Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIPK0ENmzDc
[Music] so you like it down here better i love it yeah i love it yeah people are so nice there's less of them so they're not a burden yep yeah you know i think big cities you just people just become in your they get in your way right and no one's in your way here everyone's friendly yeah it's like normal they're normal people plus it's not tainted by show business as much as people try to pretend that hollywood you know doesn't have an effect on their lives i'm in real estate get the [ __ ] out of here like everyone is tainted by that the weirdness of that city yeah because it's a city that's predicated on being full of [ __ ] like you have to i was going to say something yeah like everybody as soon as they're talking there they start lying basically right well they're going to dangle it for sure like they're selling themselves right and promoting an angle and out here no one's doing that right it's so refreshing it's like this is mike he does he makes barbecue oh hi mike like mike's a normal guy you know must take some time to sort of decompensate and decompress get back to it took a few weeks that's it and then i was like yeah i embraced it right away because you know we when we moved here um we'd i started looking in may of 2020. i was like i'm getting the [ __ ] out of here i see the writing on the wall because there was two weeks to stop the spread and flatten the curve like okay makes sense that makes sense i was all on board and then as time went on i'm like this is not two weeks and then they were talking about more restrictions and then they were shutting down outdoor dining and this that and i was like what what are they doing oh they're they're enjoying this they're enjoying telling people what to do which is just basic human nature to pretend that they would that government agencies that people who wanted to be mayor people that wanted to be governor would somehow or another avoid all the pitfalls that are just naturally a part of being a person when a person has power especially power over a bunch of people that are scared mm-hmm
and you're offering solutions and you're standing there we have to keep the safety of our communities in mind right you know that kind of [ __ ] yeah i i think that's a big story of modern america is people just not being able to deal with the idea that there just aren't solutions for some things that you just there's for some things you just can't fix it by fiat what's fascinating to me though is that people will blame everyone except the people that were actually responsible for the virus right like this is a virus that most likely i mean i'm not 100 sure but i'm about 90 sure that this thing came from a [ __ ] laboratory and all the stuff that i've read and all the emails from peter dazyk and fauci and the nih when you look at the way they were looking at it and how they're kind of panicked and then you look at their their absolute their belief that so supposedly they're broadcasting that there's no way it could have come from a lab and then you see their actual emails and you go oh you [ __ ] like you know you know this probably came from a lab and you're doing your best job to try to obfuscate to try to confuse people to try to muddy the water and make it just get just get it as far away from you as you can but the reality is this probably came from a [ __ ] lap but that's not what people are mad at people are mad at people who take alternative medications people are mad at people who downplay the severity of it people are mad at they're mad at all kinds of things but then i'm at the [ __ ] source the actual source which is most likely that level 4 bio lab in wuhan china most likely yeah at minimum those emails show that they they thought they had a serious pr problem on their hands yeah i mean i think you can look at them in a number of different ways but at minimum it shows that to be charitable to be to be totally charitable um and that should have been a big story all by itself and it wasn't yeah it wasn't it's it's a strange time but it's this is normal this is a normal time when people are under heavy anxiety because most people do not know how to handle like extreme
stress or scary unknown situations that's why they like a normal job that starts at nine it ends at five and you have two weeks paid vacation and you have your this and you have your that and everything's laid out and you know what to expect people do not like when you don't know what to expect yeah you know that was a big um thing for me i lived in russia for for so many years and you know in moscow there were constant terrorist attacks at the time because the cheshians and the russians were having these issues but when 9 11 happened in the united states people were traumatized by that beyond all proportion it seemed to me because just in america we're just not used to having to deal with all sorts of things yeah uh and so they they just don't deal well with stress uh when it's an unusual situation it has to they have to be in the kind of the the lane of safety yeah it's um we're not used to it i mean it's weird because we start so many wars yeah and we don't have any of them over here right right exactly exactly i have a good buddy of mine who's my former kickboxing trainer uh shout out to shooky he lives in israel but he lived in america for a little while and he went back to israel but um i i was hanging out with him and his family over his house one night for dinner and they're playing the bongo drums and dancing and like they're really like festive people and i go why are israelis like so happy and he goes because over in israel you never know right goes at any minute you could die so [ __ ] party party party like you know just he was always happy right but he he had this attitude because of the the conditions because there's a real fear in the air right the presence of death is all around you you're more conscious of living life yeah absolutely in america it's completely the opposite exactly it's the opposite we are basically like trust fund kids you know in terms of like uh how we handle the real adversity of the the
