James Smith and Dave Smith argue the U.S. has shifted from a republic to an empire, citing mass incarceration of nonviolent offenders, excessive debt, and climate change narratives as tools for elite control. They contend that establishment centrists became extremists through wars and bailouts, while figures like Joe Biden enforce totalitarianism via ESG scores and ineffective green policies. Ultimately, the hosts claim these measures sacrifice working-class people to justify further government intrusion, demanding a return to constitutional republicanism rather than accepting current radical agendas. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Government Overreach and Control00:15:22
Fill her up.
You are listening to the Gash Digital Network.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
Here's your host, James Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am, of course, the Libertarian Tupac, the most consistent motherfucker you know, Dave Smith, and he is the king of the caulks.
Robbie the Fire Bernstein, rocking the spider, the pink spider jacket.
Intense.
I like it.
I'm going to go yell at some school kids after this.
Hell yeah.
Just go down to the track, pretend like I'm the coach.
It's going to be a good time.
There we go.
There we go.
All right.
Well, it's, as I said last episode, it's good to be back.
We just put one out yesterday.
We're making up, getting back on schedule for the kind of erratic schedule over the last week.
And to give you people an update, supposedly my wallet will be delivered to me tomorrow.
So I'll be.
What percentage of your stuff is still going to be in there?
Oh, my God.
I mean, I'm not even hoping for the cash.
Like, I don't even care about that.
It's just, please, just give me my IDs and credit cards.
It's going to be funny if it's literally just your physical wallet.
It doesn't even have the ID, which doesn't make sense.
And my wallet is also just like an old beat up wallet.
There's no value, literally no value in just returning that to me.
I'll tell you the thing that really didn't make me, didn't give me a high degree of confidence is that United, they give you a description of item found, but the description is just word for word what I wrote the description is.
So like they didn't add anything in there to let me know that they actually have it, if that makes sense.
Like I just described it.
I was like, old black leather wallet containing blah, And they wrote back, old black leather wallet containing blah, blah, blah, word for word.
So I'm like, there's nothing you couldn't just give me a little something.
Hey, we found a Banana Republic gift card from three years ago in the thing.
And I'd be like, yeah, I think that's fine.
It'd be even funnier if they were shitty about it.
Like real old crappy wallet from dude who clearly needs to upgrade his style.
I would love that because at least they were adding something.
And also they'd be making a fair point, a pretty fair point.
All right.
So transitioning.
For today's episode, what I was thinking we would do is, you know, in light of the fact that there seems to be this real concerted effort to focus on climate change.
There was just, you know, a couple episodes ago, we had talked about the CNN piece about it, which came right after James O'Keefe over at Project Veritas had released this video of this high-ranking guy at CNN basically saying that the COVID thing is losing steam.
They're not getting the traction on that.
And now they're going to push into climate change as the new agenda.
And right after that, there's this huge Time magazine cover piece on the same topic talking about climate change.
And they're all doing it with the notion that, well, look, we kind of just showed you what we can do on a global level to upend normalcy in order to contain a threat.
And now here's the next threat.
So this is, I think, worth trying to get out in front of.
And we could talk about this a while.
We've talked about climate change in the past, but we could talk about, go over some of that stuff and kind of talk about it through the different lens of now after the COVID regime or still kind of during the COVID regime.
But let me just say this, right?
First of all, as we mentioned a few episodes back, this was something that me and you were on top of immediately.
Like as of last March, and not that we're alone.
There were a lot of people who made this prediction or who could see the writing on the wall.
But it was just very easy to see that like, well, if you're going to justify all of this complete overhaul of societal norms, not least of which the abolition of individual liberties, right?
If you're willing to do that for COVID, well, by that logic, the people who push this climate change narrative should be willing to do this for climate change, like by their own logic, or by like it logically follows from their stated starting point that this is a much bigger threat.
And I'm sure, I mean, I don't know exactly what the numbers are, but I'm sure carbon emissions have been largely reduced over the last year with all of the lockdowns.
I mean, they'd have to be, right?
So it makes sense that they would want to push this further.
I've also, this was also right from the very beginning of COVID, one of my biggest fears in general of this whole COVID regime.
It's not just the destruction that the lockdowns have caused, like how many jobs have been ruined, how many, you know, people's families have been destroyed, mental health issues, and of course, just the government totalitarianism that's been normalized.
It's not just all of that.
It's also when you go down this road, you want to see like, what's the exit strategy?
How do we get out of this?
And the thing I'm saying about climate change poses a threat to the exit strategy because you now have a president where you've already accepted that this can be done on this grounds.
And then if that's the case, it's very easy for someone else to argue, well, we can do it for this reason, for X, Y, or Z.
And climate change is the obvious one, but it's not the only one.
I mean, I think that there were two other concerns that really freaked me out.
Number one is something that I said also very early, that I said, I think last March, if not definitely last April, was that, you know, how do we now, as a society, and this is why I think it's so important that there is like an overwhelming firm rejection of the COVID regime.
It's not just that we need to end all the lockdowns and restrictions and all of that.
We need a large percentage of the population to accept and internalize that this was all bullshit and never should have been done.
Because if not, let me ask you this.
How do we deal with the next threat of a virus?
You know, there's always some virus, at least every year, at most every two years.
There's always the threat of some virus that the media is hyping up.
And none of them ever ended up being what COVID became, at least in terms of what the response was, right?
Like there's always mad cow disease or swine flu or Ebola or, you know, whatever the thing is, there's always another one.
So what are we as a society going to do the next time there's one of those?
