#2234 - Marc Andreessen

Marc Andreessen is an entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer. He is co-creator of the world's first widely used internet browser, Mosaic, cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and cohost of "The Ben & Marc Show" podcast. www.a16z.com https://pmarca.substack.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The Joe Rogan Experience. Training by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

• 0:11Joe Rogan?

  Hello.

• 0:12Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 0:13Joe Rogan?

  Good to see you.

• 0:14Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me back.

• 0:15Joe Rogan?

  My pleasure. Good to see you. Well, the world's still functional.

• 0:19Speaker 02

  Amazing.

• 0:20Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, amazing. We wanted to talk, you wanted to talk about the post-election sort of a wrap-up.

• 0:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 0:26Joe Rogan?

  Sort of where we stand. Are you happy?

• 0:28Speaker 02

  Very happy.

• 0:29Joe Rogan?

  It was a weird one.

• 0:30Speaker 02

  Morning in America.

• 0:31Joe Rogan?

  That was one of the first times ever I felt hopeful after an election. Like, you should've seen the green room at the comedy club. Everybody was like, "Yes!"

• 0:38Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 0:39Joe Rogan?

  Whoo!

• 0:40Speaker 02

  So, my theory is the timeline, like in a science fiction movie, the timeline has split twice in the last, in the last like nine months.

• 0:46Joe Rogan?

  What was the first split?

• 0:48Speaker 02

  That was when Trump got shot.

• 0:49Joe Rogan?

  Ah, yeah.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  And there was that moment where the world was gonna head in two totally different directions.

• 0:54Joe Rogan?

  Right. If he got hit.

• 0:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 0:57Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  And we saw the most conspicuous display of physical bravery I've ever seen.

• 1:00Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:01Speaker 02

  In that moment.

• 1:02Joe Rogan?

  Afterwards.

• 1:03Speaker 02

  Exactly. And it could've gone, you know, horrifically badly for the entire world after that. So, that was timeline split number one. So, that other timeline's out there somewhere.

• 1:10Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  And I don't wanna visit it.

• 1:12Joe Rogan?

  Boy, imagine, being stuck there. What kind of horrible karma.

• 1:15Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:16Joe Rogan?

  I mean, that's a totalitarian dystopian nightmare.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  That's the bad place.

• 1:19Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  And then timeline split again on Election Day.

• 1:23Joe Rogan?

  I know you're, you fancy a good conspiracy theory.

• 1:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:26Joe Rogan?

  And that, that gentleman being able to pull off what he did and, you know, the way it happened, the way it all went down is, it's a Lee Harvey Oswald 2.0.

• 1:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39Joe Rogan?

  Clearly.

• 1:40Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. The shooter.

• 1:42Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43Speaker 02

  That we still don't know anything.

• 1:44Joe Rogan?

  There's no call for disclosure. There's no call for a press conference. There's no toxicology report. The toxicology report had to have been done.

• 1:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:54Joe Rogan?

  Wouldn't you wanna know, like, what kinda stuff this kid is on that made him want to do that? Or if anything?

• 2:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, my theory is it's almost as if the people want us to think it's a conspiracy. Like, it's almost like the whole thing is almost orchestrated. Like it's just, it's so strange. This is like the rapid cremation. Like the whole thing was just completely bizarre. And then you're exactly right. Like no hearings, no, no, nothing. Now, having said that, I expect that this will change. Right? So.

• 2:19Joe Rogan?

  Do you think they're gonna do a dive into what happened?

• 2:21Speaker 02

  I mean, I would. I don't know if they will, but I, you know, I certainly would if I was in a position to do that.

• 2:25Joe Rogan?

  I wonder what they can actually find. I mean, I don't know if they wanted it to be a conspiracy that people talked about, or if that's simply the best way to pull it off.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. Or it's just, yeah, or it's just, you know, as we saw, I think in the hearing afterwards, maybe just a systemic collapse of competence.

• 2:41Joe Rogan?

  There's also a confidence in the fact that the, the news timeline today is so rapid. The, when things are relevant and people are paying attention to them is, you have a couple of days.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:54Joe Rogan?

  Even with an assassination attempt on a former president.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:57Joe Rogan?

  Where, where, where people were murdered.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:59Joe Rogan?

  And there's, it's in and out.

• 3:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. I think it's exactly. I think the news cycle now is like a two to three day social media firestorm and we just cycle from one to the next.

• 3:08Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  And we have the memory of goldfish and right, they, you know, things, right, things that would have been era defining just come and go with astonishing speed and shock. By the way, I should say, I don't think there was a, I doubt there was a conspiracy. I think anything's possible. I think it's just, we have a competence collapse. And I think we saw that on display when the, when the director at the time, you know, testified.

• 3:26Joe Rogan?

  Well, there's all the elements that it could have been a conspiracy.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  It could have, but this is kind of the thing, which is just like, it also could have been.

• 3:31Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  Systemic competence collapse. And then it's like, okay, would it be better off for the institute, you know, if it looks like a conspiracy, right?

• 3:37Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  You know, which world, okay, two timelines, which world would you, would you rather live in? The one with the conspiracies or the one with just like incompetence everywhere?

• 3:45Joe Rogan?

  Well, I think you have both simultaneously. I don't think it's binary.

• 3:48Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:49Joe Rogan?

  I, I think there's incompetence everywhere and conspiracies are legitimate. They're real.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:53Joe Rogan?

  And that one seems like conspiracy. The fact that his, his house was professionally scrubbed. There's no social media record of this kid online. There's no nothing.

• 4:03Speaker 02

  He's the only kid of his generation who's that fired up about politics to have no online footprint.

• 4:07Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  Like, it just doesn't make any sense.

• 4:09Joe Rogan?

  And he's a registered Republican. Like, the whole thing is like, so weird.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  And he was like a bad shooter and then he became a great shooter and...

• 4:15Joe Rogan?

  Well, he definitely trained.

• 4:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 4:16Joe Rogan?

  Like, you could train someone to become a good shooter. This is all you have to do.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  But that's a little-

• 4:20Joe Rogan?

  Don't move and do that.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  Right.

• 4:22Joe Rogan?

  Get all your mechanics in place, understand technique and positioning, breathing. It's not like the most complicated thing from a prone position.

• 4:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 4:30Joe Rogan?

  But the fact that he chose to use iron sights, I thought was weird, too.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:34Joe Rogan?

  There's a lot of weirdness to it.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:36Joe Rogan?

  You know, from 140 yards with a scope, that is an easy shot.

• 4:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, then he could just like wander up.

• 4:43Joe Rogan?

  That's the different timeline. The different timeline is he has a scope, and that's it.

• 4:46Speaker 02

  Okay, alright, right, that would have-

• 4:48Joe Rogan?

  And Trump's dead.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 4:49Joe Rogan?

  And then, boy.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 4:51Joe Rogan?

  Boy, do we live in a crazy world then.

• 4:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, completely bizarre.

• 4:55Joe Rogan?

  I mean, what does the streets look like right now?

• 4:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:57Joe Rogan?

  What kind of like protests and riots and...

• 4:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:00Joe Rogan?

  You think January 6th was nice. If they had killed Trump, that would be January 6th on steroids everywhere.

• 5:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. And we would, we would experience it. I mean, you know, I, I don't know, when I was a kid, my, my high school, high school history, he forgot us a bootleg copy of the, the Zapruder film.

• 5:15Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 5:15Speaker 02

  Which, you know, it's like-

• 5:16Joe Rogan?

  What a gangster high school history teacher.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  He was actually pretty focused on the, he really loved the Kennedy assassination, so we spent a lot of time on that and, and, you know, you know, you kind of watch it frame by frame and you can kind of see what's happening, but there's lots of questions. But like, when things like that happen, you know, today, it's gonna be in high definition 4K Ultra, surrounds on forever.

• 5:33Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:33Speaker 02

  Right, playing out in real time forever. And so like, I, yeah, I very much don't want to live in the world where those things happen.

• 5:38Joe Rogan?

  Well, we are very fortunate.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:40Joe Rogan?

  I mean, I, like I said, after the election, I was like, wow, voting works.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:48Joe Rogan?

  Voting works, that's nice. Like, they don't have the system completely rigged.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:52Joe Rogan?

  And then, but they kind of tried to rig it, at least with the media. The, where the real rigging in the 2020 elections, I mean, you can cast all your conspiracies upon it, was in terms of like mail-in ballots and all this jazz, but the real rigging- Was the collusion between social media companies and the government to suppress information that would have altered the effect of the election.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:17Joe Rogan?

  That's legitimate.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, that was like direct interference and it was aided and abetted by a lot of former, you know, intelligence officials and

• 6:23Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  And by the current administration, you know, tons of pressure on censorship coming from this, you know, the current administration and all their kind of arms of the censorship apparatus.

• 6:32Joe Rogan?

  You have your hands in the tech community. You have your fingers in all that jazz.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:36Joe Rogan?

  What was the general attitude about all that stuff when it was revealed? How did, how did people, you know, how did your peers respond to that?

• 6:45Speaker 02

  I think anybody in social media, the internet companies knew it. So I, it was pretty widely understood. I mean, look, there's nothing that happened at Twitter in the Twitter files. It wasn't happening all the, all the other companies, right?

• 6:54Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  So it's a, it's a consistent pattern. If you got the YouTube files, they would look exactly the same. And of course we should get the YouTube files.

• 7:00Joe Rogan?

  Sure.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  Right? And now we probably, we probably will now with, you know, this new administration is probably going to like carve all this stuff open. But yeah, no, look, it was a pattern. And then, look, you know, the companies bear a lot of responsibility and the people in the companies, you know, made a lot of, I think, bad judgment calls. But the government, the like, the Biden White House was directly exerting censorship pressure on American companies to censor American citizens.

• 7:18Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  Which I think, by the way, is just flatly illegal. Like, I think it's actually subject to criminal charges. Like, I think there are people with criminal liability who were involved in this. So there was that. There were also members of Congress doing the same thing, which is also illegal. And then there was a lot of funding of outside third-party groups that were, that were bringing a lot of pressure down on censorship.

• 7:34Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  And just an example of that is there's a unit at Stanford, you know, right next door, um, you know, to us that, um, you know, was the internet censorship unit that was funded by the US government.

• 7:43Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  And exerted tremendous pressure on the companies to censor. And it was, and it was very effective at doing so.

• 7:48Joe Rogan?

  Does it smell like sulfur when you walk those halls?

• 7:50Speaker 02

  It is very dark and grim.

• 7:52Joe Rogan?

  Ooh.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  This whole thing is, is very bad. And so

• 7:55Joe Rogan?

  Stanford?

• 7:56Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, Stanford, Stanford, by the way, another unit like that at Harvard, you know, a bunch of universities got pulled into this, a lot of NGOs and nonprofits got pulled into this. And so the Twitter files showed us kind of the basic roadmap. And then there's this thing called the Weaponization Committee that Congressman Jordan is running that has also revealed a lot of this. But I, I would imagine the new Trump administration is going to come in and carve all that wide open. And I know that there are people in, you know, Being appointed to senior positions who are very

• 8:21Joe Rogan?

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• 9:48Joe Rogan?

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• 10:32Joe Rogan?

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• 10:42Speaker 02

  Determined to do that.

• 10:43Joe Rogan?

  One of the things that I found really kind of shocking was when they revealed how much money the Democrats had spent on the election and how much money was spent on activist groups.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 10:55Joe Rogan?

  It's like more than a hundred million dollars, right?

• 10:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's just, there's extensive government funding of politically oriented NGOs.

• 11:02Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:03Speaker 02

  NGO is one of those great terms, like, "nongovernmental organization," all right, like, what the hell is that?

• 11:08Joe Rogan?

  What is that? Tell me, I don't know.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  Well, it's sort of a charity, and, but what it really...

• 11:12Joe Rogan?

  Sort of.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  Sort of, but most of the time, it's a political entity, it's an entity with a political agenda. But then it's funded by the government in a very large percentage of cases, including the NGOs and the censorship complex, like, the government grants, National Science Foundation grants, like, direct, the State Department grants.

• 11:29Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  Right, direct money, and then, okay, now you've got an NGO funded by the government. Well, that's not an NGO.

• 11:34Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  That's a G O.

• 11:36Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Right, and then you've got a conspiracy, you know, like with censorship, then you have a conspiracy, because you've got government officials using government money to fund what are, what look like private organizations that aren't, and then, what happens is the government outsources to these NGOs the things that it's not legally allowed to do.

• 11:53Joe Rogan?

  Like what?

• 11:54Speaker 02

  Like censorship.

• 11:55Joe Rogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  Like violation of First Amendment of Rights.

• 11:58Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 11:59Speaker 02

  The government, so the first, so what they always say is, "The First Amendment only applies to the government." The First Amendment says the government cannot censor American citizens. And so what they do is, if you want to censor American citizens in the government, if you're smart, you don't do that, what you do is you fund an outside organization, and then you have them do it.

• 12:13Joe Rogan?

  Boy.

• 12:14Speaker 02

  Right, and that's what's been happening, right?

• 12:16Joe Rogan?

  That's like hiring a hitman, like, it's not okay to murder someone, but you can hire someone to murder someone, and then you're clean.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, and if you want to solve a murder, it's not enough to find out who the hitman was, you have to find out who paid the hitman, right?

• 12:26Joe Rogan?

  Right, of course.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  You want to work your way up the chain, and so a lot of this traces into the White House. The best defense the companies have is that a lot of this happened under coercion, right? Because when the government, when the government puts pressure on you, like, it might be a phone call, it might be a letter, it might be the threat of an investigation, it might be a subpoena, it could take many forms, but when the government does that, it carries, you know, that's a very powerful message.

• 12:47Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  It's like a message from a mob boss, right?

• 12:49Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  It's like, "Don't you want to do me a favor?"

• 12:51Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 12:52Speaker 02

  It's like, "Yes, Mr. Camp?" You know, I do, right? Like, I like my corner store. I'd like it to not catch on fire tonight.

• 12:58Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:58Speaker 02

  And so there's this overwhelming hammerblower pressure that comes in. And by the way, even when the government doesn't talk to you directly, if they're funding the organization that is talking to you, then it's very clear what's happening. And so you come under incredible pressure. And so the whole kind of chain, this whole chain of governments, activists, universities, and companies was corrupted. And then on top of that, people in the companies, in a lot of cases, made a lot of decisions that I think they're probably increasingly starting to regret.

• 13:21Joe Rogan?

  What was confusing to me was that the government spent so much money on these activist groups during the election, and I didn't understand like what purpose that would serve. Like, what function would it serve to spend all this money on these activist groups that already support you supposedly?

• 13:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:41Joe Rogan?

  Like, are you bribing them to support you? Are they, what are they, are they, are you paying them to go on talk shows and consistently repeat the government's message, the current administration's message? Like, what would be the function of that?

• 13:56Speaker 02

  So I think in some cases, it's just pay to play, right? So for as an example, we know that Kamala's campaign paid certain on-air personalities, you know, file in, and then there were, you know, which, it's your point, people were very supportive of Kamala, who then gave her, you know, interviews that weren't really well. And so I think in some cases, you just have straight pay to play. That's just how that system works. It's just expected. And then I think you have other organizations, like these NGOs and others, activist groups, where they're actually, you know, they actually do field activities, right? And so there's, you know, maybe there's a get out the vote component, or there's, you know, social media influence downstream component, or some other, you know, kind of field activity that's happening in support of the election.

• 14:28Joe Rogan?

  I just didn't think that they pay, like, when, it's still unclear whether or not celebrities got paid to endorse her.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 14:36Joe Rogan?

  Right? Have you?

• 14:38Speaker 02

  They've mixed it up, because there's, like Oprah, Oprah's, her production company was paid to put on the production, but she was not paid for the interview.

• 14:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, whatever.

• 14:45Speaker 02

  But it was, you know, two, whatever, two million dollars.

• 14:47Joe Rogan?

  Two and a half million dollars. It was initially listed as one, and then it turned out it was 2.5.

• 14:51Speaker 02

  Right.

• 14:51Joe Rogan?

  But like, if I have a production company.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 14:54Joe Rogan?

  And my production company gets paid 2.5 million dollars to endorse Trump.

• 14:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 14:58Joe Rogan?

  And then I go, I didn't get any of that money.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:00Joe Rogan?

  People are like, shut the fuck up. Of course you got, it's your company. What are you talking about?

• 15:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:05Joe Rogan?

  And also, how much does it cost to do an event?

• 15:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 15:08Joe Rogan?

  How does it cost 2.5 million dollars to put on an event? Like, are you feeding people gold sandwiches? Like, what are you doing? Like, how is that possible?

• 15:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. So, yeah. And then you're gonna see the fact that it's deliberately confiscated, of course, is a clue as to...

• 15:21Joe Rogan?

  I just thought the really bizarre one was the allegations. And I would say unsubstantiated allegations. It's been alleged that Beyonce got 10 million dollars. And Lizzo got 3 million dollars. Eminem got 1.8 million dollars. Really?

• 15:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think if you just, like, published all these numbers, these celebrities would all get so mad at each other. That you...

• 15:41Joe Rogan?

  Oh, sure they are.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  Then you would learn everything.

• 15:43Joe Rogan?

  Eminem got short...

• 15:44Speaker 02

  Right, right, right. Lizzo's furious right now, right?

• 15:47Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  Lizzo's probably listening to this right now, being like, "What?"

• 15:50Joe Rogan?

  Well, I wonder if Lizzo's like, "I didn't get shit. I would say it, but why haven't they said it?" Like, Beyonce has been mum about the whole thing. I think I would probably say, like, "I didn't get any money to do that."

• 16:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:02Joe Rogan?

  But that was a weird one, too, because a lot of people thought Beyonce was gonna do a concert.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  Right.

• 16:05Joe Rogan?

  And she just went out there and talked. And everybody's like, "What the fuck?" Because they all came to see a free Beyonce concert.

• 16:11Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 16:11Joe Rogan?

  And then she just said, "I wanna support Kamala Harris." And everybody's like, "Good, good. Now, if you like it, then you should've put a ring on it, right? Uh, uh, uh, uh. Come on. We love your songs.

• 16:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 16:23Joe Rogan?

  That's what we're here for.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 16:25Joe Rogan?

  I just didn't think that it was even possible that a... I didn't think a candidate would ever pay for an endorsement.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:34Joe Rogan?

  I mean, the fact that it was even alleged.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, and then there's, of course, there's the even stinkier version, arguably, which is all the social media influencer campaigns now. There's, you know, tremendous amount of payola.

• 16:43Joe Rogan?

  That's for sure.

• 16:44Speaker 02

  Right.

• 16:44Joe Rogan?

  Because I know people personally who were approached multiple times and offered a substantial amount of money to post things in support of Harris.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. And like, I'm pro-capitalism, and I'm happy for them to get paid, but like, maybe we should know.

• 16:58Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that seems like something you should absolutely have to disclose. It should be like, like, say if I was gonna do an ad for, you know, whatever, a certain coffee company, Black Rifle Coffee, and I did it on my Instagram, I'd have to say, "Ad." I have to say, "This is an ad. It's a paid ad."

• 17:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:14Joe Rogan?

  And that's part of the thing.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:16Joe Rogan?

  You know?

• 17:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:18Joe Rogan?

  Unless it's your company.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 17:19Joe Rogan?

  Like, you're supposed to say, "They're paying me to do this."

• 17:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, well, you know, look, the good news with these is we learn, each cycle, we learn a lot about how politics works. We learn about, a lot about how fake it is. We learn a lot about the things we put up with for a very long time. I mean, everybody's always like freaked out by like whatever the new guy does, but like this real scandal in most cases, I think, is just the way the system already works.

• 17:37Joe Rogan?

  It's a sneaky system.

• 17:39Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 17:39Joe Rogan?

  Well, another fascinating aspect of the system that we learned out this time around is the uncontrolled aspect of it, like what Trump called earned media.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  Right.

• 17:51Joe Rogan?

  Was much more powerful than anything else.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:54Joe Rogan?

  The uncontrolled version of it, like, one of the things that unfortunately for them, mass media or corporate media has done is they've diminished their credibility so much, so much so, that like Joy Reid was on TV today talking about, saying that Trump was gonna shoot protesters and, oh, just wild, unsubstantiated, crazy shit.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:18Joe Rogan?

  And the more they do stuff like that, the more that they say things like that, the more it diminishes their impact and the more it drives people to independent media sources.

• 18:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm sure you've seen the ratings collapse that they've been, you know, they're down to like, they're down, like MSNBC is down to like 50,000 people in the 18 to 20, 18 to 49 demo.

• 18:37Joe Rogan?

  That is so wild.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  Which is tiny, right?

• 18:39Joe Rogan?

  It's so crazy.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  It's really tiny. So I think that's happening. The Gallup organization has done polls on trust in institutions, including, you know, media for the last 60 years. It's been a steady slide down, and in the last, you know, four years, it's fallen off a cliff. I think it's real. Oh, there's another study that came out. The kids are now watching a lot less TV. Kids are just giving up on TV.

• 19:00Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  And they're just, you know, they're on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and other things. And so like, I, I think it's tipping. A question I've been asking myself is when, when will the actual, you know, famously, 1960 was the first television election, right? The, you know, sort of legend has it.

• 19:13Joe Rogan?

  Sure.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  Because it was the one where the televised debate really mattered. And if you saw the televised debate, you saw confident Kennedy and nervous Nixon. And if you heard it,

• 19:20Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 19:20Speaker 02

  You experienced something different.

• 19:22Joe Rogan?

  And handsomeness.

• 19:23Speaker 02

  And handsomeness.

• 19:23Joe Rogan?

  Came into fact.

• 19:24Speaker 02

  And vitality.

• 19:24Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  And health.

• 19:25Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  Right, and all these things, sort of positive, positive spirit, positive energy. I'm actually not, this might be, have been the first internet election, or maybe we actually haven't had it yet. Like, I feel like we're really close to the first internet election, but maybe it's not all the way there.

• 19:38Joe Rogan?

  I think this is it.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  I think this, there's an argument that this is it, right, and that, you know, all the, you know, all the stuff, especially in the last six months, all the podcasts, obviously, and your show played a big role, but, like, I think there's a real, if you're gonna run in 28, like, I think there's like a fully internet-native way to run these campaigns that might literally involve like zero television advertising, and maybe you don't even need to raise that money, and maybe, to your point, if you have the right message, maybe you just go straight direct.

• 20:02Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I think-

• 20:03Speaker 02

  There might be a completely different way to do this.

• 20:04Joe Rogan?

  I think that's the only way now, and I think if you do pay people, it's not gonna have the same impact. You know, I think these Call Her Daddy shows and all these different shows that she went on, I mean, I'm sure they had an impact, but I think that in the future, I'm sure they're scrambling to try to create their own version of this show. This is one thing that keeps coming up, like, we need our own Joe Rogan.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 20:29Joe Rogan?

  But they had me.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  Well, number one, they had you, number one, they had you.

• 20:33Joe Rogan?

  I was on their side.

• 20:33Speaker 02

  They had you and they drove you away, is that number one, number, but they also have, you know, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN.

• 20:38Joe Rogan?

  Right, but that doesn't work anymore.

• 20:40Speaker 02

  I know.

• 20:41Joe Rogan?

  That's like, you know, like you're using smoke signals and everybody else has a cellphone.

• 20:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 20:45Joe Rogan?

  It doesn't work.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right, that's right.

• 20:47Joe Rogan?

  It's just, it's, it's a bizarre time. It's really interesting, though, like, as you said, like, we're in a great timeline, and I think it's a fascinating timeline, too, because there's so much uncertainty, and there's so much, right, we're at the verge of AI, you know, OpenAI, you know, Altman has said now that he thinks 2025 will be the year that AI becomes sentient, whatever that means, you know, artificial general intelligence will be, will emerge, and who knows how that affects, I've said publicly, and I'm kind of half joking, that we need AI government.

• 21:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:22Joe Rogan?

  You know, it sounds crazy to say, but instead of having this like alpha chimpanzee that runs the tribe of humans, how about we have some like really logical- Fact based, you know, program that, you know, makes it like really reasonable and equitable in a way that we can all agree to.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  Right.

• 21:40Joe Rogan?

  Let's govern things in that manner.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  Right. So you can actually simulate this today because you can go on these systems, chat GPT or Claude or these others. And you can, you can ask, you know, how should we handle issue X? How should this be?

• 21:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, we've done that.

• 21:51Speaker 02

  Right. How should the Department of Energy do whatever nuclear policy or whatever? And what I find when I do that is I discover two things. Number one, of course, these things are, these things have the same problem. Social media sad which is tremendously politically biased and that's on purpose and they, they need to fix that. And that's going to be a big topic in the next several years. But the other thing you learn is if you can get through the political basically bias and censorship, if you can actually get to a discussion of the actual issue. It's you get very sophisticated answers.

• 22:14Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  Right. Very logical, very straightforward, and it will explain every aspect of the issue to you and it'll take you through all the pros and cons.

• 22:20Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:20Speaker 02

  And, you know.

• 22:22Joe Rogan?

  I mean, it might be the way to go.

• 22:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:24Joe Rogan?

  Which is so horrifying for people to think because everyone's worried about the Terminators taking over the world. And like, if that's the first step, is we let them govern us?

• 22:32Speaker 02

  Well, look, there's nothing stopping a politician from using this. There's nothing stopping a policymaker from using, you know, as a tool.

• 22:37Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  You start out, at very least, you start out using it as a tool. There's nothing to prevent. You're like, for example, I think military commanders in the field are going to have basically AI battlefield assistants that are going to advise them on strategy, tactics.

• 22:47Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  Right. How to win conflicts and then it'll start to work its way up and then they'll be doing, you know, war planning. And then if you're a general, if you're, you know, sergeant or a colonel or a general, it's going to just mean you perform better.

• 22:57Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 22:57Speaker 02

  And so maybe there's like, you know, the human, the sort of man, machine kind of symbiotic relationship. And you could imagine that happening more in the, in the policy process and in the, in the political process.

• 23:05Joe Rogan?

  And there's also AI controlled jets, which are far superior. They, they did, Mike Baker was telling us about that. They did these simulated dogfights and the AI controlled jets won 100% of the time.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:17Joe Rogan?

  Over humans.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. And there's a bunch of reasons for that. And part of it is just simply the speed of, of processing and so forth. But another big thing is if you don't have a human in the plane, you don't have the, what do they say, the spam in the can? You don't have the, you know, you don't have the human body.

• 23:30Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:30Speaker 02

  In the plane, you don't have to keep a human being alive, which means you can be a lot faster and you can move a lot more quickly.

• 23:34Joe Rogan?

  G-forces.

• 23:35Speaker 02

  Much, much higher G-forces.

• 23:37Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. And then there's no option for someone to go crazy.

• 23:42Speaker 02

  That's also right, yes, exactly.

• 23:44Joe Rogan?

  There's no human element, you know, which is a real element.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, like, I think we're gonna, it's gonna be common to have, like, Mach 5 drone, you know, jet drones within a few years, and, you know, they'll be a fraction of the size of the current, you know, manned planes, which means you can have, like, a lot more of them. And so you kind of want to imagine, you know, a thousand of these things, like, coming over the horizon, right, at you. And it really changes, it's actually, I think, it'd be very interesting, it really changes the fundamental equation of war in the following sense. Fundamentally, in the past, the people who won wars are the people who had the most men and the most material. You just needed the most soldiers, and you needed the most equipment. And in this drone world that we're talking about, it's gonna be the people with the most money and the best technology.

• 24:23Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  Right? And so, for example, small states, you know, small advanced states, like Singapore, will be able to punch way above their weight, and then, kind of, large, sort of economically or technologically backward states that normally would have won will now lose. And so, it's gonna be a recalibration. And then, it has, the good news is you're not putting soldiers at risk, right? So you'll have a lot less, lot less death. The bad news, arguably, is it'll be easier to get into conflicts because you're not putting soldiers at risk. So there's gonna have to be a recalibration of, like, when you actually, like, lean into an attack.

• 24:52Joe Rogan?

  I'm sure you're aware of all this UAP disclosure jazz that you see on television. The more I look into it, the more I think at least a percentage of it, a healthy percentage of it, is bullshit. And there's probably some government projects where they've developed some very sophisticated propulsion systems that they've applied to drones, and that that's what these people are seeing. And this is one of the reasons why they continually have sightings over secured military spaces, like, out in the eastern seaboard, like, there's areas over Virginia where they continually see them, in San Diego, they see them off the coast of San Diego, where there's a place where you would test stuff like that.

• 25:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, so, of course, we know that that was the case for a very long time, for sure, from the 50s through the 80s, because the development of stealth was highly classified, and the SR-71 was brand new at one point, and so you had these, like, you know, alien, you know.

• 25:49Joe Rogan?

  Do you pay attention to any of that stuff at all?

• 25:51Speaker 02

  Of course, of course, 100%. Yeah. And then, and then, and then, by the way, we're not the only ones. And so, I, you know, my speculation would be that a lot, some of the military-based stuff is, you know, the Chinese doing something similar. And, you know, we got a glimpse into that with the balloon.

• 26:03Joe Rogan?

  Well, that one was goofy, though.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  They got shut down, but still, the fact that the Chinese are flying surveillance balloons over American territory and they were able to slip through our early warning systems and just like, you know, loiter above military bases and like, you know, take lots of, you know, imagery and do whatever scans they do.

