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Feb. 21, 2023 - Viva & Barnes

02:18:38

Interview with Brazilian Journalist Paulo Figueiredo! Viva Frei Live

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	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	I see my face on this little iPad to make sure that we're live.
	Sorry for the delay, but it's going to be well worth the wait.
	Another locals in-studio live interview with Paolo, and I've been spending the better part of a day making sure that I pronounce his last name properly.
	Figueredo.
	No, Figueredo.
	Yes, that was pretty good.
	And I was pronouncing it.
	The dough comes at the end.
	Figueiredo, which means fig orchard, if my research has proven to be accurate.
	Yes, it's the fig tree.
	Amazing.
	This is going to be amazing.
	It's going to be more than all things Brazil, but this is going to answer a lot of the questions that people such as myself had.
	You know, like, what the heck is going on in Brazil?
	Is it true what we hear now about compelled vaccination, failing which you lose state benefits?
	What's the difference between Bolsonaro and Lula?
	The history of corruption in Brazil, which from what I now know is rich, thorough and We're going to do this live on Rumble, live on Locals.
	At the end, we'll end the stream on Rumble like we typically do.
	Go to Locals, see if we can get some specific questions for the Locals community.
	So if you're watching now, you can go check it out, vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
	Paulo has an interesting history, is an interesting person, and is going to enlighten us today.
	Paulo, thank you and welcome.
	It's a pleasure.
	Thank you for having me.
	I've been a fan for a long time now.
	I've done my homework on you over the last couple of days.
	I've watched some of your interviews.
	I've done some history research on Brazil, which one podcast I mentioned said it's amazing.
	The history of Brazil is very unfamiliar to most North Americans.
	North Americaners.
	So, before we even get into there, 30,000 foot overview, who are you?
	And then we're going to get into not just your childhood, but the childhood of your forefathers, because they have an interesting childhood and adulthood.
	But who are your 30,000 foot overview?
	Well, I'm a Brazilian journalist.
	I used to be, and I still am an entrepreneur from Brazil as well.
	And for some reason, people...
	Like me on the internet, and that may be a known journalist in Brazil.
	Before I was fired a couple weeks ago, I was hosting the number one show in the country, number one political show in the country.
	I was nominated by the public, the number one show.
	And that's pretty much it.
	I'm also a father, Christian.
	I'm going to unpack all of that because those are things in and of themselves we're going to need to explore.
	The history of your name, you have a unique, is an understatement.
	If I'm not mistaken, your grandfather was a president of Brazil.
	He was.
	My grandfather was a president from 1979 to 1985.
	He was the president that gave the power back to the civilians.
	So he was the one that instituted a full democracy in Brazil.
	Not that Brazil had a complete dictatorship before.
	But he was not a full democracy.
	And when he was the president, he was the last military president.
	And he also gave amnesty to all political prisoners.
	He governed with a direct elected Congress, governors elected by the people as well, a free press, no censorship.
	I believe during his term, Brazil had more liberty than it has right now.
	Phenomenal.
	There's not very many people who get to say my immediate family grandfather was the president of Brazil.
	Actually, even going further back, the history of Brazil, and then we'll get into how long your family's been there for and your personal life.
	Brazil...
	Some people may not know.
	It was founded after Napoleon defeated or was about to defeat the Portuguese.
	The Portuguese say, we're abandoning Portugal.
	They're flat.
	And we're going to go to North America and run Portugal.
	To South America.
	To South America, sorry.
	Go to South America to run Portugal from South America, Brazil.
	From Rio, from the city I'm from.
	And it was great because it was a period of great development.
	And in Rio, and Rio became the capital of the Portuguese Empire, which was a big thing.
	Portugal was a very, although it was also a small country, was a very important, very powerful country with a navy that was one of the most powerful navies in the world, but not strong enough, apparently, to fight Napoleon.
	So that's why, and Napoleon said, oh, these were the only guys that fooled me.
	So, that tells a lot about our culture, I guess, in a sense, in Brazil.
	So, yeah, and after that, Brazil, right now, Brazil is one of the most important countries in the world.
	Most people don't realize that, but Brazil not only has a huge population.
	Fifth biggest in the world, if I'm not.
	Fifth biggest in the world, over 200 million people.
	Brazil is also very rich in everything that you need.
	From a geopolitical, strategical perspective.
	So we have a lot of energy from different sources.
	We have oil, we have hydro-electrical energy, wind, solar, everything.
	Every kind of energy that you can imagine, Brazil has a lot of it.
	Used to be self-sufficient in oil.
	Now, not as much.
	Same as in the US.
	The leftists, they take over.
	They stop the...
	But close.
	Also, the food.
	Brazil is one of the largest food producers in the world, one of the largest meat producers in the world, grains and all that.
	If Brazil stops exporting chicken to China, China will starve in three months.
	So Brazil also has a lot of minerals.
	Great coast, huge coast, lots of rivers.
	So it's a very important country right now.
	And it happens to be a society that's culturally very close to the American.
	It's Western societies in general, but Brazil is very similar in a lot of senses to the American society.
	So capitalism, if you can call it capitalism, what we have these days.
	It's very present in Brazil.
	Brazil in social media, one of the largest social media users in the world.
	I have to say, I'm surprised on how little people know about Brazil.
	Being Brazil is so important.
	Well, the geopolitical importance is something also that I've only recently become sensitive to because of the issues and because of China's dependence on and therefore interest in I heard two mixed numbers,
	but a substantial portion of the population were slaves, which led to slave uprisings.
	It's a multicultural society.
	Look, I knew that Brazil is big on meat, and it's also big on...
	Mixed martial arts because back in the day when I was into the UFC, Anderson Silva was, you know, my go-to favorite fighter of all time.
	We invented the UFC.
	UFC was invented by the Gracie family.
	Oh, my God.
	Well, I'm an idiot now.
	They're going back to Royce Gracie in the early days.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	They invented that.
	Actually, we have one of the guys that was part of the Gracie, Royce's crew.
	He's here in Miami, Pedro Valente.
	He's actually my master in jiu-jitsu, my jiu-jitsu master.
	Great guy.
	We were talking about this before we went live.
	I've been saying, I'm going to learn mixed martial arts.
	I used to do wrestling as a kid, and I did judo as a younger kid.
	Oh, so you're going to do awesome.
	I have good muscle memory.
	So you're going to do awesome.
	Okay, that's the history.
	The brief history of Brazil, if anybody's interested, go download a podcast and get a more thorough history of Brazil.
	It's fascinating.
	Oh, yeah.
	And Brazil became a republic and very much inspired by the U.S. Republic.
	I mean, the political system is presidential, at least in paper.
	The Constitution is somewhat inspired in the American Constitution, like most constitutions in the Western world.
	But it's a presidential system.
	Congress works.
	In a very similar way.
	So if you understand Brazil, if you understand US politics, you have a rough understanding of Brazilian politics as well.
	So it's...
	With the Supreme Court with heavy influence that's not quite as evenly divided.
	That Canadians understand better than Americans.
	We're going to get there.
	We're going to get there.
	Family history.
	So how long has your family line been in Brazil?
	Have you been able to trace it back?
	Yes, I trace it back and it's amazing because...
	And that was mind-blowing because I only found out about this a couple of years ago.
	But most of my family, they were in the military some way.
	So the first two Figueiredo that arrived in Brazil, they were towards what year?
	It was on the 17th century.
	So they arrived...
	You've been there for hundreds of years.
	Yes.
	So I'm like the Mayflower of Brazil.
	Okay.
	And they arrived to be Captain General, which was like the highest rank you had in the military back then.
	So both of them in the mines of Minas Gerais States, diamond mines.
	And it was very interesting because after them, you would trace all...
	On my forefathers, and you would see that a lot of them were military.
	So you know that my grandfather, who was the president, was also a four-star general.
	That's how he became the president.
	Before him, his father was also a general that started a revolution in Sao Paulo, a big one.
	He lost, but it was one of the largest, if not the largest, rebellions, revolutions in Brazil.
	Over 1,000 people died in Sao Paulo.
	Fighting against the dictator that we had back then, Getulio Vargas.
	His father was also in the military.
	He founded the logistics in the army.
	So if you go back and back and back, you see a lot of generals, people in the military, some politicians and some journalists as well.
	So I was fascinated.
	I was like, how much you control, how much free will you really have, right?
	No, but the ability also to trace family back that long, it's not, not everybody can recent immigrants to North America.
	Like, we can trace my grandparents back and maybe one generation before that, but then it gets, it gets, it gets disappeared.
	But these apps now, they have amazing apps these days.
	Because the Mormons are, like, tracing everyone back.
	Because you can baptize, if you were a Mormon, you can baptize people after they die.
	So they trace, and also there's a lineage thing.
	So they trace everyone back, just like the Jews.
	That's very cool.
	No, that's amazing.
	We tried with one side, we got back to Lvov, I think, early 1900s, but before then it becomes very difficult.
	But we'll give it another go.
	But your grandfather becomes president.
	How does he die?
	When does he die?
	How old are you when he dies?
	How much do you know of this?
	And do you have a...
	A unique life as a descendant of a former president?
	Does that change the way you live in Brazil?
	He died in, I believe it was either 1999 or 2000.
	So I was either 17 or 18 years old when he died.
	And yeah, when I was born during his term.
	So yes, it was different.
	We had to have security detail and all that.
	I grew up a little bit like that.
	Also, a lot of people around us because it was...
	He was not only the president, he was also a figure that everyone gravitated around him.
	But I had a very down to earth...
	I was raised in this way.
	My parents were very down to earth.
	My grandfather was known to be very humble, very simple person.
	And so it was unique in a sense, but...
	I mean, I'm a very normal guy.
	And your parents or your father or your mother had no political aspirations to continue the Figueiredo dynasty in Brazilian politics?
	So it's interesting because during my grandfather's term and political career, because before being the president, he was the chief of the intelligence service in Brazil.
	And before that, he was the chief of the military cabinet as well.
	So there's a career.
	You just don't become president.
	And my father, he always advised my family to stay away from it.
	My father was a businessman, and he lost several opportunities, business opportunities.
	My grandfather said, no, no, no, that might look bad.
	So very different.
	From Hunter Biden.
	But it was the mentality.
	No, you've got to do what's right.
	People need to have confidence in the government.
	So if it's anything that people might have questions about, stay away from it.
	So also politics.
	Don't get involved with it.
	It's like my thing.
	And he also didn't want me to join the military.
	So it was like that.
	And what did your parents do for a living, or what do they do?
	My father is a businessman, and my mother is also a businesswoman.
	So do I know, I don't know when you left Brazil to come to America.
	I left in 2015.
	Okay, so we're going to come back to that, because we're going to skip over a big period of time.
	So you grow up in Brazil, you leave in 2015.
	I think we're about the same age.
	How old are you?
	I'm 39. Okay, I'm older than you.
	39. So 2015, you're an adult.
	What do you do for your childhood growing up in Brazil?
	And hold on, I had another question.
	I forgot it.
	What did you study?
	And then what led to you leaving Brazil?
	So growing up in Brazil in the 80s and 90s was amazing.
	The country was safe.
	Lots of opportunities in the 90s.
	Start becoming not as safe.
	But it was great.
	Rio is one of the most amazing cities in the world.
	It's beautiful.
	I grew up in a very back then rural part of Rio.
	It was very not urbanized.
	I live in a beautiful big house, lovely parents, like everything that you can wish for.
	Great.
	The school that I went to was kind of like a paramilitary school, but it wasn't a farm.
	Beautiful.
	I grew up with farm animals, cows, pigs, chickens, and all that.
	So it was great.
	Very kind of far from the urban Rio de Janeiro.
	And then when I went to high school, I went to more the urban Rio.
	And it was great.
	I had fun.
	Rio is a fun city.
	Then I decided to, my grandfather was still alive.
	I decided to become a journalist.
	And he didn't like that at all.
	I remember that.
	Because of the risk or because of the nature?
	Because he hated journalists.
	Already.
	Understandable.
	So your granddad is president when the semblance of avoiding corruption was important and when journalists were still detested, I guess.
	Yes.
	Well, yes.
	But to be fair, journalists back then during his time was already biased and he suffered a lot from it.
	But now it's something different.
	I mean, there's bias and there's a...
	Activism.
	I mean, it's bias and it's gone into activism.
	It became a propaganda machine.
	It's different.
	It's like, it can be biased, and I think everyone has some sort of bias.
	Not being biased can be a goal, but it's impossible to achieve it perfectly.
	But now it's something different.
	Now journalism became propaganda.
	It's something different.
	I mean, the mainstream media, at least.
	And so I decided to go to journalism school in the Catholic University of Rio.
	And he hated it.
	But I was a rebel.