You know, like what the Ebola scare was.
You know a thing that everyone's freaking out about, that they're talking about in the media, but we ended up basically doing nothing and you know, everything's fine for the vast majority of people.
Well, are we ever going to have the political will to do that now?
I mean now, are people just going to be insisting on lockdowns right away?
Well, let's take 15 days to flatten this curve or whatever you know.
So that's a real scary one.
The other one that I see as um, as really again, not too like.
You don't have to connect too many dots to take this logical uh leap.
But one of the things that's happened over the the last uh year is that the flu has been largely eradicated.
There's like no flu, or just underreported, because they prefer to declare everything as being corona perhaps perhaps, but regard irregardless regardless.
Or maybe it's like a tag team match where Corona tagged in the flu, I mean the flu tagged in Corona, and it's like all right, you go kill them for a little bit, we're just gonna chill.
Remember when THE ROCK and Stone COLD became a tag team for a little bit, they really didn't like each other, but they still work together.
It's kind of like that right yeah um, but anyway, but but by the numbers there's no flu right, so you can make an argument that all of this social distancing and wearing masks and lockdowns and the rest has has saved a lot of lives from the flu.
And the flu kills children, kills babies, you know, I mean, the flu may not have killed as many people as uh, as Covid by the official numbers over the last year, but the flu's been killing people every single year.
You know um consistent yeah, oh yeah, so super consistent it's it's.
You know it's a, the flu's evolving.
Dave spent the viruses.
Yeah, there you go, there you go.
It's been with us for you know hundreds, if not thousands of years, I think um, but anyway uh, so you, you could see an argument being made like if you, if you start with the um, the givens, that the lockdowns were, um were reasonable and that the flu has been largely eradicated, you could make a strong argument that hey, we should just mask up and social distance and and have restrictions every flu season.
You see, there's some really dangerous implications of what we've done over the last year, and so for all of these, I think what our only hope, in a way, is if the argument, the lockdown argument, gets completely obliterated.
And then there's no it's, it's.
We can look back at this last year as what see it for what it is?
A massive um uh, you know bout of hysteria uh, an unbelievable government power grab and just disastrous policies, that's.
If, if enough, people recognize that for what it is, then we probably don't have to worry about it coming back in the future.
Um, in the same way that you know, everybody in general recognizes, you know, slavery or Jim Crow or something like that, it's just horrible Things that we did, that we never should have done.
And I want to add one more element to that, which is this false idea that we can afford this.
It'd be one thing if every single year, you know, we basically ran a surplus and we put it into a little box.
And then all of a sudden you have one in every hundred-year epidemic and you go, oh shit, this looks pretty bad.
But lucky for us, we got a surplus.
You know what we're going to do?
We're going to cut everybody checks.
We're going to do the responsible thing because we can afford to do it.
We're going to have everyone stay home.
That's not what happened.
We were running the biggest deficits ever.
We came into this thing and we're like, well, the only thing we can do is print checks and let everyone stay home.
And now they're looking at that and going, well, look, government can step in and run with entire control and let people just stay home.
And we can make the sacrifices of not being oriented towards economic growth or people working.
And that's not true.
Firstly, I don't think we could have afforded to do it this one time over this past year.
But certainly to look at that and go, oh, well, we can just afford to have people not work or not be in a environment where we're like, you know, full-fledged, just looking for growth is it's crazy.
It's not, it's fictional.
Yeah, 100%.
You know, they actually do treat it as if we have been saving for a rainy day.
And like, here we go.
But the truth is we haven't been.
We've spent all of our rainy day funds and then borrowed against those funds and then spent more than that and then printed up a bunch of money.
And now we're just like, well, we're just going to town.
So that's an excellent point.
And I think it's really important.
The other question, maybe before we even get into some of the climate change stuff, is why they would be making this transition.
And to me, it seems like from what that CNN producer was saying and from just the indications of what's going on, it does seem like in the same way that terrorism stopped being as scary the more years we were removed from 9-11, I think that COVID is getting less scary for people.
I think that they're kind of starting to lose this battle of public popular opinion on the COVID issue.
And the thing that's really hurt them, I think, is Florida, is Texas, is the states that are open, where cases are going down.
The fact that a lot of people have been vaccinated and they've painted themselves into this logical contradiction where they're like, you have to take the vaccines.
Everything about the vaccines is completely safe and effective.
But we also still need to do all of these things.
And people are like, well, if all these people have taken the vaccines, then it's not a threat anymore.
Then you know what I mean?
And then, and it's just, I think it's getting harder and harder for them to play along with this.
But what they want to do, right, is immediately transition into the climate change regime.
Because the more it, if they allow us to get back to normal, then they're starting over from scratch.
But if they move right now, then it's, it's a much easier situation for them.
You know, it's like a much easier situation if you've overhauled everything, every societal norm.
And then you're like, hey, we have to continue down this road of we're searching for new societal norms now.
You know, that's much easier than going back to the old societal norms and then saying, now we have to overhaul them again.
That's kind of starting from scratch.
So it's a very dangerous place that we're in right now, where, you know, if we don't get out of this, then it's, it's much easier for them to go like, well, hey, look, we got through that and you're pretty used to it at this point, right?
I mean, it's been over a year.
So we're just going to kind of keep going with the idea that government can restrict all of these different things that previously we would have thought it was wildly, you know, over an overreach to restrict.
So that's, to me, I think a big part of why they want to take advantage of this moment and start really pushing the climate change shit now.
If that makes sense.
All right, guys, let's take a quick second.