• 26:17Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:18Speaker 02

  And like, not, literally, nothing was happening and we didn't even know they were there most of the time. And so, like, you know, I would just say, that's like a tip of the ice, it feels like a tip of the iceberg kind of thing where if, if they were doing that, there, there are probably other things going on.

• 26:27Joe Rogan?

  Well, I've read that someone had commented that similar things had happened during the Trump administration, but they didn't tell Trump because they didn't want him to shoot them down.

• 26:35Speaker 02

  Hmm, interesting, interesting. For the record, I'm pro-shooting them down.

• 26:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I think you should probably shoot them down and take pictures and shit, they're nuts, but there's not even people up there, fucking shoot them down.

• 26:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:46Joe Rogan?

  What's the problem?

• 26:47Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly, yes.

• 26:48Joe Rogan?

  Um, do you think there are any of those that are not of this world?

• 26:52Speaker 02

  I, I, I don't think there's any way to know from the outside.

• 26:55Joe Rogan?

  Have you ever, like, pondered it late at night, sitting on your porch?

• 26:58Speaker 02

  Of course, of course.

• 26:59Joe Rogan?

  Staring up at the sky?

• 27:00Speaker 02

  Of course, of course. Well, it, you know, racist, you know, racist, and number one is, is there or not, and then if, if it is, you know, did it recently get here, have they been here for a long time? You know, did they arrive 5,000 years ago?

• 27:10Joe Rogan?

  Tucker thinks they're demons and angels.

• 27:12Speaker 02

  You know, I mean, demons and angels, are demons and angels real? It's like, you know, literally, you know, probably not, but like, certainly they're metaphorically real and are there kind of shades of gray between literal and metaphorical?

• 27:23Joe Rogan?

  Well, the actions are certainly demonic and angelic, right? Actions of human beings, mass, things that happen in the world.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:31Joe Rogan?

  Are uplifting or horrific.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, evil, evil people doing evil things are possessed. I mean, they're, they're possessed by something, right? Like, something is going on.

• 27:38Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  And like, you know, what's, what's the dividing line between, you know, an actual supernatural force and a, and some sort of psychological, sociological thing that's so overwhelming that it just takes control of people and drives them crazy, like, you might, might as well call that a demon.

• 27:49Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's fascinating because like, when you think about, from theological term, like, when you think of it from a religious perspective, you know, people would apply, what would a demon do, what would angels do, what is, what is a, what is the will of God and what is like, the evils of the, the worst aspects of humanity? You would, you know, you could apply them to so many things in the world, but we're very reluctant to say that something is demonic.

• 28:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:21Joe Rogan?

  Like, even though it's clearly demonic, like, clearly in action, like, this is what a demon would do.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:28Joe Rogan?

  A demon would possess people to gun down children.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 28:31Joe Rogan?

  You know, and, you know, use drones to shoot down a wedding party.

• 28:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:35Joe Rogan?

  A demon would do that.

• 28:36Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. So, a friend of mine is a religious scholar, teaches at Catholic University, and he's a religious history scholar, and he says that medieval people would have had a, medieval people were psychologically better prepared for the era ahead of us with AI and robots and drones everywhere than we are, because medieval people took it for granted that they lived in a world with higher powers, higher spirits, angels, demons.

• 28:57Joe Rogan?

  Ah.

• 28:58Speaker 02

  All kinds of supernatural entities, and they just, it was just assumed to be true, and in the world we're heading into, you know, that we're arguably already in, you know, there are going to be these, you know, new forces, these new entities running around doing things, and, you know, we're gonna just, we're gonna struggle, and we're gonna, you know, we're gonna catastrophize, we're gonna conclude, you know, like, AI is the end of the world.

• 29:16Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  The medievals would've said, oh, it's just another spirit, like, you know, it's just another kind of entity. Yeah, it's better, it's better than humans at some things, but so are angels. And so, we're gonna have to, like, change our mentality, we're almost gonna have to become a little bit more medieval, we're gonna have to open up our minds to the kinds of entities that we're dealing with.

• 29:31Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 29:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. Which, which also could help us actually deal with people, like, maybe, maybe, maybe there's an explanatory way to think about human behavior here that seems less rational but might actually be more rational.

• 29:41Joe Rogan?

  Well, you express yourself very brilliantly in describing the current state of woke ideology as a religion.

• 29:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 29:52Joe Rogan?

  And that, the way you described it was brilliant, because you were, you were saying that it has all the elements, excommunication, adherence to a very strict doctrine, all these different aspects of it, saying things that you, everyone knows to be illogical and nonsensical, but you must repeat it.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  Right.

• 30:07Joe Rogan?

  You know, that these things are indicative of people that are in cults, or people that are a part of, like, a very, like, a serious, fundamental religion.

• 30:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I mean, of course, the big difference between woke and those traditional religions is woke has no concept of redemption.

• 30:19Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 30:20Speaker 02

  No concept of forgiveness.

• 30:21Joe Rogan?

  Right, which is a very evil religion.

• 30:23Speaker 02

  You do not want that.

• 30:25Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's also, well, it's ill conceived, right? Because it's like immature, it's an immature religion.

• 30:32Speaker 02

  Yes, it's absolute, it's inherently totalitarian. It has to be because it can permanently destroy people.

• 30:37Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:38Speaker 02

  Woke also understand something that the Greeks understood, which is that being ostracized and being put to death are the same thing. And so when the Greeks sentenced somebody like Socrates to death, they gave them the option of just leaving. But the problem was.

• 30:50Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 30:50Speaker 02

  Yes, Socrates could have just walked out and left.

• 30:53Joe Rogan?

  No kidding?

• 30:53Speaker 02

  The reason that was considered equivalent sentences is because at that time, if you were not a citizen of a particular city, you would get killed in the next city. You'd be identified as the enemy presumptively and killed. And so there was no way to survive without being part of your community. And that's what the woke figured out is you can do the same thing if you're able to like, you know, nail somebody on, you know, on charges of having done something, you know, unacceptably horrible, then you make them toxic and all of a sudden they can't, you know, they can't have, sure, you know, people, you know, they lose friends, they lose family.

• 31:19Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:20Speaker 02

  They lose, they can't get work, you know, and before you know it, like they're, you know, living, you know, severely diminished, damaged lives. Some people then go on to kill themselves.

• 31:27Joe Rogan?

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• 32:11Joe Rogan?

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• 32:55Joe Rogan?

  Because you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/rogan. And because ZipRecruiter helps sort through thousands of resumes and applications. Showing you the most qualified and interesting ones first. There's even an option for candidates to explain why they want the job. Let ZipRecruiter find the right people for your roles, seasonal or otherwise. Try it for free today at ziprecruiter.com/rogan. That's ziprecruiter.com/rogan. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter. Attention at all to Blue Sky.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  I have.

• 33:33Joe Rogan?

  But I have multiple friends that have accounts on Blue Sky. That are very sophisticated trolls. And are pushing like the woke agenda to a satirical point.

• 33:48Speaker 02

  There we go.

• 33:49Joe Rogan?

  Like to like parody.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:50Joe Rogan?

  But like on the edge where you're not quite sure. Well, they'll say enough real things that make sense and talk about their own anxieties and personal issues with stuff. And then say fucking ridiculous shit. And it's fascinating.

• 34:03Speaker 02

  I bet it works.

• 34:04Joe Rogan?

  It does work. That's what's so terrifying. It's like all the outcasts of Twitter. All the people that were like, I can't take this. A few of them will come back, which is wonderful. I love when they come back. I'm gone. I'm gonna go to Blue Sky. Fuck you people. Like a bunch of them went to threads for a while, like Stephen King, he went to threads. Came right back. They all come right back. They can't. The marketplace of ideas, like, okay, you could go to like a fruit stand in the middle of the fucking desert. And that's a marketplace. Or you can go to the farmer's market where everybody's there. Like, where are you gonna go?

• 34:34Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 34:34Joe Rogan?

  You're gonna go to the farmer's market. There's tons of people. It's a lot of fun.

• 34:37Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 34:38Joe Rogan?

  A lot of activity.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 34:39Joe Rogan?

  That fruit stand's fucking barren and deserted. There's no one there. There's very few choices.

• 34:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:44Joe Rogan?

  It's not fun.

• 34:45Speaker 02

  And it's win-win. Well, it's win-win to have them back on Twitter because it's good for them because they want to proselytize. And so they need an audience. So they win. And then we win because it's really, really fun to dunk on them.

• 34:55Joe Rogan?

  But it's also weird for them to not want any pushback at all. Like, don't, isn't the whole thing supposed to be about an exchange of ideas? It's like, if you have a controversial idea and someone disagrees with it, don't you want to hear that position? I know I do. I want to hear it. Even if I vehemently disagree with it, I want to hear it. I want to know where, how do you, how's your brain work? How are you coming to these conclusions? What makes you think this way? Who are you? What do you like? I want to go on Instagram, I want to look at your pictures. I want to see what you're up to. What are you doing? You know? What do you do in your free time? What are you complaining about? I want to, it's like, it's a fascinating education on human psychology.

• 35:36Joe Rogan?

  And to watch people express themselves publicly and then also be attacked publicly by strangers, which never happens in the real world, like at scale, the way it happens on social media. And I think it's an amazing time for people to examine ideas. If you can handle it.

• 35:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. My favorite term is marketplace of idea.

• 35:56Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:58Speaker 02

  You could have a marketplace of ideas, it's just going to be one idea, right? So, Blue Sky is a marketplace of ideas.

• 36:02Joe Rogan?

  Sure, yeah.

• 36:03Speaker 02

  X is the marketplace of ideas. That final S makes a lot of difference.

• 36:07Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. But the thing about X is, it really is diverse. There's, I follow tons of like kooky leftist progressive nutbags that like have bizarre takes on everything. And they were 100% convinced that Kamala Harris is going to sweep all the swing states, including Iowa. They were all in, and I was like, this is wild. Like, is that going to happen? Are they right? Like, this is crazy. But it's, they were 100% convinced. And it's fascinating to see all these different kinds of people, to see the Charlie Kirk's and, you know, the full-on left-wing kooks and see them all together. You need that.

• 36:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, look, so one of the ways I think to think about this is all new information is heretical by definition, right? So anytime anybody has a new idea, it's a threat to the existing power structure. So all new ideas start as heresies. And so if you don't have an environment that can tolerate heresies, you're not going to have new ideas and you're going to end up with complete stagnation. If you have stagnation, you're going to go straight into decline.

• 37:09Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:10Speaker 02

  Right. And I think this is the aberrant nature. This is the timeline split. I think the last decade has just been like a really weird aberrant time where things have not been working like they should. And, you know, in 2015, Twitter called itself the free speech wing of the free speech party, right? And Elon has not, like Elon has restored it.

• 37:27Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 37:28Speaker 02

  Right. He brought it back. He brought it back to something that everybody thought was completely normal 10 years ago.

• 37:31Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:32Speaker 02

  And I think, I hope, this last 10 years increasingly is just going to feel like a bad dream. Like, I can't believe we tolerated the level of repression, right? And anger and, you know, emotional incontinence and, you know, cancellation campaigns.

• 37:44Joe Rogan?

  Emotional incontinence is a great term.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  Yes, there has been a lot.

• 37:48Joe Rogan?

  That's really what it's like.

• 37:49Speaker 02

  Of emotional incontinence.

• 37:50Joe Rogan?

  You're just diarrhea in your emotions.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  Just spraying rage in all directions. And so I, you know, I'm very, at the moment at least, very optimistic that there's a cultural change happening here that's even more profound than the political.

• 38:01Joe Rogan?

  I have a lot of respect and also sympathy for Jack Dorsey. I like him a lot as a human being. I think he's a brilliant guy. And I think he had very good intentions. But he was a part of a very large corporation. And he had an idea for a Wild West Twitter. He wanted to have two versions of Twitter. He wanted to have the Twitter that was pre Elon, where there's moderation and you, you know, you can't deadname someone and all that jazz. And then he wanted to have an additional Twitter that was essentially what X is now. And he just didn't have the ability to push that through with the board and.

• 38:37Joe Rogan?

  The executives and all the people that, you know, were fully on board with woke ideology.

• 38:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the experience that people like Jack have had running these companies in the last decade has been, and I don't mean to like let them off the hook for their decisions, but just the lived experiences, they say, of what these people's lives have been like is just daily pounding. Just every single day. It's like meteor strikes coming down from the sky, exploding around you, getting attacked from every conceivable direction, being called just incredibly horrible things, being attacked from many different directions.

• 39:03Joe Rogan?

  Well, he's already left Blue Sky.

• 39:04Speaker 02

  Well, yeah. So irony of Jack is that Jack then created Blue Sky,

• 39:10Speaker 02

  which is kind of exactly the opposite of anyway where he thought, you know, oh, by the way, you know, the new, the new name for it, of course, is Blue Cry.

• 39:17Joe Rogan?

  Ah, I didn't know that.

• 39:18Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yeah. But he's also got, you know, look to his credit, he's still trying. And so he's got NOSTER, you know, which is another, another.

• 39:24Joe Rogan?

  What is it?

• 39:24Speaker 02

  It's called NOSTER, N-O-S-T-R.

• 39:26Joe Rogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 39:26Speaker 02

  It's this kind of new, this is, it's actually his third.

• 39:28Joe Rogan?

  He's gonna keep swinging.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  Look at full credit, full credit. He's gonna, he's gonna keep swinging. And by the way, full credit, he's supported Elon, you know, they've mixed up a little bit, but by and large, she's been very supportive and was very supportive at a key time.

• 39:38Joe Rogan?

  Well, I also found it fascinating that when there was any sort of a right wing branch of that stuff like Gab or any of these, they would immediately be infiltrated by bots as well, like my friends that troll on Blue Sky. But these are Nazis. Like, these are Nazi bots. These are people that would just spew horrible hate. And then Gab would be labeled, oh, this is where the Nazis go. This is a right wing psychopath social media app.

• 40:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I think frankly, I think you get the same thing if you start out, if I think if you start out overtly political on either side, I think that's what you end up with.

• 40:11Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 40:11Speaker 02

  And so I just say like that, that doesn't seem to be an effective route to market. It seems like you have, you have to start from the beginning as a general purpose service, but you need to have some sense of the actual guardrails you're gonna have around. And by the way, every social media service, internet service that ever works, there's always some content filters and restrictions because you can't have child porn, you can't have incitement to violence, you can't have terrorist recruitment.

• 40:32Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  And even the First Amendment, there's like a dozen carve outs that the Supreme Court has ruled on over time that are things like that, that you can't just like say, right? I can't say, let's go join ISIS and like, you know, let's go attack Washington. Like, it's just, it's literally not allowed. So there's always some controls, but you need to have like. Spine of steel if you're going to hold back the censorship pressure and and you know there's basically Substack, you know, company I'm involved, you know, is doing very well, you know, smaller

• 40:57Joe Rogan?

  I love Substack.

• 40:58Speaker 02

  Smaller than Twitter, but doing extremely well.

• 41:00Joe Rogan?

  Fantastic.

• 41:00Speaker 02

  And they've done a great job, I think, of holding the line on this stuff.

• 41:03Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 41:03Speaker 02

  And then, obviously.

• 41:04Joe Rogan?

  And it's an amazing resource. There's so many brilliant people on Substack.

• 41:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 41:08Joe Rogan?

  I love Substack. I get a large percentage of my news from Substack.

• 41:12Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 41:13Joe Rogan?

  It's really good and it's so valuable and it's such a great place for people who are independent journalists and physicians and scientists to publish their ideas and actually get paid for it by the people who subscribe to it. I think it's fantastic.

• 41:27Speaker 02

  And there's lots of people on the far left and the far right.

• 41:29Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 41:29Speaker 02

  Right. So you actually have the full spray of like, when a far left person gets upset at where, you know, somebody working in the New York Times is mad because they're not far left enough, they quit and they start a Substack. And Substack welcomes them in.

• 41:38Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 41:39Speaker 02

  Which is, which is why they don't devolve into a gabber or something like that because it really is a, it really is a platform. It really does welcome all commerce.

• 41:46Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's also very difficult to subvert in that same way because Substack is essays, right? You're, you're reading people's essays and papers on things and like, these are long form things that are very well, in a lot of cases, very well researched and it's not the kind of thing you could just shitpost on.

• 42:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 42:05Joe Rogan?

  You know, there are comments, but it's just like, they don't hold the weight that the actual article holds.

• 42:09Speaker 02

  Right. So my partners, my partners at work, they've observed that I tend to be able to inflame situations from time to time. I can tend to be provocative and get people really upset. And so the, the rule they've asked me to comply with is I'm allowed to write essays, for example, on Substack, and I'm allowed to go on long form podcasts, but I'm not allowed to post.

• 42:26Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 42:27Speaker 02

  Right, exactly.

• 42:28Joe Rogan?

  You have rules.

• 42:29Speaker 02

  It's the rule, it's the rule. Now, by the way, I struggle, I struggle against the rules because I can't, I can't help myself from time to time.

• 42:34Joe Rogan?

  Why do they want you to have rules?

• 42:36Speaker 02

  Because otherwise I inflame people too much. I drive, I drive people too crazy.

• 42:39Joe Rogan?

  You do it on purpose?

• 42:40Speaker 02

  Sometimes. I mean, sometimes you have to. Sometimes it's unintentional. Did you ever hear about when, when the entire continent, when the entire country of India was mad at me?

• 42:50Joe Rogan?

  No!

• 42:51Speaker 02

  Oh, I spent one night with the entire country of India, basically wanted to kill me. It was like, it was, it was incredible.

• 42:56Joe Rogan?

  Oh my goodness, what happened?

• 42:57Speaker 02

  I mean, I was in a Twitter debate with somebody back when I was just posting freely on Twitter, and it was a debate about economics and the topic of colonialism came up. And I made a comment in a long thread about colonialism, and it turns out the Indians are still extremely sensitive about the topic of colonialism. And I did not understand the mindset and the historical orientation. And I tripped a line. And I stayed up all night, and I went hyper viral in every time zone in India. Every hour, there would be like an entirely new activation.

• 43:28Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 43:28Speaker 02

  And I was like, I was like, front page headline news, top of the hour TV news, like, all the way across India.

• 43:35Speaker 02

  Yes, it was like a, I do not recommend this as an experience. By the way, I learned how many incredible Indian-American friends I have, because they all rallied to my, you know, my side, you know, said, he's not, you know, Mark's not literally calling for the re-colonization of India.

• 43:49Joe Rogan?

  There's probably the language barrier as well, right?

• 43:51Speaker 02

  Language, and then just, my big, just historical context. Americans have a different, Americans experience history differently than almost everybody else. History for us is just like stuff that happened in the past that doesn't matter anymore. But a lot of other people around the world experience history as something that really still matters, like, really matters to their lives today.

• 44:07Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 44:08Speaker 02

  They just, they live in history more than we. They have a deeper understanding of kind of how they got to where they were and the things that happened to their parents and grandparents and ancestors. And so there's just, it's just, you know, I don't know if it's, you know, better or worse, it's just a different way of experiencing reality. Anyway, I recommend learning that lesson not by enraging a billion people.

• 44:26Joe Rogan?

  I experienced a small version of that recently, because I said we shouldn't be using long-range missiles on Russia. And the Ukrainians, like, and Ukrainian bots, a bunch of people came after me. Because I was saying, like, the Biden administration, I was like, fuck these people. And then I think some people misconstrued that as fuck the Ukrainian people, which I absolutely was not saying. I was saying, fuck whoever in the last days of the presidencies decide to escalate this war, because it appears that that's what they've done. It appears that they're leaving Trump a giant mess, at the very least.

• 45:00Speaker 02

  So, good news is, I am allowed to go on podcasts.

• 45:03Joe Rogan?

  That's good news.

• 45:04Speaker 02

  And the theory, it's your, I bring it up though, because it's your Substack thing. It's because it's basically, Mark, you need to explain yourself in long form.

• 45:10Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:11Speaker 02

  You can't just say a thing, exactly to your example, you can't just say a thing and have people extrapolate from it.

• 45:16Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 45:17Speaker 02

  They'll extrapolate. It's not their fault, because you haven't, it's your fault, because you haven't explained it.

• 45:21Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 45:22Speaker 02

  And so, if you write something long form, or if you go talk for three hours, at least you'll, the context will be there. And then if they want to get mad at you, that's fine, but you can point everybody to the transcript, and it's clear that that's not what you meant.

• 45:31Joe Rogan?

  Do you also think, while you're writing, how things could be misconstrued, so let me like, do a really good job of being very clear about this?

• 45:38Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 45:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you kind of have to.

• 45:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 45:41Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, like, I had Jimmy Corsetti on the other day, and he is an expert in ancient history, and ancient civilizations, and we had these fascinating subjects, and one of them that came up was the Nazis and their fascination with the occult. And so you had to like, clearly say, "Listen, fuck Hitler." Okay, can I be really clear? Fuck Hitler, fuck the Nazis, okay? I have not in any way, okay, now that we're clear, let's talk about where the swastika came from. Fuck Hitler. Did I say fuck Hitler? Let me say it again, fuck Hitler. But the swastika is his ancient symbol, and he's like, talking about like, why did the Nazis have this fascination with the occult, and with ancient civilizations? And so we got into it, but it was like, one of those things where it's like, "All right, we're hitting the third rail, everybody get your rubber boots on."

• 46:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:26Joe Rogan?

  You know, let's, uh, save everybody here.

• 46:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've got a friend in the entertainment business who is quite left-wing, but really likes World War II documentaries.

• 46:33Joe Rogan?

  Ooh.

• 46:34Speaker 02

  And so, he'll be like, "Yeah, I saw this great documentary last night about Hitler." And I'm like, "I'll bet you did."

• 46:38Joe Rogan?

  You can't even have a copy of Mein Kampf in your house.

• 46:46Speaker 02

  Oh, a student, this is actually one of the Stanford crazy stories, a student at Stanford was reported to the disciplinary board, the, yeah, the civil, whatever, disciplinary board for reading a copy of Mein Kampf.

• 46:55Joe Rogan?

  Oh my god.

• 46:56Speaker 02

  In the quad.

• 46:57Joe Rogan?

  Oh my god, that's so crazy.

• 46:58Speaker 02

  Which is a book that's been, you know, assigned for-

• 47:00Joe Rogan?

  You could buy it right now on Amazon.

• 47:01Speaker 02

  Eighty years.

• 47:02Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:03Speaker 02

  To college kids, to like, understand who these people were, and like, how to not do that again. Yeah, and that kid was like, nearly brought up on charges, nearly expelled, so like-

• 47:10Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, that's, yes, this is the world that I, that I hope that we're leaving.

• 47:15Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's just an awful way to look at things. It's so awful to think that if you read about someone horrible, you support them.

• 47:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 47:24Joe Rogan?

  It's just so crazy. Like, how are we gonna study history?

• 47:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. And how are we gonna prevent bad things from happening again?

• 47:31Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 47:31Speaker 02

  If we can't wrap our heads around why they happened the first time.

• 47:33Joe Rogan?

  Especially something like the Nazis. Like, how are we gonna learn, like, what happened? Clearly, 1920s Germany was very different than 1945 Germany. What the fuck happened in 25 years? So what we're essentially talking about is the year 1999 America versus 2024 America. Imagine a shift of that magnitude, so crazy, that there's a Holocaust in 2024, and in 1999, everybody was just hanging out.

• 48:03Speaker 02

  Yep, that's right.

• 48:04Joe Rogan?

  Well, you should probably study that. And you should probably not reprimand someone for reading a book on this.

• 48:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. Yeah, exactly. And look, the German people went along with it, right? And so, you know, how did that happen?

• 48:12Joe Rogan?

  How did that happen?

• 48:13Speaker 02

  And how many, you know, was there active agreement? Was there passive agreement? Was there, you know, what?

• 48:18Joe Rogan?

  What are the steps where things go horribly wrong? And how can we recognize those? Because those steps have taken place multiple times in history, in recorded history. We know about them. So like, if we see them happening today, maybe we should stop it and nip it at the bud. What better way than to read about when it already happened?

• 48:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. One of my observations about people talking about current events is we know conclusively that prior eras all had horrible moral problems, disasters, you know, catastrophes, wars, and all kinds. They made all kinds of horrible mistakes. But we are completely certain that in our time, we figured it all out.

• 48:49Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 48:49Speaker 02

  We're 100% convinced that we have it all dialed in. And the one thing I know for sure is people 50 years from now are gonna look back on us and they're gonna say, oh, my God, those people were awful.

• 48:57Joe Rogan?

  100%.

• 48:57Speaker 02

  Right. But like, in what way?

• 49:00Joe Rogan?

  Right. In what way are we horrible? I mean, certainly, a lot of the way we treat each other is horrible, especially with the amount of information that we have available. But it is fascinating also that if you, you know, I visited Athens last year, and I got to tour the ruins, and I was like, I wonder when it all went south? Like, when did they, when did they know this had fallen apart? Like, when was it in the peak of everything? They probably thought, hey, We have the most amazing sophisticated civilization that's available on earth and we will maintain this. This is, we will be the center of intellectual discourse and the, the home of democracy. This is us. And then, no. Now there's like shitty apartment buildings next to the Parthenon. You're like, what happened?

• 49:45Joe Rogan?

  Something horribly happened and we don't want to think that could ever happen to us today. We want to think, we're American motherfucker. We're gonna keep this bitch rolling forever. Leonard Skinner, Free Bird, let's go. Second Amendment, come on. And we're gonna, we think that it's just, this is, this is the future. We, America is the shining star of the world and we're gonna carry this on, but probably not. Like historically, I mean, what is the longest running dominant civilization ever? The Romans existed for, what, a couple thousand years? Like, how long did the Greeks run? How long did the Egyptians? The Egyptians might be the longest running. Especially if you like, take into account the possibility of alternative history timelines.

• 50:29Joe Rogan?

  Where they'll, you know, like Egyptian hieroglyphs, they have kings that go back 30,000 years. Here it is. Egypt and Mesopotamia, there it is. One estimate measuring the time of the first pharaoh's use of hieroglyph writing to the native religion was replaced by Christianity, ancient Egyptian civilization endured for about 3,500 years. But I bet it was more than that.

• 50:50Speaker 02

  Well, the, the, I mean, the, the argument is, just things just really, didn't really change.

• 50:54Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 50:54Speaker 02

  Like, changes we under, historical change of the kind that we understand where things actually changed. The way people live changes really kicked off with the Greeks and so that was sort of the default status quo. Civilization for a long time. The Greeks kicked off change as we understand it and then, and then, and then, and then the Romans. Do you know about the fish ponds?

• 51:11Joe Rogan?

  Fish ponds?

• 51:12Speaker 02

  The fish ponds, the fish, Cicero's fish ponds.

• 51:13Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  So, uh, the Roman Empire, you know, ran for, you know, in, in its sort of, Roman republican empire and it sort of helped what you consider as dynamic phases. It's sort of vital phase ran for a few, you know, a few hundred years, about maybe 400 years total, something like that. And, um, uh, towards the end, as it was sort of falling, stagnating and increasingly starting to fall apart. Brendan Mind says, when the roads got dangerous and nobody could quite explain why. Um, right, uh, which sounds familiar by the way.

• 51:40Speaker 02

  Cicero was, you know, one of the great, one of the great Roman statesmen and he, he wrote these letters that we have. And in the letters, he sends these letters to all of his aristocratic friends and it, the, the theme in the letters is basically all of the actual competent, capable citizens of Rome are at, are out in the countryside at their villas, uh, perfecting their fish ponds.

• 51:57Speaker 02

  Right, they've pulled into themselves. They've built their themselves their own protected environments, right, right, where they control everything and they're completely focused on ornamentation. They're completely focused on their clothes and and on their, you know, lifestyles, right?

• 52:10Joe Rogan?

  Kardashians, they were Kardashians.

• 52:11Speaker 02

  I'm sure. I don't know if the Kardashians have fish ponds, but if they did, they would be spectacular.

• 52:17Joe Rogan?

  They would be amazing fish ponds.

• 52:18Speaker 02

  I have no doubt they would be the most amazing fish ponds we have ever seen. And so he kept railing, he's like, stop with the fish ponds, like, stop working in the fit, like, get back out here, rejoin the Senate, like, get back involved in the system. Let's keep this thing from caving in.

• 52:31Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 52:32Speaker 02

  And I think, you know, like, as I said, you know, the significance, I think of, you know, Trump actually talked about this in the campaign, you know, his version of this talking in the campaign, campaign trials, he's like, look, I could be off in a resort. I own all these golf clubs, I have many things I could be doing in my life.

• 52:43Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, of course. And he's 78 years old. He probably would like to do that.

• 52:46Speaker 02

  Exactly, right. And he's, you know, surrounded, his family loves him and like, you know, grandkids and like the whole thing. And he's like, look, I'm not doing it because like, I need, I need, I need to do this. And it's interesting because, you know, he doesn't use, you know, he's not referencing Cicero when he says that, but it's, it's that spirit, right, that Cicero talked about where, you know, when times get tough, do the people who are in a position to actually make positive change actually step up or not?

• 53:06Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 53:07Speaker 02

  And I think we've had a pretty long stretch here where that hasn't been the case. And I think maybe with Trump and then I think also with Elon, I think.

• 53:12Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 53:13Speaker 02

  Because Elon's the other guy, right? He, he for sure could.

• 53:16Joe Rogan?

