Part Of The Problem - Dave Smith - "YOUR WELCOME" To Tyranny
Aired: 2020-04-09
Duration: 01:05:41


=== Religious Outlooks and Political Trolls (10:47) ===

[00:00:00]  Fill her up!
[00:00:02]  You are listening to the Gash Digital Network.
[00:00:08]  We need to roll back the state.
[00:00:10]  We spy on all of our own citizens.
[00:00:12]  Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
[00:00:15]  If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
[00:00:21]  Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
[00:00:26]  You're listening to the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
[00:00:30]  Cheers your host, James Smith.
[00:00:34]  Hello, hello.
[00:00:35]  What's up, everybody?
[00:00:36]  Let this be all of our welcomes.
[00:00:40]  It's another in the series of crossover episodes that we've been doing, putting them out on part of the problem and your welcome with me and my good friend Michael Malice.
[00:00:50]  And for people who don't know, me and Mike were talking, and we decided that we thought it would be like a cool idea for us to do several of these podcasts and kind of put them out on each other's shows.
[00:01:06]  In many ways, just to kind of keep some semblance of normalcy and let people see kind of friends hanging out.
[00:01:12]  And I thought maybe it would be good for everybody's mental health.
[00:01:15]  I think us included, you know, as much for us as it is for you guys, the viewers and listeners.
[00:01:21]  And so here we are with another one.
[00:01:23]  And it's always good to talk to you.
[00:01:25]  Michael Malice, how are you, sir?
[00:01:27]  I'm great, Dave.
[00:01:28]  Thank you.
[00:01:30]  So I was thinking of you earlier today.
[00:01:32]  I just saw this video and I saw it because Pete Quinonas posted it on Facebook.
[00:01:39]  Pete Mance raider Raymond Quinonas posted Donald Trump.
[00:01:45]  Did you see him at the press briefing asking the doctor if we'll ever be allowed to let the terrible media in again?
[00:01:53]  If you haven't seen this video, it was the funniest troll I've ever seen.
[00:01:56]  I just retweeted it.
[00:01:57]  Yeah, Ashley St. Clair posted it.
[00:01:58]  Yeah.
[00:01:59]  Oh my God.
[00:02:00]  Just when it was a great example of when Michael will post, we don't deserve him and just some great Donald Trump moment.
[00:02:07]  He's just like, you know, doctor, let me ask you, we have much less of the terrible, awful press in here.
[00:02:13]  And there's a lot of them who are furious.
[00:02:14]  They're just these terrible, furious people.
[00:02:16]  Will we ever get these awful people back in here?
[00:02:19]  And he's saying it with a straight face.
[00:02:21]  And to the point that Attorney General Barr just starts dying.
[00:02:25]  Like he can't, he's literally up there with the president of the United States during a global pandemic.
[00:02:32]  And he can't keep a straight face.
[00:02:34]  And it's just, it was just this amazing, ridiculous, absurd, Trumpian moment, like a true Trumpian moment that nobody else could create.
[00:02:44]  And I thought of the best troll that I know, Michael Malis.
[00:02:48]  I will take that as a huge compliment.
[00:02:52]  I think like five people tagged me like within minutes within that.
[00:02:56]  And one of the things I was talking about, I did a live stream yesterday, is how what I love about you and I and many other people who swim in our circles is how we can effortlessly go from talking about like dick jokes to like Aristotle.
[00:03:12]  What that spoke to, I was doing a live stream yesterday, is why I love the philosopher Albert Camus.
[00:03:19]  If people haven't read him, they're two nonfiction books of his are The Rebel and the Myth of Sisyphus.
[00:03:24]  And he's described often as an existentialist.
[00:03:27]  He hated that label.
[00:03:29]  He regarded his philosophy as absurdism.
[00:03:31]  And a big key element of this is finding that life has no inherent meaning, right?
[00:03:39]  And that doesn't mean like, oh, I'm going to kill myself.
[00:03:41]  It's like, all right, it's ridiculous.
[00:03:43]  Go with it, right?
[00:03:44]  So it makes me, I feel bad for, like, there's plenty of reasons to think Trump's an asshole and a putz.
[00:03:51]  But if you don't have the space to look at that one minute moment and be like, and absurdity, as you well know, is such an important element to many types of humor.
[00:04:03]  If you can't see the humor in this absurd situation that you have these reporters and you have this, you know, very distinguished doctor, older woman, and the president, just matter of fact, is just talking shit like a high schooler.
[00:04:18]  And knowingly, if you can't find the joy in this, this is something that I think you're really missing out on.
[00:04:26]  Yeah, I've, you know, it's been really interesting to watch since the beginning of Trump as a political figure, how much that quality infuriates people.
[00:04:38]  I mean, it drives them absolutely mad.
[00:04:42]  In the corporate press, all over the place, this is the, it's like the dignity of the office and Donald Trump isn't being presidential.
[00:04:50]  And why?
[00:04:51]  And it will be things like a silly joke.
[00:04:53]  And there's no, none of them ever have a real answer as to why that's such a problem.
[00:04:59]  Why is it such a problem to troll a little bit or crack a joke?
[00:05:03]  And just in the same way that me and you will go back and forth from being very silly and insincere to being very serious and sincere.
[00:05:13]  And it doesn't seem to be a problem to me.
[00:05:15]  Like it's very easy to tell.
[00:05:17]  Like with somebody like you, I mean, you can kind of like, I could see one of your like troll tweets and then see you talking about North Korea.
[00:05:24]  And it's not as if I go like, well, I don't know which is which.
[00:05:27]  It's so obvious when you're being sincere and when you're not.
[00:05:30]  And, but there's something about that that drives people crazy.
[00:05:34]  And they, even they, I think, can't exactly explain why.
[00:05:37]  There, a lot of times I'll have followers who will tweet something and it'll be so amazingly spot on.
[00:05:44]  I'm like, yoink, I am stealing this.
[00:05:47]  And there was one recently and to my credit, I am too pompous to bother remembering their names.
[00:05:54]  So I apologize, but in all seriousness, I don't remember the guy's name, but he tweeted out this great observation where he said cathedral operatives speak from a position of authority despite not being in one.
[00:06:03]  And it's like, look, how are you, Vox reporter, in a bigger position to define what being presidential means than the literal president?
[00:06:14]  Now, this speaks to the play, and I'm going to go Aristotle.
[00:06:18]  This speaks to the Plato-Aristotle divide, right?
[00:06:20]  Philosophical idealism is something that's very hard for us to grasp for people who don't hold it, or it's also hard to say explicitly because it's so absurd, is that ideas are more real than reality.
[00:06:33]  And you see this in religion where heaven's real and this is a kind of a secondary world, right?
[00:06:38]  And in their concept, there's two ways to look at what's presidential: A, look at all the presidents, figure out what they did, and be like, all right, make deductions.
[00:06:47]  Okay, they did this, they're warmongers, they're male, whatever, right?
[00:06:52]  Or you could have some idea that you made up based on whatever, and then you can seriously say with a straight face, no, it's all the presidents who are wrong.
[00:07:02]  And when you put it, and you see this, people say rhino, they say Mitt Romney is a rhino, Republican name only.
[00:07:08]  John McCain is a rhino, he's a Republican name only.
[00:07:11]  It's like, he's the nominee of the party.
[00:07:13]  Like if you have to say, what's a good way, a litmus test for figuring out the definition, definition of Republican, the presidential candidate defines the party, literally.
[00:07:26]  So this is the same kind of thing.
[00:07:27]  It's like, well, the president needs to be this, this, and this.
[00:07:30]  It's like, what are you basing this on?
[00:07:32]  Just your, what you want.
[00:07:36]  But again, they often confuse what they want with what reality needs to be.
[00:07:40]  And this speaks to their kind of religious outlook.
[00:07:43]  And it really is essentially the same as a religious belief, like you said, with the belief in heaven or the Platonic belief in forms or whatever it was that he would call it.
[00:07:54]  It's just, I don't know, it's a myth that you just kind of like.
[00:07:58]  And so you believe in it without any evidence to back it up.
[00:08:02]  I've actually heard some right-wingers say that they go, the problem with the Republican Party is that it's all dominated by rhinos.
[00:08:11]  And you're like, well, I mean, if the whole party is rhinos, doesn't that kind of make them the Republicans?
[00:08:18]  I mean, why can't you just say you don't like Republicans?
[00:08:20]  Because this is what they are.
[00:08:22]  But I've, you know, I've made the comparison many times on the show, and I'm not the only anarchist to ever do this.
[00:08:29]  I'm far from taking credit for it.
[00:08:31]  But the idea of government as religion.
[00:08:34]  And there really are striking similarities between the belief in a state and the belief in, you know, pick a religion, starting from the fact that the state doesn't exist, that it's just an idea that we've made up.
[00:08:50]  There is no such thing literally, physically, as the state.
[00:08:53]  It's just a collective, commonly held belief that doesn't actually exist in reality, to the fact that there are all, there's like the priest classes and the nobility and the different classes, to the fact that there are the rituals like voting and press conferences and state of the unions, to the fact that there's blasphemy.
[00:09:15]  There are things you're not allowed to say and things that you're not.
[00:09:18]  And just like with, you know, religious blasphemy, you're not allowed to kind of question certain things and you're not.
[00:09:25]  And it seems like a lot of people, a lot of statists, which is a broad word that describes pretty much everybody except me and you and 25 other people, but a lot of them, without realizing, really do have these religious fundamentalist views.
[00:09:42]  We played a clip on the show, it might have been last year at some point, of Brooke Baldinger, is that her name?
[00:09:50]  From CNN, she's one of the CNN anchors.
[00:09:53]  And she was saying something, oh man, about the sacred, that Donald Trump has disrespected the sacred oval office or something like that.
[00:10:01]  And I'm like, wow, you just said it.
[00:10:02]  Like you just, you don't even realize this is an admission, but you're literally referring to this as a sacred office.
[00:10:08]  And so there's something about the part of this religion is that the president gets up there and they do this a lot and they say, my fellow Americans and blah, blah, blah.
[00:10:17]  And when Trump just doesn't do that and is just like trolling and making the whole thing look like a fucking joke, they really, really hate that.
[00:10:27]  And something you just said actually speaks to one of these little, you know how like the thing with there's good people on both sides, which is like a lie and they just keep saying it over and over.
[00:10:36]  There's, I'm going to go hipster and go a little old school.
[00:10:39]  There's in Margaret Thatcher quote that they bring out all the time and they beat it to death.
[00:10:43]  And it's exactly what you were saying because she had said at one point, there's no such thing as society.

