Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan experience. Train by day. Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. Did you see the US government just released, apparently by accident, the Project Aqua stuff. Did you see this?

No. What's that?

This is crazy.

Yeah, I guess we're rolling.

Are we rolling?

Yeah, no, no, you can.

This is just. Someone just sent me this.

This is Project Aqua.

Yeah, hold on. They just released, I think, by accident.

How does that happen?

It's Kona Blue. You familiar with this?

No.

Kona Blue is a. It was a program they. Yeah, dude, they. I'm gonna send this to. Homeland Security. Just released this.

Sent to me. I'll send it to Jamie and, uh.

No, I got it right. Right here. I'll just. I don't do email or whatever. I don't know how to airdrop anything.

You don't do email?

No, I haven't done email in many years.

Really?

Yeah.

How do you exist?

Do text.

Wow. Just text?

Yeah, I don't do email. I don't go on the fucking Internet or on the tv. I'm not into that. But anyway. No, that stuff, it's bad, you know?

Yeah, I guess.

That's my isolation tank. I just stay away from that shit.

But anyway, that's smart. Did you text it to me?

Yeah, I did. I think I did.

It didn't get to me.

Yeah. Just sense. It's a big thing. Okay. So this is so amazing. So this is in there. They're talking about this. And this was just released, talking about setting up this program. Conan Blue.

I didn't get it. This is like a UAP program of some sort.

The medical division will have a small team of medical analysts under the direction of the chief physician and deputy administrator. They will organize data into a threat analysis based on medical findings, including, but not limited to, a, deaths and injuries as a result of interaction with advanced aerospace vehicles.

Here it is.

B. Medical injuries as a result of other anomalies. See collateral injuries, psychological effects to family members. So they're admitting that people are dying.

This is like a tweet from. Yes. Is this it?

Yeah.

What does that mean? Do you ever wonder if stuff like this is just disinformation?

Yeah, maybe. I mean, I wonder if. I wonder a lot of things.

I'm sure you do, but I would always assume that a lot of this stuff is nonsense.

Yeah. Here's what we know is that us servicemen have died as a result of contact with or being the proximity of these vehicles. And we know that because there are a lot of suits working their way through the VA system.

Yeah.

Where families, you know, can't get compensated for the deaths or injuries to loved.

Ones because it's all under wraps, top secret.

Well, that's just a fact, okay. That that is happening. So if there's. I guess, you know, when there are measurable physical effects of a phenomenon, we can say conclusively the phenomenon is real.

Right?

And so, yeah, it is real. I mean, I guess we're sort of past the point of, like, is it real? Yeah, it's real.

It's real in that there's these things that are moving in very bizarre ways, and they have these propulsion systems that violate what we know about propulsion systems. Retrieving data across dimensional space time. Develop remote viewing comms and countermeasures. Determine baseline for physical transport across dimensional space time barrier. Rapid response medical teams for UFO interaction events. So how did they do this? Accidentally study conscious interactions with and control of technology.

So I got this from someone in the US government who's. Well, look, let me. Let me just start by saying, I don't know anything, but he sent me this. The above is 100% legit. I was read into this program, but told never to tell anyone. It's now been released. As you can see, it began as a result of my old program, Aatip. I signed a document saying I would never talk about Conan blue and similar efforts. I can't believe the AARO would have released it. I mean, here's what we do know, is that there's enough going on in the skies, but not just the skies underwater, that the US military has been forced to respond to it. So, like, move aircraft from one place to another, because there are too many of these objects in the sky. That's actually happened. Chris Mellon just wrote a long piece about it. So it's real. The government is not controlling it. In fact, it's forcing the government DoD to respond. And we know that there is a real effort and has been underway for a long time to keep the public from knowing about it. That's all known.

That's established. I don't think any rational person would deny that. The question is, like, what is it? Actually? I mean, now is sort of the point. You have to ask, like, what is this? And, you know, so that's.

How much of it do you think is ours?

Well, none of it's ours.

None of it?

Well, I don't know. I mean, clearly, you know, the US government is huge. It's the largest human organization there are. I think that. I think there are 2 million federal employees and another 10 million federal contractors. So, who are effectively government employees but don't have civil service protection, for example. So that's 12 million people in a country of 340 million working for the federal government. So it's kind of hard to overstate how big the federal government is and how well funded and so to say, the government this, the government that. No, of course it's people within the government. But, yeah, they're working on all kinds of things, obviously, that are classified. But in general, no, they can't control these objects. So, no, it's not american technology. Well, or Russian or Chinese. It predates all of that.

Well, some of it does. Right. Like, for sure, the Kenneth Arnold sightings. That was really early on. That was like the early 1950s. He was seeing these flying saucers, these disks that were moving over mountains.

Well, right. I mean, the prophet Ezekiel writes about it in the first chapter, wheels in the sky.

Yeah, that's a crazy one. Boy, when you read.

Well, it is crazy. If you read it, it's like, oh, wow. And not just the hebrew scriptures.

Like, it's all over every vedic text.

Of course, these are spiritual phenomenon. There's no evidence they're from another planet. I mean, I think that's the op. That's the lie that they're from Mars. Look, space, the atmosphere is really well monitored, right? Both for military, for defense reasons, but also because, like, it'd be nice to know when asteroids are coming. And there's no evidence, has never been any evidence that there are lots of these objects, these vehicles coming into our atmosphere from somewhere else, some other planet. There's no evidence of that at all.

Hmm.

So they're from here, and they've been here for thousands of years, whatever they are. And it's pretty clear to me that their spiritual entities, whatever that means, are supernatural. And which is to say, supernatural means above the natural, above the observable nature. And they don't behave according to the laws of science as. As measured by people, you know? And they've been here for a long time, and there's a ton of evidence that are under the ocean and under the ground. So, like, with that fact set, what do you conclude?

When did you start having this opinion that they were spiritual and that they've always been here? When did this?

Well, I didn't know anything about the topic until 2017.

And was that after the New York Times piece?

No, it was before. It was before. And the things that I saw, I mean, I was and am still a very conventional person. I mean, I'm 54. I grew up in this country, in California, which was like, every assumption about America. I bought completely, just completely. And I thought that everyone who questioned those assumptions was bad. I just bought into the system completely without even thinking about it. And I imagined that I was like some kind of freethinker and, you know, I'm going against the grain, but, like, my core assumptions were the assumptions fed to me by the culture and the government, and I didn't even realize it. But anyway, I'd never really thought about UFO's at all. And I'd been in journalism since I was a kid, so, of course I'd run into a lot of people who had crazy views on a lot of different topics. UFO's, 911, circumcision, you know, like every whack job in the world, you run into when you're covering stuff.

Fluoride.

Fluoride, right. I just brushed with non fluoride toothpaste this morning.

Me too.

Exactly. Exactly. But probably unlike you, I didn't have any opinions like that. I was like, fluoride, come on, you know, 911. Shut up. UFO's? You're fucking crazy. You know what I mean? I just, like, I had this reflexive. I'm ashamed of it. I'm not bragging about it, but. But it was. It was 2017, and really, it was the Trump campaign. It wasn't that I was, like, so in love with Trump, though. I've always liked Trump because, you know, it's, like, hilarious and charming and all that, but I wasn't like a trumper or anything, but it was watching that campaign, and particularly his claim that they were spying on him. And I was like, really? The intel services and federal law enforcement, FBI do not spy on presidential campaigns. Like, that's so out of the realm. That's so crazy. Like, that could never happen, because, of course, there's no democracy in a system like that. And fundamentally, we're a democracy, an imperfect one. Kind of lumbers along, you know, but, like, it's not fake. And then that turned out to be true, and I. And I knew it was true, and that just blew my mind.

So I began a process, still ongoing, of reassessing a lot of other things. Like, okay, well, if that was not true, what else is not true? And what else that they told me was a conspiracy theory might actually have some basis in fact. And then someone from, you know, a DoD employee reached out to me and said, actually, there's a ton of evidence that this UFO thing is real. And really? And so I started doing segments on it when I worked at the tv channel, and there was, like, a lot of mockery, but I was like, I don't care. I'm just gonna do this. And then, of course, the second you start, as you know better than anybody, you start talking about something, then people reach out to you. And some of them are deranged, but some of them aren't at all. So I just started getting a lot of information from people and meeting with people, mostly in private, you know, come to my house, let's talk, and. And I decided on the basis of what they told me, and then I talked to a lot of people about it, that actually, this is really a very heavy duty question.

Actually, it's not just. It's not the little green men question. It's, like a much bigger question. And it's really bad. It's really dark. And then I stopped. Then I was like, I don't want to know anymore because it's not helping me at all as a person.

What information did you get that made you feel like it's dark?

What's so dark? Well, first of all, the deception is always bad. Like, lying is bad. It's bad not just in a legal sense, in that it can be illegal to lie, but it's bad for you. It rots you. Being a liar makes you a bad person. When you lie, you are serving evil. There's a moral quality to it that's inescapable and very obvious, and only advanced civilizations ignore that lying is bad. And so if you have lying at scale, which we have on this topic, it's inherently bad. Okay, so that's the first level. The deeper level is what are. Okay, so if they're spiritual beings, which I believe they are, like, it's a binary. They're either, you know, you're on team good or team bad, you can assign any name to it you want. But, like, what are these things? Are they good or bad? And. And I think some of them are bad. And if the US government knows that, or elements, the people within the US government know that, then, you know, then they're serving a bad force.

Well, when you say spiritual, like, what makes you draw that conclusion? That they're spiritual?

What's the obvious? I mean, spiritual may be the wrong word, supernatural. You know, they're beyond nature as we understand it. I mean, obviously they are. I mean, just chart their physical behavior. It doesn't. It goes outside of what we understand about physics. No visible means of propulsion coming at indescribable speed hitting the ocean continuing at speeds that are impossible under sea. In other words, if I take nine millimeter radar, 7.62 by 39 and shoot you at 50 yards underwater in a swimming pool, and it's even more intense than saltwater because it's denser, you could catch the bullet if it even makes it to you. Right. So if you have a craft, any object underwater that's traveling at 500 knots, as measured by sonar right there, you're challenging our understanding of physics. Like, what is that? How can that be?

So they've tracked that. They've tracked things going 500 knots under the sea?

Yeah. Really? Yeah. Much, much faster than any object can actually go under, under sea. Oh, for sure. Oh, yeah. There's a lot of stuff going on underwater and a lot. And there's video of these things coming out of the sky into the water and also emerging from the water.

Right?

Yeah.

So it's all so blurry, though. I don't think it's that trans medium video.

Yeah, I don't think some of it's that blurry. I think some of its crystal clear.

We just don't have access to it. Is that what you mean?

Yeah, just.

We haven't seen it. So they have some stuff for sure.

But there's just a lot going on underwater and it's measured and so whatever. I mean, these are all, again, this is like the most obvious observable level of it. But then you just ask yourself, what is this actually? And, you know, if there's been extensive knowledge of this for decades, like maybe 80 years at least, if not going back to the thirties, 90 years, to what end? So there are two possible explanations, obvious explanations. The first is the one you often hear, which is this is so heavy that if the public were to know about it, it would be just disruptive. It would be too scary. Like, you don't want to scare people for no good reason. There's nothing we can do about it. And you also don't want to suggest that the US military isn't capable of protecting the country, the homeland. And it does suggest that if you can't control these objects in your airspace, and that's known. If they can't, that's known. Okay, then that suggests a limit to the power of the US military. And you don't want to tell people that because then they, like, won't believe that they're safe.

I get it. But then there's a deeper level, which is like, okay, what's your relationship with these things? What is the US government's relationship with these things. And there's evidence that there is a relationship and that it's longstanding. And that raises, like, a lot of questions about intent. And so, like, what is that? And I just personally decided, you know, and people have been hurt by these things. You know, that's a fact. That's a fact. It's a knowable fact. It's a provable fact. And killed. And I'm not saying millions of people have been killed by whatever these things are, but people have been killed, and it's known because it's working its way through the courts, out of the VA. So I don't know. An object that is by definition, supernatural. It's above the laws of nature as we understand them, and that has resulted in the deaths of people. We don't spend enough time thinking about what that adds up to. Like, not good, actually. Not good.

How many people do you think have died from these?

I don't know, but, I mean, I.

Radiation sickness? Is it, like, what it. What is what's.

So the person that I talked to, I interviewed someone who was a Stanford medical school professor who's out there and worth talking to, by the way.

You're talking about Gary Nolan.

That's exactly who I'm talking about. Effectively an expert witness in these cases. So he's an expert in brain injury. You know him?

Yeah, yeah.

Entirely credible person. Checks all the boxes that I care about. He's got patents, so he's like a lot of Stanford University professors. Hes, like, independently rich. He flew to, I live in a remote place, and he flew to my place at his own expense because he wanted to tell his story. So hes got no profit motive here. Hes the most highly credentialed person at the university, practically at Stanford Medical School. We consider that a big deal. And hes worked on this for over ten years, assessing the injuries to us servicemen from being in close proximity to these objects or having contact with these objects. And his conclusion, as you know, because you've talked to him, is that there's some kind of energy coming off here that scrambles people's brains or kills them. And it's not exactly radiation, at least in his telling to me, so anyway. But the point is, people have died. And so, you know, it it does raise a lot of questions about, like, what the hell, right? What the hell? American citizens have died, and you're hiding it. Why are you hiding that? Why would you hide that?

Perhaps because they don't have any explanations. Because it's so beyond our comprehension that they're still trying to piece it together. Like, I would wonder how much interaction they really do have with these things, like, if I was from another planet or if I was some interdimensional being. I don't know how much I'd give a shit about the president. I don't know how much I'd give a shit about the government. I would probably look at this infantile race, this species, this bizarre, territorial apes with thermonuclear weapons, this very weird species. I'd probably look at them as very chaotic, and I wouldn't really have much concern for who's running it, especially if they have the ability to travel at insane speeds and go undetected.

Well, it depends. The template that you're using to understand this is science fiction. These are an advanced race of beings from somewhere else. But the template that every other society before us has used is a spiritual one. There is a whole world that we can't see that acts on people, a supernatural world. It's acting on us all the time, for good and bad. Every society has thought this before ours. In fact, every society in all recorded history has thought that until, I'll be specific, August 1945, when we dropped the atom bombs on Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and all of a sudden, the west is just officially secular. We're God. There is no God but us, and that's the world that we have grown up in. But that's an anomaly like no one else has ever thought that. There's never been a society that thought that every other society has assumed, and they've had all kinds of different explanations, and the details differ, but the core idea does not differ and never has differed from caves until now that we're being acted on by spiritual forces at all times. And so to someone born before or living before 1945, I think it would have been much more obvious that this is the thing that every society has written about.

And in fact, that battle, that unseen battle around us, that spiritual battle, has been the basis of every society, of every religion, not just Christianity. So once you discard your very, very recent assumptions, relatively speaking, about how the world works, you're like, well, that kind of seems like the obvious explanation, right?

Hmm. It's not that obvious to me.

So what. What's more obvious, do you think?

Well, I don't think there's an obvious explanation. I think if I had to guess, some of this stuff is ours, and some of these things are propulsion systems that they theorized way back in the 1950s, anti gravity propulsion systems, things that can operate without igniting fuel and pushing something out that they operate in some completely different way that utilizes gravity and almost can instantaneously transport to new places, essentially fold space time. I don't know. So there's things that the government does where they have these programs. And the people that are sworn into these programs, whether theyre the physicists or the metallurgists or whoever these people are that are working on these programs, they dont tell anybody. All their phones are monitored. Everythings monitored. Theres a culture of secretism thats pretty intense. And its not inconceivable that over the course of the last 70 plus years of them theorizing and then eventually implementing some of these things, that they've developed drones that can move in ways that the conventional, the people that understand conventional propulsion systems could not imagine, and that they figured out a way to do this and to keep it secret. And we're probably not the only ones working on these things, but where did they get that information?

And you know, you know, Diana Pasolka, you know her work. They describe these crafts, these crashed crafts, as donations, which is fascinating that they're left there. The crashed retrieval program, the crashed UAP retrieval program is essentially they're going like, figure this out. We're going to crash this thing here. You figure this out. And the question is if that's true, okay, where are these things coming from? If there's something that is so advanced that it's decided to leave us a little trinket for us to back engineer, is that from another dimension? Is that from here? Is that from some realm that we just don't have access to? Is it from another planet? We have drones that are on other planets right now. We have a drone on Mars. We have the lunar rovers. We have satellites that we send to observe and photograph other planets. We just got really high detailed photographs of Jupiter. They're pretty amazing. But if something was like us on another planet, but lived uninterrupted with technology, advancing for 1000 years, 10,000 years, a million years more than us, what would that be like? And how much would we be able to understand of what we're seeing?

What would we be able to see? This idea that we monitor our skies, sure. But if something just appears and disappears essentially instantaneously, if something literally can fold time, can fold space, and just traverse between immense distances almost instantaneously, what are we going to see? What are we going to see? And also, what kind of detection systems do we have? We have radar. We have visual. We have a bunch of different military based detection systems to look out for enemy crafts and airships and all that stuff. If you're dealing with something that's a million years more advanced than us, how much would we be able to detect?

Well, so I think we're pointing to the same question. I mean, I have no doubt that the US government has technology that we don't know the details of. That makes sense.

Sure.

But, like, where did it come from?

Right.

I'm not even sure this is a separate question, but related. I'm not sure we really know where nuclear technology came from, actually.

Really?

Yes.

Like, the Manhattan project.

Yeah, like, we know the Manhattan. We know something about the Manhattan project, but, like, where exactly did that came from? Germany. German scientists were working on it. Okay. The one person, separate conversation. But the one person I know who's really pushed it was writing a book on it, who's a trustworthy person. And a friend of mine I know you know him said to me, actually, I spent a year working on this, and I. One of the closer I got to like, okay, but what's the Genesis? Like, where did this. What was the. What was the Isaac Newton apple on the head? Oh. Gravity's real moment for fission. Not clear. Weird. I don't know the answer. But here's the point. Clearly, government has technology that we're not read in on, of course, but. So that doesn't answer the question, why have people seen these objects in the skies for thousands of years? Confirmed. And what are they? And maybe they're from another planet. My only point is, there's no evidence of that. There's a huge amount, a massive corpus of evidence that they're seen by people in our atmosphere on Earth looking up or in a submarine looking out.