  What's a coalition, right? It's not just him. It's Vivek, Ramaswamy.

• 53:19Speaker 02

  That's right. Another guy, by the way, who could be kicking it on the beach somewhere.

• 53:22Joe Rogan?

  100%, yeah.

• 53:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Very successful guy.

• 53:24Joe Rogan?

  And young and handsome.

• 53:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:26Joe Rogan?

  Could do whatever he wants.

• 53:26Speaker 02

  Could be doing anything. Yeah, exactly.

• 53:27Joe Rogan?

  Instead, he's decided to go all in. And then, of course, you have Tulsi Gabbard, and, you know, you have J D Vance, who I think is brilliant. You have all these brilliant people that are together, which is very hopeful. This is what we didn't see out of the Biden Harris campaign. You know, what we saw from Harris and Walz, you have Walz, this guy who's, it seems like he's a compulsive liar. At the very least, he's lied multiple times about fairly insignificant things, you know, like whether or not he was a head coach or an assistant coach. And the lies have always elevated him socially, right? All the lies about his military service, or at least. implying that he served in a different perspect- in a different aspect.

• 54:10Joe Rogan?

  And then there was Tiananmen Square, this, everything enhances his virtue. This is not what anybody wants. You want the opposite. You know, you want a guy like J D Vance who served in the Marines and, you know, went to Yale, comes from a single mother with addiction problems, rose from hard work and dedication to become who he is now. Like, that's the kind of guy that I like.

• 54:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:30Joe Rogan?

  That's what we all would like. Like, okay, that looks like a leader to me.

• 54:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:33Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:34Speaker 02

  Well, the Romans had this con- this concept they took very seriously. They called virtue, right? And like, did you, did you, there's a whole ranking, by the way, of Roman virtues. And if you read them today, you just like want to burst out crying because you're just like, oh, my God, I can't believe what we're missing. But like.

• 54:45Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 54:46Speaker 02

  People with virtue, people with virtue, it's not just that they think that they're good people or that they tell everybody they're good people. They actually act on it and actually step up.

• 54:52Joe Rogan?

  Well, this is what's missing from today's secular society, right? Like, we, we don't have like a doctrine that encourages that sort of thinking and behavior and rewards it publicly. Which religion does.

• 55:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:07Joe Rogan?

  You know, with true Christianity, you know, not subverted fucking giant arena Christianity where the guy's flying private jets and has Rolls Royces and shit, but actual, like, real Christian people.

• 55:19Speaker 02

  Right. Well, and the Roma- the Romans had gods. I mean, their, their virtues had gods.

• 55:22Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:22Speaker 02

  And so, and so they're like, it was actually wrapped, it was, to your point, it was like encoded into their religion. It was wrapped up in their religion. They knew exactly what was expected of them. They knew exactly what their ancestors expected of them. They knew exactly what their gods expected of them.

• 55:33Joe Rogan?

  I recently read Meditations again, a couple of months ago.

• 55:37Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 55:37Joe Rogan?

  I listened to it in the sauna, but it's, it's brilliant. And it's, it's amazing that this guy, Marcus Aurelius, was thinking like this so many years ago.

• 55:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:47Joe Rogan?

  And it's so, it's so valid today and it applies so well to modern life. It's so, so strange.

• 55:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:56Joe Rogan?

  You know, how. Brilliant this person was while he was running this incredible empire.

• 56:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:03Joe Rogan?

  That he could write about the human psychology and the value of forgiveness and, you know, being true to yourself and constantly being truthful everywhere and everything you do. And all these virtues and all these, the stoicism that he, that he espoused. It's, it's so valuable today. It's really remarkable that this person who was a leader, what was it, 2,000 years ago?

• 56:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:25Joe Rogan?

  That his words still ring true today.

• 56:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. You probably know, he didn't write it for public consumption.

• 56:30Joe Rogan?

  Right, yeah.

• 56:31Speaker 02

  It was just.

• 56:32Joe Rogan?

  Which is even more amazing.

• 56:32Speaker 02

  His private notebook.

• 56:34Joe Rogan?

  Which is why it's so good, probably.

• 56:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:35Joe Rogan?

  Cause he probably wrote it for a Substack. He'd be like, wow, people are gonna hate on this, let me.

• 56:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 56:40Joe Rogan?

  Let me, let me, you know, let me preemptively attack the people in the comments or.

• 56:46Speaker 02

  Right.

• 56:46Joe Rogan?

  Subdue them.

• 56:47Speaker 02

  But he's like, he's like, he's, he's, he's lecturing himself, like he's telling himself how to act. Right, like, you know, he's very, this is very deep, deep, these are very deep, important. My favorite, my favorite part of the, of the meditations is there's a section where it's something like, yeah, you're gonna wake up this morning and everybody's gonna hate you and everybody's gonna lie to you and everybody's gonna make dumb decisions and you're gonna be incredibly frustrated and you're not gonna get any credit for anything. And you have to get up anyway.

• 57:09Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:10Speaker 02

  Like, that's all, yes, yes, yes, that's all true.

• 57:12Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 57:13Speaker 02

  And you still have to get up and do your job.

• 57:14Joe Rogan?

  And of course he's saying that to himself as the leader of Rome.

• 57:17Speaker 02

  To himself, exactly.

• 57:18Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:18Speaker 02

  And you know, and what's in there is just like, wow, his life was not, you know, he's just like, again, it's, it's actually, you know, like the CEO of some, it's just like, you're gonna get pounded. Like, if you're in these positions, you're gonna get pounded every day.

• 57:27Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's, it's just incredible.

• 57:29Speaker 02

  And if you're operating out of a, out of a, out of a, out of a true sense of virtue, if you're operating out of a true sense of like, exercising your responsibilities, you, you, you get up and do it anyway.

• 57:36Joe Rogan?

  It's amazing how much it resonates.

• 57:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:38Joe Rogan?

  It really is. What's amazing how much so many ancient writings resonate. You know, there's so much valuable information, just like in Sun Tzu's The Art of War.

• 57:49Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 57:49Joe Rogan?

  Or in the Book of Five Rings, you know, there's so many ancient books that you read and you go, first, first of all, I love reading them because I, I try to imagine what, you know, what is this life like in, like, if you wanna take like Miyamoto Musashi, 1400, when did he live? Miyamoto Musashi, he was like 1420s or something like that, like. What's that like?

• 58:12Speaker 02

  Right.

• 58:12Joe Rogan?

  Like, what is your life like? What is, what is the, what is the view of the world? When you, you don't really have detailed maps? Or you don't have any photographs? You don't have any idea what the fuck is going on in Europe unless you go there?

• 58:26Speaker 02

  Right.

• 58:26Joe Rogan?

  Like, what is, what is your version of the world like?

• 58:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:30Joe Rogan?

  And then to see someone's words written down and you read them and try to just imagine yourself in their perspective and their mindset.

• 58:38Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, and look, I think if you're somebody like that, or somebody like Marcus Aurelius, you just have this incredible sense of responsibility.

• 58:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:45Speaker 02

  Like, the one thing you do have is a sense of purpose. Like, you know exactly why you're here. You know exactly what your role is. You know exactly how you're supposed to behave. You know exactly how you're supposed to basically gain glory, how you're supposed to honor your ancestors. Like, it's, it's just all, you know exactly where you are in the community.

• 58:58Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 58:59Speaker 02

  Right, you know, right? You, you have this, like, incredible sense of groundedness and rootedness. And of course, there's huge downsides to that, which is it really cuts off your ability to, you know, run off and, you know, you know, go on American Idol, right? Like, there's, there's like a lot of things you can't do, right? But like,

• 59:13Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:13Speaker 02

  You know, you know what you're supposed to do. And you either, you either do it or you don't do it. And, and these days, to, to have people like that, we need people who choose to be that way. Right? Which is, which is, you know, which is arguably harder, right? Given, given all the choices that they actually choose to, to live that way.

• 59:27Joe Rogan?

  Well, not only that, giving all the distractions that people face every day that keeps them from sitting down and writing a journal like that.

• 59:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

• 59:35Joe Rogan?

  You know, I mean, back then, there's not a lot of different things to entertain you with.

• 59:40Speaker 02

  Correct. Yes, you had to be maybe a little bit more serious because you couldn't, you couldn't have as much fun. My, my favorite, no, my other favorite meditation, Marcus Aurelius thing is, is something like, be the rocks on the shore at which the, at which the waves beat.

• 59:52Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 59:53Speaker 02

  Right? Like, yes, like, yes, your job is to stand there like the rocks do and just the surf just like keeps coming and keeps coming and keeps coming. And your job is to just like stand there and take it.

• 1:00:02Joe Rogan?

  Imagine what it was like, like, addressing the people back then, too. Just yelling out into these groups or speaking in front of all the leaders, like. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Look, it's good to prepare for the future, but when you start overanalyzing what's happening around you, dreaming up every hypothetical situation of what could happen, that's when it gets dangerous. You can start to hyperfixate and stress out and all over things that haven't even happened. That's no good for current you or future you. If you're struggling to stay in the present and out of your head, try talking with a quality therapist from BetterHelp.

• 1:00:43Joe Rogan?

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• 1:01:27Joe Rogan?

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• 1:02:10Joe Rogan?

  which helps avoid overfeeding and makes weight management easier. And isn't getting more time with our four-legged best friends something every dog owner wants? The answer to that is yes, obviously. So try The Farmer's Dog today and get 50% off your first box of fresh, healthy food. Plus, get free shipping. Just go to thefarmersdog.com/rogan. This offer is for new customers only. And everyone's plotting to kill you.

• 1:02:42Speaker 02

  There is also a lot of that going on.

• 1:02:43Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, everyone's. I mean, how many times they try to kill Hitler? Like, everybody's trying to kill you. If you're, if you're running things. All your generals are probably secretly wanting to become the king.

• 1:02:54Speaker 02

  Yep, yep, exactly.

• 1:02:55Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, all these serpers are waiting in the wings.

• 1:02:57Speaker 02

  Not easy lives, you know, today, today, most of the killings happen metaphorically.

• 1:03:01Joe Rogan?

  Most.

• 1:03:01Speaker 02

  Although every now and then.

• 1:03:02Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:03Speaker 02

  Somebody takes a shot.

• 1:03:04Joe Rogan?

  The alternative timeline.

• 1:03:05Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, exactly. That's right. That's right.

• 1:03:07Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. How fearful were you, uh, leading up to the election that it wouldn't go into the new timeline?

• 1:03:14Speaker 02

  It was so weird because all the experts said it was 50/50 razor, you know, razor sharp, you know, it's this tiny little, you know, thing, 80,000 votes in eight counties. And, you know, um, and then, now, number one, then it wasn't, which means we can take all those experts and just dismiss them forever going forward because they clearly, clearly have, clearly have, clearly have no clue. So it's another set of people we don't have to listen to. But I had this really interesting conversation that kept nagging at me with a, uh, a senior Democrat who's on his way out of, of, uh, of, of, of, of politics. And he, he said in the, in the summer, I said, uh, how, how certain is, or what's your view? And, and this person said, uh, Trump's gonna win with 100% certainty.

• 1:03:51Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 1:03:51Speaker 02

  Um, this is a Democrat, um, and from a sort of purple state. Right. So, uh, you know, not New York or California, but like a state with, you know, sort of maybe.

• 1:03:59Joe Rogan?

  Arizona.

• 1:04:00Speaker 02

  Broader cross-section of people. And this person basically said, yeah, looked, said, look, all you have to do is fly anywhere in the country into any purple and, uh, place and go into a second or third tier. You know, side city and take an Uber for 30 minutes, you know, land at the airport, take an Uber, drive around for 30 minutes, come back and just ask the driver, like, how's it going and who are they voting for? And basically 100% of the time, the answer is gonna be Trump. Cause people are just, where people were just like completely fed up. They were just completely fed up. And then there was the, you know, Kamala enthusiasm, which this person said, you know, the Kamala enthusiasm is like highly focused in New York and California. Which don't matter from an electoral standpoint, right? So they're not gonna decide anything.

• 1:04:37Joe Rogan?

  But matter's huge when it comes to media.

• 1:04:40Speaker 02

  Oh, sure, of course. But that's, that's the thing, of this, the self-reinforcing nature of the bubble. And this is what's actually so interesting about these media bubbles is like the, the people in these media bubbles are not breaking out. Like, uh, they, they, it's like they're getting deeper into the sort of collective psychosis that they indulge in. And part of it was getting excited about a candidate for which there was very little popular support for once you got outside of these, you know, heavily blue states.

• 1:04:59Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:59Speaker 02

  And so it, and it's, in a lot of ways, it's the most, you know, obvious explanation in the world, which is just people just fundamentally did not like the direction the country was going in and they were just fed up with it.

• 1:05:08Joe Rogan?

  There's also this very bizarre arrogance of people that were certain that Kamala Harris was gonna win. Like, I'm sure you've seen the viral video of this lady who's a political analyst who talks about going to the liquor store and buying a bottle of champagne.

• 1:05:21Speaker 02

  Oh, right, I saw that, yeah, right, right.

• 1:05:23Joe Rogan?

  I don't wanna show it, the poor lady. She's probably living in hell right now, but...

• 1:05:27Speaker 02

  I'm on Blue Sky.

• 1:05:29Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, she's probably on Blue Sky. She might be on X, well, she was on X, I think. She deleted her profile. But, the poor lady, I mean, she, but she was being very arrogant, and she laughed and mocked this man and said, "You do realize you wasted your vote, right?"

• 1:05:43Speaker 02

  That's right, that's right, that's right, that's right.

• 1:05:44Joe Rogan?

  And she laughed, which makes her hard to feel sorry for.

• 1:05:47Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:05:47Joe Rogan?

  It's like, you were, you were ready to mock this man, but in her eyes, it was all about reproductive freedom. And she thought that that was under attack, under the Trump administration, and that women are gonna stand up and they're gonna stop that, because in her echo chamber, that was the case. Everybody was universally, they all agreed, were universally on board with this idea that Trump is evil, we gotta get rid of him, and women are gonna vote, and this is gonna be fun. But, like, who are you hanging out with, lady? You know? You could hang out with a bunch of people that think baseball's awesome, and then, you know, you run into someone from another country, like, what the fuck is baseball? Like, you gotta realize, there's a lot of people out there.

• 1:06:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, and people really don't like being talked down to.

• 1:06:24Joe Rogan?

  They really don't. And they don't like you mocking the fact that, first of all, nobody wasted their vote. Like, that's not how it goes. Like, you don't waste your vote if you vote different and the other side wins. It's not how, the other side won, that's just all it is. Like, wasting the vote is a crazy way to look at it, like, because I think also people look at things like tribal games, you know, like, you know, Texas is a huge football state, and people love football, and it's always, "We this, we that," when UT plays South Carolina, "we this, we that." It's like, people love to be a part of a team that's winning. And they apply that, especially if they're not into sports, to other things. I think it's just a war mentality, it's a tribal war mentality that's been sort

• 1:07:09Joe Rogan?

  of subverted in the human mind and applied to other things. It could be like Microsoft versus Apple, you know, it could be Android versus Apple. You know, iOS, it's weird how people get so tribal and then connect their own personal identity to other people agreeing with these ideas that they that they believe.

• 1:07:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I know for two two thoughts. One is the Democrats for a long time were the big tent party. So the Democrats were the coalition of people who had very different points of view on things. And of course, you know, famously, it's all the different identity groups and it's all the different, you know, economic and unions and all these things. And Republicans were like the party of like rigidity, right? And just for whatever set a real lot of the woke stuff had a lot to do with it is it flipped to where at least today, Trump's Republican Party is the big tent party.

• 1:07:52Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:07:53Speaker 02

  To your point on having all these new people and many of whom are former Democrats.

• 1:07:56Joe Rogan?

  A lot of them.

• 1:07:57Speaker 02

  And the Democrats have decided to try to isolate out anybody, right, who disagrees on any any issue and demand, right, lockstep conformity through the cancellation process. And so that that's a very interesting inversion that happened, kind of without anybody saying anything about it. But it did happen. And then I think the other the other inversion was the economic inversion, which is remember the criticism of the Republican Party for a long time was it was the party of trickle down economics.

• 1:08:18Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:08:19Speaker 02

  Where the idea was the rich people are going to get all the money because they're going to cut taxes, regular administration. And then basically, if poor people get any money, it's going to be because the rich people like trickle trickle some down.

• 1:08:26Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:08:26Speaker 02

  I think that inverted to where the Democrats, especially in the last four years, became the trickle down party, which was we're going to tax and we're going to collect all the money and give it to the government. And then we're going to let the government hand it out.

• 1:08:35Joe Rogan?

  Right. But they did it under the guise of tax the rich.

• 1:08:38Speaker 02

  They did it.

• 1:08:39Joe Rogan?

  Like they did it with this Robin Hood mentality. At least they expressed that publicly.

• 1:08:42Speaker 02

  Of course, that's how it starts. But then you end up with $35 trillion federal debt. You end up with this giant annual deficit. And then you end up with all this money being handed out, right, handed out in all these grants and all these things, like just this this like shower of money coming from the government. But of course, if the government's giving you money, it also means the government can take money away, right?

• 1:09:00Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:09:01Speaker 02

  If you're making somebody dependent on you because you're giving the money, then you're in a you're in a tremendous position of power because you can make their life horrible by pulling the money away.

• 1:09:08Joe Rogan?

  Right. You can also control their ideology that way.

• 1:09:10Speaker 02

  Hundred percent. Yeah, you own them. Like, it's actually a form, you know, it's it's on this, it's on the spectrum to a form of like domination.

• 1:09:17Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:09:17Speaker 02

  You know, that should make us very uncomfortable. And so the and, you know, maybe that would be fine if the debt if the debt and the deficit didn't have a control and inflation didn't get out of control, but it did. And then at that point, it's like, okay, like this this new kind of sort of tax and spend driven trickle down economics is clearly not sustainable. It's not going to work.

• 1:09:34Joe Rogan?

  So the way the Trump administration is going to approach the economy, they want less regulation. They want tariffs and less regulation, and they want more reliance on US energy, right? They want to drill more, more natural gas, more fracking, more drilling for oil, and then allow companies to work without regulations inhibiting their performance. This will boost the economy. You'll have more productivity. You have more American manufacturing. You have more things happening.

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the two headline things you hear from them whenever they talk about this, the two headline things are, number one, growth. You just need faster growth. But by the way, it's the only way to resolve the long-term fiscal situation. It's the only way to resolve the debt. There's only two ways to do it. You can inflate your way out of it and end up in 1930s Germany with hyperinflation. Like, that's one track you can get on, which is a very bad track, and you don't want to go there. Or you can grow faster. Because if you grow faster, then your economy can catch up to the debt, and you can pay down the debt as you grow. And so they want to go for a higher rate of growth. And then the other thing is, they want America to win. And this, you know, my partner Ben and I were able to spend time with Trump this summer, and that was like his adamant thing he kept going back, which is like, look, America has to win. And specifically, what that means is, America has to win in business and in technology and in industry generally,

• 1:10:50Speaker 02

  globally. Like, our companies should be the ones that win these, you know, broad, we should win global markets. Like, our companies should be the global.

• 1:10:57Joe Rogan?

  How can anybody be against that?

• 1:10:58Speaker 02

  I happen to think that makes a lot of sense.

• 1:11:00Joe Rogan?

  Yes. I know. I mean, obviously, you're a wealthy man, and I am as well. But it's like, how could you not want that?

• 1:11:08Speaker 02

  Yes. By the way, if you are in favor of a high level of social support, if you want there to be lots of welfare programs and food assistance programs, all these things, I would argue you also want that, because it's the growth that will pay for all the social programs, right? Like, that's how you square the circle. That's how you actually have your cake and eat it, too, which is, like, first, your economy just generates a fountain of money through growth and economic success, and then you can pay for, and you can pay for whatever programs you want. I actually don't, personally, I'm totally fine. Like, set up all the programs you want, all the social spending you want, all the safety nets you want. And as long as it's easy to pay for, because you're growing so fast, then everybody wins.

• 1:11:43Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. I mean, I've always said, if I knew that I paid more taxes, people in the world, in this country, would live better. I would do it.

• 1:11:50Speaker 02

  Right, of course.

• 1:11:50Joe Rogan?

  I just don't believe that they're good at spending it.

• 1:11:52Speaker 02

  That's the thing, right? It's like, if you're putting in this, if you've generated 35 trillion of debt, and these are the results.

• 1:11:58Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:59Speaker 02

  No. Like, this is not the deal. And this is my friend that I talked about earlier. That was the point he made. It's just like, look, the deal has been broken. Like, this is not the deal anybody signed up for. This is not how it's supposed to work. Everybody knows it.

• 1:12:10Joe Rogan?

  And when you were talking about giving people social programs and giving them benefits, and then you could take that away at any moment. This was one of the big fears that people had about letting illegal immigrants into the country and moving them to swing states, which clearly happened, and also giving them a bunch of benefits, which clearly happened. Money, food stamps, housing, all that happened. Stuff that wasn't available to veterans, stuff that wasn't available to homeless people, wasn't available to the very poor of this country. All of a sudden, people who came here illegally got those things.

• 1:12:43Speaker 02

  Right, that's right.

• 1:12:44Joe Rogan?

  And the thought was, if you gave these people these things and you gave them a way better life. Look, if I was living in a third world country with a family, and I knew that I could come to America and I could get a job, an actual job, and make money, and my family's gonna definitely eat, I'll vote for whoever the fuck you want me to vote for. I don't care. My life is infinitely better than it was in this totalitarian shithole that I was in until I walked here. I'll do whatever you want. Like, I just want my family to survive, and I think everything's gonna... It's so much better than where I was. If I'm in some war-torn part of the world, it's so much better here. I don't care if the Democrats win or the Republicans. I'm in America.

• 1:13:26Joe Rogan?

  And if the Republicans didn't give me any money, and they want to get me out, they want to deport me, but this nice lady, she gave me an EBT card, and I'm staying at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, and I can get a flight somewhere else if I want to go there? Oh, this is wonderful.

• 1:13:41Speaker 02

  Right. So that's how it starts, and there is a lot of that going on. But I will say, one of the things that's interesting is it doesn't necessarily stick that way. And the sort of evidence for that is the rapid, the sort of dramatic ramp-up in the Hispanic vote for Trump.

• 1:13:53Joe Rogan?

  Well, Hispanic people generally are very hard workers.

• 1:13:57Speaker 02

  So this gets to the thing. So I'll just tell you a quick story on this. So after the night after the 2016 election, like literally everybody I knew was just like completely traumatized. Like we were all just like completely freaked out. Everybody was shocked.

• 1:14:08Joe Rogan?

  You were freaked out too?

• 1:14:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was completely freaked out. Everybody was freaked out. Like, I didn't expect him to win the nomination. I didn't expect him to win the race. Like, and you know, and the media is on like full historical blast, and it's the end of the world. And he's, you know, and he's a Russian spy. All this crazy stuff that we know not to be true is just like full on. So, a group of us, a group of us went out to dinner at a restaurant in Palo Alto, and you know, and the atmosphere was like a funeral. I mean, like, everybody in the restaurant was just like despondent, like ready to slit their wrists. And so we're sitting there eating, and like, the food doesn't taste good. And you know, it's just like, can't taste the food, you can't taste the drinks. Like, everybody's just depressed.

• 1:14:37Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:14:38Speaker 02

  And you know, it gets this thing of like, you know, my god, I can't believe that, you know, Trump, you know, this, that, you know, racist, anti Hispanic and all this stuff. And it was, it was, it was one of those moments where the young waiter, who's, you know, Hispanic young man in his twenties, one of those rare moments where he broke into the conversation at the table. Right? But it was in context, it was like, oh, thank god, because like, we're just, we're just depressing ourselves to death. So like, thank god, he's gonna say something. And he said, you know, I think you guys are looking at it all wrong. He's like, my father thinks Trump is fantastic. My father came here as an immigrant, whatever, 30 years ago, built a life here, became a citizen, bought into the system, pays taxes, like, raised a family.

• 1:15:13Joe Rogan?

  Mowing his lawn with a MAGA hat on.

• 1:15:15Speaker 02

  He thinks this guy, he thinks this guy is great. He thinks this guy is fantastic, and he voted for him. And he just had, and then, you know, you've heard this before, but then it's like, and the thing that this guy said, the thing my father thinks is terrible is if other people are able to come here, they're able to cut in line, they, you know, they didn't have to go through the process, they didn't have to prove anything, they're not bought into the system, right? They're able to jump in, and then they, you know, they don't, they're not buying into the system. And, you know, part of it, maybe they're not being accepted, but also part of it is they're not buying in. They're not, you know, they're not, they're not assimilating, they're not becoming part of the, you know, of what makes America, America. And, you know, in some cases, and by the way, in some cases, you know, the criminals are coming across, and terrorists are coming across, and gangs.

• 1:15:53Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:53Speaker 02

  And it's like, my father's not in favor of any of that.

• 1:15:55Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:15:55Speaker 02

  Right? My father wants to be part of a great society, of a great America, not some dysfunctional, you know, basically just disaster zone. And I remember the group of us, it was my first glimmer of like, okay, I need to like completely rethink my whole sense of like how the world works because...

• 1:16:09Joe Rogan?

  Is that one conversation?

• 1:16:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Well, it was, it was weird, because it was like... So what happened with me is like, so I grew up in rural Wisconsin, which is now like completely Trump country. And so from like zero to 18, like I completely understood the mentality and I was always like explaining to my friends of like, no, no, like this is, you know, this is like a different place and people think differently. And then somehow between the ages of like 18 and 40 or whatever, I just like forgot. And I became a Californian. I became a fully assimilated Californian. And I was just like, well, of course, the Californians are much more sophisticated and advanced than, right, than people, you know, where I came from. And so of course,

• 1:16:39Joe Rogan?

  Right, of course.

• 1:16:39Speaker 02

  Of course, everybody in California has it figured out. And of course, California is going to lead the country in

• 1:16:43Joe Rogan?

  Of course.

• 1:16:44Speaker 02

  In all this thinking, right? And Trump was, for me, Trump was the, Trump 2016 was the wake up call of like, no, no, no, no, no. Like, that's just like completely, that is such an impoverished worldview of how this country works and of how people think. That it doesn't explain what, because you have to explain what happened. And then you have to like, if you have some sense of being able to predict what's next, which is what I'm supposed to be doing for a living, you know, it's what investing is supposed to be. It's like, okay, I got to rebuild my entire model of the world for like, how this all works and how this whole system and how this country works. But it was that conversation that kickstarted it for me.

• 1:17:14Joe Rogan?

  So what was the process of altering your perspective, or at least opening it up?

• 1:17:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. So for me, it was primarily, it was reading. And so I started to actually read my way back in history. And I actually went all the way back. I tried to read of like, where the origins of like, left wing thought came from, and then communism, and how did that evolve? And, you know, liberal democracy, and then also right wing thought. And like, you know, everybody's calling everybody fascist now. So like, what was fascism?

• 1:17:37Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:17:38Speaker 02

  Is that what this is? Right? How did, how did the Germans do with it? You know, so all of those questions. And then, you know, kind of converging on in the last 80 years, like, how was that, you know, either stabilized or not stabilized? And so I did that. But the other thing is, I just started talking to a lot more people. And I just stopped assuming that because I read it in the New York Times, that it was true. And, you know, and by the way, and then, of course, what unfolded in the years, you know, kind of sense was, you know, the, I followed the whole Russiagate thing like, super closely. Like, I read everything and I read all the reports.

• 1:18:04Joe Rogan?

  What did you think initially? Did you think it was true?

• 1:18:06Speaker 02

  Because it's like this overwhelming consensus from the entire expert class that, of course, he's a Russian spy. I sat on stage, I went to Hillary's first post-election loss speech, which she gave at Stanford, the very first one. And I sat, we know the people organizing it. So we sat literally like 15 feet from Hillary in her first appearance. And it's, you know, the whole The whole thing is fraught with just like incredible tension because and

• 1:18:25Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:18:25Speaker 02

  And the Russiagate stuff is in full, full blown, full blown display and I, and I go there and I'm, I'm like, all right, this is going to mean to me. And you know, in the audience, the Stanford audience, and so it's all 100% Hillary Clinton supporters.

• 1:18:34Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:18:35Speaker 02

  And I, and I'm sitting there and I'm, I'm on my best behavior because I'm with my wife and I have to like not, you know, I have to not act out. Um, and Hillary gets up there and she says, Trump is only president today because Vladimir Putin hacked Facebook and, and made him the president. Right. And I'm sitting in the audience and I'm like on the Facebook board and I'm like, that's not, like, that's not true. And I know for an absolute fact that that's not true. Right. And so that got me thinking. And then the Russiagate stuff unspooled and I was like, you know, the whole, the, the, the Steele dossier and like all this stuff comes out.

• 1:19:05Joe Rogan?

  What was the accusations about Facebook? How did she think that Russia hacked Facebook and made Trump the president?

• 1:19:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it's this whole thing with, it's just, remember this whole thing Cambridge Analytica. And so it's, it's this whole thing that there was this, basically there was this data, there was this theory, which by the way, it's like completely, it is like a completely fake thing like this didn't, so there was this, there was this, there was this data set on user behavior that in theory, there's academic, there's a theory that you could sort of impute human behavior from this data set and then you could use it to predict what people would do and how they would react to different kinds of messages. And it was like this, like magical breakthrough and basically thought control. Um, and then there was this company called Cambridge Analytica in the UK that figured out a way to do this. And then it was this like new kind of literally like mind control, like, you know, by far like the most powerful meme weapon of all time for getting people to vote the way that, the way that you want. And it was this data breach of Facebook.