=== Asymptomatic Fears in China (08:21) ===

[00:10:48]  And they're like, oh, blah, blah, blah.
[00:10:49]  She's saying, eat children.
[00:10:51]  And it's like, no, what she's saying is the next sentence, you know, that's why it's not even extrapolating.
[00:10:56]  It's like she literally it's the next sentence that, and you've been told this many times, you don't care because you want to make a caricature out of her is it's it's us.
[00:11:04]  She said, there's no thing as society.
[00:11:06]  It's us.
[00:11:06]  It's you and me.
[00:11:07]  It's our neighbors, right?
[00:11:08]  Just like the government does not exist independently of the FBI and the, you know, ATF and all these other things.
[00:11:14]  Society isn't some monster that you can't see that's floating around.
[00:11:18]  When people say society needs to do something, they mean who?
[00:11:22]  You?
[00:11:23]  The doctors, the FDA, the hospitals.
[00:11:26]  It's not some independent entity that exists without reference to its individual components.
[00:11:32]  So that is something that they, at this point, I don't even know what's going through their heads, but they'll trot that one out.
[00:11:38]  So if ever they trot that out, just throw it in their face.
[00:11:40]  Yeah.
[00:11:41]  I've been thinking a lot lately, as I'm sure all of us have, about the craziness of this moment and whether or not this is going to be good or bad for anarchists and people who are really opposed to state power, because you can see it going in either direction, really.
[00:12:02]  I mean, obviously, when people are scared, they turn to the government.
[00:12:06]  And you see a lot of that.
[00:12:09]  And when there's a crisis, government tends to take more and more power.
[00:12:13]  And we see a lot of that going on.
[00:12:15]  And of course, when government is completely in control of all of the responses to an emergency, it leads a lot of people to the assumption that maybe is the thing that anarchists have to battle against the most, which is like, okay, so government's in control of the response to this.
[00:12:36]  So what are you saying?
[00:12:37]  You want no response to this?
[00:12:39]  I mean, without the government, that means nobody's doing anything because all I see is the government doing something.
[00:12:43]  So I mean, it may not be perfect, but you take that away, we got nothing, you know?
[00:12:47]  So there's an obvious challenge for anarchists there.
[00:12:49]  However, on the flip side, you could also see it going in the other direction because all of the evidence coming out is just one example after another of how badly the government botched this whole thing.
[00:13:01]  And obviously, a lot of people see through the, well, the encroachment on liberties and also just the naked bailouts of the corporatism is on display in a way that it's never been before.
[00:13:14]  But I was thinking about recently, over the last couple of days particularly, and it was because it was really brought on by the fact that I saw in Switzerland, they so in Switzerland, they've tested a larger percentage of their population than anywhere else.
[00:13:30]  Did all the tests come back neutral?
[00:13:33]  If only.
[00:13:34]  If only.
[00:13:35]  What the fuck does this mean?
[00:13:36]  She goes, I can't really say I have it.
[00:13:38]  I don't have it.
[00:13:39]  I'd like to just stay out of this whole thing.
[00:13:41]  You're like, this is the test result?
[00:13:44]  Every one of them.
[00:13:44]  Yeah.
[00:13:46]  So Switzerland has tested about 5% of their population, which is way, way, way more than anybody else.
[00:13:54]  I think for comparison, I believe America is at something like 0.3 or something.
[00:13:58]  It's very, very low.
[00:14:00]  So Switzerland tested 5% of their people.
[00:14:02]  And from their tests, 50% of the people who tested positive for COVID-19 were asymptomatic.
[00:14:10]  Now, this doesn't mean that this isn't necessarily conclusive.
[00:14:14]  This wasn't a random sample, but it says something.
[00:14:20]  And if that's the case, that 50% of people, give or take, are asymptomatic, it seems like it's going to be impossible to control this thing, no matter what we do.
[00:14:30]  No matter what we do, everyone's going to end up getting it eventually.
[00:14:33]  It's just too many asymptomatic people who can spread this thing walking around.
[00:14:37]  And if that's the case, we're quite possibly going to look at a situation where all of these government shutdowns didn't do anything to help.
[00:14:46]  And if that's the case, this is a lot of ifs, but if that is the case, it is possible that the government just put 30 million people out of work for nothing.
[00:14:56]  Well, there's a couple of ways to, a couple of points I want to make on this is one is in terms of I'm going to give you the bad negative look and then the positive look.
[00:15:05]  The negative look is if we look at World War I and World and the New Deal, World War I basically was the corporatist dream where you have DC for the first time having an excuse to take over the entire country and every aspect of it.
[00:15:19]  And the people swallowed that pill happily at a certain point.
[00:15:23]  And this was great for the people at the nation, the new Republican and so on and so forth.
[00:15:27]  Now, this wasn't necessarily their goal about getting us into World War I, despite what maybe some like NCAPs might think.
[00:15:34]  But they were like, hey, we're here.
[00:15:36]  We might as well take advantage of the situation.
[00:15:38]  So then later, like 10, 15 years later, when FDR is like, all right, we're doing this again, the people went through it.
[00:15:44]  So it's a lot scarier the second time you get in a fight than the first time, right?
[00:15:49]  That's the negative perspective.
[00:15:50]  The positive perspective is, I think you don't have the state without the media constantly conditioning the populace that this is normal and acceptable.
[00:16:02]  And if you don't like it, you're bad and so on and so forth.
[00:16:05]  And I think we are seeing very, very quickly an escalation of absolute contempt and distrust from the citizenry towards the corporate press because their antics are, I mean, even for them, they're completely unable to change their tune.
[00:16:23]  Eric Erickson, who I don't think either of us are huge particularly fans of, I don't got beef with him one way or another, a red state guy, you know, big conservative.
[00:16:31]  He had someone put a cross on his lawn, like one of his family members, and he put Christmas lights on it, you know, to give people hope.
[00:16:38]  And Newsweek had an article about Eric Erickson has what appears to be a burning cross on his lawn.
[00:16:42]  And they got nuked.
[00:16:44]  And it's like, let's pretend he did, right?
[00:16:47]  Like, this is your priority that some asshole has a burning.
[00:16:52]  First of all, let's forget the historical fact that the Klan put the burning crosses on other people's lawns.
[00:16:57]  They were anonymous.
[00:16:58]  They were symbols of terrorism, meaning like, if you don't get out of town, we're going to kill you and your family.
[00:17:02]  It's not like some kind of lapel pin where like, hell yeah, I'm in the Klan.
[00:17:06]  They were hoods.
[00:17:07]  And second, like, if your concern during these days is about, AOC had this other tweet.
[00:17:12]  She goes, this is disproportionately hurting brown and black communities.
[00:17:16]  And I tweeted back at her, and I hate hitting on her because it's such a boomer thing.
[00:17:19]  I go, what about yellow communities?
[00:17:21]  Like, they cared about anti-Asian racism for five minutes was Trump was calling it China virus.
[00:17:25]  But if there's any community that's being hit the hardest, it's China.
[00:17:29]  This is very known.
[00:17:31]  Not only what they had to deal with beforehand under the Chinese government, but I'm sure what they're cracking down over there and they're not telling us about is something horrendous and possibly necessary.
[00:17:40]  He even knows under these situations.
[00:17:41]  So that's two kind of different ways to look at things.
[00:17:46]  The other thing we have to appreciate is, you know, we're going to be hearing months about what a strong leader is Biden is and how great what he's doing is compared to Trump.
[00:17:56]  And people are even like, why are you talking about Biden right now at all?
[00:18:00]  And second, like, they're going to be looking at him like, you can say a lot of great things about Joe Biden.
[00:18:04]  He's normal compared to Trump.
[00:18:06]  You know, he's experienced.
[00:18:08]  You know, he's not a radical, blah, blah, blah.
[00:18:11]  You're not going to sit here and tell me that this guy's all there and this is some kind of, you know, weird Ronald Reagan or Wilsonian world leader type who's like bringing the country together.
[00:18:21]  So these are two kind of, again, big possibilities of how things can go.
[00:18:27]  And yeah, I mean, the anarchist question, I get that a lot too.
[00:18:29]  And it's like, no matter what system you have on earth, whether it's totalitarian China, even that's a totalian, but China to us or Italy or UK, at a certain point, ideology breaks down and it just becomes a factor of, okay, what do we need to do to mitigate these deaths?
[00:18:46]  And the other concern, what you're saying, I was talking about this yesterday on the blaze.
[00:18:50]  And this is something that's very, very scary.
[00:18:52]  I talked about it in Nightshade as well.
[00:18:54]  I'm very worried about, is if 50% of people have it and asymptomatic, at a certain point, politicians and businessmen and women are going to have to ask themselves, all right, it's going to be all the way around us.