world and and forget about just the stuff that we create i mean if anything natural occurred any like real disaster occurred you'd see mad panic in the streets all these these there's so many people out there that are prepping and so many people but are you really do are you really ready because i don't think you are right i think when the [ __ ] actually hits the fan it's the tiniest smallest percentage of the people they're going to be able to like gather up their senses and make some sense out of this and regroup yeah but i i think they're not preparing because they're enjoying being miserable right now i mean you know you were talking about that before but yeah no this this is like the most unfun period in american history at least in my lifetime yeah it's it's unfunny uh entertainment isn't fun i don't know it's it's miserable well it's very tense yeah it's very tense and there's a lot of people that are profiting off of that tension there's a lot of anger merchants out there you know that are essentially elevating their brand by just getting mad at things and having the least charitable view of people the leaf least charitable view of situations the most polarizing arguments of right versus left and vaccinated versus unvaccinated and yeah now i spent a lot of time on this the the the press aspect of it is just horrible because financially you know that's the way these businesses work now they um they're trying to create the an addictive experience of being upset yeah and they know exactly how to do it and they've they've kind of moved all the people in the business who used to be [Music] he used to do the job of moderating and making sure that people saw all the different sides of the issue they've all been kind of shoved out of the business and now it's just one gigantic anxiety machine uh you know if you turn on msnbc or cnn or you know or even fox you know basically their their job is to get you worked up about stuff well that's the only way they can make
money exactly that's what's so crazy about the world that we're living in it's but what's interesting is i think the positive aspect of this and let's try to find the silver lining right i think the positive aspect of this is it's really highlighting the importance of independent media you know people like crystal and sauger from breaking points kyle kalinski glenn greenwald yourself these independent journalists who i can turn to i'll go okay i know if i i'm reading a matt tybee article you're gonna tell me exactly what's going on and there's not many of you right there's there's a small handful of you where i know i can get unbiased intelligent observations yeah no it's great and and this uh i think a lot of people uh in what we're finding and you're of course familiar with this is that there's a massive audience out there that is very frustrated with traditional media the manipulative aspects of it yeah the predictability of it um you know and so yeah they're they're coming to to places like sub stack and i spent my whole life in the media business i i had an editor once who called it managing the decline like the expectation in media was always that there was going to be less and less money forever because audiences were dwindling because they just didn't like the product we were putting out in independent media now it's the opposite it's skyrocketing there's incredible growth you obviously know this substack is doing amazingly well yeah it's it's it's a very bizarre experience as a journalist to be part of that um but it's it's it's been really really cool i don't think it would be possible any other way i think there has to be this massive decline in the believability of cnn and you know and you know fill in the blank like whatever mainstream big time publication the [ __ ] rolling stone when they printed that horse dewormer story about oklahoma like jesus christ do you guys not have anybody working there that can fact look at the photo they used it's oklahoma in the summer and you got people with winter coats on right you guys out of your [ __ ] minds
