Transcript for #1639 - Dave Smith

Hello, Mr. Joe Rogues. That's cracker brother. Not much. We have to come back. Thank you.

Oh my god. I'm really such an idiot. Lost my wallet on a plane buying the stupid internet. I went into my bag to get my wallet so I could buy the dumb internet, which doesn't even work. in fairly weeks and left my wallet.

Yeah. It's like pointless. Yeah. And I had great when I got to the hotel I realized I lost my wallet and I was like, all right, there's a Starbucks here in the hotel. I'm going to go grab a coffee and just relax and I go up and order a coffee and then it just hit me. I was like, oh, I don't have a wallet. And then I was like, wait, hold on, let me figure out. Do I have the app? And I had to go set up the whole app and everything. And then I luckily these days you can buy it with an app. Yeah, you can do Apple Pay, too, and a lot of those. I had none of that set up, but now I have it all set up.

Yeah. I was pretty funny trying to check into the hotel and I had to get in touch with your guy to like tell the hotel that I've been and you go like, I really went up there and I was like, look, I'd like to check into my room. I do not have an ID. I do not have a credit card. I understand where this is probably going to be a little bit weird from your perspective. And probably you can't run a business where you just go, sure. Go on in. You want to be here? And I'm like, look, I have a name. It is David Smith. Now I know that comes off. Like, I'm just guessing a name. Probably top five names you would just guess. But do you have a reservation for a Mr. Smith? And can I have that, please?

Agent Smith. Yes. No, that's me. Well, I identify with Neo. More than Agent Smith? Of course. But... Agent Smith is a national. Yeah, it was real dick. Yeah. You made a few solid points. Did he? That whole thing about humans being parasites? Yeah. Remember that? And you were like, huh?

For sure. If you were like building a case against humans, Like, you were a neutral party talking to God, building a case against humans. You could build a pretty strong one.

That's the problem in America. No, no, it's way worse. These tiny, tainted men are ruining everything.

And isn't it crazy right that it's almost like just what we are as organisms? We could get this information and you're still kind of like, yeah, it's not we're not going to stop. Yeah. But that's what I'm wrap pro. Yeah, it's like how many of these geniuses have to come out and be like, listen, AI is really dangerous and we should stop building toward it. And then have to time even they go back to building toward it. Like they're just like, well, but at the same time, this is what we're doing and so I think that Lex Lex Friedman. I have not met him, but I'm a fan.

I am just for strategic reasons going to be in camp lex because it's happening either way. So I might as well, I'm going to try to believe lex. Yeah. I got super smart. If he thinks that, I'm going to go with him.

Yeah, look man. Think of fragile shit as like just that we got all these countries with H bombs and shit.

And then you'll just have like, you know, a Biden and all people in the media, just like talking shit, just kind of like pushing you to talk shit. like Joe Biden just gets in that interview and he's like I think Putin's a killer. Yeah, but he also could have dot. He could have handled it in a diplomatic way. Yeah. You don't have to be like, what are we doing? Between the two of us, we have 90% of the nooks in the world. Let's just slow down. It's like, yeah, Putin is a killer. So is Joe Biden? Yeah. We've all killed a lot of people between our two respective governments. So let's just not talk shit.

That was, look, Donald Trump, feel how he feel about him, not a fan. But one of the amazing things about Trump is that he had no control over the things he said. It all just spilled out. And every now and then he would say something where it was like, yeah, he's right about that. And he said it right to mama. And he said it right to mama. Below Riley's face. So Bill O'Reilly's face, Mr. George W. Bush, Republican, you know, news guy. And he goes, yeah, we're killers too. We killed a lot of people. And watching O'Reilly have to go, But it's different when we kill all these people. I mean, we're killing people to liberate a rack. You know, he's killing people and you're like, hmm. All right. Well, a lot of those people didn't want to be killed and it didn't really liberate them to murder them. So

How many people have you as lead wars killed in the Middle East?

So in Iraq, it's got to be well over a million, because that million number was from a while ago. So it's well over a million people that have died as a result of the war. Right. God knows how many in Libya, just by destroying the country. I think somewhere in the neighborhood of 500,000 in Syria is gone. Libya is a failed state, right? Yeah, completely failed state. One of the, you know, better countries in Africa, if not the best one to live in before, completely failed state slavery, just awful, slavery on YouTube.

All cause uh, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton decided they were going to overthrow Gaddafi for for their own reasons. Well, the officially stated reason was that he was about to go genocide all on on his own people, but all of this has been there was actually an investigation that that the bridge parliament held. And they basically determined they go, there was no grounds to think that this guy who had been in control for decades was all of the sudden about to go, you know, genocide on his people. But there, so I don't know what the number in Libya is. The number in Yemen is probably going to be somewhere between 500,000 and a million. I mean, so all in all, there's, I mean, it's millions. It's in the millions of people that we've killed in Muslim countries in northern Africa and the Middle East. Just, and I'm just talking 21st century, post 9-11, not even adding up the numbers before that.

Yeah, we'll be so crazy the idea that because someone's a bad man now It's okay to start dropping bombs on innocent people or overthrow a government I mean like I don't I think a lot of our presidents are bad man I don't want people to start bombing my family I don't think that's justified You know because of that and yeah as we you know in I'm and this is something the lesson we never learned in history that we really should have but in World War One Woodrow Wilson said he was gonna make the world safe for democracy that was the American mission in World War One And at the time, the world certainly was not safe for democracy. I mean, Europe was all monarchs pretty much. And we overthrew the monarchs. The monarchies pretty much lost. And the ones that are still there are like monarchies and name only, you know, England and stuff like that. And then in the next decades, you had the rise of Hitler, Stalin, Lenin and then Stalin. And you're like, oh man. Those monarchs don't seem so bad all of a sudden now. You know? Like, oh, shit. It turns out you could get rid of something and something much worse can come after it. You need a full-length plan. But for Obama, who even goes, you know, I think he acknowledged at one point that Libya was his biggest mistake. And he said, not having a plan for the day after Gaddafi was overthrown, was a big mistake. And it's like, yeah, I sure wish we had just lived through Iraq. Like, how could you not see that coming? How could you not be like, oh, yeah, and then after that, still tried to overthrow Assad. In Syria, right?

It was one of the most beautiful moments in modern American history. People really actually stood up and stopped a war from happening. So instead, they just covertly funded the al-Qaeda side of it. Jimmy Dore broke this down when he was on your show perfectly. Those guys who go like, They tell the story of Seria, and it's like the, you know, Mike Baker who I love, but his version of the story in Seria is like, well, Assad started killing all of his own people, and so what are we gonna do? You know, like, that's the story that they want to tell you, right? It's like, what was the other thing? There's guys just so bad. He's killing all these people.

It's a caricature of it. But that's more or less. That's more or less it, right? I love Mike Baker, by the way. But so that's, but the real story is that you go, okay, so if we're there, if the narrative is that we're there because Assad's killing his own people, and oh my God, I think he used a gas attack, or oh my God, I think he did this, and this is really dangerous. Well, then why is it that general Wesley Clark, is telling us on video that he saw plans to have regime change in Syria in 2003. Why are there articles in 2007 about regime change? Because he certainly wasn't killing his own people then. And then as Jimmy Dore broke down perfectly, you realize that actually what happened was that the CIA and the Saudis launched this Operation Timbers Sigma and they said that we are going to arm all of the anti-Assad rebels largely consisting of al Qaeda and ISIS in an attempt to take him out to have the next regime change that is that this plan had been in the works for years and when confronted with that threat Assad launched a brutal war against them. Certainly killed a whole lot of people. I mean, like if there was ISIS in a town, he'd just kill everybody in the town, like he didn't care. But the story's not as simple as like, oh, he started killing his own people. And so now we have to overthrow him. The story is we tried to overthrow him and in response, this war broke out where something like 500,000 people died.

If I'm not mistaken, I believe he ran before. I could be wrong about that. I think was he one of the Democratic candidates in 2000, I believe. So I believe this was after, after all that.

Yeah, no, it was really, really creepy. And it's very hard to not look back at that and go like, okay, well, Not all of it came true exactly, but certainly there has been an agenda since 9-11 to have one regime change after the next. In the Middle East, it wasn't just, oh, we have to go to Afghanistan and oh, we also have to go to Iraq because we think they have WMDs or something. It's like, well, why then have there been these five subsequent countries that we also have to go and overthrow? And no one ever, with the exception of Wesley Clark, no politician ever told the American people Hey, here's what our plan is. This is what we want to do. Do you guys agree with this or do you not agree with this? You have no say in this. We're doing this and each time we're going to claim that it's completely just like all of the humanitarian impulse, the people there.

Well, that's right. And what's happened is that the corporate press has lost their monopoly on information that they had for all of our lives. Like now it's like, well, you can get it from all these places. And that there's good and bad that comes with that. But they're also now flipping out and you can see it like they're losing their grip on power and becoming more and more insane about it.

Yeah, I forget his position, but it was a pretty big CNN guy.

Which is, which is to be fair, pretty obvious. Yeah. To anyone who just has an open mind and watches CNN. But to hear him say it, he still was, it was powerful.

that pushes already starting. Yeah. Um, you imagine just like if you were like the head of CNN and you have to give a meeting in the morning and you're like, all right. So one more time, guys, if a hot chick takes you out to a bar and starts asking you to tell her about how we're propaganda, that's that's James O'Keefe. All right. So please, please don't just start babbling about how we do propaganda.

Yeah, and the fact that it's funny because you almost want to envision it in like this like there's this grand plan or this conspiracy, but then you realize it's he's just a dude just being a dude just trying to like wag his dick in front of this girl. Let me tell you what we do over at CNN. Yeah, you want another drink. Yeah, we got that Trump guy out of there. Yeah, it's pretty much all us like, but just bragging about it. It reminds me of the Brian Williams thing where he told that lie about being under fire and you're like, it was purely just to look cool. Right. It wasn't even like he was trying to sell something.

I'm pretty sure Sinbad broke her down because he was like performing there and he was like, we weren't under fire. I might be wrong about that, but I think Sinbad blew the whistle on Hillary Clinton.

As Ron Paul was all that Ron Paul 2008 campaign is what changed my life and sent me on this trajectory. I guess I was a little bit interested just in the Bush years because it was like You know, like with the wars, the warna, Iraq and Afghanistan, and that I was in New York during 9-11, and so that kind of affected me. And I was kind of interested in that stuff. And then when the economy crashed in 2008, I was kind of like, what the hell is going on here? And I got- And then there was Ron Paul. who was his whole campaign was centered around, well, here's what's going on in the wars, and here's what's going on with the economy. And the first time I saw him, I just happened to be watching the Fox News debate, where with him and Giuliani, and it was just this little unknown baby doctor Republican congressman from Texas, like our Texas, who just got up there and just said, well, that's not what he does because we're free. They hate us because we've been bombing the crap out of them for like decades. And here's why. And then Giuliani was like, that's offensive that you would say that. See, this is what the woke shit used to be in the George W Bush years. It wasn't like, oh, that was a microaggression or your racist. It was the right wing version of that. It was you said something that doesn't support the troops. And I'd like you to publicly apologize for that. And Ron Paul went, mm-hmm. Now, so here's what happens, okay? You know how the CIA coined the term blowback? This is what they meant by blowback. They mean that our covert operations have unintended consequences. And if we think that we can just overthrow governments that we don't like, like we did in 1953 with Iran, and we installed a dictator, and then when they overthrew that dictator, guess who they hate? America, right? So that's what's happening. And he just explained it perfectly. It was irrefutable. It was like the best and I was like who the fuck is that guy? I want to learn more about him. And then I just started down this journey. And now here I am.

