#2025 - Dave Smith

"I imagine if they were gonna pick a comedy club to start abducting people, it would be yours. Well, they would know that we would be open. That's true. You know, Jim Probs would probably like charge them. Whereas you would welcome them in. Yeah, I'd put them on the guest list. It is. I know I just, I feel like I'm just saying the same thing everyone does, but the club is really amazing, man. You did an incredible job. It's pretty dope. Well, it wasn't me. I mean, it was sort of, but it was a lot of people. And a lot of it, Richard Weiss, the architect and designer, he's the fucking man. He did an incredible job. The whole thing's just very bizarre, you know? If it wasn't mine, I'd really be able to appreciate it. Yeah, I'm sure that's true. But it's cool to see something, you know, like, there's something cool about having a concept in your head and then seeing it manifest into reality. Yeah. Because I remember, you know, you talking about this over the last couple of years, like, we're gonna do this and it's gonna be like this, and then like, it's cool to see it materialize. I've never done anything like this before, obviously. But I mean, to have an idea and to just like go all in on this idea and just really try to cut in zero corners and just do the best version of it. And there was a lot of delays because, you know, we said, okay, let's change this, let's change that, let's do this, let's do that. And when I had an idea, you know, an idea to change things, it's just like, you have to kind of follow through with it. You just, you know, it's like, you have one chance to do it right and you don't want to go back and close for two weeks so you can do new construction and fix something. And so we just, you know, it took a long-ass fucking time, you know, there's a lot of people saying, when you ever, you're not opening a closed bullshit, it's all bullshit. They just didn't, I knew once it got, I'm like, talk all that shit, because once this thing gets open, you're all gonna want to come. And the ones who can't, a lot of FOMO. Dude, I thought, you remember this is like, was it like a month ago or something like that? You texted me, or I texted you congratulating you that for the club opening, it was like right around when it opened. And you texted me back, I can wait for you to come see it. I think you meant to say, I can't wait for you to come see it. But I thought there was something so funny about just texting me, like if that was your way of telling me, you don't want me at the club? I can wait, I can wait for you to see it actually. Oh, that's hilarious. It has been a problem though, because there's, you know, a lot of people want to come. And some of them are just, you know, people are weird, like that want a headline, and you know that they know, like you know that you're not really a headliner. Like, what are you talking about? No, I'm in the position where I was talking to Adam about it, because I'm trying to find a, he's trying to find me a weekend. And then he was like, I was like, oh, I'm free this weekend. And he's like, you know, I offered that to Schultz, but let me see. And then I have to be like, you know, you don't want to book Andrew Schultz, man. He harasses the staff and stuff. So like, you know, I just have to lie about my friends. You're like, he's actually gotten really into drugs, man. He's been assaulting people. You don't want to have him here. Yeah, he like loses it on stage. Yeah, it's really not cool. Tells it people. It's weird when you hear stories like that, like someone like losing it, yelling at people and shit. First, like weird stories about people. Yeah, I think the pressure of stand up, like the constant performance. It's like running an engine at very hot, at high RPMs for many, many miles. Like things blow. And we're all kind of crazy people to begin with. So some people have that more in check than others. But yeah, I don't want to name any names, but I've seen a couple of hot ones. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's the most fun people, though. Yeah. That fucking green room, like the hang in the green room, it's like one of the greatest things of all time. It's just excellent, man. It's set up, like you can just tell it was designed by a comedian, you know what I mean? Or at least like there was a, that perspective was taken into account. And tonight, after the show, we'll go to the bar, because the bar becomes like a speakeasy at 11 p.m. It's a private club from 11 p.m. on. So it's open to the public until 11. And then after the show, the comics and the staff all come down and hang. Amen. It's the best, dude. Hell yeah. We just like created what I thought would be the perfect environment to develop comedy. So there's two nights of open mics, which I think is very important. And you know, Bill Burr and I were talking about this when he was in town, and he was like, that's something that a lot of these clubs just forgot. They just wanna fill the place every night and make a lot of money. But you gotta have a farm team. You gotta have guys coming up. You gotta have places where women can go on stage, where men can go on stage, where anybody can go on stage, where you can just fucking, you don't have to have any experience. You don't have to have nothing. You just have to have a dream and some ideas and a sense that you think you could be funny and you can get up. Yeah, and one of the things that's cool about it, and I think a lot of this is like because it's your club, that there's just, there's this kind of like, there's just this thing in you where you're like, you can be fearless here. You know this is like to borrow a safe space to be a comedian. Like go for it. And it's almost because it's your club and you know the crowd knows that, they know that like they're coming for comedy here. And it's just great because that's one of the things that's especially in cities across America now. Like in terms of like regular showcase clubs, it's different when you go out and like headline because that's kind of like your crowd coming. But just random like spots and stuff, that's a lot of comics that's kind of in the back of their mind like, oh man, is there gonna be someone here who's looking to get offended at something I'm saying. And that's a real thing. I've seen it. I've seen it at clubs. It's fucking bizarre where someone will start a premise and then someone will yell out bullshit, fuck that. Like they'll yell out like to like virtue, they'll like have my flag of virtue. I will hold it up in this crowd of people that are trying to enjoy something that's obviously not real. It's called standup comedy. You know what it is. I remember I had a bit about this in my hour that I put out in 2017. And it was just like right when Donald Trump, you know like first came into office. But I remember like working out stuff at clubs in New York City. And if you started a premise about Donald Trump, you could feel the tension in the room where people were being like, you better not like him. Like you better get to the point where you're against him. Like are you on my team? Are you not? You're not on my team yet. Or you could like feel it. Especially New York. Yeah. Dude, I was there when he got elected. And me and my friend Cam Haynes, were you there Jamie? We're walking down the street. And Jamie too. We were walking down the street and there was an anti-Trump protest. And I was watching this guy and this guy, this fucking stereotypical liberal progressive white guy was walking down the street and he was chanting out Donald Trump, KKK, racist, sexist, anti-gay Donald Trump. And then he saw this black couple walking towards him and he starts going, black lives matter, black lives matter. He just like on cue. It's like he got up, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that part. Black lives matter. He just starts and like, this is adorable. These people are adorable. It's, yeah, it is really, it's something bonk. He really, Donald Trump, he broke a lot of brains. It's a really weird impact that he had on people where he just got them so angry that they could no longer think straight. I remember, I was living in the Upper West Side of Manhattan at the time when he first got elected. And I remember seeing like some of those like protests. I remember seeing, you know, like I remember that a couple with like their little girl, like maybe she was like 12 or something like that and she was holding up a worst president ever sign. And you're like, okay, first off, he's had the job for two months. Second off, this is very disrespectful to all of the horrible presidents before him. Like LBJ slotted like 2 million Vietnamese. He doesn't even get like a shot at contention here. You're already giving it to Trump. Like give him time. He'll do some bad things. He's probably involved in the Kennedy assassination as well. Almost certainly. Yeah, probably. But you don't wanna talk about that. Seems like he didn't like JFK. It seems like maybe he liked the CIA. It seems that way, but you don't wanna talk about it too much, Joe, you could lose your Fox News gig that way. You know what I love about LBJ? He used to take a shit with the reporters like standing there for the stall open. He was a wild dude. Just take a shit. Come on, come on, let's talk. You would just sit there and fucking grunt one out. It's the strangest but yet most alpha thing to possibly do. To just comfortably shit. Come watch me shit. While you talk to someone about Cambodia. Yeah, but yeah, that's a wild move watching people shit. It's a wild move watching people. It's more wild to just have the confidence to just shit in front of people. He's like, I'm the fucking president. Yeah, he was just, I guess. Yeah, he was a bad guy. He would have never been elected. You can't say never. Cause if Biden was running against him, he probably would have been elected. Yeah, Jesus. Biden was only 50 at the time. The fact that he's running again is so wild. When you watch him talk, the fact that there's no leadership that can find a solution to this, cause there really is no solution. I mean, we've bantered about it, you and I, and a lot of other people have as well. Like what are they gonna do? Like what is the other than Biden dying, like very soon, and then someone stepping up in a big way that makes sense. Which is not beyond the realm of possibility. He's older than the average life expectancy, I believe already. Not saying he will die, but that is possible. I'm sure there are a lot of people like in the democratic establishment who have been, I could just imagine there's a boardroom with very powerful people meeting who they're like, okay, we're getting them out, what's the plan? How do we do this? And I think they just cannot come up with one. I can't come up with one. Well, I'm not a political strategist, but I know the landscape, who's out there. He's perhaps brilliantly insulated himself by making Kamala Harris his vice president. It's not a bad move. Because they're like, well, we can't have her. It's like with Dan Quill, with Bush. What do you want? You want this guy? You want this guy? Look at this fucking guy. Yeah, it's amazing. It's a good move. I mean, it's kind of a bitch move though. You know what it's kind of like? It's kind of like those headline or comics who bring terrible openers. Yeah, that's what it is. You know? Yeah, you really want to do an hour after Kamala Harris. Like, all right. The crowd's dead, but all right. Time is like time. It just passes and time is something we're all aware of. But I got to say, I don't understand a joke. Because sometimes you'll see it and you're like, all right, you're doing a thing here. Like, this isn't real. You're like, are you like, is this a strategy of some sort to just say nothing and like sound as dumb as possible? Because you can't be this dumb. I think it's panic. Maybe. I think it's anxiety and I think it's panic. And I think no one can understand, even you and I who perform live in front of strangers all the time, we would never be able to understand the kind of pressure that must be on a person who's deeply unqualified for the job. And then all of a sudden finds herself in there through, you know, some, I mean, he went out of his way to say that he was going to have a black woman. Like, it was a thing that he wanted to do. It was like they had these diversity and inclusivity checkpoints that they had to reach. Which is also just a really shitty thing to do to her. It's like a really profoundly selfish thing if you think about it. Because if you wanted, say you wanted to make Kamala Harris your vice president because, you know, you want a woman of color in there or whatever. The thing to do would be to say, I'm going to find the absolute best, most qualified person and then pick her. But if you do that, like that would be more generous toward her because then it makes it look at least like she was the best person for the job. Whereas if you say, I'm going to make sure I pick a black woman, now you get all the brownie points for like, oh, how woke you are. But now you kind of undermine her as like, well, she's the best black woman I could find. Not necessarily the best candidate. So it's a shitty move. I think it's a good thing. I've talked to a lot of intelligent people that think it's important for representation. And I'm like, I could see how you would say that in a lot of jobs, but this is probably the most important one that anyone could ever have ever. It's got to be a meritocracy. Well, what's weird about it is it's almost as if there's some weird prejudice built into that idea. Because if you don't believe in like superiority or inferiority of different races or different groups. Or genders. Right, different genders. Then you would just go, well, make it a meritocracy. And let the absolute best person have the job. And I'm confident in that system that lots of different people will be represented. Whereas if you're saying like, well, no, we need to make sure it's like, wouldn't it be more ideal to just have the best person at every job? And then to have any type of forced diversity? Why would that not be better? Everyone in society is better off if the best person qualified for jobs gets those jobs. You want the best scientist and the best doctors and the best pilots and the best, you want everyone to be the best. No one ever wants like your surgeon to be picked based on anything other than the best at performing this surgery. Yes, yeah. You don't ever say, I want a white man doing surgery on me. Like, no, what the fuck? Is that Chinese lady the best? Bring her in. Yeah, like do more people survive when she does this? Yeah, Jesus Christ. I'd like her. Who's the expert? Fix my brain. Yeah, it's interesting because it's like, it's very similar in some ways to affirmative action, right? And affirmative action, in my opinion, is you're addressing a problem without addressing the root of the problem. The root of the problem is why are so many people of color disenfranchised? Why are so many people who grow up in neighborhoods where there's rampant crime and violence? And why haven't they fixed those fucking neighborhoods? They're dumping so much money into all these problems overseas. We have systemic problems in America that never get addressed. And this is like generations it takes to fix these problems. It's like a long-term strategy. But I've always said this. If you want to make America the best, what would be the best way to do that? Well, you want less losers, right? So what's the best way to have fewer losers? To give more people opportunities. So who are the people that have the least opportunities? The people that are in the most fucked places? You can fix that. There's ways you could dump tons of money and resources into inner cities, into these problem areas, with law enforcement, with community centers, places where people could go, where they have things to do. And people can train them, whether it's athletics or different jobs and show them, mentor them. That's not prohibitively impossible. You're not saying they all deserve their own nuclear power plant. You know what I'm saying? What you're saying is totally doable. And that's the way to fix all these problems of disparity. Because people that grow up in wealthy communities where everyone is trying to achieve things, there's a vibe of those places. And so many of those people from those places wind up succeeding. Yeah, I think a lot of it, I think, also is that there's a very shallow narrative about what it is that keeps people in these areas down. And so it's racism or it's systemic racism. Just these kind of terms that aren't specific. It's like, what is actually happening here? And so much of the problem is that the kind of culture and family units have just been destroyed. They've been decimated. And then it's like, you can pump money into the public schools there, which we do. We spend a lot of money on public schools. And they're still crappy schools. The results are still bad. And if you're not like, even back in, and there's a lot of like Walter Williams and Thomas Ohl, who are both like two black conservative really brilliant thinkers, they both wrote a lot about this. How in the 40s, even during there segregation in the South, and there was like a whole bunch of horrible policies. But even back then, you could walk around Harlem with no threat of violence or anything like that. And family units were together. I believe the black legitimacy rate was higher than the white legitimacy rate at the time. And there were a lot of policies that came in that really destroyed the family unit. Like what policies? Well, the rise of the welfare state was a really big one. It kind of subsidized single parenthood, which is people respond to incentives, even though it seems like that's an ugly thing to think. But if you pay people for having children out of wedlock, you do get more of it than you otherwise would have. And the other major one to meet was the war on drugs, which I just think was absolutely devastating to these neighborhoods. It's just like with prohibition of alcohol, where we I think was still the highest homicide rate in American history was under prohibition of alcohol. And then once they legalized alcohol again, it drastically reduced in the next few years. The same thing with the prohibition of drugs, you create these black markets, you create a lot of violent crime, and that's what's really destroying these neighborhoods, is like the violent gang culture, and it's all built and funded around drugs, the black markets for which would not exist if we just called the whole thing off. It's just calling the whole thing off is so scary politically. Because if you were a guy like Joe Biden that said, I'm gonna legalize all drugs, people would fucking turn on you, they'd freak the fuck out. Yeah, well, getting the political will up to do it is something, but I mean, you even see it even with this, we got like 100,000 OD's a year now, and so much of it is driven by the fact that people are getting fentanyl and shit that they don't even know it, that's not supposed to have fentanyl in it, because it's in black markets. And Joe Biden is absolutely, I mean, it's hard to hate him so much now because he's so old and senile, it's hard to even hold him responsible, but his career, he was like probably the worst person on this issue. Joe Biden since the 80s was pushing ramp ups in the war on drugs. He challenged Ronald Reagan from the right, partnered up with Strom Thurmond, and was criticizing Reagan for being too soft on drugs. And then he was the one who authored the crime bill that Bill Clinton signed into law. He's got a lot of death and destruction on his old hands. Yeah, that crime bill, whoof. The whole just war on drugs thing is such a strange issue, because logically everyone knows that when you legalize things, and certainly when you decriminalize things, you get a giant drop in violent crime, you get a giant drop in addiction. It's so counterintuitive, but people are so terrified because drugs have been so devastating. Because I think that if we did legalize all drugs, and it happened quickly, you're going to have more overdoses, you're going to have more deaths, you're going to have more addicts. You're just going to, because there's gonna be more access. But when do people, when does it balance out? Well, I don't know, I think there will be more access for sure, but I don't, I think so many of the overdoses now are because people become addicted to pain pills or become addicted to heroin and get fentanyl in it. And you wouldn't have that if drugs were legal. So you wouldn't have, you would have, there's not a problem with people smoking cigarettes and finding out there was fentanyl in their cigarettes. You know what I mean? Because it's not, but there would be, or there could be if it was on a black market and you were just getting it from some gang member. So it would reduce, I think it would reduce overdoses in that sense. There's no question it's a trade off. There's no good, perfect solution where there's not any costs. But the major benefit would be you would eliminate the gang violence. And already even I think when they, and I don't have this numbers right at the top of my head, on the front of my head, but the weed trade from Mexico, that used to be the big thing. And I think that's all but gone. Now because like- Not necessarily, it's not. Apparently because there's so many states where marijuana is still illegal, most of the illegal weed is actually being grown on state land by the cartels. Is that right? Yeah, there's a guy named John Norris. He wrote a book called Hidden War and he came on the podcast to discuss it. He actually was a game warden and wanted to have a job like checking fishing licenses and stuff, doing game warden stuff. And he detailed it in the book how they found this creek that had been diverted and dried up and they were trying to, they thought maybe a farmer had done this or something, some obstruction. And they traced it to this grow up that was in the middle of the forest. And his unit became like a tactical unit because they were having gun fights with cartel members. Instead of it being like game warden, now it became like a DEA type situation where you're running into these public land grow ups where these guys, they take this area and they level it and they grow weed there and these guys were camping there and they had guns and this wild shit, man. The whole book is incredible in the stories. Yeah, that's very interesting. So that's 90% he was saying of all the illegal marijuana that's being sold in America is coming out of these places. Really? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is why, again, this is why I think you just gotta call the whole thing off at a certain point. It's been a failure. I mean, we've been doing it for, what is it, 40 something years? I mean, it's like, or maybe more than that. Is it 50 years now? Yeah, I think it's 1970. 