#2211 - Michael Shellenberger
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast. Mr. Schellenberger, good to see you. Good to see you, man. How you been, man? Every day. You've been neck deep in the chaos of the world. I made it to Brazil and back, so I'll put it that way. What was that like? It was intense, man. I mean, it's still going on. We did Twitter Files Brazil. Right. And...

three days later that was back in march three days later elon just throws down and starts to attack this main supreme court justice who's the guy that's now banned x so x is banned in brazil they're in negotiations but it was very exciting to be there because and the brazilians were just relieved they were like everything that we thought was happening is proven by the twitter files brazil

And they were just very grateful to Elon. So it's been this- What did the Twitter files, I know about the Twitter files America, I don't know about the Twitter files in Brazil. So they, this is like one of the most extreme forms of censorship we've seen in democratic countries. India has been pretty bad too, but this, what they were, the worst of it was that they were- Pull that sucker up. Is it too, okay. Yeah, it's hard to bring it up to you. How's that? Good? Better? Good to go.

This is the most dramatic part is that they were the judge. This is a Supreme Court justice who is basically the dictator of Brazil is had was demanding that particular journalists and politicians just be banned not only from X, but from every other social media platform.

which is a tactic that we had seen in earlier censorship files. We had done something on something called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League with Taibbi showing this. It was an early military tactic.

censorship operation and they had a list of tactics and one of them was to get people banned on every platform. So you're basically like just depersoning people, just destroying their career. You can't make a career as a journalist or a politician if you're banned from every platform. So that was one of the most dramatic parts, all in secret, all open investigations ongoing. And basically nobody, there's no checks and balances. There's no chance to argue with it

So that came out and Elon responded like three days later and was like, yeah, Brazil's like the worst in the world and just starts attacking the Supreme Court justices like Darth Vader and Voldemort and doing what Elon does. Fast forward to last month and they had a huge protest in Sao Paulo, one of the largest free speech protests in history, which was itself just amazing and inspiring because, you know, it's a...

Free speech has been something that we didn't really think we had to fight for. So to see like hundreds of thousands of people in the city of Sao Paulo was amazing. I was there with the former president. He sort of sees me, brings me up. I'm up on top of the stage. He's, you know, just, you know, yelling at the crowd. Everyone's worked up. You know, he kind of looks over at me and covers the mic. He's like, Schellenberger, right? You know, he's like, Michael Schellenberger's up here. And the crowd's just, you know, they knew about the Twitter files. Afterwards, we go down and it's just, you know,

It's just a lot of emotion and anger, but also hope. The Brazilian people are, for me, it's like one of the most exciting cultures in the world because they're so expressive. The president, like while he's speaking, he's like crying. You know, it's a very like emotionally open culture. So now, I mean, the question for Elon, they're having to negotiate this is do you

Do you out of principle keep X banned in Brazil to defend the several dozen people that the government is requiring be banned permanently? But that means that 20 million Brazilians are denied X as a platform.

Or do you go along with what the government's demanding and hope to fight for another day? And that's what's happening now. The 12 people, it's 12 people? We actually don't know, but probably under 100. And what are they being accused of that the government is saying is so important that they need to be banned?

Misinformation. You can see every country in the world is particularly obsessed with COVID misinformation and election misinformation. But to give you an example of how arbitrary and unjust it is, there's one of the members of Congress who's one of the most dynamic. He's not actually in the party of Bolsonaro. That's the controversial former president. He's in a different party. His name is Marcel von Haten. And

He was he got into he didn't even know this until the Twitter files Brazil came out. And then Elon did release because the House of Representatives, Jim Jordan asked for these internal files from X. He subpoenaed them. So we even learned more information from those files.

They showed that von Hatton had – he was supposedly being deplatformed for election misinformation. But it turned out that the video he posted was posted the day after the elections and it had to do with labor issues, had nothing to do with elections. And that's just really common. I mean you just see – it's just arbitrary rule by one guy. That's why I say it's a dictatorship. Yeah.

Has there been any debate or discussion? Like, has anybody tried to hold them to the fire as to why these people are being banned? And please prove that this is misinformation. Has there been any sort of discussion? Huge. I mean, it's maybe one of the biggest issues in Brazil. It's the president of Brazil who probably hasn't gotten enough attention.

criticism for it because he's going along with it. He defended the censorship. This is Lula. I always heard that he was a great guy when Jair Bolsonaro was the president. The narrative was Bolsonaro was a dictator, that he was a bad guy. But I know so many Brazilians from Jiu-Jitsu. I know so many Brazilians and they all love Bolsonaro. I was like, I am so confused about their politics over there. I don't know what's going on, but Lula was supposed to be this guy that was for the people and

And to hear that he is a part of this whole disinformation crackdown, alleged disinformation crackdown, is so disheartening.

Well, yeah, I mean, for me personally, the funny thing is I had this just coincidentally, I have this deep relationship with Brazil because I lived in Brazil in the in the early 90s. I was working. I was actually working towards my Ph.D. in the semi Amazon. I went to Rio and Sao Paulo. I interviewed Lula in 1994, sat across from him just like I'm sitting across from you right now.

What was your take on him? I love, I mean, at the time I loved him. I mean, I was, you know, I was on the radical left for, you know, up until, you know, five minutes ago. Up until the Kool-Aid wore off. Yeah. I mean, even until the, I mean, really even up until the censorship part. I mean, when you start censoring, you're just like...

Not to digress, but it's kind of like, you know, back in the 90s, we were anti-war, pro-free speech and pro-gay rights. Yeah. Now the left is pro-censorship, pro-war and engaged in horrible medical mistreatment of gay children in the name of trans medicine. So it's like literally like who changed here? You know, my values did stay the same, at least on those things.

But anyway, I mean, I sat across from him and I just said, you know, everybody says that you're going to turn Brazil into Cuba. He does love Fidel Castro, but he said absolutely not. He does. That's a bit of a problem. No, they're bros. That seems like a bit of a problem. The thing is that in Latin America, like everybody on the left, even some of the center left, they actually had a lot of respect for Fidel Castro.

I know it's amazing, but they really did. It's so crazy. Yeah. He's a very, Fidel's a very, he was a very charismatic person. I actually met him too. Really? I met all these guys. Do you think he's Justin Trudeau's dad? Oh, hell yeah. Have you seen the photographs? It's crazy. It is crazy. It really is crazy. It's, I mean. But he kind of looks like his dad too.

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Frank Sinatra one is just insane. Yeah. That is not Woody Allen's kid. No. Like, no ifs, ands, or buts. That one's more dramatic than the Trudeau one. That one's crazy. I mean, that looks like Frank Sinatra. What are the odds? Unless, like, she loves Sinatra so much, she, like, willed him into existence in her own childhood.

Yeah, immaculate conception. But anyway, so I asked Lula directly. And I actually wrote an article for a left-wing magazine at the time. I said, "Are you gonna try to turn Brazil into Cuba and have censorship?" And he said, "Absolutely not. Our socialism is gonna be democratic socialism." And that was my attraction to Brazil too, was that here you... And to the Workers' Party and to Lula. He had all the stuff that you loved about the left, but he was gonna respect free speech.

So I, you know, basically after the Tour Files Brazil and the Workers' Party, you know, and Lula just start defending censorship, then I start going after Lula too. And I'm like, you lied to me. And this is, you know, unacceptable. What do you think changed?

Wow. Great question. I mean, there's a way in which it's the same thing that changed for the left everywhere. I mean, this is the question we're always asking, which is like... How? Because, you know, if you read the histories, I've been... You know, I'm now... By the way, I'm... So I'm... We're going to spend three months in Austin every year now because I'm the CBR chair of politics, censorship, and free speech at the University of Austin. Oh. I'm the first and only endowed chair there. So...

So it's exciting. So I'm here and... You're welcome. Thank you, man. Yeah, we just bought a little house. Nice. Yeah. Nice. So, yeah, I mean, one of the... Because, of course, if you read the histories of free speech, particularly the last couple hundred years, it's really the right censoring the left. There's a few exceptions, but, I mean, overwhelmingly, all the way back to the original...

you know, French Parliament where they split, you know, the French Con where they split people on left and right became a way to refer to liberals and conservatives. Conservatives were about protecting tradition, about propriety, don't say certain things. You know, that was like what conservatives were. And then if you go to the United States, like the one of the most dramatic instances of censorship here is the early part of the 20th century with the Sedition Act. And that's when they were, you know, arresting socialists, incarcerating thousands of people. I

And so that was basically the tradition. That's why when we were in the 90s and up until recently, free speech was part of the left tradition. So what happened? I mean, what's clear about the censorship that's going on is it's counter-populist. So they're going at Jair Bolsonaro like Trump is a populist candidate. So one thought experiment would be if Bernie Sanders had become president in 2016,

Would the deep state have sided with – would they have sided with the right, with the Republicans to censor a populist Democratic Party? It's an interesting question. I don't know the answer to it. Clearly – I mean I would say the – if you look at what the global elite, which is kind of a center-left elite in Europe, Brazil, United States, Canada –

It really wants to censor on COVID elections and migration. And they do the mass migration stuff around hate. So if you criticize mass migration, it's hate speech and you should be censored.

So clearly this is a reaction by the deep state against populism, which clearly threatens them, their ability to build a wage war when they want to wage war, to move people around. I mean, it's huge. I mean, the mass migration that's been occurring under Biden, of course, has been happening in Europe, too. And everybody's like, what is like what's going on? Like, why? Why is this happening? Why do you think it's happening?

That's a great question. I mean, obviously, the story that the traditional story had been that this is compassionate and it's the right thing to do and want to bring people in. There's so many. I mean, the Democrats and the Europeans, they went so far with it that it actually hurt them politically. Like, you know, Kamala may lose the elections because of just the mass migration. It was like the number one thing 60 Minutes asked her about just now.

In Germany, the AFD, which is considered the far right party, far just means anti-mass migration. So they went really far. I mean, I think there's probably some truth to the idea that Democrats are bringing in folks to increase Democratic voters. That's not a conspiracy theory. That's something that John Judas and Rui Teixeira wrote a whole book about called The Emerging Democratic Majority, where they talked about how Latinos are going to side with Democrats.

And then another part of me just wonders if it's related, is that there was a concern that populism... Because I mean, the threat of populism is that it's popular. So the threat of populism is that the people actually govern rather than these deep state organizations that have constrained... Pre-internet constrained what was acceptable. They narrowed the so-called Overton window.

With populism, you get potentially populations that say we don't want to go to war in Ukraine. We don't want to support foreign wars. We don't want to have mass migration. And for a variety of reasons, these deep state organizations, by which I mean Department of Homeland Security, FBI, CIA, State Department, are absolutely freaked out about it, as are the kind of global elite that end up supporting the NGOs pushing for that same agenda, George Soros,

Craig Newmark, Pierre Amidiar, the people that basically end up financing the NGOs that the U.S. government then comes along and finances, which, by the way, is another thing that we keep discovering. We'll be in Brazil and we'll be like,

wow, these NGOs are doing the exact same thing in Brazil that they're doing in Europe. Oh, and they happen to be funded by George Soros. They happen to have a fact-checking groups that come along and fact-check as a pretext for censorship. They do advertiser boycotts against the social media companies in order to control the social media companies. Obviously, there was this huge infiltration of Twitter. I mean, since I saw you last, we discovered...

What basically looks like a CIA effort to take over the content moderation at Twitter. It was former CIA people, Aletheia Group, which basically was we discovered these internal memos where they're basically trying to come in and create a special new content content moderation, which is, of course, code for censorship. How did they frame that?

They framed it. It's so fascinating because, of course, we can see all the memos and we have it. So it's not a theory. They were they were addressing they basically were in the internal and the sale, the sales pitches from this Aletheia group. They were selling the they were basically hyping the criticisms that Twitter was getting for not censoring enough.

And then they were saying, well, we're going to bring all this intelligence experience. And, you know, we've got these people that are really skilled at foreign languages. I mean, they were promising to bring in people that spoke all these different languages. And there was some internal resistance within Twitter, but it basically was on track to happen. And then Elon buys Twitter and it all ends. What do you think would have happened if he didn't buy it?

I mean, I mean, honestly, I go I mean, I'm careful. I don't want to engage in hyperbole, but I do feel like what we're seeing is totalitarianism, that this is it's not tanks and torture chambers, at least not yet. But the this instinct, this this demand to control the entire information environment, because, of course, it's not the censorship is in service now.

Of actually propaganda. They both want to prevent certain information from getting out and then they want to promote certain information. And that – this is – I mean I just reread 1984 by George Orwell and it's like this is what he's talking about. This is what he's worried about. So do you think when social media first came along, they sort of underestimated the potential?

And they let it become what it is. And then once it got so huge, then they tried to infiltrate, like perhaps after 2016. Then they tried to infiltrate and kind of realized it's a little too late because there's just too many people like yourself and sub stack people and podcasters. It's just too much.

Too many popular people on Twitter that have huge accounts that are on it all day long and monetizing it and acting as legitimate independent journalists without any sort of oversight. Yeah, 100%. In fact, it's not just that. They were using social media to support – I mean CIA, Intelligence Community, Defense Department were using social media for Arab Spring.

you know, for the color revolutions in Eastern Europe, it was a weapon. It was part of what they call hybrid warfare, you know, getting people, you know, mobilizing people in the streets to do regime change, to overthrow governments. I mean, if you can, the Holy Grail for, I mean, it's like Sun Tzu, you know, the best way to win is by not having to fight, you know? So if you can not have to fire any bullets, if you don't, if you, you know, CIA 1.0 after World War II, you know, it's a crude military overthrow of governments, you know,

CIA 2.0 regime change is you put a bunch of people in the street, peaceful protest, get the head of state to resign or call an early election and then overthrow the government that way. So social media was a tool of U.S. government statecraft for whatever that period was when, you know, Arab Spring 2011 until 2016. And then, yeah, I think it was basically Brexit,

Duterte in Philippines is another right-wing populist that gets elected, Trump. And even though I think the evidence is pretty overwhelming that Trump was not elected because of social media, he was elected because he defeated his opponents and his Republican opponents in the debates and then defeated Hillary in the election, mostly through conventional media. His use of social media and those other things clearly triggered a reaction from these deep state organizations.

I like it. It's funny. I just read this beautiful history of the printing press and Oxford history and the printing press at first, you know, 15th century, first hundred years, the Catholic church is just like, we love the printing press. You know, we're just cranking out Bibles and it's going great. And then Martin Luther gets a hold of the printing press and prints his theses, which are mostly attacking the church for corruption, for selling indulgences as a way to

over, you know, pay for your sins, basically. And he condemns that. And he literally goes viral. I mean, when you read like that history, you're like, it's eerily similar to social media. I mean, it's amazing because

Well, I mean, long story short, there's like a long period of revolutions and wars and the Protestant Reformation and then the Counter-Reformation. And they're like the printing presses. They're like hiding them in people's houses. The church and the government is trying to is arresting people for having printing presses. The printing presses go to Netherlands. You know, they're sneaking the printing presses into the Netherlands. And so it's like you can't help but see you're like, wow, it's like VPNs. Because in Brazil, when they were like, we're going to ban X, we're like, get a VPN, you know, and VPN in.

still hard for people to post publicly because that would obviously show that they were on it. But still, it's like you're always and this is sort of an argument. This would be an argument for Elon to cut a deal to get X back up in Brazil. And I'm not saying that's what he should do. I'm just saying one argument for it is that, you know, stay in the game. Don't let them confiscate your printing press out of, you know, to make out of principle or pride, because at some other point,

you're going to be able to find a way to work around that censorship. Does Brazil have something similar to our First Amendment? They have a line in their constitution that is extremely strong, that there should be no censorship for social or political issues. The problem is that their constitution is so long and it was created by so many people

That there's then all these other caveats, like you can't engage in racism, you can't engage in hate, you can't. There's the Nazis are Nazi parties banned in Brazil. So there's all sorts of other things that I mean, the Constitution is full of contradictions. It's a huge problem.

It made me the whole experience, by the way, because, you know, when you're growing up and you go to and you grow up and you go to, you know, you go to elementary school and high school and the teachers are telling you the Constitution of the United States is so special and you're just like, oh, come on, you know, like whatever. But you realize when you get older and you realize the First Amendment.

It's so radical because basically every other country in the world, certainly every other Western country, the progression of free speech was you would ask the king for permission. He's like, oh, king, can we criticize you for this? And he'd be like, oh, OK, we'll allow you to do that. But free speech was something gradually granted to the people here. As soon as they get the Constitution done, Jefferson and other anti-federalists, the people that were pretty skeptical about even wanting a country were like, OK,

We need a first we need a bill of rights. And the first thing up there, it needs to be free speech. And it's without qualifications. So the free I mean, the First Amendment doesn't say it doesn't say except for libel and defamation and imminent incitement of violence. Those things were built. Those things were Supreme Court rulings in the 250 years after the Constitution was ratified in 1789. And so that's why it's so amazing is that like.

You just never – I mean this history I just read of free speech is so amazing because all this battles over how much free speech to have. Is it just for the elites? Is it for the people? Then you get to the United States and it's just a clear moment in history where the founders of this country were just like –

Fuck it. Like, this is essential. Like, the speech comes before the government. The government, you don't have a government and then have free speech. We have free speech as an inalienable right from God or from our creator or just something that we're saying that we have. And then you make a government based on speech. So this Orwellian idea that we hear, including...

you know, tragically from Barack Obama and now his two secretaries of state, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton and Bill Gates, they're saying we have to have censorship to protect democracy. It's like the most Orwellian un-American idea. It's anathema. How is Bill Gates in this conversation at all? That's what's confusing. A non-elected official who just owned a software company.

My colleagues don't want me to talk about, don't be conspiratorial about this. There's other explanations for it. We've already talked about George Soros. The fact the FCC fast-tracked him purchasing 200 different radio stations.

I mean, that's kind of run-of-the-mill corruption. I mean, with Gates, you get into Epstein, right? Yeah. I mean, so I'm not saying this is the reason, but I mean, it is like this is not a theory. The current CIA director...

Bill Burns was at Epstein's apartment multiple times. Bill Gates was there. I believe the last time I checked, nobody knows how many times actually Bill Gates was with Jeffrey Epstein. He went out and did this, you know, really he did this PBS interview where he just looks guilty the whole time in his defense of talking about Epstein. Is that with that woman where she when he says, well, he's dead now, he said, so be careful.

Which is just the wildest thing to say. It's weird that, yeah, like you're like, that's what he was thinking when she was like, why are you? He's basically like, why are you going on about it? He's dead. It's like, well, we weren't talking about him. We're talking about you and your relationship with it. So, I mean, look, so obviously there is.

There was a sex blackmail operation. I mean, I'm 90, 95 percent on it. I think the Wall Street Journal reporters who did fantastic reporting on this are probably 99 percent. That was a sex blackmail operation. They were shooting film. There were one way mirrors. They were entrapping people. There's there's known connections to Mossad. And I just don't believe that Mossad operates in the United States without.

So the prevailing theory is what most people believe is that they brought these people there under this premise that you're going to be there with heads of state and industry and famous people and scientists. And this is going to be an amazing place where exceptional people get together. And once you get there, you get a little loose. You start drinking a little and perhaps taking in some party favors. And then there's ladies. Yep.

And they're underage. Yeah. And then the next thing, and you don't know it, but that mirror on the wall, someone's filming you. And then you're owned. Yeah. So, I mean, look, that's possible. I mean, I'm not. Something's going on in the fact that they haven't been released. Right. The client list hasn't been released. Well, and that Epstein was killed in jail. I mean, that's just the most suspicious thing. I mean, I don't know anybody that thinks it was suicide. Oh, I've heard people argue it. Yeah. They believe it.