Well, you know what? It came when I started getting into this stuff. I was doing stand-up, and I was just Managing to not have a day job like I was just I could just it was just at the level where I could be broke But get by off comedy like Jay was taking me out on the road with him and stuff and like sides doing like enough gigs that I could like just make my bills out and so I had a lot of free time You know what I mean? I was like okay I got like maybe an hour of work today and then that you know I'll write a little bit or something and I just got obsessed with this shit and I had the internet And so I had that and and you know like I so I just got obsessed with it and I found all these different thinkers most Murray Rothbard Ron Paul Tom Woods Scott Horton like all these really really smart guys were breaking all this shit down and I just I don't know I just got completely obsessed with it.

We still do it every year. Yeah, when you do it, what month? Well, we usually do it around the summer, time like early summer, June or something like that. But sometimes it varies to because, you know, Ari will be out in, you know, like El Salvador for six months or something.

He's got some like, elaborate Andy Kaufman, ask like mission in his mind. He's free.

It's unbelievable, but he seems to be enjoying it.

I won't mention anything about the contents of it, but he sent me this video that was like the funniest most wildly offensive shit and I was like wait dude, you're not putting that out I told delete that and I believe you send it to me and then you want to send it to other people it goes just from the world ends

Just don't. Just skip this one. It's really funny, but just not this one.

I know. And his nose is a mess. I just saw him the other night. His nose is messed up. His eyes are messed up. His mouth. So I'm like, no. You know, I'm no expert, but I don't think that's how it's supposed to look after you get a little work on your gum's done.

Aside from that he looks good though. Oh, yeah. Looks healthy.

Got to follow the science.

It's it's been something man over this last year to watch. It's like I don't know how else you could describe it other than just mass hysteria. You're like no one you're not even allowed to just have any reasonable new ones to perspective where people flipping out about Tom Brady. at the Super Bowl when he got out of his limo and like walked outside without a mask. He's like a hundred feet away from the nearest person outside. And they're mad he doesn't have a mask on.

This has been this year has been an incredible gift to would be authoritarian regular people who now have been given public license to kind of like crack down on somebody for not following these rules. Everyone who's ever lived in an apartment building, you know, in a city. You know, there's always one person in there who's just like trying to enforce the rules on everybody else. Oh, you put recycling in the wrong thing. And it's like every one of those people in our society has been granted free reign.

Do you remember the, I think you shared this video recently? There's an old-known Chomsky video where he was just talking about the effectiveness of calling someone a racist or a sexist or a Nazi or something like that. And you go, as soon as you start defending yourself, you're now the guy saying, I'm not a racist because you've already lost. Like so this is why this this shit persists so much because it's so effective it puts you in like this binary position like well, you can either agree that you are a racist or be the guy who's like I'm not a racist or a black friends You already sound like an asshole. You've let so it's the same with the COVID thing like as soon as you start going down this line You're like, well, you're not taking the harsh stance of caring about people that I am, but it's bullshit. And it's one of my favorite things. My favorite Joe Rogan moments ever was when the first UFC back when you there was such a Joe Rogan moment. It was the first UFC back and everyone's like, oh, we're doing this. So there's this kind of energy of like, oh my god, there's an event. And you just at one point go, I think it was about how distant you distance to you guys were. And you were like, but this is stupid because we were all just together backstage. say it on air. I said you're broken moment because you're just not you're just like no I no one else is like saying this but I'm just gonna say this is stupid.

like that there were so many things right away that they're you're just like this doesn't make sense and they're all around us all all over the place today and you know and I just I hate this idea that like okay so we just completely overhauled our societal norms over this last year and I'm not allowed to just point out when they make absolutely no sense yeah I was here last time I was here in November when I came out and did the show. I was at my hotel and in the hotel lobby and there's like a bar in the hotel lobby and then you know like chairs out in the lobby and this this older guy sits down in the chair and he takes his mask off and the woman behind the desk was like sir sir you have to keep your mask on and then you look at this and then you just pan over this way and there's people at the bar sitting down with their masks off drinking whiskey. And you're just like sitting here and you're like, how am I supposed to look at this and not go? This is insane. Like, either that doesn't make sense or that doesn't make sense. But the two of them together do not make sense.

It's very easy to when you're dealing with Jordan Peterson when he's speaking out about the Bill C-16 and one of these things. All right. Well, they're just kind of making you call a trans person. They're preferred pronouns. It's just kind of this small thing. But you have these legal precedents that are set. And then when the big thing comes, they already have the precedent to say, well, we don't have to respect your freedom to gather or your freedom of speech. Right. If it's a very dangerous road to go down. And even even here in America, we The Constitution and the Bill of Rights and all of this is still just kind of an idea. Like, you know, Governor Murphy, the Governor of New Jersey. I don't know if you saw this. It was last April or May. It was pretty early into the lockdown stuff when he was on Tucker Carlson show. Did you see that? No. So Tucker Carlson, again, feel however you feel about him, he's good on some things, he's bad on some things, but he gave one of the lockdown governors a really tough interview at the height of it. And very few people were doing that. And he said to Governor Murphy straight up, he goes, okay, so he talked about this thing that had just happened where I think like 15 Jewish people were arrested for going to synagogue. And he goes, okay, so you just arrested these people for going to synagogue. Where do you get that authority? I mean, this is a clearly constitutionally protected right. Like, you can read the first amendment and no, you don't have the right to do this. And Murphy just responds without any hesitation. He responds, we weren't thinking about the Bill of Rights. He goes, that's above my pay grade. He goes, what worth thinking about is the health issue. So he just told you straight up that like, Well, we repealed the Bill of Rights. At least for this moment. And basically, that's what happened all around the country. The United States of America went totalitarian in 2020. Now, you can believe it's justified because of the virus. I'm not even arguing that. But the fact is, I mean, like the word totalitarian gets overused. But how would you describe 2020 other than totalitarian? When you have people watching their television to find out what they're allowed to do today from their governor. Oh, my governor said I can have a funeral for my father or my governor said we can go to work or we can go to church or we can now we said we can't do that. I mean, that is blatant totalitarianism and you could be really concerned about COVID fine. But are you telling me you're not also concerned about totalitarianism? Like take a look at the 20th century. It's hundreds of millions of people were killed by totalitarian governments. That's scary scary shit.

Yeah. I was really hopeful and and foolishly so that I was really hopeful that when it was Trump, maybe some people on the left would have woken up to that. and been like, oh, yeah, you know, all that hypothetical, it could be somebody who you really hate. Well, guess what, now it is. So maybe we should make the presidency not so powerful. So just in case the guy you hate so much gets in there, you know, he doesn't have all of this power, but that just wasn't the conversation. It was just racist and Russia, and that said,

You remember that thing with her and Schumer where they put the fucking the the robes on and the hat on like this is theater this is yeah easy people theater but that's the point right that this is theater this is all and so much of it is that and so much of the corporate woke shit all of that this is theater you are power brokers and that you're really counting on people being stupid and unfortunately I guess too many of them are to really buy into the fact that this is some real display. You are just using this in order to consolidate more power because that's what drives these people and it's you know that's like the thing that's really that I really try to drive home especially to leftwing people about all the woke shit is that you're like just look to take a step back and look at what's happening here This is all being used to fool you. Like do you think it's a coincidence that like JP Morgan Chase is they're like building floats in the gate pride parade and yeah the fact that Ray Theon is putting out these press releases about how we have you know we're a very inclusive place for transgender people to work and all this it's like they're buying you off they're just trying to say like hey if we throw you this token then can we continue doing all the horrible shit that a good leftist should have a problem with Like, you know what I mean? I think Jordan Peterson and James Lindsay, you had him on, right? James Lindsay. And these guys, they do a great job of breaking down the academic roots of wokeism. You know, like all this stuff about critical theory and the Frankfurt school and the postmodernists, and they're right, I think, about just about all of that. But to me, like the real interesting thing about what's actually going on now, is not just that there's some crazy theories going through college campuses. It's like, why do all the biggest corporations, all the politicians, the CIA, the Pentagon, why are they pushing all this shit? All the sudden? And I think it's pretty obvious that they were like, well, this is the perfect tactic for them. that they can, this is their way to buy off the left wing resistance to them, play Kate them with nonsense that doesn't actually require them giving up any power, and pit the left wingers and the right wingers against each other to be fighting this culture war, and what is the actual agenda here? Well, we have to stay in Afghanistan because of feminism. So it's the same thing. It's the same thing it was during the busheers. It's the same thing now. It's the same corporate interest pushing it. It's the same big government in bed with them and all this shit is just a distraction.

Yeah, we're with you, totally. You know, it's like you had, you know, was 10 years ago, the left wingers are outside the big banks and they're chanting, we are the 99%. And what did they really mean by that? They didn't even mean 99%. They meant 99.9%. They were talking about people who own banks. It's the rest of us versus the people who own banks, the people who own a hedge fund versus everybody else, right? That's their populist message, right? And then, You have the big banks going like, well, how about this? We will send all of our white execs to diversity training.

Is that a good deal? Good deal now, roll in. And it's got to like, oh, OK. And now, instead of the 99%, what is the message? It's like, well, we are the 5% and we are the 13% and we're the 7% and everyone's fighting everyone. All this woke messaging is the exact opposite of 99%. You know, they did a very good job of tearing that whole movement apart, tearing that whole impulse apart. that it's like everyone versus the really powerful people.

Well, I mean, if you're trusting the people who we know do this shit in other countries to govern us here, why would you expect any better than that? You know, it's like, it's so funny like when they expect the people who will just slaughter hundreds of thousands in third world countries to then run like our welfare programs here. You're like, what's so you think all of a sudden they want to take care of you? It's like, would you let someone who's like killed kids babysit your kid? Because they go, well, he killed kids over there. I mean, I'm sure he'll take care of my kids. I wouldn't want those people anywhere around anyone's kids.