1972 or something like that. 50 plus years. Yeah, I mean, it's like, okay. So we fought a war and the drugs won and now it's time to, just like with the Taliban, it's time to accept. They keep winning. They're winning and they're killing us. It's destroying our country and it's not the legal ones. It's the illegal ones and the reason why it's destroying it is because they're illegal. So it's also propping up the cartels. It's like they just, you could walk right over there. People walk over here, walk right over there and you have literally one of the scariest results of drug prohibition right there where you have insane crime and insane resources that the cartels have. They control the government, they control cities. It's wild shit and it's all because of our policies. And it's interesting that we got the guy in the White House who was the champion of it for those entire 50 years. I mean, maybe he wasn't in the whole 50 years, but he was in for like 40 plus of them and he was the great champion of it. And it's so funny that now he runs on diversity. Yeah, but I hired the first vice president who's black or whatever. It's like, yeah, sure, I threw hundreds of thousands of them in cages, but now look at me. I got one right next to me. And yes, she's an idiot, but okay. I hired her. That's so funny how Dylan Mulvaney is the person they all go to, whether it's Bud Light or the president. Even the president was getting interviewed by Dylan Mulvaney, which is like, why? And she's talking about day 300 of womanhood. And Biden's like, bless your heart. And you know what's so funny? Did you hear the thing where Joe Biden lied and said he was for gay marriage since like the 70s or something like that or whatever it was? Yeah, he's just making stuff up, but it was so funny because he's just so old. And you know when old people try to say the politically correct thing and no matter how they say it, it still comes out like old and raw. You know, it's just like colored people could read just as good as me and you. And you're like, oh dude, that's the most racist thing. So he goes, he's telling the story of what he was a kid and his dad and he saw two gay people kiss. And then he goes, and then one of them walked into the bank. Like they had a job just like you or me. You know, like he was like, you're like, yeah, dude, they're people. This was a revelation to you. It still just sounds so fucked up. He's trying to be cool. What was the thing that he said something about just like white kids can? He was talking about poor people. He said poor kids are just as bright as white kids. And you're like, oh my God, Jesus, the Freudian slips. Like, ah, it's like you just, but it's just also like, you know, in the same way that if any of us had like, you know, our 85 year old grandpa at the table, every now and then if they say some things you're gonna roll your eyes, you're almost like, yeah, you can't expect him to be with the times on this. You're like, just stop making Biden talk about this stuff. He's not with the, but the fact that he has to not only do that, but has to be with the latest woke insanity. Like that this guy, like that any man in their 80s has got to be like, oh yeah, Dolan Mulvaney, totally. That's a beautiful woman right there. That's what I'm looking at. Beautiful woman, but he's gotta like actually do that is just hilarious. Yeah, it's very interesting. It's really interesting the mental gymnastics that people will put themselves through. Yeah, it's really something. Just the idea that they're not stopping him from running again. I mean, it's just, you can't, I'm shocked. I didn't think, I thought they were gonna replace him as the nominee at the last minute in 2020. I was shocked he did that and I was sure he'd be a one-term president and I'm still now not even convinced he's gonna be the nominee in 2024, but the more time goes on, like I guess they're actually doing this. Well, the fascinating thing is they will not allow for the primaries, they're not gonna allow debates. Oh, they don't wanna let RFK on a stage with Biden. Yeah, interesting. RFK will rip that old man up. And then imagine if his voice was good. It's really a shame. It is a shame. It's really, the job really, the job is really a speaking tour. And it's a real issue that he has issues speaking, but- He did have surgery recently and it's better than it was before. Is it better? But he's an interesting guy in a lot of ways. And I know people will say, because he was like a vaccine skeptic way before the COVID vaccine. He's been a skeptic of vaccines in general. And a lot of people say that's like, oh, this is a conspiracy theory or it's too far. But that argument after COVID is really much weaker than it used to be. Because people are actually like, yeah, I'm listening now. Now I'm actually kind of listening to that guy. It seems like there's a playbook and you guys have been following this playbook forever. Yes. And I got his speech, his announcement speech last week, he spoke for over an hour. And I mean, it was really fantastic. I don't agree with everything the guy says, but the major theme of his speech was that there is this unholy alliance of big business and big government. And they're working together to screw over the American people. And like, damned if anyone can argue that that's not true. That's just so obviously the case. And he went through this whole thing. He was really great on the stuff, on the war in Ukraine and being skeptical about like, what the hell are we doing here? Really, really great on the COVID stuff. And he's a Kennedy. And he's not just like one of these like, peripheral Kennedys, like I married a third cousin type Kennedy. Like he's Bobby Kennedy's kid. There's something powerful about that even still. And it's amazing that we've come so far, we're so far gone that they're not grasping that. They're not latching onto that. You want a democratic president? Like he could be the guy. But the thing is they don't want that. They want someone who adheres to the narrative 100% completely, doesn't get off track, is in co-hoots with big business and big tech and everything else. Well, it's just that like, the narrative is part of it, but the narrative serves the system. So the problem is that he's kind of outside the system, at least to some degree, at least he seems like he is. I don't know. But there's also something to, look, I don't know exactly. In fact, I haven't heard him address it. I'm sure he has. But I don't know exactly where he is on his uncle and his father's assassinations. But I know that his dad was completely convinced that the JFK assassination was a conspiracy that they weren't telling us about. He did not buy it all into the like Lee Harvey Oswald, lone wolf thing. So it's got to also be, you're a different type of outsider to the system if you believe the CIA killed your uncle. That's a little bit different than just- And maybe your dad too. That's a little bit different than just like, while I disagree with my opponent, I respect his opinion or something like that. That's a real like, no, you understand how evil and corrupt this system is. And that's what makes him an attractive candidate to me. I like people who recognize how evil and corrupt the system is, because it really is both of those things. And he's got direct connection to it. I mean, it was evil to his family. Have you read the real Anthony Fauci, his book? No, I haven't. I've heard him talk about it in several different interviews. If he hasn't been sued yet, and he hasn't been sued yet for it, like does that mean it's true? I mean, he's got so many references in that book. If you read that book, just when they talk about what they did during the AIDS pandemic, holy shit, man. Fauci is a very bad guy. What they did, I mean, in the book, I mean, I don't wanna paraphrase, I wanna make sure I'm accurate about this book. They tested vaccines on foster kids, including babies. Like when you read what they did during the pandemic, and it's spooky fucking shit. Also like the application of AZT as a treatment, that AZT was a chemotherapy medication that was killing people quicker than cancer. It's scary stuff, man. When he talks about Arthur Ashe, and Arthur Ashe taking AZT and dying very quickly afterwards, and that Arthur Ashe didn't even like have any symptoms before he got on medication? Well, I think one of the things that people, a lot of people have woken up to this over the last few years with all of the COVID insanity. And I think a lot of people have woken up to this over say the last 20 years of all the disastrous wars in the Middle East, is that it's very easy for them to just be like, oh, look, we have consensus amongst the expert class. We have consensus amongst the scientists that this is, we need lockdowns, and then we need these vaccine mandates, and we need all of this. And all the science, this is the science, the scientists agree. But then once you actually look into it a little bit, you realize that it's like, no, it's not that there's consensus amongst the scientists, it's that any scientist that doesn't agree with the consensus gets kicked out. They all get excommunicated and silenced. And then, oh, it's this completely corrupt group that is very involved with this money-making machine. And you're like, oh, there's such perverse incentives here. And so it's like, and the people realize this when after time, it just gets demonstrated that what they were saying is wrong. Like no one can argue anymore that if you get the COVID vaccine, you can't get or transmit COVID. No one's arguing that anymore, because it's just, you can't keep up that lie anymore. That was so quick. It was so quick. I mean, that lie was being pushed on mainstream news just a couple of years ago. Well, dude, me and you were talking about this stuff. It seems like not really that long ago, right? That we were having some conversations where there'd be these clips of what we were saying, and it would be like, look at this COVID misinformation. And now you're like, uh-huh, let's look back at that. The World Health Organization is now saying that the vaccine shouldn't be given to kids. And the thing you said that was so controversial that Fauci had to comment on it, was you were like, for young people, I don't know if I'd really tell you to take this vaccine, just be really healthy. Say like, eat really well, exercise, get a lot of sunlight. That was your dangerous misinformation that you were spreading. Like, let's put that up against, and at the same time Fauci was saying, if you get the vaccine, you're not gonna get COVID, you can't transmit it. You're like, so who's spreading misinformation there? They knew it was misinformation because they had never tested it for transmission. Yes, they knew it. The woman, I'm blanking on her name, but she was on the task force, the original task force in 2020. She's the lady who's always there at the podium with Trump and Fauci. Burks? Yes, yes. She said, in like a kind of diplomatic way, but she was like, now, she goes, I always knew that it wouldn't prevent transmission, and I felt that we overreached when we were making that claim. And you're like, overreached, lady, all of the policies that you put into place were built around that idea. The whole idea of vaccine mandates and vaccine passports and all of this. This was all predicated on the idea that it wasn't just your choice. Like, it wasn't just like, oh, you're choosing for your own health risk, that you were protecting other people. That was the whole idea that the whole thing was based on. If that's not true, then there was no justification for this, and millions of people lost their jobs over this. Not to mention just the amount of people who were just like disenfranchised, like in major cities across the country. You couldn't go to a restaurant or couldn't go to a basketball game or whatever, which may seem less important than the ones who lost their job, but it's still fucked up. It's all fucked up, because it was also incentivizing people to go along with something that they might not have wanted to do. And then when you see the amount of people that got damaged because of that, both financially, physically, vaccine injuries, ostracized from their communities, how many marriages broke up, how many friendships broke up. I know a lot of people that were skeptical about the COVID vaccine, and they were shamed by their friends, and they lost contact with those people. They stopped being friends with them. I know a lot of people whose mental health really deteriorated during the lockdowns as well. Oh, yeah. Without a doubt. There's a lot of people that were already struggling before the pandemic, and that pushed them over the edge. Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's really like, it's something to look back on it now a few years later, and just like how crazy it was that we did this, like the lockdowns, that you were just like, people were at home watching TV to find out from their governor holding a daily press conference telling you what you're allowed to do today. That was reality. And if you think about it from like a mental health point of view, what could be worse than to just be like, okay, listen, I want you to stay home. I don't want you to see your friends. I don't want you to go out to a game. I want you to stay home and be terrified of a floating abstraction that can come get you at any point. And on top of that, you're probably also gonna be terrified about like your economic security, your financial future, all of this stuff. It's like the worst thing you could do for people. So yeah, like you said, for people who are like on the edge already, you know, like, yeah, that's really bad. And there was a lot of like old celebrities who were really terrified of it, who were just calling everybody a fucking moron for not taking it. You're fucking idiots. You're gonna ruin it all for everyone. Fuck your freedom. All that stuff, remember that? Yep. All that shit is wild. It's so wild to see now. Yeah, and I do think like, I'm not, my personal view is that I think like, I think for the people at the very top, like I really do think there should be criminal charges. I think we should have Nuremberg type trials for what people did. I think it's one of the greatest crimes perpetrated on the American people by the government. Especially if we funded the research that caused it in the first place. Which we did. I mean, they can argue, no, we were funding other gain of function research at that same lab, but come on, man. We were funding the lab. Where this virus almost certainly came from. So, but just saying, at the top level, I think people should be prosecuted. They should go, Fauci should be prosecuted. Clearly, at least for long in the Congress, if nothing else. Out and out lies. Straight up lies. And now that's proven. Yes. But then like for other people, like you can't, I'm not saying everyone who supported the lockdown should like go to jail or something. We have to forgive people. But I do think there should be some process where like, some type of reconciliation, I don't think people should forget. Like I don't think people, like the thing you were just saying about Arnold Schwarzenegger and stuff like that. Don't forget what these guys were willing to jump on board with. And how much further would they have gone? You know what I mean? Like they pushed it pretty far and these guys were completely on board. Is it really that unthinkable to say if they were like, hey, we're gonna round up the unvaccinated and put them into camps, take them away from their family? You know? I don't think so. Some people would have gone along with it. Imagine if the pandemic was worse. Imagine if this disease, instead of killing a fraction of 1%, imagine if it killed 5%. People would be on board with it. If it killed 10%, people would be on board with it. It would, I mean. It's funny, cause Sam Harris had that thing, he had a clip where he was saying that basically. Like he was making the argument that like, hey, if this thing was worse, you all, we wouldn't have tolerated any of this COVID misinformation. Here's why that's wrong, because the vaccine still sucks. Yeah, no, it's, yeah, I mean, if you change, if you change all of the fundamentals and you make it a vaccine that's perfect and the thing is worse, then okay, fine. But when he said it, the first thing I'm thinking of, it's like, oh yeah, no, even in your scenario, you guys would have gone full Nazi. Like that's what would have happened if it was way worse. Because you guys wouldn't have just been like light totalitarians. You would have gone to like some full dark totalitarian thing. And so what now? Now you're gonna what? We no longer have freedom of speech and you're gonna just, what are you gonna do? What are you gonna do to the person who says, I don't wanna get the vaccine now? And when you eliminate that freedom of speech and you allow that government overreaching control, it never goes away. It never goes away. And the fact that people don't recognize that and they can't just make these logical thoughts about the future. Like if we do this, what happens if someone gets in power and they're evil and they already have these new controls that we put in place? During the NDAA, remember when Obama was like, we would never detain people for no reason? Yeah, you wouldn't. As he signed it into law. Yeah, but just saying that you would never use it, then don't have it. You should need a fucking warrant. There should be like a reason why someone gets detained. There shouldn't be an indefinite detention. Indefinite. People don't know the reference in the NDAA Act. Don't forget which year it was, 2011 I think. There was this provision that said that under the auspices of the war on terror, that the government can detain an American citizen and hold them indefinitely with no charges. If they decide that you are in some way connected to some type of group. And Obama signed it into law, but he put a signing statement on the bill and said, I do not plan on invoking this privilege. We do not plan on detaining anyone. But that's not enough to veto the bill. Yes, this bill does technically repeal the Bill of Rights, but I'm still gonna sign it. But don't worry about that. It should be illegal. It should be illegal to go against the ideas that founded this country. Well, the thing is, what's weird is that it is illegal. I mean, like the Constitution is the supreme law of the land. This is what they all hold their hands up to and take an oath to swear, to protect and defend. But the thing is that it doesn't really matter. Like the thing about laws is that they're just, words written on a piece of paper. So it doesn't really matter what's technically legal or illegal. What matters is what people can get away with doing. Like Obama murdered American citizens with no charges. Two of them, at least. That is illegal. That is very clearly illegal. This was, you're talking about drone strikes and suspected terrorists. Yes, it was Anwar Alaki and his son. Now with the son who was like 14 or 15, they came back and killed him a few weeks after they killed the father. Now I believe they claim he was not the target of the drone strike, like that he was just collateral damage. Still, I would argue should be illegal. But also most people don't buy that because it's just like seems very obvious that they were trying to take him out. But the Anwar Alaki guy certainly had been radicalized and I think had sworn allegiance to Al-Qaeda. But he's still an American citizen. And the rules are, if you're an American citizen, are you have to be charged with a crime and then you get a lawyer in a suit and a judge in a robe and 12 people who are like pooled randomly and they decide if you're guilty of a crime. And by the way, he was in Yemen at the time, but they can charge you and have a trial and if you don't show up to it, they still, you know what I mean, like convict you of it. But there's a whole process. You don't just have the president drop a sky robot on you because he says you're guilty of these crimes. And it's funny when people will still talk about Obama be scandal-free administration. What was his biggest scandal? He wore a tan suit or something and you're like, how about the murdering American citizens without charges? That was a pretty big scandal, in my opinion. And what about the people that got killed by drones that were totally innocent, which is somewhere in the range of 90%. It was over 90%. There was one report that came out about that that I think said somewhere in the neighborhood like 95% of the people killed in drones were not that were collateral damage, were not the targets of the drones. You know, they like to, people like to think of these things as they call them precision strikes, but like they're not surgical strikes. They're bombs that blow shit up, you know what I mean? And yeah, a lot of innocent people die. And then out of those, it's even higher than that because what they're counting as the target of the strikes just means you were put on a list, which is not always, does not always mean that you were actually a terrorist because what happens is a lot of times they're working with these groups on the ground. They kind of bribe them to rat out who's a terrorist. But a lot of times those groups are just giving you like their enemy. You know what I mean? Like someone they wanna get killed or they're just coming up with names because they want you to keep bribing them. The whole thing was such a cluster fuck man. And some of it is still going on to this day, although now we've decided to flirt with an even much more dangerous nuclear war. But yeah, and even the drone bombings weren't the worst of what Obama did. The worst of what he did was overthrowing Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, funding the anti-Assad rebels and starting a civil war in Syria, funding the Saudis and giving them the green light and refueling their fighter jets so they could genocide the people of Yemen for eight freaking years. That was the worst of it. And just goddamn, goddamn tragedy. Yeah, but he talked so well. He gave a hell of a speech. Great president. He really gave a hell of a speech. He's a statesman. It's, people forget how good he was. The job aged him a lot too. So he wasn't as good at the end as he was at the beginning. But if you go listen to his, it's nonsense. It's mostly just like gooey nothingness. But if you listen to his speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, his official acceptance speech, it's just like, it's a masterclass on public speaking. He would just say these things even when they were meaningless. But he would, I remember, I'm trying to think if I can remember. He has this thing where he's like, he's like, I love this country and so do you. And so does John McCain. The men and women who have fought and died in our armed forces have been Democrats and Republicans and independents, but they did not die defending a red America or a blue America. They died defending the United States of America. It's like, but the way he would deliver it, it's so like, it really just tugs it. You're like insides and makes you like, goddamn. But then after a little while you walk away and you're like, wait, but what did he say? You're like, oh, that was nothing. It wasn't like, you know. He did say some good things when he ran though. He ran on some really good policies like ending the wars and closing Guantanamo Bay and repealing the Patriot Act and restoring the rule of law and ending torture and all. The shame is he did none of it. And I think that's, like, I go back and forth. You could pick like any president really of my lifetime. You ruined the 21st century for America. You could certainly make an argument for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, but there's something about Obama. I think I put probably more blame than anyone else on him because he was supposed to be the response. And like that's the way this system of government is supposed to work or so they say is like, well, we have these democratic processes, you know, so you can, you know, if you're upset with these guys, you can kick the bums out and vote for these guys. And obviously we all know it's like, then they narrow it down to two teams and those two teams happen to have the same policy when it comes to, you know, the military industrial complex or the banking industrial complex or the pharmaceutical industrial complex. They're all on the same side. So that's how the UNA party works. Like no matter who you vote in, they're all supposed to be. But the country was so furious with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who handed him two disastrous failed wars and the worst financial crisis in a hundred years. And they were so furious with them that they voted the most opposite thing they could, you know, this junior senator, constitutional lawyer, brilliant, articulate, you know, everything that was the opposite of George W. Bush. And he was supposed to be the answer. And then he got in and just continued the Bush, like the Bush administration. It might as well have been the third and fourth term of George W. Bush. And that is where the country spins out to me. That's where you end up with Trump. I bet if you were friends with Obama, if you really were friends with him, if you could have a couple of drinks, maybe spark up a joint and talk to that guy, if he really trusted you and knew you were never gonna tell anybody, I bet he could tell you some shit. Yeah, I bet you're right. I'm more of like a believer in what Putin has said about this when he talks about how he's been through three different presidents and they all have these plans. And he goes and they get into office and people that are dressed in a suit like mine come in, sit them down and tell them how everything works. If you think about how much access to the real understanding of how the government works is ever gonna be given to a junior senator who's running for president. I bet very little. I bet very little. I bet there's no speeches. I bet there's no conversation about it. I think once you get in, once you're in the Pentagon, once you're in the Oval Office, once you're meeting with these people and you realize like, holy shit. And then you realize this machine behind you that's pushing all the buttons and you're a spokesperson for this machine. Yeah, I think this might be why they hated Trump so much because I think that speech just didn't work on him. Yeah, he's like, yeah. There's this story and I don't know if this is true or not, but it sounds so true. I think it was in Bob Woodward's book. I can't remember where it was, but this may not be true, but it just sounds so true that I guess after Trump won the election and he goes to Camp David, I think this is still while he was president-elect. It might've been right after he got in, I'm not sure. But I guess he goes and he's like at this CIA thing and they said that he came in and there's