about it on It's an illuminating conversation that is seriously about the content of the book.
	and the research and they're very like it's an illuminating conversation that is like seriously about the content of the book.
	And it's weird that we find out much later in these conversations like, okay, well, your book that you just wrote, I'm talking about my media consumption.
	It's like, okay, well, you just did this research for five years and this is your degree and your graduate studies program.
	This is your area of expertise.
	It's like Naomi Klein or whatever.
	We're talking about something that's like, okay, this is your area of expertise.
	Here are your credentials.
	And we're going to talk about your specialization in this book.
	And to get people to want to learn more, we're going to do an overview.
	And I, the host, read the book.
	And I have questions I'd like to ask you as an expert on the subject matter of the book, not just a fucking fluffy cash-grab bullshit thing that someone's gonna buy you for Christmas that you don't want.
	Which that might happen too, but I don't think they're relying on that.
	I think they're relying on their book having value.
	So, the vague, like...
	We're not talking about Vivek's, but Vivek isn't like, I'm coming from a position where I am an expert on this one thing and this is why, this is the value I can bring to the public conversation about this topic.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	And it is remarkable.
	Like, they talk about the book at the very end, just a little bit, you know, and I'm like, this is strange.
	Okay, fine.
	Yeah.
	Dear, oh dear.
	Whole lot of nothing.
	Whole lot of nothing.
	We get a little more of Vivek's perspective on the causes of totalitarianism here in this next clip.
	So in the chapter in the book that I actually put the most factual layers of confirmation, reconfirmation, had people steel man it, red team it from every side, was this chapter.
	Because this is really the vehicle that they're using to create a global governance structure of totalitarianism, not even limited to the United States of America.
	Limiting the way that we live our lives, flogging ourselves for the modern way of life and the success of the West, while completely failing To apply those same shackles or standards to places like China.
	So anyway, back to your point.
	This is the vision of the Great Reset.
	You don't have to call it Project 2025 or Project 2050.
	They call it Klaus Schwab, and the World Economic Forum vision is to call it the Great Reset.
	The dissolving of barriers between the public sector and the private sector to accomplish what neither could on its own.
	The dissolving of boundaries between nations to combat shared global challenges that either nation could not combat on its own.
	You saw a bit of this in the rise of the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic, but that really just laid the groundwork.
	They lost the excuse once the virus had mostly dissipated, and they tried to cling on to it for as long as they could.
	But it really laid the groundwork for now doing that at a larger and more lasting scale via the impositional global climate change agenda.
	A couple facts there that I thought was actually just useful for people to wake up out of the lull that they lull you into.
	Why does social democracy lead to totalitarianism?
	Well, one of the answers is that people have an inherent nature in us, all of us do, to at times behave like sheep, right?
	In some sense, we want to bend the knee to something.
	It's part of human nature.
	But there's also a rebellious side of us that doesn't, but I think the reason that they're able to do it is they lull you into submission by appealing to the part of your human nature that wants to bend the knee, especially at a time when you don't believe in God or you see a recession of faith, which I do think is a deeper undercurrent in all of this.
	When you stop believing in true God, you start believing in false gods instead.
	That also greases the wheels and it's times in loss of faith in the recession of religion that you do see that trend from social democracy to totalitarianism accelerate.
	Okay, so it's secularism.
	That's what causes it.
	Not enough people getting with God, and so they treat the state as God.
	And then, you know, delve into totalitarianism for their own.
	And fuck me, I'd be bored of this narrative if it wasn't so inherently dangerous and full of shit.
	But obviously, Russell pirates this on a regular basis.
	Yeah, the Christians have had their chance.
	Yeah.
	For a long time.
	How are we not addressing that?
	It went badly.
	Yeah.
	Yes.
	It's not great.
	Famously badly.
	A lot.
	As for Klaus Schwab's actual book about the Great Reset and the things he was trying to suggest we as a world start to do, he does speak about a wealth tax and ending fossil fuel subsidies, but the scope of the book is huge.