It's becoming obvious in the country that it's like things are spinning out. Things are spinning out of control. And I think pretty much everybody has to see at this point that like this country's in real trouble. Like we're unlike a suicide mission here. This is of whole new place of unsustainability, then we've been in the past. And it's easy to see, right? So you're absolutely right. It's like the left wing and the right wing are like spinning out of control and getting crazy and crazy. But to me, I think the real story of the 21st century in America how we went from the Clinton 90s to where we are today. You know, in such a good place as a country. I mean, there were lots of problems, but not we weren't on a national suicide like we are now. But to me, the real story is that the center became the radicals. And then there was nothing to glue the radicals back together. They lost any leg to stand on to be like, okay, that's a little bit too radical. That's a little bit too radical. Come back in the middle. So, which was basically the message of CNN through the entire Trump years. It was like, look, look, look. We don't want to go crazy, socialist, and we definitely don't want to go crazy, nationalist, right wing. Let's just meet in the middle. with Hillary Clinton and Lindsey Graham and the adults in the room who have destroyed the entire country. And I like it like this, right? Like let's say hypothetically, if you, let's say we lived in a society that you Joe Rogan would consider a pretty decent society. Like, you know, I'd say what you want. You know, I don't even know exactly what that would be. But what you would be like, oh, this is a pretty normal society. You know, we don't fight stupid wars. We're not all at each other's throats. There's good health care, good education. Like it's a reasonably what Joe Rogan wants society. And so now you're the centrist. who supports the status quo because you like the country, you like what the government's doing, you think this is all good. And then some radicals came to you and made proposals like this is what I think we should do instead of this society that you have. And let's say one was the most radical left-winger that you know today and one was the most radical right-winger that you know today saying all of their crazy shit and you're the left-wingers like we should have the woke police and hate speech laws and all of this and the right-wingers like we should be nationalist and we should build a wall and we should you know whatever it is. And then there was someone else who represents the neoliberal neo-conservative establishment order. And they came to you and they said, well, here's what I think we should do. I think we should attack seven countries in the Middle East and slaughter millions of innocent people. I think we should spend ourselves $20 trillion into debt that will pass on to our children. I think we should build up huge, a huge prison industrial complex and put people in there for non-violent victimless crimes. I think we should tax people and then bail out big banks and big corporations with the money. And you're just looking at these three people. Would it be obvious who the radical is? Would you look at the left-winger and the right-winger and say, well, that's really crazy, but this guy really has something to say. I think there's an argument that that's the most radical shit you could propose. So now those guys became the extremists and now they have no leg to stand on to tell a radical leftist or a radical right-winger, well, you're being a little bit too radical. So like fuck you, you're too radical. Look at this whole goddamn system. You inherited America and destroyed it. So who are you? And then truthfully Donald Trump, I think, signified the, yeah, fuck the whole establishment. And then he did such a bad job with it that he handed them back one last out where Joe Biden could go. Isn't normal a little bit better than this? Let's come back to normal. But the problem is that normal is all of that extremist radical shit that destroyed the country. So that's where we are now.

Well, it's because we're so like zoomed in. We're so like living in the 24 hour cycle, you know, of like what just happened or what just happened. I mean, like stories like like the accusation that Donald Trump was colluding with a hostile foreign power is like what that's years ago you know what I mean like that's not even like we're talking about what happened on the 6th of January when they bet you know but if you just zoom out a little bit more And you're like, okay, but what really happened here? And why were the right wingers willing to go with Donald Trump? And why are they willing to storm the Capitol? And even if it's just a few hundred storming, the rest of them at least protesting, and tens of millions don't believe the election was legitimate at all. And why do they have such little faith in all of these institutions? And I think, again, you could zoom back very far, but just keeping it in the last 20 years. It's like, well, look at everything. Look at what everything was. They thought all of these wars that everyone knows are bullshit. They've robbed the American people and just given all the money to huge corporations, the big banks, we have just incredible levels of corruption. I mean, just like baked into the cake now where we have the society where there's like crazy low interest rates and crazy high government spending. So all of the new wealth, I mean Bernie Sanders nails it when he talks about this, although I don't think he looks at those as the reasons. But it's like all of the new wealth coming in disproportionately goes to the top. The whole system is completely skewed toward the already powerful, because you have low interest rates. So now you have a whole speculating economy where everyone's got to get in investments and stocks and bonds and try to make money that way. And so, of course, the Wall Street speculators make crazy profits, and then if they fail, they get bailed out. And you have record high government spending, so the politically connected are getting all of this fucking money. So regular people are just more and more starting to realize like, hey, this whole system is bullshit. And fuck it, I don't believe it anymore. And I think it bubbled over to a point. On both sides, on the left and the right.

Because this is crazy. the solution is libertarianism and I know that a lot of people it's easy to just kind of laugh that off or whatever but this really is I'm not saying it has to be like my exact perfect you know like you have to agree with me on everything but the clear solution to all of this is liberty it is all of this shit is a deviation from what America was really supposed to be, which is basically the declaration and the bill of rights, which are still pretty damn good. And if we just followed them, we'd be in a much better place. I'll tell you with the police stuff, look, you're never going to have a perfect system and there's 300 million people and they'll be incidents and problems and police brutality things will happen. But what Justin Amash put forward in Congress, what roundpalls put forward in the Senate is basically pretty damn good. And the Warren drugs. and qualified immunity and civil asset for a feature and the no-knock raids and particularly raids over bullshit. Like, there should never be a SWAT raid unless someone is an imminent danger. I mean, okay, there's a hostage situation or something like that, but my god, a SWAT raid over suspicion of drug possession. This shit is insane, which is what Breonna Taylor died from, right? Just end all of this shit. Those five policies right there would take care of at least 80 to 90 percent of the problems. What's the immunity one? Qualified immunity basically means that police officers in certain situations, not all situations, but basically are immune from being sued, the way other people could be sued. So if you are a police officer and you do something that anybody else could would have a lawsuit against you for, they're protected under qualified immunity. They did something about that in New York City, right? I'm not sure. I know there was a proposal for that. I'm not sure what ended. I'm coming from it past. You might be right about it.

I think that would do a lot to help. A lot to help. And I got to say, honestly, I think that perhaps that the guilty verdict in this case against Derek Shobin will make another cop think twice if they're in a situation like that, which I think that is certainly a good thing. But just to your other question about the bigger stuff with, you know, just the government in general, like what's the answer to not making people want to storm the capital? I really think that, and I just mean this from almost like a medical perspective, like this is why the country is going to die, and this is the only thing that could solve the problem, is some type of decentralization, like a limiting of the power of the federal government, The reason why people are so worked up about every presidential election is just because the federal government has too much damn power and whoever is the president is now like half the country has to live under Biden's rule right now and they hate that and the other half of the country would have had to live under another four years of Donald Trump and they hate that And so I think the answer is just to reduce the size and power of the federal government, make it not that consequential who the president is, make more, more decisions on local levels, on community levels, on state levels, everything before you get to the federal government. And just on a practical level, the federal government doesn't do a good job at any of it. So to me, this is the thing, but I would say that like the big issues that, and this is why like I'm real all in on the libertarian party, and I know people laugh off the libertarian party sometimes, Not all of the candidates they've put out have been great and not all of the messaging has been that great either, but the Democrats and the Republicans are like rotten to their core. They're just completely corrupt parties that do nothing but rape the American people and our incomplete agreement over all the things that I just laid out that are the worst things that our government does. And what we need is basically a movement in America to say, hey, look, we're going to end the COVID regime. That's to me first and foremost. COVID regime, what do you mean by that? The lockdown regime, the restrictions, all of this stuff. This is over. The vaccines are here. President Joe Biden says they'll be available for everyone. Whoever wants to get the vaccine can get it, whoever doesn't is comfortable with the risk. And that's that. We're done with, we're going back to normal life. like the old normal, not some new normal, like we're going back there. That's got to be step one, ending all of the wars, ending every last one of them. We don't need to be fighting in third world countries over how they run their government. It just has nothing to do with America, we're bankrupt, we can't afford it, and none of these countries are legitimate threat to us anyway. So we end all the wars, and then after that it's like ending corporate welfare. Like, once in fucking for all, not one more dime of hard-earned taxpayer money is going to billionaires. You know, feel however you feel about welfare for the poor, we can have that conversation later, but no more fucking welfare for the rich. Like, fuck that. They don't need it. And the middle class can't afford it.

Well, if you look at, so, I mean, there's many different forms. But if you just look at over the last year, the COVID stimulus, right? You know how you'd always be like, oh, you know, the money they're giving you doesn't really add up to the whole bill. It'd be like, okay, so it's a $2 trillion bill, and like 130 billion of it is checks to people. What else is all the other shit in that bill? How come the bill was 2,000 pages long? And basically, all of it is, all it is, is giveaways to politically connected big business. And it's all over the place. And there's bailouts for the airline industries for communication industries, the banks, the federal reserve, you know, easy money that they give to the banks. That's just always going on.

Oh, yeah. There was also a bunch of foreign aid that was tucked into one of them. I think, you know, So I forget exactly how much, but Israel got a few billion dollars last year, Saudi Arabia got money and all these countries. So you're just giving out money. Well, our middle class is broke. Has had the roughest year in modern American history. Now we're giving money out to all of these interests. So you end that and the lockdowns and the wars. and all victimless nonviolent crimes, like we're just not putting people in jail who didn't hurt other people. And so all of this shit is not, it's not some like, oh, you have to become an anarchist libertarian or something like that tomorrow. It's just like, let's take the worst things that we do and get enough people on board to stop doing that. Like that would be enough. to save the country from its impending death.

Yeah, absolutely. That would change the relationship that we have with law enforcement. Well, look, there's, there's so much. I mean, you're absolutely right about all of that. And to me, like, and this is the essence of like why I'm a libertarian and why I believe in this shit. It's not Like to me, it's just as simple as, are we slaves or are we free men? Like which one are we? Because if I can't choose what I can put in my own body, then I'm a slave to somebody else. And I don't mean like child slavery or in the same sense, but like you are not a free person. If you can't make a decision about what you put in your body. And so obviously directly, like you just said, the most immoral thing about it is the idea of throwing a human being in a cage like an animal. for the crime of putting something in their body. But then on top of that, when you talk about the relationship between people and cops, the effect of the war on drugs has, I mean, look, just like under prohibition, when the gang culture rose up and the murder rate skyrocketed, and then when we repealed prohibition, the murder rate went back down. And then the gang members moved into prostitution and gambling, the other prohibitions. This is where violent gangs flourish is like in the dark corners of prohibited activities that there is a large demand for, because then there's money to be made there. And whatever you do about the laws on drugs, the demand is not going away. And so now you're gonna have gang violence in all the inner cities. Now you're gonna have gang shipping drugs through the border and stuff like that. You get all of this violence comes in that doesn't need to be there. And there would be nothing that America could do to turn around the crime problem in the inner cities throughout this country, and to just end all of the prohibitions. Just be like there's no more money to be made here for you guys. And now let what happens in California and other places, let legitimate businesses come in and do it. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's a lot better than having high murder rates and high incarceration rates.

Yeah, Trump's been defeated. They're now they're more including of immigrants. You can get in now and also and there's it's really tragic and very complicated. But they'll even when you do these things that do sound kind of humanitarian and nice. So Biden will do a thing where he's like, hey, well, look, we're not gonna, you know, if you're on the other side of the border, if you have like a young kid with you. We're gonna bring you in. We're not just gonna leave you there on the other side. It's like, okay, that sounds nice. but now what did you just incentivize? Everyone got to bring a young kid with you. If you're making this journey, make sure you bring a young kid and there's something truly fucked up about incentivizing more young kids to make this horrible journey. So there's lots of problems there and so this is why I say just the cleanest, easiest answer is to end the war on drugs. And look, the American taxpayer right now, you are your subsidizing the enforcement of the war on drugs, right? You got to pay for that with your tax dollars. You got to pay for the DEA and the FBI and all the local police departments and all their fancy gear and all the swat rates. Taxpayers got to pay for that. Then the taxpayers got to pay to subsidize immigration with all of the like, you know, welfare that immigrants can receive and not there's lots of welfare programs they can't receive, but they definitely get like their kids go to school, they go to hospitals, they get to this, right? So you've got to subsidize the immigrants, you have to subsidize the war on drugs, then you have to subsidize the war on immigration, like ice and all of those people. And we're paying for every side of this ridiculous policy when we could just go make the drugs illegal. And that's that. Heroine is never going to be as socially normalized as weed is because it kills people. If you ever talk to Dr. Carl Hart, I think I've heard him on your show. He's guy with dreads, right?

You know, yeah, he's a guy. He doesn't like regularly or something like that. He does. Yeah.