like what is going on over there so so what happens in media is we have this expectation that if something is published in another reputable news organization we assume that it's been checked and that's true somewhere down the line whoever did the original reporting actually checked it and and what happened in that case is you know let's explain explain what the story was so people can so basically uh an er doc if i remember correctly in uh in oklahoma in rural oklahoma uh gave an interview to a tv station uh and essentially he was saying that there was a problem with uh people who were taking ivermectin um and and they were getting so sick that they were lining up outside uh the ers and preventing people who had gunshot wounds from being treated right yes now me as a reporter if i hear that story the first thing i'm going to think is are there really that many gunshot victims in in rural oklahoma like they like there's already a you know a little bit of a problem right with that right you would want to check that right away what actually happened is some wires got crossed like the guy was talking about one thing and and somebody who saw the story assumed a correlation that wasn't there and then it got retweeted by rachel maddow and then she doubled down on it the next day exactly like which is wild the fact that the the facts were clearly available and she doubled down on it first of all do you know how many people that have actually ever even gotten sick from ivermectin ever billions of people what did peter peter tia read it off to us it's less than 100. never i mean it's ever it's been used for river blindness for how long right it's an incredibly safe communication right yeah yeah now that's that's not to say that it necessarily works as like as a cova treatment right like uh but there's so much this disinformation yeah about this it's a different conversation that's a different different
conversation but the thing about rachel retweeting that and doubling down what's so interesting about that and this is a phenomenon that's that's completely new in in my experience in media is that we companies now know that their audiences will forgive them for making mistakes as long as the mistakes are in the right direction right as long as it's ideologically correct as long as it's ideologically correct so there was a whole generation of reporters who were raised like me like our whole thing was the night before we published something we we couldn't sleep because we were afraid of that one thing that would be [ __ ] up in the in the report that somebody would catch the next day and that might end your career right like if you got something really really badly wrong it was potentially a career ending thing especially if you if you made some kind of ethical mistake and forgetting to check something so that terror was was common to all reporters until recently now all of a sudden when you make a really really bad mistake no your audience is probably going to be fine with it they don't punish you for it in the same way and they've basically brought in a whole generation of people who have this ethos of well if i make so what if it's wrong you know which is which is why all these people no longer have faith in these companies and and they can't see it it's amazing that they can't see it they but people are leaving these companies they're no longer trusting them and they don't see that correlation which is incredible to me it's very strange but again it fuels this thing that i think is very good which is trustworthy independent media like crystal and sauger when they were when they had their old show uh rising on the hill um they decided to leave and when they decided to leave we were all we had a group conversation on the phone and you know they were asking me advice and i was like i think you guys are going to be gigantic when you leave i think it's
going to be bigger than ever you'll be completely free you won't have to worry about any editorial control and you don't need anybody i mean i'll help you everybody else will help you the show's already excellent but it's excellent entirely because of you two it has nothing to do with being attached to any other organization that's going to siphon money off of you yeah and so look at them they're they were number one almost instantly right and they've maintained that position the entire time and they're bigger than ever now right yeah and they were raised they had that hesitation because we're raised in in media in professional corporate media to be terrified of leaving the fold now i actually came up through alternative media so i wasn't afraid of leaving it i had my own newspapers when i lived overseas the idea of being out in the wilderness didn't frighten me so much so when i moved to sub stack i i just thought this is probably going to be cool it's probably going to work right but a lot of people who came up who came up yeah you know that you do think wow i'm never going to i'm never going to get back in to the club and if i if i don't make enough money that's it i know that's it for me which is why they're staying but you're look at look at how much success they've had the audience out there is huge yeah they're probably making more money than they ever dreamed that they would they would make and um you know there's opportunities to do all kinds of amazing things now because of that yeah there really is and um you know i was really fortunate that i had other jobs when i first started doing this podcast the podcast was never when the beginning of it at first was never for money it was just for fun i never thought of it as a job at all and so when i had gotten it to the point where it started to become valuable there were a bunch of vultures that tried to buy half of it or take over like one there was one like podcast network that literally wanted to take 50 of the show just to be on the network and i was like what are you talking about like why would i do that they go we'll you'll have more ad revenue