Climate Change as Profit Engine00:14:53
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Okay, so let's talk about climate change as a whole and why this is all complete bullshit.
And when I say this is all complete bullshit, that's not to say that the climate isn't changing.
It's just to say that all of the proposed government responses to it are absolute bullshit and they will all cause more harm than good and they're all completely unnecessary.
So I'll just say...
They're a power play.
They just want to be able to control more of the economy and our lives.
And in part, that's because it secures their profits and interests.
Yeah.
No, that's exactly right.
That's exactly right.
So let me, I'll start with this, which I've said before, but this is kind of how I look at climate change in general.
And I think that it's a good lens to look at this shit through, right?
And then I'm curious to kind of get your overall take on how you think about the climate change issue.
So I look at it like this, okay?
I think that a lot of people, they, and this is something that we really should have learned over this last year, the idea that there are, you have to weigh costs first benefits.
You cannot just say, hey, this is a problem.
And so this policy solves the problem and therefore go.
That's like really softest bullshit thinking.
Okay.
So to me, the climate change question is four questions.
And most people treat it like it's one or two, most of the AOCs of the world.
So they'll ask you two questions, okay?
The two questions will be, is the climate changing and is man-made activity affecting it?
If yes, then Green New Deal.
That's it.
This question, one, maybe two questions.
If answer yes, then Green New Deal, period.
That's the end of it.
You either believe it or you don't believe it.
There's really four questions.
It would be like, is the climate changing?
Is man-made activity affecting it?
What is your proposed solutions?
And what are the costs versus the benefits?
Now, those other two questions make things a lot murkier.
And none of those people, none of the AOCs, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warrens, Joe Bidens, none of them like to get into those two questions.
They treat them as if they don't exist.
But if you want to have a big boy conversation about it, those are the only two questions that really matter.
Now, by the way, I will start with the first two questions.
I think the answer is yes and yes.
Honestly, I think that the climate is changing.
I think man-made activity is affecting it.
How bad it's going to be, that's a whole different issue.
And another important question that you might get in there is that.
How bad is it going to be?
Because they all exaggerate what the effects of climate change are actually going to be.
And the truth is that none of us know.
The idea of like projecting into the future what the, you know, if you think about it like this, right?
And this is why a lot of people, even really, really brilliant people, don't do a great job at predicting the future.
It's because there's like nearly infinite variables.
So if you were looking at, say, pollution in the year 1890 and trying to project it into the future, right?
You could have looked at how much like horses were shitting from horse and buggies and been like, well, look at all this pollution.
Well, in the future, if the population grows this much, there's going to be this much horse shit.
But what did you miss?
That everyone's going to be driving cars.
And it's an entirely different type of pollution.
And it's just, there's so many different factors that are hard to account for.
So when people are making these projections into the future, they really don't know what they're talking about.
Technology is going to change all of this shit.
And it's very hard for us to say what is or isn't going to happen.
That being said.
And I also, even with that option two, listen, we're going to debunk the global warming thing.
And this is not the strongest argument, but I can tell you that when you say, hey, I believe that this is, you know, that the climate is changing and the result is man.
I'll even put forward maybe.
And what I mean by maybe is there's still working theories that at the moment that because of global dimming, if it wasn't for what we've done, we actually would have been in a global cooling period and that our carbon emissions have actually helped us out because we would have had.
So the idea, and I know that these fucking, mostly scientists, they're full of shit with their models.
They're working agendas.
And so just the idea to say as an absolute that the scientists have a full understanding to the extent that the planet is warming, warming and that it is our fault and that we would be in a worse situation if that wasn't happening.
I'm just going to put forward that that's not an absolute.
Oh yeah, it's certainly not an absolute.
And the scientists, many of whom are funded and incentivized to air on the side of global warming or climate change being this huge disaster, their models are not absolute and they don't know.
And again, this is very, very difficult stuff to figure out.
If you're saying the climate is warmer because of man-made activity, so then it would be cooler without the man-made activity, which we don't even know for certain.
But even if that is the case, then you'd have to look at all of the problems that come along with cooling verse warming and actually say which one is better or worse.
And to your point, I have heard many scientists argue that it's actually better off being in a warming period than a cooling period.
So there's, again, there's a lot of very difficult questions to be answered here.
However, in addition to that, all of the credible scientists, even with their most extreme predictions of what the costs are going to be of a warming climate, none of them are saying what Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren say.
Like, none of them are saying that all life on the planet is going to go extinct, that the world is going to be uninhabitable for our children.
We're going to be dead yesterday.
Why did we even still alive today?
It's literally Bernie Sanders' claim that the world will be uninhabitable for our children.
He didn't just say that once.
He's repeated it over and over again.
And that is, to me, I mean, like just unbelievable political hyperbole.
That's, you know, pretty outrageous.
So anyway, no, no scientists are making the argument that the world is going to be uninhabitable for our children because of carbon emissions.
That's just not, it's not a thing.
So anyway, the question would be, right, what your proposals are and what the costs of this proposal are going to be.
And not just in terms of money and in terms of humanity.
And so you look around the world and where there is increased carbon emissions, there is decreased poverty.
And these two things are very closely related and not just, you know, like not just correlated, but they're, you know, there's a causal link there.
The more, you know, the more energy you create, the less poverty you have.
You take a look at China and India and these countries where hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of backbreaking poverty and their carbon emissions skyrocketed.
Like, all right.
But don't think for a second that you can just take away the carbon emissions without recreating all of that poverty.