like a wall for agents who died in the line of duty. And they said Trump just walks in and stands right in front of it, which is like crazy disrespectful to do. And he said he just starts talking to the room about how tremendous his victory was. Like he just gets there and he's like, everyone said we were gonna lose, but we won big and we won both. Just sounds like, I don't know if that really happened, but it so sounds like that really happened. And you just imagine all these CIA agents just like, we gotta get rid of this guy. But what you said about the stuff, like the speech they give, who knows? It's a real interesting thing to think about. And I would love to talk to Trump about this. It's a great Bill Hicks bit. The bit about showing the Kennedy assassination from a angle you've never seen before. Such a great bit. But there's, I will say that there definitely are, like what we know is there definitely are forces that kind of roll over presidents. And even with Obama, like, you know, if you remember the story with General McChrystal and how he went to the media and told them, this is the guy who Michael Hastings ended up getting fired because he was talking shit about Obama to him at a bar. Maybe whacked. Well, you know, he just was driving too fast that night, I guess. I don't know the story there. Let's talk about that one in a minute. Sure, sure. I'm not sure if that is, like what happened with that. Cause I have heard that like his brother said he started drinking again or something like that. So I don't know the details of that story exactly. I would drink too if assassins were asking me. Yes, if I was working on uncovering CIA corruption, I'd probably be drinking. Not just working on uncovering CIA corruption, but you were embedded with these soldiers and they got comfortable with you. And then you printed all the things that they said. But what's very interesting about that is that it was a really good, it was a really important story because it makes you recognize that like, wow, even these like very high ranking generals are talking shit about the president. Like this fucking asshole doesn't know what he's doing. But to McChrystal before that interview, he went to the media because Obama, I guess, gave him the surge he wanted, but he put an end date on it. And he was like, but our troops will be out by this date. And that pissed him off. And so he went to the media and told them that, you know, he said, I haven't had any contact with the president and we haven't been talking since this and that. And then the media was like, put all this pressure on Obama. Like you're not even talking to your guy over there in Afghanistan. And basically kind of tied his hands politically so that he kind of just had to continue the war. And there's a lot of stuff like that that happens. And with Trump, I mean, it was reported that they lied to him about the number of troops in Syria. And when he said he wanted to pull the troops out, they lied to him and said there were far less than there actually were. Like they're just bragging about this. It's really, you realize that this thing is all fake. It's not run the way people think it's run. Yeah. And that is, if anything, I mean, even if you're a Trump hater, you have to recognize that he exposed that. He showed us that in a way that we'd never seen before because they were so furious at him. They were willing to like show their powers. They were almost like witches that start casting spells. And you're like, oh. Well, what's weird is that so many of the Trump haters, which like be a Trump hater. It's fine. There's a lot to criticize there. But like so many of the Trump haters will talk about like, you know, undermining our democracy and he incited an insurrection against like this Democratic Republic or whatever. But then you'll see things like, look, this just came out within the last week and a half or so that we now know that it was a blanket, the current secretary of state before he came in, who requested that the CIA put together this letter that said there were 50 intelligence experts who had determined that the Hunter Biden laptop had all the earmarks of Russian disinformation, you know, just to help Joe Biden win. Now, forget even the fact that the intelligence agencies are interfering in an election. They're doing it to undermine who was the current president of the United States of America. They're also openly lying. Yes, yes. I mean, that's all of these are big problems. But the fact that that's not freaking people out that they openly lied about that. Yeah, it's I mean, all of this stuff is very troubling. And then, of course, you know, I mean, that's dictatorship. Well, they just just not supposed to be how America works. And if you're a guy that's involved in doing that, like Jesus Christ, how much power do you need? Like you can't do that. It's so deeply un-American. To lie to the American people about something that might affect an election is crazy. That's and to justify it because you want your guy to get in there. Like, man, that that's a crazy abuse of power. And the problem with that is, I think the FBI is very important. I think the CIA is very important. I think all these people that are understanding what's going on in the world and with no filter, they have all the access to information. If you don't have that in this world, this climate that we live in, I think you're fucked. But you can't do that because that's going to undermine everybody else's understanding of what you're willing to do. So all the good work that they do, people are going to mistrust it. There's a lot of people that have lost their faith in the intelligence community because of things like this. Well, and because of the stuff that they do. I mean, it's like it's not, but it's kind of like, but I think a lot of those people are fucking patriots, which is so fucked. Yeah, I'm sure there are some. But they're stuck in a system. Yes, but that's the problem is that it's like, you know, it's like when people say they're losing, that people are losing trust in these institutions, it's like, well, yes, but it's because they've found out what the institutions are doing. It's like if your wife found out that you're cheating all over her and you're like, well, this is a problem because she's losing trust in me. It's like, well, yeah, but she shouldn't trust you because she found out what you're doing. You know what I mean? But isn't it who's going to watch the watchmen? Isn't that it? Because when you have any kind of a position like that where you have just insane power over information and policy and what gets done and no one, no one is managing it like from outside of it, that's saying, hey, what are you doing? Give the Constitution, you can't do that. Don't do that. There's no like oversight where there's someone who is completely objective, is loyal only to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and lays out like the rules. These are the fucking rules for America. Like you can't operate outside of these rules just because you want your guy to win. That's un-American. That's as un-American as anything else that you could be prosecuted for that we get... Think about what Assange did. What they're trying to get after is what's more un-American? Lying to the American people or exposing the American people to information that has been hidden from them that's deeply disturbing, that would change their opinion on things. And that's criminal. You know, like expose actual war crimes. Like what is America? That's the thing. Like what are we? Are we the shining light of the world? Are we this incredible garden of creativity and innovation? Because we're that too. Yeah. We're aware of wild fucking amazing experiment in self-government. But we've got to stick to the fucking rules. And if you get people in power and no one is able to stop them from not sticking to the rules and then when they do violate the law, there's no consequences. We forgot what it is to be American. That's not good for them. It's not good for us. It's not good for any of us. We're all in this together. You can't do that. Yeah, well, like you said, we are kind of all of those things. Yeah. You know, we're like, we are this like, you know, it's like in the wise words of the great Eminem, I'm all for America, fuck the government. You know, like we're a great. Not even fuck the government, fuck the bad parts of the government. There's people in the government that are trying to do the right thing. I know there are. There's people in the government that are patriots. There's people in the government that really want this place to get better. You don't think Bernie Sanders wants the government to get better? I think he definitely wants the world to get better. I think that guy realistically wants the world to be a better place. I think Tulsi Gabbard realistically wanted the world to be a better place. She was in government. She was a congresswoman for 10 years. But look what the system did to a good congresswoman. Yeah, but you know what? She recognized that she wasn't willing to be compromised and she removed herself from what she thought was a corrupt organization. Right. But then like, so what does that say about Bernie Sanders? That shows leadership and courage. Right. But I'm just saying that's kind of the way the system works. So it chews up and spits out the people who have some integrity. Not all of them. There are some who stay in. But there is some ... I mean, Tulsi Gabbard got called a Russian asset by Hillary Clinton, by the establishment of her own party. Why? A woman who served, was embedded in a medical unit in Iraq. Yeah, served twice. Yeah, really saw the cause of war. Yes, really saw it. Develop that white streak in her hair from that. The war that Hillary Clinton lied us into and voted for. And then she turns around and calls her ... She says she betrayed the country. It's wild that they think they can say that because they used to be able to say that with no recourse. They're operating in a world where there was no internet. They still have that programming from the world of no internet. Yeah, and also operating in a world ... You know, it's kind of like what you were talking about with the CIA getting so much power that it just becomes so corrupted. And I think a lot of the story of America and how we've just become so degraded is really kind of goes back to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fact that what Charles Krauttenhammer called the unipolar moment, that in the 90s it was like, oh, for the first time ever, that's it. America is the lone superpower. And this really is what all of those guys said, all the neoconservatives, the Project for a New American Century and those guys. They were like, this is our moment. We can do whatever we want. We are the sole power in the world. And what they wanted to do was a lot of really awful things. But it almost created so much power and so much hubris that they just think they can get away with everything. There's no limit on what they can do. And it turns out that actually you're not gods, you're just people. And all of this carefully perfect, like, okay, well, this is what we'll do and then this is what's going to happen. We'll overthrow Saddam Hussein and then democracy will sweep the region. And it's like, no, it's actually not going to work out that way. And to me, that's the whole story of the war in Ukraine right now, too. It was all like, we've got this perfect plan that we'll just keep expanding NATO and we'll just keep interfering. We'll have these color-coded revolutions. We'll take over more and more and we will be the dominant force. And it's like, yeah, well, there's consequences to that. That doesn't just work as perfectly as you planned it out. Just like with all the wars in the Middle East. And what's happening now is very spooky. It's really spooky because so many people are dying and they're trying to put a positive spin on it. It's like, what is the end game here? How does this end? Well, you know, how is there not negotiations? And when Trump says that it would have never happened when he was in office and he would be able to stop it now, like people listen to that and like, that's dangerous too. That's dangerous to have this one solution. Like he's going to fix it. He's going to fix it. Hey, what if he can't? What if he can't? What if this is a thing that's just like Eisenhower warned everyone about? What if this is a thing? What is a fucking whole business? Just like we're in the business of telling jokes, you know, people who make pies are in the business of pie making and people who make war are in the business of war making. And once that machine gets moving, I mean, it's like a tank with no brakes. It's certainly very hard to stop it. We haven't figured out how to stop it. We haven't figured out how to yet. You know, Donald Trump can say that. And I would say I think his rhetoric has been much better on this than Joe Biden's. And at least he's talking about negotiating. Do you think he can stop it? You think there's a way to somehow or does the president have that kind of power where the president could go in and say, I want to meet with Putin. I want to organize a negotiation. I want to end this right now. He could say it and then you know, and then see what I don't know. You know, I have to get NATO to pull their arms back. Well, the I mean, the president could certainly you has a lot of leverage there. You know what I mean? Like how much power do you think they really genuinely have? It's an interesting question. I don't know exactly. I think that's what Putin's point was about getting into office. Yeah, I think I think that's that's what he was saying. And it does seem like there's a lot of truth to that. I also one of the things that makes me skeptical about how great Trump would be on this, that Trump wasn't very good on this issue while he was in. I mean, Trump was the one who sent the weapons into Ukraine. This is when he got impeached. It was famously over the Ukraine gate thing was he said he was they said it was a quid pro quo where he was holding up the weapons, putting pressure on Zelensky to investigate the Bidens. But the part of that story that doesn't get talked about that much is that then he caved and he gave them the weapons. And this was a major this was a major reason, I think, why this war ended up happening. And what they said at the time was that they were sending in the weapons to to deter the Russians. And so either either they're really bad at deterrence or it actually was a provocation because it certainly didn't deter Vladimir Putin from going in. And I think that and Trump also got us out of the INF treaty. He also like it was just he was not good on this. He was in fact, I think he was trying to prove how much he wasn't a Russian agent. You know what I mean? That he was kind of like being more hawkish toward Russia. Interesting. To show you what a Russian agent I'm not. Oh, no. So I don't know. I don't know what he would do. It certainly couldn't be any worse than what the plan is right now. And, you know, to your point that you made, because I know last time I was on the show, I talked a lot about this, like, kind of the cause of this war in Ukraine. And I put a lot of blame on American foreign policy. And I it went super viral. And I heard back from some people who disagreed. But the funny thing about it is, is that it's not like when I was talking about like NATO expansion and how much of a provocation this was to the Russians, when you were talking about like the good people in government, it's it's not like it's just kooks or, you know, crazy libertarians like me. It was not just like Ron Paul and Noam Chomsky and Pat Buchanan, like the outsiders who were all against NATO expansion. But the list of people within the government, within the national security apparatus who completely opposed NATO expansion is really impressive and long. There's a lot of like really wise people within the government who were completely against NATO expansion in the 90s when it first started. At least three secretaries of defense, Robert McNamara, Robert Gates, George W. Bush and Barack Obama's secretary of defense, William Perry, who was Bill Clinton secretary of defense and the secretary of defense at the time, they all opposed it in like the strongest possible language and all explicitly for the reason that this will provoke a conflict with Russia. And they were like George Kennan, who was the founder of the containment strategy, the old school Cold Warrior. There's this great interview he gave with Thomas Friedman from the New York Times. You can find it online. And it's in the 90s when they're doing the first round of NATO expansion. And he is like furious. Like his anger comes through the page when you're reading it because he's like, what are you guys doing? We won the Cold War. We won. And now you're picking a fight with Russia. And this isn't Vladimir Putin's Russia. This is Boris Yeltsin, you know. And he's like, these aren't the Soviets. These aren't the communists. These are the heroes who overthrew them. Why are we picking a fight with them? And he was the Cold Warrior. He was like, you're throwing away my life's work. And he said, and this was a really, you know, a crazy prediction, really ominous. He said the people who are advocating expanding NATO are going to continue advocating expanding it and expanding it and expanding it. And then there will be a Russian reaction. And then when there's the Russian reaction, they're going to say, see, that's proof that we have to keep expanding it. And damn, if he wasn't right, if he wasn't right about that. And oh, but one more little detail on this, because this is really interesting, is so there's in 2008, in February of 2008, there was a private cable that the current CIA head, Burns, Bill Burns, who's currently the head of the CIA. At the time, he was the ambassador to Russia. And so he sent a private message to Condoleezza Rice, who was the Secretary of State at the time. And this the only reason we know about this is because of the heroic Julian Assange dumped this. So this was not for the public. This is like what they were saying to each other. And this memo was titled, Nyet means Nyet. And it was about Ukrainian entry into NATO because this had been floated out for a while. Yeah, there you go. Basically, the whole piece is this the current CIA director telling Condoleezza Rice that this anything in diplomatic language. Yeah. So he says Ukraine and Georgia's NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement and efforts to undermine Russia's influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences, which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership with much of the ethnic Russian community against membership could lead to a major split involving violence or at worst civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene, a decision Russia does not want to have to face. So this is now there's another memo that comes out later that year where he says and it's a really interesting thing where he goes, he said Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines. And Burns says to Condoleezza Rice again, not to the American public, just to let the secretary of state know like this is what I'm saying. He goes, I've spoken to everyone over here. He goes from the craziest right wingers to Putin's sharpest liberal critics. And it is unanimous to a man. They all agree that Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of red lines, that this is a direct threat to Russia. You cannot do this in the same way Jack Kennedy was saying you cannot put missiles in Cuba. You cannot bring Ukraine into your military alliance. That was Putin's position. This is what they were telling him. And three months after that memo that we were just reading. So this was in February. They had the Bucharest summit where NATO announced that Georgia and Ukraine were coming into NATO. And this is what it's like our ambassador to Russia told our secretary of state, do not do this. And then they went, we're just announcing that we're going to do it. And three months after that was the war in Georgia because they announced Georgia and Ukraine were coming in. And then Georgia got ballsy because they felt like they had the backing of the West and they attacked a breakaway province south of Sheshia. They had Russian peacekeepers there and Vladimir Putin responded. That was like the first like real response. And he went to war with Georgia over that. And then you know like the stuff we talked about last time is when in 2014 when there was the coup backed by the West in Ukraine. You know what I like about these segments too is like people can argue with like this because I know there are people arguing with me the last time I was here. If you remember we played the video of Gideon Rose just bragging about this. And he was like dude it's not me. These are that's the CIA director's words. That's Gideon. That's the editor of Foreign Affairs magazine saying this like this is what people in the government were saying. And like one more note that I'll say is that Bill Clinton secretary of defense. He wrote about this in 2015. So this is after the coup in Ukraine the made on revolution and after Putin took Crimea. And he basically said that like this is all my fault and that his biggest regret was that he didn't resign over NATO expansion. He said I think he said his biggest regret was that he didn't like do everything he could to stop it and that he didn't ultimately resign over it because this was destined to be like the future that it was like you know people will say I know people will argue with me on this and they'll say like but like you know NATO is just a defensive alliance. So why should Vladimir Putin care if you know we expand this defensive alliance. And it's like yeah it's a defensive alliance except for all the times it's not you know except for all the times it fights aggressive wars like in Serbia or Libya or Afghanistan. Other than that I guess they claim it's a defensive alliance. But from Vladimir Putin's perspective this isn't a defensive voluntary alliance. This is the European wing of the American empire the most war hungry country in the world who started seven wars in the last 20 years and slaughtered millions of people. Like from his perspective when you put dual use rocket launchers in Poland that's not like we're just trying the official reason is we're just trying to make sure that Iran can't nuke Europe with the nukes that they don't have. But from Putin's perspective he's like no you're trying to cut down on the time it would take for a nuclear weapon to hit Moscow. And so like again it's not that Putin's a good guy because he's not. It's not that he's justified in invading Ukraine. He's not. And all the stories of like horrible shit that you've heard that he's done there he's probably done a lot of them. But man it's just that all these guys these same dumb neocons who had this policy to remake the Middle East. They're the same ones who also had the policy to expand NATO all the way to Russia's border. And man was just this just the dumbest most reckless policy ever that's now put us in a position where we are closer to a risk of World War 3 and nuclear war than we've ever been in my life. And for what for what to make sure that the Donbass region is ruled by Kiev rather than Moscow. Like is that really worth it. Jesus Christ. You know what I didn't consider until this all broke out when I started looking at the borders of Russia. You know when when people are explaining why this is so important and why control of Crimea and why control of all these places is so important. Once you look at the what used to be the Soviet Union you realize like oh there's all these countries that are connected to them. People can just invade anywhere. The United States has a very unique position in the world. The North America's position in the world just where we are separated by oceans. Up until these hypersonic weapons that was a barrier was a huge barrier. And it's still a barrier to conventional. Yes. You know like warfare. Right. But we don't think we really have to worry about. I agree. Yeah. We have to worry about wild shit. Yes. This is what freaks me out about this whole UFO thing. I wonder how many of those fucking things that we're seeing is a government who's reached some form of technology that we don't we're not aware of yet. Yeah. And how many of them are ours and how many of them are China's. How many of them are Russia's. Do those exist. I don't know. I mean if they exist I would I would think China more than anyone you know because they they're technological capabilities are fucking so high. Yeah. But I think Russia's put a lot into that stuff also. So I don't know. You know I don't know. That's I mean Putin claims like he's developed like all of these crazy you know what I mean things over the last few years that that's really what that basically