So, I mean, look, that could explain it. I mean, look, I think Soros really believes this stuff. You know, I think Gates. I mean, these are people, like, when you get that powerful, you don't stop wanting more power. You want more power. And there's also you need to maintain power in order to protect yourself from all this stuff that we just talked about. Right. Assuming you have skeletons in the closet. I mean, we do know one of his affairs is...

with a young Russian chess player, bridge player. That's not contested. That's established. When he was going through his divorce, Melinda, you see the leaks to the New York Times about Epstein occurred while she's negotiating over the divorce. So clearly she knew something.

You don't necessarily need that. You don't need Epstein to explain Gates. But, I mean, Gates, he just came out with a Netflix documentary. This wasn't some, like, offhanded remark. He comes out with a whole Netflix documentary talking about specifically at great length about why we need to have censorship apparatus in place. And he gave multiple reasons. And one of them is protect people trying to tell you not to take vaccines. Right.

Protect people from people like you. Well, I'm not even telling people not to do anything. No. But there's people that are spreading, air quotes, misinformation about vaccines. Right. Including real facts. Well, right. Those are the most dangerous ones. Well, that's what the most bizarre is that he himself has changed his take on it. And he did it sort of, it seemed like, to try to cover up the fact that he was promoting it for so long. And, well, it didn't work as we wanted and COVID wasn't as bad as we thought. Right.

And, you know, it didn't really offer the protection that you need in order to actually –

It's not a sterilizing virus. It doesn't actually kill the virus. It doesn't keep you from getting it. So it does allow transmission. So he kind of admitted all those things. But like, oh, we'll do better next time was sort of the gist of it. And this idea that you have to use – you can't have people talking about inconvenient things that eventually turn out to be true seems crazy to not push back on.

And the fact that he said that and there was no response whatsoever in mainstream media. There was no New York Times articles written about it. The Washington Post didn't cover it and talk about how fucking insane it is to say something like that, especially after what we've been through. The gaslighting. Yeah. I mean, I just did a debate with Bill Nye in Florida. He's the science guy. The science guy, yeah. How could you do a debate against the science guy? Because I'm anti-science, obviously. You must be.

And, you know, I mean, I just pointed out that simple fact that I just point out the vaccine didn't obviously prevent infection or transmission. And the crowd, oh, you know, how can you say that and whatever? And it's like because it because everybody knows it reduced hospitalizations and reduced death. And I agree with that. I mean, that's fine.

But the point isn't, I'm not arguing about the vaccine. I'm arguing that it didn't do what they said it did. And nobody's actually, and then they just gaslight you as though that were the reason they were telling you to get the vaccine in the first place was to reduce hospitalization and death. No, they were telling you that it was going to reduce infection and transmission. Well, everybody's seen that Rachel Maddow clip, right? But here's the thing. If everybody took it, how do we even know if it reduced hospitalization? This episode is brought to you by blinds.com. Do you know the right window treatments aren't just about privacy?

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We don't know. And when we know that the fact that the people that died of COVID, the vast majority of them have four plus comorbidities. And we know that some ungodly amount of the population was vaccinated. Was it like 80 percent? Something like that. So you but you're saying that we don't know if it reduced death. Well, because you could you could compare the vaccinated to the unvaccinated group. Right.

Could you, though, if you have 80 percent of the people that are vaccinated and the 20 percent that are unvaccinated, are they of a particular political leaning? And what are the health metrics of that particular political leaning? Has anybody done some sort of an analysis on the people that did versus didn't? Like what were their health? What was their state of their physical health or metabolic health before they made these decisions?

Because ideally what you would look at if you wanted to find out if it stopped transmission or, excuse me, hospitalization or death, you would want to look at the overall body of human beings and then we have a bunch of things that we do know, right? Okay. So we know that...

Here's a group of people that died. Well, what do they have in common? Well, the vast majority of them have comorbidities. The vast majority of them are either really old or obese or are very ill, very, very ill. So we have, what was the actual number of people that died of COVID? I think 99.7 survived.

Right? Right. So it's 0.03 of the people that got COVID. Is it something like that? Man, I'm not an expert on COVID. You also have to take into account how many people were put on ventilators who wound up dying, which we now know was a terrible idea. 80% of the people they put on ventilators died. We know remdesivir had terrible health consequences. We know there's a bunch of things that

people are connecting to the vaccine that no one is admitting, you know, and that hospitals and especially employers are very reluctant to say that these mandated vaccinations cause these serious health consequences that we know are real. And then we have this mysterious uptick of all cause mortality that everyone wants to conveniently ignore and no one wants to make some sort of correlation or causation.

So do we really know that it prevented death? That is a good question. Honestly, Joe, I'm not a COVID vaccine expert. But I mean, even like saying that in front of Bill Nye, the science guy, like he's saying it prevented hospitalization and death. By what measurement? Like how can someone so confidently say that when we know there's so much wrong with the vaccine, when we know that it didn't stop transmission? And then we found out it wasn't even tested to stop transmission.

That was all a lie. Right. And the fact that they gave it to so many pregnant women with no tests on pregnant women. There's so much about it where people want to say this one thing because they think it will keep them from getting in trouble. And that thing that keeps you from getting in trouble, the vaccine was good because it prevented hospitalizations and deaths. I'm like, how have you shown that? Like, how do you show that?

You know, I'm going to go back and look at it. I'm working with a new colleague who's an amazing expert on the COVID stuff. But yeah, it's not my area. I mean, look, I think obviously they sold it to us as though it was the polio vaccine.

And it was more like the, at best it was more like a flu vaccine. It was a magic cure. Right. It's not even like the polio vaccine. Because if you look at polio, have you ever seen the curve of when the polio vaccine actually comes in? No. Okay. I'll send this to Jamie because it's quite fascinating. Most people are under the impression that the polio vaccine stopped polio in its tracks. But the reality is polio cases have radically declined before the polio vaccine came along.

It's weird when you find – I mean that's the problem with these goddamn rabbit holes. I'll send this to you, Jamie. And this is a bunch of different vaccines that we associate with stopping particular diseases.

And what probably actually happened was there was some sort of herd immunity and it was also the advent of sanitation. People in inner cities are using outdoor outhouses. There's stopping the use of DDT. There's a bunch of different factors that seem to play in that. But look at where the polio vaccine comes along. Yeah, that's amazing. Wow. Kind of crazy. Yeah. Kind of crazy. Totally different than the story we're told. Yeah. Yeah.

You know another crazy statistic about polio? What's that? What percentage of polio do you think is asymptomatic? Oh, God. Great question. I'm assuming high, right? A lot? Take a guess. 50%? 99. 95 to 99, depending on who you ask. And the majority of polio cases today are vaccine-derived polio. So there's a particular strain of vaccine that...

causes people to get polio. And there's a particular strain of polio rather that comes from that vaccine. So where are you at? What's your bottom line on vaccines right now? I am not a vaccine expert, but I am a person that has been lied to for four years and so blatantly and so obviously when you look at Fauci talking to Rand Paul and just lying openly about whether or not they funded gain-of-function research and the fact that he got away with all that. The fact that

the White House tells you for the unvaccinated, you're looking at a winter of severe illness and death, just scaring the shit out of people. And it seems to me they were doing that to maximize profits because they wanted to keep selling these things. And a lot of people got extremely rich. Many billionaires were created because of the pandemic, because of the COVID vaccine. It's all very spooky to me because I think there's a long history in this country of people

doing things for money knowing that people are going to suffer because of it. It's just sort of a human thing if you can get away with it. If it is illegal and you have the protection in place and you know that you're going to profit largely from this, you do it. This

This is also it's also in the United States is worse because, I mean, Europe did not require the vaccine. In fact, I believe in. They pulled out a lot quicker than we did, too. I mean, they did not require for children in particular. Right. Like I just interviewed Tracy Hogue and she was saying that she spent a lot of time in Denmark and Denmark said, don't give your kids the vaccine. And we said, do. And clearly. Well, that's the difference between socialized medicine, right?

I mean, we're seeing it on the trans medicine as well. The Europeans, because it's centralized socialized medicine, when Britain says you should not give kids puberty blockers, they end puberty blockers across all of Britain. They did it first in the NHS hospitals, which is the socialized medicine, and then they did it for the whole country. And the conservatives did it right before leaving office, and then labor comes in and they go, we're upholding it. So what is the debate with Bill Nye, the science guy? What was his position?

Well, in that case, it was just more like they were I mean, it's like kind of a collective gaslighting where everybody has now. I mean, I think it's unconscious, by the way. I don't think they're deliberately doing it. So maybe gaslighting is not fair. I agree. They go right from like they just have forgotten. It's like it's like retconning, you know, the the narrative. So they just kind of go, no, no, it's about reducing hospitalizations and death. It's like, but that's not the way you sold it to us. So can we just take a beat and acknowledge that you've changed your justification for the vaccine? Right.

Which means that it's motivated cognition. It's not like you're like reconsidering vaccines now that they – because what you should do is go, OK, the vaccines didn't do what they said they were going to do. It didn't stop infection or transmission. Now, maybe there's another reason we want them and we should consider it. But you should take a beat and pause before you just sort of rush ahead to being – to justifying vaccines for some other reason. Right. And what was his position?

Just, I mean, the most, you know, Peter, it's just the same as Peter Hotez and all of these guys. It's very authoritarian. I mean, it's very like, I mean, what he calls science is not actually, what Fauci and Hotez and Bill Nye call science is not actually science because science is a process.

The way they talk about it is more like – A doctrine. Yeah, exactly. Or in a dictatorship where it's like science is done by scientists. Well, actually, science can be done by anybody. It's like journalism. Like you don't need a PhD to do science. Like science is something that you do. It's also not the same. I mean sometimes you have experiments in labs. But science in the world of ecological biology is just going out there and counting the number of gorillas or whales. Right.

So when they say science, they really mean like obey me. That's what they mean. And it's people that are connected to institutions, all of them. Very powerful ones. So you're connected to educational institutions. You're connected to –

These pharmaceutical industries, these various institutions that are funding media, so they have enormous influence and power over narratives. And then you have people like Bill Nye, who's not even a scientist. No, I know he's an engineer. Which is really wild, right? Right. A guy who's not a scientist is the science guy. And this is the guy that is a spokesperson. I find spokespeople for science that are arrogant, very strange, very,

It's a very strange thing because there's a scientific method, and that's what science is. Science is applying the scientific method and data and trying to find out the truth based on what we know. It's not trust the experts. No. Especially when the experts are severely compromised. It's the opposite of that because remember, science comes out of Christianity. It comes out of this desire to understand God's creation and

And then over time, the church gives more and more freedom to the scientists to study things that end up being quite inconvenient, like the earth revolves around the sun or there's this, you know, there's evolution or all these different things that scientists discover that.

It's the opposite of doctrine. They're discovering things that are counter-doctrinaire. So it's becoming – I mean this is where you get to this – science is basically – people are trying to make it take the place of a religion. They're trying to turn it into an authority. And of course it can't do that because science is just supposed to tell you how things are. It's not supposed to tell you what you should do. That's the realm of ethics and politics. Didn't the concept of it come to Descartes in a dream? Of science? Yeah.

I believe so. Definitely the idea. See if you can find how he figured out where he initially came up with the concept of science. But it was understanding nature through measurement. I forget exactly how he came up with it, but I'm 99% sure it came to him in a dream. I believe it was like an angel that brought him this information in a dream. I mean, all these early scientists, including Newton. Here it is.

French philosopher and mathematician believed that he had three dreams in November 10th, 1619, that revealed the basis for the scientific method and his philosophical methods. He was possessed by a genius who revealed answers in a dazzling light. He went to bed exhausted and dreamed three dreams. He envisioned reforming all knowledge, understanding the nature of existence and how to be certain of that knowledge. Descartes' dreams are

are considered a philosopher's dream and are considered to be authentic. His interpretations of the dreams are supported by biographical material, neuroscientific theory, and psychoanalytic theory. Descartes' dream is also the subject of The World According to Mathematics, a series of essays that examines the influence of mathematics on society. The essays consider how mathematics can be applied to civilization, how these applications can be beneficial, dangerous, or irrelevant.

So it came to him in a dream, the idea of it initially. It's very interesting, right, that human beings lived for so long before the scientific method came along, and now it has become this weird thing that's been captured by people who are so-called experts, the spokespeople for the science, which is always dangerous when you have an enormous group of intelligent people, which the United States is. The United States is 330 million people.

Some of them have degrees. Some of them are just brilliant people that have spent a lot of time studying things. And there's a lot of them. There's a lot of people. So when you have all these people debating things and you want to maintain control and push a narrative, that shit gets very messy. And the best way to handle that is to have certain people be the stern purveyors of the science. That's it.

When you criticize Anthony Fauci, you're criticizing science. That's right. Remember when he said that? It's incredible. That was a wild thing to say, but it's so transparent because it shows how they really think.

That you are, and it's scolding. You are not supposed to. It's the same thing that happened when Martin Luther translated the Bible into phonetic languages. Because no one could speak Latin. No one had to read Latin. They were poor people. But when he translated it into German and all these different languages that people could read and said, hey, this is up to you to interpret what God said, the church was like, hey, fuckface, you're cutting in on our racket. Like, we need people that are the spokespersons for God.

The people that are going to tell you what God meant. You don't get to decide what God meant. That fucking dude is dressed like a wizard. He gets to decide. So they're wearing these crazy costumes that regular people don't get to wear, which makes you think, well, he's got the wacky costume and the fish head hat. He must know more than me.

Which is a weird play on authoritarianism. It's a weird... It's a very strange thing that people accept when people have costumes on. Like, if cops were wearing Nirvana t-shirts and board shorts, you'd be like, hey, fuck you, man. You're just a regular dude. Right. But you were going 55 in a 50. And he's wearing...

a uniform, like, damn, I'm getting in trouble with a uniformed person. This is real. They've proven it. Like, they actually do studies where they, if you put somebody in a white uniform,

or white doctor's coat or put a stethoscope on them, people trust them more. Sure. It's just automatic. It's incredible. I do. Yeah. I mean, why not? They're scientists. They've got a stethoscope. They know what my heartbeat per minute is. So the most unscientific thing is when people say things like the science is telling us to do this. No, no, no, no, no. Science doesn't tell us to do anything. It's describing reality. You can make predictions of what would happen if you do different things, but that's not

science telling us what to do. Science can't do that. And so... Especially when you stifle debate. Yeah. If you're stifling debate, you're stifling science. You are anti-science if you are anti-debating about science. That's right. Or at least the data. It's very similar to free speech in that same way. Yes. If you're just defending...

The speech that you agree with and you're not actually defending free speech right the old the test of whether or not you're defending free speech Same as the test of your defending science is that bring it on well as soon as you're as soon as you're censoring people like Jay Bhattacharya And you know Peter McCullough, and you know Robert Malone as soon as you're doing that like okay? How is what do you these people are rock-solid credentialed physicians

These are like Peter McCullough has the most scientific papers published in his field in human history. Like this is a legitimate scientist slash doctor and he's telling you.

He's telling you. He's using the actual methods that you're telling people, trust the science. He's actually doing it, and he's got a whole list of credentials to his name. He's a very accomplished person in this field, and yet they're censoring him because what he was saying was going against narratives. Of course. So you're stifling debate, which everyone knows is the wrong way to do it, even if he's wrong. The correct thing to do is to get him

publicly to talk to someone who is right.

And have the world see how this person who is right is going to correct him on the errors of his analysis. And then we all learn. But instead, what do they do? They try to get him booted off of social media, which is very sketchy behavior. We don't like that. Well, it's what Francis Collins said. We need to do a devastating takedown of these fringe epidemiologists referring to the Barrington Declaration, Bhattacharya and the two other and Barrington.

Martin Koldoff. Koldoff and then Sinitra Gupta from Oxford, I think is the third. But yeah, I mean, even a more dramatic example is like, you know, a lot of the people that did the early pioneering work showing that COVID escaped from a lab were like anonymous people on the internet, anonymous sleuths. That is legitimate. I mean, the idea, like credentialism is the enemy of science. The idea that you need to have some established credentials

In part because the system reproduces its own ideology. Professors give – they hire people and give tenure and give PhDs to people who agree with them. That's how they feel like their legacy will continue. They don't normally promote people, the younger generation, if they have radical disagreements with them. So they're necessarily going to come outside of the establishment. Right. Right.

It's sort of like every other institution where people want to get ahead. You have to play the rules. Yeah. You have to play the game by the rules that's established by the people that are controlling the game. It's conformism. It's just bizarre when that happens with science and mathematics and with all these different things that we thought of as...

these hard sciences. It's information-based, data-based. And it's even more dangerous when it's in the health and medical context. I'll give you another example. I mean, American Academy of Pediatrics, my friend Marty Makary just came out with this amazing book called Blindspots, where he looks at American Academy of Pediatrics. Look at what they did. They recommended letting babies sleep on their stomachs.

that resulted in the sudden infant death syndrome. And babies, like many babies died from that. Suffocated, right? Suffocated. They recommended not giving children peanuts and they created the peanut allergy epidemic. They, and now they're recommending transgender medicine. In all three cases, there was never any science to support any of those positions.

And it's bizarre because I was – I mean when you read this book or you kind of look into it, you're like what was going on? Was there some special interest or whatever? It was just like ego. And also it was a desire –

In many cases, the desire to have answers to problems that they should never have given answers to. Peanut allergies, for example, there were a few tiny number of people that tiny number of kids who had peanut allergies. But they came to AAP and they said, what should we do about it? And AAP goes, well, it's better just to be safe than sorry to recommend that parents don't give their kids peanuts.

They ended up creating the peanut allergy epidemic. They ended up making it. And it's an incredible story because- Do you know the other theory of why there's so many peanut allergies and so many allergies in general? No.

I don't know if this is true. Obviously, I'm not an expert in any of these things that I'm talking about. But the theory is that when you're vaccinating children and you're using aluminum, which is... So you have the inert virus, you have the dead virus, and you have this agitator, this thing that causes people to have this reaction. And then they find the inert virus, they develop antibodies for it. That's how vaccines work. But that aluminum causes...

allergic reactions and can cause you to become allergic to various things, including peanuts. I'm butchering this for sure, but Brett Weinstein has made this argument. And he believes that's possibly why he has a severe wheat allergy. It could be. I mean, in this case, they had a pretty good study comparing American kids to Israeli kids. And the Israeli kids had peanuts at young ages and they didn't have these allergies. Do they have the same vaccination schedule? I don't know. I don't have to check.

They were very vaccinated for COVID. I mean, it was an interesting way. Israelis were. Interesting. Yeah. I believe they mandated it. I mean, what's so amazing about that, assuming that Marty's account is correct, what's incredible about that story is that you had, so first of all, something like over 14 years went by before they did a study showing that

depriving the kids of peanuts at a young age was creating the allergies. But everybody, every, there's a whole field called immunology and there's all these immunologists who were watching this happen and they would know from their basic theory, which has been around for thousands of years, that you would end up creating allergies by not having that early exposure. So one of the crazy, so you're always like,

I haven't. This is like another case of this is like we're we're working on I'm working on this study of like the last Harvard president who came to power, Claudine Gay, who ended up leaving. She was not a great scholar. You know, she was actually in trouble for plagiarism. That was why she ended up having to leave. But, you know, one of those obviously after those hearings is after those hearings. And then she said some crazy things about someone commissioned the plagiarism to go after her because of that. Hmm.