Do you remember the guy, did you, I don't know, I can't remember was this on the year show, um, booze the guy was talking about the, um, the test with the rats. And so basically there was this one test that they had with a rat, um, and it was like in the 70s, I think, and this came like the gold standard. So it was basically they had a rat alone in a cage and two water bottles and one of them had cocaine in it. And the rat just went to the cocaine one and then took it until he died. And they were like, oh my God, it's addictive. You have it once. You're gonna die. And then they started looking at it and they go, well, you know, this is a pretty miserable situation for a rat to be in. Like his life is miserable. He's alone in this cage. So what if we give him like mates and all these toys and lots of food and then put the two water bottles together? And he just had a little bit and then goes back to the water. Because it is fine. And there's something really profound about that. that the real problem there is not the substance. The real problem is all the other conditions around you that would lead to you just being like, fuck, this high is better than anything else I have in my life and I'm just gonna do this until I die.

And he loses his job because he's got this felony on his record. His life is all messed up. He loses job now as marriages on the rocks. It's like one thing after another. And these things like these policies have these huge like ripple effects outward. You know? I hear people are saying, the other day, they're like George Floyd, you know, eight is stash. And that's why he was flipping out when the cop came, which I don't know if that's actually factually true or not. But a lot of people were saying that that's what happened is that you need to stash like when the cops were coming, you're like, well, if that is true, that's again, it's because they're fucking illegal. Right.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

And everybody's when Ron Paul said it. He said it in South Carolina at the Republican presidential debate. So in a South Carolina Republican primary and the Chris Wallace from Fox News is going, Sir, you would make heroin legal and it's so great that it was Ron Paul because if it's like you know if it's like a left wing hippie type guy saying that it's real easy to like dismiss but it's like Ron Paul conservative Christian country doctor and he's just like yes and he said at one point he goes how many people here in the audience would go do heroin if heroin were legal. Are you all sitting there worried that you need the government to protect you from the urge to go try heroin? You know, and he's like, look, do we believe in liberty or not? And it got an applause. And then Chris Wallace was like, right, never thought heroin would get applause at South Carolina. But you're like, but really, they were just applauding for freedom. Yes. Like it's not, it's not for heroin. It's like, look, man, freedom means you can do a lot of things that others probably think you shouldn't do. It's too bad Ron so old.

Yeah. Yeah.

He was, uh, he was always a little too old for the time of his movement. You know, like he, if, if hit, if the movement had come with him 20 years younger, I really think he could have changed the world. Um, yes, he's also. He's also a little too nice. to be frank, like Ron Paul's just too good of a person to quite have that thing. If he just had like a touch of Trump, like just a little pinch of Donald Trump, it's like really go at people. I think maybe that would have the confrontational nature would have gotten him more attention.

Yeah. Well, that's why he's just a pinch. It's a little pinch. I don't want to don't put too much Trump in there.

Um, Rand Paul's just different than Ron Paul is. He's not, you know, he's not the same guy. Um, and a lot of us libertarians, the hardcore libertarians were really disappointed in his presidential run in 2016. We really hoped he would kind of pick up the mantle and run with it and it just, it didn't work out.

Yeah, I don't know. I think that was part of it. I think that Ron Paul was like a happy warrior who was just happy to go and do all this stuff. I don't think Ram Paul enjoyed it as much. I also think that Ram Paul compromised too much on some of the really important issues and just didn't I don't know. He just did not do what he needed to do in that campaign in order to really keep that movement going. And it's a shame because really in many ways, Ron Paul Like Ron Paul represented to me, like a return to normalcy for America. Like he was really the purest constitutional conservative up there who is just saying, look, this is not what we're supposed to be. We're not supposed to be an empire. We're supposed to be a republic. We're not supposed to be a limited government, not an out of control, huge government. Let's go back to normal. We don't need to be like this. And then What Donald Trump, who we ended up getting, represented this like middle finger to the whole establishment. But then he took us to something else that was even more abnormal. And it just, the country needed Ron Paul, but we got Donald Trump.

Yeah, the whole thing was bizarre. The whole thing was bizarre.

They're already doing that. But I don't think they can drag him over the four-year finish line. You don't think so? No.

I think I think two years I'd be impressed.

No, I think Harris could pick whoever she wants. Oh, really? I believe so. Is that how it works? I'm not sure, you know, I'm not sure, but I don't think.

She becomes the president.

Yeah, it's maybe not a great system when two people have to die from Nancy Pelosi to be president. That's not the best system.

I'm not optimistic. I, this is why I'm, I'm all in on the libertarian party. That's what we need. Maybe I'll do it and I'll just be the libertarian party candidate. Hold you now. I'm 38.

Yeah, that's true. But you know what?

There you go. Yeah. In all seriousness, I'm kind of considering it. Really. There are a lot of people who want me to run and I just want somebody who will just say what needs to be said and talk that liberty shit the way it should be talked. But what we're looking at are the Democrats and Republicans. It's going to be Harris running against, I don't know, maybe to Santa's.

Oh, he's the guy who is like real hardcore Trump. I don't know anything. I might be confusing him with someone else. I might be wrong about that.

Yeah. It became, it's like everyone else got priced out. Yeah. These things just got so expensive.

Well, how do you not look at, I mean, just like the people voting with their feats, flooding out of these areas. And not look at that as just conclusive. Yeah. Like, well, these policies are bad. Yeah. And these are better. I mean, it's like the, the, um, the comics built the wall in Berlin. to stop people from flooding out because it was disproving their whole experiment. I mean, they couldn't sit there and watch everybody flooding out of, you know, communist countries into the democratic countries and sit there and go, no, our system is really way better for the people. So they had to build a wall to stop them from leaving. And right now, you're almost watching it. It's unbelievable. We, you know, if you read the New York Times, you turn on CNN or something like that, and they'll be sitting there telling you how responsible, you know, Cuomo and NewsomR and how reckless, you know, Florida and Texas, you know, have been. And then you're watching people flood. from those cities into the other one, and you're like, well, okay, but isn't that kind of conclusive proof? That just like, it's a complete rejection of this lockdown shit. Like, this did not work.

Right. And you would think if we were being reasonable, right? If you were advocating for lockdowns. like you're advocating for destroying people's businesses, suspending basic human liberty, you know, obviously everyone knows there's going to be all types of disastrous effects of, you know, keeping people at home, ruining jobs, all of this, right? Like we're asking you to give up life. Like this is a pretty big ask, really a demand. Well, you would think the onus was on you to show not that this helps a little bit, but there has to be some drastic like very clear look the states that are locked down are doing like 10 times better the states that are opened up and as soon as that was obviously not the case It should have, if we were just dealing an honest debate, destroyed the entire lockdown argument. And all of the predictions that have been completely wrong, like what you were just saying. And they never, you know, I remember people saying Sweden by the summer, by last summer there'd be hundreds of thousands dead in Sweden. And then by the time the summer hit there were like 6,000 COVID deaths. And you're like, anyone gonna take that back? Just go, hey, we got it wrong. We just find, you know, people get things wrong. They're just just a month ago, or whenever was that a Texas opened up. Fauci said cases are gonna are gonna spike now.

Yeah. But isn't this also like, like, just completely circular logic? Yeah, where you're like, okay, so if I say this is gonna happen and then the opposite happens, it's because of what I said that was, you know what I mean? That's what Cuomo was coming on. It's been chasing New York.

He was using these fucking down home analogies like, oh, and I just can't tell you what I can't stand, which just like makes my blood boil is when they use Your basic freedoms as a negotiating tool. Like they're like, well, if you do x y and z, then maybe we'll let you have restaurants exactly. Maybe we'll let you do this like get back some of your freedoms like you're now you're using my freedom as a carrot on a stick to get me to do what I want to do like what type of six shit is that.

Well, and I said just like I said before, if you're just looking at the bigger picture of it, you're like, look, this is, and I think objectively, the country went totalitarian for about a year. Not every single part of it was as totalitarian as the rest. But according to governors out of their own words, they suspended the bill of rights. And we've been in a year living under that. How long do you think we can go? in living in a totalitarian society before that's just what our society is and there's not really a memory of the old normal or at least that seems like the old times that's not who we are anymore we're already dangerously close to that position and now we have this opportunity where it's like hey Joe Biden says that everyone who wants to take the vaccine will be able to take it I think by June, he said, everyone who wants it will be able to take it. And that's a perfect little opportunity point to go, okay, so we break out of it now. Now we break out of it. Now you can make a sound argument that if the vaccines available for everybody, the people who want it can take it and the people who don't are choosing to take the risk. And now we go back to normal life. And at the same time, they're proposing this vaccine passport, which really, if you look at the proposals, isn't a passport, it's an app. Right, your medical history, your data can be tracked, your location can be traced, all of these things. But what they're talking about doing now when we have this fork in the road, we could go back to being a free country. Not as free as some of us would like, but at least the way we used to have it. Or we can go to what is being proposed and talked about, which is a national caste system. where there's one group of people who have basic freedoms and rights and one group of people who do not. They don't have the freedom to travel. They don't have the freedom to go to events. Maybe not to work. Ideas have been floated out about grocery stores that that's a national caste system and also just You know, throwing away the idea that you have any type of medical privacy from the government. This is being it's being done in collusion between big businesses and governments. And this is already happening. It's being done in New York City. It's being done in other countries. And there were reports in the Washington Post in CNN about the Biden administration meeting with these big businesses to say, you know what? It's not really good enough to do a local level or a state level thing. We need to have one national standard. So you're talking about a national caste system. And if we embrace that, man, I don't mean to be hyperbolic, but like I think this whole thing is fucked. Like I really think this whole country, we are not gonna come out of this. If we embrace the idea of now, this is an idea straight out of the Chinese social credit system. This is what they're proposing, we do. By the way, China already has the COVID passport. This is what China does. That's it. No sense of like you have a right to do this or you have a right to not do that. And come on, you think they're going to take that power. And then this will only ever be used for the COVID vaccine.

It logically it makes no sense morally. It makes no sense, but it is an unbelievable opportunity for the government to really keep a serious, you know, level more of control.

Yeah, so what happened was there were these reports that were out that said that the Biden administration was consulting with these these big businesses on how to do it. There was a big uproar about it and then when she was asked she was like, no, no, no, we're not going to do that. And ultimately, I think that's quite possibly what ends up happening. Like I think oftentimes they put out these feelers to kind of see what the people are willing to take. Like going to war with Syria. Yes. Yeah, it gets a little bit too much push back. Yeah, remember when they tried to regulate the internet during the Obama's yesterday soap bill or whatever. They put it out there. Everyone lost their shit. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Not quite ready. But it's so that might be the case. And then there's all these other arguments, you know, like just the practicality of it. I mean, like, look, if you say you have to show a driver's license before you vote, people will lose their minds about how this is racist because poor people and black people disproportionately tend to not have drivers licenses. So what does an app on a smartphone? I mean, how do you think that's going to work in practice if you're saying you need that to do these basic things? So there was all types of these problems of how you would implement it, but it's still worth noting that they floated this out. Like, there are these people in our government who would go Chinese fascist on us. If they could.

Yeah, this is the post office cops got caught.

Yeah, they, I guess they started treating them post office and their postal workers better. Postman stopped shooting everybody.

Yeah. Right? Yeah, that's right. Because it happened like a few times. Yeah. We're like mailmen just started killing people or whatever.

But we did seem to solve that problem. I have no idea how.

This was the answer. This program would be like, look, if we let you spy on everyone.

Well, anyway, they spy on ourselves.

Like if I'm saying it's a very, very 90s like a thing. They had a bit about it. Did they? Yeah, we're just sign-filled ass Newman, why the post office, why they always kill people and he's like, because the man never stops.