• 1:19:53Speaker 02

  The whole thing was weird because Facebook had been criticized for a decade, leading up to 2016, that it kept all the data closed. Right. So the criticism was Facebook never lets any of the data, it doesn't share the data. Right. And the criticism for years was Facebook is the roach motel of data. And the virtuous thing for it to do is to actually free the data and, and let everybody else have access to the data. And then in 2016, like flipped 180 degrees and it was Facebook is the most evil company of all time because it, it let Cambridge Analytica get access to this data. And then Russia ran basically a psychological operation in the American citizens using this data.

• 1:20:21Joe Rogan?

  Why didn't Facebook push back?

• 1:20:23Speaker 02

  They did early, it's just this, they did early on, they do today in their way, but you know, they're trying to run a business, they're trying to get to the next quarter, they're trying to keep the employee base and everybody copacetic, they're trying not to get just completely destroyed by the politicians, they're getting slammed every single day on every conceivable issue you can imagine, and it's actually a very interesting thing, when you're in these companies, like these, these big issues are big issues, but you're also literally trying to like make the quarter, right, you're trying to ship your products, you're trying to close your sales, you're trying to keep your employees from quitting, right, you have these, you have responsibilities, right, you have practical concern responsibilities, and so sometimes these companies get kind of wedged because they can't do the things that they would do if they were just in damage control mode, and then they, right, and then they, you know, then they, and maybe the message doesn't get out, but-

• 1:21:08Joe Rogan?

  So what was the bigger shift, the waiter or the Hillary speech?

• 1:21:11Speaker 02

  Oh, it was the waiter, I mean, by that, it was, the waiter was the much bigger shift because it was listening to a normal, it was listening to a person with their feet on the ground actually explaining the way the world worked, whereas with Hillary, it was, it was cope, right, it was, it was delusion, she, it was, it was amazing, by the way, she then spent the next hour and a half, when I, when I'm in a place where I don't know if I'm going to control myself, I bring a little notepad along because I can work out my demons like on-

• 1:21:32Joe Rogan?

  Draw dicks.

• 1:21:33Speaker 02

  No, exactly, so that I don't, so that I don't say anything, right?

• 1:21:37Joe Rogan?

  Like super bad.

• 1:21:38Speaker 02

  So I brought my little notepad along, exactly, my little, my little Fisher Space Pen, right, and I pull it out, and I started making a list of all of the people and organizations that she blamed for her defeat that were not named Hillary Clinton, and I got to 20. My favorite was Netflix, by the way.

• 1:21:53Joe Rogan?

  Netflix?

• 1:21:54Speaker 02

  She blamed Netflix.

• 1:21:55Joe Rogan?

  What did Netflix do?

• 1:21:56Speaker 02

  Netflix aired anti-Clinton documentaries.

• 1:21:57Joe Rogan?

  Oh, you mean facts?

• 1:22:00Speaker 02

  Well, this is particularly funny because the CEO of Netflix is a famous Democrat, he's a super Democrat, well, not actually dead, but also specifically Reed, Reed Hastings and his wife are very enthusiastic left-wingers, but I mean, it was just this litany of, you know, basically excuses and complaints, right, with no sense of like responsibility, personal responsibility at all, you know, just like pure grievance, and it's, it was the negative, it was negative lesson of like, okay, like whatever that is, is not the path.

• 1:22:27Joe Rogan?

  Did she blame Comey?

• 1:22:29Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, absolutely. Oh yeah, she absolutely hated that guy. Yeah, no question.

• 1:22:33Joe Rogan?

  That was a wild one.

• 1:22:34Speaker 02

  Hundred percent. Yeah, exactly. And by the way, like, that was super weird.

• 1:22:37Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:37Speaker 02

  You know, I don't think she was completely wrong on that.

• 1:22:39Joe Rogan?

  I don't understand that one, honestly. If they didn't want Trump to win, I don't get that one.

• 1:22:43Speaker 02

  Well, she's, we know she's guilty, but we're not going to charge her.

• 1:22:46Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:22:47Speaker 02

  Is a weird.

• 1:22:48Joe Rogan?

  It's crazy.

• 1:22:49Speaker 02

  Is a weird message to send.

• 1:22:50Joe Rogan?

  It's almost as weird as the Biden one, where we don't think he's competent to stand trial for the documents that he had that were classified.

• 1:22:57Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:22:58Joe Rogan?

  But he can, what, have his finger on the button? What the fuck are you talking about?

• 1:23:01Speaker 02

  Exactly. We know, we know he's guilty, but we never convict him because the jury would say that he's a senile old man.

• 1:23:06Joe Rogan?

  Which is crazy because he's still running for president at the time. He's running for reelection.

• 1:23:10Speaker 02

  Well, then remember, everybody at the time said, the media said that the prosecutor was lying, right? Because if we, at that point.

• 1:23:15Joe Rogan?

  Of course, he's sharp as a tack.

• 1:23:16Speaker 02

  Sharp as a tack.

• 1:23:18Joe Rogan?

  My favorite is Joe Scarborough.

• 1:23:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:23:21Joe Rogan?

  This is the best Biden intellectually, the best one I've ever seen. Like, dude.

• 1:23:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:23:26Joe Rogan?

  And then meanwhile, he had to go to Mar-a-Lago and kiss the ring.

• 1:23:28Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly, exactly, exactly. My favorite was the, remember the, about, about earlier this year was the invention of the term cheap fake?

• 1:23:36Joe Rogan?

  Cheap fake, yes.

• 1:23:38Speaker 02

  Because everybody's worried about the AI deep fake, which really didn't, then there was really not, nothing, nothing happened to that. And so the, the cheap fake, we learned is a video that just simply shows you something. Right?

• 1:23:46Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:23:47Speaker 02

  That it's claimed to be out of context, but it actually turns out that it's actually just telling you the truth.

• 1:23:51Joe Rogan?

  Didn't Nancy Pelosi start using that one? Cheap fake?

• 1:23:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Well, because the theory was it was going to be clips out of context.

• 1:23:57Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:57Speaker 02

  But it turned out they were clips in context.

• 1:23:59Joe Rogan?

  Have you seen, there's a gentleman who made a video, um, here, I'll send it to you, Jamie, because I sent it to Duncan. It's pretty fucking crazy of what AI is capable of now by, um,

• 1:24:12Joe Rogan?

  come on, my phone updated, you son of a bitch. Come on. Don't make me go to a fucking Android because I will.

• 1:24:21Joe Rogan?

  Um, this guy did this insane um video where it's all completely AI and everything he did. Uh, including his voice. It's here. I'll send it to you, Jamie. It's 100% AI generated and it's so hard to believe because it's so good. And it really puts you in this, when you're talking about cheap fake, I just sent it to you, Jamie. Cheap fakes and deep fakes. Let's put the headphones on to watch this because it's so crazy. We're at that moment where you cannot tell.

• 1:24:54Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:24:55Joe Rogan?

  And let's look at this one because it's, it's pretty extraordinary. This is the best version that I've seen so far. This is completely AI.

• 1:25:03Speaker 03

  ... labs to speak like me.

• 1:25:05Speaker 02

  One of our companies.

• 1:25:05Speaker 03

  So I can input any text and it will sound like me. Then I trained uh HeyGen with a video of mine. I input the audio file to generate a video based on my text. The video you are watching right now is the result, 100% generated in AI. What do you think of that? Guys, I know this might sound insane, but this-

• 1:25:28Joe Rogan?

  Crazy. How crazy is that?

• 1:25:29Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:25:30Joe Rogan?

  That's your company? That's him?

• 1:25:32Speaker 02

  Oh, that's him. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:32Joe Rogan?

  That is, that's the AI generator.

• 1:25:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. That's right. So that's two companies. One of, one of them, the voice is ours. And then that's another great company called HeyGen that did the, did the visuals. But yeah, no, that's right.

• 1:25:42Joe Rogan?

  That's nuts.

• 1:25:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, this is part of the first internet, as I've said, first internet election. Probably the first internet election will be the one that has this kind of thing actually in it where people get tricked.

• 1:25:50Joe Rogan?

  Why didn't they do that with Kamala Harris?

• 1:25:52Speaker 02

  Well, it turns out they-

• 1:25:53Joe Rogan?

  They would have done an amazing job. They could have like really knocked it out of the park with a solid speech.

• 1:25:57Speaker 02

  They didn't, yeah.

• 1:25:57Joe Rogan?

  Just have her say it on the internet.

• 1:25:59Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:25:59Joe Rogan?

  Just have a bunch of viral videos of her speaking so eloquently and perfectly.

• 1:26:03Speaker 02

  One would think, exactly.

• 1:26:04Joe Rogan?

  That's the fear of the future, right?

• 1:26:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And so like, I think that's, that's going to be the kind, that's going to be the kind of thing that's going to happen in terms of like the dirty trick side. I, I think that, you know, that will be a part of it, right? There's, there's always some way to try to, try to game these things.

• 1:26:15Joe Rogan?

  Just have the most brilliant writers formulate, you know, get AI to do it. Like you're saying, AI has all these solutions to things that are super logical.

• 1:26:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:23Joe Rogan?

  And well, there's no like weird thinking in it. It's like, you know, cut all the fat out.

• 1:26:27Speaker 02

  So I think we have a theory on how to fix this. And the theory basically is we're going to have to switch our sense of what's real from basically just trying to eyeball it and figure out whether it's real to only taking seriously the things that we know are real. And the way that we would know things are real is we'll have them registered, registered on the blockchain. Right, and so I think the way this is going to work in the future is every politician will have an account on a blockchain service, like a crypto service. And then every politician, whenever they say anything in public, whenever they're going to have people around them with cameras all the time, whenever they put out a statement, they're going to cryptographically sign it on the blockchain so that it can be validated that it is actually content from them. And then I think we're just going to have to reach an understanding that we're just going to have to write off everything else that we see.

• 1:27:07Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:27:08Speaker 02

  Which frankly is a good idea anyway, because there just is a lot of noise in the environment.

• 1:27:13Joe Rogan?

  How would you integrate that with social media, though? Because one of the issues is these low-information voters that are getting information either from clickbait headlines on these websites, where they don't even read the actual paragraph with Mike, which might be completely different than the headline itself. The headline is just inflammatory. And then viral videos. Like, how would you?

• 1:27:36Speaker 02

  So the thing is, so that's already happening even pre-AI, right? And so I would say that's a pre-existing problem. And so, like, we can't, you know, we can't. And by the way, that's been happening for a long time. Newspapers have been scandal sheets forever. If you go back hundreds of years to the first newspapers, they were running all kinds of scurrilous. The first newspaper was a scandal sheet of the Vatican, like in the year 1500. It was all these terrible rumors about the Pope and the bishops and all these, the cardinals and all this.

• 1:28:00Joe Rogan?

  That was the first newspaper?

• 1:28:01Speaker 02

  That was the very first newspaper, was in the Vatican. And then, all the American colonial newspapers were like that in the revolutionary era. It was all crazy rumors and innuendo and people accusing each other of... There was a famous election in 1800, which was Jefferson versus Adams, that we think of as these like, super-upstanding, upright people. And they're just like, smearing the crap out of each other in their respective newspapers, right? Because they would actually own newspapers in those days.

• 1:28:22Joe Rogan?

  Oh, God.

• 1:28:23Speaker 02

  And then they would just attack each other.

• 1:28:24Joe Rogan?

  The more things change.

• 1:28:26Speaker 02

  Ben Franklin, Ben Franklin, Ben Franklin printed newspapers before he became a, when a government, and he created 15 different sock puppets. He created 15 different pseudonyms. He was a pseud, an anon. And then he would basically have them argue with each other in his newspaper without telling people that it was all him.

• 1:28:44Joe Rogan?

  Oh, Ben.

• 1:28:45Speaker 02

  So he had all these different personalities. And so like, we've been in a world of like information warfare for a very long time. We've been in a world of sensationalist, you know, nightly news, if it was a, if it bleeds, it leads.

• 1:28:56Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:56Speaker 02

  You know, sensationalist stuff for a long time. We've been in the world of like, yeah, propaganda for a long time. So, so that, you know, that, that you're not gonna, you're never gonna make that go away.

• 1:29:05Joe Rogan?

  But isn't it funny that we don't think of the past like that?

• 1:29:07Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:29:08Joe Rogan?

  We think of them as being virtuous and...

• 1:29:10Speaker 02

  We assume they had it all figured out.

• 1:29:11Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, that, that very much is not true. There's all kinds of crazy, crazy banana stuff. My favorite is in the Vietnam War, what was it? It was the Gulf of Tonkin?

• 1:29:18Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:29:19Speaker 02

  That sort of kicked off the sort of big escalation. Like, we now know for a fact it didn't happen.

• 1:29:22Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:29:23Speaker 02

  Like, the whole thing just didn't happen. And now there's this big debate about like, did they know it didn't happen? Or did, you know, did they fake it? But like, so, there's always been stuff like that in history. So that, we can't fix. And AI will be a new way to do that kind of thing. But what we can do is we can reorient people to say, okay, now you're gonna have to like, take seriously, this stuff is real. And if you want to actually know what's happening, this stuff is real, and we can prove that it's real. And if it's not, it's entertainment, and you can choose to believe it or not.

• 1:29:46Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:29:46Speaker 02

  But, but, but you, you should not rely on it. And, look, it's not gonna be perfect, and it's gonna take time. But there is, there is a way to address this.

• 1:29:52Joe Rogan?

  Hmm, okay. So, that would be the solution to deep fakes, the blockchain?

• 1:29:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, you flip it. You flip it.

• 1:29:58Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:59Speaker 02

  You focus on the real stuff.

• 1:30:00Joe Rogan?

  That's logical. That actually does make sense. That, that actually kind of gives me hope. I do generally have hope. Even though I look at the pessimistic side of things, I'm generally optimistic.

• 1:30:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:11Joe Rogan?

  Because my real feeling about human beings is most people are good. I genuinely believe there's far more good people in the world than bad people. There's far more people that just want to live a good life, and have a good time, and enjoy themselves, than there are people who are tyrants.

• 1:30:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. I'm super optimistic. I'm incredibly optimistic. And I was optimistic already with flashes of pessimism, but like, I'm really optimistic, and especially now. So I, I think this is gonna be, we have the real, we have the real potential here for golden age.

• 1:30:38Joe Rogan?

  We really do.

• 1:30:39Speaker 02

  We really do.

• 1:30:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:40Speaker 02

  The capabilities that we have, and the people that we, I mean, look, in my day job, I meet these young, you know, I meet these 22-year-olds every day that are just like, the smartest people in the world. The smartest people I've ever met. I think they're getting better, by the way, as time passes. They're, by the time they're 22, they just know a lot more.

• 1:30:54Joe Rogan?

  They have so much more access to information than we did.

• 1:30:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're so much better trained, capable and ready to go.

• 1:30:59Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:00Speaker 02

  Fired up and they know each other, able to connect online and they're already in communities and they know how to help each other. And so like, yeah, the productive and inventive, creative, you know, aspect particularly of this country is just like, there's never been anything like it in the world.

• 1:31:15Joe Rogan?

  I think there's also the real potential for a shift in perspective, a positive patriotic shift in perspective that can happen in this country. And if you think about what happened with the woke ideology, how it swept so quickly over the country and changed so many aspects of the way we deal with things socially. It happened so radically and so quickly and such a large change.

• 1:31:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:31:37Joe Rogan?

  That people are susceptible to change. It's possible to enact change and a positive change in a good direction where people are optimistic about the future, which you are and I am. I mean, I think that's probably contagious.

• 1:31:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:31:54Joe Rogan?

  I really do think that.

• 1:31:56Speaker 02

  It's an upward spiral.

• 1:31:57Joe Rogan?

  It was Evan Hafer who said that thing about psychology the other day. It was one of, is a friend of mine who was a former special forces guy. He said that psychology is more contagious than the flu.

• 1:32:09Speaker 02

  Right, right, exactly. Yes, yes.

• 1:32:12Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's right. So one of the interesting things that's going to happen right now, you know, we talked a lot about Trump's victory and Republicans, but there's now a civil war that's kicked off inside the Democratic Party, which is very interesting.

• 1:32:22Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 1:32:22Speaker 02

  Because they lost so badly, right? So the fact that they lost the White House and they lost the popular vote and they lost the Congress and they lost the Senate and they lost the Supreme Court.

• 1:32:30Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:32:30Speaker 02

  Like this time it's undeniable that like the current path that they've been on is not working. Like it's your, like being an exclusionary party and kicking people out for a wrong thing, like it's not, they're not going to win elections.

• 1:32:40Joe Rogan?

  They're not just kicking people out, they're barring people from making it to the primaries.

• 1:32:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:32:45Joe Rogan?

  Which is very undemocratic.

• 1:32:46Speaker 02

  That's right, that's right. Yeah, exactly. Well, starting with Bernie in 2016 and then right continuing, so.

• 1:32:50Joe Rogan?

  Donna Rice's book, she documented that.

• 1:32:52Speaker 02

  Right, right. And so, so like, I would say the smart Democrats know that this is not, it's not a viable path. You can't have a political party that doesn't win. It doesn't make, it's not, it's not useful. And so there's going to happen. There's a civil war that's underway inside that party that's kicking off right now. Where they're gonna have to recalibrate, decide what they want their future to be. And it's gonna be a big decision. And the same thing happened, by the way, when Reagan beat Carter really badly in eighty. And then, and then, and then had a landslide in eighty-four. It then took Democrats twelve years, right, to get to Bill Clinton and actually win again. And so they have this cautionary tale of they went too far in the sixties and seventies. And it took them twelve years to recover. And so if you talk to like really smart Democrats right now, they're like, look, this can't be twelve years. That's crazy.

• 1:33:34Speaker 02

  We have to do this a lot faster, but we have to reorient and we have to get back to common sense. We have to get back to normal. We have to get back to, you know, sensible. We have to get back to moderate.

• 1:33:42Joe Rogan?

  We were actually playing Bill Clinton debating during the elections of, what year was that, Jamie? I forget which, it was when he first ran. What year did he first run?

• 1:33:54Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, oh, ninety-two.

• 1:33:56Joe Rogan?

  Ninety-two.

• 1:33:56Speaker 02

  Ninety-two, yeah.

• 1:33:57Joe Rogan?

  So it was the ninety-two, and I was like, I'd vote for that guy.

• 1:33:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:33:59Joe Rogan?

  In a heartbeat. The guy's awesome. Also, we played a clip of Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton, where she sounded more MAGA than anybody who's MAGA today. She was talking about the penalties that illegal immigrants should face. They should pay a stiff fine because they came into this country illegally. And if they're a criminal, they should be jailed or kicked out of the country without question. Like, all this was like so MAGA. I was like, this is so wild to hear from Hillary in two thousand eight.

• 1:34:23Speaker 02

  Yep, that's right, that's right. And Hillary and Joe Biden and Dianne Feinstein and all these people wanted to build a wall.

• 1:34:29Joe Rogan?

  Uh-huh.

• 1:34:29Speaker 02

  Dianne Feinstein, our Senator in California at the time, very, you know, very left wing. She was down on the border, like, to photo ops in front of the wall that was being built, like, trying to take credit for it.

• 1:34:37Joe Rogan?

  Crazy.

• 1:34:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, like eighteen years ago.

• 1:34:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:40Speaker 02

  And so, so, yeah, so another reason for optimism is I think that they're gonna be able to pull their way back. Like, I think they're gonna be able, I think getting, losing this bad is very motivating to be able to pull your way back and become more normal. And I think, again, that would be like, I mean, how great would it be if you had two parties that actually had like sensible, normal, normal policies?

• 1:34:58Joe Rogan?

  I mean, imagine if Clinton was running up against Trump.

• 1:35:01Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:35:01Joe Rogan?

  Like, he was so good.

• 1:35:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:35:04Joe Rogan?

  We played that speech that he gave after Sister Soldier. It said a bunch of like very anti-white things about white people. And he gave this like super eloquent, but yet compassionate speech about this, where he's very charitable about her position of being a young person and not having the best perspective on things. It was fucking brilliant.

• 1:35:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:35:25Joe Rogan?

  It was brilliant. Like, that's the guy. Like, that's a president.

• 1:35:28Speaker 02

  Now, by modern standards, of course, he was a fascist.

• 1:35:30Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Well, that's the weird thing about fascism, right? Because fascism, by definition, is almost always applied to right-wing totalitarian governments. But it's really kind of just adherence to the state and enforcing a doctrine and enforcing people to think and behave a very special, which is what the left wing does. And then you talk about, like, being pro-war. Well, who's more pro-war right now, Trump or the Biden administration? Clearly, Trump is less pro-war.

• 1:35:59Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 1:35:59Joe Rogan?

  Clearly, Trump wants to end the wars. Clearly, Biden just allowed Ukraine to use long-range missiles into Russia. Like, this is... I don't know what's going on in terms of negotiations. I hear all kinds of different things. But if you looked at one side that is pushing for these wars and seems to be all in on it, and the other side that's not, like, the fucking polar shift is so dramatic.

• 1:36:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:36:22Joe Rogan?

  It's really weird. The free speech thing, which was always a tenet of the left-wing party, it was like, you know, I mean, it was... This episode is brought to you by Chime. And I know people don't usually get excited about banking, but Chime is doing something different and it's worth paying attention to. In a recent survey, they ranked the number-one choice for new checking accounts in America. That means real people, millions of them, are choosing this over traditional banks. That's because banking at Chime is fee-free. No monthly fees, no overdraft fees, and thousands of fee-free ATMs. But here's the real kicker. If you get their Chime card, it gives you 5% cash back on a category you actually pick yourself. Your savings rate,

• 1:37:06Joe Rogan?

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• 1:37:29Joe Rogan?

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• 1:38:08Joe Rogan?

  Doctrine, like free speech is necessary. It's the foundation of our ability to discuss and find out what's right and what's wrong. You have to be, I mean, it's the ADL used to let fucking Nazis speak. They used to let them march. They would defend their right to do it.

• 1:38:25Speaker 02

  Right, right, yeah, because you needed to air out the idea to be able to show why it was wrong, exactly, yeah. So, so, look, it was not that long ago when you had Democrats that were very much in favor of many of these extremely sensible positions.

• 1:38:35Joe Rogan?

  Super recent.

• 1:38:36Speaker 02

  It was pretty recent. And so, I, but again, reason for, I don't know if they're gonna, I don't know if they're gonna pull it off, they might just get, they might go crazier, like, they might just go right off the cliff, like, it's certainly possible, but, like, it is also possible that they'll drag it back and it might happen quite quickly. And I'm, I am hopeful and optimistic.

• 1:38:49Joe Rogan?

  I am as well. I think the temperature of society, like, the mindset of society is so clearly moving away from that madness that they're gonna have to course correct, which is just logical. There's just no way they're gonna keep doing it the same way or double down. It's just not gonna, it's like, they're gonna go the way that MSNBC, they're gonna become ridiculous.

• 1:39:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:39:10Joe Rogan?

  So, they have to, which is good for everyone, for everyone.

• 1:39:13Speaker 02

  So, one of my theories is, you can separate the concepts of the United States and America, and you can be very optimistic about America and have all kinds of issues with the United States, but still be positive about America. And the difference is, the United States is the formal system of the government and the politics and all the stuff we get mad about, and America's the people.

• 1:39:31Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:39:32Speaker 02

  Right. And so you can be, as I am, incredibly bullish about the people. And then it's just a question of whether, on the America part, and it's just a question of whether you can get the United States part kind of lined up to at least not prevent good things from happening and ideally help good things.

• 1:39:43Joe Rogan?

  Well, what are the things that you think about this administration, at least what they're proposing, that would move us in that direction as opposed to the way things were going?

• 1:39:52Speaker 02

  There's a lot of things. I mean, so I think you got to start with the DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency.

• 1:39:57Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:57Speaker 02

  That, you know, Elon.

• 1:39:58Joe Rogan?

  It's hilarious that it just winds up being DOGE.

• 1:40:01Speaker 02

  DOGE.

• 1:40:01Joe Rogan?

  D O G E. He's been pushing DOGE coin forever.

• 1:40:04Speaker 02

  The universe speaks.

• 1:40:05Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's just so, so many things are just so on the nose that you're like, is the simulation real?

• 1:40:11Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:40:12Joe Rogan?

  I mean, it has to be real.

• 1:40:13Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly, exactly. And Elon is programming it in the back room late at night in between playing Diablo.

• 1:40:18Joe Rogan?

  We certainly got a good position in the game.

• 1:40:20Speaker 02

  And tweeting, exactly.

• 1:40:21Joe Rogan?

  He's the number one Diablo player in the world right now, by the way. He just got number one.

• 1:40:24Speaker 02

  Which means.

• 1:40:25Joe Rogan?

  Fucking bananas. How's he have the time to do that?

• 1:40:27Speaker 02

  Which means he could be the guy steering the simulation.

• 1:40:29Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:30Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, so look, this goes back to what we were talking about before, like it just, it is time to carve this government back in size and scope. It's time to take the overall, you know, you could talk about distribution of taxes, but it's time to take the overall tax load down. It's time to take the spending down. It's time to get the government out of the position of deciding who gets money. It's time to unleash economic growth.

• 1:40:47Joe Rogan?

  Elon explained that there's more agencies than there have been years of the United States.

• 1:40:50Speaker 02

  Correct. Yeah, 450 federal agencies and two new ones a year. And then my favorite twist is we have this thing called independent federal agencies. So like, for example, we have this thing called the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, CFPB, which was the, it's sort of Elizabeth Warren's personal agency that she gets to control. And it's an independent agency that just gets to run and do whatever it wants, right? And if you read the Constitution, like there is no such thing as independent agency, and yet there it is.

• 1:41:15Joe Rogan?

  What does her agency do?

• 1:41:17Speaker 02

  Whatever she wants.

• 1:41:18Joe Rogan?

  What does it do, though?

• 1:41:19Speaker 02

  Basically, terrorize, terrorize financial institutions, prevent fintech, prevent new competition, new startups that want to compete with the big banks.

• 1:41:27Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 1:41:27Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, 100%.

• 1:41:27Joe Rogan?

  How so?

• 1:41:28Speaker 02

  Just by terrorizing anybody who tries to do anything new in financial services.

• 1:41:31Joe Rogan?

  Can you give me an example?

• 1:41:32Speaker 02

  Well, you know, de-banking. This is where a lot of the de-banking comes from, is these agencies. So de-banking is when you're, you as either a person or your company. are literally kicked out of the banking system.

• 1:41:42Joe Rogan?

  Like they did to Kanye.

• 1:41:43Speaker 02

  Exactly, like they did to Kanye. My, my, my partner Ben's father has been de-banked.

• 1:41:48Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 1:41:48Speaker 02

  We had an employee who-

• 1:41:49Joe Rogan?

  For what?

• 1:41:49Speaker 02

  We, uh, for having the wrong politics.

• 1:41:51Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 1:41:52Speaker 02

  For saying unacceptable things. Under current banking regulations, under, okay, here's a great, here's a great thing. Under current banking regulations, after all the reforms of the last 20 years, there's now a category called a politically exposed person. Pep. And if you are a pep, you are required by financial regulators to kick them off of your, uh, to kick them out of your bank.

• 1:42:09Joe Rogan?

  What?

• 1:42:10Speaker 02

  You're not allowed to have-

• 1:42:10Joe Rogan?

  But what if you're politically on the left?

• 1:42:12Speaker 02

  Well, that's fine.

• 1:42:13Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 1:42:14Speaker 02

  Because they're, because they're not politically exposed.

• 1:42:16Joe Rogan?

  So no one on the left gets de-banked?

• 1:42:17Speaker 02

  Now, I have not heard of a single instance of anybody on the left getting de-banked.

• 1:42:20Joe Rogan?

  Can you tell me what the person that you know did, what, what they said that got them de-banked?

• 1:42:24Speaker 02

  Oh, well, I mean, David Horowitz is a right wing, you know, he's pro-Trump. I mean, he's said all kinds of things, you know, he's been very anti-Islamic terrorism. He's been very worried about immigration, migration, all these things.

• 1:42:32Joe Rogan?

  And they de-banked him for that?

• 1:42:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, they de-banked, so you get kicked out, you get kicked out of your bank account, you get, you get kicked out of the, you can't do credit card transactions. By the way, you can't run-

• 1:42:40Joe Rogan?

  How is that legal?

• 1:42:41Speaker 02

  Well, exactly. So this is the thing. And so, and then you go to this thing of like, well, there's no, this is where the government and the companies get intertwined. Back to your fascism point, which is, um, there's no, there's a constitutional amendment that says the government can't restrict your speech, but there's no constitutional amendment that says the government can't de-bank you. Right? And so they, if they can't do the one thing, then they, they do the other thing. And then they don't have to de-bank you. They just have to put pressure on, on the private company banks to do it. And then the private company banks do it because they're expected to. But the government gets to say, we didn't do it. It was the private company that did it. And of course JP Morgan can decide who they want to have as customers, of course, right? It's their private company. And so it's this, it's this sleight of hand that happens. So it's basically, it's a privatized sanctions regime that lets bureaucrats do to American citizens the same thing that we do to Iran.