he said that once once NATO kept expanding so much that they left him no choice but to develop faster and crazier missiles and different technologies and it's just like you know it's weird because I've heard a lot of people I've heard people on this show and on lots of other shows say that the big concern they have is Vladimir Putin winning the war taking all of Ukraine or just keeping the parts that he wants or something like that and that then he might be like oh hey I can get away with it. I'll take Poland or whatever now that to me seems very far fetched like he's having enough trouble just taking Ukraine I really doubt he's moving on Poland next but it's like OK I understand kind of in theory where where that concern is. But what about the concern if he loses. Like what if he's humiliated on his own border and Russia's Russia is completely destroyed and humiliated what if like what like he's attacked within Russia what then what if he's convinced that he's done and he's going to be overthrown or he's going to die to me that's actually the most dangerous scenario because really nobody's probably going to launch the first nuclear strike unless they're already convinced they're dead anyway. You know what I mean and then it's like are you going to take me out I'm bringing you with me type deal right and to me that's the biggest concern what you want to find here is like an off ramp where everyone can save face a little bit you know what I mean like everyone can go home and tell their own people like we did the job you know like a justification somehow and it really it's got to involve like negotiating some type of compromise. You know what if he does get overthrown and Russia becomes a failed state. That's a pretty dangerous scenario to imagine Russia becomes like Libya because when they overthrew more market off he Libya fell apart up Libya is how they have open air slave markets where you can auction slaves off you could watch them on YouTube. The Libya is terrifying well it's that's why it's so crazy that because you'll hear people like you know like Lindsey Graham and like idiots like that we'll talk about like if Putin's overthrown like almost like it's a given that things are better than. You're like how even if it didn't go to like a failed state like Libya like how do you know it's not just like a far worse right wing dictator who comes up and takes over you know what I mean like why is it's not if there's one thing we've learned from the 20th and 21st centuries it's like sometimes you can overthrow a government and it can be much worse than the one that you overthrow. You know we do governments were overthrown after World War One in Russia and Germany. And then then came in Lenin Stalin and Hitler right like it can get a lot worse even if it's not a Gaddafi you know failed state type deal which is also much worse but you could you could be looking at something you know that's far worse than what we have right now. But isn't it amazing that that's taken place so many times and yet we still have this idea that overthrowing them or getting rid of our enemy is that's the solution to the problem. Yeah it's a it's unbelievable even the fucking game of Thrones kings handle it better. Yeah it's really. I mean they fucking got together and work shit out. Here's when Obama Obama said that the greatest regret of his presidency was not thinking about what would happen the day after they overthrew Gaddafi and you're like but you didn't like we just did it in Iraq you didn't. Yeah that wasn't your thought. You didn't think maybe it'll go crazy. Yeah this could be bad journalist in Libya now. I don't think so. I mean maybe I don't know. I mean they've done a few pieces on like the open air slave markets. I haven't seen anything in a few years. Running Libya. So I don't think anyone's running Libya. Libya is like basically warring tribes. Jesus Christ. And the only way someone's going to take control is the biggest warlord. That's usually how it goes. And what are their resources. Is it drugs. Sudan militants spark huge risk in lab with samples of deadly viruses. Oh terrific. Wonderful. Terrific. We just happen to have deadly viruses laying around where there's a revolution. You know it's interesting if you go back and read these guys. Like I was talking about the project for a New American Century. You've heard of those that before. I've heard from you. Yeah. It was a think tank in the 90s. It fueled a lot of if you are the 9 11 conspiracy guys like even some of the kooky guys it fueled a lot of them because it was basically this. It was a think tank. Its founding signatures were like the Bush administration. It was all the neocons in the 90s who were out. So it was Robert Kagan and you know like Bill Kristol and Dick Cheney and you know like all that Paul Wolfowitz all the kind of like neocons who ended up taking power in George W. Bush's administration. And they laid out their plans for what they wanted to do and one of their plans involved overthrowing Saddam Hussein in Iraq and fighting multiple wars and NATO expansion in Europe. And so the 9 11 conspiracy theorists would jump on this and go aha. You know this is why they brought the towers down just so they could get the war in Iraq that they always wanted. Whereas I think the simpler explanation was just like they took advantage of the opportunity when it came and realized they could get what they wanted. But regardless there's no debate. They're on record. They wanted it back in the 90s. And one of the so basically what it's about it's what the title is a project for a new American century. And they're like hey we're in the 90s here the Soviet Union has fallen. The 20th century was the century of America. And now what's our plan for the next century. What's the what's the plan for the new American century. And they actually say in one of the most famous policy papers is really something to say is they go look we have no real threat to our vital interests right now or no real threats to America our dominance right now. And so what we need to do is fight wars in multiple theaters. So we need to go and now show our dominance to the rest of the world. And so they're they're actually saying if you read between the lines not that much they're like we don't need to fight a war. But let's go fight them. Let's go fight them anyway. And this is what happens. They won like all the wise people in government who were opposed to them lost and all the dumb George W. Bush's and Joe Biden's won and they got their way and were living through the results of it. You're like oh great. Isn't this wonderful. Do you remember when that general was it West Wesley Clark Wesley Clark. That's right. Wesley Clark told this reporter in this interview that like find that interview because it's so fascinating. You said five countries in seven years. And he was like what are we doing. And you know I mean he's this decorated general who's being presented with this plan. And let's play this because this has not been discussed enough. This can never be discussed. It can never be discussed enough. And it's also it's all out there and you're not hearing it. You know and this is the fact that journalists aren't like putting this in everyone's face. Well they're very information that you're giving out today. Well the good ones are to be fair. I mean like the Glenn Greenwald and the Aaron Matys all the people. Taibis they're doing a great job on this stuff coincidentally all independent. Yes and coincidentally all vilified by the establishment and weren't independent initially. These these guys have all had to stick to their principles and leave to listen to this because this is very fucking wild. About 10 days after 9 11 I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the joint staff who used to work for me. And one of the generals called me and he said sir you got to come in. You got to come in and talk to me a second. I said well you're too busy. He said no no. He says we've made the decision we're going to war with Iraq. This was on or about the 20th of September. I said we're going to war with Iraq. Why. He said I don't know. He said I guess they don't know what else to do. So I said well did they find some information collect connecting Saddam to Al Qaeda. He said no no. He says there's nothing new that way. They've just made the decision to go to war with Iraq. He said I guess it's like we don't know what to do about terrorists but we've got a good military and we can take down governments. And he said I guess if the only two you have is a hammer every problem has to look like a nail. So I came back to see him a few weeks later and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said are we still going to war with Iraq. And he said oh it's worse than that. He said he reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. He said I just he said I just got this down from upstairs. I mean the secretary of defense office today and he said this is a memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years starting with Iraq and then Syria Lebanon Libya Somalia Sudan and finishing off Iran. Sudan. And you know I mean they they haven't. It's not like that plan was followed perfectly to a tee but a lot of it sure was. And it's pretty crazy to see him. By the way I don't think he needed to grab Amy Goodman's piece of paper there. She was a weird thing like he goes he goes look they showed me a piece of paper just like this just takes her paper. She's like this paper. You could have just told the story without like you really need that like visual aid. Why did you say like on her face for a second. She's like that's all my nuts and stuff is on there like all my next questions. Anyway it's a good point piece of paper just like this. It's a weird thing like like it's a very like military guy type thing to do though. This weird kind of alpha like let me just take your shit right here and show you up here anyway. But it's pretty it's like insane that this was just said and that's not just like like if we didn't have such a corrupt press how do they not talk about that every day. Every day. Like what is that never come up. As we fought all of these wars no one went but this is exactly what I heard Mr. Four Star General tell me was your plan and you've never come to the American people and said this is my plan. You're just like so and what's really interesting about it right is it just reveals this prop like the way propaganda works because if you think about it we start fighting the war in Afghanistan. We're in the war in Afghanistan by late 2001. It's not till 2003 we're in Iraq right and then it's not till 2010 that we're in Libya 2012 we're in Syria you know and then then in Yemen then in all that and it's like each time. They had their own little propaganda story for why we had to go into this war now you're like no motherfucker this was always plant you decided in 2001 you were doing this. So don't tell me this is because Gaddafi is about to go genocide all or because Saddam has weapons of mass destruction or because Bashar al Assad is killing his own people it's like no no no no this is just your latest little excuse now for the war that you already wanted to do. And that's how this shit really works man it's like they they decide they wanted to fight these wars then they make up a bullshit excuse that they tell the American people then these weapon companies rake in hundreds of billions of dollars in profits. And babies get slaughtered that's what really happens like innocent men women and children die get exploded to death starve to death get displaced like it's just the most evil shit in the world. And we want to think of ourselves as the good guys well that's and that's by the way that's the essence of my point with the whole thing in Ukraine too is that it's like I'm not because people go like oh you're spreading you know Russian propaganda like my loyalty is to Vladimir Putin or something like that ridiculous. But it's like no it can you at least even if you support the war in Ukraine let's say you're like we have to continue this proxy war of choice in Ukraine we have to fund Ukraine all the way to the end fine can you at least acknowledge that our politicians are the biggest hypocrites in the fucking world when they say things like Vladimir Putin's a war criminal. So Vladimir Putin invaded a sovereign nation like come on man did you ever see by the way and again it's just it's pretty entertaining to me but Vladimir Putin he he gave two speeches I think when he first invaded in 2022. But he did one where he like ran down the list of presidents he did one where he was like he needled Bill Clinton for his war in Serbia and he was like he goes well there's a there's an ethnic minority being oppressed so we have to go to war right Bill Clinton. And then he goes we got to check out about weapons of mass destruction right George W Bush and then like kind of like went down the list of and the point he's essentially making and he's kind of right about it and he's like you have no leg to stand on to tell me that I can't do this. Yeah, it's all I can't violate international law. But you guys sure can so why the hell can I and that doesn't mean he's justified in doing it it means like really not none of them are justified but the level of hypocrisy that America thinks were in any position to lecture anyone about war. But isn't it fascinating that as long as the people are in a place that we don't have a lot of familiarity with and as long as the people speak a language that we don't understand and we can't read it seems like less is going on in some strange way like if the United States did what it did to any of these other countries it did to England. Yeah imagine that imagine if there was some propped up bullshit reason why they needed to invade England. Holy fucking shit would that be wild yeah because then you would have people that speak the same language talking about this going what the fuck is going on look the same skin color same religion or less you know what I mean it's a especially England because England is similarly diverse right it would be everybody. You'd see everybody you'd be like what is going on again and you would hear from them they would be able to talk in a language you clearly understand all the newspapers were reflect their positions and the craze is that like in Sudan or in any other place any place we we we need somebody to interpret it for us right right and just will just like imagine if like we fought crime here with drone bombs or something like that. Well you know they were like oh there's a drug dealer in this building he's a suspected killer and so we're just going to bomb the building you know I'm starting to use robots yeah yeah they're not the bombs yet but they're starting to deploy robots to fight crime in America. This is literally a fucking Terminator movie yeah it's pretty creepy shit crazy that we're ever going to allow them to use robots to fight crime like what are you fucking talking about. What are you talking about like first of all you don't know jack shit about whether or not those things can be cacked. Where there's someone can take control of it if it's a computer there's someone out there smarter than you they could probably figure out a way to take over that thing well and the crazy thing is that you know there's which is a major. Push from the Biden administration Glenn Greenwald just did a video on this the other day is really fantastic. But this has been a major push from the by the administration since he first but even before he took office just after the election in twenty twenty. That this is their their new thing is like a domestic war on terrorism. That's a big threat that they're worried about is domestic terrorism which is a very loose. I don't want someone trying to oppose them yes that's it's there's kind of this war on dissidents yeah and it's very creepy that the same people who pushed for these wars in the Middle East. Are now the ones saying oh yeah and we need to and they're calling it the same thing they're saying we need to bring what we had over there. Right here they're calling you domestic terrorists it's the Department of Homeland Security that was created in the name of the war on terrorism. This is now going to focus on you know this this problem we have here at home which is like. Again it's just like the fact like you what you were saying like okay if they did this to England or if they did this to Chicago or whatever it would be so much more blatant to us you know but it's like they do it to Iraq or they do it to Somalia that just doesn't seem quite as real. But you're like but those people who were okay doing that they are don't be so comfortable that they won't do that to you too it's like if somebody. You know if there was like someone who would like you know like attacked kids and then you were like yeah but they did that over in a different neighborhood I'm letting them babysit my kids today you're like. I mean you know I know it was a different neighborhood where they spoke a different language but like that person's comfortable killing kids like I don't think you want them anywhere around your kids and like that's kind of what we've got with these people in our government like they're comfortable making decisions where innocent people die and die by the millions. Like if you add up the death toll of all the wars it's in the millions somewhere in the range of two to four. Let's just let's just go with Vietnam go with Vietnam because that's one that's provable that we got in under false pretenses yep that's. I think two million of Vietnamese and. Something like that died I don't I double check me on that but it's a lot and that's war that everybody opposed yep. Or so well a lot of people a lot of people a lot of you know those. And now everybody oppose it what's and nobody thinks it was yes yes well it's kind of like the war in Iraq now you know like everybody kind of even John McCain wrote in his memoir like whoopsie. Yeah I know he's good but that's kind of what it is you see the Tucker Carlson interview on full send. I guess I saw I didn't watch the entire thing but I saw a few clips of it when he's talked about how much he regrets supporting the war in Iraq yes we are fine to yeah yeah yeah I believe him I think he really means that I believe him sometimes you know sometimes there's people like there's like John McCain types who go like you know they'll or Hillary Clinton will admit. Okay it was a mistake but then they still support every subsequent war after that and they know it doesn't see where's Tucker is like I'm so ashamed that I supported this I'll never forgive myself for it and has opposed every subsequent war after. That and I'm like okay I think this guy really believes that he's different than people want to pretend he is first of all the guy was a deadhead. Yeah you know that he's just a dead around yeah so for sure dropped acid. All right that'd be my guess I would how how else can you enjoy the music I think it's legally required that you take an asset at least once if you're going to enjoy the Grateful Dead I'm not sure I don't know I think alive to LSD according to my friends who've been there and done that it's. It's really interesting what the public perception of Tucker Carlson is or particularly how polarizing he is to people that it's almost it's almost like you're there describing a different person that he actually is I really I think he was the most interesting person in cable news the most thoughtful most intelligent like he was really he I don't agree with them on anything you know on my. On my podcast we used to do a segment or was this it was I just done it so many times that we started joking about it being a segment that we called Contra Carlson because I was just disagreeing with him like he had all these economic ideas that I completely disagree with and I disagree with a lot of stuff he said but he was like. Such like the the lone voice in like really the corporate press who was completely opposed to the military index industrial complex completely opposed to big pharma and all of the cove it insanity was really good on like speaking up about a lot of really important issues issues that you would think like a good leftist would at least appreciate that he's good on that issue you know and some some of them did this is what he's the guy who's having Glenn Greenwald on his show you know what I mean he's the guy who's having Aaron Mateo and. Jimmy door yeah right where is he's having like that he's having a lot of love and it was it was very interesting he wasn't a partisan he would be completely against the Republican Party was viciously critical of the Republican Party hates the Republican establishment and even the stuff I see I've seen so many people be like um you know he was a he bought into Trump's. Claims that the election was stolen and I'm like I don't do do you watch him because I watch his show and that's actually not he was the guy he took a lot of heat from this from right wingers. That immediately following the election of twenty twenty he really aggressively called out Trump's lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sydney Powell I think was the other one because they were making claims about the Dominion voting machines that they flipped millions of votes. And Tucker Carlson went on a show and he goes okay if this is true it's the biggest story in the history of the United States of America so what evidence do you have. And he's like we have reached out privately to the Trump's lawyers we've gotten nothing in return so to be clear they're making this claim and providing nothing to back it up he really was like no no now what he has said later is they'll be like the poll quotes and be like yeah but he referred to twenty twenty as a scam. Or something like that and it's like you have it you don't watch his show so you don't get that like what he was saying was yeah the Dominion vote flipping thing is bullshit no one's ever provided any evidence of that. But the fact that big tech in the intelligence agencies work together to undermine the hunter Biden story to get Joe Biden across the finish line is bullshit like that you know what I mean that's a scam and he's that's a completely reasonable position to take. Again it's just you know like look at this dude Don Lemon is out at CNN right I promise you whoever replaces Don Lemon has the same exact views as Don Lemon and the same exact views of everybody else at CNN that's not true for Tucker Carlson like there's at least there was a guy out there who like would disagree with that with. The rest of the people at his network yeah disagree with both political parties he's really designed for the Internet. I hope he goes there he's going to unless they've paid him off to like the I mean if I was a person in a position of power in a wild card like Tucker Carlson got released from Fox News and maybe rumble makes a deal with him or something like that give any fucking idea how big that would be. Big Show it could make that that app it could make that that platform I mean if Tucker Carlson goes over there it'll be worth it for them to invest a considerable amount of money but if I was Fox News that's the last thing I would want so I would make sure that we have him locked up for the entire term of some contract some no compete and pay him off you'd be better off just giving him the same amount of money he made when he was on the air well and I wonder him opposing you. I wonder what he's already under contract for you know I mean like there may already be some clause in his contract that says you know if we leave there's X amount of time I don't know you know fucking Fox News man they're smart yeah that's stupid although very shocking seeing him leave yes I was I was surprised although in high one of those things were like I was surprised right away and then like two days later I'm like how was he ever even there like how this guy was on the 8pm hour at Fox News saying the CIA killed Kennedy like how did how was that ever a real thing you know like it's like it's a day. It's insane what he was like it but what's crazy to me is that like so many progressives have like it's like it's like invasion of the body snatchers or something it's like is this the real you man have you just been replaced with an NPC the 8pm hour at Fox News is saying the CIA killed Kennedy that's not interesting to you right that's not like something like I'm not saying you have to agree with them on everything but like that's not kind of that's different than Bill O'Reilly yeah that's a different this is a different world we're living in now like this is something that and. Yeah it just seems like kind of surreal now looking back at it almost but I bill O'Reilly did leave and he went and started a podcast or something I think I don't know something I think the problem is his average viewer was like 86 years old there are a podcast now was that yeah I'm getting them to