Yeah, I think maybe there is something in that like you know like if you have like a job to do there's like a satisfactory like even a physical job There's a satisfaction and finishing it you like your kid didn't know it's done if it's male That's just always constantly coming in ever you do it and there's more and there's more and you never get that like reward right? I'm just completely speaking out of my ass, but maybe that's what it is

And people are just being pissed off when it's not there. Yeah. And no one goes, no one has ever just like, I mean, you got like 99. 0.9% of it here. We're like where the fuck's my letter? You know, like they're just pissed off. Just never get any credit.

You know, yeah, brave men and women. Yeah. And now they got busted spawning on everyone. And I guess they could say it's because of like the capital riot thing or something like that, but this stuff is pretty creepy man. And it was, if it was so honest what they were doing, then how come it had to be a covert thing that Yahoo News was just able to get their hands on the other day? Why is this being done in secrecy? And there's a lot I will tell you that you know again, it's like like I was saying before like however you feel about COVID You could still be really worried about the totalitarianism like you could you could even think the totalitarianism was justified and still be really worried about it. Like if you were on a boat and like a snake jumped on your boat and someone shot it, and then there's a big hole in your boat now. Like you could be like, no, he had to, because there was this venomous snake. But you'd still be like, okay, but we gotta worry about that hole now. Like that's still a problem. Even if we needed to do it, so it's like you could be against, or you could be for the thing and still recognize that it's a concern. So you could be against the capital right and all that. But don't you find it a little bit creepy that they're all just openly going like, oh, you know what we really need now is to turn George Bush and Dick Cheney's one terror inward and focus on the domestic terrorists. Like had that worked out when we were fighting them in the Middle East. You know, we killed a lot more people than just terrorists, right?

I know that they did that with that Hunter Biden laptop stored from the New York. You can send the link, you can send the link through a message, anything can post it, you can do it. So if they've done that, then they do have the ability to do it. That shit is crazy. Well, right when they're posting this. And what effect does this have where it's like? Okay, so you kick all the right wingers off social media, right? And then you start kind of like punishing all the not even right wingers, but just not left wingers off of there is like so what's the end of this here now? So now none of us are talking to each other even in a shitty medium like Twitter. is the answer just that we none of us talk to each other. We all only just talk to our own groups and so many of these things and like this is another big thing I think a big story of the last year has been how much the social media censorship has been cranked up and like where it was you know I started noticing like I had a private Facebook group for people who were like paying subscribers to my podcast to not lead in a sketch that part of the problem which is my political podcast and so we have like a little community there and for years it was just fun and a lot of shit talking people say crazy things mostly libertarian but some laughingers some right wingers you know and then all of a sudden this year I, because I was the moderator of the group, I start getting messages over and over again. This has been removed because it's false content. This has been flagged. This has been this and that. It was all COVID stuff. And it was all the stuff that was skeptical of the official COVID narrative, and a lot of it turned out to be right. You know, it was like doctors being like, yeah, no, you don't need to wipe down your groceries. You can't get this from touching your groceries. Don't worry about that. it was them talking about how the ventilators were killing people. At the time, that was a conspiracy theory. At the time, they were like, no, no, no, Cuomo was saying we need more ventilators. Then there's doctors, like the ventilators are killing people. Now there were also doctors who got it wrong. But a lot of them got it right, and their videos would be removed. And ultimately they ended up shutting down the group, just shutting it down. So they kicked all of us off. I mean, I'm not kicked off Facebook, but I was only on it for that group at this point. So I don't really use it anymore. But you're like, okay, so now you wanna Okay, you take down all these videos, but you know like five of those were right Yeah, not all of them were but five of them were and they were right when it was really important to be right and you ended up censoring this whole shit Yeah, and so like how isn't that dangerous?

people got very weirdly attached to the disaster narrative of COVID like psychologically attached to it and they took it as like an attack on them if you ever pointed out any good news such a strange thing because you think like oh good this is what we want right a little bit of good news hey if you're a young healthy person you really don't have much to worry about with COVID It's like a scientific fact, but people get very upset with you for saying it. And this year, man, has been really bad for mental health for a lot of people. I know people. I mean, I know people. I'm sure you do too have really, you know, like we're, we're stand up comedians. We're in a world of a lot of like kind of zany people. And a lot of them exist kind of on the edge. You know, this year pushed a lot of people.

Well, so there are some people who went that way during the whole lockdown stuff, too, where they were like, okay, I'm gonna work out a lot. I'm gonna do this. It helps some people. But could you, if you were trying to like, as a country, fuck over people's mental health as much as you could. Could you think of a better recipe than be like, okay, well, I'm going to have everybody terrified. Yeah. And not just terrified, but terrified of a floating abstraction. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, there's a germ that's out there in the world. Um, then we're going to maybe like You know, put their financial future, their livelihood in jeopardy. We're going to literally, you like force them to not interact or go outside. Don't be around other people and stay inside. I mean, this was like, I'm not saying that's what they designed it for. I'm saying, if they were designing it for that, this would have been an excellent plan.

And it'll, it's gonna, it's gonna be going for years and years and years and we'll never be able to completely trace what was, you know, goes back to that. But, oh, you can't, well, I say it like this, right? When I go, so what was like, You know, the cost of the George W. Bush disaster administration. And you could just look at it in terms of like, okay, well, the Warner at cost two trillion dollars and Afghanistan was another trillion dollars. And then there's like, okay, that's a real tangible cost. But then you're also like, all right, well, they had to bring interest rates down and keep them really low in order to finance the wars to keep them on the credit cards. So we wouldn't pay a lot of interest on it. We wouldn't have to tax people. just kind of put it on the credit card and then when interest rates are really down this suck the whole lot of people into buying homes that otherwise wouldn't have bought homes who couldn't really afford them but at one percent interest rate maybe they could afford them so they they'd get in there and then the interest rates take back up and they all got foreclosed on in this brought down the whole economy and like what is the cost of the George W. Bush administration it's like well it's Trump it's antifa It's like everything, all of this goes back to being a cost of that. So what is the cost of all of this going to end up being? It's going to be decades of seeing what happens to the country before you're like, oh, yeah. I mean, look, you just, you ruined just one thing like ruining a marriage. What's the cost of that? Well, you may not know until their kids grow up.

There's no reason a liberal shouldn't get that. There's something very strange to me and so much of it I think in America today is that everyone's reactionary. So everyone's reacting against. So the whole Democrats, the whole left half of America was reacting against Trump. You know, like anything Trump did, you were going to be, they were going to be against that. And then the whole right half is like reacting against CNN and the media and all that stuff. Whatever they say, you're going to be against that. And you almost wonder, like what if Donald Trump had come out at the beginning of COVID and said, we have to lock down. You got to wear your mask. I'm putting my mask on right now. We got to be every set real. You know that then what would the reaction of Ben? It's quite possible the reaction would have been like he's an authoritarian. He's being draconian like we don't need to do any of this because if if you just think about it in an abstract like The idea that I'm going to wear a mask and be distant and be cautious and follow the government orders, is that really more of a left wing thing than a right wing thing to do? In my mind, it almost seems like the right wing or would be the conservative. We ought to be careful. We don't want to be risky. And the left winger would be the person who's like, hey, there's more to life than just, you know, staying alive. I want to go see a show. I want to hang with my friends. I'll take a little bit of risk. I'm comfortable with that. The more kind of artistic vision. So why would a liberal or a leftist not be able to understand that like, yeah, if someone loses their job, that has a big effect on their life. There are external costs to poverty.

That's gone. It's your identity, it's your purpose, it's your life's work. It's so much more than just, you know, it's not just the economy. Well, I hate people reducing the economy to being some small thing. The economy is human beings acting in cooperative ways to improve the standards of living. This is what you invest the time of your life into. There's nothing trivial about that. And to your point, you know, it's like it's funny because even like Look, the, the like critical race theory and the woke stuff. That is one strand of left wing ideology for sure. It comes out of like the Frankfurt School and the postmodernists. But that's just one little piece of left. There's way, there's other traditions on the left that have nothing to do with that. Nome Chomsky hated the postmodernists. He was like, this is stupid. It's like this whole thing is ridiculous. And there's other, lots of other leftists like that who don't, who would never say something like, well, it's just the economy. But they understand what work means to people, how much that's your purpose, your livelihood.

Even that you're not like allowed to say, because then they'll be like, oh, so you're lucky. You think all these dead people are lucky and you're like, well, no, but I'm just being an adult with some nuance. Yes, they're like compared to what we thought it might be. Yeah. Yeah. It's better than that. You can you sometimes you have to choose between two bad options and saying, even though there's a lot of bad with what we got, it could have been a lot worse. And like, I mean, thank God, I have Ben Shapiro said this, and I think he got in trouble for it. I ain't trouble like, you know, there's a Twitter mob, he's fine. But he said the thing he's so right, he goes, man, thank God, this thing doesn't kill kids. Yeah. I mean, can you just imagine, like, what a stroke of luck that is. Yeah. That this thing just really doesn't kill kids, and I know there's a few exceptions to that rule, but generally speaking, kids are fine for this. You know, much worse, this whole thing would be if kids died from it, how much more panicked we would all be.

all the time and then they got a baby brother at home and they go home and the baby gets the flu and baby's die from the flu all the time you know and it's like but this is the thing is that and this was one of the things that covid brought up to the surface that a lot of us don't really think about but there are all types of risks that go on with life that we accept. Yeah. That we just accept while there's risks to this this game.

It's very hard to argue. Yeah. But even just that, right? So if you take the position, hey, I think that we should always wear mass social distance because of the flow of how it, you know, can kill babies and stuff like that. You can make all the same arguments for that. And if you're making the argument against it, you're like, well, what are you fucking want babies to die? This is crazy. But we always just accepted that one. You never really got highlighted.

Very few. It's weird.

What is it? I don't know. Maybe that is it.

I think bad. I think bad might be a little worse than that. I think sometimes it's like 50, 60,000. That's a real bad year, right?

I think it's like under a thousand.

I don't know. I might not be wrong about that to get the number from me, but I know it's really low.

I don't have an answer on that one. I don't know. Unless the team is very strange.

Yeah, there's there's some people who have speculated that they're counting flu deaths as COVID deaths. Yeah, but that's I don't I don't know if that's right fucking to foil him.

I know there's and there's been a lot of that over the last year

Yeah, I don't think it does any good if you just send it to Walmart.

Well, I was way off. I thought it was a lot lower than that.

All right. So maybe it's not completely gone. Not at all. We got to take care of this flu. It's killing people.

I've never gotten a flu shot. I don't get flu shots. I was I was advised to when when my daughter was born and I never ended up doing that. I think by the time I was gonna do it, it was already like, I we kind of made it out of flu season. I was like, yeah, I think we're fine.

Yeah. Well, you should encourage people to actually care if you're immune system is important.

fucking forever for most of my life that that had an impact yeah yeah I think that this look the science is pretty clear that if you don't have major underlying health issues and you have a strong immune system you have nothing to worry about with COVID but if you say that people will go fucking bananas and say why aren't you vaccinated it's just it's really something it's it's unbelievable and it's uh... it's you know people have like we were saying before people have

Which also seemed like to be honest seemed like a very small number of blood clots. It was something like a few cases in millions of doses.