	It covers technology, climate change, the future of work itself.
	International security, loads of shit.
	And it's difficult to see exactly what the Great Reset might mean in any kind of practical way, especially as it's only 280 pages.
	Like, it's not exactly a policy statement, it's very broad strokes.
	And that lack of clarity, combined with the plan being launched by the World Economic Forum, provided very fertile ground for all these shit-heel conspiracy theorists.
	And now people like Vivek can basically claim whatever they like about the Great Reset, because up to and including peddling in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, because the actual plan was too vague and then dramatically titled as well, which the WEF has since come out and gone, yeah, that went badly.
	They have admitted that.
	A point that I did not necessarily clarify earlier is the Great Reset and the Great Replacement.
	If you are talking to Russell's audience on Rumble, I'm gonna say, as an example.
	It's changeable.
	They hear the same thing.
	Yes, they do.
	Yes, they do.
	And I would add that these rich liberal fuckers are not intent on resetting anything either.
	That's a great idea that they know should happen and refuse to participate.
	Because yeah, we do need to change motherfucking everything.
	Yesterday.
	Systemic overhaul.
	And it's not happening.
	Because, yeah.
	Existential threat.
	Yes.
	I'm, okay.
	Yeah, yeah, no, it's absolutely crazy.
	Like, the idea that he's just standing there bald-faced and being like, countries cooperating with each other for a common good?
	That sounds terrible!
	What planet are you on?
	Like, what's wrong with you?
	Yeah, getting along and cooperating in any way is Wake Up Sheeple worthy?
	Jesus Christ.
	Yeah, right?
	Okay, so from here, Russell latches on to complaining about secularism and identity politics, because of course he does, before asking an actually insightful question.
	It can't be a coincidence that there is this sense of ongoing bewilderment, whether it's the inundation of continual information, mocking and extraordinary ceremonies, the continual attempt to nominate all of us, primarily as consumers, above all else, the individual, in an extraordinary way, there are some odd contradictions here, but to make the individual a kind of personal Deity.
	That myself and my identity is the apex.
	What I want.
	What I feel.
	That is by definition limiting your tribal, familial, national, religious identity.
	Preventing you from attaining a sense of transcendence.
	A sense of purpose derived from anything other than this is what I want.
	This is what I consume.
	This is who I have sex with.
	That should be the summit of how we regard ourselves.
	Listening to you Vivek, though, what seems interesting is that the pathway to this kind of globalism that requires to achieve its ultimate goals, a kind of nihilism that people don't believe in family or nation or individual or respect or God or these kind of values, it seems that the pathway, the tracks at least, may have been laying
	By economic and corporate requirement in in the attempt to create integrated free global free markets a type of a kind of infrastructure has been wrought and brought about meaning that people can trade and they can mine in this country and transport commodity here that it's just normalized that food is shipped around everywhere to have the availability of food and now what seems to be happening is having
	Having been created to facilitate the economic elites that are no longer as powerful as they once were because of the way that our economies have changed, the way that our culture has changed because of the advance of technology for but one thing, it seems that an ideology is being lacquered on top of this.
	Do you see that part of what has led us here has been the right to consume?
	The right to make money.
	Do you see that?
	Do you agree that in some way free market capitalism has led us to this point?
	Or do you think it's more complicated than that?
	And it's something to do with the state's relationship with certain aspects of capitalism.
	He's actually inside like...
	That's the Russell I know.
	That's the Russell I knew coming into this.
	That's what I'm used to hearing out of his big, dumb actor mouth.
	We should all consider where these people are coming from.
	But for real.
	Yeah, that last little bit.
	He will not be able to square this circle.
	He won't!
	And he's going to keep trying.
	I mean, he might be able to figure something out.
	I don't know.
	But, man, oh man.
	See, here's the thing, right?
	So credit where credit's due.