	I decided to do it anyways.
	But during journalism school, I noticed that that was not what I was expecting.
	In the sense that it was already very leftist.
	And I was never socialist, leftist.
	I was more towards the center at one point.
	This is like...
	Early 2000s?
	Early 2000s, yes.
	I was 16 when I entered college.
	So it was like 1999, 2000, I believe.
	So when I decided that I wanted to become a journalist, it was to align.
	And then I switched to economics.
	So that was like, oh, and then I'm like, yes, this is what I was expecting.
	Because I like numbers as well.
	So, and then I started to work.
	So I always liked politics.
	So I started working when I was 16 as an intern in my mother's company, like, just arranging magazines and in the marketing department.
	It's just like an intern.
	When you're 16, what do you know?
	And, of course, it was getting better and being promoted.
	But when I went to economics school, I turned to my father and said, look, I really like politics.
	I want to work with a politician.
	And he introduced me to a friend of him, which was a congressman.
	His name was Eduardo Paes.
	And that guy was the anti-Lula guy that we had.
	And I'm talking probably now 2004, 2005.
	Anti-Lula in demeanor or ideologically conservative to the...
	We didn't have any...
	This is the thing about Brazil.
	We didn't have a right until...
	I don't know, 2014.
	We had left.
	We had a right until 2014.
	Brazil.
	That's interesting.
	I mean, some people often say, like, once a country goes left or socialist or whatever, it never comes back.
	But if you're dealing now with Brazil, which, I mean, was it always left or was it a centrist left at that point in time that went further to the left that then gave rise to something on the right?
	So I think we had a right until my grandfather's government.
	When the civil society took over government, the military stepped out, I think there was a sense of like a revenge or something like that.
	So we're going to do just left.
	It's beautiful to be left, okay?
	We're getting rid of these military guys and we're going to all signal our virtue of being a leftist, okay?
	And then Brazil...
	So if you think about it, and Brazil also had a president, a guy called Collor, which was more towards the right.
	I'm talking about early 1990s.
	This guy that had more liberal, economic liberal reforms, like more free trade and stuff like that.
	Brazil was a very closed economy.
	But after him, everyone that came after him was socialist in some way.
	I mean, we had Fernando Henrique, which was the president for eight years in Brazil, was the guy that came before Lula.
	His party was the Social Democratic Party of Brazil, which now is very close to Lula.
	But during a large time, it was Lula's party, which was the Workers' Party, against the Social Democratic Party.
	So we had either communism or social democracy.
	The two options that we had.
	And that changed with Bolsonaro.
	Bolsonaro was the first guy that changed that.
	And before him, of course, when a politician, when you have a politician, it means the society changed in order to elect that politician.
	So Brazil started changing in 2010 or something like that, a philosopher.
	I know you study.
	We studied philosophy as well.
	So Brazil had a philosopher called Olavo de Carvalho, who was a teacher, had thousands of students, including myself.
	And he started to explain a little bit about politics and what was...
	He was not a conservative, but he explained what was a conservative, what being a conservative meant.
	And so before him, I mean, Brazil had no right.
	But Eduardo Paes, I was talking about Eduardo Paes.
	Eduardo Paes was the right that we had.
	So he was in the Social Democratic Party, so it means he was opposition to Lula.
	So that's what we had.
	He was the right that you had before Bolsonaro.
	Yeah, he was not right.
	He was right compared to Lula.
	He was anti-Lula.
	So it's the Overton-Winden.
	So if you're focusing on the left, and all you see is the left.
	You have a small window, so you don't have the perspective of the whole thing.
	So you see the left fighting among themselves.
	So the guy that's least on the left is your right.
	It's what you consider right.
	So Eduardo Paes was that.
	Now he's a big supporter of Lula.
	But I worked with him for a few years.
	I went to the state government.
	I was his advisor.
	And it was fun.
	And then I left the government because it was definitely not for me.
	Was it...
	I guess the history of corruption is something we're going to have to flesh out as we go through this, but you have a stint where you get involved in politics to the guy who was the right at the time, but has since now become the supporter of Lula on the left.
	He's the mayor of Rio now.
	Okay.
	City of God was in Rio, right?
	City of God was in Rio, yeah.
	That was my childhood exposure to Brazil, to Rio.
	Was I watching that movie?
	I was like, okay, well...
	Have you watched Elite Squad?
	No.
	What is it called?
	Elite Squad.
	Yeah, it's Tropa de Elite in Portuguese.
	Elite Squad.
	Is it good?
	It's amazing.
	Okay.
	Is it a movie or a series?
	No, it's a movie.
	Well, it's a movie with Wagner.
	If you're listening, Elite Squad, that'll be our next.
	Is it appropriate for kids or no?
	No.
	Okay, good.
	Not at all.
	We have a date night movie coming.
	It's the least appropriate movie.
	Violence and Sex.
	Yes.
	Okay.
	Well, good.
	I don't mind that in movies.
	Okay.
	Okay, so that's my exposure of what I understood Brazil to be.
	In my lifetime, I fear the world.
	Just preface it with that.
	But I've never known of a Brazil or a Rio that was not said to be high crime, high risk.
	It's interesting hearing your upbringing and now where Brazil has gone today.
	You have your stint with politics.
	You say, definitely not for me.
	But I just gotta ask, why?
	Like, garbage wheel-turning for the sake of wheel-turning, or corrupt, insidious, fake relationships, or another reason?
	I'll tell you with a...
	Well, for example, it was very sad for me to see Eduardo Paes, who was an anti-Lula guy, run for mayor of Rio.
	And he was an anti-Lula guy when I started working with him.
	2005, let's say.
	And in 2008, He runs for the mayor of Rio with support of Lula.
	I was like, yeah, there's something wrong with that.
	You can't do a 180 in three years.
	There's something wrong with that.
	But also, while I was working in the state government, one of the largest projects I was in charge as a special advisor to the Secretary of Sports was the privatization of the Moroccan Stadium, which is a soccer stadium that we have in Brazil, which is legendary.
	Pelé played there.
	Old and legendary.
	It was built in the 50s.
	Huge.
	Almost 100,000 people capacity.
	So I was dealing, I was the head of the project that would privatize Maracanã Stadium.
	So one day, I was working like crazy.
	So it's not easy.
	As you know, you have the economical aspect of it.
	You have the legal aspect of it.
	You have public hearings about it.
	After I got all the clearances, Brazil won the candidacy.
	To host the World Cup of 2014.
	And then Lula announced...
	Lula was the president back then.
	He announced a line of credit to every state of one billion reais.
	Okay?
	What's the exchange rate?
	Right now it's one to five.
	Back then it was one to two.
	One to two meaning two...
	Like Lula authorized back then half a billion dollars as a line of credit.
	To the states.
	So one day, Eduardo, the secretary, calls me in his office and said, you know, the Maracanã project is, we're going to have to halt it.
	I was like, what?
	Are you out of your mind?
	It's like, I've been working for a year.
	I've been busting my ass to make this happen.
	What are you talking about?
	And he's like, didn't you read the papers?
	I was like, what?
	He's like, Lula authorized a line of credit of half a billion reais.
	I was like, I don't care.
	We're privatizing it.
	So the private sector will take it.
	And this costs the states $50 million a year in losses.
	So we're going to send it to the private sectors.
	They're going to turn into a beautiful state.
	We won't have to deal with it.
	Our state's not going to need this line of credit.
	And he was like, you're really innocent, right?
	I was like, why?
	He's like, do you think our governor?
	Is not going to do the construction for a project that's half a billion dollars?
	It's like, what?
	It's like, yeah.
	And he didn't say it, but you know how much in bribery this guy's going to get?
	He's not going to let it go.
	So now, and by the way, the stating was not privatized.
	And you know how much we had on our ass mates, the whole to adapt and to modernize the stadium in order to be able to host the World Cup?
	We would spend, by the numbers back then, roughly, I don't know, $80 million?
	And the private sector would take care of it.
	You know how much he ended up costing?
	I'll say.
	The line of credits was half a billion.
	I was going to say that.
	The entire line of credits.
	More.
	$600 million.
	And it's like, they used the whole line of credit, they spent it all, and said, oh, we need more money.
	So how can I work in an environment like this?
	This is like Parkinson's law of mundanity, except on the political corruption scale.
	Like, the project will expand to fit the budget that you have in the project.
	Okay, well, that's an experience that's enough to let someone know.
	It's just a tiny...
	It's corruption all the way.
	It's not turtles all the way down.
	It's corruption all the way down.
	By the way, this guy, Eduardo Pais Amirio Rio, I've never seen him being...
	And I was very close to him at one point.
	And he was...
	His name popped up in some corruption list.
	But while working with him, I've never seen any indicative of corruption by him.
	But the system in general?
	It was unbelievable.
	So that's the question.
	I mean, all of politics is corrupt and has been throughout the history of time.
	But there are levels.
	There are levels.
	Now, we're now learning about the levels of corruption in America.
	I'm learning about it now in Canada.
	Some interesting news coming out of Canada.
	We've seen what happened and is continuing to happen in the States.
	Understatement of the year, it's the next level of corruption in Brazil.
	When did it get there?
	Or was it always there to some varying degree, but took off at a given point in time under a given politician?
	So I was watching the interview that you had with Glenn Greenwald, and he described in a fair way that Brazil always had a corrupted system, in a sense.
	Okay?
	What he didn't tell you, and I think it's important to know, is that when the Workers' Party took over...
	This is Lula's Party.
	Lula's Party.
	And took over, this is in 2003.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	Everything reached a different level.
	Everything.
	And the goal for the corruption was also different.
	So we always had politicians that took a percentage to become rich.
	It was always part of the system.
	The Workers' Party, they came up with a different system.
	Their corruption was not as much oriented in terms of personal enrichment, but to maintain the power.
	So one of the big scandals, the first big scandal that they had was right after they took office.
	They took over in 2003.
	So they found out that it was very clever, if you think about it.
	They were like, okay, we're in a presidential system.
	And we need to pass bills.
	Like, same as in the U.S. Like, let's say Joe Biden, okay?
	And, okay, and we have 500 members in Congress, and they have a lot of requests, and they all want to make money.
	But how much money do these guys want to make?
	It's like, I don't know.
	If you pay them in today's currencies, let's say back then, if you pay them like $10,000 a month, They will vote with you forever.
	Like, at least half of them.
	It's like, really?
	Yeah.
	Oh, what is the size of my budget?
	Oh, you have like a trillion dollars budget.
	Really?
	Yeah.
	So just give them the money.
	And let's pass all the bills we can.
	So that was the Men's Salon scandal.
	It was a real thing.
	It went all the way to the Supreme Court.
	So what they did is that the public...
	Bank, the state-owned bank, government-owned bank, federal government-owned bank, Banco do Brasil, the Brazilian bank.
	They had an advertising contract with an advertising agency.
	The guy from the advertising agency, just like $100 million, let's say.
	The guy from the advertising agency was just withdrawing money on the bank.
	And going in Congress and distributing a bag of money to half of congressmen.
	This is before the internet really took off, I guess.
	Because this type of stuff, it wouldn't be so easy to hide today.
	You'd have to cloak it under lobbying or something, like reimbursement of expenses.
	Just outright payoffs.
	Well, you have an advertising agency guy.
	He goes to the bank.
	He withdraws money.
	And he gave...
	It was a real thing.
	For several months.
	For every month.
	Okay?
	So, that was Lula's party.
	For some crazy reason, he was never convicted because of this.
	They said, well...
	Anybody convicted or no?
	Yeah, several ministers.
	What's the name of the project?
	Just so people can Google this themselves.
	It's called Mensalão.
	How do you spell that?
	It's M-E-N-S-A-A-L.
	A-O.
	Mensalau.
	Mensalau.
	Which means a monthly given.
	It's like an allowance.
	Mensalau.
	It was like a big allowance.
	That was it.
	And it was a big thing.
	It was a huge scandal.
	The Social Democratic Party, which was opposition to Lula, said, you know what?
	After that, he's doomed.
	Let's not push for an impeachment.
	Because politically, he's doomed.
	If we impeach him, the vice president might take over and might be a challenge on the next election.
	So let's not impeach him.
	Let's wait because he's a bad man walking.
	And that was in, I don't know, 2005, 2006.
	So Lula, as a smart person, said, okay, so you're going to leave me alone.
	Okay.
	So he started the largest...
	Distribution, money distribution program in the history of the country.
	This is when it became a welfare state.
	Yeah, a welfare program.
	Yeah, it's Brazil.
	So it's like it was a food stamp program.
	Brazil didn't have a food stamp program.
	What's the name of that?
	Because that name I remember thinking is very similar to Bolsonaro, but it has nothing to do with it.
	It's bolsa.