But it's also, it's just so crazy. And this is just like how the government ends up working. But it's like, you know, you have Dr. Fauci out there for a while. Like, no, don't wear a mask. That's ridiculous. And it's like, what? You're not wearing a mask. You're an insane person. Now he's wearing two. Yeah, they're going to after being vaccinated. And then, so they're literally going there. Like, it's like one day. literally one day at noon you're a cook if you question the vaccines and the next day at noon they're like well we're pulling this vaccine because there's been all these health problems like but just yesterday you weren't even allowed to question whether there were health problems related to the vaccine I almost took the Johnson Johnson vaccine days before it got pulled and if it did get pulled I would be sitting here going

And that we have to have this unbelievable faith. in all of these establishment institutions. Well, of course, they got it right. I mean, they wouldn't be rolling it out this way unless they got it right. You know, and that's why we're all going to do this thing. Brian Stelter at CNN was criticizing Fox News because their hosts have not been publicly getting the vaccine. Yes. We're not taking pictures on air of them. Which first of all, if nothing else can we all acknowledge that that's fucking weird. Yes. It is weird. like objectively it is weird to be putting out pictures of you getting a vaccine in this almost like ceremonial kind of like thing like it's very weird and then you're going like okay well look um this vaccines were developed very quickly there there is huge money that's being made here by these big pharmaceutical companies right are we not allowed to be skeptical of any of this to ask questions about this like who's getting money is it really appropriate for say CNN to be just chilling for big pharmaceutical companies like we're taking pictures of us taking your product and now we're chastizing others for not taking pictures of it how about medical privacy like you're putting social pressure and people you're putting social pressure on people and you're also virtue signaling in the most obvious of of

Yeah, and you can have this thing where it's like you were saying this virtue signaling and this kind of like theatrical display of I get the vaccine, what a good person I am, I care about everyone, but you're like, look, my daughter's a lot younger than your kids, but I'm like, yeah, I'm not injecting my daughter with something to fucking virtue signal. Like I'm not doing that. If there's something that she's of no risk, statistically has no risk from. I'm sorry. I'm not taking any experiment on her in that and that's that's my attitude.

You really shit. That's got to just feel really awful. Not only just being shot in the road.

Yeah, yeah, I'm sure there are people laughing at him now. Everyone felt that when Trump got it. They're like, ah, I don't play it now. You got it. But then he was fine.

Well, I think that you, okay, there are like a few legitimate silver linings that I think were really good that came out of the Trump. administration and the one that I've noticed the most was that I think Donald Trump gave cover for right wingers to be against the wars and I've really noticed this like in life that he said these wars are stupid we shouldn't be fighting any of them let's end the endless wars and now I see a lot of right wingers and influential right wingers who are kind of just feel comfortable to be like yeah We're against the wars. We want to bring them out. Where's they were very uncomfortable to do that. But now that Mr. President Donald Trump did it, it's okay.

Yeah, remember that interview? That was crazy.

Oh, he goes, yeah, he goes, look, every time I want to end the war, I'm fought by the Pentagon. Of course, the issue there is you're like, well, I mean, you are the commander in chief.

No, he pushed back. Trump had worked out a deal with the Taliban to leave. And he pushed it back to September. But said that we will leave in September on September 11th. Joe Biden. This is the thing. It's like being celebrated like, oh, it's great. He's ending the war. It's like, well, no, that's not actually what he did. What he's doing is extending the war. And he's extending the war so that he can leave on September 11th for some type of like ceremonial, you know, like victory. Some symbolism of like, yeah, this was the great day that the great Joe Biden pulled the troops out. And I got to be honest, I'm very skeptical that he's going to do that. We've had all of these dates where Joe Biden was vice president. I think he promised we'd be out in 2014 and then Obama said that's absolutely right. We'll be out in 2014 and they just keep going and keep going.

Yeah, but I don't think you need a tin foil hat. You know, it's like, look, the military industrial complex is the biggest honeypot in the history of the world. It's like a trillion dollars a year that gets spent maintaining this empire. And like, yeah, there's people making all types of money off of that. And those people have a lot of influence in Washington. And so like, yeah, they want to keep making that money. They want to keep the gravy train rolling. And so I don't think it's even conspiratorial at all. In fact, I think the more conspiratorial thing is to go into all of these other reasons why they would want to stay there. But I think that the major driving force is that there is, as Dwight Eisenhower, like the Mr. Military, Dwight Eisenhower said, we built up a huge industrial complex that makes money off the warfare machine.

And of all the people, Mr. General, One World War II, you know, Dwight, you know, that that is the guy who's given you this message of all the people you have to listen to him saying it like this is the guy who really knows and it was brand new. I mean, you know, there was always like a military issue but it was the world war two effort and the post world war two effort that had led to this it was a whole new world then it's like a shit now we got nukes and we got this big arms industry and all of this and there I mean look I think that there Donald Trump was right when he said that they said that he's like yeah they're all these interests who want to keep these wars going and they fight you every time you try to end it Now, to your point, I do think that Donald Trump in result was just bad. I think all he did was he agitated the far left, made them crazier than they've ever been before. He didn't actually accomplish much of anything. I know there's people who will write a law fall of these things that he did really, really didn't. His presidency ended with Americans being locked in their homes and the economy being destroyed and Joe Biden getting elected.

I think you would want an landslide. No question. I don't see how. If it wasn't for COVID and the voting overhaul, I'm not claiming like there was a bunch of fraud. I'm just saying that the voting by mail let a lot more people vote and it was a whole different way to do elections. If he had his economy from January 2019 in November 2020 and they had the same way. We were doing voting the same way we always used to. I think he wins an landslide. I just wonder what's going to happen because he's going to run again in 2024 he said he said that but he's also it's like on one hand he's uh he's old and fat uh but then on the other hand he's Donald fucking Trump so who the hell knows what he might do different in that like he like you don't think of him as old the way you think of Joe Biden as old and they're not much different in age You remember that year on the ultimate fighter when George St. Pierre brought that kickboxer? Yes. He's like a drunk and smokes and it's fucks everyone up at kickboxer. And you're like, yeah, most people can't do that. But then there's this one guy who he could just get drunk smoke and then come fuck up MMA fighters at kickboxing and like There's sometimes like most people can't be fat and in their mid 70s and eat McDonald's and still have this much energy. But Trump kind of can. Scarboski. Was that him?

It was really cool to watch him just like sparring around and even George St.

But at Georgia Shapiro like warns them, my listen, don't look at him in his eye. Don't look away from his eyes. Don't look away from his eyes. Don't look away from his eyes. Don't look away from his eyes. Don't look away from his eyes. Don't look away from his eyes. Don't look away from his eyes. Don't look away from his eyes. Don't look away from his eyes. Don't look away from his eyes.

Yeah, it's funny to see now looking back at it. I forgot. I was literally just thinking of this thing and I forgot that it was like Michael Johnson was in there and Alex Harris. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, well, it's like, look, I mean, in the 20th century, we fought two world wars. These were like advanced industrial countries that had people, made out of the same stuff, me and you are made out of, that let it get to that level. You're like, wouldn't you think, well, at some point, like, rational minds have to, you know, have cooler tempers or figure this out. It's like, no, no, they just let it get to that point, tens of millions of people are slaughtered. And then a few years they did it again. Like, you know, and their genocides. So, Things can go really, really bad. And we're at a very dangerous point, right now. Very, very dangerous. We're flirting with absolute disaster. But there are also really amazing parts of human history where incredible things were pulled off that, you know, you couldn't have imagined. I mean, a good friend of mine was like a mentor of mine, Gene Abstain, who's like brilliant economist. And he says this, he used to say, I really love this. He goes, you know, if you were sitting around in 1840 and you were like an abolitionist talking to another abolitionist and you said, hey, you know, I think in 25 years slavery across the West will be abolished. You'd be like, that's insane. There's been slavery since the dawn of time, and it's like completely the foundational building block of all of these societies. But it was slavery, at least blatant slavery in the West. And incredible things can happen. And ideas are really powerful. And Thomas Payne just wrote pamphlets. They changed the course of history. And what you're doing here, even like putting that message out there, that it's like, hey, we have to stop trying to shut people up. We have to stop like censoring people and banishing people and all of this. We got to be able to have conversations. We got to like be able to let someone even if they're wrong. Let someone try to think out loud. Like this is really important. Otherwise, we can't have a functioning society. And I think that if enough people push that message, there are a lot of people who agree with that. Like one of the things I hate You know, is like the demand that you denounce people? Yeah. I hate that. I hate the idea that you have to denounce someone if they have bad views or even if they have, like, why can't I just tell you what I think? Yeah. Why do I have to like denounce somebody else as a person for saying something I don't agree with? Silence is violence. Yeah. Well, right. Yeah. Exactly. Silence is violence, but also saying the wrong thing is violence that could be a microaggression. But that shit has to be defeated. And luckily, it's completely hollow. Like the whole woke shit is like it's all smoke and mirrors. It's like big corporations, a few crazy 20-year-olds, and then behind it is just a sea of regular people who don't buy any of this shit.

a certain like group of people who are kind of like, would be authoritarian's who are low status and not very bright. Yes. People like that love, woqueism because it's a real excuse where you don't have to know anything. Right. You don't have to know anything to go. I'm offended by Joe Rogan. And I think he is a racist sexist, transphobic, whatever any of the other words are. That's it. You don't have to know anything. You don't have to add anything. You don't have to have built anything yourself. You don't have to, I mean, to be outraged at a president for like a war or a policy or something. You might have to crack a book. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. I don't know, maybe you should go help someone who was like, came out to their parents and got kicked out of their home or something like that. Like, go do something if you want this sense of moral superiority rather than just calling someone out. But that's so we got to find a way one where the other to break that.

Yeah. It's very terrifying. Yeah.

Yeah, no, I think they are right. I also think there's basically nothing we can do about that aspect of it. I just think like this is here with us now and this is the technology and it's going to be very it's probably going to be impossible to put that toothpaste back in the tube. But what you almost have to do like in some jujitsu sense is like we got to try to take that energy and turn it into a better Yeah. You know, way. I don't have the answers for that. But you're not going to like, you're not going to stop the technology from existing. So we have to find a way to try to mitigate some of these bad qualities of people getting addicted to the likes and the feedback and algorithm playing toward that. But the thing that I didn't like in that movie, if I'm remembering correctly, because it was a while ago that I saw it. I liked the documentary a lot. I thought it was good. Didn't care for the acting. I thought that was unnecessary. I was like, I could just listen to these smart people.

Right. The guy's down an antifa down.

But you think spelled out to me like that. The problem is that when they start pushing the fake news narrative, that I really object to like the idea that this is something that the corporate press really pushes to that the big concern about social media is you have all this fake news coming out there and I really think it's like yeah okay you guys have no problem with fake news you just want your monopoly on it I mean I'm sorry over this last year all the covid stuff there's been a ton of fake news that has come out that's been more consequential than anything Alex Jones ever said or any of these guys who by the way got more right than you did Not saying he's right about everything, but he's been better than CNN.

Again, it's like not to say like he hasn't gotten some things wrong, too, but like how about the war and the rack? Like, I'm sorry, that's still a bigger deal than anything else that, you know, CNN in the New York Times has absolutely no right to look down their nose at Alex Jones. You got the Warren Rack wrong, and he got it right. There's a million dead people over that, trillions of dollars, mothers of soldiers who have committed suicide, still crying themselves to sleep at night.

I don't know what that.

I don't know what that is.

Seems like a lot.

It still feels like this is like the first scene in a really bad movie. You know, like this is the beginning we were just trying to make. This is 28 days later. Yeah. Yeah. This is how it goes.