=== Heshy Socks and Unemployment Rates (02:42) ===

[00:19:09]  You know, weak people, you know, who are immunocompromised or elderly people are going to be susceptible.
[00:19:14]  How much death are we willing to put up with in order to restart the economy?
[00:19:19]  And you can't avoid that question.
[00:19:21]  Right now, the question has been asked and they're saying, we're not dealing with that.
[00:19:25]  Why minimize the death?
[00:19:26]  Fuck the economy.
[00:19:27]  But as time changes, that pack list gets much more tricky.
[00:19:31]  And that's a really very dark and disturbing question.
[00:19:34]  So that transition back is something I don't think that's being discussed that much anymore.
[00:19:40]  And again, viruses are really good at surviving.
[00:19:45]  So I think you and I talked about this.
[00:19:47]  You know, there's some doctors who said, look, this thing's going to go to the southern hemisphere and then come back here in the cold weather.
[00:19:52]  And it's like, yeah, what do we do then?
[00:19:56]  I don't know.
[00:19:56]  And I don't think anyone knows.
[00:19:58]  At the same time, it's possible at a certain point they will have it treatable.
[00:20:02]  So, you know, instead of having 10% of people die within a week, whatever the number is, it'll be 1% of people are really, really sick for a year.
[00:20:09]  That still becomes a function of calculus and making those tough choices.
[00:20:13]  Yeah.
[00:20:14]  And as we're starting to get a little bit more, oh, by the way, I literally just realizing I got that.
[00:20:19]  It wasn't Switzerland.
[00:20:20]  It was Iceland.
[00:20:21]  Iceland.
[00:20:22]  Okay, well, they're a very small population.
[00:20:23]  It's like 300,000 or something.
[00:20:24]  Yes, that's right.
[00:20:25]  So it was a small, so it's a small, you know, a group of people.
[00:20:31]  It allowed for your solid Switzerland joke to get in there.
[00:20:34]  So it all worked out.
[00:20:34]  All right, guys, let's take a quick second and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is, of course, Heshy Socks.
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=== Life Ruining Job Losses (08:49) ===

[00:21:52]  Anyway, there is, you know, we're starting to figure out, at least to some degree, the economic cost of what shutting all of this down has been.
[00:22:02]  And there's been around 10 million people so far who have filed for unemployment insurance.
[00:22:08]  Now, I was saying this on my last podcast, but this is worth repeating, that it's important to keep in mind, once again, I'm sorry for being repetitive, but there's three different numbers here, right?
[00:22:19]  There is, and people confuse these numbers a lot, so it's just important to clear them up.
[00:22:24]  There is number of people filing for unemployment insurance.
[00:22:27]  Then there is the unemployment rate.
[00:22:30]  Then there is real unemployment, okay?
[00:22:33]  Each one has to be bigger than the last one by the nature of what they are.
[00:22:36]  So filing for unemployment insurance is just people who are saying that.
[00:22:41]  Now, these aren't people who get it, but they're filing for it.
[00:22:43]  So these are people who theoretically have paid into unemployment insurance, qualify for unemployment insurance.
[00:22:49]  Then there's the unemployment rate, which is as they figure that out through government surveys where they ask people who are looking for jobs.
[00:22:57]  And then there's real unemployment because the unemployment rate that you see all the time used in the media doesn't take into account people who have dropped out of the workforce and aren't looking for work.
[00:23:06]  It also doesn't take into account people who had, you know, under the table jobs and lost those jobs.
[00:23:11]  So the real unemployment number is always much, much bigger.
[00:23:14]  We're just talking about the smallest of the numbers.
[00:23:17]  The people applying for unemployment insurance is 10 million already.
[00:23:21]  The New York Times, they estimated that the unemployment due to the coronavirus is probably close to 20 million at this point.
[00:23:31]  And that's just at this point.
[00:23:32]  It's probably around 20 million people who have lost their jobs.
[00:23:37]  That is a potentially life, you know, altering, life-ruining.
[00:23:42]  It's one of, you know, psychologists have determined it's one of the worst things that can happen to you is losing your job.
[00:23:48]  I mean, imagine having dependents and losing your job.
[00:23:51]  This is very serious.
[00:23:53]  And knowing there's no hope whatsoever of even getting an interview.
[00:23:56]  I mean, let alone another job.
[00:23:57]  It's just literally there's no possible zero possibility, number one.
[00:24:01]  Number two is we have never experienced, to my knowledge, or at least that I can think of, entire industries being destroyed.
[00:24:08]  Like we talk about manufacturing going overseas.
[00:24:11]  There's always been manufacturing.
[00:24:12]  It was just lessened to a large extent.
[00:24:14]  But restaurants are shut down by law in New York.
[00:24:18]  And they're going to be like, they're going to be, I mean, that is really a great vector for disease spreading, any kind of close physical proximity.
[00:24:26]  So what happens when an entire industry is eliminated?
[00:24:31]  I don't know what that looks like.
[00:24:32]  And I don't think anyone does.
[00:24:34]  It sure ain't pretty.
[00:24:36]  What happens to all that real estate that those restaurants occupy?
[00:24:39]  I mean, these, these are, these are really, and you know perfectly well that the president and every governor and every mayor is asking themselves these questions and everyone's just shrugging their shoulders.
[00:24:51]  And there's, I mean, the problem with trade-offs is, you know, like playing the game, would you rather?
[00:24:57]  It's not like, man, these two choices are great.
[00:24:59]  It's like, you know, they really both suck.
[00:25:02]  And the other thing is you don't know, even if you made the so-called right choice, that it is the right choice because it's going to suck no matter what you choose.
[00:25:10]  Yeah.
[00:25:10]  No, and that's, that's the situation we're dealing with.
[00:25:13]  And it is, it does seem like we're seeing since we made this choice, it's like the scene versus the unseen.
[00:25:19]  We're starting to see what really sucks about this choice.
[00:25:22]  Now, it's not clear that it wasn't the right choice still.
[00:25:26]  You know, it's a, we don't know exactly what the trade-offs would be, but we know that this is getting really, really bad.
[00:25:31]  And it's not something it's very easy for people, particularly people who don't understand economics, to just be like, well, well, what are you talking about?
[00:25:43]  We're talking about the human cost versus the economic cost.
[00:25:47]  I mean, what is economics?
[00:25:48]  You're talking about numbers on the stock market.
[00:25:50]  I mean, who cares about that?
[00:25:52]  But what people don't realize is that the economy, you know, much like Margaret Thatcher's quote about society, the economy is us.
[00:25:58]  That's what it is.
[00:25:59]  The economy is people.
[00:26:02]  That's all it is.
[00:26:03]  It's people mixing the human action with natural resources for specific ends.
[00:26:10]  And usually those ends are to improve their life in some way.
[00:26:13]  So you're talking about ruining lives.
[00:26:15]  I think in their minds, they look at wages as basically a video game.
[00:26:22]  And if you do a good job, you've earned a certain amount of points.
[00:26:26]  And it's kind of like, what do you mean this person doesn't deserve a living wage?
[00:26:30]  They did their job.
[00:26:31]  They should have this many points and go on to the next level.
[00:26:34]  So the concept of, well, you know, where's the money getting produced to pay all these people?
[00:26:39]  It doesn't really just print it.
[00:26:40]  It doesn't really, or like, don't hoard it.
[00:26:42]  And it's like, that's not the, it's like, where's the value that is being used to, if you want to use money to pay that farmer for his time or what, or these other things, you know, because then you have to allocate it.
[00:26:53]  You know, that farmer is rather going to spend it to the people who pay him than the person who's starving.
[00:26:58]  So it's at the same, I don't know.
[00:27:01]  So I don't know where this is going to go.
[00:27:04]  Like you said, and I am quite obviously concerned.
[00:27:08]  My friend works at Macmillan.
[00:27:09]  You know, I was working on my next book proposal.
[00:27:12]  They had already layoffs.
[00:27:14]  Everyone, everyone, major publisher getting a pay cut.
[00:27:18]  The president's not taking a salary for the whole year.
[00:27:21]  I mean, I'm sure that's not going to be much discretely relevant in terms of their bottom line, but that is telling.
[00:27:27]  And now I know I'm probably going to do my next book through self-publishing or Kickstarter like I did with Dear Reader, because this is, I can't get a book deal.
[00:27:35]  And I'm not saying this like, oh, poor little me, but what I'm saying is this is an immediate, profound consequence for me in terms of my life and how I'm approaching my career.
[00:27:45]  And if I'm feeling it this quickly, this severely, I can't imagine what it's like for someone who's marginally a member of the workforce, maybe who doesn't have their papers, you know, maybe who's making minimum wage, you know, who is regarded as in some case, you know, replaceable, even though I certainly am.
[00:28:02]  And it's like, yeah, now there's like you were saying, millions of other people just like you trying to get that job and no one's looking.
[00:28:10]  It's insane.
[00:28:12]  And I heard Joe Rogan making this point the other day.
[00:28:16]  And I thought there was really something to it where he was saying, it's got to be psychologically, it's got to be even harder than if you screw up in some way and get fired or you screw up in some way and something bad happens in your life.
[00:28:30]  I think that might be a little bit easier to swallow psychologically because you can at least know ass shit.
[00:28:35]  I shouldn't have done this.
[00:28:36]  This is what I did wrong.
[00:28:37]  This is what I can do in the future to prevent this from happening.
[00:28:40]  But when it's just this outside force, I disagree.
[00:28:43]  Oh, that's interesting.
[00:28:44]  I look at the other way.
[00:28:46]  Really?
[00:28:46]  For me, if I'm fired because something I did, I feel enormous guilt.
[00:28:51]  I'm like, holy shit, I blew it.
[00:28:52]  Every time I'm unemployed, I could be, I could be at that job.
[00:28:55]  If it wasn't just screw up, that would really get to me a lot more.
[00:28:59]  What about, I see what you're saying.
[00:29:00]  No, what I think about it is that at least you can, you can learn from it and grow from it to some degree.
[00:29:06]  Whereas when it's something like this, there's no like, oh, I should have done this or I could have done this.
[00:29:10]  It's just kind of a helpless power.
[00:29:13]  Oh, yeah.
[00:29:13]  So, so I get your point too.
[00:29:15]  No, but you're right too.
[00:29:16]  That sense of existential, like I have no control over my life.
[00:29:20]  That is extremely correlated to extreme depression and extreme anxiety.
[00:29:25]  That's the definition I would say of extreme depression is a complete sense of powerlessness.
[00:29:29]  Right.
[00:29:29]  And a rational, in this case, sense of hopelessness.
[00:29:33]  There is no hope you're getting a job for that person.
[00:29:36]  It's hard to not think about, as we've been talking about from since we've been doing these crossover shows, it's just hard to not think about the kind of mental health implications from all of this, because really what you're saying is that you're telling people to self-isolate and forcing them to lose their jobs.
[00:29:54]  And could you think of two things that you could do other than going around and shooting everybody's parents or something like that?
[00:30:00]  And by the way, a lot of parents are dying from this.
[00:30:03]  But I mean, could you think of like a recipe for more like, you know, to push people into a dark place than saying, you know, we're going to make a lot of you lose your jobs and you have to stay inside and be isolated.
[00:30:16]  It's geez.
[00:30:17]  I just had this tweet right before we started recording and I'm going to repeat it here for people who don't follow me on Twitter who have lives and better things to do.
[00:30:24]  Is if you are someone who's suffering from mental health or suicidal ideation, take a second.
[00:30:30]  You'll just take a second right now while you're in like your right mind and write a note to your future self when your thinking is going to be disordered and write down what you need to tell that person so he doesn't do something stupid or crazy.