But what's amazing, when you look at it, you know, Chris Rufo surfaced this glossary, this DEI glossary, diversity, equity, inclusion glossary, that was all these words that you were supposed to use. And basically woke language you're supposed to use. And she was the DEI going around and making the professors and the faculty all use this language. I mean, it's Orwellian. How is it that like these power... You're a Harvard professor. You're like...

this accomplished person you've achieved a lot. I mean, maybe you're, you know, maybe you're actually part of the problem in some ways, but

How is it that you would just – some faculty member gives you a list of – a glossary and you just go, oh, OK, I'm going to use your words? It's like something's going on in these institutions where people are bullied into things that they know are wrong. And so it's a failure. It's not just an intellectual failure. It's like a failure of courage as well so that you just end up going along with it. I don't want to be the guy that is accused of being a racist. I don't want to be the person accused of –

of causing childhood peanut allergies even though that's the thing. You don't want to miss out on tenure. You don't want to miss out on tenure. There's all these things going for you, but it's classic emperor's new clothes. Right. Where like everybody in the room is like, this glossary is racist and insane or telling parents not to give kids peanuts is insane because we've never had more allergies since we started banning this. How did it go on so long?

I think that's one of the things that, you know, that is one of the remedies, I think, of the Internet age and having these alternative media. That is a remedy to basically have people calling bullshit on it from outside those institutions. Because, I mean, this is American Academy of Pediatrics. If you're just an ordinary new parent and you're, you know, oh, the other one, by the way, is infant formula.

AAP recommended seed-based infant formulas, which were terrible for kids. And of course, we know that breast milk is superior for all these reasons and the antibodies and creating the immune system response. So, I mean, here you have the major organization recommending how to take care of kids with not one but four separate health scandals that it helped to create. Why should that organization even exist anymore?

Right. You know, and that's just like literally one of the institutions. But if you kind of just go down, you know, Harvard, New York Times, you know, American Medical Association and, you know, how about covid? I mean, most Americans agree now that covid was invented in a lab in China, escaped from the lab. So you have another case where these institutions are actually creating the problems they claim to be solving. Right.

You sound anti-science to me. I don't like how you're talking. If that's what it is, sign me up. I mean this is actually the subject – you asked me what the new book was and this is what it is. Pathocracy is the new book. Why elites subvert civilization and that's the big question is how is it like that the institutions – and we're taking this concept of iatrogenesis where –

The classic example is you go to the hospital for some ailment and you end up getting an infection and die. That's considered that when the health care system creates sickness, taking that and looking at a whole bunch of other institutions. Why, you know, when the news media demand censorship and create propaganda, the FBI creating crimes and entrapment potentially happens.

with informants and others, what's happening in these institutions that they end up creating the problems that they're trying to solve or that they're claiming to solve?

The crazy thing is it seems to be an emergent behavior pattern. When people get into power, when people have power, they always go in this very particular direction of control. And this was what the founding fathers of the Constitution, the people that founded this country, when they were laying it out, they were trying to prevent that from taking place. And they had this very elaborate plan to sort of subvert normal human behavior, to stop it from taking place.

Root in this country and to make this a better experiment and self self-government than what they'd experienced under dictatorships and People always want to get it back to where they're comfortable, which is being a dictator. I

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I mean, it's such a brilliant system. And I mean, there's this famous I can't remember if it was Jefferson or somebody who was one of the founding fathers that was like, we need a revolution every, you know, 50 years or something. That's clearly we're overripe for massive reform. And we in 1975, we had the church committee hearings, which is where we found out about the CIA assassinations and MKUltra and the, you know, the poisons and all the stuff that the CIA was doing.

We're clearly over overdue for it. I mean, it's been 50 years. Imagine what they're doing now. Oh, we see some of it. Well, this the guy who tried to shoot Trump, the guy they shot on the roof. Like what was what was the deal with that? And why haven't we? Why do we not? Where's the information? Where's the press conference? I mean, where's his emails? Where's the where's the social media posts? His his apartment was professionally scrubbed. Unbelievable. You know, his home was professionally scrubbed. They didn't even find silverware in it.

Or how about the second guy? Yeah. The second guy that was recruiting people to go fight in Ukraine. Well, he sounds like a full-on loon. And I think if I was an intelligence agent and I was trying to do this kind of stuff, I would find people already out of their fucking minds. Right. I'd reach out to them. I was going to say, being a loon doesn't seem to be disqualifying to be recruited into intelligence work. Well, it seems to be a very valuable asset. Yeah.

You know, like that's what Lee Harvey Oswald was. He was a fucking loon. And they probably recruited him and knew all along that he was the guy they were going to pin it on. Right. And this kid is probably a very similar case. The kid that shot Trump. And when you find out that this kid was in a Blackwater commercial just two years before, like what? Yeah.

Like who's he in contact with? Like what? Was it Blackwater or Black Rock? Oh, Black Rock. Sorry. Black Rock. Yeah. Just protecting you from any future lawsuits. I just fucked those two up. It's a Black Rock commercial. I've said it right and wrong both times, like many times.

No, I mean, it's amazing these things. I mean, or even the – remember the trans shooter? We didn't get her diary for a long time. Well, it was very – it was rough. Like some of it is leaked and I guess it was probably people trying to discourage hate against trans people. But the reality is the majority of the last few school shooters have been trans. This is also something that's conveniently left out of the discussion and –

That's not even the real problem. It's not like trans people are violent. The real problem is psychiatric drugs. And that's the thing that no one wants to make a connection with. How many of these mass shooters are on psychiatric drugs? And the answer is the majority of them.

Well, they say that. But of course, I did. I reported on the guy that attacked Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi's husband with a hammer. Right. And I mean, he first of all, I reported out that, you know, you go to his house and he was homeless and he was he was a drug addict and he had mental illness. And you go to his home in Berkeley and there's a Black Lives Matter sign and a rainbow flag and all that. But the media all reported that he was a right wing Trump supporter.

I didn't hear that at all. Oh, yeah. Really? That's hilarious. Yeah. But in that case, they didn't hesitate to release that information that he had been posting about QAnon and criticizing the Democrats and whatnot. So it's clearly ideologically selective of which assailants...

And from political information gets released. Well, and then unfortunately, there was a bunch of conspiracy theories that he was his lover and he was in the house. And if you see the guy while he's talking to the cops and holding the hammer and Paul Pelosi is trying to hold on to the hammer, the whole thing is mad. Like, why is Paul Pelosi still have a drink in his hand? Like, dude, you're in a mortal struggle with a man who has a fucking hammer in his hand and you're holding the hammer with one hand because you want to keep your drink.

I couldn't figure out why the cops didn't just go grab the hammer in that moment. They sat there and waited. I don't think they knew exactly what was going on. It was very weird looking. It was very strange. Yeah.

It didn't seem like Paul Pelosi was, he wasn't screaming or in danger. He seemed very calm. He's probably trying to slow this guy down and relax him and calm him down while the cops were arriving and just didn't ever feel like he was going to get hit in the head with a hammer, which is what wound up happening. It's the video is so disturbing, but if you look at the man in the video, he's clearly out of his fucking mind. Right. You know, there's something wrong with that guy. Like you could tell right away.

Like, here it is. Oh, it's so disturbing. It's so strange. But I don't quite understand why the cops don't rush in at that point. Right. Why is Paul holding on to his drink while this guy's got a fucking hammer in his hand? Yeah. The guy's got two hands on it. Maybe there's not as much time that goes by as I thought. That seems like they're struggling. The cops should have rushed in then, right? Yeah.

Oh, that's awful. Oh, my God. Yeah. Oh, my God. That's so horrible. That video is so horrible when you hear him snoring. And also, he's an 80-year-old man. Okay? For an 80-year-old man to get knocked unconscious in the head with a hammer like that, he's not going to ever be the same again. Yeah. You know, that's bad for a 20-year-old person to get hit in the head with a hammer. It's awful. For an old guy like that to get KO'd like that with a fucking hammer where he's snoring in the car. I mean...

I think both sides, both left and right, often attribute political motivations to mentally ill people who, if you go through that guy's

David DePop, I think was his name. If you go through, if you're going through the stuff that he was posting, it's just a mix of crazy left, right stuff. It was clearly mentally ill. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and, but clearly mentally ill, by the way, people, they will adopt whatever ideology is the most persuasive. Like they don't really, they're not objectively thinking about things. He's out of his fucking mind. Well, we don't blame John Hinckley Jr. We don't blame, uh, um, Joe

Jodie Foster for John Hinkley Jr.'s assassination of Reagan. Right. Of course. You don't go, if it weren't for Jodie Foster. He was a Jodie Foster fan. Yeah. That's why. If it's on her. Yeah. Nobody says that. Yeah. Right. He's a crazy person. I mean, look, we're in a mental – I mean, we've been in – our country is just in a bad way in terms of mental health, right? We're just not taking care of it. I mean, no country – I mean, we have a lot of guns and then you have no proper psychiatric or mental health care system. Right.

Which is crazy because now you have telehealth and we should have a bunch of ways to deal with it, but it's just not who we are, I guess. Well, it's also very difficult to get people to seek treatment.

Yeah, and you know and then also the treatment especially in terms of things like SSRIs They have to try a bunch of things on you. It's not as simple Everybody has a different level of mental illness, right? And so there's also different causes of this mental illness and there's different medications at work, right? And they don't really know until they try it on you and then then we find out now that the entire theory that it's based on which is that there is Some sort of chemical imbalance is incorrect. It's not true. I

So then, okay, we have to take this holistic approach

view of the body and the mind and the health of the individual based on lifestyle and choices and community and friends and all these different things that we don't want to take into consideration. Instead, they're just giving people pills and they give people pills and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes it causes a dissociation effect. These dissociatives, these weird drugs that people take where they don't even exactly know what the fuck they're doing while they're doing it.

Well, in some, I mean, I think also, I mean, yeah, a hundred percent. And, you know, we also, unlike Europe and whatever, we don't, we don't allow, we don't coerce, we don't mandate antipsychotics to people with schizophrenia or those kinds of treatments. We're much more libertarian than that. Right. You know, I mean, I, this guy, particularly the Pelosi guy, I actually, my, I can't prove it, but my theory would be that he, that there may not have been an underlying mental illness and,

He had a rough life. He did a huge quantity of drugs. You know, there's just a set of people, as we've known from LSD over the decades. There's some people that take LSD. We're now seeing it with the high-potency marijuana. They never come back. That triggers psychosis. Yeah. Yeah. And it's probably they already have a propensity for it. Right. The thought is that...

I forget what percentage of the population. I think it's 1% as a tendency towards schizophrenia or will eventually become schizophrenic. And then you take that 1%. That's a lot of people, man. Oh, for sure. One out of 100? You take one out of 100, you give them a giant dose of edible marijuana, and they're gone. Well, this is Mark Andreessen, who you add on, was making this point about ayahuasca, which is very fashionable among the elite set. And

I think the point that resonates with me is, you know, when I was working in San Francisco,

After the Summer of Love, 1967, when everybody shows up in San Francisco and they're tripping out on acid, the privileged kids, the educated elite, they go back to Yale and Harvard at the end of the summer. But the working class kids, the kids that were not as educated, lower middle class, they hung around in San Francisco and got addicted to speed and heroin. And that was the early beginnings of the homelessness crisis. Was this after the sweeping psychedelics acts of 1970 that made everything Schedule I?

No, this is back in the Summer of Love, which is 1967. So even in 67, they were doing Speed? Oh, yeah. So it was just something. Remember Speed, it really starts with the Beats, you know, the, yeah, it's the Beats, right? The Beatniks. The Beatniks. Of the early 60s. They're all, Kerouac writes his book on Speed. Right. That's probably part of it too, right? Like, I mean, it was ubiquitously used during the Nazis. The Nazis used it. During World War II. So Speed was around for a long time. The problem with Speed is it works. Yeah.

It really works. People take it and the people, I've never fucked around with any of it, but the people that I know that have tried Adderall, they tell you, you feel like you could do anything and you get things done. And that's attractive to everybody, whether you're a hippie or a capitalist or anybody. You just want to feel more empowered. Until you don't. Until you don't. Yeah. Especially when it stops working well and you keep taking more and more of it and the next thing you know, you're out of your mind, you're losing your teeth. Right. Right.

Yeah. But it's an important point because, yeah, people take these drugs for a reason. They can be performance enhancing. And there's a certain group of people. I mean, you know, Carl Hart, you know, there's people that write drug use for grownups. There's people, and he's a Columbia University professor. You know, there's people that have a very high internal self-control that are able to do these drugs. Isn't that the real problem is that we don't develop human beings with a level of self-control and a level of discipline and we don't encourage people?

We don't encourage, and I don't mean like disciplining a person. I mean self-discipline. We don't encourage this concept that to be able to force yourself into doing difficult things, you empower yourself and strengthen your mind and your resolve and your spirit. And if you genuinely gravitate towards positive results, positive results in your social life, positive results in business, positive results in artistic endeavors, you

if you genuinely gravitate towards those things, that is probably going to keep you on the right path in life.

And that we should really look at things in that way. Like there should be guidelines. Like, what are you trying to do with your life? Like, why do you feel bad? Like, what is, what is wrong with your body? What, what are you eating? How are you sleeping? What kind of people you're surrounded with? What happened to you when you're a child? Did someone beat you? Did you get sexually molested? Like what, what is, what, what demons are haunting you and what,

in fact, can be done to help you. And even, I mean, I would even leave off the law. I mean, you can do some of that, but I mean, I just, we have this beautiful philosophy called Stoicism. You know, it's amazing. It actually was, we now understand now that it was part, it became part of Christianity for, that's why, because Christianity, the correction to Judaism, of course, that's all about compassion and care and,

But when you lose the stoicism part of Christianity and it all just becomes compassion, the whole society gets turned around compassion. That's where you get victimhood ideology. Right. You should absolutely should be teaching because, of course, I mean, the problem with the focus on the trauma, you know, is like you start to everybody suddenly has trauma and you sort of become obsessed with it as opposed to like, no, the whole point of becoming a full human being is.

is overcoming adversity. It's going through that process. Stoicism is a philosophy that gets you there, but it's been absolutely denigrated. It's very right-wing-ish. It's considered right-wing. Of course, it's the most emancipatory. It's the most liberating philosophy because it says it's all about your mentality. It's all about what you do when you get up in the morning. It's your mentality. It's your behaviors. It's up to you. It's not up to the government. And if you read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, it's

very progressive. Not only is it very progressive, it's very compassionate and kind and considerate. Like one of the things that he talks about is forgiveness. It's a very important quality that he believes that, you know, he works on. It's for everybody. Yeah. It's not, he's not saying, you know, there's other people like Nietzsche, which would say, hey, most people can't cope with the seriousness. But they're saying everybody has this internal potential. It's a completely liberal, it's what leads to the human potential movement, the self-help movement.

You get to like, you know, I was looking at, you know, 1964, they passed the Civil Rights Act. Within a few months, Lyndon Johnson goes and gives this famous Harvard, I'm sorry, Howard University speech where it's like, I was just shocking how quickly it occurs, where it's just basically about all the problems of the black community and how we still owe this debt to the black community and how the black community has been victimized. Like, yeah.

Like here's this moment where you should be. You could be like, hey, look, we've just leveled the playing field. We've got the Civil Rights Act. It's going to end racial segregation. That's all behind us. Now it's up to us as individuals. Instead, they come out and they go, now we've got to go and we pity you and take care of you. It's really toxic discourse. It's awful. And it then has just it's just expanded to.

Everybody, including children, where like the part of the over-involved mothering of children is to treat children as though they're victims. Right. Forever. Forever.

It's actually, and you see how it really helps the medicalization of everything. Much of what we're called transmedicine is pathologizing and medicalizing puberty. Right. The same thing with pregnancy. Pregnancy often is medicalized, is treated as something's wrong with you. And, you know, we know the C-sections now, or we think it also undermines the immunity that you get from a vaginal birth. So

But it is important sometimes, right? Sometimes in emergencies, but it's a classic thing where it's just over applied. Women with small hips. And it's just overdone now, right? I mean, often you get professional women, they're like, I'm scheduling my C-section. Right, right. Because they don't want to also blow out the hoo-ha. Yeah. The reason why I brought up trauma before is I think that's one of the legitimate uses of psychedelics that I think it's used.

it's pretty provable that there's positive outcomes, particularly MDMA for soldiers. This is what MAPS had been working on. And when you ask people in the service of their country to go overseas and kill people and become a part of a war and get shot at and see their friends die, those people are going to come back with...

unimaginable strain on their psyche. Unimaginable. And the one thing universally that these people have sought help with that has helped them has been psychedelics. And it's huge in the special operations community discussions of not just ayahuasca, but ibogaine in particular, which is absolutely non-addictive and a

I don't have experience with it, but apparently an unbelievably brutal introspective experience where you see your entire life and it's sort of laid out why your behavior patterns exist and the way they exist. And oftentimes they combine the Ibogaine experience with another psychedelic, whether it's psilocybin or 5-MeO DMT. There's a bunch of different ones that they try. And all of it has to be done in other countries. A lot of it's done in Mexico because it's illegal in the United States. But...

But I have personally talked to people. I had Sean Ryan on the podcast the other day. A personal experience of how it changed his life. I know multiple soldiers where it's changed their life.

And this is illegal. And this is something that we should be looking at every single tool available to help people. Stoicism, absolutely. But soldiers are the most stoic motherfuckers. Those Navy SEALs, they're the most stoic fucking get shit done people you're ever going to run into in your life. And if they're still struggling, maybe these things are tools. I agree with you that both marijuana and real psychedelics, hard psychedelics like LSD,

I think there's certain people that shouldn't do anything. And I think the only way we find that out is we run real studies and do real tests and really try to understand what – get some real science behind the mechanism behind these things and what is wrong with these people that are freaking out. And what is the cause of these psychotic breaks? What is the cause of schizophrenia? Like especially when someone doesn't have it and then develops it.

So there's some biological mechanism. There's something taking place in the body that all the wires get crossed, and now this person thinks Satan's talking to them. So what is that? Well, and some of it might be age-related. Sure. But not necessarily. Not necessarily with these high-dose drug experiences. If people do acid and then they become schizophrenic, what is that?

Some people do acid and they figure out the double helix strand of the DNA. And they have incredible visions, like Francis Crick. Other people, they do it and they're like, what the fuck? Like, now they're gone. You know, the guy from Pink Floyd, gone. Everybody knew somebody when I was a kid growing up who did too many drugs and never came back. I know multiple people that have had schizophrenic breaks from marijuana. Yeah, I mean, I...

Like I'm very open to it. I just I worry that we have a quick fix society still. Absolutely. And so, you know, it's like you have PTSD, you had trauma from from, say, fighting a foreign war or you were abused as a child or you were raped as a woman. And I think those you can get some insight, spiritual insight, existential insight to confront your demons there.

But you're still going to have to get up every day and confront those demons. That's true. But I think it's a tool in the toolbox. And I think to demonize that tool because some people have a bad effect on it, it's like to demonize all the things that people enjoy that you could consider legal vices like gambling. I do not think you should outlaw gambling. But I think some people should not fucking gamble. I grew up – well, in my 20s, my early 20s in a pool hall.

And, you know, I played pool like eight hours a day, played competitively. And I was around a lot of gamblers, a lot of gamblers. And it is a disease like anything. It's a disease like heroin. It's a disease like alcoholism. Like these motherfuckers can't stop. Those people shouldn't gamble. Right. Like they are gambling addicts. And there's some people that should not do marijuana. There's some people that should not drink marijuana.

There's some people that there's a lot of things that they shouldn't do. They don't have whatever it is that allows you to pick up a glass of whiskey, have a drink, and then the next day, boy, I feel like shit. I'm going to the gym. And then you don't drink again for a month. There's some people that realize there's certain vices that you can do in moderation, and they're fine. A couple glasses of wine at dinner, and everyone's laughing and having a great time. There's nothing wrong with that.

But there's certainly some people that cannot handle that. And I think we need to give those... If you want a better, stronger society, we need to develop tools for all people to follow that will give you a better life, including people that have issues with alcohol and gambling and sex and fill-in-the-blanks drugs and whatever it is that you're interested in and that you're addicted to, rather. And I think...