	That's a good question.
	Like, do you see that capitalism is what's brought us all to this point?
	You know, whichever side of the coin you're on, capitalism is what's brought us here.
	Like, were I to be generous, I could say Russell is asking a fairly hard-hitting and insightful question to Vivek.
	Were I to be less generous, I could say Russell knows Vivek is an aggressive free market capitalist and is fishing for good arguments in support of capitalism, specifically seeking a really good rebuttal that he can later use should he want to defend capitalism.
	It's difficult to ascribe intention.
	I'm not in his brain, but time will tell us one way or the other.
	But yeah, I thought very interesting that he's finally brought up capitalism.
	It's like, hey, maybe this is the problem.
	I mean, I think it's a pattern we've established very well that he's trying to like, he's trying to punch everybody up because it ain't working.
	The thing is, his profit's falling and he needs to find that new vein of ore to mine.
	Mm-hmm.
	Yep.
	I've done the Trump thing, done the God thing.
	I need something.
	I need something.
	The COVID thing.
	Yeah, that's not going to pay your bills anymore.
	Sorry.
	Yeah.
	No, no.
	He keeps trying.
	He keeps hitting on the COVID stuff every goddamn week.
	Because we still fucking have people dying from COVID here.
	People are sick all the time.
	It's crazy.
	The thing is, it shouldn't be able to be a talking point.
	Because it shouldn't be a talking point.
	We should have fucking handled it and fixed it.
	Now it's endemic to America.
	Oh, my God.
	The thing is, Russell, that's not what Russell says is happening.
	Oh, I know.
	I know.
	No, no, no.
	It's the vaccines killing everyone, according to him.
	Yeah, sure.
	I know.
	But the well should be dry.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	Ideally.
	Ideally.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	Absolutely fucking should.
	Oh dear.
	All right.
	So nonetheless, let's hear Vivek's answer and his defense of capitalism.
	And I will say it gets quite convoluted quite quickly.
	Well, I'm not an anti-capitalist in any sense.
	I'm a pro-capitalist, actually.
	I'm not anti-trade.
	I'm pro-trade.
	I don't believe in relying on adversaries like China for our modern way of life.
	But here's what I will observe, Russell.
	This is why, though most of my policies tend to be highly libertarian in nature, I don't limit myself to that label because I also care deeply about virtue.
	And I think that Virtue is upstream of capitalism.
	I don't think capitalism produces virtue.
	I think virtue is a precondition for capitalism to achieve a flourishing society.
	Give me your fucking credit card statements right now, Vivek.
	You don't rely on China.
	I can see your room you're in right now.
	Oh, let's fight.
	Oh man, what a crazy thing to say, living in America in the year of our lord 2024.
	Yeah, that point does tickle me because his company, Roivant, has two China-based subsidiaries called Cinevant and Citevant that are entirely focused on the Asian market for pharmaceuticals.
	Yeah, obviously!
	What are you doing?
	He's a globalista!
	Yeah, he's a globalist!
	He is.
	He's a Soros-funded big pharma globalist.
	That's exactly what he is.
	Yeah, so the crux of his point was that we need virtue in order for capitalism to work properly, right?
	And so what we're lacking right now is virtue, and that is why capitalism isn't working for the benefit of society, right?
	That's why capitalism is a bad thing right now.
	We're not virtuous enough.
	And I'll tell you what, let's hear what he thinks virtue is.
	Okay, and so this gets a little bit philosophical fast, but you asked it, so let's, you know, at least touch on it briefly.
	I believe that we can take different cracks at how we might describe virtue, right?
	The daylight, however small that crack of daylight may be, between what you want and what you need, okay?
	Let's just say if that daylight were zero, capitalism would be the perfect system for organizing a society's affairs.
	Not only the least imperfect system would be the perfect system, if what we really wanted as human beings matched what we really needed.
	To the extent that there's a delta between the two.