=== Ridge Wallets for Minimalists (02:54) ===

[00:30:42]  And step, that's number one.
[00:30:44]  Number two is I have a few people like this and I'm not someone who's suffering with this, but I said, talk to that person and say, I promise you, if things get really bad, doesn't be suicidal, but just really, really bad.
[00:30:57]  I will call you for a spot if I'm in a really bad way because there's no strength in just white knuckling it.
[00:31:04]  It's unnecessary.
[00:31:05]  And that person will be like, okay, I promise you I'll call and I won't.
[00:31:08]  And the other thing is, and if you don't have a person, write down that suicide hotline number on that piece of paper where you're giving yourself the pep talk and you'll know, okay, I know I'm not thinking clearly.
[00:31:20]  I know this is a message from my past self when I was thinking clearly.
[00:31:23]  This doesn't emotionally feel a lot right, but logically I know it's it's the right thing to do.
[00:31:28]  So I'm going to listen to what I told myself.
[00:31:30]  And this really is a good mechanism in general.
[00:31:33]  I think for a lot, if you are dealing with these issues, take steps because you know it's going to come up again.
[00:31:38]  It's just like with a regimen, right?
[00:31:40]  If you're someone who has problems maintaining how they eat, take steps the next time you have that craving or whatever it is, you're a trigger and be like, all right, I know next time I want to have that.
[00:31:53]  I have the willpower at the moment because willpower is a very, very finite resource.
[00:31:58]  Yeah, no, absolutely.
[00:32:00]  I think that's excellent advice.
[00:32:02]  All right, guys, let's take a quick second and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Ridge, the makers of the Ridge wallet, as well as a bunch of other really cool products.
[00:32:12]  You've probably heard me talk about it before.
[00:32:13]  The Ridge wallet is awesome.
[00:32:15]  You got to ditch that old traditional wallet that your grandfather gave you where you're carrying around a bunch of receipts from the 80s and gift cards with no money left on them for no reason, and you're throwing your spine out of alignment.
[00:32:27]  And it also just doesn't look cool.
[00:32:29]  You know what does look cool?
[00:32:30]  The Ridge wallet.
[00:32:31]  It's sleek.
[00:32:32]  It's a minimalist front pocket wallet.
[00:32:34]  It just holds your cards and your cash and it's awesome.
[00:32:37]  Also, it's much easier to clean than one of those old leather wallets.
[00:32:41]  And I know that people care about that particularly right now.
[00:32:43]  And I have a feeling going forward, people are going to care about that.
[00:32:46]  Real easy to wipe down with a Lysol wipe and get any would-be Chinese viruses right off of that thing.
[00:32:53]  So if you go to Ridge.com, you can take a look at the Ridge wallet.
[00:32:57]  And they also have a bunch of other really cool products.
[00:32:59]  The Ridge wallet has 30,000 five-star reviews.
[00:33:02]  It's just simply a better way to carry your cash and cards.
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[00:33:25]  Once again, ridge.com slash P-O-T-P, promo code P-O-T-P for 10% off the Ridge wallet with free worldwide shipping and returns.
[00:33:35]  All right, let's get back into the show.