	Bolsa means purse.
	Okay.
	And it also means some sort of allowance or support.
	Familia, which is family.
	It's B-O...
	B-O-L-S-A.
	Bolsa Familia, nothing to do with Bolsonaro, and it just means a family allowance, and that is, I don't know.
	It's a food stamp program.
	Okay, not universal basic income type thing, but it's...
	No, because it was not universal.
	It's actually a good program from an economics perspective.
	So if you were very poor, Brazil didn't have that, although we had a very poor population.
	So Brazil...
	If you didn't have any money, if you were really poor, you would get a food stamp program to buy basic stuff.
	From a cynical political perspective, however, Lula right now is buying off a massive portion of the population.
	Of course, forever.
	And then he got real.
	And in the meantime, also, so Brazil is a big commodity exporter.
	So Brazil was exporting commodities like crazy in the early 2000s to China.
	China was in need of everything.
	That's when China became Brazil's largest economic partner.
	So Brazil's economy and also the demographic pyramid, Brazil was having a lot of people joining the workforce.
	So it was great for the country as well.
	The level of productivity in the country, internet was becoming a big thing in Brazil.
	A lot of reforms that the previous government had done started to kick in.
	So Brazil started to take off economically.
	So because of that, so Lula became very popular.
	He had an economy that was doing very well, a social program, a new social program that was fantastic from a political perspective.
	And he got re-elected by a broad margin.
	It was almost close, but he got re-elected.
	And he became popular as ever.
	Remember, people knew, most people knew that he was involved in a little corruption scandal.
	He doesn't have control over his minions and they took some money and they got punished and it won't happen again.
	Yes.
	It sounds like Trudeau level, Justin Trudeau level corruption, except it sounds like Lula might have actually done something good for Brazil, whereas I can't think of one good thing that Trudeau has done for Canada.
	He's had his scandal after scandal, everyone knows about it, and yet gets re-elected with a minority government.
	But Lula, at least it sounds like back in the day, might have done something good, if only for cynical purposes, despite his corruption.
	So he gets a good social welfare program in place.
	And he did a lot of bad things as well because the size of the state in Brazil increased like tremendously.
	Size of the?
	Of the government.
	So he hired, so the government, deficit, he hired a lot of...
	Public servants like crazy.
	That's another good demographic that will always vote for the government.
	Exactly.
	Social welfare and administrative state and you have captured two-thirds of the population.
	Exactly.
	And he hired like nuts.
	And the amount of laws they passed that were harmful to the country.
	You only pay the price in a few years, right?
	You don't pay the price immediately.
	Like when you pass a good bill, a good reform, you don't get the dividends immediately.
	Same thing goes with a bad legislation.
	But the problem is the Brazilian people knew, I think most Brazilians knew that Lula was corrupt, and they didn't care.
	That was the Mensalão scandal.
	But as you can see, it's different from personal enrichment.
	The money is not to buy a boat, it's to keep power.
	It's to corrupt the institutions, not to corrupt people, but to corrupt institutions.
	So remember, if the executive branch is by now the legislative branch, it means you don't have a republic anymore.
	In fact, you have a dictatorship.
	And because with the legislators you just purchased, you can also use them to confirm, let's say, Supreme Court justices.
	So now you have all three, and judges as well.
	So now you don't have a republic anymore.
	You have a central executive branch that can do whatever they want.
	So if you have political capital, meaning you're popular, you have high popularity with the people, and you control the legislative branch, and you're appointed The right justices and judges?
	That's not a democracy anymore.
	That's not a republic anymore.
	That's just plain dictatorship.
	So that's how the corruption of the Workers' Party was different from all other corruptions.
	So they didn't stop.
	They were caught.
	So what they started doing is what became then Operation Car Wash.
	It became very famous.
	What they found out is that they changed the method a little bit.
	Operation Car Wash, obviously, because this is a money laundering scheme of sorts.
	No, it was because it started investigating a car wash, an actual car wash, in the south of the country.
	And they found out there was a guy that was laundering money in this little car wash.
	And when they caught this guy, this guy...
	Plead a deal with the DA and appointed other guys, and he came all the way to the president, to Lula.
	And that was part of what sent him to jail, to prison.
	But what they were doing is that since they couldn't send money directly to the guys in Congress, so they started financing their campaigns.
	You vote with me, and I'll...
	Raise funds for your campaign.
	Not officially.
	Everything off the books, okay?
	But I will give you money for your campaign.
	So this way, they could have the votes.
	But not only that, they could help elect the people that they wanted financing their campaigns off the books.
	So the way it worked was that they had huge construction contracts.
	With other brash, like, big contractors, huge construction contracts with them, and several other contracts as well, pension funds and all that.
	But the contractor would donate money to fund the campaigns of the candidates supported by Lula.
	So that was even better, because they not only had the votes that they needed in Congress, so they bought out Congress as well, again.
	Second time.
	But they could elect the candidates they wanted.
	So it was even better.
	So, and that was, that was people, so again, different type of corruption.
	Not only a guy getting rich, not only a corrupt politician getting rich, we're talking about the republic being subverted.
	Again, and they use money to fund other socialist countries.
	So Brazil sent an immense amount of money to Venezuela.
	Brazil had a program with doctors.
	It's called More Doctors.
	Brazil hired thousands of doctors from Cuba because, you know, the health system in Cuba is amazing, right?
	Everyone talks about it.
	It's total false.
	It's a piece of crap.
	But Brazil hired thousands of doctors from Cuba.
	This is a true story.
	Cuba was almost bankrupt, okay?
	Castro was still alive back then.
	Cuba was bankrupt.
	Brazil hired thousands of doctors from Cuba, and they came to work in Brazil with a working visa, okay?
	But they didn't receive the salary monthly.
	They received a small Percentage of it.
	The rest of it was sent to the Cuban government.
	Because, you know, how Cuban government owned Cuban people.
	At least in the mind of Lula.
	This program is resumed now.
	It subsidized the Cuban government.
	Yeah, through Brazilian taxpayers' money.
	Was this known publicly at the time?
	Oh yeah!
	And sold as...
	This is starting again!
	Now that Lula is the president again, he resumed the more doctors program with Cuban doctors.
	To subsidize what was Fidel Castro's regime at the time.
	Yes, yes.
	So Brazilians are responsible for everything that happens in Cuba.
	So all the human rights violations that are happening in Cuba are being at least partially subsidized.
	They were funded by Brazilian taxpayers through Lula.
	Okay, what is the Brazilian population saying at the time this is going on?
	If it's a known policy, I mean, is the defense for the people that, well, we didn't know that not all the money was going to the doctors, we thought we were paying the doctors?
	No, no, no, it was open.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	This is like...
	It's a social welfare at an international scale where now we're going to go help.
	Cuba.
	Yeah.
	And prop up what would otherwise be a failed regime.
	We also funded the construction of their port.
	We also funded the subway of Caracas.
	We also funded stuff in Peru.
	So name a socialist country.
	We were funding their construction, their programs.
	And once you send the money abroad, you don't have any control, right?
	So it's over there.
	So what's done with the money, we don't know.
	Well, that's what I was going to ask.
	What would be the...
	Ulterior motive for Lula.
	If he sends all the money abroad, he doesn't benefit directly.
	What is the incentive to subsidize?
	I think it does benefit directly because he's funding his international supporters from the left.
	So he doesn't want Cuba to become a democracy and have, let's say, a right-wing president.
	He doesn't want Venezuela to become a democracy and have a right-wing president.
	So he was supporting his...
	Pulse.
	He's friends, he's buddies with Brazilian taxpayer money.
	And he's doing it again.
	Actually, you have to finish up on the operation in Car Wash.
	So this scandal is discovered.
	It's just, you know, iteration 2.0 of misappropriating, funneling monies, not only buying off the legislative branch for legislative purposes, but effectively influencing who gets elected.
	Yes.
	There's versions of that in America where, you know, some people...
	I think Operation Car Wash started in a very nice way.
	Young prosecutors, they didn't want corruption in Brazil to become It reached a point that was...
	The tipping point, as we say.
	The tipping point, yeah.
	It was unbelievable.
	And everyone knew.
	And everyone knew that to do anything with the Workers' Party government, you wouldn't have to give them a percentage.
	They would use that money to stay in power and all that.
	So it became, with a lot of support from everyone in the country, including myself.
	But at one point, it became very politicized.
	And they started, because they had a lot of support from the media and from the population, from people.
	To fight back against this institutionalized corruption.
	I think the next sentence is going to be, they went too far and over prosecuted.
	Over prosecuted.
	And made a very angry ban out of Lula and an angry political party machine when it came back into power.
	True.
	Okay.
	But they violated every...
	Every civil right you can imagine.
	And they violate it with bad people, but with, remember, good people as well, right?
	You have this thing in the Western world that we would rather have a thousand witches running away than to burn an innocent woman, right?
	And in Brazil...
	We burned a lot of innocent women in the process.
	This is the irony, is that in fighting corruption, the prosecution became just as corrupt, if not more so, with a vengeance.
	And from what I understood, there was corruption in the prosecution, corruption in the...
	Not like they were bribed, although they had a lot of incentives.
	Some of them were giving speeches and receiving an immense amount of money for lectures, speeches, and all that.
	But there was a corruption in the sense of corrupting a system, right?
	And this is what Glenn Greenwald talked about in our interview.
	Yes.
	In going after Lula, their power was unchecked.
	He is absolutely correct.
	So they abused of their power, but ultimately prosecuted, convicted, and Lula went to jail.
	Not only Lula.
	They convicted the guys.
	I'm talking billionaires from the...
	Construction companies, several congressmen, several congress members, senators, former ministers of Lula.
	I mean, they had, I don't know, 79 phases of this operation.
	I don't even know how many.
	But everyone was going to jail.
	It became a witch hunt.
	At one point, it did become a witch hunt.
	And Lula was convicted as well.
	But to my surprise...
	Lula was never convicted for, I don't know, sending money to Cuba or corrupting the republic.
	No, he was convicted for having a condo.
	He was not a super wealthy condo that apparently was given to him by one of the construction companies.
	And he didn't have it under his name.
	He didn't declare it as a gift?
	No, he was not under his name officially.
	But a lot of witnesses said it belonged to him.
	And it was like, come on, this is very weak.
	But the problem was not only that.
	The problem was that, well, you're a lawyer, so you can explain better than myself.
	But Lula lived in Brasilia.
	And he's from Sao Paulo.
	This condo was in Sao Paulo.
	So you can say that the judge that's going to conduct this case, it's either going to be in Brasilia or in Sao Paulo.
	But for some reason, they found a way to bring the case to Sergio Moro, which was the judge that was overseeing everything related to Operation Car Wash, saying he was the natural judge.
	But he was not.
	Well, so it's interesting.
	Only from a Canadian legal perspective, typically, you know, when it comes to real property, then you could be where the real property is situated or where the defendant resides.
	Yes, that's what I said.
	This sounds like, from what I'm understanding of what you're saying, it's, okay, we want to get a judge who we know is going to be harsh on Lula on the file.
	So let's find a way to give him jurisdiction.
	Maybe it could be done.
	It could be done.
	And then this happens.
	This happens.
	But this ultimately becomes the basis of What's the word?
	Not exonerating, but rather undoing the conviction, which they said had no jurisdiction, he was wrongly convicted.
	And he was.
	And he was.
	And on top of that, he was wrongly convicted from a procedural perspective.
	As a lawyer, you know, you have to follow the two things.
	The guy needs to be guilty, but also you need to follow due process, right?
	If you don't, you need both.
	You can have just one, right?
	And we did not follow due process with Lula.
	And I was one of the only guys on the right saying that.
	And I was crucified for saying that.
	Like, I hate this guy.
	I want him to rot in jail.
	But we're not doing it the right way.
	It's the O.J. Simpson phenomenon where, as guilty as he might have been, doesn't mean you can plant evidence to make sure that you're convicted.
	Exactly.
	And so Lula, he spends, what is it, less than two years in jail?
	Yes, he went to a...
	I said prison, but it was actual jail.
	So then some weird things started happening.
	That's when weird things started happening.
	Because Lula going to jail was an establishment that supported Lula going to jail.
	They threw Lula under the bus.
	So it had all the business elites, the mainstream media, Oligarchs, everyone.
	Like, yeah, we should just kill Lula.
	Send him to jail.
	Let's get rid of him.
	It's like, okay.
	The media is saying that.
	So we all know the media is all left.
	So why are they saying that?
	And even the prosecutors, I knew they were not conservative people, but they wanted to get rid of Lula politically.
	So what did they expect?
	Remember I told you, Brazil was always divided between Workers' Party, left, ultra-left, like Socialist Party, and the Social Democrats, which is more like a globalist, woke, social...