because you'll be connected to our uh whatever our network or what [ __ ] network right like this is a podcast man this is a different like they didn't even understand this was quite a few years ago before it had gotten big but but the point is i know friends that took that deal that gave their podcast over to this network and became a part of it and now they're probably kicking themselves right because like i'm sure it's like a permanent deal like i'm sure they own 50 of it forever or whatever percentage they i mean maybe they started with 50 and negotiated down i don't know but the point is there's so many people that when given the opportunity to have like some real security like this is gonna you're gonna be connected to this network they're gonna protect you they're gonna bring in the ads you don't have to do anything and they just take a percentage of it but you will always have income because you'll be connected to us and we are a big corporation and you're like oh just like when i was on nbc this is going to be great like it'll give me security and you start thinking about your mortgage you start thinking about your kid's college and all that stuff and you go okay this is a good thing and it's hard it's hard to just say no no i'm going to be independent but this is the time this is the this is the best time ever to be independent yeah no and and that that's why it it it is a very hard decision for people to walk away and go independent and do the thing you know what i did what glenn did what crystal and kyle did um but it works and uh and the other choice staying with traditional media is increasingly not a good bargain for you not only um you know are is the piece of the pie they're getting smaller and smaller all the time because their ratings are getting worse the advertising revenue is dropping off but the ideological conformity in those in those organizations is getting worse and and um that is something that never used to exist before uh or neat at least not to this degree anywhere near this degree so you're going to be miserable doing that you might as well do the job the way you
want to do it do it correctly and get paid you know in a commensurate way for doing it i think there's a bunch of people though that haven't established a large following that are worried rightly so of being lost in this sure so i don't think this is available to anyone it's obviously available to you and glenn and to jimmy dore and a lot of these other people that have they've already gathered up a large loyal audience because they know that they can trust these people or the people rather know they can trust them to to be honest and to just give their their take on things but there's a lot of people that are they're stuck because you know they're not really well known and they're kind of in this system and they're realizing while they're in this system that it's it's pretty [ __ ] and you have two choices either you try to fight against it and you might get ostracized and or you try to conform and then you get lost right then you become what you what you despise right which is more common than not right yeah i think that's what's happening either they're moving you the people out which you know you see at an organization like the new york times where they're just kind of moving the old guard out yeah the old traditional reporting types and they had a lot of really amazing reporters at the new york times people who really knew how to do the job and they're just kind of being pushed out whether you know for one reason or another um or you know the the other thing is you you stay in and gradually the mindset takes hold of you and you and you get lost mentally you know and i think that's what's happening to a lot of people i mean i knew rachel back in her america days um you know we were friends once sort of and uh it's just it's amazing to me what's what's happened uh i read your book um with her and uh who else on the couch is in the car is that hating hate ink that's right i didn't want to [ __ ] it up but um when you compared her and you said rachel maddow is is bill o'reilly you're like jesus christ and that but
you're like but wait i think he's right like it's just ideologically opposite but the same kind of thing where there's just like blind allegiance to the party doctrine right yeah and not a reporter anymore no and and what o'reilly did during the iraq war era you know he was he was using this sort of hyper patriotic persona his whole thing was um you know sort of bullying people who uh you know weren't behind the war effort enough or who you know and if if they if he didn't like them he would have sort of accused them of being you know in sympathy with the terrorists and you know rachel's basically doing that same gig with but it's russians this time around you know it's it's the same act it's just a different audience uh and they're using exactly the same it's it's this audience audience optimization method of making money where you identify the audience then you give them a whole bunch of information that you know is gonna you know sort of please their sensibilities and and uh tickle their prejudices uh and you just keep feeding that stuff to them over and over and over again uh and and yeah she's playing that game it works to a degree but she's so rich right of her job yeah yeah she's balling out of control and now she only works like like way less hours or something right yeah i don't know exactly what the new deal is but um but it's like way less broadcast time right yeah for more money yeah and i mean that's a tough job i mean you would know right i mean like four hours however many um you know days a week doing doing live work like we stopped you right there it's not hard no it's not this this is not hard this is the biggest scam that's ever existed this job the fact that people think this is hard now i've had hard jobs this is not one of them no i mean it requires you to pay attention right that's what the [ __ ] you know i like to pay attention anyway