download an app good luck. I'm gonna have to call my grandson where is it does it work I need to be angry just just talking to like my like in-laws about like scanning a document or something like that I know let alone you know telling them how to download an app and listen to a podcast I don't know. I'm gonna talk to your mom through one of those things. But you know but it is I do think it's very interesting I'm very interested to see what his his next move is got to be the Internet it'd be crazy to do anything other well there's nothing else I mean he's not going to CNN he's not going back to CNN or back to MSNBC by the way he used to be on both of those networks I know but he got a lot better since he was on those networks and they got a lot worse. Yeah it was a different time when he was on those networks I mean there was a video that was just released who's the interviewing is the interview Britney Spears I think. Like from 20 years ago it's like you're watching this young Tucker Carlson with a bow tie on CNN like wow. Yeah kind of crazy I think Rachel Maddow used to like have like a friendly back and forth like they disagree but it was like totally friendly when they were both on MSNBC together it was like what it was you look at it now you're like wow what a different world that those two could even be in the same room together but I think that that what happened is it just the Internet is it is it when people get together in these echo chambers and they reinforce each other's ideas to the point where anybody that opposes that is just the enemy is it's just some tribal thing. That just automatically happens when people are allowed to gather in large groups like they do on social media. I think that certainly plays a role. A major role. I think that there's also like I think the thing kind of came on glued like the establishment kind of came on glued. I think the the the George W. Bush administration. The wars in the financial crisis really set into motion like a bad dangerous thing where it almost like. I think there was like an effort to distract away from the like I think there were powerful people who wanted to distract away from how much the powerful people had fucked over the country and then they there was kind of like this effort to pit people against. Each other and then I think it was very easy for people to fall into that and just get very very tribal and very very isolated I also think there was like this knee jerk reaction from journalists. To not confront their own obvious failure like in that they hadn't really been reporting on the things that actually you know what I mean like imagine there was this like ticking time bomb like the subprime mortgage yeah you know a crisis and you were just oblivious to it. Right and you've been reporting on all these stories and you weren't reporting on the time bomb that was about to blow up on the working class in America so now what you report on. Racism you know it's all this is the problem is that this other guy is lying to you and when Trump got elected which I think very much was a reaction to a lot of that stuff. I think that then it was like that's when it really all fell apart because the media it was so obvious that this guy who you were telling everyone well this guy can't possibly win and no one cares about what he has to say and then tens of millions of people did care about what he had to say and voted for him. It was like their failure was that much more exposed and so they just had to snap into like other explanations for what happened here no it's not that we failed on the job for 30 years it's that Russia and racism and misinformation and like all of this stuff. But I do think in a lot of ways it was a concerted effort you ever see that that cartoon which it's like a banker in like his corner office and outside his window is all the occupy Wall Street people protesting and he's on the phone and he says introduce them to identity politics. I don't know if it went down exactly that way but I think that cartoons getting it something like I think there's a reason I just don't think that government is that competent they could brilliantly socially engineer civilization that way. I think a lot of the private interests that own our government are pretty competent actually you know I think the government works in very sloppy ways but if you look at it like if you look at it from the perspective of say like you know Lockheed Martin and Pfizer and companies that are doing it. And if you look at it from the perspective of like the Pfizer and companies making you know hundreds of billions of dollars in profits they're actually working very well you know like the system is working very well toward that end and I just don't think it was completely organic that after we had these disastrous wars in a financial crisis and after you had the Tea Party and the occupy Wall Street movement that all of a sudden on some grassroots level we were like we need to have a national conversation about chicks with dicks. Yeah I don't think that just happened you know what I mean it's like every day that's what we got to talk about now that's the new thing. What is the beautiful trans women. I'm sorry the trans. I mean excuse me the the Russian guy who used to work for the KGB Yuri. Yes I know you're talking about what is his last name Jamie Benton off. I know exactly what you're talking about who gave the like lectures on how the Soviet Union was destroying America in the next generation. And he he talked about this in 1984. This is during the Soviet Union time. Yuri Bessman off. Yeah that's him. Yuri Bessman off gave a speech describing exactly America in 2023 describing how Russia had eroded the Soviet Union had eroded all of our institutions. And gotten in there and implanted ideas of Marxism and reinforce these ideas and that this was undoubtedly going to lead to the demise of America. There is no way but the way he lays it out. It's it's compelling and there's definitely a lot of things that kind of happened exactly like he said they would happen. Yeah. And it's not you know it's all it's kind of evolved it's not really like traditional Marxism is kind of dead. No one's really advocating for like government ownership of the means of production. It's more now it's just kind of like it's really like corporate control of government with this weird like what they call cultural Marxism which I don't like the term because it means different things to so many different people. But the idea that like Marx had this economic view that everything all of human history was a class struggle between like the oppressor class and the oppressed class. And if you like applied that to cultural issues that it's like describes woke ism to a T. Yeah that everything can be reduced to like white black straight gay cis trans men women like it's like everything is like the oppressor class versus the oppressed. Yeah which is such a shallow stupid way of analyzing. Yeah anything it's just it's there's so much more to reality than that simplistic way of looking at things. But it's so attractive to people which is really fascinating and that is what you had described in the speech and how it would become how would captivate people. It's just I don't want to believe you know here's an interesting thing about something like that. Like even though we're saying everything he described seems to be happening right now describes woke ism to a T describe what's happening in this country to a T. I still have an impulse an undeniable impulse to reject it like no they didn't do that. No they're not that smart. No that's not what happened. There's a part of me for whatever weird reason and I think everybody has this part of that that doesn't want to believe that something's happening while it's happening. There's a thing that's going on right now because we're so accustomed to being able to do what we do. We're so accustomed to be able to drive to work and do this and hang out with your family and go out with your friends were so accustomed to this. We don't imagine a world despite all of the evidence of history. You could go see the Coliseum in Rome. You could go see the the Acropolis and the Parthenon. You can go see all of these great empires that no longer exist. There's just stone structures where these people used to rule the fucking world. But in our mind that was then and right now everything's amazing and we're perfect. And if we could just get a trans president we could solve this like we are. We believe in the moment. We can't look at the vast amount of data that shows up. Shows us the same patterns of behavior that humans are exhibiting right now have led to disastrous consequences in the collapse of civilization. And it's so easy when you look at those past civilizations to be like how did you guys not see it coming. I mean it's all around you. How were you not completely again. You know there's so many examples like this. It's very easy to and I have the same impulse. It's very easy to look in the past and be like sweet there was slavery and you were just like OK with it. Like you weren't against that every single day. And then you're just like now we of course down the road as a state prison there's a bunch of people there for weed. But that's totally different. You know what I mean. It's like I don't know in a hundred years if that all got cleaned up you'd look back at that with the exact same view. Like you enslaved people for like bullshit. People are writing about it on their phones which are literally made by slaves. It's like there's a right. There's like all of this stuff right around you. But if you try to zoom out and you try your best to be disinterested and just analyze and you go OK. So what where are we right now with the United States of America. So we are a republic that turned into an empire got expanded all over the world. Something I think seven hundred something bases and 135 different countries trying to rule the entire world through the process of doing that. We've spent ourselves thirty trillion dollars into debt and now we see massive cultural decay into just like decadence. Yeah. What's that story. If that's not a crumbling empire I don't know what a crumbling empire is. I hear the America fuck yes song in the background. I hear America. Fuck yeah. Come on. Those guys are so great. That's right. Is there anything better. That movie was so great. They're amazing. Or they go over just like destroy the whole place and they'll be like you're welcome. The greatest movie of all time. So great. So great. It's fun. That and the South Park movie. The South Park movie when Saddam Hussein has a sexual affair with Hitler. No it was the devil. Excuse me. Yes. Yes. Was Hitler in that too? No Satan. Satan and Saddam Hussein and Satan's like the sub. Oh like Satan. That's right. And then there was real dicks. They could show a photo of a real dick somehow or another. Yeah they always figured out a way to do it. They're so on point throughout the years. They've always just been so on point. The best show of all time. It's the best comedy show of all time by far. You know I just introduced my 12 year old to it the other day. And she's blown away. 12 is a good age. Yeah I'm like it's a perfect age. I'm like she hears me talk. Like I'm not very filtered. You know I always tell them don't say bad words around adults and other people. Be respectful. But they're just words. Yeah. That's what I'm worried about is your feelings. I'm worried about what is your intent. So what I'm not worried about is words. I'm just at the age my daughter is four. And my son is one. And I'm just at the age now where I'm starting to hear some of the words that I say coming back out. And you're like oh so that's going to be the next chapter. When my daughter was three. My youngest daughter was three. We were skiing and we were leaving the hotel. We packed our stuff up and my wife realized she goes. I forgot to pack the helmet in like this one bag. And my three year old goes shit. My wife look at you go no. You're like all right it's so funny too. Because she was a side. She was a side. She like shit. We're just so real. Like she wasn't like trying to say a bad word. It's just a completely. She knew that's the word you say. Somebody fucked up and forgot to put the helmet in the bag. Everything's packed and stuffed in. Shit. So funny because you have like this life right where you're like so you're like with your wife when you're just a couple before you have kids and you're just a couple. You know you say whatever you want. And then even when you have little babies it's like it's just not even a thing. And then right around that age you go. So we have we have something to confront here. There's two paths. Number one I can try to watch my mouth and I'm like babe I'm going to be honest with you. Very low percentage chance that that works out well. And the other one is what you said where you're just like OK. Let them understand it's just a word but also let them know. OK look there's there's time in places where you can't use these words. My parents were hippies. You know my mother and my stepfather were hippies. So from the time I was like seven years old they told me you could say whatever you want. They were like just don't don't say it at school. Don't. No idea the monster they were creating. We talked about the other night we were having dinner. I should have said some boundaries. You can say whatever you want to as big an audience as you want to little Joe Rogan. Yeah it was interesting. It was interesting growing up that way because like that their perspective was like everything that the establishment has created is wrong. Like this is not the way to live. You know right. That was the whole hippie movement in my stepfather like really long hair. The whole thing was very interesting to grow up that way because you know from the time I was seven I was like I was felt like an outsider because I had moved a lot. But then also I had these parents that were really open minded and very liberal and they just they they were like this is all bullshit. Like when I remember like being a child when the war in Vietnam ended I think I was like 10 years old or something like that thinking this is great. Now we're not going to wars anymore. I thought I really thought that man. I really I've remembered that and I remember being blown away. Me and my friend Jimmy were watching the Iraq war. It was like whatever year that was. Well the first one the first H.W. was 1991. Ninety one. That makes sense because I was living with my friend Jimmy and we'd just come home from work and we were watching on TV and he looks at me and goes what do you know we're at fucking war. And I was like what do you know we're at fucking war. Like this is real. Like this is crazy. I thought we figured this out. I thought we weren't doing this anymore. And you know what's so crazy about that first war in Iraq is that because I was a little kid. A very little. I'm born in 83 so I was you know eight when we first fought that war. But I was I remember being aware of it. I remember seeing the speech when George H.W. Bush announced we were going and they the whole like all those same neocons who later went to Project for a New American Century. They were all in the George H.W. Bush administration and then they went into his sons administration and they all said that they had conquered Vietnam syndrome as they called that. See from their perspective the country had this this terrible Vietnam syndrome after Vietnam meaning that people didn't really want to fight wars. They had this attitude that like we shouldn't fight wars because they can be really bad. But see now George H.W. Bush this hero he he he conquered that because they showed how easy the war was. Look we fought a war now it's so easy because America is so powerful. We just stormed right in there. Minimal loss of life on our side. Very few casualties on the American side. Toppled right in there. You know let Saddam Hussein stay in power but easy peasy that war is over. And Joe. Terrible. Thirty years later we still have a military presence in Iraq. That's how easy that war was is that all of these years later the war and the war continued through Clinton not technically a war but a full blockade of the country bombing campaigns massive sanctions tons of people dying. I don't know exactly how much the U.N. had a study which I think is bullshit but they said 500000 children had died from starvation and malnutrition during the sanction campaign. Why did he do bullshit? I saw someone I don't exactly remember but I saw someone make an argument for why their estimations were wrong and the study wasn't right. So anyway he was arguing and it seemed pretty compelling. It seems like oh that actually sounds right that they were like counting the wrong way kind of. So it probably wasn't 500000 maybe it was 100000 whatever it was like children just starving due to this blockade. And it was also one of the main things that really pissed off Osama bin Laden radicalized him against America. It was one of his stated grievances and his declaration of war on America because we had we kept the bases in Saudi Arabia to you know enforce the blockade around Iraq. And he was like OK so you have your bases in our holy land to starve other Muslims to death. And that pissed off a lot of people over there. But yeah that war man that war which they sold it as like look what an easy victory it was in many ways really locked us into a war for decades. I remember the first casualties when a scud missile hit those soldiers. I remember that was like shocking that a certain number of people had died like that. We were so we had given into this idea that it would be just they would storm it and that's it. And once that narrative got set like oh the United States is just wiping out the army like this. There is no army. It's a joke. The whole thing's a joke. They're like who knows going to die. And then when people did die like whoa. But then it becomes normal. It becomes normal. It becomes the idea of losing soldiers becomes normal. And then all these other military actions start happening. Yeah. And then 9 11 happens and then the big ones happen and then it becomes normal for us and then you're not allowed to take photographs of coffins anymore. Remember those. Yeah. I mean they didn't allow journalists to take photographs of flag draped coffins which is what is that. What is that. I mean we until this Ukraine war like the Ukraine war you're seeing cell phone footage right of war atrocities. You're seeing cell phone footage of Pete. I saw a guy get killed with a hammer. They killed a guy with a sledgehammer. You're seeing people get shot in foxholes at close range. You're seeing like HD footage of this stuff. War becomes very abstract to people who have an experience that I think it's hard to even believe or wrap your head around. Like it's so hard. It's hard to even think that like in that in a society where we mean we have the technology that me and you are sitting in this room and we're also speaking to like millions of people and we'll you know go to a shop and buy something and get lunch and then we'll go do comedy tonight and someone will be like oh great thank you very much. It's like a civilized society that we still just have mass murder sprees where we just agree like we're going to like we haven't figured out a different way to settle these disputes. It's like it's hard to actually believe like and it's it's it's hard. Certainly for me I don't think anyone's completely capable who hasn't seen it and certainly that applies to me of like really understanding what that is. But it's bad and it's just like I don't know it just I can't like I can't believe more people aren't just you know Fiona Hill. I think I talked about this last time I was on but Fiona Hill who she again this is in Foreign Affairs magazine not like not like Ron Paul weekly. You know what I mean. Like I think Ron Paul is the greatest hero ever. But I'm saying this isn't like what the kooky libertarians say like me. This is like Fiona Hill in Foreign Affairs magazine. She was the one who reported that they had a peace deal worked out basically you know in pencil not in pen but like in principle they had a peace deal worked out and that Boris Johnson as a representative of the West went over there and convinced Alinsky not to negotiate. Not to negotiate. Don't you give him one inch. It's like they want and this is what it seems like for it seems like they want this war. They want to prolong it to bleed the Russians dry. That's their plan. And you're like Jesus man. But why wouldn't they be that evil. I mean why wouldn't they be that evil when they're that evil everywhere else. That's what's fucked up. It's hard for us to think that's a fact. Yeah it's it's hard for us to when you're going about your day just hanging out in New York and fucking visiting your favorite coffee shop. It's hard to believe that you're a part of that. Yeah. Well it's one of the things that's like I guess it's like after a while like one of the things that helps me understand this is like you look at people in their track record. Is that we have a very short attention span you know as a country. But it's like when you look at so one of the absolute best people on the war in Russia and Ukraine people really want to learn about this stuff is John Mearsheimer who is the dean of the realist school of foreign policy is like a world renowned scholar. This guy is not again not a non-interventionist libertarian like me just like a scholar who's like talks about foreign policy and stuff. And he's written and spoken extensively about Ukraine Russia. And he was one of the big opponents of this whole policy. And meanwhile so after the you know after the government was overthrown the one that Gideon Rose was so happy about when we stole Ukraine away. We stole Robin from Batman Victoria Newland and Gideon Rose and all of those people who were pushing for this policy. They all said this is wonderful. Ukraine is choosing to join the liberal world order and they're choosing democracy and hope and everything is going to be wonderful for them. Their country is going to flourish. And John Mearsheimer said and his quote was it was in a lecture he gave in 2015. He said America is leading Ukraine down the primrose path and which I didn't understand what that means exactly but it sounds real good. But what it means basically is like we're leading you down this beautiful path that ends in your demise. And then basically we were encouraging them to play tough with the Russians. And it's like don't worry you got America's got your back. You know it's like you it's like you convincing some dude who doesn't know how to fight like go fight this guy because like I got your back and they're like oh OK well Joe Rogan's black belt he's got my back. I'll go fucking fight this guy. And then when you fight the guy you're like well I'm not going to like jump in the fight with you but like I'll yell instructions to you while you're in the fight. You're like throw him in an arm bar and they're like what's an arm bar. You know I'm like just get it. So we like led them down this path. And so like OK. Maybe you don't agree but like whose prediction was better. John Mearsheimer's or you know Gideon Rose. Who was who predicted what was happening here better. The guy who said this was going to be disaster for Ukraine or the guy who said yay. Yeah. We're stealing Robin away. Haha. We distracted you Putin with the Olympics. Like oh that distraction didn't work very well. And so it's just like it's it's horrible. Like but that's kind of that's one of the things that you know one of the things that's so interesting about this this war too is like when people will defend it. I almost want to ask people. So why if this war is so necessary or it's so necessary for us to arm them why shouldn't we intervene militarily. Why isn't America's military going into Ukraine. Why aren't we invading Russia. Why aren't we at least occupying Ukraine and forcing. We certainly have the conventional forces to force Russians army out of there no problem. So why aren't we doing that. And the reason we're not doing that is because everyone knows we can't do that because that's nuclear war. That's nuclear war in a certainty. So you're like OK so that's nuclear war so no that's off the table. Biden's not even suggesting that. But so then what does it go from like a certainty of nuclear war to what's the risk of nuclear war if we're just fighting a proxy war and giving them hundreds of billions of dollars and pledging till the end that will drive Russia out. Well the risk doesn't go to zero. You know what I mean. It goes to something maybe less but it's still something. Still terrifying. Still way more than we should be willing to take. Yeah if Vancouver got armed by the Russians and you were then Vancouver was attacking Seattle. Yeah. Like what do you think would happen. Everyone know. I mean everyone