	It's more like Trudeau, in a sense.
	Well, Trudeau is going more and more towards full communist.
	Back to his origins, if I can say that.
	For those who don't get the joke, there's a rumor that Fidel Castro is Justin Trudeau's natural father.
	You're saying it.
	I've read it.
	I don't think it's true, but who knows?
	There are a lot of similarities if you do side-by-side.
	Yes.
	But it's an internet meme.
	Yeah, just look it up.
	Just look at the pictures and come to your own conclusion.
	I'm not saying he looks more like Fidel than Pierre Elliott, but he doesn't look much like Pierre Elliott.
	I'm not entertaining these people seriously, although Google the images.
	You'll see.
	Okay, sorry.
	Brazil was divided between Workers' Party and Social Democrats.
	So everyone thought that when we got rid of the Workers' Party, who would come back?
	Social Democrats.
	Of course.
	It's been like that for 25 years.
	So this is what people thought.
	But then, I mean, Andrew Klavan has a very smart analogy that he says that Donald Trump, it's like Godzilla, that he was...
	The Democratic Party created Donald Trump with their radioactive experiments, like same way as Godzilla with the radioactive experiments in the islands in the Pacific.
	So Bolsonaro was kind of like Brazil's Godzilla as well.
	So people were like, we don't want the Social Democratic Party, we don't want the Workers' Party for sure, so we want something different.
	And that's how Bolsonaro got into power.
	This is like the click when things finally click, where now it makes sense, where they say, okay, we don't like Lula, we want to get the Social Democrats back in.
	So, in a sense, we're taking out one guy just because we know who's going to replace him, and then, lo and behold, Bolsonaro somehow gets elected, and now they don't even have the Social Democrats in power.
	Yeah, because society has changed in Brazil.
	So, the evangelical...
	Churches were growing a lot, so evangelical Christians tend to be more conservative, same as in the US, the same as everywhere else in the world, right?
	It's almost impossible to be a Christian and a leftist.
	Also, with the internet, the mainstream media lost the monopoly of the public discussion, of the speech, of the ideas, right?
	So you start having independent journalists in Brazil.
	You also have Olavo Zécaval, the philosopher I told you about.
	His ideas are becoming more and more popular.
	So you have all these changes.
	And Bolsonaro, he was a congressman, very, very, had a very minor part in Congress, but he was very conservative and spoke his mind very honest.
	So he was already, I mean, I don't know what his political history was, but he's already been involved in politics for some time.
	He's been at Congress for like over 20 years.
	Okay.
	Congressman, yeah.
	But he was like a congressman that represented the military people, just a small percentage.
	He was very well voted in 2014, I believe.
	But in 2018, he said, I'm going to run for president.
	And no one really believed.
	It was kind of like Donald Trump.
	I mean, the analogy between Bolsonaro and Donald Trump is very good in some aspects and very bad in other aspects.
	That's why he's an analogy, right?
	But in that sense, when he started, it was like, people thought it was a joke.
	And then the polls were saying, like, that's 20%.
	There's no chance of winning.
	And the establishment, everyone was laughing, saying, oh, no, the guy who's going to win is the former governor of Sao Paulo, of the Social Democratic Party, who is now the vice president of Lula, by the way.
	OK, because the Social Democratic Party, the workers' party, they're together now.
	The media got what they wanted.
	It just took an extra five years.
	OK.
	And so Lula comes out, and I understand that he's not...
	Sorry, not Lula.
	Bolsonaro comes out, says he's running, not taken seriously, uses social media, from what I understand, very effectively.
	Okay, Lula right now has gotten out of jail for...
	He got out of jail when?
	So I believe it was in 2019 or 2020.
	So at one point, the establishment...
	Let me use this word very loosely, but I'm going to include the media, the academia, the oligarchs, the financial sector, everyone, okay?
	The establishment realized that, oh, this is not what we wanted, okay?
	This guy is nuts.
	This Bolsonaro is nuts.
	He's weird.
	He's behaving in a weird way.
	It's like there's an aesthetical, like...
	I don't know.
	People don't like him, the way he looks, the way he speaks, more than his ideas.
	The media went nuts with him.
	And so they are like, okay, we need to get rid of him.
	Who can defeat him?
	And they tried several names, but none of them had any appeal to the people.
	And Lula still had a big recall.
	And so the polls were showing that Lula still had 40% of the voters or something like that, even with the corruption.
	And you can trust or distrust the polls.
	I'm more towards distrust.
	But Lula always had a political cap, was always popular in Brazil at a certain point.
	Then, weird things start happening.
	Under the Brazilian constitution, You're only guilty.
	You're innocent until proven guilty.
	Pretty much the same as here.
	But you're only found guilty ever after the last appeal.
	So you have all the appeals.
	I don't know the technical term.
	Final appeals, I mean, so long as it can be challenged.
	As long as it can be challenged, you're innocent.
	It's written in the Brazilian Constitution.
	So because of that, there's a discussion if you can be sent to jail.
	When can a judge send you to jail?
	Okay?
	So you have what they use a lot in Operation Car Wash, and they use much more than the law allowed them to.
	It was a preemptive arrest.
	You have a chance to destroy evidence, when you can run away, or stuff like that.
	They used that a lot in the Operation Car Wash.
	But Lula, no.
	Lula was convicted, so the understanding that the Supreme Court had back then was that, well, not after the first judge, because you don't have a jury trial in Brazil with some exceptions, but not with the first judge, but after You go to appeals panel of judges.
	After they convict you, then they can send you to jail.
	And that's how Lula went to jail.
	To prison, actually.
	But he went to jail.
	It was in a federal police building.
	And that was the understanding until 2020.
	Then the Supreme Court, because of Lula's case, of course, they decided to revisit the case, the discussion.
	And they said, No, no, no.
	It's what the Constitution says.
	It's until your final appeal.
	So meaning, in Brazil, you have the federal judge, then you have the appeals court, then you have the Superior Court of Justice, then you have the Supreme Court, and everyone can appeal to the Supreme Court.
	It's not like they have to grant.
	What do you call it here?
	Certiorari, I think.
	Certs, yeah.
	You don't have to.
	Everyone can appeal to the Supreme Court in Brazil.
	And after that, you have also other certain appeal types that only you lawyers can figure out.
	But it's a very long process.
	It can take over 10 years, easily.
	So they decided, well, Lulu was not convicted until...
	He still has some rights of appeal, so let him go.
	Let him go.
	That was before, and after that, I think a year later, a year after that, then they decided to nullify Lula's all trials.
	Remember, he was convicted by a federal judge, by an appeals court unanimously, by the superior courts of justice, by a panel of judges as well unanimously.
	And he had another case that he was convicted twice, involving a country house in Sao Paulo as well.
	But he had all these convictions, and they said, you know what?
	Sergio Moro, you didn't have jurisdiction over this case.
	And people were like, oh, what?
	The lawyers challenged the jurisdiction.
	In the beginning of the trial.
	It was ratified back then.
	It was ratified back then.
	And then they come back after and say, wrong jurisdiction, he never had the right to convict anyhow, not just let him out, tear it up.
	Tear it up.
	It was like he was...
	And then he was sent back to the original judge in Brasilia, which, yes, he was the correct judge to oversee this case, but then he was too old.
	I was going to say, there might be some double jeopardy issues in there.
	No, because the trial was found new.
	So it was like he was never tried.
	So he can be tried again, but you would have to start over.
	But he was over 70-something years, and there's a prescription.
	This is all post-Bolsonaro being elected.
	Yes.
	And then we skipped over an important thing.
	So Bolsonaro...
	Outlier of outliers, a la Trump.
	This is two years after Trump, so we're seeing something of what they call the populist movement, not just in America, Brazil, in Europe.
	We'd seen it a little earlier.
	He gets elected, despite all odds, but he got stabbed during his...
	Yeah.
	I don't think most people know this.
	While he's running the first time, before he got elected in 2018, he gets stabbed in the chest by...
	What's described as a lefty maniac, a lone wolf.
	Well, the guy had all connections with the left and with the leftist parties, and he was arrested, of course, but they investigated him and found out he was a lone wolf with mental issues.
	It's almost like the exact type of person media and politics tries to radicalize.
	Oh, by the way, the guy who was in charge of the investigation, the federal police chief, he's now the chief of intelligence in Lula's government.
	The guy who was in charge of the investigation.
	Lily Tomlin said, no matter how cynical you are, it's tough to keep up.
	So a lone wolf who may or may not have been radicalized by the rabid, I imagine it's rabid, 24-7, incessant, anti-Bolsonaro, it's the end of times if he gets elected, gets stabbed in the chest.
	Seriously.
	In the abdomen.
	It was serious.
	It wasn't like...
	He almost died.
	Almost died.
	Until today, he has health issues.
	Yeah, he was here in the U.S. And he went to the hospital.
	People were hypothesizing as to why he went to the hospital.
	No, it was for that reason.
	Ask him.
	And he was having an obstruction.
	Because when the...
	They did surgery and they had to reconstruct his intestines.
	And you have a risk, a subsequent risk of stomach blockage as a result.
	Yes, exactly.
	That's what we had.
	And from time to time.
	It's kind of sad because you have dinner with the guy.
	The guy was like, no, I can't eat at night because I don't feel well.
	So he still has some side effects.
	But after, I mean, I say but, after getting stabbed and all of that.
	Do you believe that the left said it was fake?
	It was all staged?
	I could believe.
	We live in a world now where I...
	Not that I could believe it could be the case.
	I understand how people believe it.
	It's like sort of the Alex Jones phenomenon where you end up looking for conspiracies beyond the realm within...
	Except Alex Jones was right 80% of the time.
	I'd say maybe even more, but the one where he was wrong, well, that would be his downfall.
	That is going to be the attempt to bring him down.
	I can understand people saying blue screen, holograph, whatever, as opposed to the actual conspiracy, which is...
	It wasn't a lone wolf.
	And even if it was, or even if it were, that's the result of 24 /7 absolute demonizing from the media, from politicians creating the existential threat where you trigger people to do these things.
	I think we need to be careful with the concept that media is responsible for other people's behavior.
	Because I've been accused of that.
	So, on the other side, they accused me of propagating ideas that made people invade the capital in Brazil.
	It's true, but you know what the funny thing is, and I agree with you, that reasonable words, when heard unreasonably, the person who uttered those reasonable words is not to be blamed for anything.
	When the media looks at alternative personalities and says, "Well, if you spend so much time criticizing, what do you think is going to happen?" It is a bit of the confession through projection where we have the Rachel Maddow and you have the Brian Stelters of the world.
	who spend all day every day letting people know 12 years left on earth if this politician gets elected you can reasonably anticipate it's not to blame them legally or maybe morally for creating a panic.
	True.
	Yeah, so it was not a question of actually attributing responsibility to the media just contextually That's how it happened.
	That's how it went down.
	It did, yeah.
	And from a cynical perspective, like the old expression.
	I think it was actually planned.
	I believe there's evidence, including high-profile lawyers just showing up that no one knew who was paying the lawyers showing up to defend the guy.
	And his cell phone, he had like, I don't know how many cell phones, international credit cards.
	This guy was funded.
	This was planned.
	He went to a shooting range with the Bolsonaro's sons used to go before.
	So he was like, it was planned.
	I believe it was planned.
	It was definitely, definitely not a lone wolf.
	And I asked Bolsonaro that a couple weeks ago.
	I asked, what do you think?
	It was like, yeah, no, no.
	It was planned by the left.
	But then I can also see how someone on the left is going to say, it was planned by Bolsonaro because it got him sympathy votes and he got elected.
	Jesus Christ.
	Have you heard people say that?
	I have.
	Yeah, right.
	How much do you want?
	That's one heck of an investment in your political future.
	There's the old expression of the best fundraising trick is to throw a brick through your own window and say, but then there's levels.
	We had an incident in Canada in the early days of the pandemic.
	The Nova Scotia shooter, I'm not sure if you ever heard about this, but, you know, the guy went on a shooting spree in Nova Scotia, rural Nova Scotia, killed like, I want to say 20, you know, close to 20 people if it wasn't 20, over 24 hours driving an RCMP lookalike vehicle, wearing an RCMP uniform if it wasn't an actual one.
	And, you know, they sweep it under the rug and say, it's a gun issue.
	And Justin Trudeau exploited it for that.
	Not paying attention to the fact that this individual withdrew $400,000 from a private wealth management bank a couple of days earlier, and there's only so many ways that happens.
	A very, very scandalous, suspicious story that gets swept under the rug and exploited for political purposes.
	But yeah, to believe that this guy's a lone wolf and has all of these indications that you've mentioned.
	I don't believe so.
	My suspicious bells are going on.