So that's something that you got to deal with very quickly.
Like, oh yeah, it might just sound nice.
You know, you talk to AOC and this will never come up, but the idea of reducing carbon emissions might seem nice.
But how about increasing poverty?
And we're not talking about increasing poverty like someone who makes 200K a year goes to making 100K a year.
We're talking about someone who's living on $3 a day going back to living on 75 cents a day, which is a really big difference for those people.
So that's a part of the conversation that never seems to get in there, how incredibly anti-human so much of the modern environmentalist movement is.
I think you're forgetting about the part where they cut us all checks and they cover healthcare and then really none of that works out, but they just pretend like it's a working system.
I think you're skipping over that aspect.
Yeah, I sure did skip over that aspect.
But let me ask you more just in terms of the big picture.
Like, what are your, you know, your takeaways of the whole climate change topic?
I mean, you gave some of them in there, but is there anything else that you'd like to add?
If I have to sum it up in just two words, bullshit.
And, okay, here's just the biggest proof of the fact that the whole thing's bullshit.
You're really concerned about CO2.
You just, you go nuclear.
The nuclear technology, I'm not an expert in nuclear technology, but the government's using it.
They got submarines in the ocean that are completely based off of nuclear technology.
From what I understand, the developments in that field are so great.
You can do these things where like they're smaller.
They don't seem to have the same radioactivity.
They also don't have the same threat.
Like every other technology that's developed over the last 30, 40 years, I get that Chernobyl happened.
I don't think you're going to see another one of those with new technologies, especially if you consider how good the market gets at creating things when they actually work on things, right?
So if you got this technology that we haven't worked on in the last 40 years, we just kind of, so if you're really concerned about this, there's a solution.
There's been a solution for 40 years.
The fact that you're not going, hey, we're putting our eggs into this basket is just proof of the fact you don't really think that this is a risk.
Yeah.
That's one.
And so that's just, you know, right off the bat, let's just understand.
They don't really want to solve this problem because if you did, we'd have that conversation.
And then if you just look at the way governments want to expand, they want to control economies.
They want to make sure that they can get investments, you know, into the sectors where they're ready to profit, such as Al Gore, when he got a fucking Nobel Peace Prize for putting out a propaganda film that might have, you know, drove large amounts of money to the exact field that he set himself up to regulate.
This is just, that's it.
Government just wants to control our lives.
They want to control the economy.
The threat of terrorism is gone.
They need a new threat by which they can organize society around and ensure that they don't want the thing just growing.
I'm telling you, like they're anti-wealth.
They don't want us like finding a different currency like Bitcoin.
They don't want to, like, they want to slow down economic development because as we become freer and able to just interact with each other outside of the scope of what government can control, that's their money.
Yeah.
Right.
So they're not anti-wealth for themselves, but they're, in fact, very pro-wealth and against threats to their own.
And our wealth and prosperity is a threat to their control, which is where they get their wealth from.
So yeah, I think you're absolutely right.
And I think that it's important to recognize what the actual proposals will be, who is going to get out of them, who is going to live underneath them.
You know, as one of the things that we've seen through the whole COVID regime is, you know, Nancy Pelosi and Gavin Newsom and tons others.
Well, they all have exemptions.
And even if they don't, they just go out and do it anyway, right?
We recently saw John Kerry flying around on a private jet to go give conversations about climate change.
Now, these are not people who seriously believe what they're telling the rest of us.
That is the only reasonable conclusion that can be drawn.
They are going to demand that you make sacrifices and they have no intention of making them themselves.
So that's, I think, a really important thing to acknowledge and to focus on.
And the truth is that just like you saw two years ago in France, when they had that proposed gasoline tax, and then you had the yellow jacket revulsion and all this stuff, this is what you're going to be dealing with.
You're going to be dealing with proposals that crush regular working class people.
It's not going to be something that crushes the big, you know, giant corporations or whatever some leftist fantasy about environmentalism or the Green New Deal might be.
That's not going to happen.
And the elite will always have a pass.
It will be a two-tiered system as it always has been.
Climate change really, one of the reasons why I, you know, and again, I'm not claiming to be like the only one, but one of the reasons why I was able to see that climate change would be the next thing after COVID is that climate change was kind of the thing before COVID.
Two-Tiered System for Elites00:06:04
Climate change is this thing that is really intoxicating to certain people who want to pride themselves on being like, we are the science people.
We are the people who believe in science.
And you see this all over the place.
I mean, you look at social media and you just see how much people enjoy their elevated sense of status because they are the people who believe in science and you over there are like the stupid religious people or something like that.
You know, you're the ones who don't care about science.
And I've experienced this a lot, you know, just living in a left-wing world, you know, living in New York City being a stand-up comic around a lot of left-wingers.
It's unbelievable how many people believe in climate change under this guise of like, I accept real science because science is the truth.
And they're two follow-up questions away from knowing nothing.
I mean, they don't know anything about the issue, but they really, it's an intoxicating thing that we're the science people.
And of course, you've seen this a lot during COVID, right?
The people who claim to be the ones like, oh, well, we're actually following science.
You ask them three or four questions about COVID.
They don't know anything about it.
And so this is one of the, it's like this state religion of scientism where they dictate to you what the official science is.
And then you get to feel like a really good little soldier for now you can repeat all those talking points and claim you also know science and you're you're one of the really smart people who believes in the science.
But for the most part, people don't actually know anything about this.
And they're usually only a few follow-up questions away from falling apart.