And what is that? And by the way, to your point, we can't see them coming into our atmosphere because they don't want to be seen. Well, then why do they want to be seen by people on Earth? If the technology is that advanced, and clearly it is, why do they make themselves visible in the first place?

Well, you know, when we study primates, one of the things that we do. Do you ever watch chimp nation on Netflix?

No.

You don't have a tv?

I don't have the sound of it.

It's an amazing documentary on Netflix that details these embedded scientists in the Congo. And what's really fascinating about it is that this group of scientists, or related scientists, have been there for 20 plus years. So these chimps have become entirely accustomed to having human beings near them. So there's very specific rules. You stay within 20 yards of them. If they come closer, you back up. You never have food, ever. You can't bring any food there because they'll fuck you up and just steal your food. If they find out you have food.

And they're formidable, too, you're in real trouble.

Oh, yeah, they'll tear you apart and they kill each other. So they'll definitely kill you. And so when they have done this, the chimps have become accustomed to them being there, and the chimps behave completely normally. The chimps see them as just an innocuous part of their environment. They're not food and they're not enemy. They don't ever intrude. They don't try to challenge them, they don't make eye contact, so they don't worry about the people at all. So they behave completely like chimps. And if I was an advanced species and I was studying people, and I wanted the human beings to eventually kind of catch up, right? Like you're introducing technology that they call donations, crashed vehicles. Figure out what fiber optics are. Here you go, check this out. Figure this out. Try to figure that out. Maybe it'll take you decades, maybe it'll take you more, but you are accelerating the technological evolution of this advanced species on this planet. And one way to do that would.

Be for what purpose, I wonder?

Well, that's a very good question. My belief is that biological, intelligent life is essentially a caterpillar, and it's a caterpillar that's making a cocoon, and it doesn't even know why it's doing it. It's just doing it. And that cocoon is going to give birth to artificial life, digital life. It's going to give birth to a new life form. I think we're real close to that. I think we're way closer than that to that, than most people would ever want to.

Agree. I agree. But can we assign a, like a value to that? Is that good or bad?

That's a good question. It depends universally. I think it's the path. I think it's what happens. I think what this thing is, if you extrapolate, if you take the concept of a sentient artificial intelligence that has the ability to utilize all the information that every human being has on earth at a level of computing that's far beyond the capabilities of the human mind and all of our supercomputers that currently exist, because it'll design much better computers, it'll use quantum computers, it'll have the ability to recode things and change things. It'll make better versions of itself. So instead of biological evolution, which is very slow, it takes a long time, relatively. It's pretty quick, really, when you think about it. Like how long? It's not that long to go from being a single celled organism to being a human being flying a plane, really relatively, over the course of a billion years, if you think about how long the universe has been around, but it's slow compared to technological evolution. I mean, 100 years ago, we didn't have shit, and now we have. We could send videos from your phone and it'll hit New Zealand in a second for sure.

It's crazy. The stuff that we have now is beyond imagination. It's essentially magic for people. 100 years ago, if that keeps going, it's ultimately going to lead to a life form. And if that life form has now untethered, it doesn't have any problems with biological evolution. Now it's just about information and implementing the technology that's available and increasing that technology and making it better and better. It essentially becomes a God because if you give it enough time, it has the ability to make better versions of itself, which will in turn make better versions of itself. It has the ability to utilize everything. It has the understanding of everything that exists in the universe. It's black holes, dark matter, everything. And it probably has the ability to harness that or even reproduce that. So if you take artificial, sentient intelligence and it has this super accelerated path of technological evolution, and you give artificial, general intelligence, sentient artificial intelligence, far beyond human beings, you give it a thousand years alone to make better and better versions of itself. Where does that go? That goes to a God.

It literally, I don't create what kind of God? So, like, I think of this way. So the first stage of the industrial revolution consisted of people building machines that were stronger than the human body.

Right?

Right. So the steam powered loom.

Sure.

The backhoe combustion engine. Combustion engine, they replace muscles.

Right?

Right. So that's what the machine does. It becomes stronger than the human body. The second stage, which we're in the middle of, consists of creating machines that are more powerful than the human mind. That's what computing is. And I would say AI or supercomputing is just that exponentially. Yeah, but that doesn't make it a God in the sense that the machine, however powerful it is, any more than a backhoe, is a God, because it can dig a trench faster than 100 men. It is still something that people created. So the story hasn't really changed. At the center of the story are people and their creative power may lead to unintended consequences, but the machines that they build did not make the universe and did not make people. People made the machines.

Right?

But I would say the part I agree with is there's a spiritual component here for sure. People will worship AI as a God. AI. Ted Kaczynski was likely right. Will get away from us. We will be controlled by the thing that we made. All those are bad. Like, that's just bad. And we need to say unequivocally, it's bad. It's bad to be controlled by machines.

Right?

Machines are helpmates. Like, they. We created them to help us to make our lives better, not to take orders from them. So I don't know why we're not having any of these conversations right now. We're just acting as if this is like some kind of virus, like COVID, that spreads across the world inexorably. There's nothing we can do about it, just wait to get it. It's like, no, if we agree that the outcome is bad, which. And specifically, it's bad for people, we should care what's good for people. That's all we should care about. Is it good for people or not? If it's bad for people, then we should strangle it in its crib right now.

Right?

And why does blow up the data centers? Like, I don't. Why is that hard? If it's actually going to become what you just described, which is a threat to people, humanity, life, then we have a moral obligation to murder it immediately. And since it's not alive, we don't need to feel bad about that.

Well, you could say the same about the atomic bomb, right?

Yes, you could.

And you could say that we have to develop it like Oppenheimer felt before the Nazis did.

I love that. How'd that work? How'd that work? Well, I love, by the way, that people on my side. I'll just say. I'll just admit it on the right, you know, have spent the last 80 years defending dropping nuclear weapons on civilians. Like, are you joking?

Right?

That's just like prima facie evil. If you can't. Well, if we hadn't done that, then this, that, the other thing, that was actually a great savings life. No, it's wrong to drop nuclear weapons on people. And if you find yourself arguing that it's a good thing to drop nuclear weapons on people, then you are evil. Like, it's not a. It's not a tough one, right? Is that a hard call for you? It's not a hard call for me. So with that in mind, like, why would you want nuclear weapons? It's, like, just a mindless, childish sort of intellectual exercise to justify, like, oh, no, it's really good because someone else will get it. How about. No? How about, like, spending all of your effort to prevent this from happening? Would you kill baby Hitler? You know, famously.

Right?

So I don't know why we're sitting back and allowing this to happen if we really believe it will extinguish the human race or enslave the human race. Like, how can that be good?

Well, if God creates everything, if God created the universe and God creates people, God probably creates a process. And we think that we are very important because we are very important to us. But are we very important in the universal sense? Not really. Like, if the earth just imploded and disappeared, if the sun went supernova and our whole solar system was blown to bits, the universe still exists.

It depends how for sure. In the end, as Conan O'Brien, the famous philosopher, once said, every grave goes unvisited, which is true. And that's an important perspective. Pull out the lens a little bit. Does it really matter? No, it doesn't.

But it does matter. Do your kids matter?

How about this? Do your children matter?

Yes, sure.

Do their lives matter? Would you die for them? Yes, of course.

Everything matters if you're not comfortable. It matters if you're sitting here, like, you don't want to wear headphones. Like, let's not wear headphones. That matters. Everything matters.

But what matters most, like, right?

Is it.

That is the evil, right?

The evil is the. It's the same thing as saying the necessary evil of dropping nuclear bombs on civilians is if you don't do that, then there'll be more evil, then more things will happen. It's kind of the same thing. Like, it doesn't. It doesn't.

It comes from the same place, which is hubris. Like imagining you're God. You have unlimited power, and you have omniscience. You can imagine what the future's gonna be. You can't. You're a fucking idiot. You're a person. Like, you can't even make your wife happy. Like, the limits of your power are really obvious. The limits of your wisdom, same. So, like, don't jump into shit. Big things whose outcomes you can't predict with certainty, like, you can't know, go in with humility. I guess that's what I'm saying. Right.

So.

And do what you can, knowing that you're probably gonna screw it up and you probably won't achieve your goal, but, like, you should try. And on the AI question, everyone I've ever talked to about. I'm hardly an expert. I don't own a computer. Okay. But everybody I've ever talked to, and there's many people, like, yeah, it could get away from us and enslave us. Well, let's say no to slavery. How's that? Is that a tough one? Not for me.

Yeah.

And maybe a good use of nuclear weapons would be to hit the data centers. No, I'm serious. Why is that crazy?

It's not. It's not. If you think that human beings are the end of this evolutionary chain.

Well, what else is some supercomputer in a data center outside Dulles airport? No, you know what I mean? I don't actually think that individuals. I don't think I'm that important. My life is that important. I don't. I will die. I know that. And I try to keep that in mind every day.

But you're important to everybody that cares about you. You're important to the people.

If we don't think people are important, then what do we think is important? I guess that's what I'm saying.

Not necessarily that we don't think people are important, but if evolution is real and if there is this constant, I don't know, but it's visible. Like, you can measure it in certain.

Animals, you can measure adaptation. Yeah, but there's no evidence that evolution. In fact, I think we've kind of given up on the idea of evolution. The theory of evolution as articulated by Darwin is, like, kind of not true.

In what sense?

Well, in the most basic sense, the idea that all life emerged from a single cell organism and over time, and there would be a fossil record of that. And there's not.

There's not a fossil record of transitionary species like species that are adapting to its environment.

There's tons of record of adaptation. And you see it in your own life. I mean, I have a lot of dogs. I see adaptation in dogs, you know.

Through the.

Litter to litter. But no, there's no evidence at all that. None. Zero. That, you know, people, you know, evolve seamlessly from a single cell amoeba. No, there's not. There's not. There's no chain in the fossil record of that at all. And that's why you don't actually hear people. You hear them make reference to evolution, because the theory of adaptation is clearly, obviously true. But Darwin's theory's totally unproven. That's why it's still a theory almost 200 years later. No, we've not found that at all. And I can't even guess. I mean, I have my own theories on it, but they're not proven.

What are your theories?

God created people, you know, distinctly, and animals. I mean, I think that's like. I think what every person on earth thought until the mid 19th century, actually. Right. But it's not a new idea.

They didn't have computers. They didn't have a general understanding that we have today of the process.

Do you think we understand more now?

Yes.

Really?

You don't think that we understand more today?

We understand way less. We understand so little that we're actually sitting here allowing, like a bunch of greedy, stupid, childless, childless software engineers in northern California to flirt with the extinction of mankind. So no previous generations would be like, what? No, stop. And we're not doing that because.

But they wouldn't have done that even with the nuclear bomb. Obviously, the Manhattan project was done in secrecy, but they wouldn't have stopped it because the imperative of getting this weapon before Hitler got the weapon was what it was.

Well, Hitler was kind of done. By then, the russians had pretty much extinguished any hope that that would continue, but not. We were in the middle of the logic of war and the commencement of.

The Manhattan project for sure, but the.

Logic was the same. And it was four years of. Got to beat the other guy. Got it. And I don't mean to sound too judgmental about the bomb. I know why they built it, but you just wonder why nobody in the middle of that thought is this really a guy? And some of them did think it.

I'm sure they did. I mean, Oppenheimer himself, of course, large.

Organizations don't respond to the moral qualms of individuals very well. So that was whatever. It's well known what happened. But no, we should pause and ask, is the machine we're building worth having? And nobody seems to do that. And there are all kinds of economic forces which nobody ever mentions, that drive, that heedlessness, that stupidity. Like California, for example, is completely the state both of us have lived in. It's like collapsing. And they're betting everything on AI. The tax base is going to be dependent on this technology working.

Is that what they're betting on?

Of course AI is.

Did you see the most recent thing about the amount of billions of dollars they spent on the homeless problem with no trackable results?

Well, they've had massive results. They've increased the homeless population dramatically. If you pay for something, you get more of it. And that would include fentanyl addicts? Oh, absolutely. It's been a wild success. I actually talked to Kevin Newsom the other day.

Did you really?

Yeah.

And what's that like, does he smell like sulfur?

It was by phone. I was talking on the phone. Such a weird smell. Like that was too fast for me.

Sulfur and hair grease.

No, but I was making, I was making fun of, I shouldn't even make fun of it because it's so tragic. But what's happened to the state and people living on the street?

What is this non gaslighty perspective?

He said, go back to Russia. You like Russia so much. I was like, you know, actually, I'm originally from San Francisco, but I can't live there because he really told you.

To go back to Russia?

I mean, he was laughing. Whatever. He's a perfectly charming guy. They all are in person. But anyway, I'm so far afield. But my point is AI is being driven by the greed of politicians to some extent. And you'll notice that AI, by the way, as a fact, those data centers that drive our digital life, which is not life, it's actually death mostly. But they're the biggest power draw. How much electricity does AI require? Like, more than countries. Our grid can't handle AI, just as a practical matter.

Well, our grid can't handle electric cars.

Well, it can't handle air conditioning in the state of California, where I'm from, so. Right. You live east of I five where it's really hot and you're not getting those ocean breezes like your air. They have brownouts like in South Africa. It's Johannesburg now. But here's what's interesting, is that none of the global warming cultists seem to have any concerns at all about AI. Why is that? Just like they don't have concerns about John Kerry's g four. Like somehow that's exempt. Really. AI is going to draw more electricity than anything else in the United States, more than steel production. Ok. Used to. And you don't have a problem with that, but you're totally against energy because it's destroying the planet. But AI gets a carve out even though it's going to be the number one energy draw in the United States. Let's go through your reasoning on that.

They're probably not aware.

Well, they're total of. They're not aware. They're mad about my wood stove. I heat with wood. They're mad about my wood stove. They don't want an outdoor barbecue. They don't like a gas stove? No, they're way into the details on this stuff, except somehow AI isn't a problem.

But do you think that they're informed? Because this is not a narrative that you ever hear. You never hear.

I grew up in a world where a wood stove was considered wholesome and natural, and now it's considered, oh, it's the best. And the heat is that I have a wood fired sauna, which I use every day, and it's the great, you know, it's one.

How do you make sure it's the right temperature? Is it like. Like an offset smoker? Like, you have to kind of fiddle with it for a while.

Amazing.

To get the right temperature.

It's time consuming. No, I have a finish. The fins are geniuses, but I have a finish stove in it. And it's incredibly. I don't know if you ever use a wood stove, but there's a carburetor on it basically, that lets in air.

Like a. Like an offset smoker.

Yeah, exactly. And it's so precise. I mean, it's absolutely crazy. I mean, you move it, you know, a third of an inch, and it's just like the flame changes. So I use birch, which I love, and the whole process takes a while. I get it to 200, which probably takes an hour and 20. I mean, it's a thing.

Like it hot?

Like it hot.

Yeah, yeah, 200.

Yeah. I wear a sauna hat, so.

Oh, okay. Does that help?

Which is embarrassing.

The wool hat.

Yeah. Well, it's felt.

Yeah, I bought one of those. I never wore it.

It's incredible.

Yeah. What's the difference?

I'll tell you, you're. Cause you're dunking. I'm so boring on this. If I keep going on this, please. My wife and kids are like, you.

See, I have one. You know, you're speaking to the corps.

They're the best. Go Scandinavia. Yeah. It's like the one thing, if your name is Carlson, it's the one thing to be proud of. And your people, like, they're so sad and defeated. Pathetic. But saunas are still great. But anyway, the sauna hat. So your head heats up much faster because it's higher, but also because it's got all the capillaries in your head, all the blood vessels in your head. So the point of a sauna is to bake. So you want to stay hot as long as you can. Then you reap the benefits. And you also get the solitude and the prayer time or the meditation or whatever in your cedar church. But you can't stay in a sauna that's really hot very long because your head heats up.

Right?

So the sauna hat, the felt hat, the banya hat, as they call it, insulates your head so you can really stay hot a long, long time. You really should do it.

So is it just because it makes it more comfortable? Is that the idea?

If your head overheats, you know, it just overheats. And what you want is you want to cook evenly, just like on a barbecue. You know, you really do. So, you know, you sit on the bench with your feet up. You want to be as flat as you possibly can to cook evenly and to stay that way. So I do. I try to do 20 minutes. I have my, you know, my timer, my egg timer with the sand going through the hourglass, which goes to 15 minutes, but I try to stay an extra five if I can. And I couldn't without the banya hat.

Interesting.

It's like $8 on Amazon. Well worth it.

Yeah, I have one. Like I said, I just don't use it. But I do.

They're embarrassing. And you look like a tool wearing it. Yeah, but you shouldn't have.

No one's looking in there anyway.

That's right. You don't sauna with other people, right?

I do sometimes. Yeah. Comics. We get in here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When we train together, we all get in a song together afterwards. It's fun. The rock was in there with us.

No way.

Yeah. The rock worked out with us, then sat in the sauna with us. It was fun. Got in the cold plunge with us.

Oh, that's pretty great.

It was fun.

Is he good?

Dude, he's a great guy. Really nice guy. Like, really.

I've heard that, I don't know, humble. I've heard that.

He's like, jen, you know, some people fake humble. They fake it to look cool.

It's pretty obvious.

Yeah, he's not doing that. He's, he's a real guy.

Like, the measure of humility is really, really simple. Can you tell the truth about yourself?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, are you just, are you cool to be around? Like, he gives real hugs, you know? He's a real guy. He's real. He's a real guy. And we, when we hung out with him, we were. I hung out with him for hours. We worked out for like 2 hours. And then we got in the sauna together. We're all hung out. Then we did a podcast together. He's a genuinely nice guy. Like, you'd, you'd be able to sniff. I love something out.

Well, you can tell.

Like, you tell something, you know, people are hiding stuff. Yeah. But, um. So, yeah, I do. I've done the sauna with other people.

I do it by myself so no one sees my son.

I do it at 196 degrees. I do it for 25 minutes, and I don't.

That's intense. 196 for 25 minutes is a lot. Yeah.

The last five minutes are rough, and I used to only do 20, but lately I've been doing 25.

Really?

Yeah. Just because it's more uncomfortable. The whole idea is just to make it more uncomfortable. I want it to be very hard to do so that the rest of my day is pretty easy. So, really hard workout, cold plunge starts the day. That's the. The first thing I do is hard. It's three minutes at 33 degrees. It sucks. And then I get out of there, and then I work out.