	And then the guy who was in charge of the investigation is now the head of intelligence for the federal police.
	Isn't that politically convenient, as we say?
	Okay, terrible.
	But he gets elected, becomes president of Brazil, 2018, and the elections that we just had, and this is where people became conscious of Brazil, was this last election.
	What was Bolsonaro's presidency like?
	It was not bad.
	But it was not, especially in the beginning, it was not great because of several reasons.
	Bolsonaro is a great guy.
	He's a very good person, has very good values, but he was definitely not prepared for the job in several senses.
	For example, when he got elected, he decided to antagonize the Congress.
	That was not a smart thing to do.
	What do you mean by anti?
	How did he do that?
	Well, with...
	Verbally, with a...
	He was not good.
	I mean, when you're a president, part of your job is dealing with Congress.
	And you need to get along with that, at least in a certain sense.
	And to Bolsonaro's defense, Brazilian Congress was the same Congress that, in a sense, at least partially, same Congress that was used to receiving bribe and cash until a few years before.
	So they were used to a dynamic that Bolsonaro was not going to be part of, okay?
	So he was not giving them positions in the government.
	He was antagonizing them verbally.
	Every time he and the Congress had a disagreement, he took the populist route, which was he asked people to go to the streets and demand things from Congress.
	Not as smart.
	He should have followed the Justin Trudeau strategy, which is not to get involved in protests to affect policy change.
	Just stay at home and phone your governor.
	I'm joking.
	Of course.
	So he's, in some sense, defying the government and encouraging upheaval on the streets for political change.
	Yes.
	2019 was a lot of that.
	A lot of fights with the Congress.
	He didn't have a party.
	He never had a party.
	So he was always jumping from party to parties.
	He didn't have a political base.
	He didn't have people to put in the government because he was never in power.
	So if you think about it, when Donald Trump got elected, okay, he never worked in politics, but he had the Republican Party, the largest party in the world, that had a lot of governors, had people in previous administrations.
	So you need to fulfill key positions and you have people because managing is...
	Managing anything is having the right people.
	Yeah, and one of the biggest criticisms of Trump is that he didn't clean house and put in the right people.
	Because who would he call, right?
	He had to look to the previous administration.
	He was like, okay, who do we have in the Republican Party?
	Oh, okay, we have this guy from work with George Bush.
	It's like, okay, I don't like George Bush a lot, but still he is a Republican and this guy has all the credentials.
	Let me put him.
	In this key position.
	And then you find out that this guy is like deep state.
	He's a POS.
	I'm thinking of a number of times, which I won't mention yet.
	Yes, I'm not as well.
	But you know what I'm talking about.
	Bolsonaro didn't have that.
	So a lot of times he turned to the military because he's a former captain from the army.
	So he looked into the military and he found military officials.
	To fulfill key positions.
	And the first year of Bolsonaro's government, 2019, was him antagonizing the Congress, a lot of not competent people in key positions, like the Ministry of Education was a guy like completely, it was an intellectual guy, but he couldn't run a department, you know?
	So it was a lot of that, 2019.
	On 2020, Things started changing.
	I think Bolsonaro started to realize what was the job like a little bit.
	But then COVID happened.
	And COVID was a shitshow for every president, prime minister in the world.
	It was not great politically.
	It doesn't matter if you're on the left or the right, you suffered political damage.
	But I mean, I was watching, I watched your podcast with Patrick, David, and I think he made the point or someone on the panel made the point that Bolsonaro's mismanagement of mismanagement in quotes of the pandemic was basically how it was governed in Florida.
	Yes.
	And so mismanagement, because it's like.
	But with, with, with, I think Bolsonaro didn't have a, I mean.
	Well, that's what I'm going to say.
	He may not be Ron DeSantis, I don't know, from a charismatic or PR perspective, but he's facing the same thing.
	He's better from a charismatic perspective, but the PR, he never had good PR.
	And that's when the media comes out and says, you want Granny to die.
	This is the type of mismatch.
	Shut down everything, shut down schools, and then when that turns out to be the problem, then they'll turn on you also.
	But, okay, pandemic hits.
	He wants to have a more...
	Not a full, crippling, debilitating, destructive lockdown, its mandates, etc.
	Brazil is now waking up with the inverse of that nightmare under what Lula is currently doing.
	So what happens during the pandemic and then how does it get into the next election?
	So Brazil doesn't have the same system as in the US where the states are independent on how they run their COVID policies.
	That's not what's written under Brazilian law.
	But the Supreme Court decided that's the That was going to be the case because Bolsonaro was the president.
	So he didn't have any control of the country's policy.
	So Brazil did have very strict lockdowns, masks, vaccines, everything, vaccines, passports, everything that you can imagine.
	I believe almost as bad as Canada, depending on the states.
	Did you have curfew?
	We had.
	We had.
	At one point in the south of the country, we had complete curfew.
	You couldn't go out to buy basic...
	I shouldn't complain about what we had in Quebec, because I was still allowed going out during the day, freely.
	I was free to go out during the day.
	It sounds like Australia, what you had.
	Yes.
	It depended from state to state.
	And that was because of...
	And Bolsonaro was very much against it.
	At one point, he thought about...
	Declaring some sort of martial law or some sort of federal intervention to protect people's right, but he ended up not doing it.
	But he mentioned that he was thinking about doing it.
	But that was very bad.
	And in the meantime, things are complicated, right?
	The left doesn't attack you only one way.
	So using COVID and using the way that Bolsonaro was dealing with COVID, they opened a...
	Like a commission, like a parliament commission to investigate the way he was conducting the pandemic response.
	And that was on TV every day.
	Like the January 6th.
	Exactly like the January 6th.
	Would you say the left?
	I mean, I'll say politics, but right now it happens to be the left that are in power and control the media and merge all of those things into the holy trifecta of an attack.
	But let's say Bolsonaro is mismanaging the pandemic.
	So we're going to basically handicap him for all his powers and give those powers to the states because it's not going to do anything because we've seen the lockdowns have done minimal.
	They haven't done minimal damage.
	They've done a lot of damage.
	Mask mandates had no effect.
	The numbers are not going to be any better.
	but they can still blame all of the failings on Bolsonaro to begin with.
	Create a commission, political witch hunt.
	Which we've now known Brazil is good for, as are other jurisdictions.
	Yes.
	And then use a weaponized media to run it 24 /7 and beat it into the brains of the general population.
	That's exactly what happened.
	But also, that's one side of the equation.
	But also, in 2019, and that's when things started to derail in Brazil from a civil rights perspective, the Supreme Court opened the fake news probe.
	Okay, so that's complicated.
	But you're a lawyer.
	I'm going to try to explain it to you.
	So people, when Bolsonaro got elected, people started looking for excuses.
	So Russian collusion was not on the table.
	But the same, I mean, sometimes I get tired.
	To compare Brazilian politics and US politics, but they're very similar because the tactics are exactly the same.
	So they started blaming on the internet.
	They were, like, blaming on all these Cambridge analytics.
	I mean, no, no, no.
	I mean, they started blaming on people using the internet to propagate fake news.
	Yeah.
	Okay?
	So Bolsonaro and Trump, they got elected because people were too dumb.
	And they don't know what they're getting.
	And they get a lot of fake news from the internet.
	So we got to investigate that.
	And by the way, they're using these fake news to attack the Supreme Court.
	And by attack, I mean saying bad things about the Supreme Court.
	Okay, so they're defamating the Supreme Court.
	So as a lawyer, you know, a court cannot start an investigation, right?
	You have an accusatory system.
	But the Supreme Court got very creative here, and I have to give them.
	That was, like, very creative.
	On the bylaws of the court, of the Supreme Court, there's a provision that if a crime happens within premises of the court, they can open an investigation.
	Well, now I know exactly where they're going to go.
	A defamation against the court is sufficient Supreme Court jurisdiction to recommend opening an investigation into it.
	It could happen anywhere.
	But they did it better.
	They opened the investigation themselves.
	So now, listen, it's amazing.
	Who's the chief justice, the equivalent of the Supreme Court?
	Well, in Brazil, back then, the guy who was in charge, they nominated a guy called Alexandre de Moraes, very important name.
	Moraes is M-O-R-A-E-S.
	Yes.
	To be the head of this investigation, of the fake news probe.
	So, on the fake news probes, The probe.
	They were the victims.
	They were the judges.
	They were the investigators.
	And the complainants.
	And the prosecutors.
	That's fantastic.
	That's beautiful.
	That's justice right there.
	That's how you protect your freedoms.
	By violating them left, right, and center.
	Okay.
	And by the way, all the files of the investigations were secret.
	Like sealed?
	Sealed.
	Oh my goodness.
	This is now...
	Another piece of the puzzle just clicked.
	So this is going to explain all of the injunctions that were issued by the court that could de-platform people.
	Yes.
	Shut down.
	I mean, I shut down websites.
	Create causes of defamation or allege that certain statements are defamatory.
	And now this is going to explain why you probably cannot go back to Brazil.
	Yes.
	Okay.
	So I'm assuming 2019.
	So they opened the fake news probe and they started going after Bolsonaro's supporters on...
	Every field you can imagine.
	They went after journalists.
	They went after media personalities, social media personalities.
	They went after businessmen that supported Bolsonaro.
	They went after everyone.
	I'm talking about...
	Donors as well, I presume?
	Donors?
	Well, Bolsonaro didn't have exactly donors, but he had businessmen to support his causes.
	Because in Brazil, a company cannot donate money to a campaign.
	Individuals can.
	A small amount of money.
	Not companies.
	That's because...
	The campaigns are funded by the Treasury.
	They owe private monies into it, and it's taxpayer that funds...
	Well, they still do, but it's off the books.
	Like, when you prohibit something, this is what happens, right?
	It keeps happening, but it's off the books.
	And only to the government friends, right?
	But anyways, this is what happened, and then they...
	They started with this probe, and the first effect that you have is a big chilling effect, okay?
	So everyone that supports Bolsonaro start thinking twice because you have search warrants in houses, some arrest warrants.
	Exactly like what they did with Trump.
	It's like sending a message, if you are a supporter, or what's the word, an ally, you're on the radar, and if you're thinking about it, don't donate.
	In America, your address will be doxxed, et cetera, et cetera.
	Yes.
	Okay.
	Same thing.
	And then they started this.
	Remember I also told you that Bolsonaro used to call people to demonstrate on their streets their will and their demands, right?
	The right to peacefully assemble and present your requests.
	Protest.
	It's known as protest.
	Most free societies tolerated.
	Yes, but then they opened another, a second probe.
	Same justice opened a second probe.
	Which was the anti-democratic demonstration probe.
	Okay, so you have anti-democratic Demonstrations.
	Because what people are requesting is not democratic.
	I'm not making this up!
	I think Justin Trudeau learned a couple of lessons from this.
	Yeah, of course he did.
	You can protest so long as we approve of it, and it's within the parameters that we establish for you, and you go home when we tell you to, and you don't make more noise than we allow you to.
	You know Brazil and Canada are like the top countries in juristocracy, right?
	Brazil and Canada.
	There's a guy who wrote a book, Henry Rischel.
	Jewish guy, Israeli guy as well.
	A very good book.
	It's Towards Juristocracy.
	And he explains how Canada and Brazil are like the top countries.
	If that book is on audiobook, I'll give it a listen.
	It is.
	And you're going to love it.
	I always wanted to recommend this book to you.
	You'll give it to me after the podcast.
	We're going to do this.
	Hand Rear Show, Towards Juristocracy.
	Towards Juristocracy.
	I like that.
	It's very good.
	You're going to love it.
	So I think it's one of the most important books written in the past years from both legal and political perspective.
	I think the guy, I think Hirsch was a professor in University of Toronto, one of them.
	But anyways, so he opened this anti-Democratic acts probe and again, more and more people.
	Prosecuted and investigated and the lawyers didn't have access to what the charges were because there were no charges.
	At one point, the Department of Justice, which was supposed to prosecute, said we're not prosecuting because we were supposed to be the only authority, the only institution that can prosecute someone and you're prosecuting by yourself.
	So this is wrong from a...
	From a procedural perspective since the beginning, so this is all going to be new.
	So this is invalid.
	What are you doing?
	But they didn't care because there's the Supreme Court.
	They can do whatever they want.
	So they're the final incense for appeal.
	All records were sealed, secret, classified, whatever you call it.
	Lawyers didn't have access to the charges.
	People were not charged, per se.
	Just investigated indefinitely.
	Exactly.
	And then if they don't get you on whatever charges they were, they'll get you on the procedure, misleading, lying to the Brazilian FBI equivalent is.
	Yes.
	So what he did is that he brought up part of the federal police, he brought one chief to work directly under him.
	So he had his own police working.