• 1:43:26Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:43:26Speaker 02

  Kick you out of the financial system. And so this has been happening to all the crypto entrepreneurs in the last four years. This has been happening to a lot of the fintech entrepreneurs, anybody trying to start any kind of new banking service. Because they're trying to protect the big banks. And then this has been happening, by the way, also in legal fields of economic activity that they don't like. And so a lot of this started about 15 years ago with this thing called Operation Truck Point, where they decided to, as marijuana started to become legal, as prostitution started to become legal, and then guns, which there's always a fight about. Under the Obama administration, they started to de-bank legal marijuana businesses, escort businesses, and then gun shops, just like your gun manufacturers, and just like you're done, you're out of the banking system. And so if you're running a medical marijuana

• 1:44:08Speaker 02

  dispensary in 2012, like you, guess what, you're doing your business all in cash, because you literally can't get a bank account, you can't get a Visa terminal, you can't process transactions, you can't do payroll, you can't do direct deposit, you can't get insurance, like, none of that stuff is, you've been sanctioned, right, none of that stuff is available. And then this administration extended that concept to apply it to tech founders, crypto founders, and then just generally political opponents. Yeah, so that's been like, super pernicious.

• 1:44:35Joe Rogan?

  I wasn't aware of that.

• 1:44:36Speaker 02

  Oh, 100%. And it's called, so it's Operation Truck Point 1.0 was 15 years ago against the pot and the guns. Truck Point 2.0 is primarily against their political enemies, and then to their disfavored tech startups. And it's hit the tech world, like, we've hard, we've had like 30 founders de-banked in the last four years.

• 1:44:52Joe Rogan?

  Real?

• 1:44:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's been, it's been a big recurring pattern.

• 1:44:55Joe Rogan?

  30?

• 1:44:56Speaker 02

  This is one of the reasons why we ended up supporting Trump. It's like, we just can't, we can't live in this world. We can't live in a world where somebody starts a company that's a completely legal thing, and then they literally, like, get sanctioned, right, and embargoed by the United States government through a completely unaccountable, no, by the way, no due process, none of this is written down, there's no rules, there's no court, there's no decision process, there's no appeal. Who do you appeal to, right, like, who do you go to to get your bank account back, right?

• 1:45:25Joe Rogan?

  God.

• 1:45:26Speaker 02

  You know, and then, you know, and then there's, and then there's also the civil asset forfeiture side of it, which is right the other side, and that doesn't happen to us, but that happens to people in a lot of places now who get arrested, and all of a sudden, you know, the state takes their money.

• 1:45:36Joe Rogan?

  Yes, that happens to people if they get pulled over and they have a large amount of cash in some states.

• 1:45:41Speaker 02

  Right, or, you know, there'll be, there've been, you know, well-publicized examples of like, you know, there was like, you know, there'll be some investigation into Like, you know, safe deposit boxes and the next thing you know, the the feds have seized all the all the contents of the state deposit.

• 1:45:52Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:45:53Speaker 02

  Safe deposit boxes and that that stuff never gets returned. And so it's it's this, and this is when, you know, this is when Trump says the deep state, you know, I like the the way we would describe it is it's it's administrative power. It's it's political power being administered, not through legislation. Right. So there's no defined law that covers this. It's not through regulation. Right. There's nothing you can you can't go sue a regulator to fix this. It's not through any kind of court judgment. It's just raw power. It's just raw administrative power. It's the government or politicians just deciding that things are going to be a certain way, and then they just apply pressure until they get it.

• 1:46:25Joe Rogan?

  So what happens to those thirty tech people that you know?

• 1:46:28Speaker 02

  Start to go into a different field, like try to do something different and try to.

• 1:46:32Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:46:32Speaker 02

  Try to try to get, you know.

• 1:46:33Joe Rogan?

  Complete upending of your life.

• 1:46:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, complete upending of your life and try to try to, yeah, try to change your, try to get out of the, try to get away from the eye of Sauron. Try to get out of whatever zone got you into this and keep applying for new bank accounts at different banks and hope that at some point a bank will say, you know, okay, you know, it's okay, we've checked and it's now all right.

• 1:46:51Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:46:52Speaker 02

  But there's no.

• 1:46:53Joe Rogan?

  So what do they do with their money? Like, what happens?

• 1:46:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you go to cash. I mean.

• 1:46:57Joe Rogan?

  You go to cash?

• 1:46:59Speaker 02

  Oh, you can't have a, yeah.

• 1:47:00Joe Rogan?

  So where do you put it?

• 1:47:01Speaker 02

  Under your mattress, under your mattress.

• 1:47:05Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. Yeah.

• 1:47:06Joe Rogan?

  That is so insane. So if someone has thirty million dollars in the bank and they get de-banked.

• 1:47:11Speaker 02

  Diamonds, art, you know, do you? I don't know, go overseas somewhere?

• 1:47:17Joe Rogan?

  Holy shit.

• 1:47:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And just like, it just it just happens. And again, it's really, really important. There's no fingerprints, like, there's no.

• 1:47:24Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:47:24Speaker 02

  There's no person who.

• 1:47:25Joe Rogan?

  There's no stick above the strings.

• 1:47:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:47:28Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:47:28Speaker 02

  It just happened. And and we can trace it back because we understand exactly, you know, we we know, we know the, we know the politicians involved and we know how the agencies work and we know how the pressure is applied and we know that these banks get phone calls and so forth. And so we we can loosely, like, we we understand the flow of power as it happens. But when you're on the receiving end of this, your specific instance of it, like, you can't trace it back and there's nothing you can do about it.

• 1:47:47Joe Rogan?

  So these, what are the instances? Like, what is the company? What are they trying to do? And how do they run afoul?

• 1:47:54Speaker 02

  Well, all the crypto startups in the last, basically, four years. So the, you remember the crypto crypto thing got like really, you know, sort of everybody got excited and like NFTs and like all that stuff.

• 1:48:02Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:48:03Speaker 02

  And then just like stopped.

• 1:48:04Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:04Speaker 02

  And the reason it stopped is because basically every crypto founder, every crypto startup, they either got de-banked personally. And forced out of the industry, or their company got de-banked and so it couldn't keep operating, or they got prosecuted, charged, or they got threatened with being charged. This is a fun, this is a fun twist, this is a fun little twist. The SEC sort of has been trying to kill the crypto industry under Biden. And this has been a big issue for us because we're the biggest crypto startup investor. The SEC can, they can investigate you, they can subpoena you, they can prosecute you, they can do all these things. But they don't have to do any of those things to really damage you. All they have to do is they issue what's called a Wells notice. And the Wells notice is a notification that you may be charged at some point in the future.

• 1:48:46Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:48:47Speaker 02

  You're like on notice that you might be doing something wrong and they might be coming after you at some point in the future.

• 1:48:52Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:48:53Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:48:54Joe Rogan?

  Terrifying. That's the eye.

• 1:48:55Speaker 02

  Yes. The eye of Sauron is on you. Okay. Now, trying to be a company with a Wells notice doing business with anybody else.

• 1:49:00Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:49:02Speaker 02

  Right. Try to, try to work with a big company, try to get access to a bank, try to do anything.

• 1:49:06Joe Rogan?

  So that's when they support DEI initiatives and they, yeah.

• 1:49:09Speaker 02

  Well, then the SEC, the SEC under Biden became, the SEC under Biden became a direct application of, exactly, so DEI, they started, they did a lot with that and then all the ESG stuff. And ESG is a very malleable concept and they piled all kinds of new requirements into that. So through that, through this process, the SEC could basically just simply dictate what companies do with no accountability at all. Like, there's no, you know, there's no, there's no, there are hearings where they get yelled at, but like, nothing changed. Nothing ever happened in a hearing that ever changed anything.

• 1:49:36Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:49:37Speaker 02

  It was just the raw application of power. Right. And so, yeah.

• 1:49:41Joe Rogan?

  And this is your friends, this is happened to.

• 1:49:43Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah. And we had, like I said, we had an employee who got de-banked because he had crypto in his job title.

• 1:49:47Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 1:49:48Speaker 02

  He was, he was doing crypto policy for us and his bank booted him because he, uh,

• 1:49:53Joe Rogan?

  That's it.

• 1:49:54Speaker 02

  Because they did, they did, they did a screen across, it's what they told us is they did a screen across their, their customer base.

• 1:49:58Joe Rogan?

  Just anyone with crypto.

• 1:49:59Speaker 02

  Because, because anybody with crypto became a politically exposed person because, because crypto was, was politically controversial, right?

• 1:50:06Joe Rogan?

  That's so crazy.

• 1:50:07Speaker 02

  You hear this sometimes, it's like, you know, there's these terms, compliance, reputation management,

• 1:50:13Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:14Speaker 02

  Tone at the top. They have these lovely sounding terms that make it sound like everybody's going to be an upstanding citizen. But what they're all, what they're all code for is destroy the enemy. Like, bring the hammer of God and the bank and the government or whoever, or the, or the social media, bring it down and just like crush the individual. With no due process. And look, there's an argument in the long run that this is all unconstitutional because the constitution gives us all the right to due process and this is government pressure and there's no

• 1:50:39Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:50:39Speaker 02

  So like, there's probably a Supreme Court case in five years that's going to find retroactively that this was all illegal. But in the moment, when you're the guy who's been de-banked, I mean, number one is-

• 1:50:47Joe Rogan?

  Right. And then also the potential that if you do challenge them in court and lose, the repercussions would be even heavier.

• 1:50:54Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yeah. 100%.

• 1:50:55Joe Rogan?

  Why, is it really worth your effort?

• 1:50:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:50:57Joe Rogan?

  Is it worth the risk?

• 1:50:58Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:50:59Joe Rogan?

  Especially if you've already had your life up and done. You ready to do it again?

• 1:51:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:51:02Joe Rogan?

  When you barely built yourself back up?

• 1:51:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. So this is, and I think this is important context where like when Elon and Vivek talk about like reducing regulation, you know, there's two ways to think about reducing regulation. It's like, oh my God, the water in there are going to get dirty and the food's going to get poisoned.

• 1:51:13Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:51:14Speaker 02

  Now, some of those regulations I think are very important. But the other way to think about it is examples like this, which is just raw government power being applied to ordinary people who are just trying to live their lives, are just trying to do something legitimate and they're just on the wrong side of something that the people in power have decided.

• 1:51:30Joe Rogan?

  Well, there's something that isn't illegal, but they don't want to be done, like crypto.

• 1:51:35Speaker 02

  Like crypto. Or having the wrong political points of view. Well, the trucker, you know, the other great example is the trucker's strike up in Canada.

• 1:51:41Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:41Speaker 02

  Was an even more direct version of this because here you had truckers physically showing up. And it was something like, step one was they take away your driver's license, which by the way, right, it's just somebody pressing a button on a keyboard. No more driver's license. Step two is they take away your insurance. And step three is they take away your kids. Right? And so like, that was their version of this and that was a very specific-

• 1:52:00Joe Rogan?

  Take away your kids?

• 1:52:01Speaker 02

  That was the threat at the end, the truckers and the Canada trucker strike. Because the truck, because the trucker's strike in Canada, right, was going to jam up these cities because it was the farmers that were, the truckers were very serious. They wanted to, they were doing a non-violent protest, but they wanted to stall the cities to be able to exert political pressure back, back on the government.

• 1:52:17Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:52:17Speaker 02

  And the government was like, we'll tolerate it for a little while, then we'll take your trucker license, then we'll take your insurance, then we'll take your kids. And-

• 1:52:24Joe Rogan?

  How did they say they would take their kids?

• 1:52:25Speaker 02

  Because it's administrate, it's administrative power. Like you can't, you, you can't, right, the theory would be you can't let, these aren't good parents if they're sitting in a truck in the middle of Calgary, preventing, you know, goods and services from reaching people, right, putting people's lives at risk. You know, child seizure. Now, I don't know if they actually seized any kids, but it's just an example of there is an agency in the Canadian government, just like in the US government, that if they want to, they can take your kids.

• 1:52:48Joe Rogan?

  Well, they were doing de-banking there with people who donated to the trucker convoy.

• 1:52:52Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:52:52Joe Rogan?

  Which is even crazier.

• 1:52:54Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:52:54Joe Rogan?

  Not even people who were there. People were opposed to the mandates that Trudeau's administration was imposing on people. And so they donated to these truckers. And then they got their bank accounts taken away. Which is really crazy.

• 1:53:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so, and I, exactly. And I think that, I think the right way to think about this is when we think about totalitarianism, we think about, literally, World War II. You know, we think about Nazis in jackboots with like tanks and guns and, you know, beating people up and killing people. Like, that's our mental, and that's, you might call it that hard totalitarianism, right? That's like very clearly like violent totalitarianism. But there's this other version you might call soft totalitarianism, which is just rules and power exercised arbitrarily.

• 1:53:34Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:53:35Speaker 02

  That just simply suppresses everything, right? And this is speech control and de-banking and all these other things that we've been talking about. And that is, you know, the good news is they're not coming up and like beating you up in the middle of the night. The bad news is like you are under their complete control. And they can do whatever they want to you that doesn't involve physical violence, which basically includes the entire aspect of, you know, every aspect of how you actually conduct your life and support your family and get an income and everything else.

• 1:53:57Joe Rogan?

  And most people aren't even aware of it.

• 1:53:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. And then, you know, like, these are, these are individual one-off things. Most people don't have a voice. You know, it's very hard to organize, you know, organize around these. And then, by the way, if there's an organization that organizes to try to get these stories out, it then itself can get suppressed and de-banked. Well, it happened during the COVID lockdowns, right? So, so the lockdown protests all got suppressed.

• 1:54:17Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:54:17Speaker 02

  Right? So you went, you know, so it's like, so the lockdown went from two weeks to crush the curve to two months to two years.

• 1:54:22Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:54:23Speaker 02

  Right? Which is like, okay, what the hell, right? And then there were these protests that were, there were these protests that were forming up, non-violent protests that were forming up to protest lockdowns. And I, you know, you could argue the issue different ways, but people have a legitimate right to protest for that, just like they do for anything else. And the next thing you know is all the lockdown protests all got censored. Like, just like, boop, gone. Right, and so at that point, like, the normal process of being able to try to get redress from your government, right, for, you know, to force your rights to literally, for example, see your family all of a sudden, like, you can't even organize a protest.

• 1:54:52Joe Rogan?

  Do you, how much are you aware of what happened with the FTX crisis? Because one of the things that happened with the FTX thing was it was revealed that they were, I think they were the number two donor to the Democratic Party.

• 1:55:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:55:05Joe Rogan?

  Do you think that that is sort of a preemptive measure to avoid any of this de-banking and, you know, be financially invested in these people so they're not going to come after you?

• 1:55:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was his, it was explicitly his strategy. That was Sam's, yeah. Sam's approach, Sam's approach was just pay everybody. So Sam's approach was just, I have eight billion dollars of customer funds that I can use for whatever I want, right, which was the crime.

• 1:55:31Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:55:31Speaker 02

  And then a big part of what he used, some of it he used to like hang out with celebrities and get Tom and Gisele to endorse FTX and the Larry David commercial and all this stuff.

• 1:55:38Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:55:39Speaker 02

  But a lot of that, something like 150 million dollars of that money went to basically just pay politicians. And, and a lot of that money was paid to politicians with no compliance at all with all the, you know, campaign finance regulations that the rest of us all have to comply with. And so the money was just shotgunned out the door.

• 1:55:53Joe Rogan?

  How come they don't have to comply?

• 1:55:54Speaker 02

  Well, it was illegal, I mean, it was illegal because he was breaking the law. I mean, it was, to be clear, he was, he was illegal. Now, a very funny thing happened, which is when he was indicted by the US government, they didn't, they ended up not charging him on campaign finance fraud.

• 1:56:07Joe Rogan?

  Because they'd have to give all the money back?

• 1:56:09Speaker 02

  Well, so, so there's two theories on it. The thing that they said was their extradition agreement with Bermuda, Bermuda threatened to not extradite him if they charged him on that charge, which is like super weird because you're the United, number one, you're the United States of America, you can probably get the guy. Number two, did he really want to stay in a prison in Bermuda? Right, and so, so that was all weird. And then, and then, look, the other, there's no evidence for this, but the other theory is, yeah, whoever are the powers that be that decide these things in DC decided to not open it. It's, it's like the Epstein client list, like, there are certain boxes.

• 1:56:38Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:39Speaker 02

  That are better not to open, at least.

• 1:56:41Joe Rogan?

  Well, the campaign finance thing, wouldn't they have to pay it back?

• 1:56:43Speaker 02

  So then there's this, like, panic, the minute one of these scandals breaks like that, there's this panic rush, and all of a sudden politicians discover philanthropic causes they can donate the money to. Right, and then, yeah, in the fullness of time, the trustees might come claw the money back. So, yeah, there's, you know, it'll, it'll, it'll play out however it does. But, but it is, it is interesting. It is a great example of, it was the shotgunning of money into the system under, like, basically, just like, nakedly breaking the law, and then, it, now, look, he's in prison, the other argument is, he's in prison, he's in prison already, like, whatever, it just would have been, you know, another sentence. But, like, he did break the law, and he was not actually charged on that, and that prosecution has not happened, and probably, sitting here today, never will.

• 1:57:21Joe Rogan?

  What's really fascinating about him is that he was right. And if they didn't come after him, he would have gotten all that money to those people. He would, it seems like it kind of turned around, right?

• 1:57:34Speaker 02

  It didn't get him off the hook, though.

• 1:57:35Joe Rogan?

  It didn't? No, well, he still did something illegal.

• 1:57:38Speaker 02

  He did, yeah.

• 1:57:39Joe Rogan?

  Did he know it was illegal?

• 1:57:40Speaker 02

  He is in prison. I think it's really hard to get inside that guy's head.

• 1:57:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:45Speaker 02

  I don't know that I can represent his mental state.

• 1:57:48Joe Rogan?

  He'd be a fascinating podcast guest if he was out.

• 1:57:51Speaker 02

  He flopped very hardly, very hard at trial.

• 1:57:54Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:55Speaker 02

  So, he, he had an explanation, but, no, it's just, the jury didn't buy it.

• 1:58:00Joe Rogan?

  What was his explanation?

• 1:58:01Speaker 02

  Uh, that, you know, he was, you know, that it was all the money was all being invested, and he was gonna give it all back, and it was all this and that, you know, and then all these complicated theories around all this effective altruism, and this and that and the other thing. And the prosecution is just like, it was the customer's money, it wasn't your money.

• 1:58:14Joe Rogan?

  Right. Clearly.

• 1:58:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so, I, like, I don't know, like, yeah.

• 1:58:19Joe Rogan?

  Well, there's also amphetamines involved, which definitely tend to skew your judgment. I mean, him and that lady were, like, sort of proponents of amphetamine use.

• 1:58:29Speaker 02

  And they were taking, there was some anti-Parkinson's drug they were taking.

• 1:58:32Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:58:33Speaker 02

  That has a side effect of reducing your, your risk calibration.

• 1:58:36Joe Rogan?

  Oh, dopamine agonists.

• 1:58:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, one of those.

• 1:58:37Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, like Re-Equip.

• 1:58:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, something like that. And they were, he had these, he was taking these patches.

• 1:58:42Joe Rogan?

  Wow. That makes you do wild shit. That also makes people gamble.

• 1:58:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Well, yeah.

• 1:58:46Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, there was a guy who won a lawsuit from Galaxo Smith-Klein, because he took Re-Equip and became a gay sex and gambling addict.

• 1:58:54Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I think they paid him the equivalent of like 500 plus thousand American dollars. I believe it was in Ireland. Yeah, dopamine agonists are weird. They they they do strange things to people.

• 1:59:06Speaker 02

  If that happened to me, I would definitely sue.

• 1:59:08Joe Rogan?

  That's crazy that those guys were taking those things.

• 1:59:11Speaker 02

  At least Sam, Sam was.

• 1:59:12Joe Rogan?

  Woo, boy, what a wild fellow.

• 1:59:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, M Sam.

• 1:59:15Joe Rogan?

  Confirmed, he wears an M Sam patch. What's an M Sam patch? He's supposed to use the depression medication. Oh, his supposed use of the depression medication had kicked up some rumors. So what is? That's the stuff? That's the Parkinson's?

• 1:59:28Speaker 02

  I think that was.

• 1:59:29Joe Rogan?

  Is that a dopamine agonist? Does it say?

• 1:59:31Speaker 02

  I'm not sure.

• 1:59:35Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. See, put, um, dopamine agonist.

• 1:59:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, Parkinson's, there we go.

• 1:59:42Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, interesting.

• 1:59:43Speaker 02

  It's like related. If it's not that, it's like a related.

• 1:59:45Joe Rogan?

  Interesting. How does it work? Does it say how it works? Uh, commonly used to depression. How's it work, though?

• 1:59:58Joe Rogan?

  Okay, it's an MAO inhibitor. Interesting. Used to treat mental depression in adults. This medicine is a monoamine oxide inhibitor.

• 2:00:06Speaker 04

  That's a different one. That says it's sludge.

• 2:00:07Joe Rogan?

  Oh, that's sludge.

• 2:00:08Speaker 04

  It could be the same.

• 2:00:10Joe Rogan?

  Oh, okay. Yeah, that's sludge. Sludge is also, people take that as well as a nootropic, I've heard.

• 2:00:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's what it is.

• 2:00:18Joe Rogan?

  So it isn't a sludge, a sludge. Cel- Celagene? Celagene? Celagene? I think it's sludge. Uh, I knew a doctor who was taking that. He was taking it as a, but not in a patch. He was taking it in a pill form and he said it was a a nootropic. So monoamine oxide inhibitor. So that's the stuff that's the active and that's what, um, makes, uh, ayahuasca orally active. Same thing. A monoamine oxide inhibitor along with the plant that contains dimethyltryptamine, which is not normally orally active. So this guy, if he was doing drugs and taking MAO inhibitors, he was out of his fucking mind.

• 2:00:55Joe Rogan?

  Guaranteed, because I know people have taken like prescription grade MAO inhibitors and then taken mushrooms and literally almost never came back. Like got to the point where for weeks they were fucked up and then when they did come back, they were like. I almost lost it. Like, I was almost gone, gone. Like, you know, like the dude from Pink Floyd. Like, never coming back. Shine on, you crazy diamond. You're gone. And that happens to people.

• 2:01:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:01:20Joe Rogan?

  So this fucking kid with billions of dollars, people's money, is taking those kinds of medications and amphetamines and who knows what.

• 2:01:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. You know, he had an on-staff psychiatrist who was prescribing all this stuff.

• 2:01:33Joe Rogan?

  Wonderful, like Hitler.

• 2:01:34Speaker 02

  And inside out, yeah.

• 2:01:38Speaker 02

  Once again.

• 2:01:39Joe Rogan?

  Once again, back to Hitler. That's so crazy. What a wild boy.

• 2:01:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. Are you following the psycho- the theories that are now emerging around Ozempic and psychological changes that Ozempic causes?

• 2:01:49Joe Rogan?

  No, but I did read that it makes your heart shrink.

• 2:01:52Speaker 02

  Well, there's some theory to that, which is very concerning, but there's-

• 2:01:55Joe Rogan?

  Fuck yeah, it is.

• 2:01:55Speaker 02

  There's a fair amount of evidence that it resolves alcohol addiction, certain forms of drug addiction, and gambling addictions. And the current theory is that what it does is it basically, it essentially increases your self-control, your self-discipline, and it reduces cravings.

• 2:02:09Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:02:10Speaker 02

  And there's a theory that this is very positive. Let's say this is true, which is what they think right now. We'll see, but that's what they think. So the theory that it's positive is the theory that, you know, if we were all like more responsible in our lives, we'd all be more successful and society would go better.

• 2:02:23Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:23Speaker 02

  Counterargument would be, like, responsible is only part of living, and it's only part of what makes a society work. And we also need risk-taking, and we need creativity, and we need impulsiveness.

• 2:02:33Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:02:33Speaker 02

  Right? And we need variety.

• 2:02:35Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:02:35Speaker 02

  And maybe we're all gonna get into a channel.

• 2:02:37Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:02:38Speaker 02

  Right? And maybe we're not gonna like where that, where that, that just by itself ends up.

• 2:02:41Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you can't have everybody disciplined. You have to have wild fuckers out there.

• 2:02:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 2:02:45Joe Rogan?

  You have to have your jelly rolls of the world. They have to be crazy people. They're fun.

• 2:02:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:02:49Joe Rogan?

  They make things more interesting.

• 2:02:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 2:02:51Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. So it's essentially discipline in, you know, a pill form or an injectable form.

• 2:02:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. And it's been very, it's been very helpful. They're prescribing, increasingly starting to prescribe it to alcoholics, and apparently it's working quite well.

• 2:03:02Joe Rogan?

  That's crazy. Well, that's, that brings me to ibogaine, which is the one thing that has like the most success for people with addictions. And it's illegal in this country. People go down to Mexico and go to these ibogaine retreats. It's apparently, I haven't done it, but it's apparently this insane introspective journey. That's very uncomfortable and it lasts about 24 hours. It's not something that's addictive in any way, shape or form. Almost everyone says it's a very uncomfortable experience. But you gain unbelievable insight into what is wrong with you that makes you want to pick up heroin? Like what it, what's going on in there that you're trying to escape? Like what is this and it recognizes that pathway and puts a chemical stop there.

• 2:03:43Joe Rogan?

  It actually like stops people from having addictive cravings and it rewires the way they think about things.

• 2:03:49Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:03:49Joe Rogan?

  Particularly beneficial to veterans. A lot of veterans who've just seen way too much and come over and they're all fucked up. And they don't have any way to straighten their brain out and they've had tremendous benefits using that.

• 2:04:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:04:02Joe Rogan?

  You know, I wonder with, particularly with these, um, uh, these Ozempics and Wegovy and all these different types of, uh, weight loss diabetic drugs. I, I wonder if there's a way to mitigate these side effects. Because you know, I, when I've talked to people that think that like my friend Brigham, Brigham Buehler, who runs Weights to Well. He, he's concerned about side effects of it. But he's also, he looks at people that are just morbidly obese and he's like, these people, they need some fucking help.

• 2:04:36Speaker 02

  Right, that's right.

• 2:04:37Joe Rogan?

  There's, they've gone down this terrible road. Yes, they shouldn't have done it. Yes. Okay. We all agree to that. Don't, don't eat pie all day. But if you've gotten to 500 pounds, you're probably, you're in a bad state and you could probably use some help. And maybe that could get them back on track. And maybe there's a way with maybe strength training, because one of the things is they lose a large percentage of muscle mass and bone density. Maybe that could be mitigated with strength training. Maybe it's one of those things like if you're going to get on Ozempic, you must lift weights three times a week. Which is, that might be it. I mean, if it's just losing tissue, there's certainly, that's, that's relatively easy to fix.

• 2:05:17Speaker 02

  Right. That's right. And there's, by the way, there's a ton of R and D going into these drugs right now. So there's going to be many more versions of these things.

• 2:05:23Joe Rogan?

  I'm hopeful that we could develop something where no one can ever be obese again. That would be really interesting. I mean, maybe this is just the first. Steps of this, right? And then like, these are crude versions of what will ultimately be a very comprehensive way of addressing an issue like that.

• 2:05:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the other thing I'd say, so I've been down in Florida the last couple of weeks, working on some of the, you know, stuff happening down there. And I, one of the things I learned is that the RFK, the RFK is really in charge of health for the country from here, you know, for like, he's really in charge, you know, working with the president. And he, you know, for all the controversy around some of his positions, like he's, you know, this whole Maha, like, he's very serious about this.

• 2:05:58Joe Rogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:05:58Speaker 02

  And a lot of people, including a lot of the most qualified people I know in the field are like, yes, it is long overdue that we look at the food system.

• 2:06:04Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:06:05Speaker 02

  And we look at all these, all, just whatever, to your point, the horrible track that we've been on for 40 years.

• 2:06:11Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:11Speaker 02

  Which is just a complete catastrophe. And I think it's a, there's this concept in psychology called common knowledge, which is, it's like, it's something that everybody knows, but yet nobody states out loud. And so it like, it's like known, but then all of a sudden, there's a tipping point. And all of a sudden, it's not only known, but it's like obvious. All of a sudden, everybody agrees on it.

• 2:06:26Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:06:27Speaker 02

  And this feels like one of those moments where it's like nutrition, behavioral, you know, exercise, like the path that people are on to become obese. Like, no, like this actually needs to be addressed.

• 2:06:36Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:06:37Speaker 02

  This is actually a profound issue.

• 2:06:38Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:06:39Speaker 02

  And it's, we're on the road to hell. And like, it has to get fixed. And maybe it gets fixed chemically, and maybe it gets fixed behaviorally or other things. Maybe the culture has to change, but like, it has to get fixed. And I'm actually, I've been very encouraged that, that, like, I think this is now going to be a very big focus area. And not just by the government, but I think also in the culture.

• 2:06:55Joe Rogan?

  I agree. And I'm very encouraged as well. And I think as we were talking before about a sort of a shift in perspective of the country, I think a shift in perspective of the country towards that being something that you should strive towards. I think that's coming too. I think that's happening right now. One of the happiest moments for me is when I run into someone and they said they were inspired to get fit and healthy from listening to me talking about the benefits of it. And I've talked to so many people that have lost 100 pounds, 150 pounds. They're, they're exercising regularly. They eat healthy. It's fantastic. It's one of my favorite things when I run into people that are fans of the podcast.