That's that's pretty incredible. Yeah, I know this stuff they've done with like prosthetics has gotten like way better. Yeah, I think it adds one of the only silver linings of the wars. Well, this is a way better at that shit

But yeah, but if we're and let's be like completely fair to them because it's so easy to just react against that because it's so disgusting and despicable and just you're watching what you know like a tantrum that a 20 year old is having anyway and it's just it's like yeah and every inch of it is just like you know you're like who the fuck do you think you are get the fuck off this table or people eating here with their money hard earned money that they're spending this is a business but you will do realize to some degree it's like man how much has to speak like a leftist in a sense how much has our system failed these kids that they find themselves in this position.

I think, but I agree, but I'm just saying that it's like, look, man, these are kids who came up in a culture where There was not a strong culture of families and values where they were kind of many of them were drugged from, you know, put on any of these, you know, psychometric drugs, a psychotropic, I should say, drugs from a young age. They've been propagandized in their university system, in their universities that they went to and probably spent themselves 100 grand into debt. There are no position to get a job. They have no, you know, they probably live in their mom's basement and work at Starbucks and have 100 grand in debt. How are you gonna own a house? How's they're going for $600,000? They have no prospects of getting married and taking care of a family or anything like this. So they want to burn it all down. And they're fucking pissed and dumb and just, you know, and it's like man, we In some ways, in some collective sense, all of us have failed these kids.

And then they jump on the other cop. which is an example of a clear justified shooter. Right. Like a clear, oh, like, oh, and now there's another cop who killed a black girl. Well actually, he saved a black girl.

And she's aiming at at her head and neck and wearing it. I mean, it's like this was scary. You know, this was the one time where it is appropriate for a cop. to shoot someone is when they're actually in the act of a violent crime or someone else's life is in danger. And the girl's like right there.

But the problem and like, you know, I certainly understand where certainly from a black person's perspective. I mean, there has been state policies that have just fucked over black people from the beginning and before the beginning of our country. And when things like this happen, even if there were other, you know, races of cops around, this Derek Shove and Guy is a white guy, he's got a black guy on the ground, handcuffed, and he's got his knee on his neck, and he keeps it there. I don't know if people are doing it with them all. All this over. No, the knee is an on the neck. It's down a little bit. So what, on the back of his lungs? Like, okay, the guy died after this happened. He's sitting there. The guy was probably dead before he was off him. He's certainly unconscious before he gets off of him.

Yeah, and the guy people are screaming at the guy the guy's screaming I can't breathe people are screaming you're killing him and he does this I mean like I'm sorry I understand where for and I understand more from a black person's point of view they'd be like yeah, there it is another fucking example, you know, but the problem is that we get so obsessed with the racial aspect of it that no one's actually focusing on the policy aspect of it and it's like what like we were saying before like what policy could you actually change that will make less of these happen but if you really wanted to fuck over the movement for police accountability here's what you do when you actually get justice for that guy start fucking jumping on tables and screaming regular people who had nothing to do with it That'll make you look like an asshole like what they did when the riots were going on in New York when they were alluding fucking sacks Fifth Avenue and smashing windows all that stuff then had nothing to do with any of it you were just taking advantage and if you just want to convince every right wing or in the country to jump right back on the police side go have a riot and they're gonna be right back on the like well I'd rather have the police than have the rioters and they have a point

That's pretty hard to conceive of. That's not though. Well, no, I just mean it's a way that would change like the fundamental human experience.

But he said like you people at some point or something like that or he said these people and then when he clarified like what he was talking about couldn't be offensive at all. But you just saw this thing where he goes these people and then all these tweets start popping up and he's like who's these people? Please elaborate on these people and then he went I mean this and then he just kind of died down. But for that little moment he said to him that you could see people getting excited at the prospect of being offended. It's a game. It's such a game.

Look, ooh, I got something to do today. I got one that joined this virtual lynch mob today. Oh, this is definitely like this. This is sick. But I do think you're right. I think that in the grand scheme of things, we're still in the infancy of this kind of technological revolution. And I don't think that I don't believe that anything is predetermined. So I think that it could go in a really bad way. That's bad for humanity, or it could go in a really beautiful way. That's better than anything we could imagine. And like I was saying with the COVID passport things, There are people who want to turn this into a state, you know, straight up, fascist authoritarian Chinese social credit model. And then there are other people who want to do really beautiful shit and, you know, use the technology to fucking educate more people and spread good ideas and all of this other stuff. When you're talking about the stuff you're talking about there, that Elon Musk is talking about, and it's really, really hard to possibly predict where all of that could go. I tell you where it goes.

Well, that's, yeah, that's not bad, yes.

Is that just some guy's dad talking shit? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. He sent me the link of a video of him. Oh, okay.

So when you say created a virtual song meaning not did one of their actual songs, but created something that they would make with their tendencies of how to play music.

Because if they can, then that changes everything. Like if they can write jokes, if they could write philosophy. Yeah. Then you're like, oh shit, there could be a computer program someday that figures out the meaning of life or something. It a better way than we could ever figure it out.

That's a great excuse for whenever they find something problematic that you've said. So that's robot Joe Rogan. Robot Joe Rogan, that asshole.

So, and then you wonder what like I wonder what kind of secret classified technology they have? Like how many levels ahead of us is the Pentagon? where it's like some deep state program to point where you go like, could Joe Biden be dead? And they're just like, well, Joe Biden's still going to come give a speech today and we're going to have it on the video.

Yeah, he saw it. I missed that. Was it just like a spur thing?

So it wasn't like a Freudian slip. No, I don't think it was. But it wasn't like it wasn't bad. Dude, he does these things that he does that there's nothing. You can make fun of a lot of different presidents, but Joe Biden does this thing that I've never seen another president do like where he just he gets tripped up and then gives up midthought. Yeah. You know what I mean?

Anyway. Yeah. Nice. I shouldn't even. Well, that's what you're positive. Yeah.

And he's like me and you are lawyers so we know this a lot of other people in other and Clarence Thomas is like this dude was speaking out of his ass nothing none of what he was saying means anything it's so crazy but so that's what Joe Biden essentially was raised that Joe Biden was always a bullshitter who always thought he was a lot brighter than he was. And always felt like he could pull like he could pull this off. But now he's lost like five steps. So he's all of that with a little bit of like, yeah, sprinkle them.

The flavor of the days, inclusivity and, you know, well, like I said, it's that Donald Trump gave the establishment one more hand to play. Yes. Which is, hey, there wasn't everything so crazy with Trump. And, and there's truth to it. Like everything Trump said was crazy. Everything the media reacted was crazy. The people was crazy. Go, all right. All right. So that's just unity and nice and moderate and back to the status quo and all of the adults in the room. Yep. The problem is that all of the pilot Joe Biden really is representative of, he's the architect of all the worst policies, like all the worst stuff.

Yeah. And even before 94 Joe Biden, when Ronald Reagan was ramping up the war on drugs, Joe Biden partnered with Strom Thurman, the actual segregationist to challenge Ronald Reagan from the right to say that he's too soft. that this ramp up of the war on drugs isn't enough and you got to be locking more of these criminals up he bragged at one point that he wanted to lock uh... he wanted to give people life in jail for everything short of jay walking like it was there was like a line like that or something he said he was it wasn't just it was all the way leading up to the ninety four crime bill which he co-authored he was pushing for the creation of the mass incarceration state like this is him and then for him to now partner up with a with a prosecutor from from California who is throwing people in jail for pot and for them to be like you know we really need to think about systemic racism like you motherfucker you built this this is your doing and of course on top of that he was also one of the biggest champions of the war in Iraq and not only championed and voted for the war in Iraq but went out and called out everybody who didn't vote for the war in Iraq as like your you know you're allowing another nine eleven to happen because Saddam is weapons of mass destruction and You know, all the neocontalking points of, you know, the mushroom cloud and New York City, all that stuff. And he pushed all of the worst policies that everyone was reacting against for the last, you know, decade.

The guy who was the guy who was rallying up a whole bunch of people had a serious fucking plan and had a whole lot of left-wing populist support was deemed unacceptable. And that was Bernie Sanders. and I have there's a lot of things I don't like about Bernie Sanders a lot of things I do like about him but he was the guy there's undeniably and he was look big business decided no they could control him Well, he was focusing, look, like I was saying before all that stuff where JP Morgan Chase is like, oh, yeah, let's focus on diversity training and all this. Bernie Sanders had an economic, leftist populist message that was like, no, no, no, I want to focus on billionaires. I don't think billionaires should exist. And they were like, no, we're not letting this guy up. And they circled the wagons. And, you know, they got him. They did it the first time and then they did it again in 2020. And so it was like, who's left? They tried everyone. They tried to throw everyone at the wall. They pushed Kamala Harris. She got a big push from the corporate press. She got big money donating to her Hillary Clinton's campaign. People all joined her campaign. But tells you that. It then tells he just destroyed her on stage. And it was like over. And they got rid of Tulsi. And well, they did everything they could. She was unacceptable as well. And Tulsi was my favorite in the Democratic field. I mean, she's amazing. She's great. and just an incredible campaign to run I mean look there's there were mistakes made I think in the campaign and I think she could have said things a little bit different at times but the fact that you had an active duty military member somebody who actually served and not just like like kind of certain she deployed like really deployed to a medical unit in a rack during the height of the fighting in a rack someone who really saw the costs of war coming back and saying we cannot fight these wars anymore now that was powerful and then to think right that Hillary Clinton the last nominee for the party would turn around and call her a traitor How's Russian asset? Here's Hillary Clinton who voted for this disastrous war, and here's this young woman who was brave enough to go there. And she comes back and says, I want to speak out against the war. And this blood-soaked monster, Hillary Clinton, will call her a traitor. Who's the traitor there? It's crazy. You know? I mean, just unbelievable. I mean, Hillary Clinton should be launched to the moon for that. She should not be allowed to exist in polite society. The nerve of you. I mean, think about it, just in any moral society. Hillary Clinton, by the way, has admitted it was a mistake. to vote for the Warren Iraq. So you vote for a war. You send some, you know, brave young woman over there to watch her brothers and sisters die have to deal with that, like in a medical unit in Iraq, literally holding people as they breed their last, you know, gasped their last breath. And then she comes back. You should be dropping down to your knees and apologizing to that person. And you call her a trader? I don't know. I don't know what else to say about it. I couldn't set it better myself.

and that she's a real threat. I mean, she's a threat to the establishment. Pat, like I said, the military industrial complex is a big honeypot. And she's saying we got to roll back that honeypot. There's a whole lot of people who make a lot of money off of that. And they're also comfortable with people dying.