=== Corrupt Politics and Song Lyrics (15:00) ===

[00:33:36]  All right, I wanted to talk a little bit about what you mentioned, you touched on earlier, because I've actually, it's not just that AOC was tweeting this out.
[00:33:45]  I saw on, what is it, ABC Nightly News, I think they were doing a whole thing about how this is disproportionately affecting minority communities.
[00:33:53]  In Cuomo's speech today, he had a whole segment about how this is disproportionately affecting minority communities, and that's going to require more investment in the African-American community or whatever.
[00:34:05]  Do you have any initial thoughts?
[00:34:06]  I mean, I thought your point about the disproportionately affecting the Chinese community was pretty spot on.
[00:34:12]  But it does seem to me that it's like the classic left-wing mistake of like, oh, if there's a disproportionate outcome, well, the only answer to this is racism.
[00:34:21]  And we can't even look at other things like, well, don't African Americans disproportionately live in cities?
[00:34:27]  Couldn't that be a pretty big factor in this?
[00:34:29]  Disproportionately poor and poverty is always going to hurt poor people more than health issues are going to.
[00:34:34]  Right.
[00:34:34]  It's, I mean, this might be a great thing.
[00:34:37]  If we just tell the coronavirus it's racist, then it'll be canceled and then we'll have to deal with it, right?
[00:34:44]  In 2020, like even the coronavirus is like, well, no, I didn't, I didn't mean to disproportionately affect black people.
[00:34:49]  Well, oh man, this is so awkward.
[00:34:50]  Oh, God.
[00:34:51]  I didn't disproportionately mean to offend the, to affect the blacks.
[00:34:55]  I mean, African Americans, oh, God.
[00:34:56]  Oh, Jesus Christ.
[00:34:57]  Oh, man.
[00:34:59]  He's got to go stop by HR.
[00:35:01]  Right.
[00:35:01]  Yeah.
[00:35:02]  So it's, I mean, but again, this is their basis of their worldview, just like for the conservatives, the constitution is the basis for their worldview.
[00:35:10]  So they're going to see everything through that lens.
[00:35:12]  My point is people who aren't that interested in politics or people who are more independent, when they see this, I can only imagine their eyes are going to roll and they're going to be like, okay, this is not the time or the place to be worried about proportionality.
[00:35:26]  The disproportionate is age.
[00:35:28]  Like, if you're going to talk about a community, it's the senior citizens who are by far the most disproportionately affected.
[00:35:34]  So let's actually, if you're going to play that card, it's the ageism.
[00:35:39]  The right prejudice is ageism.
[00:35:41]  It always is.
[00:35:42]  Yeah.
[00:35:43]  If you guess anything else, you're wrong.
[00:35:45]  Good lord.
[00:35:46]  Yeah, I agree with you on that.
[00:35:48]  And it just, it just felt kind of like, I felt the same way.
[00:35:53]  And this will transition into the next thing that I want to talk about.
[00:35:55]  But I remember thinking it was actually, and I've been somewhat kind to Bernie Sanders over the last few months, kinder than I usually am.
[00:36:06]  And a big part of that is because I, you know, as much as I may hate, you know, Bernie Sanders' economics, I hate the Democratic establishment far, far more and the Republican establishment, which are basically the same thing.
[00:36:21]  And I liked that he was shaking things up and getting people scared.
[00:36:26]  And I just, there's something about that I liked, much like I liked it with Donald Trump in 2016.
[00:36:33]  But I remember just thinking it was so cringy at the last debate between Biden and Bernie Sanders.
[00:36:40]  And it was right after the virus had really hit and there was no audience and it was that in-studio debate.
[00:36:45]  And he was basically just talking about how this coronavirus lets you know that we need Medicare for all and that inequality is a big problem.
[00:36:53]  And you're just like, talk about not being able to adjust to the facts on the ground and just forcing everything into your preconceived notions already and like not even being able to take like it just oh, it was so terrible.
[00:37:08]  But that's that's what you know talking about racism from these Democrats seems like to me.
[00:37:13]  It's like, can you just not make this about what your thing already was?
[00:37:17]  Which I'm sure I'm guilty of to some degree too, but I hope to be a little bit better about it than them.
[00:37:22]  I am shocked that they didn't try to shoehorn global warming into this somehow.
[00:37:29]  Because that you would think that is something that's global.
[00:37:31]  That's something that's environmental, just like this is environmental.
[00:37:34]  That would be a much more organic fit.
[00:37:37]  And they didn't.
[00:37:38]  So I'm like, all right, I don't know how they missed that one, but Greta Thunberg is now has been.
[00:37:45]  So that means she's either home right now, twitching more, twitching less, but it's some change in the world.
[00:37:51]  I am very worried about her making a comeback because I do think that that is the next logical progression of this.
[00:37:59]  I think that after this whole thing is over, it'll be much easier now that the precedent has been set for some Democrat to say, well, you know, we responded to the coronavirus as a real emergency, but you know, guess what's a much bigger emergency?
[00:38:13]  I mean, in 12 years, every single thing is going to be dead.
[00:38:16]  So doesn't this really justify shutting down the economy?
[00:38:20]  You know what?
[00:38:21]  Why I think that won't happen?
[00:38:22]  Because I don't think that's Biden's song.
[00:38:25]  And they're going to start singing Biden's song.
[00:38:27]  Or if you start singing that song, it's going to come off as forced.
[00:38:30]  And let me also hear, let me argue against myself now and agree with you about what I just said.
[00:38:35]  I think one of the things that's very different about the coronavirus and one of the reasons why you're seeing a real serious response to the coronavirus, whereas you don't to other things, you know, like, you know, there's lots of problems in the country all the time that you don't see.
[00:38:55]  I mean, look at like the gang violence.
[00:38:58]  Look at drug overdoses, drug addiction.
[00:39:01]  I mean, hundreds of thousands of people every year are addicted to drugs.
[00:39:04]  Close to 100,000 people a year die from drug overdoses.
[00:39:08]  It's a real, real problem.
[00:39:10]  Oh, yeah.
[00:39:10]  But you know, that really doesn't affect the elites.
[00:39:14]  I mean, there are some elites every now and then who OD from drugs, but generally speaking, if there's crime in Chicago, it doesn't really have anything to do with the elites.
[00:39:23]  It doesn't affect people in the corporate press, people at universities, people in government.
[00:39:27]  This, on the other hand, can very much hurt people in privileged, powerful positions.
[00:39:34]  And so all of a sudden, it's like, oh, no, this is a real threat.
[00:39:37]  And I think as much as they talk about climate change, you can kind of, as you pointed out many times, you can deduce from their actions that they don't really think it's as big of a threat as they claim.
[00:39:47]  I mean, you were the one who pointed out, I remember years ago, and I think you said this on your first Rogan appearance.
[00:39:53]  Yes, correct.
[00:39:54]  That, you know, I mean, it's like, if you really think the world's going to end in 12 years, then why the hell are you talking about anything else?
[00:40:00]  I mean, who the hell talks about anything else?
[00:40:01]  Like, if I saw, if there was a meteor that's about to hit Earth, I wouldn't be like, okay, I have three major issues, tax policy, healthcare, immigration, and the meteor that's about to hit Earth.
[00:40:13]  Those are my four big issues right now.
[00:40:14]  It would probably be like, forget everything.
[00:40:18]  Let's focus on this meteor.
[00:40:19]  And if you're not doing that, I don't think you really see a meteor on its way to Earth.
[00:40:23]  Yeah, it's so I think we're in for a very interesting near term.
[00:40:30]  It'll be cool to see how Biden does unplay this.
[00:40:34]  That's a very real concern, though, that, you know, like that you're making it make a good point that they're like, all right, we did the dry run.
[00:40:41]  And now we have, you know, grounds to make sure that we don't have to do through this again vis-a-vis global warming.
[00:40:46]  Yeah.
[00:40:47]  And that's what they would want.
[00:40:48]  The ratchet effect is something that we all need to be concerned with.
[00:40:52]  Anyway, so I wanted to, what I was leading into to talk about, because this was the big news from today on the political side, is that Bernie Sanders officially dropped out of the race.
[00:41:03]  He threw in the towel.
[00:41:05]  I don't know.
[00:41:05]  I didn't see if he officially endorsed Joe Biden yet, but obviously that's coming and he'll, you know, he'll be campaigning for him.
[00:41:12]  And I couldn't help but think that was somewhat significant.
[00:41:15]  The Bernie Sanders, you know, had a big moment in 2016.
[00:41:19]  I think he had an even bigger moment in 2020.
[00:41:22]  And it looked for a little while like he was going to be the nominee.
[00:41:26]  And part of that was his momentum.
[00:41:28]  And part of that was Joe Biden's senility, quite frankly.
[00:41:32]  I mean, the two together, it just seemed like Bernie Sanders might be impossible to stop.
[00:41:37]  They threw Mike Bloomberg out there for a little bit, and that just completely fell flat.
[00:41:41]  And now he's gone.
[00:41:43]  And I don't know.
[00:41:44]  I was wondering what your thoughts about that were or what your thoughts on his campaign were.
[00:41:50]  I thought it's more impressive in many ways that Biden got the nomination in 2020 and the Democrats that Trump got in 2016.
[00:41:57]  To have a campaign that was on its face this much of a disaster in Iowa, to have a campaign this much of a disaster in New Hampshire.
[00:42:05]  Bernie was ahead in every state on Super Tuesday poll, except for one, and Minnesota, which is Klobuchar.
[00:42:13]  So to have both Klobuchar and Buttigeg drop out the day before and endorsed the day before, and to have all the voters throughout the country get the message that this means that Biden's our guy.
[00:42:25]  And they actually went in there and pulled the lever for him is a really huge accomplishment by the Democratic Party and by the corporate press who really made Bernie radioactive very quickly and very effectively.
[00:42:37]  So I'm shocked, but I can't imagine there isn't an enormous amount of buyer's remorse.
[00:42:47]  You know, like Obama is our first black president.
[00:42:49]  Hillary is the first female president.
[00:42:51]  These would have been big accomplishments.
[00:42:53]  Defeating Donald Trump, that would have been, we're going to put a stake in this vampire and kill the deplorables in the Republican Party once and for all, right?
[00:43:00]  And we're going to laugh about it for the next eight years.
[00:43:03]  Ha ha, there'll never be another Republican president.
[00:43:05]  That was what they were saying.
[00:43:06]  Biden is not that guy.
[00:43:09]  I see very little enthusiasm among for Biden, among the left on Twitter.
[00:43:15]  And if a lot of people are extremely enthusiastic about being anti-Trump, but those people were the Bernie people or maybe the Warren people, but they're not the moderates who are like, hell yeah, you know, they're the ones who are foaming at the mouth.
[00:43:30]  So it's going to be interesting to see who he picks as his VP.
[00:43:34]  That's that that was trending today on Twitter.
[00:43:36]  I tweeted out that it'd be very smart for President Trump to start talking about how great Kristen Sinema is, the Arizona senator, and how she'd be a wonderful running mate, because she'd be a perfect pick.
[00:43:47]  But if he praises her, and since Trump's Hitler, you have to do the opposite, that might be enough to keep him from picking her on the ticket because she'd probably bring over Arizona, which is huge.
[00:43:57]  And she is very attractive to moderates.
[00:44:01]  Yeah, there's, you know, the establishment, it has seen, it seems like over the last few years, it's had a lot of trouble adjusting to the kind of populist era that we live in.
[00:44:13]  And it seems like they're really slow.
[00:44:16]  They're very removed and very in their own bubble, and it's very hard.
[00:44:19]  And I really would not be surprised if he picks Kamala Harris because that is kind of the traditional establishment thing to do.
[00:44:29]  Well, she's a woman.
[00:44:30]  She's a woman of color.
[00:44:31]  She's a senator.
[00:44:32]  She's one of us.
[00:44:33]  Let's pick her.
[00:44:34]  And I think that'll be a really bad move for Joe Biden if he does.
[00:44:38]  I kind of hope he does because I mean, as was evidenced by her presidential campaign, even with the big push that she got behind her.
[00:44:48]  Anyway, what's interesting to me about the Biden phenomenon was that it seemed, and this is kind of where I got things wrong, is that it seemed to me that obviously all across the board, trust in the corporate press is way down and there's polling with the left.
[00:45:05]  Isn't it up with the left?
[00:45:07]  Well, I don't really.
[00:45:08]  Well, I don't know, but the overall number I know is even in the Democratic primary, you had, they didn't love, the corporate press didn't love Joe Biden.
[00:45:19]  They weren't in love with him from the beginning.
[00:45:20]  They really, really liked Beto O'Rourke for a period of time.
[00:45:24]  They really, really liked Kamala Harris for a period of time.
[00:45:27]  They really, really liked Elizabeth Warren for a period of time.
[00:45:31]  And all of them, no matter how much the corporate press was like, this is our guy or woman, they just fell flat on their faces.
[00:45:38]  And the voters were like, nope, sorry, you're not selling me on this.
[00:45:42]  And so I kind of thought, I go, you know, all the media attacking Bernie Sanders, this is just going to solidify him even more, just the same way it did with Trump.
[00:45:50]  And I think what I underestimated was just the fact that amongst the Republican base, there was far more hostility to the corporate press than there is in the Democratic Party.
[00:46:00]  And I think, and this is true because even, you know, your, you know, Fox News watching father's generation, they hated the liberal media and the biased media.
[00:46:11]  They've always hated what they call the lamestream media or whatever.
[00:46:15]  Like they've always, and you just didn't have this same animosity from the Democratic base.
[00:46:22]  And you're right.
[00:46:23]  It really was an amazing thing that Joe Biden and the corporate press pulled off together in getting Bernie Sanders out of there.
[00:46:29]  And then the other factor, which I've been saying from the very beginning, is that I just don't really buy that Bernie Sanders actually wanted to be president.
[00:46:35]  I don't buy it.
[00:46:37]  He doesn't run.
[00:46:38]  To me, Bernie Sanders, this was, I've been saying this from the beginning of the race.
[00:46:42]  This was his race to win.
[00:46:43]  It was his race to win.
[00:46:45]  If Bernie Sanders had a Trumpian spirit about him, if he wanted to actually roll up his sleeves and fight to get this thing, I think he gets this nomination easy.
[00:46:54]  But he was never really willing to fight for it.
[00:46:56]  He was never really willing to call out Joe Biden for being corrupt.
[00:47:01]  And in fact, when pressed, he would go out of his way to say, no, no, no, he's not corrupt.
[00:47:04]  But he would say he is corrupt by the subtext.
[00:47:07]  So it would be like he would say things like he would go, well, you know, Joe Biden's got billionaires donating to his campaign.
[00:47:13]  And when billionaires donate to your campaign, what do you think?
[00:47:16]  They're doing that for nothing.
[00:47:17]  This means that you're going to govern for the billionaires.
[00:47:19]  And they'd be like, so are you calling Joe Biden corrupt?
[00:47:21]  He goes, no, Joe's a very honest guy.
[00:47:23]  I would never call him corrupt.
[00:47:24]  You're like, but you just said he was corrupt.
[00:47:26]  Like you can't have both of those things.
[00:47:29]  And so he would do, look, if Bernie Sanders had started, I just, I run the counterfactual.
[00:47:33]  I used to do the same thing with the Rand Paul campaign of just being like, I think Rand Paul could have made it a two-way race between him and Trump.
[00:47:40]  I don't know that he would have won, but I think he clearly, he definitely could have been the Ted Cruz of that election.
[00:47:45]  I mean, if Rand Paul had stood up at the very beginning of 2016 and his first debate answer, instead of being the stupid Donald Trump won't even pledge to support the Republican nominee, no matter who it is, if Rand Paul had stood up there and been like, look, there are really only two choices on this stage, which is me and Donald Trump.
[00:48:04]  Do you think anybody is going to vote for Jeb Bush?
[00:48:08]  Your last name is Bush.
[00:48:10]  You will never be president of the United States because your brother was in there and he was the worst disaster we've had in the history of our nation.
[00:48:17]  They go, listen, I don't care.
[00:48:18]  Donald Trump might say he's the outsider, but he's a billionaire from New York who's friends with the Clintons.
[00:48:24]  I'm a Paul.
[00:48:25]  Here's what we're going to do.
[00:48:26]  We're going to end every last one of these wars.
[00:48:28]  We're going to end the war on drugs and we're going to let nonviolent criminals out of prison.
[00:48:32]  We are going to finally audit and end the Fed, which is robbing every American of their wealth.