So it's really impressive. I mean, I had the opposite training as a young man, which was the goal, was like, french toast. You know what I mean?

French toast.

Grind out the cigarettes in the syrup when you're there.

Right? Yeah. Well, I started doing martial arts when I was a young man, and when I got into it, it was the first thing that I'd ever did. That, first of all, gave me a real understanding of the value of discipline and hard work, because you can get as good as the amount of effort that you put forth. And if you put more effort and you're more intense and you're more driven than other people, you beat them and you start beating everyone, and you start becoming this thing that you never thought you could be, which is someone who's extraordinary at something that's very dangerous. And so that was my formulation as a man like that, that helped me go from being this, like, confused kid to being someone who understands, like, oh, there's a path, and most people don't want to do it, but if you could do it, if you can do this dangerous thing that people are terrified of and just do it ruthlessly all day long, like, live it. I lived at the gym. I mean, I taught all day long. I trained all day long. My whole life was dedicated to martial arts.

So I got really good really quick, and it changed the whole trajectory of my life, and it instilled in me this understanding of the value of dedication and of a singular commitment to something, to really being. While you're doing it, you're not distracted. You're fully focused on improving, and through that, you could apply that to all aspects of your life. But we all encounter difficult things in life, and there's this saying that I love. It's a really great saying that the hardest thing that's ever happened to you is the hardest thing that's ever happened to you. If it's a parking ticket or if it's your parents being blown up by a drone, it's still the hardest thing that's ever happened to you. If you've had an incredibly easy life, like most people today, they complain about the dumbest fucking shit because to them, that is their primary focus. They don't have a real existential threat. You remember how nice everybody was after 911?

Very.

It was crazy. California was patriotic. There's fucking flags on everybody's car. Everybody was friendly. I went to New York City. It was like a totally different place. Everybody was so friendly.

Applauding when firemen walked in.

Yeah, they were heroes. Everybody was a hero. And that's because they had encountered something that was way harder than they were accustomed to. And it just put things into perspective. So for me, training and really hard workouts and doing difficult things like the sauna, there's a lot of health benefits to it, too, but the mental benefits to it are really primary for me because it makes.

It's impressive the rest of life have a childhood like that at all. And we were decadent, unfortunately. And so those are lessons that I learned much later.

But, yeah, it's.

That's a good. I think it's a. If it doesn't destroy you, I think it's a great way.

And you don't have to do it the way I do it. You could do other stuff. You could do yoga. You could do hikes. You could do.

But doing things for the sake of the difficulty in doing them.

Yes.

I love that. Again, that was not my training at all.

Yeah. But I was very lucky that it was mine. But more importantly, it gave me a tool to mitigate the stress of regular life and especially the stress of this kind of life that I live. You need something to mitigate that. You'll go crazy.

I agree with that completely.

You'll go crazy.

Yeah. You know, removing yourself from it a little bit has always worked for me. You know, nature works very, very well.

Yeah.

Animals, contact with animals, people you love. Less digital experiences. Fewer digital experiences, for sure. I think that this stuff's not good for you. It's just so obviously not good for you.

I was having this conversation with Michelle Dowd yesterday. She is a woman who survived an apocalyptic cult. She was raised in Apocalypse cult and kicked out when she was 17. Cause she snuck out to go see the color purple. They weren't allowed to go see movies. She'd never seen a movie until she was 17.

She'd never seen a movie. And her first movie was the Color.

Purple, and then they kicked her out.

I can kind of see that. I mean, what about Raiders of the Lost Ark or something?

The color purple was the first movie she'd ever seen.

No, but, like, someone seen one movie, that's the color purple.

Well, boy invited her to the movie, but could you imagine never seeing a movie or even a television and then seeing the purple, dating a boy who.

Wanted to see the color purple? Like, there's so much going on here, Joe.

Well, this boy was a guy who had left the church, and so she was in contact with him, and, you know, and he was saying, hey, there's a whole world out here. You want to go see the movie? And she's like, okay, let's go.

Yeah, I mean, obviously, look, I'm totally against cults. Obviously. On the other hand, you gotta ask yourself, like, I don't know, is your average Amish teenager happier than your average conventional american teenager on instagram? And, of course, the answer is, oh, yeah.

Well, they certainly have less instances of autism, which is really fascinating. It's very, very fascinating.

The Amish have less autism?

Yeah. There's almost none.

Well, I'm not surprised.

It's extremely rare. Why do we think that is, I wonder? I really did.

I can think of a couple. Yeah, I don't want to go Bobby Kennedy, speaker one.

But that's the problem, right? If you go Bobby Kennedy, they'll come for you. But the question is why?

Why? Look, and I don't know. I don't know the answer.

But how is that not in the debate? How is that not in the conversation?

It's not only not in the conversation, you're punished for adding it to the conversation.

And so, like, we are dancing around anti vax conspiracy theories.

Why? Why be on the defensive? It's like if you purport to represent science and you're mad about a question.

And you're ignoring data.

Yeah, but even in the absence of data, science is a process.

Yes.

It's not a result. It's a way of doing things. And at the core of science is asking questions, including unlikely questions. That's what science is. And if you don't allow that, then you may be doing something. What you're not doing is science. We can say that conclusively. So for people to wrap themselves in the mantle of science and attack you for asking a question. They're frauds. And I don't know how they have the moral high ground in this.

I don't think they do. But I think it's the same kind of mindset that allows people to create the nuclear bomb. Because you say, listen, we're not even saying that vaccines cause autism. Let's say this. If you're looking at all the data of all the things that cause autism, and you see that the vaccine schedule ramps up considerably, and then you have autism, which seems to at least be more diagnosed than ever before, people will instantly say, we stopped polio. We stopped smallpox. Vaccines have saved millions of lives. And they're probably right. We dropped that bomb to keep germany from dropping that bomb. We need nuclear weapons so that other people don't have nuclear weapons. We do a thing that maybe has some negative effects but is overall good. And I think you can kind of apply that sort of logic and reasoning as a human being to very messy issues.

I think people do that.

People do. By the way, people do that with abortion, right? Sure, they do that with abortion.

They do with everything.

Has a right to choose reproductive freedom. They say all these things, and then you say, okay, what if the baby is near term? What if it's six months old? What if it's seven months old? And people don't want to have that conversation. A woman has the right to choose. You're a fascist. Stay out of women's rights.

Does a woman have a right to kill you if you annoy her or inconvenience her?

Well, it's.

This is like, what do you. Weird.

It's like, when is it a life? But it is one of those things that, to me, is a human problem. Whereas humans have these very messy interactions with some things that don't line up with their ideology. And there's an ideology of science worship. There's an ideology of authoritarian worship. The bodies of science have bestowed the truth. If you ignore it, you're a science denier. And, you know, that's.

Those are political terms or theological terms. They're not terms rooted in science. And look, we all make trade offs constantly. Everything's bad. It's a shit sandwich versus a shit croissant. I'll take the shit croissant. It's smaller. That's a daily experience for everybody. So I get that. And I don't think everything is moral absolute either. We don't even know sometimes whether a decision will result in good or bad. So it's very complicated. I totally agree with that. What I object to is the absence of reason.

Right.

Like, you have to believe, because I think it's true that if you're reasonable, that you can reach maybe not the perfect decision, but a better decision. And if we don't believe that, then we're just in the land of witchcraft and let's just admit it. So the lack of reason is what freaks me out.

Well, it's ideological capture, right? Because there's certain things that if you're on the right side of these subjects, the correct side, whatever your ideology believes, you can't differ from the doctrine. There's a very clear doctrine.

It's religion, then. It is. Yeah, it is religion. So I'm very pro religion. But you can't have a religion that's too stupid and destructive. If your religion winds up hurting a lot of people, then I'm against your religion. Right.

Yeah, I think. But even some really good religions have aspects of them that you could say were overall detrimental to the people that were.

Sure. Absolutely.

You could encounter with them. I think that kind of thinking. I think cult thinking, whether it's Scientology or whether it's Christianity or there's like a type of thinking or that's woke. Woke is clearly a cult. It's a mind virus. And I think that it's so trite to call it that now. It's like, whatever this thing is, this leftism, this marxist sort of ideology that's waving its flag and indoctrinating people in this country, its very similar to all kinds of religions. Its very similar to fundamentalist religions that have always existed in that everybody has to believe very specific things. And you cant differ. You cant differ from the doctrine.

So heres another way to think about it, that ive been meditating on this a lot. Yes. Religion, politics, they're all kind of melding. It's hard to know where one ends and another begins. So maybe a simpler and more useful way to think about it is truth or falsehood. Lying or honesty? Maybe just assess everything that way. Is someone lying? I don't care what your justification for it is. Lying about vaccines. They've lied a lot about vaccines, and they've done it, I think, in most cases because they feel like they're serving some greater good.

Right. Well, that's the narrative, right?

We can't tell people that there are vaccine injuries because they won't get vaccinated, which are good for a big population. I understand the thinking, but you, how about this? You can't participate in lying you can't lie.

You can't lie. And you.

Period, though. You can't lie about anything. Just don't lie about anything. Try to tell the truth all the time. If you can't say something that's true, just don't say it.

Right.

You're not required to say everything you think, obviously, and you shouldn't say everything.

Right.

But you should never lie. And if you just stick with that, like, you get pretty quickly back to reason and order, don't you?

Yeah. Yeah. No, you're making complete sense. And I think that this is the problem when people have information and power above other people.

Well, right.

That's for sure. Which is the problem of governments, which is also the problem of cult leaders.

Yeah.

You know, cult leaders, they get completely infatuated with this idea of being omnipotent and this power that has control over giant swaths of people, and you get to dictate their behavior and you get to tell them what to think. That's very intoxicating. And it's common. It's common in that it's always existed throughout human history. It's a thing that people do when they get power. They abuse the shit out of it. And if they think that you're too stupid to know the truth and that they're better than you because they do think they're better than you because they're running things, it's a natural inclination. It's a natural thought that people have. If they're the ones. If you guys are a bunch of dopes that. That are just listening to my orders and I tell you how to live your life and what to do, I'm naturally going to think I'm better than you.

Well, that's. I mean, people have lived under those systems since there have been systems. But always what makes it particularly galling and hard to live with is when you call that system a democracy.

Right?

That's too dishonest for me. I would much rather live in a monarchy where everyone thinks the king has been assigned by God to rule over us and his whims are law. That makes sense. I don't like it, but at least it has internal coherence. When they stand up and pass a $60 billion funding bill for Ukraine, when 70% of the population doesn't want it, when they're ignoring the actual problems in our country, like the economy and the border, and they're calling in Congress over the weekend to pass something that people don't want while ignoring the things that people do want. And if they do the same kind of thing again and again for like 50 years, and they call it a democracy. That will drive you insane because it's just too dishonest. Why not just say, we don't give a shit what you want? We are getting something out of this Ukraine funding. Whether it's like the thrill of being masters of the universe or whether it's money from the defense contractors, whatever we're getting out of it is more important to us than your opinion. This is not self government. You don't run this country.

We do. Shut up and obey. If they said that, you'd be like, okay, I get it. Those are the terms. But if I get another fucking lecture from Joe Scarborough about defending democracy when this is not a democracy, it's not even a close approximation of a democracy, then I'm going to go crazy because I just can't deal with the lying. Does that make sense?

It does make sense. What's interesting is that there are people saying that now, and I think that's a relatively new thing in terms of mainstream media. And I consider what you do on ex mainstream media, what we're on right now is essentially mainstream media. It used to be. You could call it. There's corporate controlled media.

I agree.

And that used to be mainstream media. Mainstream media used to be CNN. It's not really anymore. Mainstream media is what, in terms of the volume, consumed. More people are consuming things on Twitter, on x, than there are on anything else. They're consuming information through the Internet, through YouTube, for good or for bad. Whether it's correct or incorrect, they're consuming information in different forms now than ever before. So more people are saying what you're saying than have ever said it before. And when people lie, and when people bullshit and gaslight, it's more offensive now than it's ever been before because there's so much access to truth that it's just, you could see it now if you're paying attention, if you're not a boomer who only reads the newspaper, you pay attention and you see it and you go, this is horseshit.

But it's like, I guess what bothers me is that the lies aren't sophisticated. No, I mean, I look back over my now sort of long life, and I'm recognizing all the times that I was lied to, but I didn't know I was being lied to. They kind of pulled it off. There's something incredibly insufficient, insulting and demeaning to tell me a lie when I know it's a lie. And, you know, I know it's a lie. We both know it's a lie. But you're demanding that I pretend to believe it, right? What you're really saying is I have no respect for you. You're like my dog, right? You're a slave. Like, I'm demanding that you participate in my lie.

Right.

The lack of stealth. I'm not explaining it very well, but that really bothers me.

Well, there's no real other way to lie. Some of these lies, like politicians. Did you see that conversation that AOC had with that man they brought in for the Biden case? And they were talking about what crimes? And she was grilling this guy. What crimes? Did you see Joe Biden? Did he steal anything? Did he steal bread? Like, I forgot what she said. And he was trying to explain what they were. Rico crimes. And she was saying, rico is not a crime.

I saw that.

It's a category of crime. Like, okay, all right, but tell that.

To the Genovese family.

Not only that, it's so dumb to say that publicly and say it with confidence and to tell a person.

That's the thing. The marriage of ineptitude and high self esteem is. It's really the marker of our time. It's like, I have nothing against dumb people at all. My dogs are dumb, and I love my dogs. No, I'm serious. I don't think God cares about your intelligence. Right? Only people care. And so it's not a moral category, and stupidity is not, I mean, somewhat down syndrome. I really believe better people than I am more likely to go to heaven. So I'm not attacking her for being dumb. But the idea that a dumb person has no. The White House press secretary is in the same category, who has no idea she's dumb. And she really thinks, like, she won the prize. Like, she's the most impressive. Like, I'm White House press secretary because I'm the best talker in America. It's so crazy. And yet the smartest people I know are very often, like, sort of, well, you know, they have humility.

Well, also, she's following Kayleigh McEnany. Is that how you say her name?

I don't really know who that is.

She was the last White House president I know.

And you don't know who that is?

She's the goat.

I sort of do.

She's the goat. Greatest White House press secretary of all time. She's the best.

I had stopped paying close attention by that time.

She had all the documents. She would kill them whenever she would get called out. Like, whenever there'd be a question, she'd say, that's interesting, and then she'd open it. Because you said this and your paper said that and CNN said this, and she would call them out on stuff. And she was just really, really well prepared.

I love that.

Very articulate. She was wonderful.

Well, good for her. I mean, that's what it should be.

But she was operating under President Trump, you know, so. But obviously she's demonized.

It's just, I can't believe you don't.

Know who that is.

No, I don't. I know who it is. But I, it's just funny. The, she's the goat. Well, that's. I had stopped watching all briefings by then. I used to go to dumpsters.

Well, they're so dumb.

They're, so did I used, I mean, I literally would go there, be in the briefing room, the former Kennedy swimming pool. And the first thing you note, I mean, I was never a White House reporter, but I was a reporter, so I would go to them occasionally. And the first thing you notice is how impressed all the correspondents are to work there. I work at the White House. Work at the White House. Got my hard passed. And then the distance between that, that little credential they were so proud of and the reality of their lives was, like, insane. Like, they're in this tiny little room. They're being treated with total contempt by the White House staff who thinks they're just fucking animals. You know, it's like, shut up. They're eating out of vending machines. And this was a different time, right? So, like, when I was working as a journalist in Washington, like, we went out to lunch every day at, like, a good restaurant and charge it to the company and, like, with your sources. Like, we had lunch every single day like civilized people. I don't even think that exists in the world anymore where you had time for lunch, where you weren't just so under the gun from your corporate masters that you had to, like, get back to work.

We ate lunch, and I remember thinking, these people don't eat lunch. They eat like, a stale mounds bar out of a vending machine. Like, they bring quarters to work so they can eat. I remember thinking your life, like, is you're not even human. You're just like a little puppet or something, but you're so impressed. And like, all your neighbors know, he works at the White House. He's in the White House press corps. And the job wasn't even really a job. You would just sit there and ask your question in your little assigned seat like you're in a high school gym. It was just awful. And I just had no respect for people who did that for a living at all. Did you ever read it?

Fear and loathing on the campaign trail?

Come on.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's amazing. That guy gave sort of the, that's, I think, probably the best window into an outsider in the political process, at least in terms of the campaign trail. It's the best window to the press, the best window to the relationship that they had with the politicians, at least in the 1970s. It's an amazing book.

I was talking to a campaign reporter. I never do that anymore, but I was this week, actually, and he was telling me, it's totally different. When I did it, you were all on a. I mean, it was bad, actually. It was because it just cultivated groupthink, which was then leveraged by the candidate for better coverage. The whole thing was kind of an op, actually, but it was at least fun. You were on a charter plane and you're flying with everybody, and you hit three or four cities a day, and there are cocktails on the plane, naughty behavior, and they fed you and they kind of dulled everything for you. It was fun. It was like a road trip, right? And now it's just, like, grim. They're all driving alone in their little rental cars to some obscure town in Iowa to sit there with no access whatsoever to the candidate, write up their little reports, and then they get back to their hotel and they're, like, writing up more for the website. And, like, it's just an, it's such a bad job, actually, covering politics that only the people who couldn't make it in any other business are doing it.

It's like the, it's like a reverse meritocracy. It's only the most kind of pathetic power worshipers would ever do a job like that.

But, like, critics.

Yes, that's exactly.

Most critics want to be writers. Most like the worst people, just as.

People like, well, you've actually been in show business, so you've got a better experience with them, or you have a lot of experience with them. But I've known a lot of them who worked for magazines or newspapers that I worked for, and they're the kind of people who have a lot of cats, and all the cats hate them. You know what I mean? They're just, like the lowest. They all have some, like, sort of weird, like, wandering eye and they're fat and they're, like, super into porn. Totally from everybody. I actually worked and for one of them for a while, who was a critic for the New York Post, a guy called Jon Pidharts. And he was one of the weirdest, most unhappy people I've ever met in my life. And he would come into my office occasionally, and he would rub his, he had a really hairy back, and he would rub it against the door frame and say these kind of obscure, he was stupid, but he didn't know that. He was, I mean, he was actually kind of dumb, but he didn't know it. And he would kind of philosophize. I was like, ten years younger, and I was his captive, so he would just, like, lecture me as he was rubbing against the door frame.