• 2:07:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. So one of my theories on this is that, this is, part of this, what happened is something very specific happened during COVID, which is the public health people by and large, looked very unhealthy.

• 2:07:42Joe Rogan?

  Yes, right.

• 2:07:43Speaker 02

  They didn't, they didn't look good.

• 2:07:44Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:07:45Speaker 02

  And so you've got these people standing up there telling everybody how they've got to like do all the, you know, lockdowns and the masks and like all that stuff and like.

• 2:07:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, Bill Gates should get jacked.

• 2:07:52Speaker 02

  That would be very helpful.

• 2:07:54Joe Rogan?

  He's got a lot of money.

• 2:07:55Speaker 02

  It would be extremely helpful.

• 2:07:57Joe Rogan?

  Get a trainer.

• 2:07:57Speaker 02

  When he writes the book and goes on the press tour to talk about public health.

• 2:08:01Joe Rogan?

  Stop eating fake meat, get a trainer.

• 2:08:03Speaker 02

  That would be great.

• 2:08:04Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:04Speaker 02

  It'd be great. By the way, it'd be great for him and his family.

• 2:08:06Joe Rogan?

  Sure.

• 2:08:06Speaker 02

  And society. It would be very reassuring.

• 2:08:08Joe Rogan?

  Bill Gates had a six pack, I'd listen to him more.

• 2:08:10Speaker 02

  That I think would be absolutely fantastic. And so like, it's just this thing. It's just like, well, of course, like, yes, the people who are telling us all how to live and eat ought to be healthy.

• 2:08:22Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:08:22Speaker 02

  And if they're not like.

• 2:08:23Joe Rogan?

  Clearly. And that's where RFK comes in play.

• 2:08:26Speaker 02

  A hundred percent.

• 2:08:26Joe Rogan?

  He looks fantastic.

• 2:08:27Speaker 02

  He looks great. He looks great. Yeah. Super. Like, yeah. It's just like, wow.

• 2:08:30Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, we were taking pictures. I'm like, dude, you're jacked. Look at, put my, my arm on him. Like, you're fucking jacked, dude. Look at you.

• 2:08:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:08:35Joe Rogan?

  Works out all the time at Gold's Gym in Venice.

• 2:08:38Speaker 02

  There we go.

• 2:08:38Joe Rogan?

  With jeans on.

• 2:08:39Speaker 02

  Awesome.

• 2:08:40Joe Rogan?

  Works out with jeans on.

• 2:08:41Speaker 02

  That's old school.

• 2:08:41Joe Rogan?

  I don't get that.

• 2:08:42Speaker 02

  That's amazing.

• 2:08:43Joe Rogan?

  That seems weird. It seems like it gets in the way of your squats unless you're wearing like, like Origin jeans or something. It's got a lot of stretchy fabric to it. You know, you got, you have to give stretchy jeans, but even then, like, put some shorts on, you fucking weirdo. Like, what are you doing, man?

• 2:08:56Speaker 02

  No, it's like, it's like, that's like, that's like prison yard credibility.

• 2:08:58Joe Rogan?

  It is.

• 2:08:59Speaker 02

  It's fantastic.

• 2:08:59Joe Rogan?

  It is a little, it is a little street cred.

• 2:09:01Speaker 02

  Old school.

• 2:09:02Joe Rogan?

  You know, wearing Timberlands.

• 2:09:03Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:09:04Joe Rogan?

  Timberlands and a pair of jeans and doing your squats. It's kind of crazy.

• 2:09:07Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 2:09:08Joe Rogan?

  But the promotion of health is like, I don't know how anybody could be against that. Do you want more energy? Do you want more vitality in your life? Well, you should be healthier. It's like, you're lit, you know, your body's a race car and you could choose if you work hard enough to jack up the horsepower.

• 2:09:23Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:09:24Joe Rogan?

  You can make better brakes. You can have a better fuel injection system. Like, the whole thing could work way better. Like, all you have to do is work at it. And that is your vehicle for propelling you through this life. It'll give you more energy for creativity, more energy for your family, more energy for your hobbies, your recreations, time with your friends. You'll literally have more energy as a human, which is what we all like. Nobody likes waking up and feeling like shit. I mean, everybody's been hungover who's had a few drinks and. You wake up in the morning like, what am I doing? I don't ever want to do this again. Why did I do this to myself? And then you can't wait for the day where you feel better. Like you drink your electrolytes, you get your sleep, you do whatever the fuck you can. And you're like, I'll be over this soon. Oh, your head, oh. And you, you know, everybody likes having more energy. It's better for you.

• 2:10:09Joe Rogan?

  And we could promote that as a society. And the, this RFK Junior appointment is a really big step in that direction that we've really never had before.

• 2:10:18Speaker 02

  That's right. Yeah. You have to go back to like literally his uncle. JFK had a program like this in like 1962.

• 2:10:23Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:24Speaker 02

  Been a long time.

• 2:10:25Joe Rogan?

  Well, Michelle Obama did for a bit, right?

• 2:10:27Speaker 02

  A little bit, although that was like vegetarian, you know, getting into like vegetarian school.

• 2:10:30Joe Rogan?

  Oh, was she saying vegetarianism?

• 2:10:32Speaker 02

  I don't know if she was vegetarian, but like well Eric Adams, you know, the governor, mayor of New York. He's been trying to push vegetarian school lunches. It's like, no.

• 2:10:39Joe Rogan?

  That's not right.

• 2:10:40Speaker 02

  No, that's not right.

• 2:10:41Joe Rogan?

  It's so dumb. I can't wait until they can figure out that plants really can think and feel.

• 2:10:45Speaker 02

  Right, exactly.

• 2:10:46Joe Rogan?

  Cause they're real close. They're real close to proving that. They've, they've demonstrated intelligence and allocation of resources through mycelium. There's a lot of stuff that we know now about plants that we didn't know then. I think they're all conscious. I think everything's conscious.

• 2:10:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think we need, we need audio recordings of the screams.

• 2:11:02Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:02Speaker 02

  When you mow the lawn, it's just like Armageddon.

• 2:11:04Joe Rogan?

  You know that they can play audio recordings of caterpillars eating leaves and it changes the flavor profile of all the plants around it?

• 2:11:10Speaker 02

  Awesome. Oh, amazing.

• 2:11:12Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. They've, they've done this because there's a phenomenon when giraffes, if giraffes are eating, if they are upwind and they're eating leaves as the, the wind comes down and gets to the other acacia trees, the acacia trees will, they'll come up with this phytochemical, they produce a phytochemical that's disgusting to the giraffes. And the giraffes will literally starve because they won't eat those trees. And they do this somehow or another through communication. It's like they're preventing war. They're being attacked by mammals. And they're like, we have to stop the attack and nature has provided them with this mechanism to do that, which is really crazy.

• 2:11:46Speaker 02

  That's amazing. So back, back to, back to the dose for a moment. So the, one of the reasons why everybody became unhealthy is because the government directly exerted, put itself into the food system and specifically high fructose corn syrup. Right, high fructose corn syrup was an artifact of government agriculture subsidies, right?

• 2:12:02Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:12:02Speaker 02

  The country was-

• 2:12:03Joe Rogan?

  Which was good during World War II because we needed food.

• 2:12:05Speaker 02

  At one time.

• 2:12:06Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:06Speaker 02

  Right, but like by the 1970s-

• 2:12:07Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:12:08Speaker 02

  We were massively overproducing, specifically we were massively overproducing corn. And the corn lobby, the agriculture lobby became very powerful. And we have this government agency, one of the 450 government agencies is the USDA. And the USDA has a dual mandate. It's to promote US agriculture, specifically things like corn, and it's also to advise us on what we should eat. And they also do the food pyramid.

• 2:12:28Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:12:28Speaker 02

  And that's why the food pyramid is upside down, right? For all those decades, where we're supposed to eat carbs and not protein and fat, was because literally that's the agency that's responsible for promoting agriculture. And then that agency inserted itself through laws, regulations, and this kind of administrative pressure. And basically it said, "Thou shalt use high fructose corn syrup because it is our byproduct of corn," as opposed to sugar.

• 2:12:52Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:12:52Speaker 02

  And as we now know, that was absolutely poisonous decision. Like that was like literal poison, absolutely a ruinous decision, just an absolutely terrible idea.

• 2:13:01Joe Rogan?

  Well, Casey Means was on here and she was explaining the very mechanism by which high fructose corn syrup encourages overconsumption.

• 2:13:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:13:09Joe Rogan?

  And then it's essentially like, it's an evolutionary thing that like where bears would eat like a bunch of berries to get fat for the winter. It's like these, high fructose corn syrup encourages you to overconsume.

• 2:13:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, we were not supposed to be eating this.

• 2:13:22Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:13:23Speaker 02

  This was not supposed to, it would not have happened-

• 2:13:24Joe Rogan?

  Especially drinking it.

• 2:13:25Speaker 02

  100%. Like, yeah, 100%. And so, but this would not have happened had the government not made it happen. And so it traces directly back to a government decision to do that. Now, they didn't, of course, they didn't understand the consequences, but that's kind of the point, which is they interfered without understanding the consequences. And so that's the kind of thing where you look at it and you're just like, alright. And then you're 40 years later and you're still doing it.

• 2:13:45Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:13:45Speaker 02

  And then at some point, you know what the consequences are, and then at some point, there's a question of whether they're being covered up.

• 2:13:50Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:13:51Speaker 02

  Right. And it's just like, okay, at some point, this has to stop.

• 2:13:54Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:13:54Speaker 02

  And, and, and literally, they just need to stop. Like, they just need to stop subsidizing corn. They need to stop forcing the food companies to do this. They just need to stop. And so there, this goes back to like the regulatory reform thing, which is like, there's just like tremendous amount of this that may have been good intentioned at one point.

• 2:14:08Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:09Speaker 02

  But sitting here today, we're living with these horrible downstream consequences. And unless somebody steps in with a hammer, none of this is going to happen.

• 2:14:15Joe Rogan?

  And they also have the insane amount of money that's involved because RJ Reynolds, these tobacco companies, when they were getting sanctioned, they were getting in trouble, they decided, well, let's buy all these food companies.

• 2:14:26Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:14:26Joe Rogan?

  And so now, these same companies that lied about whether or not cigarettes are addictive and cause cancer, now these same companies are pushing super unhealthy food on people. Or at least, selling super unhealthy food to people. Which I think you should be allowed to buy.

• 2:14:41Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:14:41Joe Rogan?

  I think you should be allowed to buy whatever the fuck you want. I'm, I'm all for that. But I do think we should be like, much more aware of what's actually going on, like you're saying, and why this stuff is in there in the first place.

• 2:14:52Speaker 02

  Right. Well, and then, and then you get into these other, you know, more delicate questions. But it's like, okay, food assistance programs for like, you know, low income people and low income children. And it's like, okay, should they be, do we want little kids who have no control over this to end up on the receiving end of this food production pipeline?

• 2:15:08Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:15:08Speaker 02

  Paid for with government money and being 300 pounds by the time they're 18.

• 2:15:11Joe Rogan?

  Right. And cheaper than other food.

• 2:15:12Speaker 02

  And cheaper than other foods because they're subsidized.

• 2:15:14Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:15:15Speaker 02

  Because they're subsidized. And so, and you just, you have this very perverse outcome where you have these government officials who have been standing up there for 40 years saying, we're protecting you, we're protecting you. And what's been happening is they've been poisoning us.

• 2:15:24Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:25Speaker 02

  And so, it like, stuff like, it just needs to stop. And, and, and that's, that's where you need something like the Doge.

• 2:15:31Joe Rogan?

  So.

• 2:15:31Speaker 02

  And, and, and somebody like President Trump.

• 2:15:32Joe Rogan?

  What would they be able to do to mitigate a lot of these issues? Like, how would they, if you wanna, would you make it illegal to put high fructose corn syrup as an, as an ingredient? Or would you simply stop subsidizing? Like, and what would be, how would that work within the government? Like, how would you apply something like that?

• 2:15:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think there's three things you can do, two of which involve direct action, and then the third is maybe even the most important. So, one is, you can just stop doing things that are harmful. You can stop doing things, the government can stop subsidizing bad things. That's an example, like giving you this is a parallel, parallel thing. If you want to clean up the universities, you need to stop feeding them student loans.

• 2:16:09Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:16:10Speaker 02

  So the government should stop paying for things that are clearly harmful. So that's one. And then two is, look, there may be a role for additional protections or prohibitions. And so, for example, maybe you let people freely buy all the Oreos they want, but maybe you can't get them with food assistance programs so that, you know, kids who have no control over it are not, are not being poisoned. And so, you know, you maybe do that. But, but I always think that the third thing is culture, culture. Like, there's always a temptation with these discussions because the government's so powerful to talk about what the government does or doesn't do. And I think so much of this has to do with the culture. It's actually upstream or downstream from politics, which is like, like, what is the cultural tone of the country?

• 2:16:47Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:16:47Speaker 02

  What's the value system?

• 2:16:49Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:16:49Speaker 02

  What are the role models? Right.

• 2:16:51Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:16:51Speaker 02

  What are people being inspired to do? Also, what form of shaming is in effect? Like, what are, what are we not going to tolerate? Take the perverse fat studies. Like, are we going to glorify obesity?

• 2:17:04Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:17:04Speaker 02

  Right. No.

• 2:17:05Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 2:17:06Speaker 02

  And that's not necessarily a legal judgment or a court case, but it's, it's a, it's a cultural statement. And if, and I, and it's not that the government plays, should control the culture, but our leaders certainly play a big role in that.

• 2:17:17Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:18Speaker 02

  And so, both in and outside of government. So for our leaders to step up at a moment like this and basically say, yeah, no, this is not the kind of culture we're going to have. It's not the kind of society we're going to have. It's not what kids should, you know, be looking up to. I think, I think is just as powerful as the actual government actions.

• 2:17:30Joe Rogan?

  It's interesting you saying the kind of shaming. Cause I don't want to shame anybody for being fat, but boy, does that work.

• 2:17:36Speaker 02

  Maybe you should shame.

• 2:17:37Joe Rogan?

  Fat shaming works.

• 2:17:37Speaker 02

  And maybe you should shame parents if their kids are fat.

• 2:17:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:40Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:17:40Joe Rogan?

  Problem is, there's so many people that are ignorant as to what exactly is going on.

• 2:17:45Speaker 02

  Of course, and that's, it's like absolutely required.

• 2:17:47Joe Rogan?

  And they're being fed bullshit.

• 2:17:48Speaker 02

  A hundred percent. And yes, but, but again, it's also cultural, which is like, okay, is, is the media thing? Like, is the media educating people on this? And if the mainstream media is not doing it right, are there, should there be new media sources that are?

• 2:17:59Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:59Speaker 02

  Who gets, and which source, and then therefore which sources the media get respect? Right, and so we, we have this giant collective culture question.

• 2:18:06Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:18:06Speaker 02

  That we get to, we all get to ask and answer. And particularly those of us in a position to be able to send messages that a lot of people hear.

• 2:18:12Joe Rogan?

  So that will help, that will help move the needle. And, but, but what specifically can RFK Junior do once he actually gets in?

• 2:18:20Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 2:18:20Joe Rogan?

  I mean, there's.

• 2:18:21Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, it's tremendous. He was, he's the secretary of HHS. He has very broad, you know, I would say, a very broad ability to look at this holistically inside the government.

• 2:18:29Joe Rogan?

  What kind of pushback is there going to be against that? Like, that seems like a wild amount of money is going to be lost.

• 2:18:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. So there's, there's, there's, there's the work that the cabinet secretary is like, he will be doing formally. And then there's the work that the Doge and, and the president will be doing kind of in parallel with that. And, you know, there will be some convergence between those. And, and, you know, there's the, we'll see, there's the potential here for quite dramatic action on a lot of these fronts.

• 2:18:52Joe Rogan?

  Could you imagine if you're running an agency and you have to have a meeting with Vivek and Elon?

• 2:18:58Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:18:59Joe Rogan?

  And you gotta open your books?

• 2:19:00Speaker 02

  Yes. Yes.

• 2:19:03Speaker 04

  It's like Office Space where they brought in the bobs for consulting.

• 2:19:07Speaker 04

  What do you do here?

• 2:19:08Joe Rogan?

  Exactly. That's exactly what it's like. Isn't there a meme like that? Isn't there a meme like that? I think there's a meme where they take those guys and they put Elon and Vivek's heads on them.

• 2:19:18Speaker 02

  Yes. So there was another key timeline split that happened in Silicon Valley about two years ago, actually, two and a half years ago, when Elon was actually right before he took over Twitter, where he got in an email fight with the CEO of Twitter at the time, who's actually a guy who's a friend of mine, who's a really good guy, but had, literally, this guy had just been promoted from engineering to run the company. And then, like, a month later, he ends up trying to deal with the Elon situation. So, kind of, got a little bit sandbagged on it. But, um, uh, yes.

• 2:19:45Joe Rogan?

  Of course he said, Elon Musk says he re-watched Office Space to prepare for Doge. Of course he did.

• 2:19:52Speaker 02

  Of course he did.

• 2:19:52Joe Rogan?

  Fucking psycho.

• 2:19:55Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 2:19:56Joe Rogan?

  God, we're so lucky that guy's around.

• 2:19:58Speaker 02

  Exactly. So there was this moment in the Twitter takeover where Elon sends his email and he says, and the line is, "What, what did you get done this week?"

• 2:20:05Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:20:06Speaker 02

  "What did you get done this week?" And in the context of Silicon Valley companies, that was a provocative statement, because a lot of Silicon Valley companies take months or years to do anything. But imagine that statement being applied to the government.

• 2:20:18Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my God.

• 2:20:20Speaker 02

  Right, like the level of like accelerated like, OK, what are the problems? How are we going to fix them? And what have you gotten done this week?

• 2:20:26Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you think de-banking upended some lives.

• 2:20:29Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. So, yes, what have you done this week? And by the way, when Elon runs this guy, it's actually interesting. A guy just tweeted, a guy just tweeted or posted or has tweeted what it's like to work for Elon at his AI company, XAI. And he said Elon came in last week and he said Elon spent 18 hours at the office and in five-minute chunks. And it was every five, each person had a five-minute speaking slot to explain to Elon what they were doing.

• 2:20:49Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:20:50Speaker 02

  And he did that for, you know, five times, whatever, right? Oh, 18 hours.

• 2:20:54Joe Rogan?

  Jesus Christ.

• 2:20:55Speaker 02

  And so think about what that meant. Every employee had an opportunity to tell the big boss what they were working on. Every employee had an opportunity to be recognized for their effort. Every employee had an opportunity to get live feedback from the big boss, who had a comprehensive overview of everything as to what they should be doing.

• 2:21:10Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:21:11Speaker 02

  And there's no place to hide.

• 2:21:14Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:21:14Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:21:14Speaker 02

  Think about different it is for a company to be run that way.

• 2:21:17Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:21:17Speaker 02

  Then even again, the Valley companies generally are quite well-run by by sort of business standards. And even that, like, that's the level of intensity that most Valley companies aren't even close to.

• 2:21:26Joe Rogan?

  Now, imagine that applied to government.

• 2:21:28Speaker 02

  To government.

• 2:21:29Joe Rogan?

  Which is just...

• 2:21:30Speaker 02

  And it's, and again, this is the kind of thing, there's no law that, like, there's no reason it can't be done. There's no law that prevents that. There's nothing in the Constitution that says you can't do that. It's a choice. How the government is run is a choice on the part of the executive branch and the president for how it's going to get run. And there's no reason why the government can't literally be run this way.

• 2:21:46Joe Rogan?

  And here's what's crazy, the pushback against even the concept of this by leftists. So leftists defending bureaucratic bloat and big government is wild to watch.

• 2:21:59Speaker 02

  Which they really shouldn't be doing, which is a weird thing to have wedged themselves into. My hope is they'll figure out how weird this is.

• 2:22:05Joe Rogan?

  Do you think it's like just an ideological thing? Like, the right wants this, so we oppose it?

• 2:22:09Speaker 02

  I think, I think they, I think the left thinks they control the government. Like, I think 50 years ago, they would have been on the other side of this, of this issue. Like, like Noam Chomsky 50 years ago would have been on the other side of this. He would have viewed government power as an extension of like the state and big business intertwined. And you have these terms, manufacturing of consent, where it's like government and business are conspiring against you.

• 2:22:28Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:28Speaker 02

  So he would have been on the other side of this. But I think today's leftists think they control the government, which in many ways they do. Well, so Washington DC, the Washington DC voted 94% for Kamala. Uh, 6% for Trump.

• 2:22:39Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:22:39Speaker 02

  Right? And so, okay, so two data points. That is data point number one. Data point number two, four of the 10 wealthiest counties in the country are suburbs of Washington DC.

• 2:22:48Joe Rogan?

  Wow, lobbyists.

• 2:22:49Speaker 02

  Lobbyists. They call Beltway Bandits.

• 2:22:51Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:53Joe Rogan?

  That's a crazy job.

• 2:22:54Speaker 02

  Is the actual term. And these aren't people working for the government. These are people making money from the government, right? These are people sponging, sponging off the government. And so, like, yeah, for, for, to the extent that Democrats have wedged themselves into a position where they're defending this, they really shouldn't. They should really rethink this. They should figure out how to get back to, right, the correct mentality on this that they used to have.

• 2:23:16Joe Rogan?

  No, if there's less government bloat, then there's less tax dollars. You don't, you don't, you don't need as much money to fund these things.

• 2:23:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 2:23:24Joe Rogan?

  There's like, people can be taxed less. There can be more allocation of these funds towards these social programs that we all want.

• 2:23:31Speaker 02

  You know, most federal workers never came back to work.

• 2:23:33Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 2:23:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, they, they work from home.

• 2:23:36Joe Rogan?

  Most?

• 2:23:36Speaker 02

  Most, yeah.

• 2:23:37Joe Rogan?

  Like, what percentage?

• 2:23:38Speaker 02

  Very large percentage. Something like half, just literally just never came back.

• 2:23:41Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:23:41Speaker 02

  They, and they still, by the way, still draw paycheck. They're still on their jobs, but literally they're not in the office. Or in some cases, they have an agreement where there's one agency, I won't name, but there's one agency where there's, where the, this, okay, here's another great thing. There are agencies of the federal government whose workforces are both civil servants, civil, have full civil service protections and, and unionized.

• 2:24:03Speaker 02

  Entirely paid for by the taxpayer, but they both have civil service protections, which by the way, are totally made up. There's no concept in the constitution of like civil service protections. It's just like a totally made up thing. And they're unionized. And then there's a particular agency that I know of where the union agreement, the union negotiated the return to the office from COVID and the agreement was you have to be in the office one day a month.

• 2:24:20Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:24:22Speaker 02

  And actually, what the, the pattern now is what they do is the employees come in on the last day of the month and the first day of the following month. So they only have to be there for two days.

• 2:24:29Joe Rogan?

  For two months.

• 2:24:29Speaker 02

  Out of, out of 60 days.

• 2:24:30Joe Rogan?

  That's crazy.

• 2:24:32Speaker 02

  As a consequence, many of them have actually left the area, right? Because they get their government paycheck, which is calibrated for living there. And then they go live someplace nice, you know, someplace nice, but you know, they go live in the Ozarks or something where it's, the cost of living is cheaper and they have a bigger house. And, you know, in theory, they're working from home, but like, you know, like, is it, is it actually happening? So, and this is, again, this is the DOGE. This is one of the things that the DOGE, they've, they've already announced. The, the thing they've said is you can work from home, just not for the federal government. Right?

• 2:24:59Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:59Speaker 02

  And so when people are talking about like, is the DOGE going to be able to do anything? Like, it's just, okay, there's 50% of the federal workforce.

• 2:25:07Speaker 02

  Right, and as a taxpayer, how do you feel about that? And to your point on paying taxes, like if those people are in the office and they're dynamos of activity and they're making the country better.

• 2:25:17Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:25:17Speaker 02

  Fair enough.

• 2:25:18Joe Rogan?

  Of course.

• 2:25:18Speaker 02

  But if they're kicking it at home.

• 2:25:20Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:25:20Speaker 02

  Maybe not.

• 2:25:21Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, maybe not.

• 2:25:22Speaker 02

  And that's the.

• 2:25:22Joe Rogan?

  How much oversight has there been on whether or not they've been kicking it?

• 2:25:26Speaker 02

  Excellent question.

• 2:25:26Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:27Speaker 02

  Now, it turns out there are ways to figure this out. So, for example, for many jobs where you have to log in to be able to get access like to email, you can actually, often you have VPNs to get into the corporate network, you can actually audit and you can see who's been working.

• 2:25:42Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 2:25:43Speaker 02

  And then there's a, do you know about mouse wigglers?

• 2:25:47Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:25:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:25:48Joe Rogan?

  Yes. Programs.

• 2:25:50Speaker 02

  No, actually, physical.

• 2:25:51Joe Rogan?

  Oh, they're physical mouse wigglers now?

• 2:25:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, physical mouse wigglers. And so it's a physical device that holds your mouse and then intermittently wiggles it. And a friend of mine who runs a big tech company, he just had like a nagging feeling in the back of his head that maybe all of his remote workers weren't pulling their weight. And so, he actually wrote himself in a weekend, an algorithm to inspect all the mouse movements of all employees for a week. And then, and then he bought all 50 like mouse wigglers from China that you can buy, and he fingerprinted them all, and he found that he had a whole bunch of employees who were using mouse wigglers.

• 2:26:23Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:26:24Speaker 02

  Right, and so how many federal employees are using mouse wigglers? Right, so.

• 2:26:27Joe Rogan?

  How crazy is that, that that's how they can measure whether or not you're active?

• 2:26:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:26:31Joe Rogan?

  Whether your mouse is moving?

• 2:26:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:26:33Joe Rogan?

  Like, what are they, what are they seeing?

• 2:26:34Speaker 02

  Just.

• 2:26:35Joe Rogan?

  Just a pattern of movement of the mouse, that's it?

• 2:26:38Speaker 02

  Well, the mouse, the mouse wiggler is moving in a way that you can fingerprint.

• 2:26:40Joe Rogan?

  So is this like, do you agree to a certain amount of disclosure of your personal information while you're working? Like, how do you get access to mouse wiggles?

• 2:26:50Speaker 02

  Oh, so it's very common, so in corporate environments, it's very common that your company-issued computer has some kind of software on it that lets the company control the software, and gives them, and gives the company some level of visibility to what you're doing. And that doesn't mean, that doesn't mean they're washing, literally washing you, but it means that they have the ability to kind of reach in and be able to, you know, be able to see, you know, how much is the computer on?

• 2:27:09Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:27:10Speaker 02

  Is the mouse moving? And so that's actually a reasonably common thing.

• 2:27:12Joe Rogan?

  I heard the most ridiculous argument against this.

• 2:27:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:27:15Joe Rogan?

  That, what are you gonna do with all those employees that get fired? Like. What are you gonna do with all those people who are stealing hubcaps? They're making a living stealing. What are you gonna do if you make hubcaps stealing illegal? Like, what are you talking about? They're essentially stealing tax dollars. If they really are doing something that's totally useless, and we're wasting enormous amounts of money on this every year. The argument that, what are you gonna do if those people can't do that anymore is really crazy.

• 2:27:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, the answer is they can do something productive.

• 2:27:43Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. And people are more than capable. You don't have to infantilize someone to say like, this is the only thing they're capable of doing. They've worked for the government for 20 years. This is all they can do.

• 2:27:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then, by the way, there's multiple knock-on effects, positive knock-on effects. If you can cut government spending, there's multiple knock-on effects. So one is, if you cut the spending, you can cut the taxes and you can just simply, the private economy then just simply has more money, because it hasn't been taken. And so, if there's less public spend, there will be more private spend.

• 2:28:08Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:28:08Speaker 02

  Right, because the money reallocates. And so, there might be just as much demand in the economy. It's just coming from people choosing to buy things instead of the government forcing it. So that's number one. Number two, you can bring down government debt, which means you can bring down government interest. And the government today, the federal government today pays more in interest than we pay for the Department of Defense.

• 2:28:26Joe Rogan?

  Right, but how much of that is salary?

• 2:28:27Speaker 02

  No, no, that's just interest on the debt.

• 2:28:29Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:28:29Speaker 02

  That's just interest on the old debt.

• 2:28:31Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 2:28:31Speaker 02

  We pay like 1.2 billion a year right now, I think is the latest number, which is just interest on debt. It's not paying for any good or service. It's just interest on debt. But again...

• 2:28:38Joe Rogan?

  What percentage of that is the... of the GDP?

• 2:28:42Speaker 02

  Well, so the total government spending is on the order of 7 trillion. Interest payments are like 1.2 trillion, something like that.

• 2:28:49Joe Rogan?

  1.2 trillion a year.

• 2:28:50Speaker 02

  I think that's the current number. DoD is 800 billion a year.

• 2:28:53Joe Rogan?

  So 1.2 trillion.

• 2:28:54Speaker 02

  Just off the top. Yeah, just off the top. And again, nobody's benefiting from that. It's just interest payments.

• 2:28:59Joe Rogan?

  That's bananas.

• 2:29:00Speaker 02

  And total GDP is like, I don't know, it's 20, 30, 40 trillion. It's much larger than that, but like, still.

• 2:29:08Joe Rogan?

  It's enough.