	There, I think actually is where you see the failures of capitalism.
	It wasn't a failure of capitalism.
	It was a failure of underlying virtue that was just amplified by, you know, and even exposed by capitalism.
	So it's not the system that I blame so much as the loss of that upstream virtue in the first place.
	How do we close that gap between what we want and what we need?
	It's grounding ourselves in the true things that come from outside of the world of capitalism or commerce and come from the revival of True faith, understanding our relationship, reconciling man's existence with his creator or supreme being.
	That's a difficult thing for one to reconcile.
	That is the ultimate pinnacle of the human experience in being able to do so, right?
	And that's the call of every major world religion in its own different way, attempting to answer that question.
	Grounding yourself in the family.
	Every one of us is brought into this world by two parents, mother and father.
	You know, you could say what you will.
	The nuclear family, I do believe, is still the greatest form of governance we have known to mankind.
	The decimation of the importance of that institution, I think, erodes that sense of identity that grounds us.
	Same thing with respect to the erosion of hard work or pride in what I create in the world.
	The erosion of national identity, that I'm not a citizen of this nation that I was once proud of, but I'm a nebulous citizen vaguely fighting climate change somewhere.
	Okay, so we've got to get with God, traditional family values, and protectionist nationalism, and through that we can finally start wanting what we need, rather than wanting other stuff, and so capitalism will then produce what it is we need, because we want it now, and the whole system will work properly and for the benefit of all.
	In other words, everyone needs to be a cishet Christian who loves America, goddammit, or the system of capitalism just doesn't work.
	Which then means, well, if you're not a cisgender heterosexual with a nuclear family or whatever else and you're not a Christian, you're the one fucking up the system and you're the problem.
	There are several points that I wish I was conducting this interview, because I'd be like, What does that look like to you?
	Yeah, it's like, wait, whoa, whoa.
	There are some things, like, I don't feel that way about every single, you know, like, the clips that we listen to on this show, right?
	But there, I'm just like, because I'm genuinely interested, much like I'm genuinely interested to know, like, what Russell thinks his ideal world actually fucking looks like.
	Like, what does that actually look like to you?
	And I think that legitimately, even, you know, like, the most milquetoast liberals who, you know, like, whatever, lukewarm, kind of like, Pussyfootin' around are still at least asking, I think, like, conservatives in America now is like, what does this deportation system look like to you today?
	Right?
	Like, we need to be asking these questions.
	Vivek, what does this world look like to you where the family does all the work and everything works great?
	What does that look like, like, genuinely?
	Like, stop.
	Tell me what that looks like.
	What is... and... I just...
	Because there's, dog, okay, all right.
	Oh my God.
	Inherently, capitalism prioritizes competition above everything else and disincentivizes, I don't know what his definition of virtue was, by the way.
	I have no idea.
	He did not outline it in any kind of clear way.
	He didn't outline any idea in a clear way.
	God.
	That's not an answer.
	God.
	Family values?
	Nationalism?
	Yeah, but that's just a different label.
	He did not explain... I don't think he... Well, he doesn't have to understand concepts.
	He is a buzzword man.
	He's like a buzzword magician.
	He just makes them appear and then doesn't have to explain.
	It's like, okay, what do you mean by that?
	What do you mean?
	Well, I'll tell you what.
	Virtue as morality is disincentivized under capitalism, and we all live it every day.
	How is that not blatantly obvious?
	And the excuse that communism or socialism, like, oh, and paperwork's really great, but in practice, it's kind of bad.
	Okay, can we say that about capitalism?
	Because, same.
	Except one system has a way more effective extortive control mechanism than the other.
	I don't think capitalism looks great on paper, either.
	I agree.
	Well, I mean, in theory, and what they argue is like, oh, well, anything bad is they're not going to get money, so it's not going to be a problem.
	Right, yeah.
	The market will sort it out.