There's a bunch of tools that can be used if used correctly Just like I used to say like you could you could take a hammer You could build a house with a hammer or you could hit yourself in the face of your fucking crazy hit Paul Pelosi or hit Paul Pelosi It doesn't mean that we should get rid of hammers, right? It's like some people have used psychedelic drugs and had any

incredible insight and has completely changed their lives and now they're better for it. And then there's some people that we can point to that lost their way and they're gone now and we might not ever get about. I mean, Howard Stern talked about it famously. He took acid and he was really fucked up for a long period of time where he really thought he was going crazy. And I think in that case, it's very dangerous. There's also, there's a dosing thing. When you're taking something that's made in some fucking hippie's bathtub while he's listening to the Grateful Dead, like what are the odds that

you know exactly what the dose is. Like, what are the odds that this is pure? Especially if you're doing a drug today. Because if you're doing a drug today, you're rolling the dice on whether or not you're going to die of a fentanyl overdose. Even if you're taking something that you would think would be completely benign. Like cocaine. Oh, cocaine's a big one. That's a big one. But there's other stuff that people are taking. Like molly. They're taking molly and it's not really molly. It's laced with fentanyl. And they die. They're taking...

street drugs like anti-anxiety medication that are forged drugs that are actually laced with fentanyl and they're dying from that kind of stuff there's people that you know maybe they developed an addiction to benzos and then their doctor says look I'm cutting you off and then they fucking find it on the streets and they die from fentanyl overdoses so

I think there's tools that could be used. I think this panacea, this idea that it's a one-shop-fits-all, you go do ayahuasca and now you're a better person, I don't believe that. I think there's a lot of work to be done. I think there's a lot of work to be done, and I think there's a process as we are growing as...

As human beings, you start off as a child where you don't get to pick your parents and they bring with them a bunch of baggage because they were raised by people in the 1940s and they didn't know what the fuck they were doing. And they were raised by people who literally came over on boats from Europe to escape tyranny and chaos. And they came over to America to do the most desperate wage thing.

work you could possibly get dock workers steel workers factory workers they would do anything they were desperate they would take any jobs they would work on you know railroads and whatever the fuck they could because they just wanted to be able to eat

Right. And they raised your grandparents and then your grandparents raised your parents. And then you're here going, OK, what are we doing? And there's some tools. Stoicism is a great tool. It's a great tool. Discipline is a great tool. I think we are blessed in this time that you can hear a lot of speeches from brilliant people. There's a lot of great, brilliant people that have talked about.

various ways that they've overcome their problems on YouTube and on podcasts. And you can learn a lot. And some of them use different tools. Some of them use the tools of meditation and yoga. Some of them use the tools of fasting. And some of them use stoicism. Some of them use martial arts. Some of them used... There's a lot of different things that people do to make themselves a better person. And I think

To discount one like psychedelics because there's a bunch of people that abuse it and get fucked up from it, I think it's foolish. Because the profound effects that these things have should not be minimalized. They shouldn't be dismissed because they're illegal. They shouldn't be dismissed because of ignorance. And they certainly shouldn't be dismissed by people who have not experienced them and have not had those profound changes that take place in their perspective on life. Because there's a lot of people, a lot.

And I think it's probably been going on through the course of human history. It's probably what caused us to consider democracy in the first place.

The whole, have you ever read the Brian Murrow rescue book, The Immortality Key? No, I haven't actually. I haven't read it. That's in there. Yeah. That's what it's all about. It's all about the Illicinian mysteries and what these people would do. They were taking drug-laced wine and they were coming up with concepts of democracy and they were trying to figure out society in a more equitable and even a peaceful way. And there were, you know, the philosophies that they were,

Coming up with to this day, people read their stuff and it's profound. And these people were all doing drugs. Yeah. We can't seem to find, you know, we do freedom really well here in the United States. We can't seem to find the balance between that and proper care for people. I mean, the Netherlands has potency limits on marijuana. We don't.

Right. But the thing about potency limits, they don't have a dose limit. So even if it's potency – so let's say – let's get crazy and say 39 percent because that 39 percent is like high THC apparently. We looked it up the other day. If like crazy THC that really fucks people up can get as high as 39 percent. They don't even go that high there. Dutch government goes to 15 percent. OK. So here's my point. Three hits versus one.

Okay, so if you have 30% THC and you take one hit, oh my god, I'm so high. If you have 15% THC, you take two hits. But if you're a crazy person and you take 30 bong hits of 15% THC, you're going to get fucked up.

You're going to get fucked up no matter what. No one's controlling the amount of pot that you smoke. Snoop Dogg smokes pot all day long. When you hang out with that dude, that dude sat there. He rolled like eight blunts in the course of a three-hour conversation. He just kept rolling blunts. He had a disco machine. The guy's awesome.

But I mean, whatever tolerance he has is preposterous. And it's not that guy who, you know, he's in grad school and he does some bong hits from his friends and has a schizophrenic break and thinks that the government has put a recording apparatus in his pencils. You know, people lose their fucking way. And it's not everybody. And I think we have to figure out like what is causing it, not eliminate it for the vast majority of people who don't have that effect.

Well, we're just really bad at it. I mean, I think the bigger thing is, you know, you go to Europe and it's like younger people will drink alcohol in moderation. Right. But isn't that because it's always been legal? And I think this is the problem with the United States and our demonizing of certain drugs. Like we celebrate certain drugs. Look, I own a bar. You know, I'm not opposed to alcohol, but alcohol is one of the most destructive drugs that we have available.

But yet, used socially responsible, it makes conversations more lively. It's a social lubricant. Everybody has a great time. As long as you do it moderately or the right way. But it has consequences. We don't do moderate in the United States. But the thing is, some people can moderately drink. We all agree to that. You're not an alcoholic.

I quit drinking because I had a problem. When did you quit? 2018. Oh, wow. September 21st. It's a good time to quit. Right before the shit hit the fan. I drink...

I don't advocate prohibition of alcohol, but I would advocate constraining sales and just putting some limits on. I mean, the potency point is well taken. Constraining how? Because isn't this like constraining free speech? If you're a grown adult and you want to drink yourself to death. So if you go over a man's house and he has a wine cellar, should he be arrested? No. Why does he have so much wine?

What are you doing with all that wine? If you drank all that wine, you could kill everybody in the neighborhood. No, but I mean, I think, you know, for example, we've restricted it to liquor stores, out of supermarkets. We've had don't-sales on Sundays after midnight. But that's only hard liquor. Hard liquor. I don't know. Yes, you can go to a supermarket and buy beer and wine. When I was in high school, at 18, you could drink 3.2 beer. Wow, I remember. And at 21, you could drink a higher potency beer. So again, your point is— How old are you? How old are you?

53. I'm 57. When I was a kid, they changed the age from 18 to 21 before I hit 18. I was like, fuck. Yeah. But it didn't stop you from drinking. Maybe that was local. Is that local? Is that Massachusetts only? No, it didn't stop me from drinking.

Come on. Every kid gets together in parties and they all figure out a way to drink. But my point is, if alcohol, if prohibition had succeeded, okay, in the 1920s, and we had illegal alcohol in the United States, no one would know how to drink. No one. It would be just, and you would never know what the fuck is in the drinking. You'd be still buying drinks. People would still buy drinks. There'd be jails filled with people who sold and bought alcohol.

And there'd be a bunch of people that died because they got poison drinking because they got drugs. They got their alcohol from the cartel. But so, Joe, how far do you go then? I mean, do you sell meth and fentanyl at 7-Eleven? But this is where it's this is where it gets to be a really interesting question. Right. Because why not? Like you shouldn't buy it.

But why should it be that only criminals sell it if we absolutely know that there's a market for it? Should we allow people... If you listen to Dr. Carl Hart, who to me is the most brilliant person that I've ever met that does heroin all the time.

Don't know if he does it all the time, but he says it's wonderful You know he's he's done it before and you know stuff to take an account that he was a straight-laced clinician He was not a drug user He was a guy that was studying the effects of these things and realized that there's a bunch of Gaslighting as to what their actual effects of the pure versions of these things are and that this concept that they are unbelievably addictive and you can't stop yourself he thinks is false and

He's smarter and more educated about that subject than I am. Well, I mean, but look, the more available it is, the more people use, the more people use, the more addiction you get. But can you see that the same concept can be used to – the same narrative can be used to control free speech? Well, free speech – But can you see it? Well, in the sense that there is limits to free speech. We don't allow free speech –

for immediate incitement to violence, fraud, defamation. We have a high bar for defamation. So it is, there are limits. But couldn't you see how you could say the problem in our society is that a bunch of people are saying things that are incorrect and the only way to stop that is to censor them. The problem in society is that some people are drinking too much. The way to stop that is to moderate their drinking and control them. The problem with people that are addicted to drugs is we need to make drugs illegal so no one can become addicted to drugs.

But it doesn't work that way because humans don't work that way. And humans don't like other humans telling them what to do. If it was just you, me, and Jamie on an island, and I decide that coconuts are illegal, and I'm going to put you in a cage that I created out of bamboo if you drink coconut milk because I think coconut's bad for you. And everybody else is saying, I fucking love coconut. This guy's an asshole. Well, that doesn't make any sense, right? Because I'm a grown adult, and I'm telling another grown adult to stop doing something. That's how I feel about almost everything that doesn't hurt other people.

I know, but we're looking at 112,000 deaths from illicit drugs last year as opposed to 20- But most of them are opioid overdoses. Yeah, 75,000 are fatal. Opioid overdoses accidentally. Yeah, because drugs are illegal. Well, no. It's not because drugs are illegal. It's because they became more available.

Right, but because those drugs... Look, it all started with the Sackler family, right? It all started with oxycodone and all that stuff. But the reality is that there's a bunch of people that are addicted to these drugs, and the way they're getting them is by getting drugs that are tainted with fentanyl, and that's a primary cause for the people that are overdosing. Did you say like 70-plus percent? 75% is fentanyl. So that's because of the illegal drug market. Listen, it is, because if just those opiates, pure opiates, were available...

You could make an argument that those 75% would still be alive if they died from fentanyl overdose. No, they would also be dying of opioid overdose. Are you sure?

Well, I mean, look, here, let me give you another example. But there's a reason why they specify fentanyl because it's so much more deadly than the pills. But Joe, Europe does not have this drug death epidemic. Well, they also don't have an opioid crisis because they didn't prescribe it the way we did. Well, right. So they made opioids too much. Opioids were too available. Then heroin was too available. And now fentanyl is too available. But it wasn't available. The solution is not to make it more available. But it wasn't available under, it was available under false pretenses. First of all, they lied about it.

about it being addictive. Of course. And there's a lot of documentation of this. Not only did they lie, they testified about it.

So they knew it was addictive. And then there was also never an opioid that was prescribed as an everyday thing because pain is something that you shouldn't have to live with. That's what – when I asked the Dutch, why don't you have an opioid? They didn't say because we don't have greedy pharmaceutical companies. They said because the doctor – when you go to the doctor, the doctor doesn't say, you have some pain? And this is – the Dutch are famous for this. You have some pain? Yeah, you'll have some pain. Right.

Take some Advil if you want, but you're still going to have pain because you just had back surgery or whatever. So some of it is the culture of entitlement. But it's also they don't have a financial incentive to push this medication because they have socialized medicine. 100%. This is part of the problem that we have in this country. And we accept all sorts of socialized things like the fire department. That's basically a socialist idea. We're all going to contribute. It's all equal. The fire people work for everybody and they put out fires because we all need firemen.

Right? And sort of with public schools. It's very similar. But when it comes to medicine, we're very wary about that. But the problem is then people profit off of how much they can sell you. And when you have some monsters like the Sackler family and what the fuck they did, that's how you create this opioid crisis. Let's imagine that wasn't the case.

So let's imagine this sweeping act in 1970 does not take place and all of these psychedelics, whether it's psilocybin, including marijuana, which is made illegal because of prohibition. Prohibition went off and then they started, you know, they went after marijuana. That was a new thing.

William Randolph Hearst and Harry Anslinger. It's a long story, but it was really more about hemp as a commodity than it was actually about the drug. That's why they even called it marijuana. Marijuana was a slang name for wild Mexican tobacco. It didn't have anything to do with cannabis. So when they passed that, they made everything illegal, all these things illegal. And so then when the government comes along and takes this incredibly –

dangerous and addictive substance like oxycodone and says, let's say you guys want to sell it. We'll make sure the guys that are deciding whether or not you could sell it get a cushy job in the pharmaceutical drug companies afterwards. We'll hook you up if you hook us up. And then that's what created the opioid crisis, not opioids being illegal.

Right. Or not being legal, rather. Not being available. But they became more available. But they became under a lie. You're describing ways they became more available. But if it was just heroin. If it was just heroin. No one was doing heroin when I was a kid. Well, they weren't doing as much. Very rarely. No. But now everyone knows someone who knows someone who's died of oxycodone or oxycontin. Yeah. Or at least is addicted to it. But so the problem is you're... So in other words...

You want these drugs to be less available, not more available. But who's to decide? That's the problem. And when you decide... Well, it's the size of society. But when you decide... Well, certainly for people of a certain age. We all agree to that. Like, you shouldn't be able to do that when you're, you know, 16 years old. It's crazy.

But if you're a 35-year-old man, who's to tell you that you shouldn't be able to try heroin? I mean, you have to make a decision as a society because, I mean, look. So Carl is right that most people that do opioids or heroin don't become addicted. The people that do become addicted, most of them are able to quit on their own. So only a small percentage of people become so addicted that they die from it.

But that's 112,000 deaths a year. So are we going to just condemn the most vulnerable people? In other words, the 112,000 people that died of drugs and drug poisonings and drug overdoses last year are by definition the most vulnerable to those drugs. Are we just going to sacrifice 112,000 people from drugs so Carl Hart can get high on heroin? I don't think that's the argument. For me, that's not a good calculation. No, I don't think that's the argument. That's not a fair calculation. I don't think that's the argument.

But then what's the alternative? Well, first of all, we've already established that 75% of those people are dying because it's illegal. Because it's no. Because it's fentanyl. Well, but heroin is illegal too, Joe. Right, but they're not taking heroin. If they think they're taking heroin and they're getting fentanyl, they're getting poison because it's illegal. Yeah, but the number, here what I'll say too, it's a little bit more complicated. It was 20,000 deaths in the year 2000, 112,000 deaths last year. It was going up.

before fentanyl. So yes, it's hard to overdose on heroin alone. - So oxycodone for sure kills people. Let's be clear about that. I'm not saying it's harmless. But it's on heroin.

It's different, right? The curve goes up when they start prescribing it. The curve goes up when they start giving people prescription pills and telling them they need it after an accident. If you just had heroin available, do you think without recommendation people would gravitate towards heroin? People generally learn. This is one of the reasons why you learn from other people's failures. Like there's not a lot of people that are crack advocates, right?

Because crack didn't really work out good for fucking anybody. No one's out there telling people to take crack. But if the government came out with some sort of, or not the government, a pharmaceutical drug company came around and the FDA approved it, and it was some sort of a medication that gave you the exact same effects as crack...

but they told you this is a great drug for people to overcome timidity. Timidity is a real problem in our culture. We're going to compete with China. They would pathologize timidity, for sure. Yeah, I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding. Like, you could do that because that's essentially what they did with pain. And that's how they snuck in heroin. But it wasn't heroin. It was synthetic.

But using that synthetic heroin and using it so ubiquitously and prescribing it is what caused that epidemic. You trick people into getting addicted by telling people it wasn't addictive and then telling people they need it because of pain. And then, of course, your whole body's in agony because it's addicted to this stuff. And when you get off of it or you try to get off of it, you're in terrible, terrible pain. So the key is just stay on it. That's the trick. So if we didn't have that happen.

And in 1970, they didn't pass this act that told people that things like Ibogaine that cure people of addictions, actually rewire the mind in some substantial way that stops all those addictive pathways and stops people from wanting to engage in these self-destructive behaviors because it makes you so aware of why you're doing it in the first place. We made all of those illegal at the same time. If that hadn't been done, we would have a much greater, if they hadn't been done and if all

All of these compounds had been pursued under the name of real science. And we actually studied them openly. And you had the brightest and most brilliant minds running tests and studies and trying to figure out what's going on and what's good and what's not good and what's the right way to take it and what's the wrong way to take it. You wouldn't have the influence of the cartel because you wouldn't have this insane –

I mean, who knows what the actual numbers are, but it's hundreds of billions of dollars that are being earned south of our border by these ruthless murderous gangs who control the drug trade because it's illegal in the country that has the most demand for it. Yeah. Although let me let me respond to I want to respond to that last part. But.

Remember, Obama comes in and he restricts opioid prescriptions around 20, I think it was like 2009, 2010. So people are now going into fentanyl directly or from marijuana or whatever. They're going direct in. Yeah. They fucked everybody because they got them addicted. Then they pulled the rug out from under them. Yeah.

So, I mean, I'm not denying any of like, yeah, I mean, ultimately kids need to be raised right. You need more self-control. You need more delayed gratification, 100%. I also support marijuana decriminalization. I mean, drugs have two dimensions, right? There's one dimension, which is the inherent toxicity of the drug. And the other dimension is how you use it. Marijuana, nobody's ever overdosed from it. Nobody ever dies. You do get psychosis. But I mean, really compared to other drugs, marijuana is fairly low toxicity. Alcohol, no.

Actually, when you read the history of alcohol prohibition, it did actually have health benefits, alcohol prohibition, because people drank less. But I agree. I agree. I mean, I think alcohol...

Like, I think it should be legal. I like I like the Dutch model. I like the restrictions because I think it does. It doesn't prevent people from getting it, but it just it is constantly saying, hey, be careful with this. Right. But meth, heroin, fentanyl, I think absolutely illegal. Do what they do in Holland. I mean, they chase people down. They chase cocaine. Do they is there no cocaine in Holland? Of course there's cocaine there. Is there heroin? Sure. But they chase it.

Makes it more expensive because it's less available. Now, you get to you get to kind of go, well, OK, so then you get to we have a real world case, which is marijuana. We've legalized marijuana in California and many other states. The the criminal element controlling the marijuana growth and industry in California is larger and more more violent and more dangerous than it was before we decriminalized it. Do you know why, though?

Well, I mean, I think it's mostly because the market for black, the black market for marijuana is still much larger than the market for legal. In other words, you can buy marijuana for much cheaper, you know, informally through your dealer on the street than you can if you go into the store. And some of that's

I will grant you that it's because the California ... You can imagine when California decides to make marijuana legal, it's going to add a huge amount of tax and it goes and require a set of costs so that legal marijuana is just much more expensive. That's part of the issue. But the issue is a little bit deeper. My friend John Norris wrote a book about this. It's called Hidden War.

What happened was he was a game warden. So he was a guy that would check fishing licenses and stuff like that. In California. In California. Yeah. And they found out that cartels were growing in national forests. Yes. So because they made marijuana legal, growing it illegally was just a misdemeanor. So because of that, 90% of all the marijuana that's grown to all the places where it's illegal, all the states that it's illegal, comes out of California. Right. And it is made by the cartel. So it's the same sort of a situation. They're...

even though it's legal in California, there's an illegal market and this is the safest place to grow it because it's just become a misdemeanor. And we are also a very unique country and we have these wide swaths of land that are public.

that people could just go out on and just go for a walk in the woods. There's no restriction. It's ours. It's yours. And so they go out there and they set up shop and they use unbelievably toxic poison pesticides and herbicides and that shit gets in your illegal marijuana. It's the same thing. It's because it's illegal that is causing all the violence. It's not necessarily because it's being taxed and

and because there's a black market. The black market is because it's illegal in other states. It's not because people don't want to pay taxes on weed. Weed is so cheap.

Not the legal weed. Yes, it is. It's so cheap. It's so cheap. It's more expensive than the illegal weed, though. For sure, but it's still so cheap. In terms of the efficacy, think about how much it costs to go drinking. You go to a bar with your friends. At the end of the night, you're buying rounds for people. It's hundreds of dollars. Hundreds of dollars of weed will put you on Pluto.