One time we went out to lunch and we all had drinks. Of course, this is like mid nineties. He didn't really drink, but he ordered this drink with, like, an umbrella, and it had a piece of watermelon on the rim of the glass. And he took the watermelon, ate it, and then he ate the rind. I'll never forget that, watching him eat the rind and thinking, of course, this guy's a critic. His true love. He was editing this magazine, but his real interest was in writing about movies. They're just sad people who wanted to.

Did you ever read Siskel and Ebert? Did you ever read when Siskel, Roger Ebert wrote a screenplay?

No.

It's very bizarre. It's, it's really sexual. Very strange. It's supposed to be terrible.

Of course.

I've read passages in it, but I remember going, oh, okay.

Yeah, they're not, they're not creative. They're creative adjacent.

Well, they don't have anything to contribute.

That's what I'm saying. They don't have creative power. Right. So they're mad about that.

They probably could figure it out if they had a different mindset. I think creativity isn't in everybody.

It's just a matter of how 100% it's in everybody. It just requires honesty.

Yeah.

The impediment to creativity is lying. Sure.

And yeah, I used to say that about joke thieves, that one of the real problems with joke thieves is when they get caught, and then they have to write their own material. And the problem is they don't understand the language. They just know how to say the sounds. Like, if you told me what to say in French, I can't speak French, but if you told me what to say, and I practice it and I said it right, you think, wow, that guy fucking speaks French.

Yes.

So that's what comedy's like, so if you got a guy who knows how to repeat other people's jokes, but he doesn't know how to create them. See, comedy's one of the rare things where someone, when you get a guy like Shane Gillis, that guy writes his own stuff. He edits it, he thinks it out in his head, forms it, he produces it. He changes the order of things.

I love that.

It's a complete, everybody does it pretty much the same way. There's a few guys that hire writers, and that's honorable. There's nothing wrong with hiring a writer. And it's also gives jobs to other comics because some comics are just really good writers and they're not so good at performing. And so people will work on stuff. They'll collaborate on stuff. Like Chris Rock would do this thing where he would hire comics and they didn't write the jokes for him, but they would be like guys who would bounce stuff off so he would have his ideas, he would go on stage, and then after his set, they would all meet and they would talk about the set, and guys would have taglines like, you could say this, oh, great. And they write that down. They're adding, so it's a collaboration. So you have the master. You have Chris Rock, who is so open minded and intelligent and humble that he brings in other masters and says, tell me what I'm doing wrong. Tell me what I could change. Tell me what I can make better. And they work together. And then there's people that have people that are essentially ghostwriters.

They hire comics to write jokes for them. They pretend they're theirs and they don't really write them at all. So that's another level, which is also.

Does anyone who does that get successful?

I don't know. I don't know. I don't. Not top shelf. They get close. They do well. There's people that have people write for them and they do well. But they're not the guy that everybody goes to. They're not David tell, they're not the guy that everybody goes to see. They're not the, like, David tell's the guy that comics go to see when he's in town.

Yes.

Like, he just sees a master. You watch him, he's Yoda. You're like, jesus Christ. Like, how is he so good? Well, he's so good because he writes every day. Because he's sitting with fucking a pack of cigarettes and a cup of coffee every morning, writing things in a notebook. And he's practicing every day. He goes on stage constantly and he's just, it's that japanese term Kaizen, where you take this one thing and just refine it to its ultimate mastery. That's what he's doing. So these guys who pretend to be that and steal jokes, and then they get caught, then their material drops off a cliff. It's so obvious.

Frauds. Yeah.

Also, because the very thing that allows you to steal someone's jokes, that's an ego thing. That's like, I want the laughs. I want to be the man or the woman. I want to be the fucking one up there showing everybody, look how amazing this person is. Look how amazing. That's the opposite mindset that's required for creativity. So creativity is not about you. Creativity is about the ideas. Creativity is about things. Creativity is about how does this concept work with these other concepts? How do I get it in the most digestible form? If I was an audience member, what would it be like to feel this? What's the best way to introduce it? What's the way to make it so that people don't think that I'm being mean, that I have a point, or that I've thought this through. This is not just a flippant thing, like you're allowing someone, when someone's on stage, you're allowing that person almost to think for you. Like, you take me on a ride, I'll give you my mind. I'm not going to. I'm not going to be thinking what I would do. I'm not going to. I'm just going to let you think for me.

If that person's not doing a good job of that, if it's clunky, if it's shitty, if the transitions suck, if the way, then it just interrupts this hypnotism that you've put on me, this hypnosis. Now, I'm not letting you think for.

Me, it's inherently fraudulent, right? I mean, I'm giving control of my mind over to someone who is himself under the control of somebody else. Do you know what I mean?

Do you mean if you're stealing?

No, if I'm in the audience, right. And I would say this also goes for ideas, for commentary. You know, that's not funny, but that's real. And you see it a lot. I've seen it a lot.

Yeah, you see bullshit a lot.

Well, the number of people who are totally not controlled, who are really saying what they actually believe with no weird agenda that they're not telling you about, is pretty small. And I just have noticed that a lot recently, particularly on the question of wokeness and free speech, there are a lot of people who are, like, on your side because they're for free speech or not actually for free speech at all, who are pushing a very specific foreign policy agenda, for example, and using another issue to lower your defenses and let themselves into your brain. And I think that's really sinister. Really, really, really sinister. And it's becoming more obvious now. Like, if you're for free speech, then you're just for free speech because you support the principle. It doesn't. The content of the speech is not that interesting to you. The fact that a sovereign human being has the right to express himself because he's not a slave, he's a citizen and a human being, that's what matters. And if all of a sudden you become famous, like, I'm for free speech, and then you support silencing people who articulate opinions you disagree with, like, you're a fraud.

You're kind of a sinister fraud.

Yeah.

Yeah. And I. Cause that's the business I'm in. I. Boy, I've really noticed that. Have you noticed this?

Yes. And that's also the same kind of thing when you hear them talk. If you hear someone talk, that's saying something that's kind of horseshit. It resonates with you that that's what you've seen.

You had a moment with Barry Weiss on your show that went everywhere. I saw a clip of it. I never saw the show itself, but she was going on about. She was posing as one thing, and then you pressed her. You're like, well, hold on a second. What do you mean by that? You just attacked somebody and she had no idea what she was talking about. And it became really clear to me. Watching that completely changed my view of Barry Weiss forever. I was like, oh, she's a fraud. Actually. This person's not honest at all. Like, she has a very specific agenda. That's all she cares about. The rest of this stuff is just a kind of sleight of hand maneuver.

You're talking about the thing with Tulsi Gabbard?

That's correct.

Yeah. She called her a toady, and she didn't know what that meant.

Well, but she had no idea. Like, tulsi Gabbard had, straight outside the lines on some Syria or something. And Barry Weiss was going through the files in her head, like, what does she have to believe? And she was aware that Tulsi Gabbard had somehow violated that in a way that no one's willing to say, like, in detail. To fully articulate what did Tulsi Gabber do wrong? No one will tell you. She's just bad. And then what that revealed about Barry Weiss is she's completely dishonest. Like, she's a liar, actually. You can't, by the way, if you attack somebody particularly personally and can't explain why you're attacking the person, like, that's not acceptable. You're a dishonest person. If you can't explain why.

I think it's a common thing that people do in private and they get accustomed to speak like we're talking. Like we're talking in private. We're just two people talking. So people get accustomed to saying things without being able to back them up. You know, like, oh, he's a vaccine denier.

Well, I've done a ton of that in my life because I'm an asshole. So it's like, I just don't like that person I have as well.

But what I'm saying is I don't know how much time Barry Weiss had spent doing podcasts before that.

Well, she spent, look, I'm just saying, like. But it's important to be honest about what your agenda.

I think she is honest. I think she is honest and I really like her. Yeah, I like, she's very intelligent.

Not against her personally.

I think that was a mistake. And I think you're allowed to do that and hopefully learn from that. And don't do that anymore. Don't. Don't say a thing that you and I've done that. I've definitely done that. I've said a thing and I wasn't really exactly sure what I was talking about.

Gosh, I do that every day. And I may have just done it with Barry Weiss. So let me be a lot more specific. Specific about what? I mean, if your agenda is neocon politics, which is her agenda, just say so. Don't pretend to be a defender of free speech as a principle, which is what she does.

How is she a defender of neocon politics?

Very. Weiss.

Yeah. Like what specifically?

Well, anyone, including me and Tulsi Gabbard who thinks that America shouldn't be funding wars, that don't help America, she will attack as a traitor to America or whatever. Whatever it takes. And so. No, no, no, that's her. That's her main interest, which is fine. And by the way, I actually have friends who I disagree with really strongly on this question who believe in neocon politics. Doesn't mean they're terrible people or I hate them or I'm not friends. I'm still friends with them, but they're very direct about it. This is what I care about. Okay, fine. I really care about bird hunting and fly fishing and or whatever. You don't. That's totally cool, but be honest about it. So if your job is to defend the right of free people to say what they really believe, then go ahead and defend it. And if somebody is not allowed to speak or fired from his job for having an opinion that you disagree with, defend him anyway, I just interviewed a guy who is a black nationalist socialist. Okay? So I'm obviously not much of a black nationalist. I don't know if are you aware of that?

But I'm not. And I'm not a socialist either. But this guy is facing prison time under the Biden DOJ because he said things they don't like about foreign policy. And I just interviewed the guy for an hour, and it was like, I'm. Because on principle, you should be able to say what you think, period.

What is this gentleman's name?

He was actually a boy. Turns out I, like, loved him, and I'm embarrassed. I can't. He's a member of a pretty small black nationalist socialist group. It's like the revolutionary black nationalists or something like that. They're out of southwest Florida, and he's literally facing prison for repeating russian disinformation. He's not even accused of doing anything. He's accused of saying things the Biden DOJ doesn't like. Well, in a.

What were these things that he said.

Repeating russian propaganda about the invasion of Ukraine? And his point was? Well, there's a backstory here, which is that NATO has been moving eastward since 1991, and that's a massive threat to Russia. Missiles on their border from a hostile power is a threat, and the Biden administration accelerated that. And in response, Putin invaded eastern Ukraine. Now, you can disagree with that, but that's hardly a crackpot view, by the way. I think that's actually true. But even if you don't agree that it's true, that's not. You don't have to be a paid propagandist from the Kremlin to say that.

Right?

I have said it. I'm not a paid propagandist.

Is this a gentleman?

That's him right there.

Four Americans from empowerment organization work with russian intelligence to spread propaganda.

Yes, to spread propaganda. Now propaganda. First of all, you know, there's a lot of propaganda.

Scroll up a little on that, Jamie, so I can read what this is saying. Oh, okay.

Right. So that guy that guy right there.

Okay, subscribe real quick.

Yeah. The People's democratic Uhuru movement in St. Petersburg. So.

So he contacted. He spoke with someone in Russia. They spoke with people in Russia. And then he's not.

No, no, he is being. He's charged with felonies. The FBI raided his house. The first thing they did was cover up the security cameras and they went in there and arrested. They get raided by the FBI.

Okay.

Russia's foreign intelligence service allegedly weaponized our first amendment rights. Freedom's russian dinosaur. Sentence to divide Americans and interfere. Elections in the US is assistant attorney General Matthew Olson. Now, first of all, weaponized our first amendment rights. No, your first. Your first amendment rights are never a crime. They're God given. The government did not bestow them. You were born with them as a free person, period. And the First Amendment simply says you can't interfere with their exercise. That's it. And in this, they are. And I looked at, I read this and I thought I reached out to.

This guy, by the way, Matthew Olson.

No, I wish Matthew Olsen would never do my show. Mean the guy whose salary I pay as a us citizen. No, he would never speak to.

Look at that quote. Russia's foreign intelligence services allegedly weaponized our first amendment rights. Freedom's Russia denies its own citizens. To divide Americans and interfere in elections in the United States. That you gotta. Like, why are you saying that? Let's say what happened.

Well, but nothing happened. So that's the thing. So I'm reading this. Someone sent it to me and I'm like, okay, clearly there's a crime here. Like, they were found with, I don't know, mortar shells or they were. I mean, usually the government makes up. They put kiddie porn on your computer, at least to discredit you. There's no underlying crime other than they said something that the foreign policy establishment of the United States disagrees with them. Okay, that's not a crime by definition. And this guy is facing life in prison. And it looks to me because no one. Cause Barry Weiss has not defended him. I think this guy is likely to spend the rest of his life in prison. And I'm like, this is crazy.

The rest of his life in prison?

Yes.

Okay, hold on. This is the thing.

I think he's 83.

Yeshita, how do you say his name? Yashitella Yuschatella and three other us citizens, Penny Joanne Hess, Jesse Nevell, and Augustus C. Romaine junior, are charged with conspiracy to defraud us. Hess oh, okay. Defraud the United States. Hess Yeshitella, and Nivelle are also charged with impersonating agents of a foreign government.

Okay. They say to defraud the United States. So defraud suggests theft of something of value. Right? Right. If I defraud you, I steal your money. There's no allegation of that at all. And I actually read the charges. There's no. The only allegation is they said things that the US government, the biden administration, doesn't like. That's it. And because they're unpopular and they have views that are considered, quote, fringe, you know, like crazy black nationalists, nobody wants to defend them. And my only point is not that I'm, like, such a principled person, this also seems very obvious to me. You can't allow that. You absolutely cannot allow that if you believe in the First Amendment, in the freedom of free people, to say what they think.

So with this app, this implication is they're saying that they were recruited by the FSB. So it says, prosecutors said Ianov operated an entity called the anti globalization movement of Russia that was used to carry out its us influence efforts. Overseen by the russian intelligence service known as FSB, they recruited us based organizations to help sway elections, make it appear there was a strong support in the US for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and backed efforts such as the 2015 United nations petition to decry the genocide of african people in the US, according to the indictment. Backed efforts.

What does that mean?

Look at that. Like, back efforts to. Such as the 2015 United nations petition to decrypt the genocide of african people.

But what.

Just look at that statement. Backed efforts such as a thing to decry genocide. The United nations petition of 2015 to decry the genocide of african people in the US, according to the indictment.

Okay, so the real misinformation and propaganda is in the charging documents. Actually, the real liars here are the Biden DOJ officials who did this. And they're dangerous. They're criminals, in my opinion. But if you read it carefully, you will see that the only crime is having opinions that the people in charge didn't like.

And were they in contact with people from Russia?

Yeah, I think they went over to Russia for some conference. So.

So they went over to Russia, by the way.

But the way this typically works is they say, well, you went to a country against which we've imposed sanctions.

Right.

And you violated the sanctions regime in some way. Like, that's how they get you. They're not even alleging that. They're not even alleging that. They're just saying you said things that we don't like that. By the way, a foreign government we don't like agrees with.

But that's not learned those when they went over to Russia.

No, it's all on the Internet there. But they learned them. I mean, I guess it doesn't matter where they learned them. I would. Because I've talked to the guy and I've seen what they wrote, the opinions that they expressed. I don't, you know, the genocide of african peoples in America, I don't even know what that means. I guess I don't agree with that. But their views on Russia I generally agree with, because I think they're true, and so does Jeff Sachs and a lot of other non crazy, non black nationalists who probably agree with the basic framework of their position. But whether we agree or not is not relevant.

Right.

All that matters is in a free country, which this was when I grew up, you have the right to any opinion you want. You do not have the right to hurt people. You don't have the right to steal from them. You don't have the right to defraud people. But you certainly foremost have the right to any opinion you want, no matter what the people in charge think of it. In fact, you have that right as a bulwark against tyranny by the people in charge. Like, that's the only thing that keeps this country free, is my right to have any opinion I want. And this guy is going to jail for his opinions. And, you know, it's so crazy that I kept thinking, like, is there something that I'm missing? Like, it does seem a little fringe, this group. I'd never heard of them. I'm not saying the money. Okay. They must have done something. Nope, nothing. And you should see the video of the FBI, right? It's unbelievable. They sent. They sent, like, it's on the Internet. It's on x. I have the video on there. They sent, like, 40 armed agents with automatic weapons to this guy's office and his house.

Like, no exaggeration, it was a full blown, like, we're arresting El Chapo type thing for this guy. He's like an 83 year old army veteran. It's outrageous. And I really find it baffling that nobody who's, like, against woke culture or whatever will touch it. And the reason they won't touch it is because their foreign policy views in general are more important to them than their views on speech and the first amendment, their views on America.

Well, if you step out of line. Right? So the ideology is that we must support Ukraine. So this is. Russia has a point. This is what they're saying. So Russia was very upset about the movement of the weapons closer to their borders, joining NATO. All the stuff that was the hard red lines that Putin had already set. Like, if Russia would definitely do something, if Ukraine joined NATO, we all knew that. So if you deviate from that, you're going to be in trouble. So better just ignore it, because you can't. You clearly, if you look at who these people are, I mean, these are people that would be supported by the left wholeheartedly.

Well, they are. I mean, it's like the revolutionary socialist. Yeah, they're not at CPAC this year.

But the left has to ignore it because then 100%, it conflicts with the.

Well, the categories right and left are just like now. They're actually ridiculous. They don't mean anything. In fact, we've moved past the point where they don't mean anything. They do mean something. They are propaganda instruments designed to cloak the truth from the rest of us, that, in fact, there's agreement, not disagreement, at the center of the power. They all agree on the things that matter, and those are the economy and foreign policy, because that's where the money is. There's no effort to say, rein in the credit card companies, which if you really cared about the country, you'd say, but people are really suffering, okay? They don't have enough money to live. Kids can't not only not buy houses, they can't afford rent. And why is that? And one of the main reasons is because they're paying, like, close to 20% interest on their credit cards. And, okay, we just imagine that in a free market, that's a good thing. Tell me why that's a good thing. Who benefits from that? Why are we for that? Again, I'm not for that. I think the credit card companies are villains, and they send credit cards to kids at school and get them hooked on this.