knows what would happen. America would start blowing shit up like crazy. We would go to war with the world if anyone ever. And look Jack Kennedy fucking said it. He literally said that I mean literally but he basically said he said you put these missiles in Cuba. I will blow up the world. I'm treating this as a preemptive nuclear strike on America. If you do that get those missiles the hell off of Cuba. And I think most people go. Yeah that's reasonable. You know like it's kind of reasonable to say we cannot tolerate Soviet nuclear warheads pointed at us from a little island a few miles off our coast. That's just like can't be. And like look we have a Monroe Doctrine. Monroe Doctrine says that America does not tolerate any far away power coming in and interfering in our realm of influence. OK. And essentially what Vladimir Putin has been saying for years was like well I want a Monroe Doctrine for Ukraine. Like I want a Monroe Doctrine for this part of the world. And that doesn't mean he's a good guy and that doesn't mean that that's a perfect system. But at least prior to invading Ukraine he had a point like he had a reasonable point to say I don't want you interfering in my biggest neighbor right here and a very strategically important area to him. Dude hold that thought I got a P. Yeah. All right we're back. So the the the leaked document. Like what was your thoughts on that because the whole thing was crazy that this guy had access to it that and I guess he was showing it to his friends or something. Is that what it was. Well it seems that way. You know a lot of people kind of were were criticizing the guy and they were kind of saying like well look this guy is no Ed Snowden. I mean he didn't like take this to Glenn Greenwald at the Guardian to have him vet through it and properly disclose it. He's like bragging to friends on a Discord server or whatever. Essentially that seems right to me like that does kind of seem like what happened. But again like that's not the interesting story here. The interesting story isn't like what this guy's deal was or what his motives were. The story is like oh the government's lying to you again. And also that it's they have this information that they claim is so vital that it's so horrible he leaked it and yet you're so reckless with it that you know it's like it's funny I remember Glenn Greenwald making this point when people would talk about like people were at the national security apparatus or whatever would be talking about how how reckless it is that Snowden just like gave all of this information out and you're like well then weren't you pretty reckless too because like if this information is so vital you didn't even know it was gone. They didn't even know it was gone until the Guardian published it and then they were like oh I guess this guy took all of our documents. What another. The documents say. Well just right before that one of the other real interesting thing is that they came out so a couple of days after the leak first like was getting reported the Reuters had a piece an article where they had three high level U.S. officials under anonymity said that you'll never believe this Joe. It had all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation and so isn't it just amazing that they'll go and then like two days later they completely gave up on that and went let's just smear the kid who did it. You know like forget all that stuff. There were some some interesting revelations from from the documents things like they they're evidently there are NATO and U.S. military embedded in Ukraine like assisting them basically which is which is pretty dangerous. Western special forces operating inside Ukraine. One document dated twenty three March refers to the presence of a small number of Western special forces operating inside Ukraine without specifying their activities or location. The UK has the largest contingent 50 followed by Latvia 17 France 15 and the U.S. 14 the Netherlands one Western governments typically refrain from commenting on such sensitive matters but this detail is likely to be seized upon by Moscow which has in recent months argued that is not just confronting Ukraine but NATO as well. Oh and essentially look this was the I think what when Putin ultimately decided to invade Ukraine last year I think basically what he concluded was that they did it. They brought Ukraine into NATO even though Ukraine is not an official NATO country at this point they backed the coup that overthrew the democratic the democratically elected government under Yanukovych. They poured weapons into the country and they were doing joint training exercises with NATO and the Ukrainian military and I think Vladimir Putin was basically like we told them this was our brightest of red lines and they crossed it and I got to do something. Now I'm not saying he should have done this. There's other things he could have done. There's lots of things. I mean I don't know exactly. You get creative but he could have cut off all natural gas to Europe. You could have dropped a nuke in the ocean. I mean he could have done something before he did this you know but he basically concluded that Ukraine is de facto a member of NATO and if you look at the way we're responding to this whole thing he's he's kind of right. I mean like we're backing them all the way because they were invaded. That's what we're supposed to do to a NATO country you know. And so this is bad that this comes out although I got to say I'm surprised to some degree how much you know they've I mean if the North stream bombing didn't you know like do it I don't know if just like some special forces being embedded there is going to like you know create some big escalation but but yeah this is a stream bombing is wild. Well look dude I mean there's been in the last year. Trump predicted that Germany if they don't if they don't take steps to stop this they're going to be completely dependent upon Russian oil and it was one of those things where people were making fun of him at the time like what are you talking about. I don't know I don't know if I completely agree with Trump on that but there's there's no question that but they are dependent upon it now right because of the Nord Stream pipeline blowing up well not anymore it doesn't exist anymore. But I think that there's a lot of a lot of people were there a lot of very powerful people were very against the Nord Stream pipeline right I have a different I have a different view of it. I think it was great but I you know there's it was great yes why because the worst thing that's ever happened in the history of the world was Germany and Russia going to war. And World War Two something like 30 million people died just in that conflict it's like the worst thing that's ever happened in the history of the world and so for them to be interconnected and interdependent which is how I would see it trading you know like where goods cross borders armies don't have to that old saying. I think it would have been a good thing for them to be together oh look now you're directly incentivized to not be enemies because you want the cheap natural gas and they want your money for their cheap natural gas and so. However, there is there's a big view. From like the neoconservatives and the neoliberals the kind of establishment that this is the scariest thing. The scariest thing is that Germany and Russia align and I don't know exactly if this is true but some people like I'm blanking on the guy's name the guy who founded a Stratford Friedman. I believe is his name he basically said that this is the centerpiece of American foreign policy since World War Two that like the whole idea of NATO is to like keep Germany in and Russia out and that their biggest fear is that Germany and Russia would. Unite against us and that that could be the only thing that could really challenge American power is like the ingenuity of Germany with the manpower and natural resources of Russia so there's a lot of people who have been against this from the very beginning. No one would ever think of that today like your average person today would think maybe Germany and Russia could unite again. Well, you know it's the mean like that's not but to those well to you know to some people look that the neoconservatives. Who are and let me say this delicately let me preface this i'm Jewish okay so let me just say that there's a there are a lot of Jewish people in the neoconservative like movement and there, this is part of the reason why they're very, very pro Israel. It's also part of the reason and i'll say somewhat understandably well like it's a big German independence is a big concern to them they still live with that kind of like this is the great fear that Germany will rise again one day and like oh if they're connected with Russia like this who they're not under the EU's thumb and NATO's thumb anymore now they could possibly go in a different direction so for years there are a lot of people who are against this. Now when Ukraine invaded i'm sorry when Russia invaded Ukraine they did turn off the pipe like like Germany was boycotting there and that so they weren't using any of the gas from the pipe. However, they've also adopted all of these crazy like climate policies and like completely destroyed a lot of their own internal energy sources like they've denuclearized and all that stuff. And so I think the concern was that going into winter what if there's pressure on them to decide to turn these pipes on and that this might be then Germany might start you know. Siding with Russia or at least if they're getting their natural gas from Russia they're not going to be so harsh on on Russia and they're not going to be so willing to play ball with the EU and there's already you know, like a history of this like that what I was talking about before at the Bucharest summit in 2008. When they announced Ukraine was going into it would would eventually join NATO it was it was Merkel was really against it. They got that in over her wishes so they're already a little concerned that like maybe Germany is not quite as anti Russia as we are. And so going into the winter I think they were concerned there was going to be a strain on on power in Germany and they might be tempted to turn that that pipeline back on. And so they made sure it's as Victoria Newland said a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea. Could you fucking imagine if some time in the future we're going to war with Germany and Russia United against America. Yeah well I think I think much much more of a concern than that to me right now at least is look at how crazy is this that over the last year while this war has been going on NATO has been attacked twice. There was missiles in Poland and there was the Nord Stream bomb and there's two attacks on NATO and yet both of them didn't come from Russia. You know what I mean now if you remember do you remember the story a few months back. So there was these missiles hit Poland killed a couple people there Zielinski immediately said this was Putin and that the West has to respond. Then eventually a couple days later it came out it was actually Ukraine. They were like oh it was an accident that's what they say it's an accident I mean who knows maybe it was intentional to try to blame on Russia or something like that but even saying it was an accident OK they accidentally attacked NATO and then the Nord Stream pipeline which was clearly not Russia. No that was what they said at first I was a rush of blew up their own pipeline for why you saw the video Biden saying that they would do something like that yeah he promised that it would happen yeah you know. Well it's just wild. The whole thing is just it's all in front of our faces. It's an act of industrial terrorism and like environmental terrorism to do this and you know Sahirsh reported and I trust that guy a lot more than I trust most other journalists and he reported that it was America. Even I think the New York Times now concluded that they said it was some pro Ukrainian group and you're like OK but that includes all of us. Do you see the article in the New York Times that said maybe we should yeah yeah yeah that's great journalism right there we don't know it was the title was literally something like we don't know who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline and that might be for the best. Something along those lines. It's like you can't like I don't know you can't make this shit up like really such a crazy thing for a journalist to write. Well I mean I remember sometimes you can just kind of like. You know you can just look at these things logically like I remember in 2017 is when I was when I was still a contributor on a SC Cup show and she was at CNN. And the big story came out that Assad had gassed his own people. And I remember right away and this is before any of those like OC PW whistleblowers came out or anything like that but just right away I remember the day after. Being on TV and just being like I don't think he did this and they're like how can you say that everyone saying he did this and you're like well look at it it's like. Two weeks ago Trump announced that we're leaving Syria like we're withdrawing from Syria he won after this five year bloody civil war where he's been fighting for his life to not be Mo Mar Gaddafi he is just announced that he won. And so now you're telling me for no strategic military advantage he just did the one thing that will keep this war going and maybe end up like more market off he doesn't make any sense. I don't I'm not buying this and then it did kind of come out as these whistleblowers were like yeah it didn't come from the sky came from the ground and it was done in you know rebel controlled territory and like it does not look like it was Assad. But I remember when they first it was like the same thing when they first we think Russia blew up their own pipeline like but why why would they like this just so you're telling me Vladimir Putin just took away the option that Germany might cave this winter and want to buy his natural gas again. Why would he do that and then of course it comes out later like no that's not what it was it was probably British intelligence or some some US allied group if not directly us and so yeah that's pretty crazy it's pretty hard to like look at that and still feel like we're just the good guys. In this war and again when I say we just for everyone disclaimer for this entire like those great M&M lyrics I'm all for America fuck the government when I say America did this or America's wrong I'm not talking about you or your daddy or your hometown or anything like that I'm just talking about like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and Barack Obama and Dick Cheney and Donald Trump and you know all of them Bill Clinton. Jeffrey Epstein's rapist friend that's who I'm talking about turns out these guys aren't good people. It's so wild when you you if you looked at us from outside of us and you looked at the human race and these patterns that repeat themselves over and over again. You would wonder like why aren't they seeing these patterns like why don't they recognize when these things are happening as they've happened to so many civilizations before like what is it about watching everything erode before your eyes that's not shocking enough to wake people up to what's happening. Well it's sometimes I think there's kind of like a pattern and there's big forces at play that are hard for individuals to get a hold of you know like there's kind of this thing where there's like. Governments are power centers and they're just there it's not just like in the same way every business kind of wants to get bigger wants to have more profit you want to have more listeners to your podcast you want to have you just kind of want more but the government isn't in the in the market it's not like. Oh I have to provide something of value in order to get more people voluntarily to listen to my show or come to my business or something like that they're in the game of take things. They're in the game of force you pay your taxes or you go to jail you know like this that's the government is a monopoly on legal aggression like on force and so governments it's almost impossible to stop them from just getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and the bigger they get the more corrupt things get in the more power they have and it's almost like this cycle you know we're like. If a government is limited then the country is prosperous because they have more freedom and then the more prosperous they are the more the government has that they can leach off of and then the government gets bigger and bigger and bigger and it's almost like I don't know what can happen to stop that cycle you know the thing that makes me optimistic is that they really rely on propaganda. Like they really need the propaganda and they know it you know they know they can't just like roll out the vaccine mandates without a huge propaganda campaign they gotta convince you and then try to get away with their tyrannical policies and I do think that the propaganda is being undermined more than ever more than ever like it's really really hard for that it'd be really really hard for them to sell us on some next bullshit policy. Much harder than it used to be and think about how easy it was after 9 11 George Bush could have done whatever he wanted to yeah well that's how we got into Iraq yeah I mean did he had a blank check yeah everybody was like take care of it yeah take care of it yeah yeah I mean I remember feeling the the the strangest sense of patriotism driving down the road and seeing everybody with an American flag hanging off their car people were all in yeah dude I was 18 when 9 11 happened and I was living in a prospect heights. Which is like it's on if you flatbush Avenue kind of runs down to the Manhattan bridge and the Brooklyn bridges down there too it's like couple miles away from the World Trade Center and I remember. Get we got out of school I think I was a senior in high school and we got out of school and I remember walking to my house at flat and looking down flatbush Avenue so this has been a couple hours now since the towers came down and seeing people covered head to toe in soot. Like walking like they walked over the Brooklyn bridge and just came home because there's like no subways running or nothing so they're just walking just cover like oh that guy got caught in the you know in the middle of it. And it was a crazy feeling in the city the whole thing was insane it seemed like we it seemed impossible no one could ever hit us this is America in the 90s you know I mean it was in the 90s but it was. It was still the 90s until 9 11 you know what I mean right and you're like this is impossible this couldn't happen and I remember when George W bush came and gave that speech on the megaphone yeah and it was it was like almost perfect in his simplistic you know way where he goes I want you to know. We hear you in Washington DC and pretty soon the people who knock down these towers they're going to hear you too and I remember being like fuck yeah you just picked a fight with the baddest motherfuckers and we're going to fuck your shit up you know I was an idiot fucking kid but if I fell for it completely. Everybody did you know but it was just like that's that's kind of how it is when you're hurt you feel like you got hit and they killed our people we're going to fucking kill your people motherfucker but then you kind of realized and this is what like Ron Paul taught me is it's like yeah okay you know that impulse that you just had. Exactly that's what they feel so it's like the same way that you went you kill us motherfucker we're going to kill your fucking people you go that's that's it that's the same exact thing that the fucking terrorists are feeling that's the same thing their sides feeling that we're like oh yeah you come here in Balmar fucking village we're going to kill your fucking people you know. It's kind of like that's the whole fucking cycle and it's like I don't know it's like I you know I remember literally saying this when I was arguing with the se cup and them on our show where they'd be like that like an attack even like the littler ones I remember there was one where like a New York guy some some Muslim guy in New York like people with his car and he was like said he was part of Isis or something I don't even know how connected he was and they're like they're all like well don't we have to do something about this. I mean don't we have to go bomb I you know Syria or do something about this and you're like right you just got hit and now you feel like we have to do something but what's something blow shit up right yeah it's not just like something like give a speech you're saying we got to blow shit up over this like all right well maybe that's their perspective too. And also once you blow shit up people want to blow shit up back yeah that's and now you're just continuing this and so like oh we got to fight him over there so we don't fight him over here but you're like well maybe that actually ensures that we have to fight him over here and isn't it wild that during this most chaotic of times in our history if we think about the we think about the future of the world we think about the future the possible possibility of war it's escalated and. We have the craziest situation as a president and vice president it's the thing is wild like the only options we have what are from the right or the left we're like what the fuck this is it like this is all that's left it's like going to the supermarket during the pandemic and there's nothing on the shelves yeah like oh my God. All that's here is a Trump and a Biden we're gonna that's all we have really all right we're gonna need a jar of mayonnaise and pickles oh my God all this here and it's and the thing about it that's kind of crazy is that it's like it is so entertaining. Even though you kind of know it's a disaster like I remember when Trump announced he was running again it was literally like my exact I was like this is so bad for the country God damn this is going to be fun like all in one thought like God damn this is going to be funny as shit like I definitely was that the devil is funny. No I'm saying 24 is gonna be funny like it's just but it's a it's bad that hopefully hopefully there's like more I really hope that. That Robert Kennedy juniors campaign like has some impact and like takes off I hope more good people run how could he possibly win well he's probably not going to win if they're right so like all he's doing is getting the message out. Getting the message out but I don't I think that's that's valuable you know I think that's very valuable and I also think things like that can. Like there it can like check the establishment a little bit if they're like whoa a lot of people like what these guys this guy saying maybe we can't get away with this right now maybe we can't get away with that like there have been examples of that before where that happens they try to do something and they realize this is going to be too. Like too many people are going to be upset about this yeah wasn't there talk during the Obama administration about some sort of regulation of the Internet yeah the soap a bill the soap and not paper there were like these proposals that were like real deal going to regulate the Internet. Not like big tech censorship shit like really the government was going to regulate the Internet I'm telling you Joe they just shut your show down if that should have passed on the soap ahead past there's no way your podcast goes through the pandemic. There's no way you're allowed to have dissident doctors and scientists on to give like their point of view on how the whole every policy is wrong they just wouldn't have allowed it and so and so that didn't happen we're still like in the game with a fighting shot because enough people. You know got furious about that and look I should be fair there was also corporate help with that like back then a lot of the tech companies were against it because they were still like they weren't in bed with the government as much back then and there was like I believe Google was really against it and so they helped push kind of that message so I do think also. Like we're going to need a mass awakening in this country but we're also going to need like powerful people this is like what you see what's really encouraging with with Elon Musk buying Twitter is you kind of see that like yeah that's necessary to you got to have like a badass billionaire who's like on board with this who can actually do something about it. Because he's so valuable yeah yeah that move I know that pissed a lot of people off there's a lot of people that are just missing the fucking point man. The man that questionable people are allowed to be on it listen the fucking all sorts of questionable people are already on there yeah the Taliban's on Twitter the CCP is on Twitter. Joe