You will be on fucking Pluto. If you go to one of those places in LA that has like a store where they're just like an Apple store, you go in and buy weed. For five bucks, you could be fucked up for a week. Oh, no, I get it. Compared to alcohol. It's cheap. It's cheap.

It's cheap in terms of its effect. Even if you're paying 39% taxes, which I think they were doing in Colorado, which is the first state to make it legally, like fine. It's still cheap. It's not that expensive. I don't think it's driving the black market to undercut people.

I think that's bullshit. I think what's going on is the black market exists because it's illegal in other states. And you develop these enormous criminal organizations and they infiltrate legal stores in California. And they do a lot of shady shit in California, too. But they exist because it's illegal. So you think if marijuana were legal and across the whole United States, there would be no black market? There would be, but it won't be a powerful...

unit like the cartel in Mexico. Like the cartel in Mexico is like a government. It's like an enormous, terrifying government of people that are profiting off of drugs because drugs are illegal in the United States. If everything was legal here and you could grow it yourself...

I'm with you on marijuana, not cocaine, not heroin, not fentanyl. Let's just start off with marijuana. If marijuana was legal in this country and you could grow it yourself, it's so cheap to grow. It's literally a weed. It grows like it's easy. It wouldn't be hard for people like a guy on the block grows it and sells it. And if it was just legal to do that instead of the government getting involved, then you'd have no black market.

drugs. It should just be a plant like a fucking tomato where you could grow tomatoes and sell tomatoes and you can go to the farmer's market. Look at my tomatoes. It should be like that. I mean, I think that's where it's headed. I mean, my understanding is that that's where Florida is headed. Is that where Texas is? Where's Texas? Texas, it's illegal, but it's decriminalized in the city of Austin.

And then the Attorney General Ken Paxton apparently doesn't like that and he wants that to stop. I think most of the people that want marijuana to be legal don't necessarily use it and don't necessarily really understand what it does. And there's this idea that it makes you lazy, which is my favorite. Like I know some of the most motivated people ever and they smoke weed all the time. I think it makes you more compassionate. I think it makes you more creative.

more considerate, makes you think about things in a different light. Carl Sagan was a famous cannabis user and he has a very famous quote about cannabis, about there's states of mind that are achievable in cannabis that he doesn't think are achievable any other way. He was an inveterate cannabis user. So was Terence McKenna. And what's your view of age limits then?

I think it should be just like alcohol. 21. Yeah. And I think it would be smart for parents to explain to kids that there are some drugs that are really fucking dangerous. And don't just say all drugs are bad. Just let them know. And if you have a history of mental illness in your family, which many people do, mental illness seems to be something that's inherited, that some people have a tendency towards certain mental states or

There's a lot of arguments about that. I'm not the one to say yes or no, but maybe you should not do these things if your family has a tendency towards schizophrenia, if you've had your own mental struggles, if you've had moments where... I know people that have had schizophrenic breaks or they've come back. I have a couple of friends that had real problems and now they're normal again and not with medication. They just sorted it out and they figured it out. Oh, for sure. And they came back. So...

I mean, we're dealing with the—I mean, I think it's always so important to remember that when you're— the people that have the worst problems are definitely a small minority. But the question is, how many people are we willing to sacrifice? How many people do we sacrifice every year because of alcohol? How many people do we sacrifice every year because of sugar? Do you know that heart disease is one of the biggest killers of human beings in this country? And how much heart disease is preventable because of lifestyle and diet? A large—

So should we say, why is cake legal? Because you can handle cake, Michael? That doesn't make any sense. Michael, we've lost 5 million people this year because of cake. And you're saying that cake should be legal because you like cake? That's crazy. So you can get all fucked up on cake? These poor little diabetic kids? I actually am trying to move away from cake. You don't care about these diabetic kids? No, I mean, you can make the argument for anything. You can make the argument for everything. That's my point, is that freedom is the most important thing. Yeah, but okay, but what about fentanyl then?

So you're going to want to sell fentanyl? Fentanyl is essentially poison. Fentanyl, the LD50 of fentanyl is so small you can barely see it. You know that, right? Have you ever seen what a lethal dose of fentanyl looks like in comparison to a penny? Yeah, I mean I've interviewed many, many people smoking fentanyl on the streets. Unbelievably terrifying. Yeah. So that is a poison, and that is something that was invented to try to make a more potent opiate.

I don't think that- And it's a miracle drug for people in hospitals. I mean, it's a miracle drug as a pain med. I mean, for women giving birth, for back surgery. It's a miracle. Fentanyl is a miracle. But it's an opioid, right? Oh, yeah. No, I mean, I saw my mother was given fentanyl for her back surgery. It was wonderful. Sure, but why wouldn't morphine work?

Why wouldn't something like that work? Well, okay, so here's another— But something that we know that people can tolerate. Right. Well, in Vancouver, they had this experiment where they said, we're going to go give hydromorphone, which is an opioid, as a harm reduction to people that use fentanyl and heroin. And it's been a total nightmare because it gets diverted—

and people will sell it in order to buy fentanyl. Kids end up with it. I mean, I think you have to remember, every time you add drugs to the drug supply, you increase supplies. You just said the same thing.

That's alcohol. Okay kids buy alcohol from a cousin who's willing to buy it for you because alcohol is legal kids can get alcohol But it's the same thing but it's also right you what you're talking about is crime So you're talking about preventing crime right because that's all it is illegal to do with well and preventing it We also want to prevent addiction right, but it's illegal to do that with morphine There's laws already to prevent you from doing that if you want to follow the law well It's not in it's it's

people that are willing to break the law and do this if there's a reasonable law that gets put forth in terms of age of use age of discretion and it probably honestly i mean it's no one's going to buy it but it probably should be 25 right especially for males right that's in the frontal lobe fully forms and you know your decision making is all fucked up and if you're hitting the bong every day while your brain is forming and all this frontal lobe is under development it's

Of course it's going to have an effect on it. It's going to have an effect on if you're on Prozac. It's going to have an effect on if you're drinking every day. There's a lot of substances in this country that can do you wrong, and food is one of them. And I don't think that we should be telling people what they can and can't do. I think we should be explaining what you should and shouldn't do.

do. And I think that's the best way to handle this. With food, I would say the tobacco model is wonderful. I mean, we did an amazing job with reducing tobacco use in the United States just through, I mean, there was some reduction in availability, reduction in advertising, and then moralizing against it. The culture changed. It's not cool anymore to smoke cigarettes. Well, it's a revealing of the actual statistics and the fact that it's

it does cause cancer and that it is addictive and all things that they tried to fight against. It was really money that kept it. There wasn't a giant problem like this, you know, back in like the 1800s.

Well, and don't allow open air drug dealing. Right. Right. And Chase, I mean, Holland, there's a small group of people that actually the government actually they give heroin to. It's like somewhere between 50 and 100 people. It's not very many. And then they're chasing dealers. They don't allow open air drug dealing. They're arrest. They're they're stopping cocaine from coming in. Yeah. I think that. Yeah. Look, it's a nuanced problem, which is why we're spending so much. It is a nuanced problem. But I think.

I think we have to be very careful about limiting people's freedom. And I think there's a bunch of choices that people make that are very bad that you should be able to make. I don't think you should make them. I don't think you should bet your fucking house on a roulette roll. But you can do that. It's funny. The other thing that we're going to come to in the book is we're looking at assisted suicides. Yeah. Oh, my God. Canada is fucking insane. Well, right. So in other words, should you be free to commit suicide? I think you should.

That's different from having a government program to assist it because you would say, well, it always starts to think we're not going to promote it. But in fact, the people that are involved in assisting suicide are basically selling it. There's this amazing BBC clip of this woman, this doctor that's been assisting people with their suicide. And she's it's impossible to listen to her and not feel like she's promoting it.

Because he benefits from it, which is nuts. It's nuts to have people benefit financially from people deciding to kill themselves. They're telling people that have long COVID, hey, come on in. Oh, you got PTSD? Oh, come on in. I mean, what are the numbers of people that they helped kill themselves last year are fucking terrifying.

I think it's like 13,000 people. Yeah, we looked at it. I don't know the exact number, but we looked it up recently, and it's been increasing significantly. And it's also, yeah, one of the changes, as you mentioned, was it's now from...

people that have life-ending illnesses to people with psychiatric disorders. Right. Or people with just depression, simple depression. Or there was a case of a woman, I didn't check to see if it's true, but I'm assuming a young woman who was sexually assaulted and depressed. And I think it was in the Netherlands.

They have assisted suicide there as well? Yeah. I mean, it's a funny country, Netherlands, because on the one hand, they also did the gender medicine there. They did the drug decriminalization, but they're also very strict. So they've...

They've achieved a balance in the Netherlands I don't think we're going to be able to do here. But they have a giant problem with Moroccan crime gangs and drug sales and gun sales. And there's a lot of... I mean, compared to who? Compared to San Francisco and Oakland? I don't know. I'm not the guy. But my friend who was from Holland told me it's a giant... Holland has a...

A giant history of kickboxing. Some of the greatest kickboxers of all time came from Holland. Not surprised. The legends. It's an amazing country. Amazing country. And they're tall, right? Yeah. Well, some of them, the best one ever was small. A guy named Ramon Deckers. But he was so ferocious, he went over to Thailand and fucked everybody up, and he became a legend. It's a crazy country in that regard. It's not a very big country, but the people are very big and robust, and they're like manly men.

And they're very blunt and they're very direct. They cut to the point. They're some of my favorite people in the world because I think they are able to get that balance between freedom and care. But they're also raising their kids different. They're not coddling in the way that we coddle our kids. The social media epidemic that we're in. They don't have a social media epidemic over there? They do, but it's just not as bad, just like you would expect. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't know what the solution to all of these things that are very complex. And I see your perspective. I really do. But I think, unfortunately, you could apply that perspective to almost everything that people do that's dangerous and tell people they can't make these choices anymore because we're going to lose people. And I think you really want to be honest about that one. The biggest one is food. And no one wants to tell people you can't eat cookies.

But the reality is that will fucking kill you. And, you know, what should we do about that? What should we do? Should we educate people and tell people about the benefits of healthy diets and exercise? Yes. Yes. I think we should do that with all the above. I think we should do that with all the above. Yeah. I think we should do that with marijuana. I think we should do that with psilocybin. I think we should also take into account the people like these veterans like Sean Ryan that I was telling you that have had these experiences from psychedelics that have changed their life in a huge way. Yeah.

And for these people that sort of dismiss that and poo poo that and say, oh, Carl Hart just wants to get fucked up. I don't think that's really fair. And I think you have to apply the same ideas of freedom where we have it with speech to especially behavior like drug use, where it's not affecting anyone but yourself. And we already have laws that you're not allowed to drive intoxicated.

And if someone does something and commits a crime while they're intoxicated, that's also illegal. We have laws that prevent bad behavior. And that bad behavior, those laws, it's already criminalized. So I think the real problem is not these things. The real problem is like all things that people get to try out. There's a lot of people that are going to fuck up.

With everything. And I would feel better. I mean, I don't think Carl, I read his book and I interviewed him. I don't think he's honest about the trade-offs. I think he sells it as though it's just an injustice that we don't have legalized drugs and then dismisses this very well-established reality that greater drug availability results in more addiction and more problems. I don't think you could shuck off the trade-offs. Just like you can't shuck off the alcohol deaths. I think there's something like 90,000 people every year die from alcohol.

Yeah, but not the only difference is. Well, yeah. But the difference is like when you die on fentanyl, you smoke it and you're dead. Right. They're counting as those alcohol deaths. It's over. It's a longer. Yeah. People that are dying. You can have a couple of drinks and you're definitely not going to die. Most likely. Yeah. But I think what Carl Hart is kind of saying from his own perspective is that he had a very different opinion of what they did and the dangers of them before he started researching them.

And then once he became a clinical researcher, then he realized like, oh, this is not. And then he started experimenting with them. I mean, literally, he's like, I mean, he's literally a world expert in drugs. Right. And so, I mean, he's just an again, it's like after the Summer of Love, the kids that are like, I mean, he's a PhD. He's at Columbia. He's one of the best universities in the world. He's obviously somebody that has a huge amount of experience.

self-discipline and be able to delay gratification. And I mean, in his book, he talks about actually becoming addicted to opioids and having to kick and going through withdrawals. I mean, that's a very disciplined person. He has something to live for.

One of the most amazing groups, there's two famous studies, the Vietnam veterans who were addicted to heroin, they come back to the United States. They weren't around heroin anymore. They went on with their lives. They kicked their heroin and they were fine. The other group is doctors, doctors who become addicted, you know, because, of course, they're

It's available. Oh, yeah. Big problem. Yeah, but their recidivism rate or their relapse rate is extremely low. Why? Because- They're fucking smart. Well, they're smart and they're disciplined. And if they don't quit, they're going to lose their medical license. Right. And they're going to stop making mid-six figures every year. But they're also exceptional people. So they have something to lose. If you're a doctor, that's a very difficult process to become a doctor. Almost every doctor you meet is an exceptional person in some way. Yeah. Yeah.

In San Francisco, I tell the story about these I have these two addicts telling a story about how they recovered. One of them was white. One of them was black. The black guy, Jabari, is arrested multiple times from from, you know, when he starts his criminal career and as a teenager all the way into his 40s. And they keep letting them off because they're because they're because they're racist, actually. And they're saying, oh, you know, you're a victim and whatever.

basically is getting to a place of just very serious addiction, finally gets arrested in a way so that he can get into recovery. The white guy gets arrested once and because they're not lenient on him, he ends up getting into recovery right away. So I think that

I think if we can find some common ground, it would be that you would enforce some basic laws so that if you're out there on the streets dealing drugs or you're sleeping in a tent on the sidewalk after you've been told multiple times –

or the EMT has to come out and revive you 12, 20 times for your fentanyl. I mean, how many times do you just even if you don't care about the guy, how many times do taxpayers want to pay to to send the fire trucks out? I mean, it's like often a fire truck and an ambulance go out to revive a dude who often has already been revived. I mean, the one one time I saw was with The Times of London reporter David.

guy overdoses in front of us, they get him Narcan, the fire truck still has to come, the ambulance still has to come. I mean, how many thousands of dollars of staff time and medical time is that to revive that guy? Instead, arrest him or get him in the system. And then if you do it again, then you got to choose between rehab and jail. I think

I think that's how you end up dealing with it. So Carl Hart, yeah. I mean, I don't want to send the police into arresting Carl Hart. But you were saying that he downplays the negatives. Yeah. Dismisses the negatives. I mean, if you go the route that he's recommending, which is that all of these drugs be legally available, you're going to increase use. You're going to increase availability. You're going to increase addiction. Yeah. We've had this conversation a bunch of times about what do you just pull the bandaid off and allow that to take place?

So if you don't, you keep empowering the cartel. So your vision is to keep pumping money, billions and billions of dollars every year into the cartel. There's no other way. You're not going to stop. There's no magic wand that you have that's going to stop addiction. There's no magic wand that you're going to have that's going to stop the market for illegal drugs in the United States. I think we can reduce it. How? I think we can reduce it significantly. How? You tell me how. Well, first of all, shut down the open-air drug markets. Don't.

don't have this thing of repeated... If you overdose and the system has to come out to reverse the overdose, next time they come out, it should be a choice of jail or rehab. Like, that's it. You got to go to rehab or you go to jail. That was the system we had

And California is about to reform the law that changed that. You know, we had Prop 47, which made shoplifting up to nine hundred fifty dollars legal or decriminalized, I should say. Same thing with three grams of hard drugs.

California's are going to vote in November to reverse that. Proposition 36, you know, it's polling. You think they're going to vote for that? Yeah, it's way ahead. Yeah, it's over, well over 50%. That would be nice if they make stealing illegal again. Exactly. Recriminalize crime. How many times? But then you're going to have to rehire cops.

And you're going to have to refund the police. Well, yeah. I mean, you definitely need more police. I mean, honestly, it was just we had drug courts. It was imperfect. But you'd go to the courts and you'd be like, look, you need to get into rehab. And you're just trying. You're going to have some amount of relapse. But this thing of.

12, 20 times of relapses. Well, it's also incentivizing people, like in Seattle, incentivizing people, paying people. It happens in San Francisco too, apparently. Just paying people to stay on the streets. Yes. Giving them money, giving them food. All they have to do is sleep in that tent. Okay, fine. People just shitting on the streets. No one's cleaning it up. And when Xi Jinping came to town-

Everything was hosed down. Everybody was moved out. They put fences up where people couldn't camp there anymore. It was wild. And Gavin Newsom's response that when your friends come over, you clean your house up. Like, well, just clean your house, you fucking psycho. What are you, a hoarder? Like San Francisco is like a hoarder's house, but way worse.

It's like the idea behind it of it being compassionate is like there should have been a course correction when you realize the results of that. There's nothing compassionate about letting people shoot up in the streets and have your whole block filled with needles and human poop. And the whole thing's nonsense. Like this is not good for anybody. It's bad for the health of the people that are doing it and certainly the health of the people that are encountering it.

He's opposed to this ballot initiative. Of course he is. You know, I mean, it's insane. He's like the worst. He's the worst. He's both a terrible, terrible politician and he's a terrible bureaucrat. His latest thing on homelessness is he's like, well, this time I'm going to give out the money to the counties and they're going to give me a plan. It's like you've been doing that for, you know, your entire time as governor, lieutenant governor. I'm sure you've seen the list of the people that work on the homeless in California and the salaries they get. Oh, yeah, of course.

That's what we mean by pathocracy. It's a sick bureaucracy that creates sickness. I'm not saying it's deliberate. It's unconscious. But it's Munchausen syndrome by proxy. It's creating, making your child or making your community sick so that you can treat them. And there's very few countries that have figured a way out of that once that already takes place. It's very hard once you lose the norms of

This is an amazing book called Weird about Western industrialized educated societies. And they just talk about these core values of working hard, delaying gratification, stable relationships, education. And religion. And religion. I think that's the one that people don't want to say, especially people that fancy themselves intelligent. I think a big part of our problem is we have lost –

sense of religious virtue and values as a culture and we've rejected them under the guise of you being too intelligent for religion. Yeah. And the results of that is like if you just look at the results in terms of the way people feel about life. If you really do believe in God, you will feel about life like that it is a gift and is a miracle and you will live a more righteous and just life. It will benefit you. It actually will.

And I don't know if it's true, but I know that if you believe it's true, and Jordan talks about this, he won't say whether or not he believes in God, but if you act as if God is real, you'll have a much better life. And that's a fact. And people know that. They know when you meet like a really good Christian person who does charitable things and is a wonderful, lovely person who actually lives by the Bible, not a hypocrite, you're like, wow.

What a cool guy. Like, I really love that guy. He's awesome. Like, cause it's a great value. It's a great, it's a great virtuous way to live your life. And we've rejected that because we're too smart for it. And in the absence, in the void of this, this thing that I think we all need, you fill it.

With this new religion, whether it's wokeism or whatever it is, fill in the blank, the climate, whatever it is, you find a thing. I think that happened during COVID. I think it became a religion for a lot of people. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's funny. So on both free speech and on homelessness, my best allies are Christians.

They literally just have shown up. There's all these people that are secular that are like, yeah, we're with you, but they don't actually do the work. Like the Salvation Army, when I did a fentanyl protest in Los Angeles, the Salvation Army shows up and they're effective on the free speech issues in Europe. There's a group called Alliance Defending Freedom. They show up. They're so reliable. My best supporter of our nonprofit for years, just a Christian, is just gives us support. He says, I trust you. Go do it.

I mean, when I look at my grandfather, who was a farmer in Indiana, lived to 101. After he died, I interviewed his neighbors and I was like, what? Like, why? And they were like, oh, yeah, that neighbor over there is 98 and that neighbor is 97. And I was like, why does everybody live so long around here? And they just go, right living. And I was like, well, what's right living? And they were like.