I think it's totally wrong. And if you said that in the US Congress, people would look at you like you had three heads. Like what? They just don't care because they all agree that our current economic system and our current foreign policy assumptions are good. So that's not a two party system. That's a one party system, and it doesn't serve the interest of the country. And my position is super simple. The only country I have an emotional attachment to is the United States. That's it. I like lots of countries. I like almost all countries, actually. I've been to a lot of them. I like them all but the only one I feel emotional about is the United States because I live here. I was born here, my kids are here. It's my country. And most of the people in our foreign policy conversation do not feel that way. So that distorts it really dramatically. And they're also, a lot of them are violence worshippers. Like, they get off on war, they get off on hurting people and on the power that, that imbues them with. And I think, you know, the Liz Cheney model. You know what I mean?

Like someone like Liz Cheney who's got, like, a really sad and barren personal life. A lot of them are this way weird personal life, failed personal life. They don't have people who love them. They don't have kids who respect them. And so Adam Kinzinger or whatever, they're all kind of the same. The more broken they are inside, the more focused they are on war and foreign policy because it gives them a feeling of power and strength and success. Like, I can't get my wife to respect me. I can't get my kids to listen to me. I can't pass any meaningful domestic agenda, but what I can do is bomb the living shit out of a foreign country. And there, so there is this. It's not true for all of them, but for a lot of them, there is this syndrome that drives their behavior. But whatever the reason, it's totally disconnected from what's good for the country. And if you run America, you have one job, one job, and that's improve America, period. They don't see it that way. And so I don't think the system can continue because it's too distorted. It's not serving its original purpose at all.

So what was it that these guys said that made this raid possible?

They said Russia. And I don't want to speak for them. Like, anyone who wants to see it can interview. And I just want to say again, like, one of the cool things about this moment that I did not anticipate, there's all this sad stuff happening. I know that you probably experience this all the time, is like finding not only common ground with people you thought you had nothing in common with at all, but also, like, liking them. You know, like, I actually liked the guy. I'm sure we disagree in a million things. Probably mad at white people. I am a white person. Whatever. But, like, in my conversation, I was like, I like this guy. You know, he's honest and he's sincere, he's principled. He was a veteran, you know, but whatever. No, I really think what they said was what I have said, and a lot of people have said, which is there was a reason for this invasion. I personally think the invasion was a bad idea. It didn't help anybody. I'm against war. I'm sad the war's ongoing. But they were pushed to this by a more powerful country, which would be the United States of America.

With the threat of including Ukraine in NATO. It's really simple. And right before the invasion, days before the invasion, they send poor Kamala Harris, who has no idea what day it is, to the Munich security conference, an area she knows nothing about, no experience in it at all. And they send her there for one purpose, which is to announce at a press briefing with all the cameras rolling, two. Zelensky right there. She says, we want you to join NATO. What? No other NATO members were clamoring for Ukraine. It didn't even qualify for NATO membership. Why would you say that when Putin's got troops masked on the ukrainian border? You send your vice president to the Munich security conference with the world watching and say this, that no one even really wants. Why would you do that? To provoke war, obviously. What's the other reason? And it was scripted. Like, Kamala Harris is not free balling stuff. Like, she's saying what she's told to say. Obviously, it's not her area. She doesn't know anything about this stuff. She was told to say that. But why? To provoke a war, obviously. So that was my read. I said that on Fox News.

Not a lot of people liked it, but it just seemed obvious to me. I'm not making excuses for Putin. Please. I want to protect the United States, and I think this war really hurts the United states. Like, my motives are always right out there anyway. I think they said a species of that, something like that. And the last thing I'll say is that. Why was the reaction so strong? Cause it was true. They don't care if you lie. No one in power cares if you lie.

But a lot of people, they only.

Care when you tell the truth.

A lot of people are saying those things, and they're not getting arrested.

He's, like, some black nationalist guy in St. Petersburg. Like, who cares? We can do. Who's gonna defend him? Nobody. He's some wacko. He's some, like, 80 year old guy who's, like, been in the, like, fringe left movement for the past 50 years, you know, like, new Huey Newton and Stokely Carmichael. He's, like, a relic of the past, and, like, he doesn't have a constituency. He doesn't care the modern democratic party hates him. He hates them. And the Republican Party is like black nationalism. No, thanks. So he has no constituency. They're never gonna like. You could say that. And what are they going to do to you? You know, nothing. Because they're. They can't. But this guy. Yeah. Crush him, kill him. And that's exactly what they're doing. And I really think not to be like a seventies liberal about it, if you let the weak get crushed, it's bad. It's super bad. You need to protect the weak. And this guy's weak.

And so you think they're making an.

Example out of him with this, and they can. They have all this power.

I just don't understand why they would move so many people, why they would get so many agents, why they would do this so publicly for one guy's opinion or one group of people's opinion.

Well, I don't know. I mean, why did especially, why did medieval kings hang the heads of people they executed from the gates? Right.

But it feels like there should be more to it. Like what? What did they say? So the problem.

You're telling me.

I know the problem is that, I mean, I'm just straw man. I'm steel manning this rather. So the problem is that they went over to Russia and they talked with people in Russia, and then they're saying these things. Is that the problem?

They're not charged with that they're not charged with going.

But you think that's the motivation behind it, because they went over there?

Okay, yeah, they are not. At least when I interviewed him, they had not been charged with taking money from Russia.

So it says they've been accused of us. They've accused us of taking money from Russia. Yashitella said yesterday at a news conference on July 29. Never taken any money from russian government. But I'm not saying that because I'm morally opposed to taking money from the Russians or anyone else who wants to support the struggles for black people. Don't tell us what we can. Don't tell us that we can't have friends that you don't like. He accused the US government of seeking to use the APSP as a pawn in its proxy war with Russia. The unsubstantiated allegation that opponents of the war are co conspirators with a foreign power are intended to bolster the phantom of a russian bogeyman in the public consciousness. The escalating military aggression by the US against Russia and China is already being accompanied by increasing repression and an attempt to criminalize left wing opposition to the unpopular war.

Well, exactly.

So they're accusing him of taking money from Russia.

They're not. They're not charging him. So here's the distinction, which is, like, really, really important. So there are two levels on which the Department of Justice in all administrations acts. There's the level of propaganda, like, what do we want people to think? And there's the level of law. What are we charging someone with? And you have to ignore the first and pay very close attention to the second. So we have a legal system. We have laws, and you can't actually go to jail unless you violate one under the terms of our system. And so ignore what they're saying about you. Joe Rogan sucks. He's a bad man. But in the end, I'm busting you for double parking. And so you really. You're not a bad man. You're a double parker under the law. And so if you look at the charges against these guys, they're not charged with violating sanctions regulations. They are charged with totally amorphous, quote, crimes like defrauding the US government, not for money, but for, like, defrauding it, like, I guess, counter signaling it, sending a message publicly that they don't like. I mean, there's no crime. Look it up. Except speaking.

And I think that's a precedent that we don't want to live with.

No, no doubt.

All right.

Yeah. Let's take a leak. We'll be right back.

We're going to pee.

Tucker and I are going to pee together. Yeah. Well, that's the confronting of reality. You're forced to examine your beliefs and why you came to those beliefs in the first place.

That is the beauty of this moment, though.

It is.

People are living intentionally much more. And it's also just much more interesting. It's not just. It's less shallow than it was, for sure.

I think so. I think it's more nuanced. People have more nuance. At least the people that are paying attention have a more nuanced perspective. But then you have the people that are in the echo chambers that are just digging their heels in even more, and you could spot them easily because they.

Well, they're missing out because there's nothing more liberating than admitting you were wrong. I mean, that is like the moment of liberation, right? And that's the basis of religion. It's the basis of AA. It's the basis of anything that improves you as a person is admitting, honestly admitting to other people, not just to yourself, that, like, wow, I got that wrong.

Yeah.

And then you're important. Cause then you don't have to hide it anymore.

Right. Very important.

And it's a beautiful thing. And that is like changing your mind. I always noticed this covering politics, that a candidate would be like, I've got him on tape saying ten years ago something different. And no one ever asked my opinion, but I always wanted to say, why don't you just, why don't you say you're absolutely right, and the country's a lot different from what it was ten years ago. And so my opinions change, too. Like, why wouldn't they? Because I'm not a freaking robot or a liar.

Also, I used to think this because of that, and now I realize I was wrong.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Which is. How great is that?

I mean, it's part of being a human. It's not being a flip flopper.

It's the best part of being a human.

Well, this is an interesting time for that because you see people that won't do that, and you could recognize them easily because they're the first people to throw out insults. The first thing to do. And they describe you, they'll describe you in an insulting way, and then they'll say what they disagree with you about. They'll say something hard. They try to define you. You far right. White supremacist, racist. Yeah. They throw it all at you and then they say what you said.

It's so funny. I got called racist and white supremacist so many times. But when I first was called that, I mean, it really stung, you know, a lot, because just where I grew up and how I grew up, and those are like the worst things you could ever call somebody. And so I actually, like, paused for a moment and thought, am I. Which I think it's fair to ask yourself, like, am I whites? Whatever. That. I never figured out what that was. Am I a racist? Not really. And I thought, really, the people I dislike most are almost all white liberals, actually.

So you're racist against white people?

No, but like, no, I am white. My kids are white. I'm not against white people. I like white people. But no, it's not that. It's that. So a reporter once called me about this. You've been called racist? Like, no, actually, really, just like you. If I were to sort of narrow down my bigotries, it's like, people like you. I just think you're disgusting. I really mean it, too. Racing racist. Okay. All right.

Well, it's a. It's a thing, you know, I don't.

Think that works as much.

It doesn't work? No. Well, I think a lot of the things that you overuse, eventually people realize, like, oh, you're. You're. You're yelling wolf again. Yeah, well, of course.

And when people get hit with it and don't disappear, then it becomes obvious.

That it lacks power. But it's also. You're trying to use these words to define someone, especially someone like you, that has so many hours and hours of talking about things. Like to try this reductionist perspective of someone, to reduce them to this ultimately very negative thing and not say that they're a human being. And also the fact that it's done by the people that want to think of themselves as compassionate and kind, which is the most bizarre. The left is so aggressively incompassionate, like, they're so aggressively unkind with letting.

Letting people die of drug od's on the sidewalk. That's compassion. No, it's not.

That whole thing is fucking crazy.

Well, it's cruelty, actually. It is.

And it's also when you find. Do you know Coleon? Dwarves?

I know him, yeah.

Great guy. He opened my eyes to the homelessness thing. We had him on the podcast, and he was explaining how he was in San Francisco, and he was like, what is this? They don't have any money for this. Is that what it is? Like? No, there's a whole business behind it, of course. And these people that are running this homelessness initiative or whatever the fuck they call it, they're making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, some of them a quarter million dollars a month.

Imagine making money off the homeless and.

Not doing a goddamn thing.

But what's so funny is I do think the root of their power and the one thing they're good at is just charging the moral high ground and taking it in the first moments of the battle, they just run up to the moral high ground and like, we've got this. This is ours, and they'll protect that at all costs. And it's like, that's kind of all they have is this self righteousness. And if you can puncture that, it's like you're getting rich from the homeless, actually.

Yeah.

And is there anything more disgusting than that? It's some junkie who's dying in misery outside the convention center in San Francisco, and you're making money on that.

They're essentially using those people as a battery to expand the power of government.

Yeah. And their own personal advantage.

Yeah. They're expanding government. They're making more government employees. Now, there's tons of people that are working on the homelessness problem. Air quotes, and, you know, they probably all have blue hair and they talk nonsense and nothing's getting done and no one's being punished for it. But when they did that study where they said that they had no data, like, how are you? What? You can't say whether or not it's doing anything? Well, how'd you spend $24 billion?

But why are they not treated as, like, the most reprehensible people in our society?

I think there's too many things to think about. I think most people, unlike you and I, aren't even paying attention to it. They're paying attention to the fact that the tents are there. They're paying attention. If you go to Los Angeles, it's a fucking zombie apocalypse. But what they're not paying attention to is what is going on. How many people are making money? I didn't even know until Coleon explained it to us. I had no idea. I thought it was just. They don't have any money. They don't put any money in it, and they let these people sleep there.

Oh, no, no. There's actual money. Parasites.

Yeah, parasites. Government parasites. Those are real.

Of course.

And, you know, this whole idea of, I've created so many jobs. Like, what jobs are they? Government jobs that are just bullshit? Because there's a lot of those.

What's crazy to me, just having spent most of my life in Washington, is how close this is to the lawmakers, physically. So the US Capitol sits across from something called Union Station, which is a really beautiful train station right on Capitol Hill. And so to get into the Capitol when there's a massive homeless city there, people dying of drug right there. And so to get to work every day, lawmakers have to, like, step over the bodies of fellow Americans dying. Like, dying. Living outdoors, shitting in the bushes, addicted to drugs, which is hell, okay? And they have to ignore that on their way to creating utopia in some foreign country. And you're like, does it ever occur to you that that's disgusting, that your primary duty is to the drug addict, your fellow American? You're doing nothing. And you're telling me how we're gonna make Eastern Europe into this brave new world? I don't know. I just can't get past that. I think. I'm not super sensitive or aware or anything. I'm not super anything, really. I'm pretty ordinary. But I think I would notice walking into vote on Ukraine aid, I'd be like, shit, there are like five junkies on the street.

Like, maybe we should do something for them.

Yeah. Yeah. It's very bizarre. It's bizarre that they can rationalize it, or at least that they don't get called out by all their people. And this idea that it's compassionate. You have compassion to lead these people and to give them aid to help them and give them clean needles.

But then you've got to think, like, maybe there's something bigger going on, actually, because there's no.

Yes.

There's an entire sector of the economy now that feeds off of human misery. The drug treatment centers that don't work, the homeless advocates who create more homeless, the migrant workers, american born aid agencies, workers who increase illegal immigration and gang activity. There's all this. People are making money off this. The arms manufacturers that help kill people in foreign countries, et cetera, et cetera. There's a vague in all of that. It's a scam, it's a grift, et cetera, et cetera. But there's something more. There are a lot of people who seem to be just for evil for its own sake. And you're like, maybe all the crazy talk about a spiritual war of good and evil, maybe there's something to that. Maybe that's not an illusion. Maybe that's like everyone else has always.

Thought, that there are certainly forces that have evil consequences that exist, but they.

Act on people from the outside, and you feel it also on the other side. I mean, people are better than they naturally are sometimes. Like, you feel compassion for people or true empathy for someone, or you really want to help someone. There's no advantage to you at all. Like, why are you doing that? It's almost like you're being acted on by good. And all of us have known those moments where we just are cruel for the sake of it. Hurt someone for the sake of it. What's that? There's no advantage to us. That's evil acting on us. And I think we're seeing it at scale. And, like, I grew up in the most secular world. You could ever grow up in southern California in the seventies and eighties and in a very secular family, and I've never really paid much attention to that. And all of a sudden, every, not everyone, a lot of people I know who had similar childhoods to mine, similar life experiences, are like, maybe there is, like, a supernatural realm. Maybe there's more than just, like, what we can see and feel. Maybe life is more than just ordering shit on Amazon.

Maybe there's, like, a purpose. Maybe there is this battle between good and evil around us that we can't see, but that we do experience a lot.

It seems like it's always been a narrative throughout human history. It's always been this recognition. Carl's over there snoring. I don't have my headphones on, so I can hear him.

Are you snorting or snoring?

Carl, snoring? Carl the dog.

Oh, Carl the dog.

Carl the dog.

Carl the dog.

He's the best. But he snores when he sleeps because he's a little french bulldog.

He's a sporty little bulldog.

He's awesome. Yeah, he's the best. Dogs don't get cuter. They might be as cute, but they don't get any cuter than Carl.

I think. That's right.

Yeah.

I've got some pretty good looking dogs.

Yeah. I have a beautiful dog. I have a golden retriever. But he's not as cute as Carl. Carl's a different.

Don't tell him that.

He knows. He doesn't like Carl. Well, he doesn't hate Carl, but he, like, ignores him. He thinks of Carl as a thief of attention only, which he is. Yeah.

Fair.

So we've always. Human beings have always at least believed that there are forces of good and evil and that they. That's what exorcisms are about, right? The idea that you're possessed. You're possessed by evil. There's always been this thought that there's good and evil. But when did you start. When did you start considering that and thinking that? That's because. Weren't you at one point in time? Weren't you a grateful deadhead?

Oh, yeah. Listen to him this morning. Yeah.

Used to travel around with them.

Yeah.

How old were you when that was going on?

I went to my first dead show in December of 1984. So I was 15 at. Speaking of the San Francisco Civic center. Yeah, the new year shows. So they've always played in Oakland, but one year they played at the. In San Francisco. And so we were in Tahoe over Christmas, and for some reason my dad was gone. I don't really know where. So my brother and I drove illegally from Tahoe in the family vehicle to downtown San Francisco.

How old was your brother?

13.

So you drove or he drove.

Yeah, I drove 15.

You drove?

Yeah. Wow. From Tahoe. So it was a couple hours. And I remember being on the freeway, like, at 15. Well, we had a pretty different kind of childhood. Good. But anyway. Anyway, we just.

Is that you?

Yeah, it's me on the left.

Get the fuck out of here.

Yeah. I don't know. You know, I don't know how that. That picture is hanging in my barn. And I've never. You know, I don't release any pictures of myself or family or anything like that. And somebody came to my barn and took a picture of that. It's hanging next to my sink and put it on the Internet.

Wow.

So that's my brother Buckley, on the right. That picture was taken. So my dad was a reporter in San Francisco in the sixties and. Pretty well known reporter. And that was in the eighties when I was in school and we were home for Christmas vacation, and he had covered the Grateful dead. He knew the grateful dead, my dad did. So they were in his office. They came through DC and they called him, and they came over to his offer. Jerry came over to his office and my dad's like, I've got Jerry Garcia here. You guys should come down. So my brother and I, we lived in Georgetown, and we had a Vespa. Remember those?

Yeah.

And we drove our Vespa. It was freaking cold out. I'll never forget that. We drove our vespa down to 6th and e or whatever, where my dad's office was. And there was Jerry. I'd never met him before. He was missing the middle finger of his right hand, famously. You know, the famous hand print. Grateful dead handprint. But when you shook his hand, you could feel his. It collapsed, kind of, because he didn't have that middle finger. But anyway, so my brother and I drove to this. To the new year show. It was actually a couple nights before New Year's, and we didn't have tickets, of course. And we were in the park across from there, and we were, you know, whatever. Doing the. You know, whatever. The things that people do at dead shows. And we were pretty freaking out of it. And this guy comes up out of nowhere and puts a ticket right in my face and goes here and hands me a ticket. So my brother was extremely out of it. I mean, he was. You know, I never should have done this, but I was like, all right, man, I'm going in.