And the big thing that nobody seems to know or make the connection of is what I said earlier, that, you know, it's like the even if you believe the official narrative on climate change, well, then it's just a fact that all of this enhanced carbon emissions are go hand in hand with an increased standard of living and a reduction in poverty worldwide.
You know, all these people who are so concerned about the poor and are always, you know, saying, think globally or whatever, well, think about the global poor who are far poorer than the poorest person you know.
Well, they've been made substantially less poor because of energy.
All right.
And those people are the ones who are really threatened by this, as well as just regular working class people in first world countries.
So all of that, I think, is real important.
If you look at our risk for survival on this planet for the next hundred years, I would say the debt that the U.S. government and countries have taken on is a significantly bigger risk to us in terms of countries folding, countries going to war, massive poverty, people trying to uprise against their governments.
I'm just saying, like, take it from a nervous Jew.
I like getting nervous about things.
I can tell you what to be nervous about.
You should be way more concerned about government debt than you should be about global warming.
Oh, yeah.
And I got some faith in science.
I got some faith in science that if we actually continue moving forward with, you know, economic growth and we stop doing all these things that actually get in the way of innovation, such as what I was talking about in regards to nuclear, or I'm sure there's some other energy sources that might be pretty good.
We'll get there.
They'll solve this stuff.
Like the other thing that's amazing about the free market that you don't really consider is if we get to a point where like, you know, we can't use oil anymore, we'll figure out how to make energy from something else.
Or like they figured out you run out of water.
Let's just say theoretically, that would be pretty terrible.
You run out of fresh water.
Well, then all of a sudden the costs were, you know, of desalinating saltwater.
It's not like that technology gets better.
And all of a sudden, in other words, like there's a built-in system within capitalism that let's just say is a theoretical, you were to over pollute and make some resources like no, we would figure out how to use them because there would be the economic benefit in figuring out for the scientists, like, well, how do I clean up that pollution?
How do I make these things usable?
And like if we were to go to colonize Mars tomorrow, let's say, you know, we got on that thing with Musk.
We're going up to Mars.
What are some of the things that we know when we get that we're going to need?
Like you're going to need a water source, a food source.
And what's the third thing?
Energy.
Like, I mean, even look at it, like you're surviving out in the fucking wilderness.
You need fire.
That's one of the root things that you need to build civilization off of.
What we've done with fossil fuels is create a pretty.
good, plentiful source of cheap energy to build off of.
Like if you were trying to survive tomorrow on fucking Mars, one of the first things you'd be investing in is what's my energy source that I can compete against this planet for my own survival.
And so to point at that, like, you know what I mean, the fabric of what we're building off of and trying to pretend like that's a negative, you're crazy.
It's one of the most important tools we have.
Yeah, no, right.
100%.
A lot of really important shit that you just said there.
And like one of the things, and this is why I say that the modern environmentalist movement is so anti-human, is that it's almost like they want you to look back at the, let's say, over the last, I don't know, 150 years.
Well, what is that?
Like basically since the Industrial Revolution, that what are we supposed to look back at all of this?
Like this was all horrible.
This was all, oh, it's so horrible that we made all of these advances.
Really?
I mean, it's really, when you get down to it, incredibly anti-human.
I mean, yes, there's been a ton more energy production.
And that has allowed us to live a standard of life that would be considered magical to our great, great, great grandparents.
I mean, just would have been completely inconceivable.
And you can just look at that and reduce that down to like, well, it's, you know, there's climate change and there's more carbon emissions.
It's like, yeah, well, also babies who would have died now survive.
Minimalist Wardrobe for Business00:03:00
I tend to think that's like really good.
That good to me outweighs any supposed bad that you can, you know, that you can, I don't know, extrapolate from higher carbon emissions.
Okay.
Yeah.
Like, are there some dirtier lakes and rivers and stuff like that?
Yeah, and we should try to clean them up.
And by the way, some of them are cleaner than they ever have been.
Is the temperature a little bit warmer than it otherwise would have been?
Probably.
You know, that's my working assumption.
But we're talking about babies living who would have died.
And these aren't unrelated things.
It's like because of those technological advances, these babies live who would have died.
People are, you know, I mean, it's, this is overall, it's not even a question.
It's a tremendous good.
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Value in the Eye of Beholder00:03:02
The other point that you made there that I thought was really important and worth repeating is that there is this mechanism within capitalism, if you want to call it that, although I know capitalism has gotten kind of a dirty wrap, and understandably so, because capitalism is associated with our current system, which is, you know, has a lot of cronyism in it.
But in just the free market, in voluntary exchanges, there is this built-in kind of invisible hand mechanism where when things are needed, they become much more valuable and therefore more profitable to produce and they draw a lot more entrepreneurs into them.
In the same way, like you could probably imagine where, like right now, okay, a diamond is worth a lot more than a bottle of water, right?
Like a diamond is, you know, whatever, thousands of dollars.
And a bottle of water is like a buck, maybe two bucks after all the money printing from the last couple of years.
But if we were on a desert island and we were all thirsty, that would change very quickly.
Very quickly, that bottle of water would become far more valuable than a stupid diamond that nobody cares about, right?
It's like depending on the situation that you're in and what your needs are, value changes because value is subjective.
Value is in the eye of the beholder, much like beauty.
Actually, I don't think that's completely true with beauty.
Beauty is a lot more objective, but value is completely subjective.
Except if you're the editor of Sports Illustrated magazine.
Oh, yeah, you know what?
It might be.
It's more subjective than ever these days.
But if you, you know, so if you're on, on, you know, if people are, if the water supply is in real threat and people are dying of thirst, I promise you that a bottle of water will be much more valuable.