=== Iraq Mistakes and Tulsi Endorsements (14:42) ===

[00:48:37]  Like if he had put forward a campaign like this, he would have been in the year of the outsider, he would have at least gotten 15, 20% of the vote.
[00:48:45]  I mean, he would have had a real moment, but he didn't.
[00:48:48]  And he fucking sat on his balls and sucked.
[00:48:51]  If Bernie Sanders had started 2016 by being like, listen, this is my year and my party.
[00:48:58]  The entire party has moved to me.
[00:49:00]  I was out in 2016 giving a principled message and the DNC rigged it against me to give it to Hillary Clinton.
[00:49:07]  And look what she did.
[00:49:08]  She went and lost to Donald Trump.
[00:49:11]  The DNC is responsible for Donald Trump being president.
[00:49:14]  This is our year.
[00:49:15]  We're doing Medicare for all.
[00:49:17]  We're raising the minimum wage.
[00:49:18]  We're doing all of these things.
[00:49:20]  Get behind me.
[00:49:21]  Let's go.
[00:49:21]  I think it's his nomination.
[00:49:23]  He just didn't have that in him.
[00:49:24]  That's a great, great point.
[00:49:26]  And you could see that when people do talk in those terms in either party, it really gets the bases motivated.
[00:49:33]  And those bases are the ones who are knocking on doors.
[00:49:36]  They're the ones who are getting out the vote, especially in caucus states.
[00:49:38]  Wow.
[00:49:38]  I didn't think about it in those terms, but that's a great analysis.
[00:49:42]  Yeah, that's interesting.
[00:49:44]  I thought it was Bernie's.
[00:49:45]  It was Bernie's to win the whole time.
[00:49:46]  And I got to say, I question, you know, it's possible that it's just not in his character.
[00:49:51]  Like he just doesn't have that in him, which is, you know, one thing.
[00:49:55]  But I also just kind of wonder, I wonder when you have a guy in Bernie Sanders who, you know, makes like $3 million in a year and he maximizes, he itemizes his deductions to maximize the, to pay as little as you possibly can in your income tax.
[00:50:13]  You get down to like 13% income tax and then he gives away like another 2% to charity.
[00:50:18]  So he's giving away like 15% of his income and he's making millions.
[00:50:22]  And I just go, do you really believe this horseshit?
[00:50:25]  Like, do you really, I mean, if you really morally believed that somebody in this situation should be giving 70% of their money away to the less fortunate, maybe you would do that.
[00:50:35]  And if you don't, I just kind of wonder, are you on some level full of shit?
[00:50:40]  And not everyone, and there's a misconception I think people have, not every con man has to be going, moho-ha-ha, I'm a con man.
[00:50:48]  I want to con you.
[00:50:49]  You can kind of buy your own bullshit, but really be a hypocrite.
[00:50:52]  You know what I mean?
[00:50:53]  And I wonder if Bernie Sanders wasn't just kind of like, I'll have my little moment.
[00:50:57]  I'll be a hero.
[00:50:58]  I'll go write a book, make a few more million dollars and go kind of live out the rest of my life.
[00:51:04]  Here's a piece of data.
[00:51:06]  I don't know how to work with that because Tulsi, Tulsi's, Tulsi's brother, Tulsi Gabbard's brother, he posted on Facebook that she tried to endorse him and basically they wouldn't return her call this year.
[00:51:20]  Right.
[00:51:20]  Really?
[00:51:21]  Yeah.
[00:51:22]  So if what you were saying is true, and that actually makes more sense now that I think about all the data, that makes a lot of sense because he did have a lot more fight in him.
[00:51:30]  And I'm sure he had advisors in his ear.
[00:51:33]  If you look at his surrogates who've been on the TV talking head circuit, a lot of them are very aggressive.
[00:51:38]  And I don't mean that in a negative way.
[00:51:39]  They're very like, all right, here we go.
[00:51:41]  This is a revolution.
[00:51:42]  This is our chance to fix this country.
[00:51:43]  What have you done?
[00:51:44]  We've gotten Trump.
[00:51:45]  We have to grab that wheel and turn in the complete opposite direction.
[00:51:48]  This is a nightmare.
[00:51:51]  But I mean, on the one hand, yeah, sure, she's been made radioactive to some extent, but I'm still surprised that he wouldn't even just take an endorsement from her at this late date.
[00:52:02]  And this is right before she endorsed Biden.
[00:52:04]  And if he did really want, didn't really want to be president, then I think he would take the support.
[00:52:09]  Maybe.
[00:52:09]  I don't know.
[00:52:10]  It's hard to get inside his head.
[00:52:12]  Yeah.
[00:52:12]  Tulsi Gabbard endorsing Joe Biden to me was just also like, I think she flushed her future.
[00:52:19]  I think she flushed her position down the toilet.
[00:52:21]  It really is like, it's just like, I'm sorry, you can sit there and like have your moment where you attack Kamala Harris for putting people in jail for marijuana, and then you're going to turn around and endorse the guy who wrote the bill.
[00:52:37]  I got to disagree with my about my girl Tulsi.
[00:52:40]  I knew you would.
[00:52:41]  She promised to support the nominee.
[00:52:43]  And if you look at those two things you talked about, which had a bigger impact on the electorate and the election results, right?
[00:52:51]  The first one was major.
[00:52:53]  She dropped on that grenade and took out one of the major candidates and possibly kept her from the vice presidency.
[00:52:59]  And then, let's face it, the presidency.
[00:53:01]  Or it's like Biden was already going to be the nominee.
[00:53:05]  And she's like, yeah, I endorsed Biden.
[00:53:07]  I don't think that moved a single vote.
[00:53:09]  Maybe not, but that's why it's all integrity.
[00:53:12]  That's why it's all the worse.
[00:53:13]  And she doesn't get the out.
[00:53:15]  She could have if she had just kept her mouth shut, but she doesn't get the out of, I'm going to support the nominee because he wasn't the nominee yet.
[00:53:21]  You know what?
[00:53:21]  You're right.
[00:53:21]  She did have a choice.
[00:53:22]  You know why you're right?
[00:53:23]  You know why you're right?
[00:53:23]  Because Warren never endorsed.
[00:53:25]  Yeah.
[00:53:25]  And if Warren could sit in her hands up to this late date, then she has no excuse.
[00:53:30]  What's that gaining her?
[00:53:31]  It's not like Biden ever acknowledged her anyway.
[00:53:33]  You're right.
[00:53:33]  You're absolutely right.
[00:53:34]  And I also just think that, first off, I also think it was a mistake to say she supported whoever the nominee was.
[00:53:39]  I mean, if you want to be, if you're the principled candidate, which is obviously what she was running as, and you're not going to win, then what does it mean?
[00:53:48]  Like, come on, you're going to be the anti-war candidate and then tell your people to support Joe Biden.
[00:53:53]  None of her people are supporting Joe Biden anyway.
[00:53:55]  So what the hell is the point?
[00:53:57]  And if you're going to do that, then it's like, well, okay.
[00:54:00]  You know, like I had someone the other day who I was tweeting with, a comic who I know, who I was tweeting with back and forth on Twitter.
[00:54:06]  And he's like, just not in our world of political thought.
[00:54:09]  I would describe him as blue-pilled completely, respectfully, but like your average blue-pilled left-wing guy.
[00:54:16]  And he, you know, he said a thing about, I tweeted something out about Donald Trump.
[00:54:22]  I said, if Donald Trump gets re-elected in November, he will have survived opposition from the Democratic establishment, the Republican establishment, the entire corporate press, all of Hollywood, the deep state, a special counsel investigation, an impeachment, and a global pandemic.
[00:54:40]  And I said, just saying, that's pretty metal if he does get re-elected.
[00:54:45]  Like, and, you know, just kind of fucking around with the metal part and whatever.
[00:54:48]  But it's, you know, to say, like, holy shit, can you imagine someone getting through all of that and getting re-elected?
[00:54:53]  And he replied back something like, yeah, he's the greatest con man of all time.
[00:54:58]  And then he started like people started replying back with him.
[00:55:01]  And he was like talking about how Hillary would be much better if she was in there now.
[00:55:05]  And I wish we had a serious person like Obama or Hillary who was at the head of this thing.
[00:55:10]  And then someone goes, oh, yeah, Hillary is so serious.
[00:55:12]  How about Benghazi?
[00:55:13]  And he was like, four people died in Benghazi.
[00:55:16]  How many people have died because of the coronavirus, blah, blah, blah.
[00:55:19]  And I just tweeted back at him, you know, someone I know, just trying to be like, hey, maybe think about it this way.
[00:55:23]  I said, okay, four people died in Benghazi.
[00:55:26]  How many people died in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen?
[00:55:30]  You know, put them all up there.
[00:55:32]  Like, why are we just doing Benghazi?
[00:55:33]  How many people died in all of them?
[00:55:34]  Because that's a little bit more than the coronavirus so far, you know, by a magnitude of order.
[00:55:40]  And he goes, he said, listen, I'm against the forever wars too.
[00:55:45]  I'm no fan of the military-industrial complex.
[00:55:48]  I just want someone competent to bring Hillary Clinton there.