• 2:29:08Speaker 02

  This is a lot of money. And the total accumulated debt is 35 trillion. And the total accumulated debt is 35 trillion, and it adds another trillion of accumulated debt every 100 days.

• 2:29:21Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:29:23Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my God, it hurts my head.

• 2:29:25Speaker 02

  There's a congressman, actually, Thomas Massey, you should have, so he's the one guy in Washington who talks about this, and he's an MIT, he's a libert, he's one of the only libertarians, and he's a, he's an MIT engineer, and he actually designed himself the, a pocket lapel pin calculator of the, of the, of the government debt, and he wears it every day in Washington, DC.

• 2:29:42Joe Rogan?

  So he walks around with this scroll?

• 2:29:43Speaker 02

  He walks with a little scrolling LED display.

• 2:29:45Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my God.

• 2:29:46Speaker 02

  On, on his lapel, and it literally counts, it counts the debt, and it's accurate, it's pulling data from the US Treasury, and it's actually an accurate count, and so it's like 34 trillion, 35 trillion, 36 trillion. Here's the kicker, at the current pace, at the compounding, it'll cross, the debt will cross 100 trillion in the foreseeable future, so he's already working on the redesign, because he needs a bigger device with a bigger screen to be able to display the bigger number.

• 2:30:07Joe Rogan?

  How much anxiety do you get standing around him, looking at that thing?

• 2:30:10Speaker 02

  That's his goal, right, he wants, because otherwise, the status quo in Washington is just let this happen.

• 2:30:14Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 2:30:15Speaker 02

  Right, and so, so anyway, so, so another way you benefit is reduction of interest, and then another way you benefit is reduction of interest rates, if you bring down the amount of debt in the economy, you bring down interest rates, and then everybody else who buys things, when you go to buy for a house, your mortgage is cheaper, right, so everybody who buys, anybody who ever borrows money in the real economy, then therefore is better off.

• 2:30:32Joe Rogan?

  Right, this is the argument against it being only good for wealthy people.

• 2:30:37Speaker 02

  Oh, it's good for everybody.

• 2:30:38Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:30:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's good for anybody who ever gets car loan, home loan, small business loan, you want to bring down interest rates.

• 2:30:44Joe Rogan?

  But this fundamental discussion of it, the, like, the argument, particularly from the left, is that all these tax cuts, deregulation, all this, all this is going to do is make Trump supporters and Trump's people wealthier, and it's going to ruin the middle class and ruin the lower, everyone else is going to suffer.

• 2:31:02Speaker 02

  So just observationally, almost all the rich people in our society are for, were for Kamala.

• 2:31:06Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:31:07Speaker 02

  Really? Yeah, the Democratic Party, so, the, so Democrat, Republican, it's a, it's what they call, it's a political scientist called top plus bottom versus middle is the configuration. So the Democratic Party is the top and the bottom versus the middle, so the top is what you might call the sort of upper-middle-class coastal elites, so it's everybody who went to the fancy schools, it's everybody with the fancy jobs, it's for sure me, I guess your grandfathered in.

• 2:31:29Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:30Speaker 02

  Right, but it's like, it's like, you know, it's like, it's like fancy, it's like high net worth, high income people with primarily knowledge working jobs. Right, so professor, reporter, programmer, right, database expert.

• 2:31:43Joe Rogan?

  Author.

• 2:31:43Speaker 02

  Author, lawyer.

• 2:31:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:45Speaker 02

  You know, accountant, banker, like, all the sort of, you know, quote, elite jobs. And all the elite degrees, by the way, who all went to the top schools and got, like, you know, the elite degrees. So, so that's the top. And then the bottom is what you call the clientele underclass, right? So, it's, and it's, they call the rainbow coalition, right? So, it's all, it's the minority groups, right? And so, it's the assembly of, you know, low-income African-Americans, low-income Latinos, you know, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.

• 2:32:09Joe Rogan?

  Recent immigrants.

• 2:32:09Speaker 02

  Recent immigrants and so forth, right? And so, that's the Democratic coalition that they explicitly program against. And then Republicans, in our era, Republicans are in the, it's the middle, it's the middle class, lower-middle class, you know, it's, it's all the people who don't have the fancy degrees and that are doing all the actual work that's basically making the country run, right? So, it's, it's everybody from the small-business owner, the restaurateur, you know.

• 2:32:30Joe Rogan?

  Truck drivers.

• 2:32:31Speaker 02

  Truck drivers, farmers, you know, all the way, you know, garbage man and janitor, like, everybody who goes to work nine-to-five, has a job, probably, probably either small business or a physical job. You know, it's sort of, say, labor, like, real labor, like, actual labor, calluses on the hands, right?

• 2:32:48Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:32:48Speaker 02

  Right, kinds of stuff. So, kind of the so-called real economy, which is why, right, the Republicans are concentrated in the center and the south, because that's where all those things are. And then Democrats are concentrated in New York and California and on the coast, which is where all the symbolic, you know, creative, intellectual jobs are. And so, so, so, and so, the weird thing that's happened is, progress, liberalism, progressivism started speaking for the working man, right? Like, a hundred years ago, it spoke for the working man, and now what's happened is there's been a complete reorientation where the working man has separated out. And then, and then you saw that in this most recent election, where the unions, the union leadership still, for the most part, endures Kamala, but the rank-and-file voted majority for Trump in a lot of cases. And the, the, the data point that I remember is the Teamsters voted 70% for Trump.

• 2:33:32Joe Rogan?

  What do you think the motivation of all these wealthy people to vote for Kamala Harris was?

• 2:33:36Speaker 02

  Because they feel great. Because they're saving the world.

• 2:33:40Joe Rogan?

  This it is?

• 2:33:41Speaker 02

  It's amazing to be in charge and control society and decide how everything works and decide who's good and who's bad. And like, you're elite. You get to be the elite. You get to make the elite decisions.

• 2:33:52Joe Rogan?

  And if you want to be in that group, you have to...

• 2:33:54Speaker 02

  You've got it. You've got it. You've got to do this. And you feel good about yourself because you feel like what you're doing is on behalf of your... You feel like what you're doing is on behalf of your clientele and your class.

• 2:34:02Joe Rogan?

  It's reinforced by the echo chamber you live in.

• 2:34:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. And it's why the... If you read the media, New York Times, it's just... It's either... New York Times only has two articles anymore. It's either how evil are Republicans or how innocent and helpless are, you know, poor aggrieved minorities or, you know, identity groups. Right? And so, oppositional force and then... But we're the party of good with a capital G because we're taking care of all these poor marginalized people. So, it's a very compelling... You feel great about yourself, right? It's just absolutely amazing. And then, by the way, it just so happens that the economy is wired up in a way where you're getting paid a ton of money for not working very hard.

• 2:34:36Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:36Speaker 02

  And it's all great. And then, you're completely isolated away from the lived experience of just normal people, which is the state that I've found myself in, where it would never even occur to you to talk to a garbage man or to a... Somebody, you know, running a restaurant or whatever because... But it's just like, you're not affected by the rising crime rates.

• 2:34:54Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:34:55Speaker 02

  Because you live in a safe neighborhood.

• 2:34:56Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:34:57Speaker 02

  And you've got to, you know, you're against the wall on the border, but you've got a wall around your house.

• 2:35:00Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:35:00Speaker 02

  Right? And so, you just... You're in this bubble.

• 2:35:03Joe Rogan?

  Uh huh.

• 2:35:04Speaker 02

  And then, you only ever talk to people who agree with you.

• 2:35:05Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:35:06Speaker 02

  And then, the media is constantly reinforcing it. And then, you get ostracized if you disagree.

• 2:35:11Joe Rogan?

  And that's...

• 2:35:12Speaker 02

  And that's the wedge.

• 2:35:12Joe Rogan?

  That's the wedge.

• 2:35:13Speaker 02

  And it worked. Like, look, for a long time, it worked for 40, 50, 60 years, it worked as a way to gain and hold political power. It's just... It's just gotten wedged in kind of this corner where it can no longer win. And so, therefore, it has to get reexamined.

• 2:35:26Joe Rogan?

  So, for you, when you had this shift of thinking, you talked to the waiter and then the Hillary Clinton speech, and they're like, how long is it before you start publicly expressing these things? And like, how much of a reluctance is there?

• 2:35:40Speaker 02

  Well, so, from 2017 to 2020, I was just like, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. And then, COVID hit. And then, I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on with COVID. And, you know, our business, you know, went crazy. Our business caved in and had all kinds of crazy, horrible things happening. And, you know, we have all these companies. We have hundreds of companies who are responsible for startups. And so, we're working with them to try to keep them afloat and get the money and everything. But really, it was, I mean, really, the big thing was the Biden administration just like flat out tried to kill us. Like, they just came like straight at us and they came straight at our founders. And so, and they tried to kill crypto and they were, they were on their way to trying to kill AI. I mean, they were horrible. Like, they were

• 2:36:16Joe Rogan?

  What was the motivation to kill AI?

• 2:36:18Speaker 02

  Because it's, because they want, they want control. I mean, they want control. They want to control, they want to control in the same way they control

• 2:36:24Joe Rogan?

  So they recognized the potential of it and they wanted to head it off of the path?

• 2:36:27Speaker 02

  They want to control, or they want to put it in a headlock. They don't necessarily want to stop it, but they want to make sure that they control it in the same way that they controlled social media, in the same way that they control the press.

• 2:36:35Joe Rogan?

  So how are they trying to do that?

• 2:36:36Speaker 02

  So censor, I mean, so it's the, it's the AI, is think about it as the same dynamics that caused censorship to happen on social media were also going to happen in AI. And so there's a couple steps to it. So one is you just want a small number of companies that do AI because you want to be able to put them in a headlock and control them. So you, you basically want to give, you basically want to have a government, you, you want to bless a small set of large companies with a cartel and set up a regulatory structure where those companies are intertwined with the government. And then you want to prevent startups from being able to enter that cartel.

• 2:37:04Joe Rogan?

  And how would they do that?

• 2:37:05Speaker 02

  That's a threat to the control. So it's, it's a concept called regulatory capture. And so the way, and this is, this has happened many times for, you know, hundreds of years. This is like a very well established kind of thing in, in economics and politics. So if, if, suppose you're a big, suppose you're a big bank, suppose you're Jamie Dimon, you run JP Morgan Chase, like, what's like the biggest possible threat of what you could possibly face? It's that there's some disruptive change that comes along that upends your entire business. You know, you're Kodak, you know,

• 2:37:32Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:37:32Speaker 02

  You're Kodak. You're, you're making a ton of money on analog film and then digital cameras come along and you get destroyed and for the, in your obituary, it's like you're the idiot, you know,

• 2:37:40Joe Rogan?

  Blockbuster Video.

• 2:37:41Speaker 02

  Blockbuster Video. Like, that's the cautionary tale. Those are the ghost stories that those guys tell around a campfire at night.

• 2:37:46Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:37:47Speaker 02

  They're just absolutely terrifying.

• 2:37:48Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:37:48Speaker 02

  And like, business schools teach you, like, that's the one thing you do not want to do. And so, there's two ways to try to deal with that. One is you could try to invent the future before it happens to you, but that's hard because you're running a big company and, you know, these startups are out there doing all these crazy things. And can you really do that? And it's hard and frisky and dangerous. The other thing you can do is you can go to the government and you can basically say, okay, we're gonna, we would like to propose basically a trade, which is we would like the government to put up a wall of regulation, right? We would like the government to put in place rules, right, that are potentially thousands of pages long, right? And in fact, the more the better, right? We want a very, very, very high bar for regulation for what's required to be in this business. Because I'm a big company. I can afford 10,000 lawyers and compliance people, right?

• 2:38:31Speaker 02

  I voluntarily put myself under basically the government thumb. But in return, the government has erected this wall of regulations such that the next startup comes along and just the next company comes along and just literally can't function. And by the way, this is literally what happened in banking. So, pre 2008, pre the financial crisis, there were many different banks in the country, big, big, medium, small, and lots of new bank startups every year that would people would just start banks, entrepreneurial banks of many different kinds. After the financial crisis, we had this problem called the too big to fail banks, right? The banks were too big, and so there was this legislation called Dodd-Frank, which was regulatory reform for banking, which was going to fix the too big to fail banking problem. They implemented that in 2011. I call that the Big Bank Protection Act of 2011.

• 2:39:15Speaker 02

  It was marketed as it was going to solve the problem of the too big to fail banks. What it actually did was it made them much larger. So, those banks are those two big to fail banks, the same ones we bailed out are now much larger than they were before. The banking industry has concentrated into those banks. All the mid-sized banks are being shaken out, and you know, they're periodically, they'll go under, like our we have a bank in Silicon Valley, it's called Silicon Valley Bank, right? And you know, it went under, and this has been happening all across the economy. And then since Dodd-Frank, the number of new banks created in the United States has dropped to zero.

• 2:39:45Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:39:46Speaker 02

  And so, the banking system is being centralized basically into 10 big banks. They actually have a term, they have a great term called GSIB, Globally Significant Something Something Bank. And so, there's like 10 GSIBs, and then basically what's going to happen is those are going to consolidate basically into the three big banks.

• 2:40:02Joe Rogan?

  And if you get de-banked by one of the big three...

• 2:40:05Speaker 02

  You're done. You're absolutely done.

• 2:40:07Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my God.

• 2:40:09Speaker 02

  But, but think about it from the other side. If you're the Treasury Secretary and you want your political enemy de-banked, it's just a phone call, right? Which is what, which is what has been happening, which was happening under, under, under the prior regime.

• 2:40:22Speaker 02

  Right. And again, like at that-

• 2:40:23Joe Rogan?

  Zero, zero new banks.

• 2:40:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, zero. Literally, it was like cardiac arrest. It was like, that's it for new bank charters. And we've had companies that have tried to start new banks, and it's essentially impossible. Because you have to comply with the wall of regulation. You need to go hire your 10,000 compliance people and your lawyers. But you can't afford to do that because you're not big enough yet. So you can't function. Like, you can't exist. Like, it's ruled out. By definition, it's ruled out. You can't do it. It's not financially viable.

• 2:40:50Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:40:50Speaker 02

  Right. So that happened in banking. That's what they've been doing in social media. There's been the same. And by the way, this has happened in many other industries. By the way, this happened in the food industry. The food industry has greatly consolidated. That's a lot of what's happened in that industry as well. And it's the intertwining of government and the company, right? Because at that point, it's like, okay, is this a private company? Yes. Like, it's still a private company. It has a stock price. It has a CEO. Does the CEO have to do everything that the relevant cabinet secretary tells him to do? Yes, he does. Why does he have to do that? Because if not, it's going to be investigations and subpoenas and prosecutions and protological examinations for the rest of his life.

• 2:41:27Joe Rogan?

  Wow. So it's essentially what we accuse the CCP of doing in China.

• 2:41:32Speaker 02

  It's the, so if you combine banking and social media, and now AI, you have basically privatized social credit score. Right. Is where you end up with this, right? And this goes back to the trucker strike thing. You don't have to threaten to take away somebody's kids. You just like, you threaten to take away their insurance. You don't threaten to take away their insurance. It's not government insurance that's being taken away. The same thing has happened in the insurance industry. It's consolidated down to a small handful of companies. They're super regulated. If the government doesn't want you to have insurance, you're not going to have insurance. And there's no constitutional right to insurance. So there's, so there's no appeal process. We're back to the de-banking thing. And so that happened in banking. That's been happening in internet, in social media generally. It's been happening in many other sectors. And then it's happening specifically in AI. And

• 2:42:17Speaker 02

  what you have in AI is you have a set of CEOs of some of the big AI companies that want this to happen. Because again, their big threat is that we're going to fund a startup that's going to eat their lunch, right? It's going to really screw them up. And so they're like, look, if we could just take the position we have and lock it in with government protection, the trade is, we'll do whatever the government wants. And if you assume the government is controlled by, you know, people who want to censor and punish and cancel their political opponents, that's going to come right along with it. And so that's why when these AI systems come out, like nine times out of 10, they're tremendously politically biased. You can do this today. You just go on, you go into these systems today and you just like ask, you just start asking like really basic questions.

• 2:42:54Joe Rogan?

  Gemini is the best example of that, right? When they had multiracial Nazis.

• 2:42:58Speaker 02

  The black Nazis.

• 2:42:59Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:59Speaker 02

  Once again, we're back to the Nazis. Yes. So it turns, according to Gemini, Hitler had an excellent DEI policy.

• 2:43:05Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:06Speaker 02

  Now, in reality, he did not.

• 2:43:10Speaker 02

  And it's important to understand that in reality, he did not. But yeah, Gemini happily threw up black Nazis because it's, because it's, they programmed it to be biased. They programmed it in a political direction. There's this guy David Rosado, who's been doing these analyses on the social media side, where he shows the incidence rates of the rise of like all of the woke like language, like in the media, and there are similar studies that have come out for the AI, where you, there's, there's studies that have been done that basically show the political orientation of the LLMs. Because you can ask them questions, you can ask them questions and they'll, they'll tell you. And they're just like, nine out of 10 of them are like tremendously biased. And then there's a handful that aren't. And then there's tremendous pressure. This is one of the threats from the government is, is the government basically going to force our startups to come in and compliance, not just with their trade rules, but also with all of their,

• 2:43:54Speaker 02

  right, basically essentially a censorship regime on AI that's exactly like the censorship regime that we had on social media.

• 2:44:00Joe Rogan?

  Wow, that's terrifying.

• 2:44:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. And, yes, and, and, and this is my belief and what I've been trying to tell people in Washington, which is if you thought social media censorship was bad, this has the potential to be a thousand times worse. And the reason is, social media is important, but at the end of the day, it's, you know, it's quote, just people talking to each other. AI is going to be the control layer on everything. Right? So AI is going to be the control layer on how your kids learn at school. It's going to be the control layer on who gets loans. It's going to be the control layer on, does your house open when you come to the front door? It's going to be the control layer on everything, right? And so if that gets wired into the political system, the way that the banks did and the way that social media did, like we are in for a very bad future. And that's a big thing that we've been trying to prevent is to keep that from happening.

• 2:44:43Speaker 02

  And the Biden administration was explicitly on that path, like they were very clearly going for that. And it was just like crystal clear that's where it was headed.

• 2:44:51Joe Rogan?

  And do you feel like with a second administration, they'd be even more emboldened to act in that direction?

• 2:44:56Speaker 02

  Yes, 100%. Another Biden administration for sure. And then there was an open question around Kamala, and the open question there was just she wouldn't, as you know, she wouldn't declare if her issues positions were the same as Biden's or if they were different.

• 2:45:09Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:45:09Speaker 02

  And so, you know, you could imagine a Kamala administration that had a very different approach, but she refused to clarify any of her positions.

• 2:45:16Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:45:16Speaker 02

  And so, we had to assume that they would be the same as Biden's, which I think is the default case.

• 2:45:21Joe Rogan?

  Now, is this a closeted sort of a perspective in Silicon Valley? Do people hide these thoughts that this administration would be bad for business?

• 2:45:32Speaker 02

  I mean, much less now than we used to. Yeah. I mean, look, Elon really broke a lot of the... Elon did two things that really opened a lot of this up. One is he bought Twitter, which really gave us a place to talk about this stuff, all of us. But then also, he himself, of course, started to actually express himself. And so, he gave a lot of the rest of us permission structure to be able to say these things. And then, look, it's like a cascade where people are like, okay, apparently you cannot talk about things. Okay, I have some things to say.

• 2:45:58Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:58Speaker 02

  Well, and then, look, also, just, they went too far. They tightened the screws. I mean, they really came at us hard. And so, you know, and the harder they come at us, like, we didn't predict. When Biden won, like, we didn't think it would have negative effects in our business. We thought, yeah, probably taxes will go up, but like, we'll just keep doing business. But then they did all these things, right? And it took a couple of years to figure out that this was not like a temporary thing, like this was like a concerted campaign in that they were really coming for us.

• 2:46:22Joe Rogan?

  What agency specifically is involved in doing that?

• 2:46:25Speaker 02

  Oh, I mean, they have Alphabet soup, but like SEC, SEC tried to kill crypto very specifically. FTC, you know, was thoroughly weaponized. There's something called the CFTC, which is the other part of the crypto puzzle, commodities futures. Crypto, there's crypto that's a security. There's some forms of crypto that are a security and the SEC regulates. There's other kinds of crypto that are a commodity that the CFTC regulates. The CFPB I mentioned earlier, so the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, right, decided that they were also going to regulate AI, which they just volunteered for. And then, you know, at the FAA, the FAA killed the drone industry years ago. The reason why we don't have, the reason why the Chinese are winning in the drone wars is

• 2:47:08Speaker 02

  because the FAA basically made drones illegal in the US years ago. So like the FAA has been a big problem. You know, the, what is it, the F, also the FAA.

• 2:47:16Joe Rogan?

  When you say made drones illegal, but you can still buy drones, like what have they done?

• 2:47:21Speaker 02

  So legally, you cannot fly a drone in the US that is beyond line of sight if you don't have a pilot's license.

• 2:47:26Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:47:27Speaker 02

  Which means if you're a US drone manufacturer, you have to build a system that enforces that regulation.

• 2:47:32Joe Rogan?

  So you have to handicap your ability?

• 2:47:36Speaker 02

  Yes. So either the, either the US drone needs to either not fly beyond line of sight, which is not very useful, right?

• 2:47:41Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:47:42Speaker 02

  Or it needs to somehow validate, only have customers that have pilot's licenses. China, there's no such restriction.

• 2:47:48Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:47:49Speaker 02

  And the Chinese, we have, because we run a more open economy, the Chinese drones, you can just buy in the US and use however you want. Technically, as the user of the drone, you're out of compliance with the law, but they ignore that part. They just punish the American drone makers.

• 2:48:00Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:48:01Speaker 02

  And that's why, that's why Chinese own the drone market, and that's why 90% of the drones used by the US military and by US police are Chinese-made drones, which, again.

• 2:48:12Joe Rogan?

  That sounds like a terrible security risk.

• 2:48:14Speaker 02

  Is a very bad idea because every Chinese drone is both a potential surveillance platform and a potential weapon.

• 2:48:19Joe Rogan?

  Oh, criminy.

• 2:48:21Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:48:22Joe Rogan?

  Well, I've seen the advancements in Chinese drones in particular, the choreographed dances that they do in the sky where they had, did you see the dragon one?

• 2:48:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:48:32Joe Rogan?

  See if you could find that, Jamie. Chinese dragon drone displays, like one of the largest ones they ever did.

• 2:48:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:48:39Joe Rogan?

  It's unbelievable how much more advanced they are.

• 2:48:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I will tell you, the Biden administration had zero interest in addressing this, like, or worse than zero, like just, I would say, absolute contempt for the idea of a US drone industry.

• 2:48:51Joe Rogan?

  So let's watch this thing, see if you can go fullscreen on that. Like, this is just a grid in the sky. Look at this. They're flying up together.

• 2:48:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:49:00Joe Rogan?

  They did one that was at night, Jamie, because they were all lit up.

• 2:49:03Speaker 04

  It's on this video, it's just a little...

• 2:49:04Joe Rogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:49:04Speaker 02

  So imagine those with guns.

• 2:49:06Joe Rogan?

  Jesus Christ.

• 2:49:07Speaker 02

  Coming at you, right?

• 2:49:09Joe Rogan?

  Well, we get to see some of that in Ukraine.

• 2:49:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, 100%. Absolutely.

• 2:49:12Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. We've seen those suicide drones. Like, look at this. That is... That dragon in the sky is drones that are all lit up. I mean, that is unbelievable.

• 2:49:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:49:21Joe Rogan?

  It even has a puff of fire coming out of its mouth.

• 2:49:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:49:24Joe Rogan?

  That's incredible.

• 2:49:25Speaker 02

  If they send that at a football stadium during a game with grenades on those drones...

• 2:49:30Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my God.

• 2:49:31Speaker 02

  It's carnage.

• 2:49:31Joe Rogan?

  Dude, don't even put that out there.

• 2:49:33Speaker 02

  Uh...

• 2:49:33Joe Rogan?

  Don't put that voodoo on me, Ricky Bobby.

• 2:49:35Speaker 02

  Sorry, sorry.

• 2:49:36Joe Rogan?

  Look at that heart in the sky with a heartbeat.

• 2:49:38Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 2:49:38Joe Rogan?

  This is insane.

• 2:49:40Speaker 02

  Correct. Yes.

• 2:49:41Joe Rogan?

  It's so incredible.

• 2:49:42Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:49:43Joe Rogan?

  They had a little one like that that played over the Eminem concert at, um... When I was at, uh, Cota. At the Circuits of the Americas here. They had this giant Eminem concert, like 100,000 people there. And then afterwards, they had, like, drones in the sky that did little dances.

• 2:49:57Speaker 02

  Chinese drones?

• 2:49:58Joe Rogan?

  I bet. I bet they were. They weren't like this, though. They didn't... Didn't... Not... Wasn't at that level. I mean, that's unbelievable.

• 2:50:04Speaker 02

  Enjoy the show while you can.

• 2:50:06Joe Rogan?

  That's crazy.

• 2:50:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:50:07Joe Rogan?

  That that's a Chinese thing only.

• 2:50:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. I don't... Yeah. Look, DOD runs in these. Soldiers in the field, you... It's very common, soldiers. Just soldiers... Normal grunt soldiers in the field carry drones in their backpacks because they want to be able to see what's around the building or up on the roof.

• 2:50:19Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. And these are Chinese-made drones.

• 2:50:21Speaker 02

  And every single one of them can be taken over by China and used for whatever they want.

• 2:50:24Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my God.

• 2:50:25Speaker 02

  Anytime they want.

• 2:50:26Joe Rogan?

  Is the Trump administration on this?

• 2:50:28Speaker 02

  They're very... They're aware... I don't know what they'll do. You know, it's somewhere in the priority order of the things that they're dealing with. But they are... Yes, they are well aware of this and...

• 2:50:35Joe Rogan?

  Well, I mean...

• 2:50:36Speaker 02

  It's the kind... It's the kind of thing I would hope that would get some attention.

• 2:50:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:50:39Joe Rogan?

  Well, this is the... Brings us back to the UAP thing. Because if that's what we're seeing, we're seeing super sophisticated Chinese drones that operate on some novel propulsion system.

• 2:50:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:50:48Joe Rogan?

  That's not good.

• 2:50:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:50:50Joe Rogan?

  And that could be because they put ridiculous regulations on drone manufacturers in America.

• 2:50:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 2:50:57Joe Rogan?

  And they got way ahead of us.

• 2:50:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. Yeah, we, th- th- these are bad, these are bad.

• 2:51:02Joe Rogan?

  It's also, you're just opening my eyes to this. I always had this rose-colored glasses view of our society versus the Chinese society. Our society is more open, so people can innovate and come up with new startups and all these crazy ideas because there's so much freedom in America. They don't have to deal with the government being involved in every business.

• 2:51:22Joe Rogan?

  Silly me.

• 2:51:23Speaker 02

  Well.

• 2:51:23Joe Rogan?

  Silly me, I was wrong.

• 2:51:25Speaker 02

  So this is my argu- this is my argument I make geopolitically in DC, which is our, to, to, if you imagine that the 21st century is going to be, let's say, a contest between the US and China, the same way that in the 20th century it was the US versus the Soviet Union, and like, contest, competition, Cold War, maybe Hot War.

• 2:51:40Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:41Speaker 02

  Like, that's, that's the, the basic fundamental kind of geopolitical puzzle of the 21st century, then you want to think very clearly about the strengths and weaknesses of both yourselves and about the other side. And then, as you think about how to beat the other guy, is the answer to become more like them or more like yourself?

• 2:51:56Joe Rogan?

  Maxine Waters made that argument when it comes to social digital scores and cryptocurrency and a centralized digital currency. She was talking about that, like, in order to compete with China, we have to come up with a centralized digital currency.

• 2:52:08Speaker 02

  Which, which in my view is exactly the wrong thing.

• 2:52:10Joe Rogan?

  Yes, I heard that, I was like, that's a terrible idea.

• 2:52:12Speaker 02

  It's exactly the wrong thing.

• 2:52:13Joe Rogan?

  You gotta be like China to compete with China?

• 2:52:15Speaker 02

  It's exactly the wrong thing, it's exactly the wrong thing, you don't want that. Because, because, because, as you know, the China system has its problems. Like, th- they terrorize their own population directly, they do impose the social credit score stuff.

• 2:52:25Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:52:25Speaker 02

  They do, th- and they, they do all this stuff. And then, by the way, th- th- here's, here's something we have going for us, which is the Chinese system has turned on capitalism. Um, Xi Jinping is not a capitalist, and he, th- there is a broad-based crackdown on private business in China, uh, to the point, it's, it's a friend of mine invest- one of the leading investors in China, and he said, every single Chinese tech founder has either left China or wants to leave China.

• 2:52:44Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:52:45Speaker 02

  And they're all trying to get their money out, and they're all trying to get their families out, because it's now too dangerous to run a tech company in China, because the government might just snatch you, like, literally, physically snatch you at any point.

• 2:52:54Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:55Speaker 02

  And you may or may not come back. And then, every Chinese CEO has a political officer of the Chinese Communist Party sitting down the hall, who can come in and override your decisions anytime he wants to.

• 2:53:04Joe Rogan?

  Oy.