	Toddler economics, which by the way, has also dictated how our country's run for almost like fucking many, many decades at this point, is a fucking toddler's idea that they probably would even not stick to for more than a day.
	Like truly, it's so fucking baby brain.
	There's so many things that he says, I'm like, whoa, what?
	But we don't pause.
	And also, we're not going to get the answer anyway.
	So it is what it is.
	Yeah, yeah.
	There's so many things.
	Well, we'll let Vivek expand a little bit more because he has a metaphor here to drive his point home.
	We're like blind bats lost in a cave, right?
	We're blind in some moral sense of the word.
	We send out these signals through echolocation or sonar that bounce off a wall and it comes back and tells us, this is where I am.
	That's what my religion does.
	That's what my family does.
	That's what my belief in my nation does.
	These are grounding pillars that help us relocate our identity in that cave.
	And I think that right now, I mean, I think I'm probably inadvertently drawing from Plato here.
	We're lost in that cave, sending out these signals and then nothing actually bounces back.
	So I don't blame capitalism for that.
	Could it exacerbate it?
	Could the amplification of modern digitized social media amplified capitalism exacerbate that?
	Yes, but that is the symptom, not the deeper root cause.
	And the reason I don't call myself just a libertarian is all we want is the state getting out of our affairs.
	Well then what then?
	What do we do then?
	That matters to me too.
	I think that we require preconditions of virtue to actually flourish.
	But let's do the hard work of reviving those virtues, reviving those grounding institutions and beliefs that are precedent conditions for capitalism.
	But then we don't need to complain about the fact that, okay, some guy has more green pieces of paper than the others.
	So what?
	It wasn't an important part of our grounding identity in the first place, and we wouldn't have been so susceptible to allow our base human instincts to respond to that in the way that we do if we were sufficiently well-grounded and based in our own principles in the first place.
	So, a little bit abstract and philosophical there.
	Okay, so we weren't Christian enough to begin with, which is where it all went wrong, and also we need Christian traditional values to be everywhere, ubiquitous, before libertarianism can work either.
	Because, well, we don't just want to take government out of everything and hand it to potentially the atheists.
	Those will start having orgies and things.
	No, no, no.
	We need to make sure everyone is a cishet Christian first and then both capitalism and libertarianism can work.
	Because then we're all on the same page with our traditional Christian values.
	And again, if you're not a cishet Christian, you're fucking the system up and it's your fault that none of it works.
	Right?
	It's not capitalism's fault.
	Don't blame capitalism.
	That's on you.
	Right?
	God damn.
	Well, but that, I mean, but also poor, I mean, poor, like there's so many other qualifiers.
	Fill in the blank, yeah, yeah.
	But that's the thing is, like, the qualifiers are people that are down the line that don't think that they're going to be next on the chopping block, including Vivek!
	Buddy!
	And Tulsi, right?
	Yeah, right?
	You are cordwood to be tossed on the pyre to these people.
	My patience is wearing extremely fucking thin listening to rich sociopaths or comfortable sociopaths telling me how much they struggle with morality that's totally fine for most of us.
	Totally fucking fine for most of us.
	I get that By dint of you being so rich, something's fucking broken in you to get you in this position.
	But it's crazy that they're the same conversations over and over.
	I have such a hard time conceiving of a world where people want to cooperate and care for each other because I, not a cell in my body has that thought.
	I just want to take from everyone until I have to go to sleep and then I wake up and all I want to do is take again.
	That's not everybody.
	That's you.
	That's you.
	I don't care.
	You need to work your shit out and quit projecting that on everyone else, which is typical fucking sociopath behavior.
	So virtue is what?
	Christianity?
	Seriously, do they not know about governing for hundreds and hundreds of years all over the world, really?
	There's been a shot almost everywhere.
	Well, apparently it was never Christian enough or like traditional values enough, you know, which didn't do it hard enough the first time.
	So you need to, you know, and that's what led us to this point.
	So we needed to use all the rules in the book, right?