right right it's not hard yeah it's not hard well yeah there's hard jobs out there this it would be a [ __ ] travesty to call this compared to a real job i keep forgetting that yeah which is something that one should know yeah we're we're removed from real jobs by too many years no i've had real jobs in fact believe it or not i uh you played the world war theater right yes so uh i worked demolition once and i demolished uh my crew demolished that basement no [ __ ] yeah wow yeah and that so we we did the job that that helped turn that into the wilbur theater that was that seller a million years ago that's why i was being punished for for uh getting um i got in a scrape like a drugs thing and so my parents decided that i needed uh um to learn a little bit about real work so i ended up doing demolition for a long time in boston so dude i had a construction job when i was well i have many of them because my father was an architect growing up but um when i was 19 years old my buddy jimmy jimmy lawless shout out to jimmy um he got me a gig working with him i think i only lasted like a month they we were building a knights of columbus hall and um in somewhere in massachusetts and it was during the summer so it was hot as [ __ ] and i was carrying cement and pressure treated lumber all day that's all i did and i remember i would and this was back when i was still competing so i would go to the gym after work and i could not do anything i could barely hit the bag i was so tired right and i remember thinking to myself like this is a very important moment for me because i could just be doing this forever and you want to be doing anything but that anything but that yeah i was 19. and it was a real wake-up call i was like okay yeah we got to figure this out because there's no way this is going to work i can't do this yeah absolutely i mean in that first job that i did you know this the big stairs there at the at the wilberth you go down so we had to basically jackhammer a whole bunch of concrete out of that floor and then figure out a way to get it up into a
dumpster like you know so it was big big chunks of uh concrete and stone and we tried all these different ways like driving a bobcat up the stairs like all these different things there was no way to automate it the only way to do it was to put it in a rubber bucket and have two guys carry each one up oh just up and down the stairs so the guy i was with had just gotten out of jail and he was like um this is what the the people who built the pyramids must have felt like you know carrying that stuff up the stairs so yeah yeah if that's how they did it um i used to work in that basement there was a comedy club in that basement called duck soup yeah the guys who owned the comedy connection uh uh bill blooming wright who eventually took over the wilbur he bought it after these guys had kind of failed this one they decided to try this project of a really high-end comedy club that only did clean comedy for like respectable people and then like they they served really nice food and it did not work out huh it's like because right across the street was next comedy stop which is like wild and they were they were literally offering you you can get paid in cash or cocaine like it was that's real like that was really that sounds like where all the actual comics would want to go exactly right so we would work across the street but you had to like you had to do surgery on your act you had to like remove parts of your act to be able to work there what did they put in the sign like comedy but less funny is that no the you know the idea was like the you know duck soup the the great groucho marx marx brothers movies um that movie was you know they thought it was like one of the great classic movies and they thought it would be fun to like have this classy comedy club and so they had all these other options you know there were stitches and the comic connection all these other clubs they're like let's have one club that's like very high-end and beautiful and it didn't work and so then it became an improv after that the improv took it over after that and then eventually just went under and then bill
who's a he's a real businessman he turned it into the will they they did faneuil hall for a while and i think that's when bill bought them and then he they converted the wilbur is now uh the the big like when comics come to town they work right that's the big big venue now yeah i did my last netflix special there right right exactly it's a great place yeah absolutely yeah but those really hard jobs are very important for people that way you can never say a podcast is hard work absolutely it's not even close yeah but the the thing that's going on now that's really interesting is watching all these pieces shuffle and move around like the sub stack thing and the podcast thing and and watching the reaction that traditional media has to it because it's been unbelievable go ahead why it's because it used to be they ignored it and then they recently just have started attacking it and it's it's fascinating