Biden did this yeah all types of bad people there's there's always been people like. There's always been people on Twitter yes yes and come on it's like it's also like you kind of just like miss. You know like don't just don't get it twisted it's like again like when it's like what I try to say with the Ukraine thing it's like look. If the people who didn't have anything to say over what happened in Yemen over the last like seven years are really upset about the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine it's like. Just don't be a fucking mark right like see what's going on here I'm not saying you can't be upset over the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine but I'm just saying recognize what they are doing they don't really care about the humanitarian crisis they're using this they're manipulating you and in the same sense don't think the people who are like all for big tech. Don't look you may really hate if there's like a neo nazi or something like that like on Twitter or something you know okay I get it I get where you hate that but understand why they hate it yeah they don't hate it because of that. Like they don't care about that they they got no problem sending weapons to the neo nazis in Ukraine by the way we haven't touched on that there's some real deal ones in there but my point is it's not that they hate neo nazis they hate dissidents okay so you might find one example of a dissident who we all agree is a real bad guy or something like that but they're not shutting down people like just for that they're shutting down Alex Berenson. For making data driven arguments about why the covid policies are wrong yeah guys who write for the New York Times yes that's who they're going after you know what I mean so like like asking him to be removed what are you doing about it. And it's always in like coded kind of mafia so yes you know it turns like yeah I didn't technically say you should you should get Alex Berenson off I just want what's up with this what's being done yeah there's he has a lawsuit now yeah yeah yeah well he didn't he win his lawsuit against Twitter. Yeah I guess the old but now he has one against the Biden administration that's real interesting yeah good for him I think he wants to find out what was said he wants to find out what what did you do like what the internal discussions were there. Right you guys are trying to remove my first amendment rights yeah and it was data driven stuff that he was talking about you're trying to silence a journalist but that's also you realize that it's kind of like that's why it just all has to be protected can't silence journalists man. But it's also why it's like even if he wasn't making data driven arguments he should have a right to make the arguments you know what I'm saying like even if even if it's not like you have to protect even the dangerous speech otherwise you have no leg to stand on you're like anything short of incitement of violence or some type of criminal activity or something like that but you have to like it's like otherwise you have this slippery slope and it's it's amazing how quickly it happened right like you remember when that happened with Alex Jones. So like not that long ago that it was like oh all of the companies colluded together to all kick him off and silence him at once and then everyone goes like yeah but it's just Alex Jones you know and then like before you know it oh it's not just Alex Jones. It's gonna keep going it's it's a thing that feeds off of removing people that you disagree with and this is why Elon Musk pisses them off so much it's the same reason why Donald Trump pisses them off so much it's almost like he interrupted. The inevitability of them winning yeah you know like progressives will say you're gonna be on the wrong side of history yes which is like a really presumptuous thing if you think about it like you're saying you already know how history is written and that you are the right side of it but that kind of is their worldview that it's like look we're going in this direction and that's the correct direction and what's gonna happen next is Hillary Clinton is gonna be president you say that's the next step and they're like well this wasn't supposed to be the right side of the world and they're like well what's the point of this? Trump was not supposed to happen. Trump was not supposed to be here and the same thing was like we're going in the direction of content moderation and you know cracking down on misinformation whatever their euphemisms for it are people you disagree with yes and then all of a sudden Elon Musk you're like wait what am I what? Yeah the richest man in the world had 44 billion to burn and he just bought Twitter and it's like and and you know so you could criticize him it's Twitter hasn't been perfect since he took it over there's like you know it could always be better or whatever but um but it's pretty awesome that he did this it's pretty awesome the getting away with eliminating verification is weird like it was strange because like that seems to look if regular people want to get verified and there's a fee for that that makes sense okay just it pays for the site but if and especially for people that are addicted to it and they're on it all day long anyway like just give them some money but for celebrities and like musicians and people and you know like that you could be someone impersonating them like why don't you just give them their check yeah it makes it work better for all of us and it does add to confusion a little bit like when Don Lemon announced that he was fired from CNN there was no check mark next to his name and I'm like I'm like I thought I go this is someone trolling like you know what I mean so that's a little bit confusing that's I do it doesn't make sense to me that makes the experience of using the app less good I agree with you I agree with that I love labeling state funded media I hold state funded media I love seeing the reaction so funny the reaction of NPR yeah like this is outrageous right but it's true well aren't they just 1% state funded no it's actually much more than that because then they like they they get it's like 1% is directly funded by the state and then they also take money from like local groups that have like collected taxpayer money and then they like they take taxpayer funded money so like I think there's nothing wrong with labeling them that and if taxpayers are forced to fund any amount of of a news organization and then that news organization is going to turn around and say like we won't report on the hunter biden or we won't you know it's their stuff during covid was just god awful I have no problem with them having a little label there especially one that pisses them off I love that who did he label 69% state funded oh I don't know is it the BBC maybe maybe he did I also love that he's I love that he's having fun with it yeah there's just something great about it oh he's he's a billionaire troll yeah he likes to troll people the fucking one that he did with Bill Gates is my all-time favorite when he had a photo of bill gates was standing next to the emoji of a pregnant man said if you want to lose a boner real quick that is so crazy yeah twitter label CBC's account CBC okay 69% government funded media opinions were mixed on whether or not Elon Musk was musk was making a sex joke or just thumbing his nose the Canadian broadcast corporation or both so yeah it's a 69% government funded media well is that the actual number I don't know I think this happened during it to their work Chinese journalist that had that label on their account oh wow twitter drops government funded label on media accounts including in China well he did you know I know he dropped it on the ones he dropped it on um on NPR too I think he was just fucking with him for a little while and then he's like alright we're not actually gonna realize ladies and gentlemen that oppose him this is so much better than the alternative because the alternative is a system like China has where it's a state controlled system like their their social media is monitored like people go to jail for dissenting well it's very dangerous well look I mean if you it's gonna show you this video video shows how China is using AI in their schools again this is from an Instagram account that is popular what they show is like an edited video I don't know how accurate all this is though but China know exactly when someone isn't paying attention these headbands measure each student's level of concentration oh my god is then directly sent to the teacher's computer and to parents classrooms have robots that analyze students health and engagement levels students were uniforms with chips that track their locations there are even surveillance cameras that monitor how often students check their phones or yawn during classes but schools say it wasn't hard for them getting parental consent to enroll kids into what is one of the world's largest experiments in AI education a program that's supposed to boost students grades while also feeding powerful algorithms whoa yeah whoa they're gonna kill us well they're gonna dominate but sometimes there's I just I'm always a little bit skeptical of some of these things because you're kind of like okay is this just like one random school is doing it this way in China and it's like a little experiment because I have heard people like say that like like I've heard people who like run businesses in China like I heard a podcast with this one guy who lived there or still lives there in China and he was like I don't know what everyone's talking about with this credit social credit score he goes I've never heard of it it's never affected me I don't have a social credit score you know and I almost like wonder like sometimes we do get a lot of propaganda about China because there's also a whole bunch of people like who are real hawkish toward them so I always try to kind of be skeptical of some of this no doubt the CCP is really creepy you know what I mean and they're definitely like an authoritarian fucked up government they're dictatorship yes a one-party dictatorship for sure and when you've got something like that that's how you're on it yeah but there were like um like that dude a Adrian Zen who was like he was like putting out a lot of the stuff about the the Uyghur genocide and he was like drastically like misrepresenting what's happening and he actually I believe he apologized for it but he just got called out like like literally like just doing bad math like oh you didn't carry the one here motherfucker it's ten times less than what you're saying and it's not like the evidence for that is not nearly what they kind of suggested it's it's more seems like oh yeah China's a real authoritarian government and they limit how many people every how many children everyone can have and it's okay they don't have the one shot the one you know child policy anymore now you're allowed three or whatever but like it's it's like it wasn't quite like the story that was originally put out there I just always get worried about that I'm seeing um German scholar named Adrian Zen's has recently stood out on the anti-china stage with his reports accusing China of detaining Uyghurs and other minority groups or imposing sterilization on ethnic minorities in its how do you say that Xinjiang I believe that's right Xinjiang region Zen's has been welcomed by the US and Western media as a leading expert on Jingjiang he was quoted by um Pompeo when Pompeo declared that they were committing a genocide okay and so what does it say full of lies far-fetched assumptions and baseless accusations there's if yeah if you go uh they did a good piece on this if you go to anti-war.com which I recommend everyone do every day and just search Adrian Zen's there they did a really good piece breaking down like how his it's like straight up like his math is wrong it's not even like oh there's an argument about this it's like no look he's got these numbers completely wrong so it's just people get real carried away with this shit and my biggest concern is just that like after this whole stand in Ukraine Taiwan is gonna fucking be next and it's like oh so now we're gonna be flirting with a nuclear confrontation with Russia and China so that's like my biggest concern in all of this I do uh I do agree though that the whole like AI in the classroom and all this shit is creepy as fuck bro they don't want it around my kids nationwide first of all the problem would be it would work and kids would get way better because he'd make them work yeah it force them the you'd hold them accountable there wouldn't be any hiding it would also be terrible for getting people to recognize that figures of authority should be questioned you're not gonna develop any of that you're going to have to adhere very strictly to these rules yeah I think part of going through school is learning that different people are more or less effective at communicating that you want to pay attention to them more or less that the there's something there's an education you're getting in a shitty class believe it or not you're getting an education on what happens in a shitty class about how much you hate it and how much it sucks and how stupid your teacher is yeah and how disinterested they are in the subject that they're teaching you and how they expect total compliance and they don't understand human emotions and the way people think and behave that's a that's an education to like going through bad schools gave me a great view on what some potential some adults are potentially like I learned a lot from really awful teachers about what I don't want to be in this world yeah man think about how much interaction you have as a child with adults right you have your parents and you have your friends parents and then very rarely are you alone with strangers except when you go to school and then you go to school and you get sent by the least motivated I mean sent to the least motivated people oftentimes people that aren't happy to be there they don't enjoy it especially if it's a bad neighborhood that's a sketchy job to begin with you might get jumped by some kids and these people are just brow beaten and they get in there and they don't even want to be there and these are responsible for showing your children for most of the day what an adult is like yeah and if that kid doesn't have a strong figure at home if that kid doesn't have someone at home that's kind and and generous and works hard and is very engaged in them with their life then they think that that's what adults are like and has been for since the beginning you know it's kind of important that they had that already for years before they they go to school you know that's still better than robots yeah still because I don't I mean I want compliance yeah I want my kids to develop like discipline and a work ethic and I want like all of that stuff but I don't want to do it because the robots watching I'm right I wanted to do I want them to live and be a human and then be convinced that like oh it's really awesome to develop these things because life's better that way but there's also something that we have to dig into consideration that there's all there's a wide spectrum of things that people are interested in and oftentimes when kids are bored in class their imagination is running wild and they'll start thinking about what they want to do with their life they'll start thinking about things through boredom but Joe if we just give them this pill no pay attention thank God that shit wasn't around when I was a kid oh my god I would have been medicated for sure I like like parents who couldn't handle it I got a medic so I I'm lucky in a sense but I got diagnosed with 80-day and they prescribed me Ritalin and I think my mother begrudgingly put me on it for a week and I was just fucking I was just a little kid peeking out on fucking Ritalin and I wouldn't eat her sleep and so she took me off it right away and she was like no fuck it we're not doing this and then I never did thank God I got off it yeah so you really don't I mean like I've done Adderall like as an adult you know what I mean and you're like yo this is a serious drug man to just be giving this to children is really insane because he's a little boy who wants to run around like let him run around more I don't know it's wild that different ways of thinking about life and different things being interested in whether or not you could pay attention can be a disease like if you can't pay attention to things like we think there's something wrong with the way your mind works but meanwhile those kids who can't pay attention things watch them play a fucking video game watch them play World of Warcraft watch them play whatever the fuck the kids play today what do they play what's the what's the big one yeah one of those fucking things they these motherfuckers can play that shit all day long and be fully locked in how come because it's interesting because their kids kids are bored as fuck and if they they haven't been interested in math previously and then they're behind and then they're trying to pay attention in class I remember just struggling through math because I was so dumb I was like are there calculators and they'll I guess I do have like basically an unlimited supply of batteries and they're like yeah so I'm like well I'm out well I'll figure all this shit out with a man I'm not learning how to do that but that was the stupidest way to think but as a kid that left me thinking about other stuff like I was bored and because of board I would scribble on my notebook I would draw I would think about things but you know the the history of school where it comes from the term school it comes from Prussia as they they were the first ones to invent school and this is the Prussian system is what we adopted in America the Prussians were the geographic and cultural precursor to the Nazis and the reason they did it was because they had this problem that their conscripted armies would not fight like they'd get out there and you they'd draft these people into an army and tell them to go to war and they'd like pissed themselves and run away and they were like what are we gonna do about this and so they're like we gotta get them at a young age and really like indoctrinate them toward like being subservient to the state and Horace Mann who's considered you know the godfather of education in America he literally said it was in the late 1800s he literally said we're adopting the Prussian model and he was like but you know surely if this model can be used to support like Prussian you know like authoritarianism it can also be used to support republicanism of America you know and like support the great Republic and it's literally I mean that is the first thing they would do at schools is like have you pledge a allegiance to your government you know and that's why I do think it's interesting when a lot of these you know like right winger types today they'll be like oh my god they're propagandizing these kids in school and I will grant that I do find the latest insane gender sexualization of kids to be particularly troubling it's not like it's a new thing that they're propagandizing kids in school in fact that's kind of what the whole thing was set up for and it's like it's you know like my kids are like I got little little kids but like even just from like like like my four year old man it's just like the state of these little kids are so magical and amazing and all they want like they have this amazing passion for life that's built into them all my four year old ever wants to do is ask me why. Like that's all she wants to do is understand how things work she wants me to explain the tar she wants to help. You know what I mean like everything you can think of she wants to do a little task and then say I helped you know like mom baked muffins and I helped I stirred like they want so badly to know things and participate in the adult world and then we're like oh okay well what we're going to do with you for the next. 14 years is send you to go sit in a row of desks and memorize and regurgitate information that an authority figure hands to you it's just horrible like that's the best we could come up with. With the data in the 1800s and Prussia that's what you've got for me and we're so locked into this idea that that's how to do it yeah. Yeah like they can't learn how to read and write and learn something about history and math in a different way that's like better I'm not saying I have the answer to it it's just like someone's smarter than me should well the problem is people are busy. And you don't have enough time to invest in your kids education restructuring a lot of people don't at least yeah that's the thing about it is just kind of what's the best school in my area yeah you fall into that. And of course because the schools are you know largely monopolized by the government is also like there's not that much ability to change things and try new things and try you know. I think there's a really important factor that goes on with schools though it's these kids getting together and recognize and these teachers are idiots. When you have a conversation with your kids as they get older they're going to tell you about some idiot teachers and that these conversations are hilarious I got I got to witness some in California because my daughter during the pandemic was on zoom so she'd have to do zoom school. Okay so or whatever it was you know the right streaming service they use and so I get to set in a room with her while she was doing zoom and just to see how dis interested this teacher was how about how. Unbelievably boring it was to listen to the stuff that she had to say and there's no engagement no no thought of the fact that these are kids and a lot of these people don't have kids and they don't have kids that age either. Which is like or they're not accustomed to being like kids don't want to fucking pay attention you got to make it fun if you don't make it fun they don't want to do it they don't want to do it but that's normal and that's healthy you want people to do things and have fun you want ideally your life should be you doing something you enjoy. We got to figure out what you enjoy Bob and we got to drill it into your Sally we're going to fool you find what what you gravitate towards let's encourage that. Yeah 100% man and like there's you know like and I knew like I had a few great teachers like in my life but like three you know like they're the they're the minority and then there were tons of awful teachers just tons. Here's the question man like what creates an artist. Like what most people if they had artistic talent in some way shape or form they'd probably want to do that because it's a fun thing to do there's something exciting about creating things where's that come from is that in all of us but it's just discouraged so hard in some people and through this sort of rigid. Adherence to whatever is in control whatever whatever power structure whatever authority figure is that does that squash it in so many people that only a few of tortured childhoods get out and maybe we associate creativity and we associate brilliant art with with people with tortured childhoods. Yeah for all the wrong reasons you ever hear that I always loved this quote so much but someone asked Jerry Seinfeld or they were like when you were a kid were you like the funny one in your group of friends and he went we were all funny and then everyone else got jobs. Wow you know it's kind of like that it's like there is something to that man like what do you mean we were all hilarious I just kept being hilarious yeah they all decided to stop at some point. I'm like I do I don't think everyone it like could be an artist there are some people who are wired for like different things there are some people who are like like this dude's a chemist or this dude's like a computer programmer and he was made to be that way he had like a real propensity toward that but I think there's no question a lot of people have that squashed a lot of people like you know I've known people like that who are the most people are the most bitter people. There's something tragic about that. Yeah the guys that wanted to be in a band but it just didn't work out. It just didn't it didn't have the balls to like go for it and then got a job and then had a family well now you got a family you can't leave this job now you know what I mean like and yeah that's there's something so tragic about that man. It's weird you know it's a it's a sad person to be around someone who just it didn't they didn't chase their dream or they didn't have the encouragement or the they didn't have the confidence they didn't have the circumstances they had bad circumstances that befell them. Yeah well if you're if you're like young and you're you're listening to this like keep that in mind I remember Jordan Peterson said once I think it might have been on on with you. Maybe it wasn't