	All the rules in the Bible are how we govern.
	He doesn't elaborate, unfortunately.
	I would love to know that answer as well.
	I'd be like, which specific kind?
	Because there are lots of different versions of this.
	Yeah.
	Is it the, if you beat your slave and he doesn't die in three days, then it's fine?
	Or is it the, if your eye causes you to sin and offend God, then you pluck it out?
	Which rule?
	Which rules are we keeping?
	Which rules are we throwing away?
	Yeah.
	Is that complicated?
	Which interpretation are we going to run with?
	Because I feel like that's been an argument in America for some time now.
	I think it's not that cut and dry.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I think it's a little more complex.
	Just that cooperation could really solve.
	Uh-huh.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	All right.
	So we've got one more clip here.
	And Vivek pivots to talking at length about his new book, finally, which I have not read, before speaking about his presidential campaign a little bit and fucking off the show.
	If you write with anything like the insight with which you communicate, and if you're half as articulate, it will be a fantastic book indeed.
	Truths, the Future of America First, Vivek Ramaswamy's book is out now.
	There's a link in the description and maybe we can get a few of them Vivek to give away on the basis of some competition.
	It's certainly a book I'll be interested to read.
	On the point of the campaign, I remember seeing you at different junctures, very near the beginning, full of ebullience and enthusiasm.
	Oh, you never looked anything less than, I'm not saying you were diminished, but I remember seeing you one day in a flight jacket, and I feel like there was a lot of Nikki Haley stuff going on, and I felt like, wow, this looks like a real odyssey that you've gone on.
	You know, like the stuff you've said about CIA, media.
	It was an odyssey.
	It was eye-opening.
	It's one of those things that you could never learn it from a book.
	You could never learn it from somebody else telling you about it.
	You're only going to learn it by doing it.
	A million lessons, a humbling process in many ways, and one that I learned an immense amount from.
	I was the youngest person ever to run for U.S.
	President, certainly as a Republican.
	I know that for a fact.
	And you know what?
	As a young person, I couldn't have taken more away from an experience than I did from that one.
	Campaigning is hard.
	Cool.
	Cheers.
	Yeah, so Vivek was the youngest person to ever run for president as a Republican.
	That's a fun fact.
	Or it would be if it was true.
	Harold Stassen, who ran in 1944, was a Republican slightly younger than Vivek when he ran at 36.
	Vivek was 37 when he began.
	And 38 now.
	Also, these are specifically people who have made it to the Republican primaries rather than just people running.
	I'm pretty sure there's a 20 year old somewhere who ran for president on the basis of changing the age requirement, I'm sure.
	A non-zero amount of American cities elect dogs as mayors.
	I think there's a lot of leeway.
	I mean, look, there's no rule in basketball that says, you know, um, and, and like, also like there's going to be plenty of 35 year olds out there.
	Oh, I'm not mad, by the way.
	No, no, no.
	I'm fine with it.
	Um, dog for president.
	Sure.
	Let's do it.
	Um, there's, there's plenty of 35 year olds out there who I'm sure have been like writing candidates for president or whatever else.
	I'm, I'm pretty sure he's just, he's saying stuff, but it's, it's just a little piece of Vivek's mythology he likes to throw out there, which is never fact checked.
	Like, I was googling this, and all I could find were articles about LeVaque just mentioning in passing that he was the youngest Republican, the youngest candidate for president ever, and I was like, no, he's fucking not!
	And you've got, like, ABC News, like, repeating the bullshit.
	I'm like, come on!
	Well, that's the slick shit that's, like, that's what's slick, is if you say enough Silly, like, fake things that, in and of themselves, on their own, are just not worth arguing about.
	Especially if you're, like, ABC News has bigger fish to fry.
	They shouldn't repeat it.
	That's stupid.
	But also, like, okay, girl, fine.
	I'm reading your press release.
	But if you add up enough of those things, the problem gets exponentially larger.