	I know the police is part of the executive branch.
	But we have a part of the federal police in Brazil that answers to the judiciary branch directly.
	And he appointed a guy, actually it was a lady, that he liked.
	So the chief of police was making the request and he was granting the request.
	But the chief of police was a person he appointed.
	So he was making the request using the federal police and they were granting.
	I said was, but it is.
	It's still ongoing.
	Phenomenal.
	We're seeing iterations of this everywhere in the States and Canada.
	But I didn't get to my passport yet.
	Continue with me.
	It's a long thing.
	A lot of things happen.
	They freed Lula.
	There's a big part of it.
	Is related to...
	They freed Lula, and the rationale, they freed him and basically nullified his conviction on the basis that jurisdictional, because otherwise, if he had had the conviction stand...
	They never found him innocent or not guilty.
	Yeah, no, no, but my understanding is that unless they had found a way to nullify the conviction, he would not have been able to run again.
	Oh, no, because under Brazilian law, you cannot run for president if you've been convicted.
	By a panel of judges.
	They learned the lesson the first time.
	If we're not going to have the Social Democrat guy replace Lula, we're now going to have Lula replace Bolsonaro because...
	He's the only guy that can defeat him.
	He's the only guy that can do it.
	He's got a little thing preventing him, which is that conviction, so let's find a way to nullify that conviction.
	Oh yeah, jurisdictional procedure was not respected.
	Nullification.
	Can't retry him again because he's too old.
	Now he gets to run again.
	With a media that's learned its lesson.
	With a judiciary that's...
	Operating full throttle behind him with, I guess, police that are also working behind him.
	Trying to outlaw social media platforms.
	Suppress social media discourse.
	Prevent anybody from criticizing the government or the judiciary.
	And Lula...
	There's also one piece left.
	Which is the electoral system.
	Because Bolsonaro was still very popular.
	And Lula was popular as well.
	But...
	Bolsonaro might defeat Lula again, and then who would they have?
	They can't take any risks.
	They can't take any chances.
	So in Brazil, the electoral system is a beauty.
	It's all electronic.
	So there's no paper trail.
	And it's all controlled by one court, which is the Supreme Electoral Court.
	Who was the president of the Supreme Electoral Court on the last election?
	Demorais.
	I was going to say it, but I was going to say it, and then I was going to...
	No, that's too absurd.
	One level or just say, a Lula supporter.
	Demorais, the judiciary guy.
	Yes, remember, in the Supreme Court, Lula or Lula's allies, Dilma, they appointed nine out of our 11 justices.
	They appointed nine out of our 11. That says a lot.
	But Brazil has a system.
	Completely electronic.
	And a lot of people complain because if it's all electronic and it's centralized in one court, they're overseas and come up with all the rules and everything, it's very easy to fraud, right?
	It goes without saying.
	The absence of a paper trail.
	Exactly.
	The digital voting is one thing.
	The not matching signatures.
	Or refusing to do that audit reconciliation is another thing.
	In Canada, people were, you know, I think on the provincial level they might have been using Dominion or electronic voting machines, but federally it's still pen and paper, show two pieces of ID.
	At the end of the day, you still have to trust the people who are actually counting the paper.
	Right.
	But it's a little bit tougher than...
	But if you have a system that is decentralized and you can audit the papers, it's...
	This is centralized, digital, being run by the man.
	Yes.
	Who hates Bolsonaro.
	He's more powerful than the president.
	Of course he's more powerful than the president.
	Let me put it this way.
	People promised that Bolsonaro was going to be a dictator.
	He was Hitler.
	The press trashes him, defamates him every day until this day.
	No journalist got prosecuted.
	None.
	Zero.
	There's no political opposer that was prosecuted or persecuted in any way.
	Everyone...
	Kept saying bad things about Bolsonaro for four years, including crazy falsehoods, like he stabbed himself, like crazy stuff, okay?
	And nothing happened to them.
	The dictator didn't do anything to them.
	The dictator was a guy that defended free speech for everyone.
	The analogies with Trump are...
	He's a fascist dictator who gets deplatformed from Twitter and Facebook.
	That's exactly what happened to him back in the day.
	Well, the big tech were also...
	And I'm going to get to them because it's important.
	There has to be a Twitter files version of Brazil.
	Yes, of course.
	Elon Musk is promising our batch of the Twitter files and haven't released them yet.
	But he fired everyone in Brazil.
	Elon Musk fired everyone in Brazil.
	Yeah, everyone.
	Twitter has basically no employees in Brazil anymore.
	It is still operational.
	It is, yeah.
	In Brazil, I mean.
	Partially.
	Because a lot of people were banned, the platform, by the court.
	By Morais's court.
	Yes, by the court.
	Anyways, they have this system, and Brazilians, everyone complained about it, and including the Social Democratic Party said, well, you're saying the Dilma from the Workers' Party won the presidential election in 2016-2014, but we can't verify, we can't audit, because it's all digital.
	You can't audit something that's in a system.
	And then Brazil passed a law, actually, passed several laws.
	Coming up with a system that was pretty good, it would have the digital, you would print a receipt, and the receipt would be in a box that you couldn't take away.
	But you would have, after the elections, you would have to match the count from the physical papers, you would have to match the electronic.
	So it's better.
	You would see...
	Still don't trust it.
	Hand signature or hand...
	But you have...
	Well, Brazil requires ID.
	So you would go to the voting place and you would have to show proof of ID.
	You would go to the machine, vote.
	You would see your vote being printed.
	In a translucent box.
	And so someone who votes can say, that's not my vote, it got flipped.
	Exactly.
	So I can verify it myself.
	If there's a problem, you can report it the day of.
	And it can be audited out.
	Exactly.
	It was a better system.
	Not perfect.
	There's no perfect system.
	But I thought it was pretty good.
	Because you would have both.
	The conveniency of the technology, electronic.
	And you would have the paper trail.
	And it would be hard to fraud harder because you would have to match the count.
	Okay?
	It was a good system.
	Brazil passed that.
	Brazilian Congress passed that on a law.
	Okay?
	On a bill.
	It was approved.
	The president rectified.
	And then the 2016 election was supposed to happen with the system.
	But then one justice said, I'm going to suspend this law because...
	I don't think...
	I'm gonna grant an injunction for a party because I think this violates the confidentiality of the vote.
	Didn't explain how.
	And they suspended for 2016 election.
	For 2018 election, I'm sorry.
	So that's...
	Bolsonaro won with the electronic system.
	We don't know how many votes he actually ended up winning because who knows, but he ended up winning anyways.
	In 2020...
	Before the 2020 election, the Supreme Court declared that the law was unconstitutional.
	2022 election, you mean?
	2020.
	Because Brazil has like a midterm for municipal, for city elections.
	So they declared the law was completely unconstitutional, and they would have to amend the Constitution to make paper vote a thing in Brazil.
	So Congress did that, okay?
	And they put a bill on the floor.
	For amend the Constitution to get electronic vote system for the 2022 election.
	That was in 2021.
	So what happened was that some justices of the Supreme Court went to Congress and started lobbying against this bill.
	And by lobbying, according to a few congressmen, they were threatening Like mobsters, they were threatening congressmen with jail time if they voted for the bill.
	The bill ended up having a majority, but not the qualified majority that it needed to pass.
	So it was if he had more votes, I believe 2029 to 2021 or something like that.
	I don't remember the actual figures, but it had more votes, but it didn't pass.
	Okay, the lobby, I'm talking about, think about, I don't know, Sotomayor says going to Congress, U.S. Congress, and having meetings against a bill, okay?
	That actually happened.
	It's so depressed.
	It's not a conspiracy theory.
	And I interviewed Congress members, I personally, that said I was threatened.
	And I saw colleagues being threatened.
	So if they were or not, I don't know, but they claim, some of them claim they were.
	So with that, we had a system, all electronic.
	Alexander Morales was going to oversee the election.
	And then you have all sorts of battles in courts, all crazy rules, all decisions against Bolsonaro, making for him very hard to run.
	And at the end...
	Lula got elected by one or two points.
	And what happens is that during this process, the Supreme Electoral Court also granted themselves special powers, like the power to de-platform people, including members of Congress, including journalists, and all that.
	The station that I worked for, TV station that I worked for, again, my show was the number one in the country.
	What was the station?
	It's Shaving Pan.
	Okay.
	They were censored.
	We couldn't say certain things on air.
	For example, we couldn't call Lula next con.
	We could not.
	They said it was illegal to do so.
	And several other words.
	There were like a few words that we couldn't say on air, on TV.
	And again, businessmen were arrested.
	At one point, Bolsonaro's party filed a lawsuit against Lula's party saying that they had millions of radio spots, more than they were supposed to.
	Because in Brazil, it's the radio spots and TV spots.
	It's supposed to be equal airplay.
	Equal because everything is paid by taxpayer money, so airplay should be equal.
	And they found out that Bolsonaro's party had millions less spots than Lula's party.
	And when they filed this lawsuit, Demorais was the judge.
	Is this Demorais who then sanctioned Bolsonaro like millions of dollars for abuse of proceedings or something along those lines?
	Yes, that was the case.
	And that was the case.
	Dismissed and sanctioned.
	If it wasn't the lawyers, it was Bolsonaro.
	It was Bolsonaro's party for 22 million reais, which is, I don't know, roughly $5 million.
	For abuse of proceedings.
	Abuse of proceedings.
	A variation of that.
	Exactly.
	And again, they dismissed the case.
	Then, election was over.
	The military came up with a report because they were overseeing the process.
	By Bolsonaro.
	They were invited by the Supreme Court, by the Superior Electoral Court to oversee the process.
	Bolsonaro was pushing towards that because he trusted the military.
	So the military came up with a report saying, look, we couldn't do our job.
	The software of this electronic system has 17 million lines, and they only let us audit with a pen and a pencil.
	They didn't let us...
	Really audit.
	And we found several vulnerabilities, and we cannot attest this system is safe.
	So I'm talking about the military, the Department of Defense, okay, in Brazil.
	So we suggest with urgency that we investigate, we open up an investigation to verify if the system is safe or not.
	And the court's going to say, well, this is Bolsonaro's military making recommendations that are favorable to Bolsonaro, so to be disregarded.
	No.
	You know what they said?
	Oh, we're glad you didn't find any evidence of fraud.
	Thank you for your report.
	And then they issued a letter, a public letter.
	I'm talking about the Joint Chief issued a letter and the Ministry of Defense issued a letter saying, we did not say we did not find evidence.
	That was not the scope of our work.
	We're saying that we cannot attest that the system is safe and secure.
	And this is a vulnerability and we need to address that urgently.
	And they're like, eh, I'm going to ignore it.
	And then a lot of things happened.
	A guy from Argentina started releasing documents showing that depending on the model of the machine, Lula got a way higher vote than Bolsonaro, depending on the model, on the year.
	So the machines that were audited, Bolsonaro, on the machines that were audited, Bolsonaro won.
	On the machines that were not audited, older machines, Lula won.
	And it was less than a percent or give or take a percentage difference.
	What did Bolsonaro win with back in 2018?
	I don't remember.
	It was a big amount.
	Yeah, like over 5%.
	I think 10% maybe.
	And this time around after the...
	Because we have two rounds, right?
	You have a run-up and he won in the second round.
	Bolsonaro.
	And again, on the second round now, Lula won by...
	A percent.
	Yeah, less than two percent.
	Now, the last time that I heard you talk publicly about this, the question was whether or not Bolsonaro is going to declare martial law or bring in the military.
	What's happened since the election?
	Bolsonaro...
	Went to the States or came to the States.
	I don't know if he's still here now.
	He's still in exile from Brazil.
	After the election, he tried to challenge the election, showing some electoral inconsistencies.
	And again, he was, for a second time, his party was fined for abuse of proceedings.
	By the same judge.
	He dismissed the case and all that.
	At one point, after all that happened, a lot of people started looking for the Brazilian Constitution.
	We have an article in the Brazilian Constitution, Article 142, that says what is the role of the military in Brazil.
	And they say that the role, among the roles, is to guarantee law and order and to guarantee constitutional powers.
	And there's a discussion of what is the meaning of that.
	So if a judge, if there's a conflict between powers, and there's a power that's doing stuff that's out of the Constitution, that's still a constitutional power.
	So if your role is to guarantee constitutional powers, don't you have to do something if a power is overstepping?
	And the other power can't react.
	That was a discussion.
	Guarantee law and order as well.
	It's like, how is that under the law?
	This is completely outside of the rule of law.
	We're having journalists being...
	We have...
	Well, in the meantime, a lot of things happen.
	Congressmen were arrested.
	They suspended parliamentary immunity, congressional immunity.
	They suspended...
	In a certain sense, in Brazil, they even suspended the right of assembly, the people to assembly in protest.