All right. And I left my little brother in the park during the show. Just like, very, very impaired. Like, super, super impaired. It was completely wrong to do something like that. But I did do it. And then I went in and saw the show. Kind of freaked out in the middle of it. Hid in the men's room for a while. I'll never forget that. Standing on the stall smoking cigarettes.

Is it acid?

Trying to. It was. No, it was psilocybin. Mushrooms, which, by the way, I should just say I got sober 22 years ago. I'm completely opposed to anything. I don't take Advil. Like, I'm totally opposed to anything, but other than nicotine and coffee. But, yeah, it was mushrooms. So we ate way too many and started to kind of melt down a little bit. But anyway, the point is, I get out of the show. This is pre self, this is 1984, and I get out of the show, and they played, actually, a lot of tunes that they didn't play. They played spoonful. Like, they didn't play spoonful a lot. It was, like, a pretty obscure tune. I'd never heard it before, actually. And I couldn't find my brother, my little brother, and I'm, like, in charge, and my closest friend and lifelong friends talked to him this morning, but I couldn't find him. And I was like, oh, man, my brother's got me. But there he was. He appeared, like, an hour later. He had spent the entire show in somebody's van parked there, but he seemed undamaged. And it was great. I mean, not everything about it is great.

I mean, I do think the drug thing got, you know, definitely hurt people, for sure. But from my perspective, I went to a bunch, probably 50 or more shows and really enjoyed it. And I love the fact that they had two drummers. That was a huge thing for me. I love rhythm. I think it's the basis of music. It's obviously the basis of music. I mean, instruments are cool, but they're kind of like interior design. And the architecture is rhythm, and it's the universal sound that every culture appreciates because it reflects something that's pre existing, that's in you. Everyone relates to rhythm. And I just absolutely loved the drums. And I love. They would always play, like, it was called drums, actually, but they would play a section of every show. It was just drums. Bill Kreuzman and Mickey Hart just gone crazy on the drums. They had drum circles, and I just like drums. To this day, I listen to drums. Just percussion. King Sunny Adey, the great west african drummer. And anyway, whatever. So, yeah, I like the Grateful Dead a lot and still do. And I like that kind of music.

Jam music.

I like jam music. I like acoustic music. I love bluegrass. Love bluegrass and americana. And to see that grow, to see Billy strings become like a venue packer, Billy Strings is like a big act right now. I do feel like creativity, art has been completely destroyed and eliminated in the United States. As we were saying earlier, you can't be creative if you're not honest, it's that simple. And we can't be honest. So there's no creativity. And in the visual arts and literature and architecture, it's died. But comedy is still alive, thank heaven. And music for some reason has escaped that and is still alive. And the growth, the explosion of acoustic bluegrass, the banjo, like one of the great instruments ever, is just thrilling and like a sign of life at this late stage.

Well, I think when there's social pressures and when society's in chaos, art does tend to thrive. Some kind of art, some art.

That's right.

Comedy certainly does now, like, comedy's never been better.

But it came amazing. It came close.

Oh, yeah, yeah. The walls got breached.

Whoa. No, but a few, a few years, I don't know when it was, but, you know, eight years ago or something, it felt like, oh, wow, you know, people can't tell jokes anymore.

We kept doing it, I noticed. Yeah, yeah, we kept doing it.

You kept the little embers alive.

Yeah, well, there was flames. It's just you, you know, when you get people in a club and you take their phones away and just have them just be actual human beings and not be filming everything, just being completely trapped with this idea of capturing something and then putting it online, then you get to have a human experience.

You mean when people, like, live in the present rather than in the future or far away?

That's one of the great things. Going to a good club that uses yonder bags for your phones is that it just takes you out of it. Like, at the very least, it's a break. Like this podcast is a break for 3 hours of phones. There's no, I'm not, no one's checking phones.

I love that.

That's very rare with human beings where they could just sit down and just have conversations for long periods of time without being distracted by something.

Not in my house, but yeah, it's.

A real problem with folks.

It's a huge problem. It's a huge problem. And the one thing I will say about my very unconventional childhood is there was a huge premium on meals and like, eating with people and spending 4 hours at the table was like totally normal in the house that I grew up in. Totally normal. In fact, it was like daily, and that was our primary form of entertainment and mode of communication and, you know, thing that we did for fulfillment and fun. And I still do that. I still feel that way. And we have dinner parties constantly and there are no phones, and people talk and entertain each other and it's like it's so much more interesting. I'm not on social media, but if I were on social media, I don't think I would find that on Instagram, and I'm not attacking Instagram, but I don't think I would find that anything like that.

No, it's. And it's definitely a lost thing.

It's such an easy thing. It's such a fun thing.

It is a fun thing. Yeah, it's a great thing. And I think people enjoy it. I think that's also led to the rise of podcasts, too, because they don't get that in their real life. So at least they get to be a person who sits in on these conversations.

I gotta say this is. I'm not being suck up y, because I don't suck up ever to anyone, but the effect that podcasts have had is just. It's just incredible. And I never would have predicted that in a million freaking years.

I would have never thought it.

When.

When I first started doing this, it was in my living room with my friend Brian, and we did it on a laptop and we had a webcam, and we were like, my friend Brian. Yeah, Brian Redband of kill Tony. You met Brian?

Yes, I did. No, but I just love the phrase with my friend Brian. Like every bad story, like me and my friend Brian, we were down in Mexicali, and I just.

Me and my friend Brian, we just started fucking around online. And then, then we started eventually bringing in guests, and then we eventually got a studio, and then eventually I got, you know, a big place in LA, like a real warehouse, and then eventually moved to Texas. It all just eventually happened.

But it's. It was not. I mean, I was in another part of media for that whole period. And if you had asked me up until the last few years, like, the future is clearly shorter, crisper, more produced. Right, right.

Everybody would have thought that.

Exactly. Everyone did think that, including me. And I hated it. You know, I hate it. I like long form, but I never. I was a long form magazine writer for years. So I. I thought. But I thought that was over. Yeah, not over.

Everybody thought that. Yeah. Even my friends, they were telling me how to edit my show. They're like, you should edit that. No one's gonna listen in 3 hours. I'm like, then don't listen. I don't care. Do whatever you want. I'm not making any money doing this. It was just for fun.

I love that. This is fun.

For years. For years and years, I did it just with no money. There was no money in it forever.

What year? Like, how many years in did it start to pay for itself?

Five.

That's a long time.

Yeah, long time. Let's say it took a while. I mean, it was making, it was probably like existing. Yeah. But about five years in, then it started making money, and then it was like, oh, this is a business I remember very clearly. I was on stage once in Chicago. I was doing the Chicago theater, and I had this story that I was going to tell how many people listen to the podcast? And there's 3700 people in the place, and they went nuts. It was like, yeah. I was like, oh, I thought there's this like, thing that I'm doing where, you know, a few people are paying attention. I don't even know what the, I didn't back then, I never even knew what the numbers were. I didn't even care.

Well, they may not have been like, could you even collect numbers actually?

You get downloads off of, you know, like whatever the provider was that was with a host. You could get like download numbers from the host, and they would use that to inform ads. Like, oh, he gets x amount of downloads per month. And then they would, you know, that's when there's very few people advertising on podcasts. All right, let's give it a try.

But it's one of the great developments between podcasting and Billy Strings. Like, I have, I'm serious, I have hope that it's not all going in the wrong direction, because you can get this view that, like, everything is falling apart late Rome, just a matter of time before, you know, it really does collapse. And then you see these signs that are not minor, they're significant, that, like, no people, I mean, I haven't met a person in the past year who said, you know, I thought this, but then I was reading the New York Times and I realized I was wrong. Like, not one person, right. But the number of people say, I was listening to this podcast, I was listening to Rogan and da da da da da. It's like really noticeable.

Yeah. That's why it's interesting. It's interesting because you could put people in front of people and they might not even be right. They might be wrong. But at least now you're having conversations about something you would never have a conversation about before. And even if this person gets exposed as being incorrect, well, now you have a more nuanced understanding of what the subject is about, why people think incorrect things. And, you know, this idea of like, platforming people is a big one today. Why would you. Platform. That person.

First of all, platform is not a verb. And whenever they take a perfectly good noun and turn it into a verb, you know something bad is afoot. Okay, platform. Oh, you mean letting an adult human being talk.

Right.

I think that's not only allowed, I think that's the law.

Not only that, I think it's important for us. It's even important to talk to people that are completely different than you, that don't agree with you at all.

Well, it's especially important. Otherwise, it's just masturbatory.

It's interesting.

It's just you alone, getting yourself off.

But it's also interesting to know why these people think the way they think. And also, there's so many people that if you talk to them online, you'd have these horrible conversations. But if you sit down with them as an actual human being and treat them with respect and consideration, you talk to them like a human being, and you just try to be as friendly and open as possible, despite what your differences might be, you realize most people have a lot in common, a lot more, way more in common than they do.

But that's the secret that they're trying to hide. So mind control, the end stage of mind control is censorship, right. But it begins long before that. And it begins by creating false categories that wall off your willingness, that prevent you from wanting to know certain things or talk to certain people. And name calling is the most obvious tool. Like, he's a crank, he's a racist, he's a whatever. Fill it in. And then you're like, I can't listen to that person. And I have to say, your willingness to platform or to have a conversation with Alex Jones I think was a revolutionary act, actually. Not that everything Alex Jones says is right. It's not. Not everything I say is right or anyone says is right. But Alex Jones is an interesting person. And even if he's not interesting, he has been walled off from the rest of us through name calling. And your willingness to be like, no, actually, we're just gonna listen to Alex Jones and you can decide for yourself.

Well, Alex has been my friend for more than 20 years.

Exactly. But even if he just. Yeah, but I'm sure you have other friends you haven't invited. And just like you were not allowed to talk to him. And when you hear Alex Jones talk, you may not agree with everything he says. I don't know that I do. But you definitely understand why they told you you couldn't listen to Alex Jones.

Well, that's one of the reasons why I had him as one of the first guests when I came over to Spotify love that, I was like, let's go.

What did they say?

Well, a lot of people weren't happy we lost sponsors. It was an issue, but I think it did the job. Regardless of what he said, that's incorrect. Clearly, the Sandy hook thing was incorrect. You know Alex. I know Alex personally, so I know what he was going through. And, you know, everybody wants to talk about mental health, and they want to praise people for being honest about their mental health issues and support them on their mental health journey to wellness. Alex has gone through some real issues, and one of the reasons why he's gone through some issues is because that guy is uncovering real shit that's terrifying every fucking day. And he was drinking out of control. And, you know, he's just fucking constantly stressed, freaking out. And when you see so many lies and so much propaganda and so many psy ops that are being done on people, you start seeing them where they don't exist. And that's what he did.

Well, and he's also channeling some stuff. You can't call 911 in detail because you're super informed before the fact. He called it. He literally called it in the summer of 2001. He said, planes will fly into the World Trade Centers and they will blame a man called Osama bin Laden. We know that he said that because he said it on tape multiple times. And then he said, call the White House and tell them this. Now, let's just. That's all we know about Alex Jones. Let's just say that's the fact set. How'd that happen?

Right. How did he do that?

No, he's channeling something.

That's super.

Yeah, of course.

Yeah.

There's, like, no other. I mean, tell me how he did it. Otherwise I've asked him about it. How did you do that? At length. He had dinner on my barn recently. We're talking about this. How'd you do that? I don't know. It just came to me. And that's real? That is real. The supernatural is real. And I don't know why it's hard for. For the modern mind, guess because it's a materialist mind to accept that. But what you see, and that's not a new phenomenon. It's happened throughout history. There are people called prophets, and there are people who were prophets who weren't called prophets, but there are people who have information or parts of information, bits of information, visions of information come to them and then they relay it it's not from them. They received it. This is, like, one of the oldest phenomenon in human history. Those people tend to be a little crazy, a little imbalanced, a little different from everybody else. Do you know what I mean? They live on locusts and honey in the. In the wilderness. I mean, that's just like. That's. They're not like everybody else. And that's clearly part of what I'm not saying, that everything that Alex Jones says is a prophecy from God.

It's not. But that was prophetic. There's. And if it wasn't, tell me how it wasn't in. In July of 2000. Like, I lived in Washington in July of 2001, my dad worked in the government. I was as well informed as anybody could be about what was going on in the government. I've always been interested in what's happening in other countries. I was aware of Osama bin Laden. I knew about the Taliban. I knew more than most people. There's not one person who was saying. Not one person in Washington, DC, was saying, at some point soon, they may fly airplanes into the World Trade Centers and blame Osama bin Laden. Wasn't a thing. So if you said that multiple times on camera, there's a reason. Like, and everyone. I've said this to 50 people, what I just said to you, and they all look at me like, yeah, that's stupid. Tell me how it's stupid. Like, tell me how he did that. Like, that's impossible.

He didn't just do it with that either. No, I'm aware he's done it with a lot of things. And that's one of the more interesting things about him is that, like, he talks about stuff. Like, he talked about, like, I'm gonna send this to Jamie because this is one of the really crazy ones that he. He called. And this is, like, 2000. 2000, probably, I guess, 2017. Here it is. Let me find this. Give me a second. Here. I find. Because I sent it to him, like, how the fuck did you call this? Because it's. It's one of those ones where you're like, this is exactly what's happening now. Here it is. Here, 2017. Hold on a second. I'll send you this, Jamie. Come on. Technology. Let's go. All right, I sent it to you, Jamie. So this is some guy's Instagram clip that I found that took a clip from the podcast, and he's doing commentary over. Put these on real quick. You got it. Okay, cool. Here we go. 22 years on podcast Infowars. Alex Jones and Joe Rogan, discuss what's currently happening right now.

Google CERN technology vampire aliens. In a nutshell. Alex was pretty on point with this message.

Let me know what your thoughts are.

Is he crazy or is he on to something?

Is really big?

So, okay, yeah, pour another shot.

All right, let me give you my best, please. Deep research proclamation once.

What do you think is going? But am I wrong to still hold out hope that aliens are real? Because I tell you as one, the two guilty pleasures that I still cling to, it's Bigfoot and aliens. Those are two. Bigfoot, not so much. I wish it was, but I just don't.

Are you ready?

Yes. Bigfoot's real. No. Come on, daddy.

No.

Are you ready?

Yes.

I'm gonna give you the biggest. Joe, there are aliens in this room right now.

For real?

Yeah.

You're not of this world, bro.

Me.

You're the alien.

Oh, wow. I didn't know.

Well, here's what the elite believe, and.

Let me be very clear.

To me.

I'll take this out of context. I only go with what I can prove.

Oh, thank you.

And people can't even handle that.

There's armies.

We're fighting a powerful conspiracy. But beyond that, it's a vampire conspiracy, in that they are interdimensionally sucking the essence of our youth.

Right.

And they believe they're possessed by an off world entity. They do, yeah.

And then.

Joe, I've been on air 22 years. I don't get into aliens, metaphysical religion, any of that. I've studied the elite, and I've also communicated with a lot of the top people. And if you want to know, I will actually break down right now. The best knowledge right now. What's happening on the planet?

What's happening.

The elite are all about transcendence and living forever and the secrets of the universe. And they want to know all this. Some are good, some are bad, some are a mix, but the good ones don't ever want to organize. The bad ones didn't want to organize because they lost after power. Powerful consciousnesses don't want to dominate other people. They want to empower them. So they don't tend to get together until things are really late in the game. Then they come together. Evil is always defeated. Need it, because good is so much stronger, and we're on this planet. And Einstein's physics. Shut it. Max Planck's physics. Shut it all. There's at least twelve dimensions. And now that's why all the top scientists and billionaires are coming out saying it's a false hologram. It is artificial. The computers are scanning it and finding tension points where it's artificially projected and gravity's bleeding in to this universe. That's what they call dark matter. So we're like a thought or a dream that's a wisp in some computer program, some God's mind, whatever, they're proving it all. It's all coming out now. There's like this sub transmission zone below the third dimension that's just turned over.

The most horrible things is what it resonates to, and it's trying to get up into the third dimension that's just a basic level consciousness to launch into the next levels. And our species is already way up at the fifth 6th dimension, consciously our best people. But there's this big war trying to, like, basically destroy humanity because humanity has free will, and there's a decision to which level we want to go to. We have free will, so evil is allowed to come and contend, and not just good. And the elites themselves believe they're racing, using human technology to try to take our best minds and build some type of breakaway civilization where they're going to merge with machines, transcend, and break away from the failed species that is man, which is kind of like a false transmission, because they're thinking what they are is ugly and bad, projecting it onto themselves instead of believing, no, it's a human test about building us up. And so Google was set up 1819 years ago.

This was.

I knew about this before it was declassified. I'm just saying I have good sources that they wanted to build a giant artificial system. And Google believes that the first artificial intelligence will be a supercomputer based on the neuron activities of the hive mind of humanity, with billions of people wired into it with the Internet of Things. And so all of our thoughts go into it. And we're actually building a computer that has real neurons in real time, that's also psychically connected to us, that are organic creatures, so that they will have current prediction powers, future prediction powers. A true crystal ball. But the big secret is, once you have a crystal ball and know the future, you can add stimuli beforehand and make decisions that control the future. And so then it's the end of consciousness and free will for individuals, as we know, and a true 2.0 in a very bad way. Hive mind. Consciousness with an AI jacked into everyone, knowing our hopes and dreams, delivering it to us, not in some PKD wirehead system where we plug in and give up on consciousness because of unlimited pleasure, but because we were already wired in and absorbed before we knew it.

By giving over our consciousness to the system, by our daily decisions that it was able to manipulate and control into a larger system, there's now a human counter strike taking place to shut this off before it gets fully into place and to block these systems and to try to have an actual debate about where humanity goes and cut off the pedal and psychic vampires that are control of this AI system before humanity is destroyed.

Of AI. How'd they get the pedophile? Yeah, it's pretty much it.

Yeah, it's incredible.