	Because you're a liar who lies, and you don't care about lying.
	But, I mean, you know, libel and slander and all that, but it's a balance to fight these tiny little battles and win the war, and if you're not pushing back, what?
	Yeah, exactly.
	And what happened with his last book, for instance, Woke Incorporated, was that it was completely full of falsehoods, but because they were ones that no one was necessarily going to sue him for, they just went completely unchecked.
	The publisher did not fact check them, and unfortunately a lot of people consider the non-fiction section of a library to mean fact.
	They consider non-fiction to mean fact, and they are not the same thing.
	But that is the interpretation in a lot of places, and so that's just like...
	I've not read any reviews of his new book yet.
	I couldn't find any because it is kind of brand spanking new.
	What was it?
	Truth and the Future of... Oh, whatever.
	Yeah, whatever.
	Cash Grab Incorporated?
	I don't know.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, but like, I'm expecting very much the same thing from that, of like, you know, this is not gonna, this is gonna be unmitigated, un-fact-checked shit, and I'll be expecting the same from the TV show as well.
	You know, there are, yeah, there are concerns.
	I'll keep everyone posted if I get around to reading the book, because I'm sure that's gonna be an adventure, but oh boy, oh boy.
	Well, he's picked his lane anyway.
	He's going down the pundit road for now.
	That's what I was curious about was like, where is he going?
	Like what is he's obviously gunning very hard for something.
	I don't know.
	He's very TV coded.
	So I just kind of assumed that like the run was for TV.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Is more reliable than trying to get a job in Trump's, safer than getting a job in Trump's cabinet.
	Cause that's, that's the two things, right?
	It's like, okay, I want a job in their government.
	And so I'm going to keep, and especially with the ass kissing and all of that and the myth-making, but I mean, he's, he's TV coded, but that just could, I mean, listen, uh, a token, As a cudgel, can go really far.
	Yeah.
	I think that he... But at the same time, there is that... The token isn't there because they like him.
	He's there as a tool to be used, and tools get used up.
	That's the thing, is if you are being used in your position rather than genuinely being given a seat at the table and being welcomed and Included and your experiences being considered and included in the party platform, we'll say.
	If you're just a token, they are there to use you, use you up and throw you away.
	So he has a lot more.
	I mean, yeah, there's a lot more, I think, wiggle room and popularity contesting that can happen on TV because he has trouble over it.
	I think a lot more kind of It's a lot more sustainable, I think, you know?
	That's what I'm saying, yeah.
	Yeah, there's a lot more risk that a political career would flame out pretty quickly, whereas with TV, I mean, he can carry on and he can come back to the politics if he ever wants to, you know?
	Or maybe he'll be making enough money where he never has to and doesn't give a shit.
	He'll do a tucker and be like, well, I've got more influence here, so I'm going to carry on doing this terrible thing.
	He has so much money.
	He just would never have to do anything ever again.
	No, he doesn't have to.
	He could just be on a beach in a hammock with a tiki drink somewhere, and instead he wants to do this.
	That's a broken person.
	Yeah.
	He's got a lot of fucking money.
	Do you know what I mean?
	Yes.
	He's not regular.
	Even Russell, to maintain the kind of ... Russell obviously craves fame, and that's where he's coming from.
	Mm-hmm.
	That is what fucking baffles me with these VC, the Peter Thiel types.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	You got more money than God.
	Or Elon Musk.
	This clearly is a black hole in your soul that will suck the whole universe into it if left to your own devices, which is the state of affairs in America now, is your devices are fine.
	All your devices are actually that we've tax-incentivized all of your worst instincts.
	For the record, you know, I have said before, Russell is among the 0.01 richest percent of people in the world.
	But Vivek is just shy of, I think he might actually be by now, of being a billionaire.
	Right.
	Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
	It's like, there's still like, it is an impossible amount of money.
	Yeah.
	You could just never, like you, your children, In the bits of the world that are left.