Didn't smoke, didn't drink, you know, ate right. I mean, they ate great food, obviously. They're on the farm. But also, he had no choices to make. I mean, there's this really interesting book by Leah Greenfield that argues that the increase of mental illness in Western countries over the last 100 years is just this incredible pressure on the individual to make all these choices. You know, like my grandfather was like, there weren't that many

young women to choose from, to marry. He didn't choose his religion. I mean, it's like absurd. Right. Like we choose, we tell our kids, it's like, can you imagine? You can believe whatever you want to become Jewish. You can become Jewish. I want to be a cat, dad. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And then you go, I want to change my gender. I mean, the levels of choices that people have, it's overwhelming as opposed to like, he basically didn't choose any of the major things in his life. He didn't choose any of them.

He didn't choose his occupation. He barely chose his – I mean he didn't have that many women to choose from. Certainly didn't choose his religion. But are we arguing that that's a good thing? Well, no. I mean because of course you and I would hate that. We're libertarian. Like we want – we love our choices.

I mean, because you were saying it's not just that there's two things that are going on. First, people just – the church didn't explain the world very well. Suddenly you have these scientists that are like, well, actually, the earth revolves around the sun, guys. And it looks like – and then there's a story about evolution, which may not be correct, but nonetheless –

The scientists had a much better story of reality than the church did. And then the other thing is that just as you get wealthier, you just have more money. There's more choices. There's more things to do. And you're sort of like, why am I going to go along with what some priest tells me to do? Well, especially when you're the literal translations.

When people literally translate ancient religious texts, things get weird. You're dealing with a story told down by oral tradition for a thousand years. Somebody writes it on animal skins. It gets weird. Oh, yeah. It's weird. But to dismiss all the ideas behind it, I think it's foolish. I mean, the Dutch, for example, they're very secular. I mean, these Western European societies...

They're far less belief in God than in the United States. And yet somehow, you know, they keep raising their kids to be more disciplined than we're raising our kids. They don't have as they have, you know, their cultural philosophy. There's there's like an inner. I do think it's a stoicism in the sense that it's.

And it's, you know, it's like when I would my parents, it's funny because Jonathan, you know, Jonathan Haidt at one point he was asked, I think by, I can't remember who, someone asked him like, who's better parents, left wingers or right wingers? And he was like, right wingers. Yeah. Even though he's a pretty liberal guy. I mean, my parents who are very, my mom and dad are very left, but they raised me more conservative. And the way they would do it is they'd be like, you know, be like, oh, well, that's not fair. And they'd be like, well, life's not fair. Right. That's like a conservative view. Life is not fair. Right.

And then you'd be like, well, why don't you, can you, will you get me some food? They would teach you, they would teach us how to like push a chair next to the kitchen counter to climb up and get your, make your own food. They had a philosophy that was if the kid can do it, the kid should do it as opposed to now it's like, I think there's just these over-involved parents that are like, oh, I want to, I want to take care of you. And so the kids end up getting coddled somehow for whatever reason in Europe, those core values of self-reliance are,

When I interviewed the progressive homeless service providers in the United States, they

They were in San Francisco and other places. They would say things like, oh, that's the whole buy your bootstraps philosophy, which is just so oppressive. It's like, no, actually, it's completely liberating to be told that you have the power to do these things. I mean, that's basically what Anthony Tony Robbins is telling people all the time. Right. Is that you have the inner resources, the inner power. Sure. So that's got to be I don't know how we restore it. I mean, there's.

The fear, of course, is that once that stuff's gone, it's gone. Well, the fear is once you tell the person that it's not their fault, their whole life is because somebody else did them wrong. Absolutely. Or that there's some injustice in the system, some systematic oppression that's keeping them from succeeding. Yeah.

But the reality also is that some people are born in terrible circumstances. And, you know, and then there's no beginning finish. There's no starting line. That's the same. But this thing where this thing we're like, you know, after the George Floyd, where it's like the Obamas are an affluent, you know, black families are saying, oh, yeah, I'm worried about my kids.

What are you telling your kids that they're like that they're going to be victims of the society, that police are all racists? I mean, these messages are constantly being told to people that the system that basically the broader society is essentially unfair as opposed to telling them that really the playing field is more level than it's ever been. And the crazy thing is up until about 2012, that's what we thought.

I blame Obama. People that don't – a lot of people do because there's a sort of a political incentive to communicate that way and to promote this idea that it's everybody's fault and everybody goes – and then you get white guilt involved like it's not my fault. I'm an ally. And then they jump in and next you know people are looking for racism everywhere like racist Columbos. It's weird. It's weird how it shifted because when I was a kid –

Racism was bad, period. No one cared. It got to this weird point somewhere around 2012 where it was everywhere in society and you had to encounter unconscious bias and unconscious racism training in the workplace. So then you get these grifters who their only job is to tell you that everything is racist. And their only job is to berate you and scare you into...

You have to give in to whatever their demands are in terms of the numbers of employees that have to be X, Y, or Z. And they develop these very rigid rules that you have to follow. Now, they're in control.

No, they're controlling what you're allowed to say, the way you're allowed to discuss things. If someone says anything about a person that is of a particular group, that becomes either homophobic or transphobic or racist or you're not taking into account all these other factors that led that person. It's not equitable. There's all this nonsense talk that's used by grifters. It's a cult. Yeah.

but it didn't exist this is what people need to understand that was all dismissed when I was a kid by 2012 by around that time that was not a thing in 2001 that was not a thing this thing calling race there was always racism there was always people that were saying there was

racism in the workplace. And I'm sure it's true because some people suck. But it wasn't this overall message that society is inherently racist. I mean, think about how Obama was raised by his white mom.

you know, by a single mom, you know, and his grandparents were there. She didn't teach him that he was a victim, that he was helpless against society. He literally became the president of the United States, the most difficult job to get on earth. I mean, she, so, I mean, I mean, what I success, American success story you can imagine. I mean, here, here he's like reelected in 2012.

Like this stuff is starting, you know, Black Lives Matter starts and I think it was like was it 2015 or is it 2013? I can't remember. But he sees all that stuff happening. There's literally nobody on the planet more capable of pushing back against all that bad woke ism than Barack Obama. Barack Hussein Obama is so well positioned to do it. He doesn't do it.

You know, I mean, and I think part of it is that it works for Democrats. Yes, it works. That's the problem. It works politically for them. Yeah. And that but that's but that's actually a tragedy, especially for young black men in this country to be teaching this idea that he does once in a while he'll say something about it. But I mean, the whole Black Lives Matter movement, which was, you know, just brutal.

a tragedy, you know, where you're you're the grotesque exaggeration of police killings of unarmed black men. He was in a position to push back against that and they didn't do it. And he hasn't done it since he left office. So I say I blame him just because of what he hasn't done. Because there have been grotesque uses of police brutality on black people. And we all know it. Sure. Problem is, if you say that it's not as big of a problem, we have very specific instances where it was a problem.

So it's like, I don't think that the problem declined. I mean, we looked at FBI data from the 70s. The problem is bad cops. It declined, but it declined so much from the 70s until now. Sure, but it doesn't mean that it's not still a giant issue if you're a black man and you encounter cops and you're terrified. I mean, it's under, it's about one or two dozen a year. That's still a lot of people that died that didn't have to die if the police weren't incompetent or if they weren't racist or if they weren't fucked up on PTSD because a lot of them are. But,

But if you calculate the number of – the increase of the number of black people killed –

Because the police pulled back in reaction to Black Lives Matter, what we call the Ferguson effect. Right. Where you're out there demonizing and – Yeah, that's not the correct response. No. So the cops pull back and so you get more black deaths. You get cops that are terrified to police. Yeah. You get cops that are demonized. You get terrible morale. You get a lot of really bad things. Absolutely.

And then you get a wake-up call a few years later where people are like, we need to refund the police. And that's what happened in Minnesota. And it's happened in a lot of places where people are up in arms. Like our communities...

are more fucked up now than they've ever been before. This didn't help anybody and you didn't even fill the void. It's not like you defunded the police but figured out some new strategy that's more effective and implemented that. No, you just created this bizarre environment where you allow people to steal. If you make a law that makes allow people to steal up to $950 worth of shit, they're just gonna steal $950 worth of shit every chance they get and then you're gonna see all these businesses closing down like in San Francisco.

You know, Chamath was on the podcast recently, and he thinks that San Francisco is going to experience a rebirth because of AI. And his perspective is that the super nerds are like more in charge of San Francisco now. And so these sort of mid-level grifters who are into virtue signaling, which is like how you got ahead in a lot of these businesses where you're not really exceptional businessmen.

as a person, but you fit a good quota and you're kind of a DEI hire. Next thing you know, the CEO of a big company and it's nuts and it happens. And he said, that's not going to happen anymore. He was like, AI is going to essentially revitalize that area because there's going to be so much money and the people that are going to be running it are going to be the actual geniuses again.

Well, and he, I mean, but also he and David Sachs, I mean, they've had such a powerful impact just in talking back to that culture. Yes. I mean, their podcast is so dominant now in business that I think it's just made, it's just given courage. So has Mark Andreessen. Yes. They've given courage to people to just not put up with it. So much of this stuff. Brilliant, brilliant people who are finally expressing themselves. And I think that's so huge. And Mark and Chamath and all these folks that are doing that now, it's courageous because if

If you step out of line with the ideology, with the ideology supports, you get attacked. Oh, yeah. It's not fun. Well, there was – I think there was an earlier generation of tech leaders who went along with the political correctness. And so now you get Andreessen and Sachs and Chamath and these guys. And Elon. He's the biggest one. Yeah. I mean he's left. He's here now, right? He's the biggest pushback ever. Yeah. Well, the biggest pushback ever is he spends $44 billion to purchase Twitter and then we find out all the stuff that's going on.

It's incredible. The fact that it's still – the Brazil thing is unresolved. And so the only way it's going to be resolved is if they get rid of those 12 people? Oh, well, yeah. Wow, we're circling back. Yeah, let's circle back. Well, I mean, yeah. I mean, well, so one important observation about this. So first of all, Elon was very strong on Brazil. I think that there's a way in which he's going to probably have to cut a deal to get X back in Brazil. Yeah.

We don't talk at all about Zuckerberg and Google. All this pressure is on Elon. Are they giving in to the requirements? Yeah, they gave in right away. I mean that's what's awful about it. Did they ban those people off of Facebook, all those people that you were talking about from Brazil? I mean I can't prove it, but I assume that that's the case. Yeah, they went along with it. I mean only Elon stood up against it.

So, I mean, Facebook is just engaged in a huge amount more censorship. You know, the fact checkers, they outsource their brain to these fact checkers who are then funded by all these bad actors. I think the thing about the Brazil that shows is, you know, they froze Starlink's bank accounts and they seized its assets. So, you know, because people point out, you know, Elon's incredibly powerful, richest man in the world. I mean, Starlink is this incredible innovation. I've seen you talk about it.

But at the end of the day, it actually makes him somewhat vulnerable because then they can just, you know, it's not just about X. Like if you if the Brazilian government can come in and seize Starlink assets in a country where Starlink is absolutely essential because the Amazon, you know, it allows for this incredible connectivity.

So it really – for me, it's just you still need a free speech movement. Like you need to re-inculcate. And I think the other thing that I've realized in the last year and a half of doing the Twitter files and other censorship files –

Because I used to think that my support for free speech, that our support for free speech was sort of like natural or something. But I realized it was taught to me. I remember my father teaching me about Skogi and telling me that the ACLU had defended the right of Nazis to march through a neighborhood of Holocaust survivors. And I remember being horrified by it as a very woke kid and being like, that's very insensitive. And my dad kind of being like, well, yeah, but here's why we do it that way. And it was...

Because actually censorship would then be used against other people. And he would also make this point, and I was making this yesterday to my future students at University of Austin, is that you want to know who the Nazis are.

Yeah. You actually want to know who the Nazis are and you want to argue with the Nazis. Right. You this idea that we're there's a fantasy. People say, oh, well, if we had if Germany had like censored the Nazis, then they wouldn't have come to power. They did censor the Nazis like they had imposed a censorship regime before the Nazis came to power. They were they were they were censoring them. They came to power, reinforced that system. So much better to defeat these bad ideas in the realm of free speech.

But I do think there's a whole younger generation that never got indoctrinated into the religion of free speech in the ways that we as Gen Xers did. Well, I think they're learning it more now because it's being discussed now because it's under threat. And I think people need to understand the ramifications of giving the government control over.

they're not truthful. There's no instances where you could look back and say, well, the government never lies about this. There's not one thing, whether it's healthcare, whether it's international relations, whether it's their political opponents, whatever it is, things get distorted. There's lies that get told. That's just how it goes. It's an incredible sort of master tool for so many different things. I mean, it's

I mean, half of it is just calling it censorship. These guys are so good with language. They talk about how, "I'm just doing counter disinformation." Like who could possibly defend disinformation and misinformation? I'm doing counter disinformation. Just calling it censorship. - But the problem is like who gets to decide? And are there ramifications? Let's say if you're one of those people that said the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation and you signed off on that.

What are the ramifications? What's the result of that? Do people still call on you for suggestions and questions? Like people that were involved in Russiagate with Trump that promoted that idea, how come they still get to talk on CNN? - Unbelievable. - The whole thing is very bizarre. It's like if you really are against misinformation, you have to stop it everywhere you see it, including from yourself. So if your own organization is a purveyor of misinformation and you're acutely aware of it and you hide it and you dismiss it and you gaslight everybody,

And then you say we have to stop misinformation online. Well, what about yourself? How about start with you? You have to clean up your own fucking yard before you come to us. Well, look, I mean, it's like I'm a journalist. I'm investigating what is the truth about a lot of different topics. I'm fighting misinformation, but I'm doing it through free speech. But you're actually doing it. What they're doing is pretending. Well, right. Pretending. It's not really misinformation. It's inconvenient information. My favorite one was malinformation. Right. Right.

Well, you should explain what that is. Malinformation is information that is true but could be harmful. That's amazing. Which is so nuts. And that was, they could apply that to vaccine hesitancy. Right. So you could tell truthful stories about vaccine injuries. They would attribute that, they would put that in the category of this is going to contribute to vaccine hesitancy. So they would put the label of malinformation on that one and we could silence that.

Well, this was and that was in the Facebook files where the Facebook's tops researcher says to the White House, they go, hey, our research shows that if you censor true stories of vaccine side effects,

Shocking as it sounds, people will become more suspicious of the vaccine. So it's actually, yeah, they do contradict themselves in that sense. I think the Hunter Biden laptop story, we talk about it a ton. But what was so important about it is that the disinformation campaign comes before the censorship. They go out and they say, and this will be a segue to our conversation about UFOs. FBI gets the laptop in December 2019.

They know it's Hunter Biden's laptop. They know it's not Russian disinformation. Aspen Institute, which is funded by the US government and very close to the intelligence community, then goes and brainwashes journalists and the social media companies into preparing that there could be a hack and leak coming around Hunter Biden's laptop. And of course, Mark Zuckerberg made history here with you when he told you that the FBI had come to him in the summer of 2020 warning of a hack and leak operation.

So they do that and then they come out and then when the laptop comes out, they demand that it be censored. But the key thing there is that there was an organized disinformation effort around that laptop by people that were fed that by the FBI. This is why I'm so confident now in saying that both the FBI and the CIA –

interfered in the 2020 election because they ran this disinformation campaign whereby censorship was one part of it, but it was actually the part that came after the disinformation. And it probably would have had a significant effect on the outcome of the election. I mean, I personally, I voted for Biden, by the way. And when I saw that story, I was like, there's clearly something wrong with it. It looks like it's a hack and leak. I mean, I genuinely believe that. Now, would I have voted for Trump?

Otherwise, I don't know. Well, we already had found out that the Steele dossier was bullshit. So it makes sense that that would be bullshit, too. There was a precedent. Well, also, the hack and leak was also about the Hillary emails, the John Podesta emails, the DNC emails. Yeah.

So it fit a particular framework, but what's important is that the FBI knew that it was legitimate the entire time. Right. So that's misinformation. If you say that it's not true, that's misinformation. You got to stop that. Stop that. It's disinformation because they knew it was not true, right? Right. And then the CIA, remember, Gina Haspel was director of the CIA for Trump.

She was part of it because she approved the letter from the 51 former CIA directors and leaders that said that it had all the earmarks of a Russian information operation. She approved that letter within hours. All she had to do all. I mean, look, I mean, you.

assuming she didn't know, all she had to do was to call the FBI. Right. You know, all she had to do was... I mean, look... They had a very clear agenda. I mean, it's such an... Joe, it's such an unprecedented thing. When you talk to Martin Gurry, who's a former CIA guy, you talk to people that really love the CIA, that really believe in it. They were like, that is insanely unprecedented for these... Because, you know...

The classic statement is nobody ever leaves the intelligence community. So to have former intelligence people doing that is just absolutely – I mean that's just unacceptable. It's wild. It's really wild. And we've never had that happen before, which is why it's so scary that nothing happened because of it. There was no repercussions. I mean people should go to prison for that. Talk to me about aliens.

What's going on? Do you know anything? Okay, let me segue. I got to segue on that because here's the craziest thing. That Aspen Institute Hunter Biden disinformation operation was run by two people, Vivian Schiller and Garrett Graff. Vivian Schiller is this just wild. She was New York Times, NPR, Twitter executive, high-level executive, now runs Aspen's digital initiative. Garrett Graff is this...

acclaimed nonfiction book writer, they did the Hunter Biden disinformation campaign where they program and brainwash these journalists and the social media platforms in advance of the release of the Hunter Biden story. Well, guess who wrote the big book Dismissing UFOs earlier this year? Guess who came out with that book? Garrett Graff. So what is going on

And Aspen Juice, I think it's their biggest or one of their biggest supporters is the U.S. government. Hmm. All of a sudden I just got really interested. This is very, very suspicious. You should invite him on your show and ask him some questions. Why did he decide to do a book about UFOs? So here you have people that I feel very confident saying were part of an FBI-run disinformation and censorship initiative on Herb Biden's laptop. Then turning around...

They then did an interview. He she then interviews him at like Aspen Institute, you know, classic YouTube. So I saw it on YouTube. She's interviewing him. There's this moment. It's so crazy. She goes, they says there's something like they both kind of go, well, you know, the reason we this is just UFOs are obviously a conspiracy theory is because, you know, the government can't, you know, the government is incompetent and can't get away with this kind of thing.

Well, that is madness because, of course, the U.S. government is actually very good at keeping secrets. You know, from the making of the atomic bomb until today, there are a lot of secrets that the U.S. government is actually quite capable of holding. And nobody knows that better than Vivian Schiller and Garrett Graff of the Aspen Institute, who ran the Hunter Biden operation. So what they're doing is they're deliberately...

It's a PSYOP or whatever you call it, because a lot of people are experienced of ordinary normie experiences of government is going to the DMV. Right. So you go, wow, the DMV. Yeah, that's the government. The people that are working at the CIA and the FBI, those high levels are best. They're like some of the smartest people in the world. I mean, these are people that they're recruiting them out of the Ivy Leagues. The idea that these agencies are incompetent and I'm not saying that they're always competent.

But these are some of the premier spies that have ever existed. And the idea that somehow the U.S. government can't carry out these operations or keep it secret, that's obviously wrong. And then we have all these whistleblowers coming forward. So that's the prelude to today's story. What is your thought on it? So what do you think they're – so if it's a psyop and – I'm not aware of what the book is and what their premise is. Yeah.

essentially the premises that UFOs are bullshit? It's a very sophisticated book. So, I mean, it's worth, you know, I encourage people to read it in part to understand, like, how is the U.S., what's the most sophisticated take by the U.S. government? The less sophisticated treatment was by Sean Kirkpatrick, who was the recently departed head of the Defense Department's All... HALSAP? No, AERO. Okay. That's the...

all-domain anomaly resolution office that was created by the Senate that came out with this very dismissive report about UFOs. And then he left, the head of Arrow left, and has now just been ridiculing and attacking all the UFO whistleblowers, including David Grush and Lou Elizondo and all these folks. So basically, this is a book of the history of UFOs, and it basically just goes through every single major case and shows you why it's just...