Well, particularly this time around, and I thought that Glenn Greenwald when he was on your show did a really great job of breaking this all down, but it's that there was a very conscious decision made by pretty much the entire corporate press that they were going to get Donald Trump out. Yes. And so we were just not going to report on anything that hurt who the Democratic candidate was who ended up being Joe Biden. They were just weren't going to do that. And they had social media going with them as well. So that was tech colluding with them as well. That's why the hundred Biden stories were all, you know, and even down to the intercepts. I mean, even imagine that Glenn Greenwald's own outlet, even wouldn't allow this to be done. Crazy. And that's a gangster. He's a gangster. He's the best. I think he's the best journalist in the world. I mean, there's several, he's probably. He is as legit as I guess. He's probably the best. I think uh, uh, Jeremy Skales incredible, too. Um, and, uh, Matt Tahoe, he's great. Aaron Mate is great. There's a lot of people out there do really, and by the way, all of them guys, I just named our left wing guys, and I'm not a left wing. They have to be so brave, but they still do good real journalism like really you know shining a light on powerful people's corruption like that's what real journalism is supposed to be yeah and but look this is the other thing that's interesting about all the woke stuff right is that it's almost to me it's like a corporate plot a corporate takeover of a left wing cause But it's not at the point now, it doesn't even resemble anything left-wing. And it just gets used against the left-wing, right? So when you control the corporate press and you have big tech and you have all the big platforms, you get to decide what stories are ramped up and what aren't. And who gets accused of the woke stuff? It turns out to be every good leftist. Bernie Sanders is a sexist. because of something he said to Elizabeth Warren. Why are we even talking about this? Well, because the entire corporate press decided, you know, his supporters are all Bernie Bros. They're sexist like, is there any evidence of this or what? Well, people say things on Twitter. What? It's a narrative. Glenn Greenwald is harassing a young woman. Sure, the young woman happens to be a reporter for USA today who he's criticizing for her reporting, but harassing young woman. Like, you're just, so everyone who's good on the left, all of a sudden conveniently, gets the woke mob sent after them.

You could not have imagined her. like just blindly repeating CIA talking points, which is essentially what she's done over the last year. And I, you know, it's interesting that those guys, all of them, right? Like, particularly Glen Greenwald and Aaron Matei, and Matti EB2, but all of them They didn't fall for the Trump rushable shit one bit, and they hated Trump. There's our lefties. They don't like Trump, but they just know CIA bullshit when they see it. And they're like, yeah, okay, the CIA's making this claim with absolutely no evidence to back it up, and all of the evidence that we've been shown completely contradicts this idea. Now, I'm not just deciding that's real, and yet all pretty much all of MSNBC just went, that's our narrative, CNN went, that's our narrative. a pretty big accusation that the sitting president of the United States is colluding with a hostile foreign power to undermine American democracy. But the truth is that Donald Trump, who, by the way, personally, I think Donald Trump should be prosecuted for war crimes and spend the rest of his life in prison. Like, I don't, I'm not a fan. What do you think he did that's a war crime? Oh, you're propping up the Saudi war of aggression of war of genocide against the people of Yemen. I mean, it's absolutely, and it was against the will of the Congress that absolutely crimes against humanity. He should, he should go, he should rot in a prison with Barack Obama and George W. Bush and all of them. As far as I'm concerned, they're all war criminals. Dave Smith doing hard. That's, that's my take, but, but Donald Trump did not conspire with the Russian government. There's just it's just bullshit. He was set up by the CIA the NSA and the FBI.

I don't really want to Joe.

Well, I feel like what the country needs. Look, I mean, here's the truth of the matter, right? It is exceedingly unlikely that the libertarian party candidate for president is going to win the presidents.

He's seen that. He's seen it, right? Not cages, detention facilities. It's the same goddamn thing. It's crazy. I mean, yeah, there are metal bars around them. But it's a detention facility.

Well, he was a billionaire, which helps.

Well, I think what Look what Ross Pro did was he also made them clamped down on the system. Like they really made it harder for third parties to run after Ross Pro because he scared them like this guy could actually win. Yeah, I fucked him out of the debate. I think to me, I think the role of whoever runs for president on the libertarian party. What it's about is It's about not just spreading a message and introducing more people to the ideas of libertarianism and trying to like convince people that this is the way to go, but I think what the libertarian party could really do with a presidential nominee is to set the agenda for what the Democrats and Republicans have to talk about now. Like you guys might want to talk about this, but guess what we're talking about this because we're just going to keep beating this drum and make such a compelling argument that if you're not talking about this, enough of the American people are going to realize like, hey, how come you're not talking about that?

there has to be like what we what you need is a huge movement of people just simply demanding we're not taking this anymore because just like we said before when they poke out about the war in Syria or regulating the internet and there's enough resistance they don't do it so what you need is enough people to just be focused just again it doesn't have to be everything perfect but like five issues like we are not fighting another stupid war period no one's gonna tolerate it None. We're not putting people in jail for nonviolent crimes. Period. We won't tolerate one more person going into a cage for a nonviolent victimless crime. And whatever, all them and corporate bailouts and corporate welfare and all the COVID lockdowns, like if you get enough people and it's just overwhelming the consensus, whoever's in there, they're going to have a real tough time.

And then I think hopefully, you know, you repeal legal tender laws and maybe Bitcoin or some crypto currency becomes the fucking currency, then the Federal Reserve loses its power. You need this whole system to kind of crack up, but it's going to do it on its own. It's not going to be because one hero becomes president and then does all the right things. You know, I think it's got to be like more of a bottom-up kind of movement.

Unbelievable. Yeah. Yeah. Unbelievable. I thought I was in 2019, I felt that way. I was like, this has been an unbelievable time. I mean, just like, you know, the Trump is president and there's all this crazy shit going on. And then after 2020, you're like, this is, it's like we're living through a movie.

really really hoping for a happy ending. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like that. I'm going to get and jerked off. Sexual happy ending. I mean, I'd be cool if that was there at the end, too, but just like a good happy ending. First.

Better than during World War II.

Half a comedy wants to take comedy at face value. Yeah, for them. They're terrible. Yeah, I know. But that's how it's some of them are great. Some of them used to be really great. And now they're terrible.

Oh, yeah.

Which is, but then the, you know, the bad side of that is that there are probably some could have been really good comedians who also fucking quit. I mean, if this happened to you, if this happened to you five six years into comedy, yeah, that is really tough. True. That's really tough for one year. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, but even one year maybe a little bit easier like if you, if you quit your day job and comedy was your full identity. But you needed to work the road in order to be able to like, you know, pay your rent. And all of a sudden that's gone. And then you got to go back to some type of job or something like that. And that's enough to break a lot of people from never coming back in. But for that one person, there's probably like 5,000 who just never should have been doing comedy anyway.

possibilities you're you're you know you're at the launching pad and it's frustrating and it's scary and it's really nerve-wracking for for comics like when you're first that's that's 100% true um but there's also like you know there's there's different points where you're more vulnerable than other points and to hit face a huge amount of adversity at your most vulnerable point is I think a lot worse than when you're a little bit stronger and ready to deal with it and I am you know I've for the whole last year. I'm just I'm very grateful personally that I feel like I was at a point where because I've seen people literally go crazy like people who's really lives have been ruined over this whole last year and I just feel like I was like okay is it hit where like I was making personally like I was making enough money just from doing the podcasting and stuff like that and doing stuff that I could do uninterrupted completely the whole time through COVID I've also a married and I've a kid so I'm kind of like it was easier than like in my 20s where I would have been more isolated and cut off it's right I'm lucky in a sense that for me personally, it was very easy for me to weather personally, you know, the storm of like, oh, okay, to lock down.

Well, that's, that's the big one that I could uninterruptedly keep making money. But I mean, you imagine like, you know, imagine like somebody who's just like has three kids. and just loses your job. Yeah. Over this. I mean, I don't know what it's like to be in that situation and the whole lot of Americans were. And you know, it is you're absolutely right. We say overcoming adversity is a big part of like the human experience and all this, but that's a really tough one.

Yeah. No, you're absolutely right. And the other thing about it is that, and this is true in general in life, right, with a kind of a victim ideology or a victim narrative verse, the narrative that you're talking about of conquering, you know, like a adversity, there is truth to both of them. Like there are people who are really victims. Yeah. And there is also something to conquering adversity. But in terms of which narrative is more helpful and useful, there is no question. That this one is just death and this one can really help you get through something. So no matter what, even if there's truth in both, it is always better to have the outlook that like you're gonna conquer this thing and you're gonna, no matter what's thrown at you, you're gonna get past this and to have the outlook of like, I'm a victim.

It's a force yourself to do it. It's very hard work. I remember I had a real problem with that for a while when I was like younger and comedy. It was like maybe like I've been doing contract like seven eight years or something and I get very jealous of other people who were like getting things that I wasn't getting and I really drive myself crazy thinking about this and then I remember having a moment where like a really good friend of mine got a got a big thing and I was like damn it he got that and I almost like caught myself and it was like I do not want to be this person. I'm like the person now who's like not happy for someone I love for getting something good and I really I to make such a conscious effort and it was really really hard for me to just be like I am simply not allowing myself to do that I am just going to be happy and inspired by other people who are getting things and I'm going to put all of that energy into trying to get what I want out of this career.

It's really unfortunate that that That feeling, I'm not unfortunate, but that feeling of being like, oh man, I'm just being such a bitch right now, which is literally the same exact feeling I had when I'm like, oh, I'm that guy. I'm disgusted with myself. Like, I'm upset that someone I love got something great. You know, like, that's who I am. And that moment that like kind of like shame and like that fucking disappointment in yourself is really necessary to improve yourself. Oh, yeah. And it sucks. It's like you got to feel this burn in order to build out of it. But that is the most important thing. That's, again, it's like why bombing is really important for humans. It's why losing things in life is really important for you because you have to, you have to feel this sting and it sucks. But that's what allows you to like be a better person.

It's small, but I will say it was pretty obvious even back then, particularly in hindsight. Like there was just no question. Like I started with or around the same time as like a lot of guys. And none of these guys were like as good as they are now. You know what I mean? Right. But they can tell right away that like Andrew Schultz was gonna be something. Like you just knew like this guy's got a thing. I could tell Mark Norman was gonna be like a fuck like this guy's gonna be great. I was at Tim Dylan who started later than me, but I mean literally as soon as we saw him and he was he was brand new when I first met him. So he was still like green in comedy, but you were like, oh, this guy's gonna be a star. Like he's just this guy's a force of nature. Like there's just no. And so it's weird. In hindsight, you're like, oh, yeah, for every one of those, there were like a thousand.

So what I meant to say is Tim Dylan's clearly going to fail as well as trying to say all along. I go, this guy is going to have a rise and fall.

That's not your choice. But that's the next thing that people like that are going to have to deal with. I'm going to face that I'm sure in the next few years at some point.

Well, that's why I got to say I love what Lewis Lewis J. Gomez did with building the gas digital network and that's where all my stuff is at like all my podcasts are there my special that they put it out like I just keep it all there because at the very least like I'm not going to get kicked out of cash digital network right stay in the wrong thing It was like I pissed Lewis off.

Well, dude, that means the fucking world to me, man, because I've been a huge fan of yours forever, dude. And like, I've told you this before, podcast, but you're like, not just your whole podcast, but talking monkeys in space, literally like, had a profound impact on my stand-up career. Like, I had just started when that special came out. And I remember looking at it and being like, wow, so you can really do. Anything like with stand up like I I wanted to talk about all of these more kind of deep ideas and have these longer like bits But I was like I can't really do that I got it just like tell jokes and stand up and then I saw you have like all these like long like chunks about like ancient Egypt and all these different things and they were still hilarious the whole way through and I was like oh you can just do that and like your your career really inspired me man like the fact that you're just like like imagine if you had told someone on paper in the 90s what you were going to do like you had some agent and they were like so you're going to act or you're going to write and you to be like I'm going to kind of be like an MMA commentator stand up comedian who does a TV show but I'm the network and I'll talk to like a physicist and then we'll talk about politics and then we'll talk about hunting and then we'll talk about this and they'd be like You know, that can't be done. And you just like, yeah, no, it can. And you're doing it. And so that means the world to me and you're an inspiration, huh?