	A lot of things started happening, and things got hard.
	On December 30th, I was here in the U.S. with my family, and then I got a call from a source in a big tech company saying, I just received a court order by the Morais and all your 4 million followers on social media.
	He's mandating to block you from all social media.
	I was like, wow, that's interesting.
	And in the meantime, people were, like, thinking if something was going to happen in Brazil.
	And because of my history with the military, I had a lot of sources in the military.
	I know it was reporting of what people were talking about regarding this issue.
	And he decided to suspend all my social media.
	Not suspend, pretty much block.
	Block by way of court order.
	Yeah, in Brazil only.
	So if you're in the U.S., you can still access.
	Except that Rumble and locals and through social, they said they're not going to comply with any orders because they're not even in Brazil, so they're not even getting these orders.
	So apparently.
	But other than that, all other, like Twitter, Facebook, I don't know, Telegram.
	All that.
	Block you in Brazil.
	So if you're in Brazil, you can't see me.
	Unless you have a VPN, I presume.
	Unless you have a VPN or in Rumble and locals.
	Okay.
	What's your locals before we forget and I'll put it in afterwards?
	It's Rio P. Figueiredo.
	Rio P. Figueiredo.
	Yes.
	Like it's spelt on the thumbnail, people.
	The Rio P. Figueiredo.
	Okay.
	But...
	And then I found out later, again, I never got...
	Remember, all this is sealed, so I never got the court order.
	But again, I'm a journalist, so a source from the federal police that happened to like me said, look, I'm seeing the court order against you right here.
	It's not only your social media.
	He also ordered to freeze all your assets in Brazil and bank accounts, all of them, 100%.
	Do you have any?
	I do, yeah, of course.
	And they have been frozen?
	Yes, it's all frozen.
	All of it.
	Everything, including my companies in Brazil, completely frozen.
	Bank accounts.
	Personal bank account.
	My father, I used to send him money.
	I can't.
	All of it, frozen.
	He also...
	I don't know the name of that, but in Brazil we have a right of a...
	It's like Trump.
	His tax returns are like...
	Not secret, but private.
	Confidential.
	Confidentiality.
	Yeah, yeah.
	He broke all confidentiality of all my tax returns and bank records and all the credit card records and all that.
	He also apparently issued a fine for every time I speak anything undemocratic or anything that make people doubt Brazilian electoral system.
	20,000 hash fines, like a $4,000 fine for every day that I say anything derogatory of Brazil's institutions like I'm doing now.
	And also, he did something very weird.
	He canceled my passport.
	And I called several lawyers in Brazil and they're like, I never heard of anything like that.
	It's like, they don't cancel passport for...
	International drug dealers.
	Well, like, yeah, I guess I'm trafficking something worse than cocaine, which is information, right?
	And not just information.
	Accurate information.
	That's more important.
	But according to them, disinformation.
	Yes.
	And that was the actual term they used, disinformation.
	This is all...
	There's no conviction.
	This is all...
	No, there's no accusation.
	It's not there's no conviction.
	There's no accusation.
	All this is under a probe that's sealed.
	No lawyers got access.
	As a businessman, I've dealt with all the big lawyers in Brazil.
	They're all friends of mine.
	So I call them and say, look.
	And some of them, very leftist lawyers.
	And I call them and say, look, what's going on?
	What can I do?
	And they said, Paulo, there's nothing you can do.
	There's no appeal.
	This is the highest instance, and it's all sealed.
	So you just have to wait.
	That's it.
	Bolsonaro never called in the military.
	He left and, I don't know, did he formally concede?
	Does he have to?
	No, he didn't concede.
	He didn't have to.
	He made a brief speech saying that he was going to follow the Constitution.
	He left Brazil on December 30th, the same day that Demorais did that to me.
	And he came to the US.
	He never used the military.
	He never declared martial law or anything like that.
	I understand.
	And they faulted him for not giving a proper transition of power to Lula?
	No, he actually started the transition of power right after the election, but he never did the ceremony in Brazil.
	Like a thing that you put on body and you just give it to God.
	When Trump, not to draw more analogies, when Trump said he wasn't going to the inauguration, Twitter heard that as a call to violence.
	Something along those lines.
	It was a dog whistle.
	Yeah, same thing with Bolsonaro.
	He came to the U.S., he's been living here, but he's going to have...
	Well, and then January 8th happened in Brazil.
	Brazil's January 6th.
	It's so similar that you wouldn't believe.
	Except that...
	Brazilians are more violent than Americans.
	I mean, when Americans entered Congress...
	They took selfies, and one guy took a picture holding a lectern.
	But there was some violence.
	Can't discount that, but it was the most unarmed insurrection you've ever seen.
	It was not an insurrection.
	Look, to be an insurrection, you have to have the expectancy to seize power.
	And you didn't have that.
	It was a Sunday.
	No one was there.
	No one ever thought, oh, okay, I'm going to enter the palace and now I'm going to proclaim myself the president or whatever, or the king or emperor.
	So it's just people were, you had everything.
	You had agents, provocateurs, same as in the U.S. You have, and right now we know that for a fact, that we had Lula's government, again, same as in the U.S. Reducing the amount of police officers, police forces over there.
	You had the honeypot, all that.
	Same thing.
	And you had a lot of people that weren't happy with the fact that their voices were not being heard.
	Before that, people spent, I don't know, two months protesting in front of military bases, asking for military intervention.
	Thousands of people throughout the country.
	And their voices were not being heard by anyone, including Bolsonaro.
	Because Bolsonaro disappointed a lot of people.
	Look, I'm all for the rule of law.
	So I didn't want Bolsonaro to become a dictator in Brazil.
	I didn't want him to stay not even one day more than his term.
	By the end of his term, he had to leave.
	Lula didn't win the election fair and square, so he can't be the president.
	So you need to come up with a solution for that.
	The U.S. Constitution, and you and Barnes discusses that a lot in 2020, lack remedies for that.
	But Brazilian Constitution does have a remedy, like it or not, which is the Article 142.
	And yes, it's something that has never been done, but it's written.
	It's in the law.
	And so Bolsonaro didn't do it?
	He didn't do it.
	He claims he didn't have support from the military.
	Military says otherwise.
	It's partially true and partially not true.
	Because he had some support of some military leaders, but he didn't have from others.
	So at the end, he didn't feel like he had a way of doing it.
	I think he did, if you ask me.
	And Lula's in power.
	And I have to say, after that, 40% of Brazilians, just like in the US, think Lula did not win the election fair and square.
	So that makes...
	How can you have democracy when 40% of the...
	It's not that 40% of the people didn't vote for him.
	It's 40% of the people think we didn't have an election.
	And the courts don't even address that.
	And they sanction the party who goes through...
	The similarities between this and the states are shocking.
	It just seems like a playbook for governments seizing control and facilitating a situation where they can never be forced to relinquish it.
	So Bolsonaro did not...
	Invoke martial law or that article.
	Pissed a lot of people off.
	Disappointed a lot of people.
	Now they're left with this fait accompli.
	Lula is president.
	A lot of people don't believe in the sanctity of elections anymore.
	Well, we have roughly a thousand people arrested without due process after January 8th, January 6th.
	People are still in jail.
	Most of them without access to lawyers.
	January 6th defendants?
	Most of them facing...
	Ambiguous charges, if any charges?
	With the difference that everything is centralized on the Supreme Court.
	In the U.S., you had several courts and several federal judges dealing with the...
	And, I mean, and with the difference that in as much as there's no official media gag order in the States, you might have a leftist-dominated media.
	There's alternative media that talks about it in Brazil.
	Oh, in Brazil, the station that I work for, he's seen the...
	Complained from the Department of Justice that they were spreading misinformation, and because of that they were threatening to cancel their public concession of the airwaves, and because of that they fired all conservative commentators, including myself.
	And they were literally crying when they fired me because I had the highest ratings in the country.
	And they were like, we love you.
	We love working with you.
	Same with my colleague, Rodrigo Constantino, who, by the way, also had his passport canceled and all that.
	Same thing that happened to me happened to him and other people.
	And Rodrigo was also a guy that brought great ratings.
	And they loved working with us.
	But they said, we have to fire you in order to stay open.
	And not face criminal charges, I presume, ourselves.
	Exactly.
	And since then, they fell from the second or first largest TV news stations to the fifth or sixth because the audience hated it.
	The viewers hated it.
	And they hired only social democrats guys.
	Could they even announce the reason for which they fired you in Brazil or no?
	They can't say that.
	But everybody knows it.
	I know.
	It's like...
	One day, you have one guy that's doing two shows a day.
	Five hours of a year, and viewership skyrocket, and now they have to fire the guy?
	It's like, for what?
	And it was not me.
	They fired a bunch of people.
	All their conservative commentators.
	And I don't consider myself a conservative, but anyways, I'm anti-socialist.
	You don't consider yourself conservative, but they do.
	And a far-right, alt-right conservative at that point.
	So now, bottom line, I know you've got somewhere to go.
	I don't know what time.
	It's two hours since we started at about 3.15.
	What time is it?
	3.11.
	It's 3.11 now.
	Your bottom line is, it's not an irrational fear.
	It's not hyperbole.
	It's not exaggeration.
	You can't go back to your homeland.
	I don't have a passport, so supposedly I can't go anywhere.
	But also, my source says...
	There's an order in the federal police system that if I...
	Let's say I have a different passport and I'm not going to say if I do or if I don't because why tell them, right?
	I would not have asked and I won't ask.
	But let's say, hypothetically...
	You land in Brazil.
	I land in Brazil.
	You're getting arrested.
	I'm not getting arrested but I can't leave the country.
	I might get arrested but I can't leave the country.
	Even with a different passport.
	And again, it's not that I haven't been convicted.
	There are no charges against me.
	So they need to follow the procedures to notify me of the investigation that's ongoing.
	I can't find out my sources in the federal police.
	The guy might be lying.
	I don't know.
	He's not.
	But he needs to notify me.
	He needs to do that through a rogatory letter and follow procedures.
	The reason they don't is very simple.
	Because there's no process.
	There are no documents.
	SEAL is bullshit.
	For things that don't exist.
	Or they'll make them exist.
	They'll fabricate something.
	I think one of the other reasons why they won't do that is you'll go public with it and then people might see the absolute...
	Not only that, the DOJ in the United States needs to receive, look if there's probable cause, look if it follows the treaty between Brazil and the United States.
	It falls under...
	It's like, I'm protected by the First Amendment.
	I know the U.S. looks bad now.
	But still, except for the big tech.
	Oh, by the way, quick chapter about the big tech.
	When everything happened in Brazil, big tech, including Facebook, YouTube, they updated their policy, making it not illegal, but making a violation of their terms of service to say anything bad about the Brazilian elections as well.
	It's the same thing.
	Zuckerberg, now, he recognizes the FBI misled him about the Hunter laptop.
	Here's the warning.
	You might want to be on the lookout for this.
	And so what do they do?
	After having interfered in the 2020 elections, they go enact policies.
	This is post-election, but in a way it's challenging the election.
	Outlaw it.
	And get Zuck and I don't know who else, Twitter, on the social media, to prevent people's ability...
	To challenge, lawfully question, I don't know how there could be an unlawful manner to question the elections, but right back to election interference at the behest of a government that arguably got into power through illegitimate means.
	Now you can't investigate it, or you can't even talk about it.
	Can't talk about it.
	And from my perspective is, look, you're a public servant.
	Demorais, you're the most powerful man in the country.
	You're a public servant.
	I'm a journalist.
	It's my job.
	To ask questions.
	Like you or not, if you don't like the questions I'm asking, just quit.
	Resign.
	I'm going to keep asking them.
	And you can try to shut me down, but I keep saying that.
	You have to shoot me in the back of the head because that's the ideology.
	That's your ideology.
	You're just not there yet, but that's what you want to do.
	Shutting me down as a journalist.
	And shooting me.
	It's the same mentality.
	I hate making those words come together in a sentence by putting that juju out of the universe.
	But the idea, killing is assassinating, is almost messier than just digitally assassinating, financially assassinating, starving to death.
	And then hope that the person does something terrible to themselves.
	It's much cleaner, it's much easier.
	It is.
	And I don't want to ask and pry into what has been seized and frozen in Brazil, but psychologically, I can imagine...
	A lot.
	I was a businessman then.
	Money's one thing.
	Freedom is another.
	And I'm looking at you, and I might be projecting, but I might be feeling the same thing as you're looking at Brazil and saying, what the hell has happened to my home country?
	I've now been...
	I would be a prisoner in my own country, and they turned my country, my homeland, into a prison, the same way I'm sort of looking at Justin Trudeau up north.
	How do you internalize all of this?