• 2:53:04Speaker 02

  And, by the way, and drag you into training. This is a great thing. Okay, so you're sitting, you're the CEO of a company with, you know, 50 billion in revenue and 100,000 employees and this guy from the CCP comes in and pulls you and you sit in the conference room down the hall for seven hours getting grilled on how well you understand Marx, right? So like, that actually happens, right? It's political officers. And that's the kind of thing that happened in the Soviet Union and that's the kind of thing that happens in China. So you'd rather be a CEO in the US than in China, for sure, as long as the US system actually stays open, where you can actually get all the benefits of all the power of all these incredibly smart people building companies and building products. And that's why this administration freaked us out so much, is because it felt like they were trying to become way more like China.

• 2:53:45Joe Rogan?

  See, I was not nearly as aware as I should have been about all these things that you're saying. I didn't know this. I did know about the banks and I certainly didn't know that they were cracking down on AI the same way they cracked down on social media.

• 2:53:57Speaker 02

  The AI thing was very alarming. We had meetings this spring that were the most alarming meetings I've ever been in, where they were taking us through their plans and it was...

• 2:54:04Joe Rogan?

  What kind of, can you talk about it?

• 2:54:06Speaker 02

  Basically just full government, full government control, like this sort of thing. There will be a small number of large companies that will be completely regulated and controlled by the government. They told us, they told us, they just said, "Don't even start, don't even start startups. Like, don't even bother." Like, there's just no way. There's no way that they can succeed. There's no way that we're going to permit that to happen.

• 2:54:20Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:54:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. They said, "This is already over. It's going to be two or three companies and we're just gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna control them and that's that." Like, this is already finished.

• 2:54:28Joe Rogan?

  Oh my God. Now, when you leave a meeting like that, what do you do?

• 2:54:31Speaker 02

  You go endorse Donald Trump.

• 2:54:39Joe Rogan?

  Oh my God.

• 2:54:40Speaker 02

  And again, like, I'll just tell you, like, you know, like, because I'm gonna get a lot of, you know, the flak I'm gonna get for this is, you know, he's just a crazy, whatever, right-winger. But, like, I was a Democrat. I was like a Democrat. I was a, I supported Bill Clinton in 92. I supported Clinton in 96. I supported Gore, who I knew very well in 2000. I knew John Kerry. I supported him in '04. I supported Obama. I supported Hillary in 16. Like, I was like a Democrat in good standing. And then...

• 2:55:04Joe Rogan?

  Are you completely out in the cocktail circuit now? Like, are you allowed to hang out with people?

• 2:55:10Speaker 02

  So, there's now, this is actually true, there's now two kinds of dinner parties in Silicon Valley. They fractured, they fractured cleanly in half. There's the ones where every person there believes every single thing that was in the New York Times that day. Which, by the way, is often very different than whatever was in the New York Times six months ago. But everybody has fully updated their views for that day, and that's what they talk about at the dinner party. And I'm no longer invited to those. Nor do I want to go to them. And then, and then there's the other kind, which is, you know, David Sacks and like all these guys and all these people. And, you know, just this growing universe. You know, it's a microcosm of what's happening more broadly in the culture, which is like, hey, let's actually get together and talk about things and have fun.

• 2:55:46Joe Rogan?

  Right, but it's so much more comforting when it's you guys and not the MyPillow guy. You know what I mean? It's like, no disrespect, Mike, to the MyPillow guy. But you know what I'm saying? Like, I want people that are smarter than me to be saying these things. That's what helps. It helps when you say, well, this person actually knows what they're talking about, they're very well informed, and they understand the repercussions. They understand, like, what's been coming their way, and there's people like yourself that can speak about these, the plans that you're laying out, what they were trying to do with AI is fucking terrifying. That should terrify everybody. Where you have bureaucrats are now in control of potentially the most, the biggest agent of change in the history of the human race, potentially. And you're gonna let, what? The people that can't even balance the budget? People that don't know what the fuck is going on?

• 2:56:32Joe Rogan?

  That's, that sounds insane.

• 2:56:34Speaker 02

  And, and look, my, my hope, my, I think, I think under Clinton and Gore, I think that they, they dealt with this very differently. I mean, look, they dealt with the internet very differently than, than, than the current crop are dealing with these technologies.

• 2:56:44Joe Rogan?

  Well, it was very different.

• 2:56:45Speaker 02

  It was very different, but also they were much more, Clinton and Gore in particular, were much more understanding that you could act, you could...

• 2:56:52Speaker 02

  So, there used to be this thing I call the deal, with a capital D. And the deal was, you could be, and this is what I was, you could be a tech founder, you could start a private company, you could create a tech product. Everybody loved you, it was great, glowing press coverage, the whole thing. You take the company public, it employs a lot of people, creates a lot of jobs, you make a lot of money. At some point, you cash out, and then you donate all the money to charity, and everybody thinks you're a hero. Right, and it's just great, right? And this is how it ran for a very long time. And this was the deal, this was, you know, the deal, this was Clinton and Gore were 100% in support of that, and they were 100% pro-capitalism in this way, and 100% pro-tech. And they actually did a lot to foster this kind of environment. And basically, what happened is, the last 15 years or so, Democrats culminating in this administration, basically broke every part of that deal, for people in my world. Like, every single part of that was shattered, right?

• 2:57:36Speaker 02

  Where it just like, technology became presumptively evil, right? And like, you know, if you're a businessperson, you were presumptively a bad person, and then technology was presumptively had bad effects, and dot-dot-dot, and then they were gonna regulate you, and try to kill you, and quash you. And then, the kicker was, philanthropy became evil. And this is a real culture change in the last five years, that I hope will reverse now, which is, philanthropy now is a dirty word on the left, because it's the private person choosing to give away the money, as opposed to the government choosing a way to give the money.

• 2:58:01Joe Rogan?

  Ooh.

• 2:58:02Speaker 02

  So I'll give you the ultimate case study. Here's where I radicalized on this topic. So, you'll recall, some years back, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla, you know, they have a ton of money in Facebook stock, they created a nonprofit entity, called Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which, of which the original mission was to literally cure all disease. And this could be like, you know, $200 billion going to cure all disease, right? So, like, big deal. They said they committed to donate 99% of their assets to this, to this new foundation. They got brutally attacked, from the left, and the attack was, they're only doing it to save money on taxes.

• 2:58:33Speaker 02

  Now, basic mathematics, you don't give away 99% of your money-

• 2:58:38Joe Rogan?

  To save money on taxes.

• 2:58:39Speaker 02

  To save money on taxes, right? But it was a vicious attack. It was like, a very, very aggressive attack, and the fundamental reason for the attack was, how dare they treat that money like it's their own? How dare they decide where it goes? Instead, tax rates for billionaires should go to 90-something percent. The government should take the money, and the government should allocate it, and that would be the morally proper and correct thing to do.

• 2:58:59Joe Rogan?

  What do you think is the root of that kind of thinking?

• 2:59:01Speaker 02

  Utopian, this is a utopian collectivism, you know, it's the-

• 2:59:06Joe Rogan?

  Socialism that works.

• 2:59:07Speaker 02

  Socialism, yeah. It's the, is the core idea socialism? Like, the core idea is this, this, this, is sort of, is a radical egalitarianism. Everybody should be exactly the same, all outcomes should be exactly the same, everything should be completely fair at all times.

• 2:59:19Joe Rogan?

  And some root of it has to be in envy.

• 2:59:21Speaker 02

  Of course, yeah. Envy, resentment.

• 2:59:23Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:59:24Speaker 02

  Nietzsche had this great term, he called it "resentment." And it's like turbocharged resentment. And so the way he described it is resentment is envy, resentment and bitterness that is so intense that it causes an inversion of values.

• 2:59:37Joe Rogan?

  Ooh.

• 2:59:38Speaker 02

  And the things that used to be good become bad and the things that used to be bad become good.

• 2:59:42Joe Rogan?

  Ooh.

• 2:59:42Speaker 02

  Right, and that's how you-

• 2:59:43Joe Rogan?

  Philanthropy becomes bad.

• 2:59:45Speaker 02

  Philanthropy becomes bad because it should be the state operating on behalf of the people as a whole who are handing out the money, not the individual.

• 2:59:51Joe Rogan?

  I was not aware of that blowback. I would have loved to read some of those comments.

• 2:59:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:59:56Joe Rogan?

  I would like to go to their page and see what else they comment on.

• 2:59:59Speaker 02

  I'll give you another example. Here's another radicalizing moment for you. So my friend Sheryl Sandberg, who I worked with very closely for a long time at Facebook, and by the way, Democrat, liberal, by the way, endorsed Kamala, like very much not on the same page as me on these things. She actually worked in the Clinton administration, died in the war, Democrat. She wrote this book called Lean In about 12 years ago. It's this sort of feminist manifesto and it basically said-

• 3:00:20Joe Rogan?

  Lean in?

• 3:00:20Speaker 02

  Lean in.

• 3:00:22Joe Rogan?

  Lean in.

• 3:00:22Speaker 02

  And the thesis of Lean In was that women in their lives and careers could quote-unquote "lean in." She said what she observed in a lot of meetings was the men were leaning in to the table and sitting like in front and then the women were like leaning back and waiting to be called on.

• 3:00:34Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 3:00:34Speaker 02

  And she said that women should lean in. It became a metaphor for her, for women should like lean in on their careers, they should like aggressively advocate for themselves to get like raises and promotions.

• 3:00:42Joe Rogan?

  Like men do.

• 3:00:43Speaker 02

  Like men do. They should, basically, women should basically become more aggressive in the workplace and then therefore, you know, perform better. And so it was like, it was a manifesto to women basically saying, be more confident, be more assertive, be more aggressive, be more successful. And I read the draft of the book when she was writing it and I said, well, you know, you realize you've written a right-wing manifesto.

• 3:00:59Joe Rogan?

  Ah.

• 3:00:59Speaker 02

  Right. Right. And she looks at me like I've lost my mind, right? Because she's a lifelong lefty and she's like, what do you mean? And I'm like, you, this book is a statement that women have agency. Right? This book is a statement that the things that women choose to do will lead to better results. That's what people believe on the right. On the left, what people believe is that women are only, always and ever victims.

• 3:01:20Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 3:01:21Speaker 02

  And if a woman doesn't succeed in a career, it's because she's being discriminated against. And so I said, I said, I predicted when this book comes out, right wingers are going to think it's great and you're going to get it. Like the left is going to come at you because you're violating the fundamental principle of the left, which is anybody who does less well is a victim, which in that case is exactly what happened. By the way, the reviews were all by women and they tore into her like in every major publication, they just like completely ripped her.

• 3:01:45Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 3:01:46Speaker 02

  And they're like, how dare this rich entitled woman be telling us, you know, these would be telling women that they're not victims and that they're, you know, that they have all this agency because this is denial of sexism, right? It's denial of oppression.

• 3:01:56Joe Rogan?

  Wow. Cause imagine if a man wrote a book like that for men.

• 3:02:00Speaker 02

  Right. That was patriarchy, right? That's, you know, that would be.

• 3:02:03Joe Rogan?

  Well, but I mean, but men wouldn't attack it.

• 3:02:05Speaker 02

  Oh, right. Exactly. Right.

• 3:02:06Joe Rogan?

  It would be a guidebook.

• 3:02:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 3:02:08Joe Rogan?

  This is how you kick ass and get ahead.

• 3:02:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. We call it self-help.

• 3:02:10Joe Rogan?

  Lean in, bro.

• 3:02:11Speaker 02

  Lean in.

• 3:02:12Joe Rogan?

  Just call it, just call it lean in, bro.

• 3:02:15Speaker 02

  Exactly right.

• 3:02:15Joe Rogan?

  Wow. That's crazy. She got attacked for that.

• 3:02:18Speaker 02

  So again, it's this, it's the inversion, it's the resentment, it's the inversion, which is like advocating on your own behalf and choosing to do things that make you more successful.

• 3:02:25Joe Rogan?

  What was her reaction to that blowback?

• 3:02:26Speaker 02

  I would say she was, I don't want to speak for her, but she was not, not pleased.

• 3:02:31Joe Rogan?

  Well, also was she shocked that you're correct? Did you have a follow-up conversation with her? What did she say?

• 3:02:37Speaker 02

  We've talked about it a lot.

• 3:02:38Joe Rogan?

  Like, god damn it, Mark, how'd you see that one coming?

• 3:02:41Speaker 02

  So she was in the, but the answer is she was, her worldview of how these things worked was from a different, it was from the Clinton Gore era.

• 3:02:48Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 3:02:48Speaker 02

  In which you could, in which you could say things like that, you could talk like that. And by the time the book came out, it was already into the second Obama term heading it, right? And then the woke stuff started. And then at that point you could no longer say things like that.

• 3:03:00Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 3:03:01Speaker 02

  And everything got classified through this very hard edged, right? Us versus them, right? Oppressor versus oppressed.

• 3:03:06Joe Rogan?

  Oy.

• 3:03:06Speaker 02

  You know, kind of mindset. And so.

• 3:03:08Joe Rogan?

  It's such, it's such a contrast to what we hoped would happen when Obama would be president.

• 3:03:13Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 3:03:14Joe Rogan?

  My thought was, okay, look, there's still some racism, but clearly if you're the baddest motherfucker, you can get ahead. Like you could win, the country will vote for you. That's not what happened.

• 3:03:25Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:03:25Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 3:03:26Speaker 02

  And you can win again.

• 3:03:27Joe Rogan?

  You can win twice.

• 3:03:28Speaker 02

  You win twice.

• 3:03:28Joe Rogan?

  And be like, I've always said, up until, I've lost a lot of respect for him from some of the things that he said during this election cycle, because I think they got desperate and they just resorted to actual lies. And I thought this is crazy to see him lying, especially the very fine people hoax. And we played the video back and forth of what Obama said he said and what he actually said, and it's pretty shocking, because he's very explicit. You know, he's saying not white nationalists, not neo Nazis, they should be condemned. He says that very clearly. That's not what I'm talking about. Talking about people who are protesting the taking down of the statue.

• 3:04:02Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:04:03Joe Rogan?

  And when you see a guy like Obama do that, it's such a bummer, because he was the guy, for me, that was like our best spokesman. He was like, here's a guy that came from a single family, a single parent household. He wasn't some rich entitled kid who was given everything in life. He's this brilliant speaker. He's like, he's handsome. He represents like what we're hoping for. We're hoping for a colorblind society that just treats people on the merit of who they are, and anyone can achieve, and look, here he is. He made it.

• 3:04:32Speaker 02

  He made it.

• 3:04:32Joe Rogan?

  And then all of a sudden, identity politics goes through the fucking roof, and victim mentality becomes a thing that people choose to side with, and it just gets real weird for a long time.

• 3:04:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. That's right. And like I said, I hope they can find their way back.

• 3:04:47Joe Rogan?

  But this lady's still on Team Kamala.

• 3:04:50Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:04:52Joe Rogan?

  She got a few lessons out of that, but not all of them.

• 3:04:55Speaker 02

  Well, no, this is, if you're, you know, if you've been a lifelong Democrat, this is, if you've been a lifelong Democrat, and if that's, you know, if that is in this quarter a lot of people's value systems, then it's a real challenge, you know.

• 3:05:04Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah, it's my parents.

• 3:05:05Speaker 02

  When your movement.

• 3:05:06Joe Rogan?

  They're all in.

• 3:05:07Speaker 02

  Goes in directions.

• 3:05:08Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:09Speaker 02

  And there's, you know, right, and you can choose, you can choose to follow, you can choose to follow into the, you know, the craziest version of it, or you can choose to say, you know what, like, I'm still not going to switch sides, but at least I'm going to advocate.

• 3:05:18Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 3:05:19Speaker 02

  For my team to come back.

• 3:05:20Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 3:05:20Speaker 02

  Isn't it Richie Torres?

• 3:05:21Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 3:05:22Speaker 02

  This guy is a congressman in, in, in Queens, I think, or the Bronx. He's actually, he actually started out, everybody thought he was going to be a far lefty, because he's gay, he's black, he's Latino. He was like, he was like at least associated with the Squad early on, and he's like one of the guys in the Democratic Party who has now stood up, and he's been doing this in public for the last two weeks, saying, clearly, we have to get back to sense. Like, we have to get back to common sense, we have to get back to moderation. We have to have law enforcement. We have to have, you know, we can't have crime in the streets. We have to have a border. You know, we have to, we have to get, we, Democrats have to get back to moderation and sense. And so he, he is hoping to lead the party.

• 3:05:55Joe Rogan?

  That's great.

• 3:05:56Speaker 02

  I think he's, we support him and I think he's like a really, I think he's a very impressive guy. So there, there are people like, and he's young and very energetic and, you know, I think he has a, you know, very bright future. But that's the kind of person who could lead the party.

• 3:06:07Joe Rogan?

  Well, the big Nietzschean shift was when Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala and everybody cheered. If there's not a better example than that, please tell me what it is. Cause that one was fucking nuts. Like Dick Cheney was always the hard right. Like during the Bush administration, all the lefties looked at him like that was Satan.

• 3:06:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 3:06:29Joe Rogan?

  He was the profiteer.

• 3:06:30Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 3:06:30Joe Rogan?

  He was the, the manipulator. He was the guy pulling the strings. He was the CEO of Hal Burton that came, the whole thing was so crazy and to see, oh, Dick Cheney just endorsed Kamala. And everybody's like, yay, look, Dick Cheney's on our side. Like, what the fuck are you guys talking about? This is, this is the best shift of it, right?

• 3:06:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's right. All of a sudden, all of a sudden we're all neo-cons. All of a sudden, as you said, all of a sudden we're pro-war. It's like, wait, wait, you know, cause like, as you know, like the, you know, yeah, the Democrats used to be the anti-war party.

• 3:07:00Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 3:07:01Speaker 02

  They were the anti-war party for a very long time.

• 3:07:02Joe Rogan?

  Yes. Yes.

• 3:07:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:07:05Joe Rogan?

  Except back when they were trying to keep slavery in act. That's part of the problem.

• 3:07:09Speaker 02

  That was a different.

• 3:07:10Joe Rogan?

  People don't realize that.

• 3:07:11Speaker 02

  That was a different era, but you know what? Coming out of Vietnam, they were definitely the anti-war party for like, you know, 30 years.

• 3:07:16Joe Rogan?

  But isn't that a shift as well?

• 3:07:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:07:17Joe Rogan?

  But the shift of the Republicans from back in the day being Abraham Lincoln and that trying to get rid of slavery. And the Democrats fighting to keep it. Like there's these weird ideological swings, they happen. And, you know, we're still attached to the idea of being a Democrat is like being a Clinton Democrat. We're, we're in this weird sort of. Denial of what the ideology actually stands for versus how we think of ourselves when we say, "I'm a Democrat. I'm a good person. You know, I support civil rights, women's rights, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, down the line. I'm a Democrat."

• 3:07:54Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:07:54Joe Rogan?

  And if you go against that, well, now you're against all these things that you know to be inherently important for society.

• 3:08:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 3:08:00Joe Rogan?

  They got you.

• 3:08:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 3:08:02Joe Rogan?

  They got you. They roped you into some crazy thing where you're supporting war. And then there was the big faction, right? There's the big Free Palestine versus support Israel.

• 3:08:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:08:11Joe Rogan?

  Because the left always supported Israel.

• 3:08:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, 100%.

• 3:08:13Joe Rogan?

  And then all of a sudden, there's this Free Palestine movement, which divides the left even further.

• 3:08:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. There's this, there's a book written some, some years back by this guy, Norman Podhoretz, and it's great. It says, "Why are Jews liberal?" Right. And he was a right-wing, he was a right-wing Jew, a very important Jewish thinker, American Jewish thinker of like in the 60s, 70s, 80s. And he's like, he basically is like, basically, he had this thesis that like, these Jewish liberal voters in the US, like, basically are voting against, ultimately, they're voting for the wrong team. Because what they don't understand, basically, is that this is sort of a path, number one, to antisemitism, which is what's happened. But number two, that basically, you're never going to have long-term support for Israel from the left, because Israel, the basic concept of Israel violates, you know, the idea, that Israel is like, literally, a religious ethno-state.

• 3:08:55Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 3:08:56Speaker 02

  And that's like inherently a right-wing idea, not a left-wing idea.

• 3:08:58Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 3:08:58Speaker 02

  Like, the left doesn't have room for that.

• 3:08:59Joe Rogan?

  And a military superpower.

• 3:09:00Speaker 02

  And a military, right, and is able to, right, is able to, right, is able to...

• 3:09:03Joe Rogan?

  And it's run by a former special forces operator.

• 3:09:05Speaker 02

  Very, yes, very, yes, a very capable, yes, very capable soldier in history.

• 3:09:09Joe Rogan?

  He's a fucking assassin.

• 3:09:10Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 3:09:11Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:11Speaker 02

  And so, you know, he argued, I don't know, it's like, whatever, 20 years ago, he's like, "This is headed in the wrong direction." And, but, you know, the argument was ignored at the time. And then, you know, at least a lot of my Jewish friends, after October 7th, you know, they were completely horrified, you know, to find out, for example, the DEI was actually anti-Jewish, right? Which is what everybody learned with the scandals at the universities.

• 3:09:29Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 3:09:29Speaker 02

  And it's like, you know, and there's two ways of looking at that. One is, "Oh, my God, the DEI is anti-Jewish, therefore, we need to add Jews to the DEI scorecard," right?

• 3:09:39Joe Rogan?

  Well, when we saw the heads of Harvard, and was it MIT, was it Yale? No.

• 3:09:44Speaker 02

  It was Harvard, MIT, and Columbia.

• 3:09:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that was...

• 3:09:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 3:09:47Joe Rogan?

  That was just so in everyone's face and so bananas.

• 3:09:51Speaker 02

  Well, and then we saw that, yeah, right, and then what we saw is that this, the same sort of radicalized left had actually slid into not just antisemitism and not just anti-Israel, but also pro, I mean, ultimately, pro-terrorist, pro-Hamas.

• 3:10:01Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:02Speaker 02

  You know, the new acronym, LGBTH.

• 3:10:05Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 3:10:05Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:10:06Joe Rogan?

  But there's a bunch of other stuff in there now. There's Q, there's Two Spirit.

• 3:10:09Speaker 02

  I know, but you gotta get H in there now for Hamas.

• 3:10:11Joe Rogan?

  Oh, boy. Really?

• 3:10:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course, of course, of course. And so, so like,

• 3:10:14Joe Rogan?

  God!

• 3:10:15Speaker 02

  I bring it, I bring it up just as an, not to take a position, just as an example of it's the kind of realignment. A lot of Jewish Americans now are having to kind of rethink fundamental questions about political structure and alliances and who they should be part of and who they shouldn't be part of. So I, I think to your point, I think like the whole country is going through, I think we're going through the first like profound political realignment probably since the 1960s.

• 3:10:36Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:37Speaker 02

  Which is, which is when everything shifted, you know, between Johnson and Nixon in the South. I think we're going through like the most profound version of that right now. And I think it's, it's something like the multi-ethnic working class coalition. You know, they came together around Trump, you know, basically again, against this sort of super exaggerated elite plus underclass, you know, kind of structure that the Democrats have built for themselves. And it just, I think it's just, it just turns out there's just a lot more people in the middle.

• 3:11:01Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 3:11:02Speaker 02

  And so I think, but, but, but by the way, including like a lot of, a lot of black people, a lot of black people, you know, black vote for Trump is way up, Hispanic vote for Trump is way up.

• 3:11:08Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 3:11:09Speaker 02

  Youth vote for Trump is way up.

• 3:11:10Joe Rogan?

  Way up.

• 3:11:10Speaker 02

  Gay vote is like all of,

• 3:11:11Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 3:11:12Speaker 02

  All of the identity groups that Democrats relied on all these years are, union vote is, is for Trump.

• 3:11:17Joe Rogan?

  I'm sure you've seen the, the map, the electoral map of California.

• 3:11:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:11:22Joe Rogan?

  2024 and 2020.

• 3:11:24Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:11:24Joe Rogan?

  In contrast, it's a crazy red wave that's going through across the whole, the most of the state is red now.

• 3:11:29Speaker 02

  Those of us on the coast are gonna get pushed into the ocean.

• 3:11:31Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 3:11:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:11:32Joe Rogan?

  Well, I think, you know, maybe the other way, you were talking about the hopeful way that the Democrats will wake up.

• 3:11:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:11:39Joe Rogan?

  And come up with a more reasonable, I mean, there's obviously clear cultural pushback on all these crazier, crazier issues. And I mean, like the giant pushback from women about biological men competing against women. I mean, this is a giant one where women are like, listen, we created Title IX for a reason. Like we, we want women's sports to be for women. You can't have them for mentally ill men that think that they can be able to just decide they're a woman and compete against women, which is what it is in a lot of places. You don't even have to get tested. There's not like some sort of a hormone protocol. It's just like, it's just what your identity is, which is just nuts. And that's one of the things that I think a lot of people on the left are having a really hard time justifying.

• 3:12:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. Because how can you deny a victim group?

• 3:12:25Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 3:12:25Speaker 02

  Right. You can't. I mean, in the full version of that ideology, in the extreme version of that ideology, you cannot deny a victim claim.

• 3:12:31Joe Rogan?

  Well, it also comes with this weird caveat where you have to deny the existence of perverts.

• 3:12:37Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:12:37Joe Rogan?

  Because a pervert, all they have to do is say, "I identify as a woman," throw on a wig, and now you can go hang around the women's room, and no one can say anything. Well, you've emboldened, empowered, one of the worst groups in society that we've always protected women from.

• 3:12:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:12:52Joe Rogan?

  And you have to pretend they don't exist if you just want to base it solely on identity. Especially like a self-described identity. You just decide, and then that's it. And, you know, I mean, there's states that have that now with prisoners, that all a prisoner has to do is identify with being a woman, and you are now housed in women's prisons. California has forty-seven of them, when the last time I looked at it. And there's hundreds that are waiting, on like a waiting list, to try to get in. So you have women who, you know, especially if you're someone who's dealing with, if you've ever been raped or sexually abused, and now you have to share space with a man who might be a fucking pervert.

• 3:13:34Joe Rogan?

  And some of these men even have some crimes that are along those lines that they're in jail for.

• 3:13:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:13:42Joe Rogan?

  It's crazy. I mean, Canada's the worst at it. There's a bunch of different examples of these type of people getting into female prisons. And it's just, it's insanity.

• 3:13:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:13:52Joe Rogan?

  And I think the left rejects that too, for the most part. There's the sensible version of the left that is like, "Hey, yeah, I'm pro-gay rights. Yeah, I'm pro-women's rights. I'm pro-civil rights. I'm pro-choice. I'm pro-this. I'm anti-Warmont." But also, you can't let psychos just put on a fucking dress and hang out in women's rooms just because we want to be kind.

• 3:14:11Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:14:11Joe Rogan?

  Like, that's nuts. So there has to be some... And then there's legitimate trans women. So like, how do you make the distinction? Well, clearly, we have to have a fucking conversation. And if you don't allow that conversation to take place, like, if you go to Blue Sky and you type in "there are only two genders," you're banned.

• 3:14:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're...

• 3:14:27Joe Rogan?

  Right there. People have done it. There's a bunch of people have done it. It's fun.

• 3:14:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:14:30Joe Rogan?

  It's fun. They have like, they've created a little sock puppet account, and they say some shit that should have been a reasonable thing to say just twenty years ago.

• 3:14:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:14:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, well, you make me hopeful, Mark.

• 3:14:40Speaker 02

  Good.

• 3:14:40Joe Rogan?

  You do. You do. Because you you lay things out in like a really well thought out way that is not hyperbolic and you're you're making a lot of sense. So I'm glad we talked. I feel better.

• 3:14:51Speaker 02

  Good. Fantastic.

• 3:14:54Joe Rogan?

  I think the world does, too. I really do. I mean, I've talked to a lot of people, even people that are Democrats. They say, I feel better that Trump won.

• 3:15:00Speaker 02

  Every day, it feels better. It's just like the, you know, it feels like just things are opening up.

• 3:15:05Joe Rogan?

  It's the Obama campaign. It's hope and change.

• 3:15:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, hope and change.

• 3:15:08Joe Rogan?

  Never?

• 3:15:09Speaker 02

  It's hope be changy.

• 3:15:10Joe Rogan?

  This is kind of actually hope and change.

• 3:15:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:15:13Joe Rogan?

  This is actually it.

• 3:15:15Speaker 02

  It feels like oxygen returning.

• 3:15:16Joe Rogan?

  Yes. Well, thank you very much, Mark. I really appreciate you. Tell everybody your Substack, how to find you on social media.

• 3:15:22Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm on I'm on I'm on X under P Marque. I'm on Substack. Google me.

• 3:15:27Joe Rogan?

  All right.

• 3:15:27Speaker 02

  Ask perplexity.

• 3:15:28Joe Rogan?

  All right.

• 3:15:28Speaker 02

  Ask ChatGPT and it will deny that. No, it will happily tell you that I exist, at least at least last at least last time I checked, so.

• 3:15:35Joe Rogan?

  What about Wikipedia?

• 3:15:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, we don't know. Yeah, we don't know if Catherine is still working.

• 3:15:39Joe Rogan?

  Always a pleasure, Mark. Thank you very much. Appreciate you.

• 3:15:41Speaker 02

  Good.

• 3:15:42Joe Rogan?

  All right. Bye, everybody.