Why is it right now that the diamond is more valuable than the bottle of water?
Well, it's for several reasons.
Number one, people like diamonds and they like the way they look and sparkle and all that, but they're much more scarce.
And so you can get water anywhere.
You're like, water comes out of my tap.
I have a Brita filter.
I have a water system on my refrigerator.
And I can walk right down to the store and get another bottle of water.
And there's tons of them.
If water was really, you know, scarce and you were very thirsty, the water would become very, very valuable.
So the more you're willing to pay for the water, the more profit there is in producing water.
And this draws more and more people in and they get more and more creative and find new ways to produce them.
There's optimum coming for Abby.
But you know what I'm saying?
So yes, there is this built-in mechanism, as you were pointing out, where when things become dire and you really need them, this is what's going to kind of pull entrepreneurs into that field to get creative and find new ways to produce them.
This has been going on in real life in our actual society all the time.
It's constantly happening.
Pulling People Back to Normal00:07:54
And that's what will happen with different energy needs if things ever were to get to a situation where this is really dire.
Like you said, we already could just use nuclear energy and drastically cut down on our carbon emissions.
But the truth is that there's government policies and laws that prevent us from using nuclear energy.
And also just that most people don't really buy this whole thing.
And so we're quite happy to keep burning fossil fuels.
We've also gotten much better.
Like coal and oil is much cleaner than it used to be.
Anyway, all of these things.
All right.
Is there anything else like in this realm that you wanted to mention?
Because there was another kind of angle that I wanted to look at this through.
But anything else on this?
Next angle.
So this is one of the things I said when I was on Rogan's podcast.
And I know I've made this point on the show many times, but it's kind of like the lens that I view where we are right now in this moment through.
And it's also part of the reason why I really look at Donald Trump as a failure.
And I think did more harm than good for the trajectory of the country.
One of the things I said on Rogan, which I know I've said before on the podcast, I'm sure you've heard me say it.
But what I said was that one of the things, like the state of America in the 21st century is essentially that the center became the extremists, that the ruling elite became the true extremists.
And this is why everything is spinning out of control.
And this is why you see the left wing, you know, going crazy and the right wing going crazy, because when the center becomes the extremists, there's nothing to pull the extremists back in.
So, you know, now this has been happening slowly for a while.
I mean, I started with the 21st century.
You could easily go back 100 years before that and just talk about more and more of the power that was being concentrated in Washington, D.C.
And over the last 100 years, America really went from being a republic to an empire.
And that is a radical change.
There was more and more power consolidated in Washington, D.C., whether you're talking about the income tax or the Federal Reserve, you're talking about the Department of Education or the Department of Homeland Security or just any of these things, the Pentagon expansion after World War II and all this stuff.
But if you focus on the 21st century, it really just started to spin out of control.
And the example that I used to Joe Rogan, which he liked very much, was that I just said, like, look, if we lived in a normal society like that, you would like, whatever, you know, your version of kind of a normal society is, you know, we didn't fight stupid wars.
We didn't bail out bankers.
We had good health care and good education.
And you're just, so now in your society, you're kind of the centrist who upholds the status quo because you like this system.
And then I said these, some radicals came and were making proposals to you.
Like, no, we think we should radically change society.
And one of them was the most radical leftist and the other one's the most radical right-winger, you know, and whatever you want to imagine for that.
You know, the left-winger is like, I think we should have, you know, worker co-ops and we should, you know, they could be like a socialist or maybe they're like a woke radical.
You know, we should have hate speech laws or whatever it is.
And then the right-winger, I don't know, is like some, you know, nationalist.
We should build a wall.
We should make them whatever you want to, even an ethno-nationalist or whatever, some radical right-winger, right?
And then there was someone representing the neoliberal, neoconservative status quo of today, but they were just proposing this when this wasn't the status quo.
And they were like, okay, well, here's what I think we should do.
I think we should bomb the hell out of seven third world countries in the Middle East and Northern Africa and just slaughter millions of people, spend trillions of dollars upending their governments and try to remake them in our image.
I think we should build up the biggest incarceration state in the world and throw people in jail for victimless, nonviolent crimes.
I think we should forcibly extract money that people work for through taxation and give it to huge corporations, bail out the big bankers.
I think we should build up a $30 trillion debt and pass that on to our children and grandchildren.
Now, if all of those three proposals were there, would it be self-evident who the moderate is?
Would you look at this neoliberal neoconservative and say, okay, well, that's a lot more reasonable than the left-winger or the right-winger.
I mean, I think there's a strong argument that that's the most extremist shit you could propose.
The left-winger and right-winger might seem sane compared to you, even though they're both pretty insane in their own way.
They might seem sane compared to this shit.
And so this is what happened in America, is that the establishment centrists, moderates, became the extremists.
And people, you know, they then, the reason why everything started, you know, spinning out of control is because when the establishment center becomes the extremists, they lose their ability to pull in the radicals.
Because the radical on the left could be saying something, and then you have the moderate Democrat who says, okay, this is a little bit too radical.
We don't really want to go in this direction.
And that kind of pulls people back in, or vice versa on the right-wing.
That pulls people back in.
But now the radicals could look at them and be like, I'm the radical.
You're the fucking radical.
Your policies are insane.
You destroyed the country.
And they've got an argument.
And so none of this kind of, you lose this kind of self-healing, stabilizing force.
Now, Ron Paul was what the country needed.
But instead, we got Donald Trump.