to watch because like their their ship keeps sinking and as their ship is sinking they're like you [ __ ] you guys suck you know like this this is terrible what you're doing over there is tearing they're going under while they're doing it it it's it's amazing i first started hearing about this uh last year uh i knew somebody who worked at the times and then he was basically saying you know the op-ed page is really worried about sub-stacking like why would you be worried like you're the new york times you got 7 million subscribers who cares but they they're really worried about it and they did you know the series of hit pieces have come out over and over and over again it's one line of attack after another it's misogynistic it's it's anti-trans it's this or that um and the it's it's it's just a mechanism it's a cash register it's not anything it's not really a company you know um but it speaks to the desperation within the the news business that they they are convinced that if they are losing audience it must be because somebody is stealing it from them yeah whereas what happened in fact is that they lost their audience first because and this goes all the way back to the wmd episode uh and then
after that i think russiagate was a big one that that turned off a lot of people uh and you know they've been steadily losing audience just because of factual issues and people are they were already out there that audience was already out there as you know um but they you know they're trying to blame it on somebody whether it's factual or not i think people are very tired of being lectured too in this sort of like very clear ideological bent this the the the the angle that they're taking in these these papers when they're discussing a real news story when the actual facts are available to people as they start seeing the facts and then seeing the big picture and then they go back to that original article they read they get angry they get annoyed like you guys are bullshitting me like this is a [ __ ] version of what happened and it's so clear that you keep doing it in the same direction so now every time you read the new york times or the washington post or whatever paper it is you have to go okay how much of this is legit well who's writing it you have to think like which guy is writing it and how accurate is his reporting how full of [ __ ] is he how did you know does she a hardcore lefty or is she like a centrist like what what what do we what am i getting here right it used to be i could just read the new york times and this is the story hey jamie i made a little spill chug me something over there thank you this stuff i'm um um subconsciously trying to pour it out because i know i'll drink the whole goddamn thing this is this black rifled coffee sugary it's it's too good it's really good it's too good yeah it's gonna become a new problem 300 [ __ ] milligrams or grams of what yeah milligrams of caffeine that's a lot it's awesome yeah so i spilled it um it's it's strange but i think this is just what happens when something new comes around it's always what happens there's always like this attack against the denial that there's anything wrong with the original product i saw it in martial arts i mean
i was a part of martial arts when you know i was a child and then when the ufc came along along there was all of this uh rejection of the idea behind it it was barbaric it was you know you only need this and you don't need to learn how all this other stuff and then eventually everybody gave up right now it's clearly established like that is 100 the best form of martial art for an actual physical confrontation is a combination of all the things it's with everything when something new comes along that's superior there's a rejection of it there's an attack against it and then eventually the dust settles and people realize like oh this is what's going on yeah no there's there's a there's a total blindness within the within the median business to they just can't see how audiences perceive them um you know once upon a time i think the the idea within the news business was pretty simple like reporters were raised basically we'll get all the facts we'll work really hard on getting it right we'll give it to you and then you do what you want with it it's it's it's not our job to tell you what decisions to make it's just our job to get it correct right and then that's the news after that you know it's up to you to make your own political decisions um but that's why political affiliation didn't necessarily mean so much back in the day it was always true that basically all reporters were democrats but it didn't show so much in the news media once upon a time because we had a professional ethos that just said we're not supposed to care right right we go and we go into cover whatever we're just gonna collect all the facts get all the quotes put it out there make sure everything's been checked and then it's your it's your deal now there's this new ethos that that what wesley lowery the reporter calls the view from nowhere journalism which is what i just described that that's not good enough that we they have to compensate for inequities in the system