but he said something about like you know there's people who are like in a job that they hate or in a career that they hate and they'll think about like well I can't like I can't leave and pursue something else because what about all the risks of doing that. I'm like yeah what about the risks of not what about the risks of doing something that makes you miserable for the rest of your life because that seems like a risk worth considering you know. I was really lucky in having no stability when I was young which doesn't make sense if you think about it because you want to provide your children with as much stability as possible but I was really lucky that I didn't because I didn't believe in like normal systems like I didn't believe in them. They seemed alien to me like the idea of getting a job in an office was like so crazy I never even considered it. I've never had an office job ever even when I had other jobs I took these weird alternative jobs like I did construction or I drove limos I did stuff that like anybody could do like you didn't need there's no barrier to entry like it was working in an office to me seemed like madness like to sit in for sure have ADHD or whatever the fuck. But it works for regular life like if you have just a life you enjoy it's actually beneficial but this idea of sitting and doing a job all day that I was completely unemotionally attached to not creatively attached to I couldn't do it but if I had to do some stuff for money that I knew is temporary I could do that that's easy deliver newspapers fine that's just stuff I'm doing. You just kind of physical where you're like doing something it's a little bit of a different thing from money it's on a job right right I'm not going to move my way up the corporate ladder right fucking crazy like it was so impossible for me I was just programmed so different no I'm well aware of it in myself to where there'll be things sometimes that like something like even like like shopping like clothes shopping or something like that if it's like going slow I'm like I've never been able to do that. I'm like I've never been so miserable in my entire life I don't know why this is so excruciatingly painful I have no interest I don't freaking care let's go I'm so bored so bored but if I'm doing the things that I'm passionate about I could focus on that forever like limitless late you know that's what marijuana comes in because marijuana and shopping it's a totally different experience then you're just having fun relaxed and just walking around you could walk around the slowest shopper ever and just make fun of everything that's going on. Make fun of everything that happens well dude I mean I started smoking pot like very young in life like 14 maybe I became like an everyday smoker very quickly and I think there was something to that connection that the things that were so boring and miserable to me in life were like oh now this is fun like this is not that anymore it's like oh look I found the cure for these 100% that was my entire time of filming fear factor. The entire fucking every episode of every season except the first four episodes the first four episodes I did sober I was like oh my god I'm gonna go crazy and then once I started getting high I was like this is awesome. I could see where that would change the experience oh my god it was much better experience it was much better it was like night and day I was like oh yeah this is an amazing job. For the record I don't recommend other 14 year olds all the time there was a there were problems with it and it wasn't for the best but I was very fortunate that I was during my entire like from high school age to like the time I started doing stand up I didn't party at all very very rarely because I was competing so because of that I was always scared to lose and I was always scared that I would lose because I had gotten drunk and then I was hung over and you're not talking about losing a basketball game you're not talking about losing a basketball game you're not talking about losing a basketball game. You're talking about getting kicked in the face and yeah it's not fun you don't want that to happen to you so I was obsessed with not getting kicked in the face but kicking people in the face and so if like not getting drunk was like the solution to a lot of those problems and it's also I just knew that there was a lot of kids that I was friends with at the time I was you took the opposite of the John Jones approach well which on Jones so goddamn talented he could dominate while partying was that on here when he said that to you that he said that he's not getting kicked in the face. That he would do it so he had an excuse in his mind in case he lost and he still won he still beat everybody he beat people with like minimal training man he's so fucking good John so good and he comes from a family of super athletes like his brothers in the NFL I mean it's just it's just kiss by God you know you're just like there's people like that man there's Roy Jones juniors and Mike Tyson's and they have all the talent in the world and the athletic ability but they're also kissed by God yeah there's just great but John Jones fought Cyril and you're just like I guess you could have just always been fighting heavyweights this whole time man you just probably could have always done this and it's just like it's not even like a competition even about you're like there's not even a next fight that I'm dying to see yeah because I'm just kind of like I mean he's just there's no one John's no one is gonna fuck good he's so good he's the goat I mean if you're gonna say you're gonna have a goat I don't think you can argue that John's not the goat I think the argument really is who are the greats because they're secret so subjective if Nirma Gamedov was better than John Jones it's so what do you did you like total dominance because in total dominance Nirma Gamedov is the goat total dominance ran just smashes everybody nobody had a chance do you understand how crazy it is to watch a guy storm through an entire division with masters like Justin Gage a master of destruction no one has a chance yeah Conor McGregor master of destruction no one has a chance this motherfucker he gets everybody there's an argument that he's the goat there's an argument that mighty mouse is the greatest expression of martial arts in the history of combat sports I would make that argument yeah in his prime he's the greatest expression slamming guys into arm bars and that crazy athletes and he's a ghost he's standing right in front of me he's tagging him and he's a ghost his footwork his last fight where he won the game and he's like he's insane he was a repeat of what the guy did yeah the way he timed it as he's following him into the cage just like insane shit that that guy does and he's in his like what is he 36 how old is mighty mouse let's find out how old mighty mouse is because for the 125 pound division to be competing at a very high level in a natural athlete in his 30s he's 36 yes recall they say marijuana kills your recall that's bullshit it's a little cloudy how do you know how do you know my mouse was 36 then this that guy when he was in his prime like when he beat so who do the first time when he stopped him in the first round he was the only thought about that oh my god that's right and it was real close the second fight was very close to you know I went behind mighty mouse once when he's behind backstage at the UFC and I just grabbed him to hug him just play just to play he's my friend I go to hug him and he turns and just a fuck with me hits me in the body touches me the most gentle touch with two knees so fast that I couldn't believe they actually moved that quickly it was just he went just did that to me I was like oh my goodness yeah he was he's an unreal talent dude no he's got an argument with those knees to the body I remember watching that going I don't think I've ever seen anybody land a need of the body more precisely it's a shame that he magic that's a hudo it's a shame that he left the UFC when he did and didn't get like like the third fight with so hudo a rubber match there I think would have been so huge you know what I mean like I feel like he never got the fight that had like that type of height behind him I believe you're correct it was just like kind of like hardcore fans knew like they were like you know this guy's like unbelievable I think he's the best but I think he just didn't quite have the moment there was also talking him moving up and fighting TJ Dilla Sean I think there was like a contractual dispute or something like that didn't happen but it's a shame that he didn't get one of those like huge moments because even when he beats a hudo the first time people he wasn't like that big of a name yet right like people didn't know like who that was whereas like the by the third fight it would have been like a huge thing you know and then GSP also is in the conversation he's got to have an argument yeah he's in the conversation for sure the dominance of the welterweight division and the fact that he beat everyone he ever faced and came back and won the middleweight title after a leave that's hard to not that's hard to not consider him there yeah it's hard yeah I mean especially how brilliantly he handled it he just like beat Bisping and said I'm done I do think the belt all of this is kind of subjective like you said it's like what do you like but I would say that for me John Jones has the strongest argument because he dominated multiple generations of fighters like he dominated the Shogun rampage Machida generation of fighters then he dominated what was it the Gustafson first fights the most impressive because he didn't train for it yeah that's just the most impressive thing is that John Jones pulls out the first fight in the later rounds he wins a decision by dominating the later rounds in a fight that he didn't train and we had never seen him in a dog fight before at that point you were like sometimes there are these guys I remember thinking the same thing with Israel out of Sanja when he fought Kelvin Gaslem whereas all we had seen from him was just like dominating everybody and so there's something there's kind of a question mark a little bit with that where you don't know you know some people like when the going gets tough kind of like look for a way out and I remember if you remember in that fight in the fourth round Kelvin fucked him up in that fourth round he really heard him and he was busting up and you remember before the fifth round starts is that he looks at him and he's like unprepared to die for this he said and then he went out and dominated the fifth round and you were like oh okay this dude's special he's not just like a talent that can dominate people but he's also like a real fighter he's so special that he chose to fight Pajera for the fourth time after getting knocked out and he was getting locked up in that fight too he was he was getting fucked up his leg was getting chewed up and and he was cornered and he was taking a bullet after the fight he's not again he's getting me again because he was getting him again with the same goddamn thing that guy is so clever here goes he says I'm prepared to die I have no problem I'm prepared to die and look how fucked up yet like he was really beat up man I'm prepared to he said I'm prepared to die I'm prepared to holy shit dude like shit I do like at the end of it though not knocking off just singing his praises he's the greatest but at the end of the fight where he's like that's it he goes we're not fighting again he goes I don't I don't keep score I end score whatever you're like I get where you're coming from on that one you're like Jesus because you should really move up you should move up and go fight a better way it's pretty it's pretty funny to be three and one and go I think we've all seen enough I don't think he's three and one I think he won the first fight oh yeah that's right it was a bad it was a bad decision I believe you say this and he got saved in the second kickboxing fight on Sonia had him on skates right he was in real trouble and he was got a getting a standing egg count right she's huge if you especially look at the first round of the first MMA fight and he dropped yeah yeah drops him in the end of the first right now imagine if he dropped him he rocked him I don't know if he actually found you're right I don't know if his hand touched the ground I think he just rocked him you're right but he rocks them in a very similar manner to when he finishes him off in the second fight imagine that had taken place and the referee had stood in and gave him a standing egg count pahada is a monster he recovers quickly like he can get cracked and some there's some speculation that some of that has to do with the fact that he's cutting so much weight Michael Bisping I believe I believe it was there was a few other fighters Oh think it was sugar Sean O'Malley was we're talking about this insane weight cut that this guy makes to get down 185 pounds and the fact that could affect his ability to absorb punishment very possibly but imagine a scenario where he gets rocked like that but then you give him eight whole seconds to recover and you're it's the referees doing like one two three like they don't want him to lose right and so they give him this little ability to recover and he survives and then he winds up winning and knocking out pay it knocking out out of Sonya in this spectacular fashion hits him with this monster left hook but that's the thing about that guy that's what's so terrifying about fighting him and that's why is he so special that he's like I can figure this motherfucker out well I you also got a look at it like you know there's almost like there's like a winner verse loser mentality to that and I remember thinking of this going into that last fight where like look you could look at it and say I was fighting my best fight and he still got me you know what I mean or you could look at that and go I had this guy I was winning that fight until the fifth round you know what I mean the thing is there's zero margin for error when you fight that dude zero like you can't fuck up once it's almost you gotta crack him because like him saying that he he was gonna get him early I think he kind of knew that you the punishment he puts on your legs it's so it's so sneaky how he does it man but he throws the best calf kicks in the fucking businessman yeah he really does he's gonna be a force he'll be a force at 205 I mean he's a real dangerous guy five he's gonna have a problem with really leak grapplers I think yeah there's some big there's some big grapplers that that's a little bit of an issue but it'll be kind of interesting it'll be very interesting well he's training with Glover and Glover is one of the best grapplers that ever fought in the 205 pound division yep so he is gonna get amazing and struck but we when you saw the first out of Sonya fight when is he took his back when is he was on top of them you could imagine someone who's an elite grappler in that division like having their way with him in those situations well when Israel out of Sonya moved up to 205 and fought like that was the issue that he had with him where he was like okay I know what I can do to this guy but he's bigger and stronger than than is a huge you know I'm saying but her is bigger and stronger than is he so that it's it's a question how good can you get fight at 205 would be fucking insane that's a real job a hove which versus Alex Pajeta at 205 would be fucking bananas dude that fight him against hell would be a great for any of the matchups there would be really good any mistakes against Bohovitch and Bohovitch can take it yeah I can take it holy shit is he an animal yeah no he's he's got on Kalya of Jesus Christ and what's his name and the champ is a well not the champ anymore but he's out for a few years I think Jamal Hill no no no no Jamal Hill is the champ now what's his name who was was the champ but didn't lose it shit what fucking the guy yeah what's his name he literally just got a big shoulder injury oh my god I'm blanking yeah he I not fucking catch that I'm that's how good this fucking Rick that's hilarious see there my memory sucks yeah one for two so far Oscar do you know this what happened with him I know he fucked his shoulder up in a real awful way right dude he fucked his shoulder up so bad the UFC surgeon said it was the worst shoulder injury he's ever seen this is what happened his shoulder came out of place during training and they yanked on it to put it back in and fucked it up Jesus yeah that sucks that's all he's champion of the wall is the champion of the world what coming off the most insane fight with Glover to share I mean that was a fucking insane one of the best fights ever the fact that he submitted Glover to win he's so unusual you watch his movements yeah it's crazy so different it's so hard to prepare for this guy here he's training again so he'll do this like he's just fucking around he's like loosening up I think is that what he's doing yeah yeah it's just showing up while you're talking about oh but his movement when he fights is so unusual so this is why they did this is why they like strip the title right away because this is gonna be relinquished because he was like this is no he's the real deal man no he's incredible he relinquished the title he decided that that injury was too spectacular that he needed real time to recover but what what's interesting about this is like shoulder injuries are notorious for being they repeat it's very hard like a shoulders a complicated joint you know what I mean? You gotta really rehabilitate that thing perfectly before you come back so many guys have come back from knee injuries and shoulder injuries too soon. Ed Shortfuse Herman who just retired he got his ACL reconstructed and in training like getting back into it blew it out again because it wasn't really recovered yet you got to give yourself the right amount of time you're an elite athlete and so he was talking about getting back in there I think in July and I think that's all scrapped. But I think he was talking about getting back in there very quickly he says he knows his body like man that's a complicated joint like these guys that are surgeons today are the greatest that have ever lived they can do amazing things with people shows but even TJ Dilshaw he's had a shitload of surgeries and his shoulders are fucked. That was awful seeing that in that fight with Algermann Starling. But TJ's shoulders have been fucked for a long time he just compensated for it to the point where it all eventually just fell apart. Well he looked real good in this fight before that I don't know I guess he said he had a lot of problems with it in that training camp. Well in that fight he looked really good before it and Corey Sanhagen destroyed his knee destroyed his knee in that exchange. His knee was fucked up man and so from that he goes and wins that fight he wins that decision and now he's got a fucked up shoulder so his shoulders are so bad and he got surgery on him but they basically said like you're not going to be able to fight again. Like they just won't hold up like it's been too much damage and that's what I'm worried about when I hear people having a catastrophic shoulder injury and then saying I'm going to get back in there as quickly as possible like. You know be careful shoulder injuries they're just like they're a tough one knee back when people recover from like Algermane Starling recovers from a neck surgery where they replace one of his discs with an artificial disc and goes on to retain the title. Yeah like holy shit man like you got an artificial disc in your neck and you're fighting like the stuff they can do today is. Yeah it's incredible shoulders do seem like the trickiest one though and they seem like the ones that like you know it's weird like when you see people I remember this from like basketball like in like high school and shit. Whereas it would be someone who like their shoulder popped out like they dislocated their shoulder and then that just happens to them then that's just a thing that like regularly like not like all the time but you always like know it could happen again and like there's really like. I don't know that's something I want to recommend for shoulder health that people are interested in this there's a product that I have no affiliation with other than I bought it it's called crossover symmetry and it's these bands and they come in various weights and you put them on a poster you can hang on the wall or whatever. And you do a series of exercises whether it's pulling them upwards or pulling them across pulling that pulling them this way and that way and it's all shoulder strengthening and it really can help people and it really can prevent injuries too if you do it on a regular basis if you stick to it. You got to think of your shoulders is like something that you're protecting you're not just like building it up you should protect the joint like that's what knees over toes guy is really interested in like his right his whole thing that is about like strengthening all the muscles around your knee and strengthening the muscles around your shoulder so important to and so often when people are training in a thing. Whether it's jujitsu or more tired anything you're only training doing that thing and that thing can strengthen you and it certainly will but it would benefit you to doing things to prevent injuries and strengthening joints and strengthening the the tissue around vulnerable areas in your body whether it's your neck or your shoulders or your knees is very good it's very important everybody should do it if you can. I know who's happy right now is the people who run that company with those shoulder. There's a bunch of different mean you can I think someone's listening live like yes that's my thing well the knees over toes guy has a great system that he does too with just he uses dumbbells and. Different external and internal what rotation exercises and those are all very good there's a bunch of different things you could do with with just dumbbells. There's a bunch of different exercises you can do that all are just low weight things that strengthen your shoulders another one is great is clubbells have you ever use them before but they're like it looks like a like a small bat that's made out of iron. And you do all these actually the iron sheik used to do with those big wooden ones you ever see those things no do things like shield casting where it's all you have this. This thing in your hand that's like a bat with and it's the weight is weird so you don't even need much weight like 15 pounds you get a really good workout. And you're holding these things out and you're doing all sorts of different exercises with these with these things you're swinging them you're swinging them overhead like look at that's the iron sheik doing it. Those things are tremendous for shoulder strength wasn't enough to be local again. That guy was a beast dude in real life he was the lead athlete elite right was he really oh yeah I didn't know that yeah I lead wrestler for Iran like legit oh okay. That's where we wrestled right it wasn't fake right because you never know what those people like with the he came from Iran right. I mean didn't lie about that did he back then you just lie though there was no Internet do my favorite wrestling story ever that my favorite story when you wrestle for we should give him his props because the iron sheik was the fucking man. I'm 99% sure he wrestled for Iran but he was like an elite wrestler when so what you yeah when did he wrestle for Iran probably. 60 okay so that's before the revolution that's when we we liked the government look at him fucking animal by the way the CIA overthrew the Iranian government in 1953 and installed the show. Just saying I'm just saying that was that wasn't a good thing on that note dude we're like almost four hours in okay I just say the one thing that I wanted to say my favorite wrestling storyline ever was. During the first Iraq war that we were just talking about is a sergeant slaughter defected and became a pro. That was the American because that was a big problem. I realize Iraq is right. It was so easy in 1991 it was so easy we play it we play it. With America What an amazing move. What an American Sergeant defected to Iraq. This is amazing. What is he unwrapping? What is this boot? An Iraqi military boot? What is that boot? What is that boot? What a gift from the American Sergeant defected to Iraq. People are so angry. I'm going to get flatter, glad that my career will follow your lofty standard. Yes, I'll get offered to wait. I'm an American Sergeant deflected to Iraq. I will wear your gift. And I will wear your gift. Yes, I get it. I get it. The best place batteries to trap you. The ultimate warrior. And I'll be royal rumble. Alright, it's over. My cast is over. That's amazing. Alright, bye everybody. Bye.