So we needed Ron Paul, but we got Donald Trump.
Now, what Ron Paul was saying is that we should go back to being a normal country.
Ron Paul was basically, and I don't mean normal in the sense of like unimpressive or something like that or ordinary, but I just mean like you could still be extraordinary, but just not insane.
So Ron Paul was saying, hey, the center has become the extremists, and the center really should be the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution.
We're a republic.
We're not an empire.
We're not going to spend all this money.
We're not going to throw people in jail for no reason.
We're not going to bail out big corporations.
We are just going to be free, respect people's individual liberty, and be a normal country.
And so it's a rejection of this whole establishment and a return to the tradition of individual liberty and freedom.
He didn't win.
Donald Trump won as a blind fuck you to the establishment.
Just fuck all of this.
Now, in there was certainly a lot of a rejection of the center becoming the extreme, but it was just kind of a blind, fuck you.
Fuck your normal.
We're going in a whole new direction.
But Donald Trump didn't return the country to normalcy.
He took us towards something else that was also abnormal and crazy and wild.
And people rejected that.
Not all of it's his fault, right?
Not all of it's his fault.
A lot of it is because the entire media apparatus and the deep state apparatus were all turned on him.
The media just obsessively hyperventilated about all of it.
A lot of people were rejecting that too when they didn't vote for Trump for the second term.
Biden, Conspiracy, and Control00:13:32
A lot of people were like, I just can't handle CNN freaking out every day.
I can't handle all of this.
I just want normal.
You know, they just want to go back to normal.
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Donald Trump didn't hand us five really important reforms that no matter what happened, he at least got that through.
You know, like if you could imagine if a Ron Paul type figure had won and there was all this hysteria and craziness and flipping out, but at least he could say, hey, we repealed the income tax and we yada yada yada and we got these five things and now we can be a little bit more normal of a country.
Donald Trump didn't get us any of those.
He got us a couple pieces of wall.
Yeah.
There's some gaps in between, but a couple pieces.
That's the best he could say.
I got you a couple pieces of wall.
I didn't start any new wars, but I kept all the old ones going.
I made it.
And I spent more than anybody, okay?
I get their speakers.
Right.
And right.
And spent more money than any other president.
Joe Biden will pass him, but spent more money than any other president before him.
And, you know, had these things like, well, I made a deal to get out of this war as soon as the new president's elected.
And what do we see?
That deal has already been torn up and the date's been pushed back and probably will get pushed back again.
But what Donald Trump, in effect, did was he handed back those ruling class moderate extremists one last play.
One last option to say, eh?
So in the same sense that I was saying that the center became extremist and allowed everyone else to spin out of control and they lost their ability to say, no, you're too radical.
Because it's like, fuck you, you're too radical.
This handed them one more opportunity to say that.
To say, eh?
Don't you want to come back to normal?
Because look how abnormal this whole Trump situation is, right?
So come on back and let's be normal again and let's put Joe Biden in there, the poster boy of normal.
You know what I mean?
Like the guy who's been in the Senate for decades and decades and decades, who's, you know, but the problem is what?
That Joe Biden is the real extremist.
And in fact, Joe Biden is the architect of all of the worst policies in America, whether it's the war on drugs or the war on terror, you name it.
It's got Joe Biden's fingerprints all over it, okay?
So now you put Joe Biden back in.
So you gave them, in effect, whether his fault or not, in effect, what the Donald Trump administration ended up doing was giving the extremists a play to say, come back to us.
One last play to say, come back to us.
Except the problem is that they are the extremists and they've got this extreme radical agenda.
And this climate change shit is the next part of their extreme agenda.
That's how all of this ties back in, that this is their next play.
And it's been this for a while.
They've been building toward this, right?
Like in the same sense that they want, if you just look about, look through all of it.
And this is really getting to your point that you were saying earlier, where you were like, it's all about them wanting power over people, right?
If you look at all of this from the progressive era to now, what does all of this have in common?
We want a federal income tax.
We want the Federal Reserve to be able to print fiat currency out of thin air.
We want a Department of Education and we want your Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and all of this stuff, right?
The Department of Homeland Security, the wars abroad, the empire.
It's all control.
It's more and more centralized control over other human beings, which really is the greatest resource in the history of the world.
Human beings.
That's what it's really about controlling.
Fuck controlling oil or controlling wealth or controlling all that, controlling people.
That's where it's at.
That's where real power is at.
And so now they've got the empire.
They've got the money printing machine.
They've got your kids' propaganda known as education, right?
They've got all of this.
And now what are they going to look for control over?
Everything else.
And that's what they've taken over this last year with COVID.
But how do you keep that permanent?
Well, this is what the CNN producer was essentially saying, whether he realized it or not, because I think this is way above his pay grade.
But he was saying, ah, yeah, the COVID stuff isn't really working anymore.
We got the orders.
We're switching over to climate because the climate's always going to be there.
And there's a remarkable amount of financing and compliance that allows them to basically shut down anybody.
And so what I mean by that is, firstly, there's this new thing called ESG scores.
And you can go look into it, but a lot of pension funds and a lot of money is being moved around.
And you're only able to get these investments if like, that's an element of control, where if you are going to play by the left, and by the way, I think that money's filtering down from government.
I don't have to get too conspiracy, but I'm just saying there's going to be financing that only goes to people that are compliant.
And you'll also have, like you were saying, like your Walmart, your Amazons, the airlines.
I mean, who's who's burning through more fuel than them?
They get every bailout known to man.
What do you think?