	My father's 79 years old.
	Let's say he gets sick.
	In Brazil.
	He's not here.
	He's in Brazil.
	Let's say he gets sick.
	What do I do?
	You'll ask de Moraes for a compassion visa and an assurance that they won't arrest you or lock you down.
	I'm being cynical, but like...
	In Canada.
	They did that.
	They issued compassion visas.
	There's no compassion.
	This guy's a psychopath.
	And I don't mean that...
	I'm not calling names.
	I mean, technically speaking.
	Demorize is a psychopath.
	He's not capable of compassion, technically speaking.
	So, there's no...
	And can your family leave if they wanted to?
	Yeah.
	For now, I believe we're not in North Korea yet.
	But it's the same mentality.
	It's the same ideology.
	And...
	Of course...
	You interviewed Glenn Greenwald.
	And Glenn, well, I think you put it well in the show where the lines between left and right are blurred in a sense, in a traditional sense.
	But Glenn and I have different perspectives about a lot of things.
	He's a damn good journalist.
	Very honest guy.
	And I respect him a lot.
	This is the guy who exposed NSA and CIA.
	And before he started talking about this that's going on in Brazil, he said he has never been so afraid in his life about publishing a story.
	So, I mean, the guy who exposed the NSA and the CIA thinks Demorize is more dangerous than these guys.
	That says a lot to me.
	And it's not that I'm not afraid of Demorize.
	Of course I am.
	He can do, still, do a lot of stuff to me, as he has been.
	But silence is not an option, right?
	What did I do?
	And again, I'll quote Jordan Peterson again.
	Hold on one second.
	Are we still...
	Yeah, it's just a little battery here.
	Because sometimes I think when we go over two hours, it might...
	Okay, good.
	We're still live.
	I'll quote Jordan Peterson again.
	If you have something to say, silence is a lie.
	I have a lot to say about what's going on.
	If you have something to say, silence is a lie.
	Yeah.
	That's Jordan Peterson.
	Fantastic.
	The guy's a genius.
	Even if I disagree with Jordan Peterson on, you know, regime change in Iran, we live in a world now where the second someone who you considered an ally says something you disagree with, they have to become like, you know, people I like can say things I don't like.
	People I respect can say things I don't respect.
	There's a limit after which, you know...
	I've been disagreeing a lot with Jordan Peterson about Russia a lot recently, but...
	The guy's a genius.
	He's a genius, and I was listening to him talk about the Bible.
	It makes me want...
	I'm going to have to do it.
	I'm going to have to start reading the Bible.
	Oh, no.
	You got it.
	This...
	Well, Genesis was unbelievable.
	But Exodus now is even better.
	And he says something that is exactly the way I feel.
	It's like, it's not that I don't fear demorash, it's that I fear God more.
	It's like, if I don't do the right thing, you know?
	It's exactly that.
	Exactly that.
	That if I shut up now and stop saying the things that I'm saying...
	Well, first of all, yeah, it will not get you in anybody's good graces.
	It might.
	They might.
	When you comply, they show their mercy when you bend to the system.
	They show a little bit of their mercy.
	Is it Michael Malice who said, they want you dead, but they'll accept your compliance or something along those lines?
	Yeah.
	And that's what every lawyer that I talked to said.
	Just shut up for a while.
	Disappear for a year.
	Don't say anything.
	And then we'll try to talk him out of it.
	It's not that we're going to fight in court.
	We're going to talk him out of it.
	It's like, what?
	No way!
	I'd rather...
	I'd rather die.
	Literally.
	Literally.
	And I mean it.
	No way.
	No way.
	Now let's end on a happier note.
	I'm being sarcastic because you'll see what the question I'm going to ask.
	One rumor.
	My brother, who's in Canada now, gotten very involved in activism as relates to vaccine mandates, vaccine injury.
	He says to me, Dave, or Viva, I forget what he says.
	In Brazil, their compelling vaccination against the will on prisoners.
	Yes.
	A recent video went around of Lula, be careful what you wish for in Brazil, you've gotten it now, saying, predicating the, what was it, it was Bolsa Familia, yeah.
	Bolsa Familia, predicating social welfare on mothers vaccinating their children.
	There was one translation which said, if you don't vaccinate your children, you're going to lose them.
	And I think one translated that as them as being children, but it means your benefits.
	They're not taking away kids yet.
	Are these rumors true?
	And to what extent?
	You're not going to lose your kids, but you're going to lose all your benefits.
	You're mandating for all prisoners.
	And that happens at the same time as Project Veritas uncovered everything regarding Pfizer.
	We all saw that video.
	It's not a good week to mention Project Veritas.
	I'm going to be talking about it today with Barnes, people.
	I saw your...
	Your comments about it.
	This is why I'm joking about it.
	But they did an amazing work there.
	And also, this week, the Florida Surgeon General issued an alert about the side effects.
	When you're going to recommend it to doctors, you have to let them know they might have a heart attack.
	They might die and develop other stuff, thrombosis and other stuff.
	You have to let people know.
	And in Brazil, it's mandatory.
	So it's a disgrace.
	And suddenly then, the government of Sao Paulo, which is the guy who won the government of Sao Paulo, is a big Bolsonaro guy.
	He's supposed to be Bolsonaro's successor.
	He's expanding the vaccination of babies in a partnership with Pfizer.
	It's like, what?
	Really?
	In what planet are you living?
	Is that really a thing?
	So, the bottom line of everything that we talked about is that Brazil is the Disneyland of globalism and the modern leftism.
	So every idea that's present in the US is in Brazil with steroids.
	Because we don't have, to use the vaccination metaphor, our society doesn't have the immune system to fight it.
	Our institutions are not strong enough.
	So everything that you heard here, everything that I talked about, is present in the United States in some form.
	The Juristocracy...
	You just hope the immune system of America is strong enough to withstand this virus.
	It has been so far.
	Touch wood?
	Well, we don't know.
	This is metal.
	Or touch gold.
	My daycare teacher is an Indian woman.
	She says, touch wood was from touching the original Holy Cross, which is what the expression came from.
	Okay.
	So they say touch gold, which is the good luck non-religious way.
	I don't have any gold on me.
	Platinum.
	That's not even gold.
	Yeah, no, you just hope.
	Canada didn't have the robust protective measures the U.S. has.
	And I don't think it's...
	The only question is, can they feed off another country's resistance and see that it doesn't go good places when it goes these places and you don't come back from these places as you're describing now in Brazil?
	It's very hard now.
	The only hope I have in Brazil right now doesn't come from elections.
	It comes from the tensions within the left.
	From within what the workers parties want.
	It's not exactly The same thing that does more globalist, social-democratic left ones.
	I mean, these guys, the globalists, don't want Brazil to turn into another Venezuela.
	Workers' parties do.
	They might clash.
	Their interests might clash.
	And from that clash, something might happen.
	Because the majority of Brazilian society, the majority now, And I'm positive.
	The majority of Brazilian society don't want that.
	None of that.
	Venezuela or globalism.
	The majority of Brazilian society don't want that.
	We just need two things right now.
	Very important things.
	We need Brazilian people, the average Joe, the average Homer Simpson guy, to realize we're not a democracy anymore.
	We need to realize that.
	We are not a democracy anymore in any sense, to put it in a James Madison perspective.
	We don't protect the will of the majority anymore because we don't have fair elections, and we don't protect the rights of the minority.
	So we're not a democracy.
	I mean, technically, again.
	And we need the international community to realize that as well.
	Which international community?
	The one on which Lula appears with his landing page on the WEF website?
	Yes, but also, yes, it's true.
	The UN, which is in bed with...
	True.
	We're never going to get these guys, but Republicans are pretty strong in the United States, and Brazilians look up to America a lot.
	And if you had the Republican Party more concern...
	With what's going on in Brazil, it would be very helpful.
	Very helpful.
	And I've talked to several congressmen here in the U.S., and they don't seem to care a lot.
	Unfortunately.
	My white pill, last faith, is the populism that we've seen nationally has to become international, where everyone everywhere is going to say, we either...
	Stand up to this now and oppose these measures.
	And I think once they start compelling vaccination on children and certain things become undeniable, that's when you're going to have people start saying enough is enough.
	Some might say, I can't even admit that because they would admit that I've done harm to my loved ones.
	But that's like, in Brazil right now, workers' party, union workers, whatever, when people are told what they have to put in their body with a sharp little metal needle, then they might start realizing...
	Well, what the hell have we just ushered in here because I know that now my life and my benefits are predicated on this and I feel like I'm being physically violated, which I am.
	So maybe at that point it becomes an actual populist, not uprising, but a populist resistance, a populist movement.
	Well, a lot of people when I tell my story, they're like Brazilian people.
	They look at me and it's like, what?
	They did that to you?
	Can they do that?
	It's like, what's going on?
	They don't know what's going on.
	So it's part of my job to tell to the Brazilian audience and to your audience, international audience, what's going on in Brazil.
	And everything that I said here, I swear, everything is accurate.
	If it's not, the internet will figure it out.
	They'll take the clip and they'll say this is where Paulo got it wrong.
	And I remember, well, on Patrick Bet-David, apparently they couldn't find someone on the left.
	On the other side to come and engage at the same time.
	I wouldn't qualify you as being on the right, but if anybody wants to come in and say, my goodness, what he said is all wise, come and do it.
	I'd love to.
	Any day of the week.
	Any day.
	I became more known in Brazil for debating other commentators.
	So, it's my number one thing.
	I love doing it.
	Paulo, I'm going to ask, is there anything that I forgot to ask you that you absolutely want to say?
	I think the answer has to be no.
	Is there anything I forgot to get to that you absolutely said viva?
	I wanted to say that when it came on.
	I don't know.
	I don't remember.
	We talked for over two hours.
	It's been great.
	But again, it's so rich.
	From a journalist's perspective, not from a personal perspective, but from a journalist's perspective, this has been interesting.
	Interesting times.
	I'm witnessing...
	A lot of interesting stuff in Brazil.
	And it's good to know all that.
	It's not boring.
	We're in the proverbial desert, Paulo.
	Everybody, where can people find you?
	And I'll put the links in the description in any event.
	But where can people find you?
	They can find me on Rumble and Locos mainly.
	And yes, outside of the United States.
	Real P. Figueredo.
	Yes.
	And spelling the way it's in the thing there, in the thumbnail, in the title.
	And you're on Twitter?
	I'm on Twitter for outside of Brazil.
	I'm on Twitter.
	Or in Brazil with VPNs.
	Is it illegalized yet in Brazil to have VPNs?
	No, you know, there was a thing circulating on the internet.
	I don't know how accurate that is.
	But saying that Brazil was the number one country in a few things.
	We can check that.
	Rumble growth.
	Number of...
	Downloads of the Signal app and new VPN accounts in the month of January.
	Does that sound like a healthy democracy to you?
	It sounds like...
	I think number one was China.
	But it sounds like the dystopian novels that we read as children.
	My daughter just read a book about a future in which they charge you for air.
	Unhealthy people don't get the same amount of...
	I forget what the book was called.
	Anybody who knows the book, it sounded totally far-fetched, and yet we're not far off.
	You wouldn't surprise me.
	Paolo, thank you very much.
	Thank you for having me.
	Thank you.
	Every time I say I'm going to bring a mug to give...
	I have a mug with the Viva Fro on it.
	I forget, but we'll meet again and I'll give you...
	You're going to do jiu-jitsu with me, right?
	So I'm going to do this now.
	I don't want to say the name because I don't want too many people calling.
	I can't take classes in classes.
	If I do courses, it has to be one-on-one because I'm too embarrassed.
	Taking classes of fighting, it's like dancing in public, which I do not do.
	These guys at Valencia Brothers are actually...
	The guy just called me a couple of times.
	It's his birthday.
	Pedro Valencia's birthday today.
	I'm doing it.
	It's not a question.
	I'm going to be like...
	No, they're unbelievable.
	You're going to love their classes and the private lessons as well.
	I'm doing it.
	Let's do it.
	There's that and what else?
	Eat Brazilian steak.
	I have not done that.
	I have not done that in Florida.
	I noticed a lot of great Brazilian restaurants.
	You live near the best butcher shop in probably Florida in Boca.
	You're going to give me that name afterwards.
	Easy Meats.
	Easy Meats.
	Easy Meats, yes.
	Their Wagyu Picanha is, I swear to you, it's the best steak you'll ever have.
	Wagyu Picanha.
	Done.
	And done, and I might do it on the way home tonight.
	Paulo, thank you very much.
	This was, everybody, see you tonight for Biba and Barnes Law for the People.
	Sunday night stream on a Tuesday, but check Paulo out.
	Thank you very much.
	Send my best to Robert.
	Absolutely, will do.
	Thank you.

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