[00:55:51]  And it's like, how can you really say, I'm not a fan of forever wars.
[00:55:55]  I don't, I hate the military-industrial complex, but I support Hillary.
[00:55:59]  Can I tell you?
[00:56:00]  It's like, no, you don't.
[00:56:01]  You don't hate the military-industrial complex, motherfucker.
[00:56:04]  It's like saying, I hate the Nazis, but I'd support Adolf Hitler.
[00:56:07]  Then you don't really hate the Nazis that much.
[00:56:09]  I was having this exact thought yesterday, or very similar, which is there's like there's some prominent conservatives who I know who are like, you know, in the, who played a part in beating the drums of war to get us into the Iraq war.
[00:56:27]  And I saw an interview with one of them.
[00:56:29]  And the way he talked about this, you could tell the guy felt extreme guilt.
[00:56:35]  And in the sense of like, it's not like, oh, I raised taxes and, you know, people, it's like, I caused a lot of, like, I had a part to play in children dying.
[00:56:44]  And it's when you wake up and look yourself in the mirror and it's like, and I could never undo that, right?
[00:56:49]  And you look at yourself in the mirror and it's just like, you know, we've all done things that we apologize for.
[00:56:54]  Maybe I said something and I hurt a friend's feelings.
[00:56:56]  And you'll think about that every so often in the years.
[00:56:58]  You're like, wow, that was really fucked up of me.
[00:56:59]  And I know I apologize and they forgave me, but that's a, I'm a, I'm a shittier person than I'd like to be, right?
[00:57:06]  If I knew that like I caused like the Iraq war to some extent, I'd be like, and then I was open, I was red pill to like what that meant.
[00:57:16]  I'd be like, this is really, really bad, like really, really bad.
[00:57:20]  So when you see, that's the thing, though, when you see someone like Joe Biden be like, it was a mistake, it's like, no, no, no, you don't really think it's a mistake in the sense you need to think it's a mistake.
[00:57:33]  It's not like you flipped a coin and you said heads and it was tails.
[00:57:36]  You're like, oh, I guessed that wrong.
[00:57:37]  It's like, you had your part to play in mass death, even if you don't care about foreigners' lives.
[00:57:46]  Let's forget that ridiculousness outside.
[00:57:48]  Don't you care about other countries?
[00:57:50]  But like, how many military people, you know, gave their lives for a mistake, you know?
[00:57:55]  And this is, this is not even like, not like the most generous interpretation, not even saying you lied us into war or you knew there were no weapons of mass destruction, which by the way is much more likely the case.
[00:58:06]  But regardless, for the sake of argument, we'll give you that it was just a mistake.
[00:58:11]  How you wouldn't go.
[00:58:12]  This is what's crazy.
[00:58:13]  And this is what I really, I actually thought Bernie Sanders was completely right when he said this about Hillary in 2016, is that he'd say that's disqualifying.
[00:58:21]  I mean, how could we not at least all agree?
[00:58:24]  Since pretty much everybody acknowledges the war in Iraq was a mistake.
[00:58:27]  I mean, for God's sakes, fucking John McCain acknowledged that the war in Iraq was a mistake.
[00:58:32]  So it's really like even the most hardcore people outside of like maybe three people, even Max Boot acknowledged that it was a mistake.
[00:58:38]  Did he really?
[00:58:39]  Yes.
[00:58:39]  He goes, knowing what we know now, we probably wouldn't have done that.
[00:58:42]  So even he, even these guys, so if that's the case, okay, fine.
[00:58:46]  I'll grant it that you were wrong and it was a mistake.
[00:58:49]  But if you had the biggest decision of your life and you fucked up this monumentally, you don't get to make the next decision.
[00:58:58]  Like, isn't that reasonable?
[00:58:59]  Here's it's very easy to put like if you are a drunk driver and you thought you weren't too drunk to drive and you kill one person or put them in a wheelchair at a certain point, I would hope for the rest of your life.
[00:59:12]  You're like, you know what?
[00:59:13]  I can't judge when I've had too much to drink.
[00:59:15]  I'm taking Uber or someone else is driving.
[00:59:17]  I'm not rolling those dice again.
[00:59:19]  I rolled them once and the consequences were so profoundly bad that I'm going to be the most risk-averse person on earth.
[00:59:26]  You go, oh my God, I just got in an accident and killed 1 million Iraqis.
[00:59:30]  This was the worst car accident ever.
[00:59:33]  So it's not like, oh, I want to, yeah, get me back in the driver's seat, coach.
[00:59:36]  I want to be top gun.
[00:59:37]  It's like, wait, wait, this is, there's got to be some soul searching and there's none.
[00:59:41]  And I don't think that behind closed doors, there's a lot of guilt.
[00:59:45]  And in public, it's like, okay, I got to face this.
[00:59:47]  When you watch them talk, as opposed to, like I was saying, this conservative, watch the look on his face, which could be phony.
[00:59:52]  Let's, who knows, but people are like behind the scenes.
[00:59:54]  Let's be fair.
[00:59:55]  But it's just like, you don't get what the nature of your so-called mistake was.
[01:00:02]  Yes, that's right.
[01:00:03]  And if you're someone like Hillary Clinton, by the way, which I thought was the most Hillary Clinton moment ever, when she said, when she was grilled about it at the debates in 2016, and she said, yeah, I made the wrong vote in Iraq and I've taken responsibility for that.
[01:00:16]  Like that's her.
[01:00:17]  I've taken responsibility.
[01:00:18]  It's like, oh, I'm sorry.
[01:00:19]  Did you do 1 million consecutive life sentences?
[01:00:21]  I didn't realize you had taken responsibility for the mass murder campaign that you championed.
[01:00:27]  Oh, just I admitted it, basically.
[01:00:28]  So now you're, but that the idea that, okay, so if you, if this was, and this is one way to gauge, because like you said, we never know for sure whether someone's really had a change of heart.
[01:00:38]  People, people lie and people are deceptive.
[01:00:40]  And that's one of the problems that we all deal with in this existence.
[01:00:44]  But something that you would maybe use to judge it is how did you deal with subsequent military conflicts after that?
[01:00:54]  So if Hillary Clinton's like, oh, I made this huge mistake in Iraq, but then supported military intervention in Libya, championed it, it was really, she was really the driving factor behind it.
[01:01:03]  It's like, yeah, I don't know that you really do regret this.
[01:01:05]  Whereas someone else, like say Tucker Carlson, who did support the war in Iraq and then went to Iraq and was like, oh my God, I've made a horrible mistake.
[01:01:13]  Like I was totally wrong.
[01:01:14]  He's opposed every single subsequent military intervention that they try to push and like really, you know, passionately oppose them.
[01:01:24]  And so that's something where you go, I'm more inclined to believe that you've had a serious change of heart.
[01:01:29]  And then the other thing is just kind of this intangible just reading people.
[01:01:33]  Like you can kind of just tell.
[01:01:34]  And like you said with Joe Biden, it just doesn't seem that way.
[01:01:36]  And so anyway, for Tulsi Gabbard to endorse, if you're going to be the person you are, to endorse, it would be like Ron Paul endorsing John McCain in 2008.
[01:01:45]  It would just feel ridiculous.
[01:01:46]  He's everything you're supposed to stand against.
[01:01:49]  And if Ron Paul had endorsed John McCain in 2008, that would have made me really re-question how I felt about Ron Paul.
[01:01:56]  But when they would ask, I remember they'd ask him at the end because Ron Paul had enough of a passionate fan base that they wanted his endorsement in 08 and in 2012.
[01:02:05]  And they would ask him in 2008, be like, will you endorse John McCain?
[01:02:09]  And he goes, absolutely.
[01:02:10]  As soon as he changes his foreign policy, his monetary policy and his fiscal policy, I'll endorse him.
[01:02:16]  Oh, my God.
[01:02:17]  It was just badass and awesome.
[01:02:18]  It's like, oh, yeah, no, as soon as he, you know, stops being horrible and everything, I'd be happy to endorse him.
[01:02:24]  I don't hate the guy personally.
[01:02:25]  Yeah, right.
[01:02:26]  Yeah.
[01:02:27]  John McKenney, he was pretty good on torture.
[01:02:30]  Yeah, that's true.
[01:02:31]  He was.
[01:02:32]  He was good on torture.
[01:02:33]  He was one of the only like right-wing war hawks who was actually like, yeah, no, we should not torture people.
[01:02:39]  That's a bad idea.
[01:02:40]  But I guess that was a personal issue in that sense.
[01:02:44]  So yeah, so Bernie Sanders is out.
[01:02:48]  Biden is actually the nominee somehow.
[01:02:51]  Somehow, I was so convinced that he was going to he was going to KP, well, something.
[01:02:58]  I was just, I actually just thought he would fall apart and someone else would take over from him.
[01:03:02]  And I think the fact that he's in.
[01:03:04]  Yeah.
[01:03:04]  Well, I well, by the way, I got to tell you, all these Nostradamuses on Twitter, and I really hope this comes back and bites me in the ass, by the way, so I'm going to be as pompous as possible, even more so about my standards, who think that he's going to pick Hillary as the VP and then he's going to drop out.