They're suddenly going to be, no, it's all of a sudden your Uber is going to be more expensive and, you know, or whatever other option might have existed that could have gotten you cross-country.
I don't know, maybe some super van.
I'm really just ranting stupidity at this point.
No, but I understand what you're saying.
The point I'm trying to make is that Government through financing and through other things, they're going to really be able to police our behavior and basically just take more control over our lives.
This is not a win.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And can I rant one more piece of conspiracy?
But this is conspiracy here.
I also think, no, no, I also think that if you look at some of what Biden's doing, he's shutting down new drilling.
They also, with China, I mean, they're trying to get them to use less coal.
We're definitely using less coal in this country.
I also think in some ways this must be a profit play for people heavily invested in the oil industries and probably specifically Saudi Arabia, where I think the more that you can force us to these inefficient like things that probably are not going to work out right now, such as windmills and solar, what you're really going to do is actually just drive up the cost for oil.
And if you're Saudi Arabia and you really only got one product, which is your oil, well, you got to do everything you can to try and figure out, hey, how do I get the U.S. to stop fracking?
How do I get people to stop using cleaner coal?
How do I get people buying this product for more money?
There's no question that the U.S. becoming more and more energy independent over the last couple decades and becoming even a net exporter of energy has, yeah, this has cut into a lot of people's profits.
And a lot of these people have influence over our own.
Shut down the Keystone pipeline.
Yeah.
No, I mean, it's not that crazy to speculate about this stuff.
The other thing, of course, that's worth mentioning is that all of these proposals, this is like the real craziest thing about climate change is that every single proposal, again, the thing they, which they don't like to talk about very much, and this is to the point I was making before that what they jump from is like climate change is real.
Everything's going to be killed.
As Bernie Sanders, the world will be uninhabitable for our children, therefore Green New Deal.
You don't hear AOC or Bernie Sanders or any of them talk a lot about the details.
And in fact, they get pissed off when you bring up the details.
Like, what was it?
There was that QA thing on AOC's website where it was like, she's going to pay anybody who's unable or unwilling to work.
And you were like, wait, what does that have to do with climate change?
And then they're like, oh, this is a Sean Hannity talking point.
You're like, what?
I mean, it was on your website, but okay, we're not allowed to talk about any of your proposals.
We're going to tear down 100 million buildings and build new ones and all this crazy shit, right?
Like real.
But the most infuriating thing about climate change, right?
Like, let's say, I don't know.
I'm trying to think of a good like analogy here, but, but, you know, let's say like, you know, you had some problem that you were trying to eradicate.
Maybe like there's like an infestation or something like that of bugs.
And you were like, we're going to bomb all of these buildings, you know?
And you're like, oh, my God, this is like, first off, the bugs aren't even that bad.
And this is going to destroy so much wealth and this won't be worth it.
And like, that's the argument we're making or something.
But at least they'd be able to say the problem will be solved if we bomb all of these buildings, you know?
All right, not the best analogy, but struggling.
But with climate change, none of these proposals, again, which they don't really like to talk about, but none of these proposals would even make a dent.
I mean, like, everyone flipped out about Trump leaving the Paris Climate Accord, but you know what?
China wasn't involved in it.
So it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
If you don't get China on board, there's none of these models that suggest the U.S. cutting their carbon emissions, even substantially, is going to have some huge impact on climate change.
It's just not going to do it.
The other thing that's that, and that's why when you see these things like the, you know, France proposing that gas tax, what would that do?
What would that do in the greater scheme of things?
I mean, if France became completely carbon neutral, it'd do nothing.
It doesn't even make a dent, not even a blip on the radar in terms of the actual climate models.
Nothing.
It's like, but it will really fuck over some working class people in Paris, you know?
So it's like they want you to sacrifice everything for something that doesn't even help, that doesn't even make a difference in the bigger picture.
So, you know, that's the thing that's like extra infuriating about it.
This isn't even, it's not even a dumbass proposal where you sacrifice everything, but it makes a big difference.
It's not even going to make a difference.
It's literally just all for power and control.
There's nothing about this that they can even argue is going to change any of these fundamentals.
It's just not going to happen.
And theoretically, for them to even have that, they'd have to say, hey, China's on board and they're going to do all of this.
Another thing that conveniently gets left out is that the biggest polluter short of China is the U.S. military.
The Department of India.
Where's India on that list?
India might be a little bit ahead of us.
But the biggest polluter by far that the U.S. has any direct control over is the DOD.
It's the warfare machine.
And yet none of them, I mean, I shouldn't say none of them, but none of the powerful people who are pushing this stuff are ever going, hey, you know, we're really concerned about climate change.
So maybe we got to scale back some of these wars.
Maybe we got to cut the defense budget.
Now, there's a climate change proposal I could get on board with.
You know what?
I changed my whole mind on all of this.
Climate change is a really serious, is a very serious threat.
And I also think that there's some systemic racist problems in the military-industrial complex, and therefore we got to cut back on that.
We got to stop fighting these wars on behalf of the climate.
All right.
I think I'm just about good to wrap up on that.
How are you feeling?
Anything else to add?
Global warming is bullshit.
There you go.
You know what?
We're going to cut the whole episode and just put that out.
That sentence will just, that'll just be enough for us.
All right.
Good people.
Catch us at Porkfest, me and Robbie the Fire, live stand-up show, live podcast.
Catch me.
I'll be hosting Freedom Fest, the entire festival.
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He'll also be speaking at the Libertarian Party convention in, where is it?
I think it's like an hour outside of Portland, Oregon.