It's not a UFO. I mean, basically it's showing why it's a natural phenomenon. So it's essentially doing what Project Blue Book did. It's absolutely an extension of...

It's really – remember in 1953, the CIA created something called the Robertson Panel. And the Robertson Panel comes out and says the U.S. government should just focus on debunking UFO cases and including ridiculing people, which is a very cruel treatment of people because it's such a devastating – socially so devastating to be ridiculed. Sure. And then you get the Condon Report, the Condon Committee, which is the University of Colorado 1966-1968 report.

Same thing, dismisses this, suggests it's all kooks. The Garrett Graff's UFO book is more sophisticated. It's actually a little bit more gentle in the sense that it's dismissing all these things. It's also...

It's also talking about like these may be natural phenomena. It might be plasmas or ball lightning, you know, and then they kind of go through the psychological estimation. But the whole book is aimed at just absolutely dismissing the phenomena. I mean, that's the whole purpose. I think some of the phenomena should be dismissed. I think that's one thing that we really need to accept when we try to develop an objective sense of what's really going on, that ball lightning is real.

Oh, sure. Plasma's real. There's a lot of real natural phenomenon. Ball lightning is bizarre. And if you ever see ball lightning and you imagine you're a person alone in the forest and you saw ball lightning, you would 100% shit your pants. You'd be like, oh, my God, there's a fucking alien here and they're going to get me and take me like Travis Walton. I also think.

there's something going on with the government. I believe that they have, and this is a pure guess based on no evidence at all, I think they probably have some super sophisticated propulsion program that's based on something that is an entirely new set of physics.

It's probably based on some sort of gravity propulsion. There's long been speculation that eventually there will be an ability to create something that does not rely on conventional propulsion. There's long been some sort of an understanding of manipulation of gravity. In fact, there was an article –

some science journal from like 1957 that was talking about the new wave of gravity devices. They're going to start coming. It's going to be gravity planes and we're not going to use propulsion anymore. People have always wondered if we're eventually going to crack that. And if they did crack that, I think the problem is

I think a lot of these things are drones, and I think the problem is biological life can't survive those speeds. I think those things are moving at these insane rates of speed because there's nothing alive that's piloting them. And so that's why no humans can survive that kind of G-force, so there's no one in those things. It's probably alien species that also visit us.

I don't think that's outside the realm of possibility either. I think all those things are happening. I think that one has been documented clearly throughout human history. There's been these experiences, and you've got to chalk some of them up to bullshit, lies, hysteria. There's a lot of – but there's too many that are too similar.

And I'm in the middle of Jacques Vallée's book. Have you read any of his stuff? I've read almost all of it. I'm in the middle of – it's called Dimensions. That's what it is. There's a three trinity of books. Yeah. Apparently – I didn't know that when I picked this one up. But Dimensions is – one of the things that he does in the book is –

He has eyewitness accounts of UFO events throughout history, like going back into the 1700s. Right. And they're like uniform. Yes. They're fascinating. And he also makes this argument that there's a cultural context as to what people see and that a lot of these people that live in Ireland, they see leprechauns and elves. Fairies. Fairies. And that-

It's quite possible this is not from another planet, that this is some sort of extra-dimensional experience, that these things come from somewhere that's here but not here, and that this is why they've existed forever, and this is why there's no evidence of them, and they just come and go as they please, and they're probably a completely different type of thing than what we are, this bizarre carbon-based life form that we are. There are probably some...

parallel evolution that took place somewhere else that's probably gone on a million years past where we are.

Or that's just guessing. You know, who knows what it is. But there's something else to it. There's some sort of a spiritual element to it. It's not as simple as a metal ship comes from another place and lands here. But I also think the metal ship coming from another place might be real, too. If you just take into account the sheer vastness of the universe and the unbelievable possibilities of the variety of life.

you would think there's got to be intelligent life. And if we do have some sort of super sophisticated drone technology that doesn't rely on conventional propulsion systems, which there's evidence of, okay, if you look at the go fast video, if you look at the FLIR video and David Fravor's experiences with the TikTok where they got video of that thing, they got radar of that thing. So we know something can move that way that fast. Something can.

You would think that if that's here and it is real and there's video footage of it, so we know that a real phenomena took place. So that means someone, whether it's here or whether it's somewhere else, can figure that out.

So now we know that can be done. So if that could be done today in 2024, and back then it was 2004, which he encountered that, who knows if it's, you know, ours or from another planet or whatever the fuck it is. It was a thing that existed that an intelligent creature had created.

It just makes sense that the sky is littered with that. Probably littered. There's probably millions and millions and millions of planets that have intelligent life on them. And a bunch of them probably are capable of interstellar travel. And probably a bunch of them aren't even biological anymore. They're probably some sort of super sophisticated AI that ran amok and took over.

A lot of possibilities. A lot of possibilities, an infinite number of possibilities. But when the government wants to dismiss all of them as being explainable and nonsense, and it's the same people that dismissed the 100-biter laptop story, yeah, you should get nervous. Yeah. Well, that's, I mean, I don't know what they are, and I'm agnostic in some ways. Have you ever seen anything? Well, let me. Yeah? Well, yes, I have, actually. What did you see?

I mean, I don't know what they were, but I've seen things I can't explain. What did you see? So I saw, so there's twice I've seen things. I saw one time I saw three lights that were, I thought they were stars. And then the one on the, they were all just like, they looked almost like Orion's belt, like three stars. And then the one on the far left was,

just broke away from the other two and then did, and it was weird. This is going to sound really weird. No, just express it. It really, like, literally, it felt like it was pulling my left eye. The left, like, I was looking at them and it felt like, you know how, like, it's almost like you're being cross-eyed, but it felt like it was literally pulling my left eye. And then it just did a set of squiggles like that. And then a cloud bank came over and covered it up. You know, I don't know what it was.

I had no drones. It didn't look like a drone. There was no noise. But did you see a shape of this thing or was it as high as the stars? No, they were just white lights. I couldn't tell how high up they were. And then the other one I saw was actually in a suburb of Houston or was it Dallas? Dallas.

And I was running at night and there were these two guys there, two black eyes, young guys that had just gotten out of their car. And they were, they were, and I had seen these orange orbs and then they were filming them with their cameras. And I went over to them and I was like, what are those? And they're like, we don't know. I mean, they looked a little bit like, at first you thought they were Chinese lanterns, but there was no paper bag, you know, that the lanterns were no, like there's nothing there. So they looked like,

And they also kind of looked like there was some translucent thing around them. And they just looked. I couldn't also tell how big they were. Couldn't figure out where they were coming from. I went and ran around the neighborhood trying to figure out where they were coming from to see if maybe somebody was sending off. How fast were they moving? Shockingly slow. Like they were sort of floating. They were kind of they felt like they were floating. So I'm not saying I don't know what happened with them.

I watched them until they stopped coming. What do you mean? I mean, I just watched them. They just kind of would appear out of nowhere, and then they would, like it was in this residential neighborhood, and then they just drift off. And they would float over. We watched them at one point float all over downtown. So it was probably like a Mylar balloon or something with an LED light inside of it. I mean, it was just they were also blurry and orange. I mean, I looked it up. There was a lot of cloud cover too. I actually photographed it. I have a bunch of videos of them. Let me see.

all right well sent to Jamie okay we're gonna analyze it we'll tell you what it is all right but I also want to tell you the thing we just did all right okay I need those videos all right okay so it's gonna we're gonna do it all pause all right all right we'll pause all right and I also have the ones that the guy so the guys there we exchanged for

phone numbers and stuff and they texted me since we're paused I have an update on your story that's been published already oh what is it people found out on Google there was some mentions of that back they think when Gresh brought it up in 2023 and since that was made public on Twitter it seems that Google has removed those searches what yeah this is for the we're keeping this in I was gonna bring it up when we came this is immaculate conception there's the screenshot someone took of a spike

Wow. I guess it doesn't say the exact date. I was trying to find it and tried to recreate it too. And then like an hour later, the spike's gone. Oh, that's crazy. But did Grush mention immaculate conception? I don't know. It says a long time ago. Okay. The term immaculate conception is rarely searched on Google. Of course, searches for it skyrocketed today. And this is because of UAPs? So what did Grush say?

Immaculate Conception is the name of the secret UAP Pentagon program that I revealed today. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Interesting. Show more? Of course, searches for it skyrocketed, but there was one other time it was displayed in a large blip, June 2023. Just as modern UAP crash retrieval story broke, David Grush went public and hearings were planned. Whoa.

So they removed that spike, so they pretend it doesn't exist anymore? I don't know. It says zero there, so it's hard to say. It could have been a Google trend blip that people were trying to make something and make more out of, but it is a weird, you know, it's weird. It is weird that it just jumped up one day and then stopped. But also people have like a fucking very quick news cycle. How's it going over there? Me? Oh, I'm trying to find the videos. How long ago was this?

It was last year, and it must have been... So here's the other weird thing, is that I... It was the same day that I published a story about UAPs. Oh. You ever wonder if maybe they're fucking with you, and they find out where you are, and they send some drones over to this place, get them to start talking? I mean, I felt better because there were two other guys there, and I have their info, and...

So, yeah, it's just... Of course. Who knows what it is? But at least it's not behaving like something out of this world. It's not like the Phoenix Lights where you've got something that's a mile long flying over Phoenix and no one can figure out what it is. Right. There's enough of these that make me think there's something going on. I don't think it's all bullshit. I think some of it is ours.

But I think a bunch of it's probably not ours. So first of all, if they are ours and they're anti-gravity, that's just insane. Insane. And the part of me that's skeptical of it is because I know a lot about nuclear energy and nuclear power. And it took a huge amount of effort to build the bombs. Huge amount of effort, huge number of people involved.

So the idea that anti-gravity was then sort of like, oh, yeah, we just did that in like a couple of years or something. That strikes me as really improbable. Yeah, very improbable in a couple of years. But if they're doing it over decades, they're doing it with retrieved crashes, which seems to be a part of the narrative. Yeah. You know, Diana Pasolka and Gary Nolan, you're aware there were. Of course. They call them the crash sites donations. Yeah.

That's very interesting. It gets weird. It gets weird because there's a bunch of inventions they attribute to crashed retrievals where they back-engineered stuff. You know, I would imagine that if I was a super sophisticated society from another planet and I saw these struggling apes, I would give them some hints. Yeah. How do I send these to you? You can airdrop them to Jamie's MacBook. Okay. See them in there? No.

Air drop, okay. So there's no people. Oh, there you are. Jamie's MacBook. Bam. They don't look like much. They're just like orange dots. But it's weird.

It's weird. And I want to stress, because my critics always use this to try to describe me. I don't know what it is. I just don't know what it is. Anybody who says they do know what it is, I get very suspicious. Yeah. If they say, I have all the information, I'm like, how could you? Yeah. How could you? How do you absolutely know what it is? This whole thing is real weird.

It's real weird when fighter pilots recognize things that are behaving in a way that they've never seen before. That's real fucking weird. Yeah. When you've got these guys like, you know, Grush is the best example, but there was another pilot, there was another jet that was with him, multiple witnesses that saw this thing physically.

You know, whatever these things, Brian Graves, when they see these things, like, what are these? What are they? What's the explanation? It's got to be somebody's if it's a real thing. If it's ours, holy shit. Like, what are they doing? And if it's not ours, holy shit. Right. Is this another nation? And if it's not another nation, then holy shit. Are we getting visited by interdimensional beings or something from another planet? Like, what's your take?

Well, I mean, guess. Well, here's what I mean. What I was what I am, what I wrote today and what I feel confident to say is that. Keep those glasses on. It makes you look smarter. I'll take all the help I can get. Doesn't it make you look smarter? I mean, what I so what today today's piece is about a new whistleblower who has come forward and has written a report. And this is somebody that is either in government or is a government contractor who.

I've interviewed this person multiple times in person. I've checked their credentials. They are who they say they are. They have written a report and provided it to members of Congress. And in that report, they claim that the Pentagon is illegally withholding information from Congress about a secret UAP program. And that secret UAP program is considered a parent program of other

of other programs, but it's called Immaculate Constellation. I was told by a, I had it confirmed by a second source that this is the name. I also was told that if we revealed the name that we would probably fall, get under surveillance by simply revealing the name.

I went to the Pentagon with a story on Friday. Today is Tuesday. They told me on Friday they couldn't get it to me. They couldn't get me a response by the end of Friday. They asked if I could wait until Monday. I said, sure. They said, Monday morning, we'll get your response. No response. They said, hopefully later today. Nothing later today. Then they said, how about tomorrow morning? Finally, that's today. So we gave them four full days. I found the Pentagon's response...

What was the response? Well, first of all, because they said they were going to respond and they didn't. So they never responded? They never responded. I emailed the spokesperson and said, if you give me a response, I'll publish it. But, I mean, it could have been like, no, we don't have a program like that. Right. There's no such thing. If they say that they don't have a program like that, then they're lying. If they have a program like that. If they have a program like that. So if they don't have a program like that, should they have to answer you?

If they don't have a program like that, then I don't know what the harm is from saying that they don't have a program like that. Remember, Arrow, this is the Blue Book 3.0 or whatever it is. They said they looked and they were like, we looked and there's no secret UAP program. If I wanted to spread misinformation or disinformation, if I was an intelligence agent, I think I would get someone to be a whistleblower.

I would sanction whistleblowers. I would tell them, go on podcasts, go on radio shows, go on television and discuss all these different disclosures. And you can't tell them everything. Top secret stuff. Some stuff you got to keep secret. Boy, I wish I could tell you, but there's more I can't tell you. There's a lot going on. And that's a really good way, I would think, if I was in control of a narrative that I wanted to be

continuously slippery like this is a very slippery conversation like they never get to the end of it what would be the motivation because there's some sort of a program that exists that they want to hide and the best way to hide it is to continually bring up and then debunk these fake programs crash sites for dealing with aliens

I would make a bunch of things that are absolutely provably untrue that could eventually be proved as untrue, attribute them to these people, and then have everything else that gets said about the subject get reduced to nonsense. Because that's essentially what it does. If you start talking about UFOs and UAP, you're a cuckoo. You're a kook. Until you show me some hard evidence, I've got bills. I've got a family. I don't have time for this.

And the people that do get really wrapped up in it are kind of kooky. And the best way to keep that kookiness going is to give them a little bit of taste. Give them a taste. Throw them a little breadcrumb trail. I think there's a thing we found. Oh, so you're saying you would do that disinformation if you were covering up UAPs. Yes. If I was covering up UAPs, I would have all these people go out and be whistleblowers.

Because the more they do it, the more it looks ridiculous. And the more everyone's like, disclosure is imminent, and it never comes. No. It's like Lucy and the football with Charlie Brown. You never get a kick out of fucking football. I don't think it's imminent. But here's what I would say. I would say if it's, so first of all, if the government is running a disinformation campaign on UAPs against the American people, that's bad. And it seems like. That's serious business. And it seems like.

If they are doing that, then I would want to know. It seems like they're doing that. Well, I'm comfortable saying I'm like 90%, 95% that the government is hiding information. Okay.

And the reason I'm so confident on that is because Donald Trump said so multiple times that they're hiding information. And I cite him in the article. They probably told him that. And also they lied to him about a bunch of stuff. Oh, sure. Didn't even tell him about Chinese drones because they were worried he was going to shoot them down. So they told him something that he says has not been made public.

public, to the American people. So my view is, look, if you think it's either a secret weapons program, that it's a government disinformation program, that it's just mis-sightings, then I want the government, they have an obligation to tell us. The first article of the Constitution is congressional oversight of the executive branch. That is why we are a democracy. If you have an executive branch that is even...

covert operations, secret weapons programs all must be shared. It doesn't have to be the whole Congress. They have the Gang of Eight, which is the heads of the military and intelligence committees, plus the ranking member, plus the speaker and the Senate and the minorities. Those eight people

have to be told. Well, they're not being told what this is. No, I'm not denying that it's absolutely illegal. But I'm saying that if it is illegal and has been done this way for so long, the odds of you untangling that

They're going to fight against that with tooth and nail because that's going to put a lot of people in jail. It's going to get a lot of people fired. A lot of people are going to lose their careers if they lie to Congress, if they misappropriated funds. There's a lot of weird stuff that gets attached to that. And so I think there is some sort of, whether it's the government, whoever's doing it, there's some sort of sophisticated disinformation campaign that's essentially tied to everything.

There's a disinformation campaign that's tied to medicine. There's a disinformation campaign tied to fluoride in the water. There's a disinformation campaign that's tied to almost everything. The idea that there wouldn't be for UFOs is kind of crazy. Of course there is. And I think... But if there is, that's really... It's illegal. It's illegal. Yeah, sure. It's bad. I know. I agree with you. I agree with you. I agree with you 100%. I have a feeling there's a lot going on. And I think they have...

infantilized us for so long that to give up the reins of that is the same thing that people, like why they don't want to give up the reins of free speech. They're in control of the power. If you really do have knowledge that we are not alone and you're hiding that from the American people, well, you've already made a terrible choice and you've been probably making this choice for decades.

Why would you change that now? And what are the repercussions? Are any of them positive? It doesn't seem like they are for your career. I think the best way forward, if you're just one of those people that wants to protect their career, which most of them are, right, which is what the whole Hunter Biden laptop thing was about, people protecting their career. Trump get into office and everybody here gets fired. So they protect their career with lies.

This is just what people do. So if you're asking them to disclose stuff that they've been hiding for so long, good fucking luck. Good luck. And if you wanted to create a misinformation campaign or you wanted to confuse the waters even more, I'd have a bunch of fake whistleblowers. I'd get agents to say a bunch of crazy shit about biological entities and mind control and –

and shut down nuclear power plants. I'd have them say all kinds of crazy shit that's provably untrue. Okay, here's a little red lights. Is this just a photograph? I think it's a lantern. It's a video? Let's see. Yeah, maybe it's a lantern, but... Oh, whoa. It doesn't look weird. It didn't have the, like a paper around it? Yo, that's moving pretty quick.

Whoa, that's weird looking. It didn't have any paper. The problem is you need a Samsung phone because you'd have better zoom. I had a friend just send me a similar video from Ohio where his mom took it and thought it was some orbs flying over, and it looked honestly weirder than this. And he found out a couple hours later it was a memorial service and it was a bunch of lanterns that got left up in the air. Yeah. I mean, it could be. I'm not saying it's not bad. It's hard to look at it because you've got it zoomed in because I'm not getting a perspective of how quickly it's actually moving.

It does look weird, but it also looks like how it would look like it was fire in one of those... Well, now it's moving. Very strange. That's why I just say it looks like it's the fire and maybe wind blowing the red thing around. Yeah, it could be. Was it a windy day? No. It was not windy at all. Um...

That's fucking weird. It was weird. It's definitely weird. But it's not moving supernaturally. I don't, again, all I'm saying is that it's unidentified. Drunk aliens. They look hammered. They're not even driving straight. I mean, also, they didn't look big. So, I mean, I'm not suggesting there was anybody in there. Right. And it wasn't like an, it wasn't an orb. The other story seems more interesting. The star is moving, seems more interesting. I've never seen shit.

I convinced myself I saw something when I was a kid, but I'm pretty sure it was a jet. Did you just get this or no? This is the one from my friend that sent me. Look, there's like two or three things that come together here, and they're starting to fly together. That looks more like aliens to me, but they found out it was lanterns. Yeah, it's probably lanterns. That's probably what you saw. Yeah. Did you get the last one? That's the whole beautiful thing about real investigations. You could find out stuff that's nonsense. And ball lightning is a big thing.