=== Justification for Hillary Clinton (02:21) ===

[01:03:20]  It's like she's not taking the VP spot.
[01:03:22]  Why would she?
[01:03:23]  If anything, they're going to force him out and have a consensus candidate, which would be her.
[01:03:28]  Of all the people out there, she would be the smartest one to run in terms of there is a track record for her getting more votes than Trump.
[01:03:34]  People have been, you know, trained to pull the trigger for her.
[01:03:37]  So it wouldn't be that stupid of a move.
[01:03:39]  Again, given the choices that they do have.
[01:03:42]  And there's a justification.
[01:03:43]  There's a justification from the DNC's point of view where they could say, look, say Joe Biden has some health issue or something like that and can't run.
[01:03:51]  Okay, no one qualified this year.
[01:03:54]  We're going to pick the last person who qualified.
[01:03:57]  Who should have won?
[01:03:58]  Right.
[01:03:59]  Who had the popular vote.
[01:04:00]  So there is a real justification for them to go with Hillary Clinton.
[01:04:04]  And if they'd offered that, I think Hillary would take it in a second.
[01:04:06]  Hillary wants power more than any person's ever wanted anything.
[01:04:10]  Oh, of course.
[01:04:10]  So, but this whole vice VP splot, she's not taking number two to a man again ever in her life.
[01:04:16]  No, no, no way.
[01:04:17]  I don't see that happening.
[01:04:18]  Joe Biden was vice president because Hillary Clinton said, you take that.
[01:04:22]  Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton didn't want the VP.
[01:04:24]  She could have had whatever she wanted to throw her delegates behind.
[01:04:27]  Oh, no, no, no, no.
[01:04:28]  You're wrong.
[01:04:29]  My understanding is she campaigned hard for that spot and Obama said, fuck no.
[01:04:32]  I don't need this.
[01:04:33]  Really?
[01:04:34]  Okay.
[01:04:34]  I might be wrong about this.
[01:04:35]  I thought it was the opposite.
[01:04:36]  I thought she wanted this spot.
[01:04:37]  No, no, no.
[01:04:37]  My understanding was that Michelle was like, you do not want this bitch around.
[01:04:42]  Like, she's more trouble than she's worth.
[01:04:44]  Well, that's a good call by Michelle.
[01:04:45]  And she was right.
[01:04:46]  And that's part of the reason why he begged her to be Secretary of State, Hillary, because he wanted her to get the fuck out the country so she wouldn't be in the Senate constantly undermining him with her passive aggression.
[01:04:56]  Yeah.
[01:04:56]  Instead, she was able to just convince him to fucking start wars.
[01:05:00]  Yeah.
[01:05:01]  But at the same time, he got re-elected.
[01:05:03]  Yeah, sure did.
[01:05:04]  So from his perspective, it worked.
[01:05:06]  Yeah.
[01:05:06]  Yeah.
[01:05:07]  That's kind of sickening.
[01:05:08]  But yeah, it sure is.
[01:05:10]  All right.
[01:05:11]  So I guess we're about at the end of the rope here.
[01:05:14]  And we're going to keep doing these because they're a lot of fun for us.
[01:05:19]  And I think the listeners really enjoy them.
[01:05:22]  So, Michael, what was the most horrible part of this show for you?
[01:05:27]  Oh, the fact that you're wearing a hoodie.
[01:05:29]  Yeah.
[01:05:30]  All right.
[01:05:31]  Well, I am welcome.
[01:05:33]  All right.
[01:05:34]  I love you, buddy.
[01:05:35]  And stay safe and healthy.
[01:05:37]  And we'll do this again soon.
[01:05:38]  Thank you, everybody, for listening.
[01:05:40]  Peace.