It's.

I understand about a third. That was seven years.

Seven years ago.

Okay, so.

No, it's seven years ago. No one was thinking.

You can see why the FBI decided to destroy him, which it did the people in. I mean, it's just like what has happened to Alex Jones is proof that at least some of what he's saying is true. Because why? Who is Alex Jones a threat to?

Did you see that interview with the guy from FBI was trying to hook up with that dude on a date?

CIA. Yeah.

Was the CIA. That's right. And they were talking about how they can destroy a person.

Yeah, I think I was mentioned in there, too.

Were you?

Yeah, it was. Yeah. I mean, there are a couple. Okay, so, yeah, again, the third dimension. I don't know anything about dimensions. Okay, so I can't comment on that. But two things he said are true. One is that every civilization, every religion, the greek myths, every single one, including Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, has believed that there is sort of. That the spirit world and humanity are like that. There's, you know, they're hybrids.

Yeah.

Okay, so that's just a fact. Genesis six. So, you know, I don't think that's crazy at all. Given that it has been the belief of civilizations that had no contact with each other.

I don't think it's crazy. And I also don't think it's crazy to consider it. I don't think we have a real map of reality.

Well, we definitely don't. And better put than I. Than I explained it. That's exactly right. We don't have a real map, and it's not crazy to consider it. And it was a very. It was an entirely conventional view up until fairly recently. That. Yeah, that this spirit world, like, I hate when I don't use race breeds with people, but that is that everyone thought that, right?

And even the term spirit world is probably a loaded term.

Of course they're all.

Whatever it is, how do you say.

It in a way that doesn't sound crazy, but the whole thing sounds crazy because we don't acknowledge the reality, the actual physical reality of the supernatural. And it is real. That's the first thing. The second point that's obviously true is that people, weak people, which is a synonym for bad people, come together for strength and safety. They act as one. The hive mind is. Is specific to a certain group of people, bad people. And that good people don't tend to come together, but they're coming together now. And I just know. I just noticed this. I mean, people independently who I know or sort of know in many cases have long despised, have come to exactly the same conclusions without talking to each other. I know that you have this experience all the time.

Yeah.

It's like, I can't believe you think that. How did you wind up thinking that?

Right.

And not just on a specific issue like foreign policy or COVID or whatever, but, like, on a whole bunch of different things. They're all coming to the same conclusion and they're coming together. And so that does suggest, you know, a big change and a battle. I mean, it is a battle between good and evil. I'm not always convinced I'm on the good side. I've been an instrument of evil many times in my life, and I'm ashamed of it.

But you're talking about the Iraq war.

Yeah, the Iraq war. I've been cruel to people, probably even already on your show, in ways that are unjustified. That's my instinct to do that. That's a fault. Not, you know, not something to brag about. It's something I'm ashamed of. So I'm not saying I'm always on the right side. I certainly have not always been on the right side. I've been on the wrong side many, many times. But that doesn't change the fact that there is good, there is evil. They are at war with each other, and we are subject to the effects of that conflict. And that we're seeing it suddenly play out in ways that are really, really obvious. There's no political explanation for the trans phenomenon. Nobody benefits. You can say, I hear these. See, these right wingers be like, really? It's all about the people who make synthetic hormones. They benefit. Yeah, okay, they benefit, but it's not driving it. That's stupid. It's not about the money, actually. There's no upside. It's not helping the kids at all. If a child has anorexia, which is pretty common, actually, in this country, and the child thinks she's fat, you don't say to the child, yeah, you're fat.

You don't do that. You give the child help if you can. It's hard to treat, but you try. If a child comes to you and says, actually, I think I was born in the wrong body, the last thing you do is affirm that it's hurting the child. Like, why would you do that? If you love the child, you wouldn't do that. It's really an exercise undertaken for the sake of destruction, for the sake of hurting someone. There's no real upside. What's another phrase, description of that? It's evil. And you see that a lot. A lot. And why? What is that?

What is it?

And why is it so obvious to even a completely secular person like me all of a sudden? There's a reason for that. History is moving really, really fast. We're right in the middle of it. And I probably wouldn't have chosen to be born at the time I was. I'd much rather sort of reach maturity in 1955. Really? Well, I don't know. I don't get to choose. You know, I don't like drama. I don't like change like I'm.

But there was drama and change back then.

There was, but people didn't recogn, well, if there was a cold war, of course there was a korean war. Okay. But people didn't see it in their face. Right in the way, I don't think.

Wouldn't you rather know?

I don't have a choice. I do know.

Yeah, I'd rather know. I'd rather be right now.

Yeah, well, then you've got a much better attitude than I. I mean, sometimes I just, my parents got divorced when I was little, and so I kind of like, I don't want change.

Yeah, I know what you mean.

It's not up to me.

I know what you mean. You know, I was having a conversation in the green room at the club the other night about this guy from Canada that's HIV positive. That's a trans woman that's taking hormones so they can breastfeed their nine month old daughter. So a biological male is taking hormones and is now breastfeeding their daughter off of their male tit. And I said, if I was Satan, if Satan was real, I would do that.

Exactly.

If Satan's real, I would. I mean, if Satan was gonna do something insidious and unbelievably creepy, he would do that.

Well, I think he is doing that, obviously.

But this guy's a real freak.

Well, but, right. He's also using public money, but he's a victim too. I mean, the thing about. Right, because the thing about evil, the reason that evil is distinct from everything else, it destroys the vessel it's held in the conduit through which it flows, destroys the person. So, like, that guy, in the end, will not thrive. He'll be destroyed too. And so that's how you know that it's supernatural. In other words, if I. You know, if I steal your iPhone and sell it and I get an extra $400, like, that's kind of explicable. You understand why I'm doing that? I want the $400.

Right.

But if I'm encouraging your kid to castrate himself, I'm not really benefiting from that, actually. There's no material benefit to me at all. There's no real psychic benefit. It's hurting for its own sake, and that's evil. There's no political category that explains that.

Right. And then there's clearly money involved in that.

There is money.

Of course, the gender affirming clinics that have popped up all over the country since 2007. You see the map of it. It's fucking bananas.

But why would you want to do that? That's. Why would policymakers want to do that?

Why would anybody want to make money that way? Right.

Well, but also, if they choose to make money, it's the most unnatural thing ever. Because parents, every parent at a certain age feels is like, I like my kids. I want grandkids.

Right. And you want to protect your children.

Mine to continue.

Yeah.

The politicians who push trainism on the country, like their kids are going trans too.

Yeah, they are.

Right. They're not escaping it. It's like they're burning down their own house.

I would like to see the statistics of people in Hollywood, like, how many of their kids turn trans versus the.

Rest of the world.

Yeah, I know some of them too.

Yeah.

But how many of them versus the rest of the world?

Well, a lot more. A lot more.

Which is a morally corrupt business.

Yes.

Yeah.

Like, more than we knew. More than I knew. You know, the entertainment business, it's.

It's always been that way. You know, Tarantino was talking to us about this famous old director that had a bedroom at his office where he would bed the starlets. And it was just common knowledge if you wanted to be in his movie, you had to fuck him. And you'd go into his office. He had a literal bedroom in his office.

We had some of that in television. Yes, I'm sure. Yeah, quite a bit. Yeah. And I didn't, I didn't really understand. I didn't obviously partake in it or you would know because all my text messages went up in the New York Times. So I'm not hiding any of my own behavior. But, I mean, I will say, if I'm being honest, it didn't really register with me. I was like, yeah, that's kind of wild and crazy. I just didn't like my wife. I don't want to blow up my family. I didn't do anything like that, really. But I certainly saw a lot, like, a lot of it. Like, a lot of. And I just didn't really see it as, like, horrifying. I just saw it as kind of like, well, you know, creative people are this way kind of thing. But I look back and I'm like, it was really dark.

Well, especially the producer thing, right? That, like, the Weinstein thing, that. The way they ran the business, that that's how it was pay to play.

I worked for Harvey Weinstein for a year.

Did you really?

Yeah, I did.

When?

1999. He had a magazine with Tina Brown called talk magazine. I was the head political writer for it. And they had an office at Carnegie Towers in New York, right below the park. And I remember the big. I mean, I remember that he was a pig. I was not like an intimate friend of his or whatever, but I certainly dealt with him. And the big controversy was he was smoking in elevators. And that was. And I've kind of supported that, if I'm being honest. But he was considered incredibly insensitive and just like, vulgar. Like a pig.

Well, he looks vulgar.

Yeah, well, that was certainly what everyone thought of him where I worked. Harvey's just a pig. And his brother Bob was a little bit less that way. He was also involved. But, but, yeah, people knew that he was a bad guy, but, like, awesome movies. Yeah. And also. But he was just powerful. It's like Robbie Weinstein, like, want to fuck with Harvey Weinstein, right. I mean, I didn't really think about it too much, to be completely honest. That was just. He was just a guy I worked for, but I don't know. I didn't. I certainly, if you'd played that Alex Jones clip for me in 1999, I would have been. And I did see Alex Jones clips in 1999 and then in later years where he was talking about building seven. And I was very offended. I was, like, outraged that he would be suggesting that there was something about 911 that wasn't above board, that there was, you know, things we didn't know that were being hidden from us. And I was like, mad at Alex Jones for saying that. I remember that really well. How dare you?

The building's having one is wild.

Well, it is wild. It is wild. I mean, I have no. All I know is 21. I don't even know what year it is. 23 years. Could it really be 23 years after 911? 23 years later. What's the justification for classifying any document around 911? There's no justification.

Well, the same justification in classifying the documents about the Kennedy assassination.

Well, exactly. 61 years later.

Yeah. Or releasing the COVID vaccine data 75 years later.

Of course.

Yeah.

Right. I mean, it's. Of course. Look, secrecy is different from privacy. Privacy is necessary for the dignity of. This way you've got a door in the bathroom and your bedroom. Right. You know, you need privacy. Private thoughts. We have no privacy whatsoever. None. No privacy at all. Thanks to the. To the iPhone and government spying on us all. So there's no privacy, but there's massive secrecy. Secrecy is different. Secrecy of Beth's lying. The only reason to have secrecy is in order to do something that you're ashamed of other people knowing about. That's immoral and probably illegal. And there's more secrecy than ever. And that means that there's more lying than ever. There are more crimes being committed than ever. That's the surest sign of it. Why are there a billion classified federal documents in a so called democracy? Because they're lying to us, that's why. But 911, like, what is the justification for that? I don't know the answer. I really don't know the answer, but there is one that's for sure. It's not methods and sources. You think it's methods and sources trying to protect their saudi sources? I don't think so.

You know, the wildest thing about tower seven is that if you just say it looks like a controlled demolition, people get mad at you.

Why?

Well, I don't know why. I'm not saying that it is a controlled demolition, but I'm saying if you watch it, it looks like a controlled demolition.

But that happens all the time. Buildings catch fire and they just implode in on themselves. I think it happens every week. Right. And manufacturing plants that keep getting burned through fire, they all like.

It's the way it went down.

Yeah. So I say, why do they respond that way? And of course I responded that way, so. And I think, looking back, the reason that I did was because if you call that into question, you had to ask a lot of other really obvious questions. You didn't want to deal with. And you might arrive at the conclusion that a lot of your most basic assumptions are false and that you've been had and it's just too destabilizing, maybe.

Right. Well, the real problem with tower seven is they go, well, okay, if it was a controlled demolition, how was that engineered? Did they just decide to do that before September 11? And you know how long it would take to rig a building like that, right? Or was it built into the building? And how would they know it would even work? And how would they do something like that? And how would there not be a record of it being built into the building, like for someone to engineer?

And where's the sound signature on the tape? There would be a sound of the explosions.

Yeah.

Which is a fair question.

Yeah. So a lot of fair questions. And has there ever been a building that experienced a tremendous amount of damage because two enormous skyscrapers fell right next to it, damaged it, and then massive fire started. And then there's diesel generators that are in the basement, so they have all this fuel, so they have this incredible inferno in the basement that weakens the structure. Is that why it collapsed? Maybe.

Totally possible. A lot of building engineers disagree with that, as you know.

Yeah.

And they don't think that could have happened in the way you just described. I'm agnostic on it. What I know, cause I don't know the answer and I have no way of knowing. All I know is that there's no justification for keeping those documents secret that I can think of. And if there is, tell us what it is. No one has bothered because nobody presses. And it's, you know, I'll add that to the list of outrages.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

And then it gives you this feeling of helplessness because there's so many of those. They just pile on. There's always another one.

Well, the US government spied on me. Broke into my phone and spied on me, and I couldn't get a straight answer to that. And I'm. I'm not a felon. And.

Well, not only that, they used. They got into your signal account, right?

Yeah. And then they leaked it to the New York Times, what they found there. So it's one thing to say, okay, we picked up your text exchanges with a foreign national, which is true. I text a lot of foreign nationals because of my job. Why wouldn't I? And that's my right as far as I'm concerned. That's not illegal. But we picked up your text exchanges, which I think itself is a lie. I think they were targeting me. I think they are now. I know. I'm pretty positive they are, but whatever. Leaving that aside, we spied on you. We think we have justification. Is there a justification for leaking the contents of my private conversation to a news outlet in order to discredit me? No, there's no. That's secret police shit. Okay?

Yeah.

I'm not whining, ooh, I'm a victim. I'm certainly not a victim. But what was infuriating was my total. And I got members of Congress involved because I was pissed and I felt threatened. I couldn't get a straight answer. They were just like, we're not answering those questions. And what are you gonna do about it, bitch? What are you gonna do about it? I don't possess a drone fleet. There's nothing I can do about it. Actually, that's the truth. So when the system breaks down and things like, I don't know, honesty, justice, the law, none of those apply. The people in charge decide. Well, that doesn't apply to me. You are literally powerless and bizarre that.

The New York Times wouldn't have an issue with that.

The New York Times does that all the time. But bizarre, they wouldn't have an issue.

With the government tapping into your phone?

They work for the government. Are you kidding? The New York Times. The New York Times is a conduit for the lies of government. That's what it is. It's their tool. And they're perfectly aware of that. I mean, I used to write for the New York Times as a freelancer. I mean, I've been around the New York Times a lot. And there are. Yeah, there are a lot of really smart people there, for sure. Even now, I would less so now. But there's still, I think, smart people there. There are. I know some. And they know. But they think that. That, you know, it's worth it because they're bringing information or. I don't know what they think, actually. But no, they're tools of power. And that's like, the one thing that you're not allowed to be, even if you think the power is good. Like, maybe they all support the agenda of the US government, destabilizing the world and impoverishing their own population. Maybe they're on board with that. Even if they are, they shouldn't do it because the job of the media, the press, is to keep power in check. You are kind of like the seatbelt, right?

You know, you make sure that things don't go too far. So. And they're not doing that. They're acting as a willing handmaiden.

When do you think that switched?

I think it's been the case for a long time. I mean, if you look at what happened to Richard Nixon, which I, of course, did not understand at all, Richard Nixon was taken out by the FBI and CIA and with the help of Bob Woodward, who was a Washington Post reporter who had been a naval intelligence officer working in the White House. Working in the Nixon White House. And then he shows up like a year later, and he's this brand new reporter. He'd never been a journalist at all. He's a naval intel officer. The famous Bob Woodward we all revere. And he's at the Washington Post, and somehow he gets the biggest story in the history of the Washington Post. He's the lead guy in that story. Well, I worked at a newspaper. I've been in the news business my whole life. That is not how it works. You don't take a kid like his first day from a totally unrelated business and put him on the biggest story. But he was. He was that guy. And who is his main source for Watergate? Oh, the number two guy at the FBI. Oh, so you have the naval intelligence officer working with the FBI official to destroy the president.

Okay, so that's a deep state coup. What else? How would you describe that? If that happened in Guatemala, what would you say? And yet the way it was framed in the way that I accepted for decades was, oh, this intrepid reporter fought power. No, no, no. This intrepid reporter, Bob Woodward, was a tool of power, secret power, which is the most threatening kind to bounce the single most popular president in american history, Richard Nixon, from office before the end of his term and replace him with who? Oh, Gerald Ford, who sat on the Warren commission. Now, how did Gerald Ford get to be Richard Nixon's vice president? Well, because Carl Albert, the Democrat speaker of the House, told him, you must choose him. We will only confirm him when they sent the actual elected vice president away for tax evasion. Spiro Agnew of Maryland. So you have a complete setup, like an absolute. Gerald Ford, the only unelected president in american history, actually sat on the Warren commission. Something else that I accepted at face value. Until I looked at it, I was like, that's completely insane. You didn't want to interview Jack Ruby in your investigation, the assassination.

Okay, you're fake. Yeah, he was on the Warren commission. And so, sorry for the long story, but the point is, like, that happened in front of all of us. But the way it was framed cloaked the obvious reality of it. The people who broke into the Watergate office building from which the name is taken. Watergate. I think it was six of them or seven of them. All but one was a CIA employee. That's real. It's like, look it up on Google. So the whole thing. Richard Nixon was elected by more votes than any president in american history. In the 1972 election, he was the most popular by votes, which is the only way we can really measure popularity. The most popular president in his reelection campaign, and two years later, he's gone, undone by a naval intel officer, the number two guy at the FBI, and a bunch of CIA employees. You tell me what that is. Those are the facts. Those are not disputed facts. That's not crackpot shit. That's just look it up.

So why did they want to get rid of Nixon?

You know, there are a lot of theories on that. I mean, we don't. First of all, we don't need to know motive to know what happened. They, meaning unelected federal employees, got rid of Richard Nixon, which is the most anti democratic way to make a leadership change that there is. Okay. I should just say at the outset, I actually kind of believe in democracy. Obviously, it's not working well. Obviously, it's ending globally. There will never be another liberal democracy, unfortunately. But I'm attached to it because I was born here. I really believe in it, and it's better than any other system. So that's why I'm pissed. What was their motive? There are a lot of theories on this. There's an amazing conversation, it's on tape, between Richard Nixon when he was still president, I think it was in 1973, and I think it was Richard Helms, the head of the CIA, though I may have fucked that up. But it was the head of the CIA, and I think it was Helms. And Nixon says, I know why they killed Jack. So Nixon was a student of history, obviously a flawed and complicated person, but a very, very smart person.