	You would never have to make a post on social media ever again.
	That's one of those things that this weekend, seeing friends, they really revel in not having to post on Instagram.
	And it hurts my feelings every time.
	Yeah, yeah, that's fair.
	But I'm proud of all of you and I'm so thankful that you don't have to do it.
	Imagine, you never have to tweet.
	That means this guy tweets insane shit all day every day for the fun of it.
	Yeah, so, like, the thing about wealth breaking your brain is a really interesting thing, like, it would be interesting to point, to kind of pin down exactly what it is, because I wonder if it's just like, at a certain amount of wealth, you can pretty much do anything and get away with it, like, within a few kind of lines, but like... As we're seeing with the Diddy stuff that's coming out horrifyingly right now!
	Exactly, exactly.
	It's a chicken or egg, though!
	Right?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Because, like, he was also, like, really fucked up.
	Like, he was a fucked up person to begin with.
	But then, like, the money plus boredom really knows no bounds.
	And, like, that's such a bad thing to do.
	Like, such a bad thing to do to everybody.
	A series of bad things to do.
	Yeah.
	I mean, this is amazing.
	Because, like, I'm interested that they didn't talk more about the assassination attempt.
	I don't know if they did or not.
	That's funny because Vivek was like on the shortlist of the most recent shooters like Fan girl.
	Like, he was like, it was like, I think it was like Tulsa.
	It's funny because like, especially like the New York Post and everything was coming out.
	It was like, liberal Democrat tries to shoot Trump again.
	And like, he's into like, and then you actually go and see even what the most sensational headline was reporting.
	It's like big fan of Tulsi Gabbard, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, and oh, also used to be a Trump supporter.
	Ooh.
	And I'm sure he says a lot of things.
	I'm sure that guy had a lot of thoughts.
	I'm sure.
	One of them was not, leave your phone at home.
	I'm sorry, maybe the attempt was a bit unserious.
	A lot of them are.
	A lot of them are.
	What a great point that you made, by the way.
	Yeah, a lot of them are.
	A lot of them really are.
	There could be 15 of these dudes a week, but we don't know about it as much because TikTok is a thing now.
	So what are we doing?
	The first one, when Trump was first president in 2017, fascinates me because it was a guy who stole a forklift truck and his plan was to tip over the limo that Trump was in with the forklift truck and that would theoretically kill Trump.
	That's a gold medal for creativity.
	The best part, however.
	You live your Killdozer fantasy, baby.
	But obviously it wouldn't kill him, it's an armoured fucking vehicle.
	But obviously the best part... Spill his drink!
	Yeah sure, he wouldn't be happy about it.
	He'd be very upset.
	The best part is that the guy was obviously caught, he stole this forklift truck and he was caught by the Secret Service.
	Because they're slow!
	They're slow.
	And he gave up this information voluntarily.
	They just thought that he was just trying to steal a forklift truck for his own purposes.
	They didn't know that he was trying to attack Donald Trump with it.
	And the guy gave up the information voluntarily and was like, nah, I was trying to kill the president.
	And then they gave him 20 years.
	It's almost like the thoughts aren't super real.
	No, exactly.
	This guy's clearly not well.
	And the Secret Service, because he picked the wrong, not his neighbor, but the president, the Secret Service is like, you shouldn't have told me that.
	Now I'm going to throw you away.
	For 20 years.
	I'm so sorry you were having a bad, bad one.
	Yeah, you're clearly having some kind of break, you know, and just, I mean, the thought process is, I'm gonna kill the president via forklift anyway.
	With a forklift?
	It's delightful if it wasn't so sad.
	Oh dear, poor guy.
	Poor guy.
	But yeah.
	It's a comic book I'd read.
	Yeah, right?
	Oh, dear.
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	Phyllis Schlafly's still dead.
	Bye!
	Yes!
	That's not win-win-win.
	That's lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie.

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