Yeah. It's one of my favorite ones. I've seen actual videos of ball lightning. Have you ever seen it? No, I don't think I have. Jamie, this is obviously a lantern. Show us videos of ball lightning. I was looking for one earlier. There's one that's moving. That is clearly a CGI that I didn't want to get confused in there. So one of them's staying still and the other one's moving weird? That could be the moon. I don't know. What is that other one? Actually, that's weird. I don't even remember that. Maybe something.

So I'll just... It's okay. See if you can find video of ball lightning. Ball lightning is wild, man. If you didn't know what that is, if you didn't know that this is like tectonic plates shifting against each other and they release energy and you see this stuff flying through the air, it's so crazy looking. And it doesn't look... Does it look like the Fukushima UFOs? I'm not sure which one is the real case of it. I'll be honest with you. That's ball lightning. Uh-huh.

This isn't a lightning storm, but there's a really cool one of this canyon where ball lightning just comes out of the ground, this canyon. I think this one on the – I think that's fake, but I'm not sure. That looks like CGI effects. That looks super fake. That looks like a ghost. That might be a ghost. If it is CGI, it's pretty good. Is that CGI? I don't know what that is.

It looks like, I mean, if it is, it could be lightning because it does. If that's ball lightning, that's wild. The other one would be to look at the Chinese lanterns and see how they compare to the orange. Whatever it is, like ball lightning is a real thing, and it's really weird. And it moves around, and if you didn't know any better, you'd think it's an alien. But that doesn't discount like Ezekiel's take of a wheel within a wheel and all the crazy shit from the Bhagavad Gita. Here's a lantern. Oh, look at the little pretty lantern.

That's what I just sent. Yeah, it's a lantern, bro. It didn't look like it, but you could be right. I don't know. I just don't know. Who knows? It might be some kind of – That looked weird. Yeah. But it's also clouds. And he's super zoomed in. Yeah. So what do you think – This whistleblower says that – the other part of the story is the description of the database. And they say that there is this –

very large database of high-quality videos, still photos, and also other sensory data that has captured atmospheric effects of UAPs. Christopher Mellon had said that the Pentagon has much better quality video evidence than has been released. It makes me want to get a job in the Pentagon. Yeah.

Show me. This person says that there's a lot of it. Yeah. And they describe...

One case of an F-22, which is an amazing fighter jet, being escorted by a set of UAP orbs out of its target mission area. Another case of a UAP declining from very high up in the atmosphere and coming right over an aircraft carrier that the entire crew saw. So some incidents that have not been reported. Mm-hmm.

The report is in the hands of members of Congress and this is a critical time because again,

if you are a skeptic, if you're debunker, whatever, you should not want the government spreading disinformation on this. If you want to get to the bottom of it, we should get to the bottom of it. We need Congress to hold hearings. And then the other pitch I'd make on this issue is that these people that I'm interviewing, first of all, if they're actors, they're incredible because they are genuinely terrified when I talk to them.

They're genuinely scared. You know, most actors aren't very good actors. So I'm always like these guys are the greatest actors I've ever met, these people. So they need better whistleblower protections. And if you interview congressional staffers, members of Congress, they will acknowledge that whistleblowers do not have proper protections, whether for UAPs or anything else. What do you what is your take on this? What do you think is going on with the UAPs?

I genuinely, I'm genuinely. Are you looking for more videos? I was just going to keep sending them though. We've got enough of the lantern videos. All right, enough of the lanterns. Do you see what's going on here? You want to believe that's not lanterns. So you want to keep showing us better videos. I'm genuinely agnostic in the sense that. Right, but you keep sending videos. Well, I'm just being thorough, dude.

I'm convinced. I'm putting all my money on lanterns. On the orange orbs. So what do you think this UAP program, what do you think they're actually studying? Like, what is that?

I don't know. I don't know. All I'm really confident saying is, in other words, I'm very much an incrementalist in the sense that, like, I like my stories to move the ball forward. It's been over a year since I've done a story on this. And I was always like, I'm not going to, I'm not somebody that wants to just, I mean, on some things I'll write a similar story, like a free speech or whatever. But on this issue, I'm like, I'm not going to write a new story unless I really have something. Right. I'm very confident that

the government is not revealing all that it knows and that Arrow, the organization that the Congress created to reveal what the government knows, did not reveal what it knows. And that really it was engaged because look, it's one thing to be like,

hey, we didn't find anything. It's all good. But then for the guy that was running that program to come out and actively disparage people in the ways that they're doing, that's character assassination. That's the ridicule strategy. I object to that because I don't think that that's conscionable. I think you can be like, look, that person misinformed it or whatever. You thought that they were

orange orbs were something that they weren't or whatever. But to go out there and like actively disparage people, that really, I think it's very concerning. It is concerning and it also makes you very suspicious. Yeah. Why would you, why the need to be such a dick about it? You still looking for pictures? No, no, I'm just closing out.

It's a strategy of character assassination, and I think it's not something that our government should be engaged in. No, I agree with you. But it also makes me wonder what's the motivation. And you must have formed some sort of a personal opinion on what's going on.

Or at least you have an inclination towards what's going on. I mean, I think that if you read through the histories. So, I mean, I just think the problem is that there's so many possibilities of what's going on. Like I said, I'm a little skeptical that we've mastered anti-gravity because that would just be so game changing. And I think it would just take a huge amount of effort on the other hand.

I have interviewed people that are not comfortable coming forward yet that say that we have and claim direct evidence of that. And it's just not – I can't unfortunately say much more about it. And these are folks that want stronger whistleblower protections to be able to come forward. But I find it hard to believe just because of my knowledge of nuclear that we've got those capabilities. Right.

I also, you know, like what's amazing is like the most for me, one of the most amazing parts of this is when you just go to the newspaper archives and you're reading stories from the 40s and the 50s and 60s and 70s. And you're seeing and that's part of the reason I am also with you. I'm skeptical that we are getting any closer because there's a way in which like you read New York Times magazine stories from the 1960s and 70s that actually treat the subject differently.

not with ridicule, but treated seriously. And they actually were reporting on government programs and whatnot. Well, Project Blue Book was essentially designed to ridicule the people that thought they saw something. J. Allen Honick, when he left Project Blue Book, became a UFO proponent. That's all you need to know. Which is very convincing. Yeah, absolutely convinced that it's all real. And it explained how he was told to label everything as swamp gas and...

Which, by the way, if you watch that original press conference where he says it could be swamp gas, which I think it was a Michigan sighting, the whole room just goes, ah. The whole room is so convinced that it's not swamp gas. It's like journalists. They ridicule the idea that it's swamp gas. So there's definitely moments in history where you have elites –

you know, media elites, government elites and others who are like, this is a real phenomenon we need to take seriously. I think we're in that moment again now. Congress needs to do more. We need to have those protections for whistleblowers. They need to pass this disclosure legislation. And anybody who, in my view, who anybody that's like a debunker or skeptic or whatever, who says that we shouldn't pass legislation to disclose what the government knows,

For me, that person is acting in bad faith because if you're really sure that there's nothing there, then you should be first in line to demand disclosure. Do you think there's a genuine fear in giving people this information and having a collapse of society if it turns out to be true? If a genuine – if we – there was a full disclosure and all this top secret video that has been hidden that's really high resolution –

All that stuff gets released, and the government says, this is what we know. I'm sorry. Sorry we wouldn't keep this from you, but if we give immunity— But what would it show? Well, I don't know what it is. I could say what it shows, but maybe they know what it shows. Let's say that there's extraterrestrials, and the government knows about it. And let's say maybe they're already in contact. And then the government comes out and goes, hey, we've been in contact with extraterrestrials. No.

Like, what did they say? They go, the extraterrestrials told us that there is no God and that they were just they had they created all these religions. Then the question is, why would we believe them? I mean, in other words, like if you're like a truly who's saying that I'm not saying anybody is who's saying that the extraterrestrials say there's no God. No, I'm saying that if you go through the scenario that goes, oh, societies will collapse because people will.

it'll counter i mean that's the story right well i think the society collapses because we're faced with an intelligent being that's been able to visit us for ages whenever it wants and we weren't aware of it and we the illusion that anyone of human race is in control of this earth and can lead us from some sort of a position of knowledge and strength

in the face of this overwhelming force from another planet, that would be a collapse of rules and of society, the like, that we have never seen before. But why? Because no one would listen to anyone anymore because there would all of a sudden be a new daddy in town. And people would want to figure out what the new daddy wants them to do. It depends because, I mean, I think that you have a scenario where it goes –

Again, we're just completely – I'm talking mass hysteria, fear. I don't know. I mean if the government is like, look, we've been in contact with them for decades and here's what they want. They just want an earth base and they want some of our – whatever. I mean I think if they were like they're – actually the abductions are all real and we signed a deal to trade technology for abductions –

That could be problematic. Do you think that's real? I've read that before. I mean, that's part of the lore, right? It is part of the lore. Who's making deals with aliens? I think much more likely they do whatever the fuck they want to do and we're terrified of them. That's what I think would be much more likely. Are you going to make a deal with baboons? Are you going to go to the fucking...

Baboon tribe and go listen you fucking dummies. I'm gonna make a deal with you No, you're gonna do whatever you want. You're gonna abduct them and perform studies on them. That's what we do No, we but we well, but we also we've we've well, but we've we've gone through I mean I happened I included us how we've protected gorillas in my book apocalypse never and like we actually I saw a gorilla in a zoo just a few years ago He did not look protected. He looked like he was a gorilla prison for no fucking reason Joe You've got to go see gorillas in Central Africa

in live. It's incredible. It's an incredible experience. But a huge amount, I mean, Diane Fossey, people have fought to protect gorillas in their native habitat. The gorillas know we're there. They actually, you have to... But the reality is some gorillas get abducted and they get put into zoos. That's the reality. Same as some humans get abducted and they get brought on the spaceship. Well, we don't know that. I think probably. Have you ever listened to Betty and Barney Hill talk about it?

That case, I just read a debunking of that case. Debunking? Yeah. How can you debunk it? And I found it. You found it. There it is. Okay, finally. Pentagon goes on record. So following Michael's story, the DOD has now commented, the Department of Defense has no record, present or historical, of any type of SAP called Immaculate Constellation.

Well, was that so hard? Why did that take four days? That came from Sue. How do you say your name? Sue Goff, I guess. Sue Goff. There's a lot to digest. I doubt the DOD would ever likely confirm a UAP's existence. I am trying to confirm whether any type of SAP also refers to USAP. It should. We'll bring you more info when I have it. USAP is just an unacknowledged special access program.

So they say it's bullshit. I think I'm going to – well, I mean, I would expect that. I know, but this is my whole point. To keep everybody fucking clueless and guessing and keep all the infighting going on, wouldn't you release a bunch of shit that's not necessarily true? I would. If I was really running a secret government UFO retrieval program and we were in contact with extraterrestrials –

I would release a bunch of nonsense all the time that makes it look stupid. Oh, I see. Just like they did with Project Blue Book. You're saying if there is truly extraterrestrials, then the government would do disinformation on the nationals? I think that's interesting. That makes sense. I mean...

Like, because they always go, people always go, well, it's just a secret weapons program. And so they're just trying to create the aliens around it. But we had a Manhattan Project. Also, how can you say that? You don't know. Nobody knows anything. You could say it might be a secret weapons program. Yeah, maybe. But it might be we get visited by fucking aliens from outer space because space is goddamn huge.

And life is here. So we know intelligent life exists in our solar system, which is one of hundreds of billions of solar systems just in this galaxy alone. And there's hundreds of billions of galaxies in the known universe. The odds that this is it are fucking dumb. That's a dumb thought. So are we visited? And does the government know? This is the question. And if they did know, and they've been protecting us all these years because-

Especially back before they had any control of – when they had all control, rather, of any narrative, whether it's newspaper, television. The government had complete and total control. And the real argument is after Kennedy was assassinated, they've had control over everything, including the presidency. So you can say whatever you want. Why would you tell people?

Why would you tell people about UFOs and complicate your life? Just say it's bullshit. Hire a guy to tell everybody it's bullshit, and then a few people know about it. And those few people are the privileged few, and it feels kind of cool to have some inside information. And every now and then you get a little whistleblower, and that guy's a kook.

Bob Lazar. Come on. Bob Lazar's a loser. That guy, you really think we'd have him work on our... Oh, he's on the list of the employees at Los Alamos Labs. That's a fucking bullshit. So he knows the inside of Los Alamos Labs by heart.

heart. He can walk you around. He knows the security guards. They know him by name. They remember him. He can tell you where the stations are. He tells you exactly how these things move. And then the go fast video, you see the fucking thing turning sideways and moving exactly how he described it. So if that's real, if that guy really was working on a retrieval program and that was in 1987, 86, what, how long has this been going on?

And if it has been going on for a long time, why would they tell us now? I don't think they would. I think there's a long – if it's real, if it's a real phenomenon that the highest levels of the government are aware of –

I think it's been kept under wraps for so long it's almost impossible. It's like a person coming out of the closet. You're 58 years old. I don't want to do it. I don't want to do it. It's like it's been so long you've been lying. It would cause so many problems if you came out and told the truth. And I think it's very difficult for people that have been lying to hundreds of millions of people about one of the biggest questions that...

that humans have ever had. Are we alone? And what is this all about? And they've had the answers for all this time, telling us now too hard. Well, right. I mean, remember Mike Pompeo, Trump's CIA director, when he was asked why they didn't release all the JFK files, he said, because some of the people involved are still alive.

So that is potentially a plausible reason if we assume Mike Pompeo was telling the truth about why they didn't release all the JFK files. Sure. Well, especially all these people that have been lying to Congress and misallocating funds and are a part of these programs that are hidden programs. You could go to jail for that. You could lose your career if they blame one person or blame a group of people and they decide, well, it was Mike's idea. Yeah.

Mike's in trouble. Mike gets brought in front of Congress and you're in real deep shit. Then they should do, by the way, then they should do blanket amnesty. I agree. That would be one way to solve that problem. I agree. I think someone should do that, whether it's Kamala or Trump, whoever gets in there, give them blanket amnesty and let's fucking tell people what's going on because either it's bullshit or it's real.

Both of them are crazy. The fact that people have been lying about UFOs forever is crazy. You mentioned the Bob Lazar case, and I don't know if it's true or not, but I think the ad hominems, like when you see them using ad hominem character assassination, you're like, well, wait a second.

Plenty of dirtbags are right about things. Sure. Many of them worked in the FBI and CIA and the military. Certainly plenty of people, like in other words, everybody that worked on secret weapons programs was like a Boy Scout. Excuse me. You know, so the idea, so the character assassination in the homonym for me is a bit of a tell. Yes. That there's something, there's some other agenda going on than just being like, no, there's no information or here's what doesn't make sense. Almost always.

And we know it's so effective because the other thing it does is it scares everybody else off. So you end up only – the few people that are willing to do this are people that –

are more confident, they've got a career, they're not worried, like, I'm, you know, not worried about that. Or they're just people who just feel compelled. Yeah. Like, Rush's position is that he just felt compelled to tell the truth because it's just too deep and too powerful to be in the hands of these people. It shouldn't be that way. It feels like people should know. Look, and that's why the whistleblower came forward is because David Rush's courage. I don't think we're alone. I don't know what it is, but I don't think we're alone. Well, I don't think we're alone in the universe. I think the only question is, are we alone on Earth? I don't think we're alone here.

I don't think I would allow us to be alone. I think I'd keep a close look on us fucking crazy assholes. They're very, if we're not alone, then the phenomenon, it's just so elusive. Or much more advanced and doesn't want us to be aware completely of its presence. And it's monitoring these psychotic monkeys who have this propensity to be constantly intoxicated, who are also in control of thermonuclear weapons and are enforcing magical lines they drew in the dirt.

If we're not alone, here's the other thing I'll say. If we're not alone, then the reason that we don't know what they are is because of them and not strictly because of the U.S. government. I think both. Because if they were, if they, if they, if we're not alone, then, and they are doing all these things, then they're certainly more than capable of, of making themselves known. Well, I think one way to ensure that you don't have to kill all the people is to go to the people that have the biggest weapons and say, we're here.

Stop fucking around leave us alone and let them do whatever they want to do then. What are they doing? I mean, that's the thing that they are Probably observing us just like we observe uncontacted tribes. We observed gorillas we observe what we observed but the other thing like we observe remember the it's interesting because the study of the study of gorillas Mm-hmm was always part of actually protecting gorillas. Sure. Well, maybe they're protecting us from what ourselves and

War? Nuclear war? That's one theory. Well, the reason why my club, the rooms are named Fat Man and Little Boy, is because those bombs that they dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that started a whole wave of UFO sightings. It did. And I think that's probably why. I mean, just logically, if I was from another planet and I saw, oh, we've just detected a nuclear bomb went off on whatever they call our planet...

Like, let's go see what they're up to and go check in on them. They probably visit infrequently, just like scientists when they're going looking for sloths. They visit infrequently. They come. Just think of what we do. They tag them? Sure. I had a woman on here yesterday that works with wolves. This is her book. Yeah, Diane Boyd, Woman Among Wolves. Her entire life has been tagging wolves, releasing them, studying their behavior, finding out where they go and everything.

Of course they would do that with us. We do that with wolves. Of course they would do that with us. We do that with butterflies. We study everything. Humans are interested in other things and acquiring information. We're curious. If you're going to be the type of thing that can figure out how to get here from another planet, you're going to be really fucking curious.

The curiosity that is required to allow you to figure out interstellar travel is pretty bananas. You got to be super fucking curious. And I think they probably are. I think they're probably aware that there's an adolescent period that every intelligent species goes through when it has the power to blow itself up and it doesn't have the wisdom to not do it.

Because there's clear examples right now, every day, all over the world of people killing people, blowing people up. You can see it in the news every day with what's going on in the Middle East, what's going on in Ukraine. It's really clear that we have the power, but we don't have the wisdom.

And so there's probably an evolutionary period where this intelligent animal adapts and learns from its mistakes and eventually gets past these base primate instincts of greed and envy and lust and anger and retribution and retaliation. Gets past this territorial instinct.

and recognizes that we are truly all connected. But it takes a long time biologically. And I think the thing that helps it along is technology. And I think there's this furious battle of trying to claim ground and control technology's influence on people because we know it's an overwhelming influence. And we know that the technology that has allowed people to have truth, truth,

Maybe for the first time in human history where anyone like yourself can come on a podcast like this, an independent journalist, and you can reach millions and millions of people. That's never happened before. And that's changing things. AI will change things further. And then sentient AI will change things in impossible ways that we can't even imagine.

There's not a science fiction author around that's right now got an accurate idea of what 100 years from now looks like. It's all 100% guesswork. If you lived in 1500, 1600 wasn't that much fucking difference. Everybody's got a musket. Everybody's on a boat. Basically the same shit. The difference between 2024 and 21-2024 is going to be bananas. It's going to be impossible to imagine. Yeah.

What a time to be alive. It's an awesome time to be alive. It's amazing. It's a golden age of journalism, too. I mean, it's a great time to be in journalism. It's a great time for real journalism because you're confronted with so much bullshit and propaganda and that people reject that bullshit and propaganda and they're turning towards real journalists. So thank you.

Thank you, Joe. Thank you for being here. Thank you for everything that you do. You are a real source of light in this confusing time that we live in. And I appreciate your courage and I appreciate your writing and all the work that you put out. I appreciate you. I appreciate you opening up the conversation in the ways you have. Honestly, there is no way that we could, the whole society could be having this conversation about UAPs if it weren't for you. True story. Ah. Nope. True story. There's plenty of other podcasts we'd still be talking about it, but thank you. Appreciate it. All right. Bye, everybody. Thanks, Joe. Bye.

Thank you.