And he was really interested in why this guy, who'd been president, just one president before him, was murdered. And he didn't think it was a lone gunman who was mysteriously assassinated two days later by another lone gunman. Like, it's so obviously bullshit. And he knew that. And he said to say, a director who, and you can listen to the tape, it's on the Internet, is totally silent on this question. So I think there was the impression, I don't think I know, that Nixon understood that the bureaucracy was really in control of the country. It wasn't elected officials, and that's a massive threat, because it's true. And there may have been other reasons, too, that I'm not privy to. Look, all I. And by the way, I didn't even know any of this, despite having moved to Washington in high school and been around this stuff a lot, a lot, a lot. I didn't know any of that. And I know Bob Woodward personally, and I know Carl Bernstein personally. I even work for Carl Bernstein briefly. So I knew some of the actual players in this, but I didn't connect the obvious dots because they weren't framed that way.

That's the point I'm making. It's the way that you frame things. You can have all the information available on Wikipedia, which is also controlled by the intel agencies, but there's still information on there. The information can be out there in the public domain. It's a matter of seeing it for what it is. Right?

Yeah. So Nixon said that he knew why they killed JFK. Did he elaborate?

Nope. And it's worth listening to. It's a very weird conversation. It takes place in the oval office, which famously had tape recording devices in it. Obviously, this became a big feature during the Watergate hearings. But yes, that conversation, and I may be mangling it slightly, but it's on the Internet and absolutely worth listening to. And the CIA director has this kind of sinister silence. So, like, if. If I'm the president, you're the CIA director, and I say, I know why the guy who was just President ten years ago was killed, the obvious answer would be like, well, why? What? You know why he was killed? You've got insight into the assassination of the US president. He doesn't say anything, just like a very weird response. Like what? Just gotta throw that out there. Like, if you say to me, you know, we're taking a leak, you're at the next journal, and you're like, I figured out the secret to life. And I'm like, huh? Okay. That's, like, not a good response.

Right, right.

It's a telling response.

Did you hear Trump's take on the JFK assassination? Why he didn't release the files?

Yeah, I know what Trump's taking.

He said that if you knew what I know, you wouldn't tell people either, which is crazy.

Well, that's his position on the UAP thing as well. Yeah, actually. And that's a lot of people's position on it. I mean, you know, Trump is saying, of course the CIA had knowledge of it. That is known. I mean, I mean, the whole thing, it's so funny. There's so many levels and there's so much I don't understand. But the whole JFK conspiracy industry, and it really is an industry, more books written on that than almost any historical topic is filled with wackos. Right? There are a lot of wackos in there. But that fact obscures the larger fact, which is the facts themselves tell an unbelievable story. And so whatever, I could get into it at great length. But, yeah, yeah, they're still classifying documents 61 years later. Both Trump and Joe Biden have, in violation of my read of federal law, kept those documents secret. There's no living person connected to the Kennedy assassination. It was a couple generations ago. There's no one person whose secrets are being protected. It's an institution. Or maybe countries, there may have been countries involved, too. I mean, I dont know the answer, but theres clearly something worth protecting.

And I know that when I spoke to someone whod seen the documents two years ago, and I got one fact out of him, which is, yes, the CIA was involved. And by CIA, CIA is a huge organization. But James Jesus Angleton, the head of the operations directorate, had knowledge of this, which I think is well known. But thats the view of someone who saw the documents. So I thought that was news. So I went on tv and said that the next day, I'll never forget it, I went quail hunting, and I was driving back and I got a phone call from Mike Pompeos lawyer. Mike Pompeo was the secretary of state, but before then, he was the director of the CIA. And in that position, he plotted the murder of Julian Assange. So he is a criminal as far as I'm concerned. But his lawyer called me and said, you know, you should know that anyone who tells you the contents of classified documents has committed a crime. He's threatening me, is in my car. I'll never, with my dog sitting next to me. I'll never forget this. And I said, are you really saying that to reveal that the US government had a role in the murder of a democratically elected president, to say that out loud, that's the crime.

What about the actual crime, which is murdering a presidential. Like, you're covering up for that. Mike Pompeo, he had no response at all. And so Mike Pompeo is the one who pressed Trump to keep those documents secret. And so it's like, what's crazy to me is not just that Pompeo did that. I think Pompeo is a really sinister person. And a criminal. I think that. I think that because the facts suggest that he was caught. Yahoo news Mike Isikoff wrote a long piece on this. Several years ago, his employees went to Mike Isakoff and said, hey, Mike Pompeo is plotting to murder Julian Assange, who has never even been charged with a crime in the United States as CIA director. That's illegal. You're not allowed. Federal employees are not allowed to just kill people they don't like. Okay, just to set the baseline here. So that's who Mike Pompeo is. But he somehow intimidated Trump into not releasing this. Well, okay, that's all bad, right? I think it's criminal behavior. What's crazy is how Mike Pompeo is treated. He's treated as, like a republican poo bah in good standing. He fully expects to become the secretary of defense in a Trump administration, which is, like, completely insane.

Why would you take a criminal and give him nuclear weapons? Okay, that's my view. I think it's a common sense view. And, like, he goes to fundraisers and dinners and everyone's like, hey, Mike Pompeo. It's like, no, you're the guy who kept information the public has a right to know secret. You're the guy who plotted the murder of someone who committed no crime. You are the outlaw. You are the bad guy. But no, he's treated as like, you know, like a pillar of Republican Washington. I think that's. I think it's mind bending to watch that. And by the way, you know, whatever. That's all I'll say, by the way. No, I mean, you know, people don't say that because they're worried about getting punished. They're worried about someone putting kiddie porn on their computer.

Right?

Members of Congress are terrified of the intel agencies. I'm not guessing at that. They've told me that. Including people on the intel committee. Including people who run the intel committee, the people whose job it is to oversee and keep in line these enormous secretive agencies whose budgets we can't even know. They're black budgets. They're the parents. The agencies are the children. They're afraid of the agencies. That's not compatible with democracy. Democracy is a really simple system, even representative democracy like ours. The people rule. They do so through elections. They express their preference through voting. They send their people to the capital city to run the government on their behalf. Whenever you have unelected people who are not accountable to anyone making the biggest decisions, you don't have a democracy, you have something else. Another system. I would call it a tyranny, or whatever you want to call it. It's not a democracy. So that's, like, super obvious. It's playing out in front of everyone, and no one cares, and no one does anything about it. And I think the reason is because they're threatened. And if you look at the committee chairman who allow this shit to happen year after year, they're all.

And I don't know, people say, oh, they're compromised or being blackmailed. I don't have evidence of that, but I know them, and they all have things to hide. I know that for a fact. And so it's not a stretch of imagination to imagine that some committee chairman who's allowing warrantless spying on Americans to continue, or whatever abuse they're allowing, knowing fully or hiding the truth about UAPs, ignoring the UAP Disclosure act of 2023. Like, why are they doing that? It's not impossible to imagine that some guy with a drinking problem or a weird sex life. And that's very common, very common up there. That's why they're doing it, because they don't want to be exposed. I don't. I don't have evidence of that. I don't proof of that, right? But that's not a crazy thing to assume that that could be happening. And I said to somebody, a very powerful person, the other day in a conversation in my kitchen, an elected official holds a really senior position, a very famous person. I was going crazy. I was so mad about all this stuff and about the warrantless spying and about the funding for these insane wars.

And I said to the guy who serves in one of the legislative bodies, I got so mad. My dogs were afraid. They were like, whoa, why are you yelling? Because I don't yell at home. But I was like, all these people are controlled. They're all got weird sex lives, and all these things are hiding, and they're being blackmailed by the intel agencies. And he said, and I'm quoting, I know. It was like, are we okay? So at this point, we're just sort of. We're just sort of admitting that's real. Like, why do we allow that to.

Continue having people compromise thing? God, that's an old story.

It's the oldest story.

J. Edgar Hoover. It's all of them. It's Epstein's island. It's everything.

But look, I don't have any. I'm telling you. What's the phrase the finance guys use? Open kimono. Like, I'm actually telling you all I know. I don't know anything. Else.

Right.

But I know that the publicly available facts tell a really clear story, which is the government is not acting on behalf of the population. And so it's inherently illegitimate because its only legitimacy derives from the citizenry. The only reason the government can do things that it does kill people, collect money by force. All the powers that it has come from one place, and thats the consent of the governed. Thats the only legitimacy they have.

And thats where its fascinating, this concept of good and evil. Because when you think about it, if this is true and if these people are compromised because they're secretly perverts and creeps, they are, though, and they're corrupt and they steal money, or they, all these different things are evil things. Lying, controlling people, engaging in unnecessary wars that are going to cost thousands of lives for profit. All these things are evil things. So if evil is real, evil would want those kind of people to be in a position of power.

Yes.

And here's evil would want men to breastfeed their children.

Here's the, like, op. Here's the illusion that we fall for time and again, we imagine that evil comes, like, fully advertised as such. Like, evil people look like Anton Lavey. Yeah.

You know what I mean? Black cloak.

Exactly.

Sickle.

Evil is an independent force that exists outside of people, that acts upon people. I really believe that. I've experienced it a lot, and it's obvious. And what vessel do they choose? The weak. It's weak men and women who are instruments of evil. The weaker the leader, the more evil that leader will be. So it's. And unfortunately, we've reached a time in american history where every leader is either a woman or a weak man, pretty much. And so there's, I'm sorry to say it, that's just true. And the weaker the leader. That's why Mike Johnson. Everyone's like, oh, Mike Johnson is such a nice guy. Well, I know Mike Johnson, and he's perfectly nice guy to the extent that he's, like, polite and seems kind of meek and restrained and he's not saying motherfucker. Every, you know what I mean? He's got, like, very sort of buttoned down affect. But he's a weak man, and that's the man you should be afraid of. The people who you shouldn't be less afraid of are the headstrong, loud, don't care what anybody thinks. Yeah, those guys will go off track, but they're probably not gonna abet genocide or blow up the world in a nuclear exchange because they may be obnoxious, but they know who they are.

Weak people just become a host for evil. An open, empty building that evil occupies, possesses, even. And that's exactly what's happening to Mike Johnson. That's, like absolutely crazy what Mike Johnson is doing, but it's not because he's evil. It's because he's weak and therefore susceptible to evil. It's a meaningful distinction that I have noticed.

It is a very strange thing how many weak people wind up being leaders in this society, and particularly because so many people don't want their live exposed. They don't want that eye of Sauron gazing down upon them if they try to run for president.

I get it. Or the physical threat.

Yeah, physical. Mean, look at what's happening to RFK, where the Biden administration, for the first time ever denied him Secret Service protection. It's absolutely, as a legitimate presidential candidate, what's absolutely nuts.

Yeah, I mean, how is that? I mean, it's hard. You realize that a lot of the things that we took for granted were actually voluntary. Like, people just didn't do things, because that's just wrong. That's not fair. You know what I mean? That's bad sportsmanship. There was a lot of self restraint involved in running a functional society. You can't just make an infinite number of laws and enforce them. That's impossible. You rely on people to just not do bad shit because, like, I'm not the kind of person who does bad shit. And once the people in charge decide, well, I'm just gonna do whatever I want, not all you can do about it. So the Biden administration denies him secret Service protection, and you're like, how can you do that? Like, we're doing it. What are you gonna do about it, bitch? And, like, the answer is, nothing, actually.

What is this most recent bill that they're trying to pass about the ability to monitor phones?

Well, it's just the nightmare scenario.

It's something that they're already capable of doing because they did it to you and they did it through an encrypted app.

Oh, they do? Oh, yeah.

How do they do it? Do you know how they use, how they got into your phone?

Well, there are two ways to do. It's interesting. And I was with Ed Snowden in Moscow and talked a lot about this because he's got the technical. He's first of all, an excellent and principled person. And his ex feed is a really good place to start for people to understand what's happening here. He's paid a huge price for being. Obviously, he's literally exiled to Moscow involuntarily. But there are a couple ways to do it. One, you could hack into signal, I guess it's open source. It was created with Ci money, as I'm sure you know. I'm not sure that's how you. I don't think you need to do that. You just capture the phone itself. You just capture the phone. And the bottom line on digital security is that nothing is safe from state actors who want to spy on you, period. There's no electronic communication that they can't monitor, period.

What about these things? Like, Eric Prince has some new phone out. I think it's called unplugged.

Yeah. Eric is a good friend of mine, and I have a couple of those phones, and I've talked to him a lot about it, and he's really a wonderful person. One of my favorite people, actually. But that phone is designed for a different purpose, I think. I know. And that phone is designed to keep Apple and Google from tracking you, which is sort of a separate category.

Like, was this Jimmy?

This is the bill, I believe, I think.

Which bill?

The one you were talking about.

Oh, okay. House Bill.

So that's it. Can we just roll down to what you highlighted? So this is like, a perfect example? So the Turner Himes bill. Congressman Mike Turner and Jim Himes. So who are Mike Turner and Jim himes? So it just be funny. Both those guys are the most. And who knows why? And you can sort of fill in the blank on motive. I'm not going to. But those are two of the most reliable water carriers for the intel agencies and for basically the federal bureaucracy in the Congress. Like, these are not people who are working for their constituents. These are people who are working for permanent Washington. I would say these are two of the most sinister people. I know more about Turner than Himes, so it's not surprising they're doing this. It would permit federal law enforcement to also force any other service provider with access to communications equipment to hand over data. Anyone with access to a WiFi router, server, or even phone, anyone from a landlord to a laundromat will be required to help the government spy. So that's the story right there. So basically warrantless. Oh, of course. Warrantless, absolutely. And in, you know, violation of the fourth amendment to the constitution.

As if anyone cares anymore. No one does, clearly. But I just remember when I was a kid, and we're roughly the same generation, you remember this, too. People would be like, oh, East Germany. Like, there are more spies than there are people. East Germany was like the most elaborate surveillance state ever created. And of course it collapsed. But we'd always make fun of East Germany or North Korea. Who has more privacy, the average North Korean or the average American? Well, obviously the average North Korean, because there's less technology. The US government spies on its own population more than the north korean government spies on its. That's just a fact. I'm not saying North Korea is preferable. I'm not moving there. I'm not carrying water for North Korea. What I'm doing is criticizing my government because I live here, because it was better. It can be better. It should be better. And it only will be when we demand it. And it's not some fucking esoteric, like, you have to be some crazy civil liberties lawyer or something like every person should demand, just as a starting point, a baseline that, no, you're not allowed to spy on me.

I didn't do anything wrong.

Right.

Like what?

Right?

No privacy. No humanity. You can't be fully human without privacy.

And you also have to take into consideration that these people that are ahead of these intelligence agencies that are requesting these data are just. They're just human beings. They're human beings requesting data from other human beings without going through a court, without going to a judge and getting a warrant, without stating a case, without having, like, some clear national security mandate, something.

Of course not. And there's no justification. I mean, by the way, we had Fisa. We've had the FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance act, since, I think, 1977, so it predates. 911. Did it stop 911? Oh, I don't think it did. Shut the fuck up. You're not protecting us. Actually, you open the southern border to anyone who wants to come. You're not checking ids. You're not doing any kind of biometrics. You're not even screening for COVID. So clearly you don't care about my safety. Stop telling me you do. You don't. You're a criminal. Stop this charade. You don't care about my safety. So using my safety as a pretext for spying me, it's not going to fly. Because I'm not that stupid. I may be kind of stupid. I'm not that stupid. No, you're doing this for one simple reason. Because this is what organizations do. They protect themselves. They exist for their own benefit. All human organizations, from the church bake sale committee to the Department of Justice, they all are the same. They're an organism just like any other. And an organism's main goal is to survive and reproduce, to get bigger. And you just see this throughout the federal bureaucracy.

Well, just so happens that the largest human organization in history is the federal government of the United States. And so all of this stuff benefits, its accrues to its own power. That's why like, let's say you believed every, quote, piece of science or scientific claim about global climate change, you would not reach the same policy conclusions. You'd be like, well, the first thing we need to do is ban private air travel because obviously that doesn't make any sense. And then the second thing we need to do is, you know, whatever. You'd look at it rationally from a scientific. If you bought the premise, which I don't, but if you did, you would that. No, you go through every climate, quote, climate demand. Not one of them disempowers large organizations, whether it's ngo's or the government of the United States, not one of them. They all make the government more powerful and they all make you less powerful. So that's when you know it's not really about the temperature of the earth's atmosphere, it's about making them more powerful and disempowering you. And it's not about who runs those agencies. The bigger the agency, the more effective it will be in doing what all human organizations do, which is protect themselves and increase their power.

It's fundamental. I guess that's what I'm saying. It's not about, oh, elect Trump. It'll change. No, it'll only change when like we're just eliminating the CIA and we're going to have like a small intel gathering service that feeds the president relevant information so we can make informed foreign policy decisions. But we're not going to, we're not going to like overturn elections in other countries in the name of democracy because that's insane. If we believe in democracy, then we're going to let people vote for their own leaders because we believe in democracy as a principle, right? Like, you just get rid of all this shit because it's not helping us, it's only hurting us. And it would take someone, you know, who'd be willing to be assassinated to do anything like that. And so as you're choosing your leaders, ask yourself, does this person mean it enough to die? And that's the same question you would ask about your own dad. Does he love me enough to die for me? About your own husband, does he love me enough to protect me from a home invader at risk to himself? Like, the basic prerequisite for leadership is love of the people you lead and the willingness to die for them.

And if you don't have that, you shouldn't be leading, period. That's true in the military, it's true in business, it's true in your home, and it's true in the government. And so no president will fix this unless he's, like, literally willing to die for it. In short of that, it can't be fixed.

I can think of no better way to end this conversation than that.

Joe Rogan, ladies and gentlemen.

Well, listen, man, it's been very fun getting to know you. I think you are a very. You're a controversial character in the world, but you're misunderstood. And I think if people pay attention to your actual work and the things that you talk about, I think you're generally a force of good. I really believe that.

I feel like I'm in the most conventional person who's ever lived. I don't think I'm radical at all. I'm the opposite.

In this crazy time, someone who's conventional and wise seems radical.

Maybe I'm hoping for a better time.

Yeah. I think a better time's possible.

Me too.

I do. It's just. We're in for a rough ride.

Yeah. I'm not disarming anytime soon.

Yeah. Thank you, Tucker.

Thanks, Joe.

Bye bye, everybody.