by basically trying to impact how people behave uh through coverage and this is what they do all the time i mean they're they're trying to get you to to make political decisions by how they cover things and i saw this early on as a as a campaign reporter uh once when i was much younger you know in 2004 and 2008 i would sit in the bus with the reporters and they would be discussing which candidates they were going to describe as fringe which ones they were going to were going to be described as electable which ones would be serious right because they want they they enjoyed having the power of deciding for people you know who got to be taken seriously and who who didn't um and i i think that that urge to mold how people act is just ingrained in the business and it's so off-putting you know i think it is but people especially with something like the pandemic people are desperate they really really need just to get the basic information and instead you know when the pandemic happened we were in the middle of this super intense culture war that was revolved around trump so everything was viewed through that lens you know like hydroxychloroquine trump liked it or trump said he was taking it therefore it must be bad therefore you know it must not work but that's not how it worked it's not the drug's fault that done that yeah that donald trump took it you know did you see that fauci had actually written a paper on the effectiveness of of chloroquine and coronaviruses what did he say it was from 2000 i want to say 2015 or 2016 but there was uh he he gave a statement about the effectiveness of chloroquine and coronaviruses see if we can find that because it's it's really fascinating but yeah it's one of those things that when it came up when i mean
trump [ __ ] so much up just by being trump exactly he broke people's br that trump derangement syndrome i think that was a funny thing that you know not even that funny but a thing that republicans would say to try to invalidate anything that left the liberals would say like oh they've got trump derangement syndrome but as time has gone on and you've seen it over and over again and the justification for not just bias but blatant distortions of the facts in order to to impart a narrative like clearly doing it on purpose and they'll they've done it with all this righteousness because they're combating something this evil right this evil trumpster and this evil trump thing that's happening right yeah and and that again that's new yeah that's a new thing so so another example of that is what you were talking about before the lab leak story yeah right trump believed it therefore it must not be true right whereas i think the old school reporters would look at it we wouldn't give a [ __ ] right like it's it's right whether it came from a lab or whether it came from a cave somewhere we don't care like we're not supposed to care our our job is just to find out you know yeah and and so they would dig and there there was not a satisfactory explanation that you know throughout all of last year we we didn't know exactly uh where it came from so why did we stop looking right uh we stopped looking because it had been decided just sort of collectively that well here's the story we're going to have we're going to stick to it anybody who has any other point of view on it is clearly a trump lover or whatever and we have to denounce that person we have to call them a conspiracy theorist um we're gonna we're gonna have this fact-checking um that you know piously declares that this is wrong you know and uh and of course it turns out then they backtrack and they think that there's not going to be repercussions for that
well you know that's why people are are fleeing they were forced into it though they were forced to backtrack yeah they had to because well actually i mean that that's still a little bit of a mystery as to why they suddenly decided to to back off well josh rogan was responsible for quite a bit of it and he's done amazing stuff i mean his his work in exposing the the whole disinformation campaign and the the emails and the fact that fauci was the one that restarted the gain of function research and funding gain of gain of function research all that stuff i mean and and he's a washington post guy he's he's rock solid right and then that i think there was a bunch of people that kind of when he started reporting all this stuff and saying all these things a bunch of people that were like [ __ ] he went out there right like you know he went out the door and he's like guys i can breathe and everyone's like [ __ ] should we go outside you know what i mean like yeah you know what i mean like if there was here oh is this uh the fouchy thing 2005. 2005 studies uh found that chlor yeah chloroquine not hydroxychloroquine was effective in inhibiting the infection and spread of sars cove the official name for sars the research was conducted in cell culture conditions so uh in vitro meaning the drug was not administered to actual source patients that's the same thing they found with ivermectin that it stops viral replication in vitro yeah that's the if you look at the the announcement for the uh oxford study on ivermectin they use very similar language to say that this is a drug that has had uh in-vitro successes and it has some anti-viral properties yeah um you know not uh there isn't a long record of it but it has some right and that contradicted this again it was it was much more of a faith-based thing in the reporting exactly it's it's we believe that this is not true so therefore um we're just not going to touch it well the horse dewormer narrative is where where it got really weird because it was clearly the same language over and over
again which by the way um that stuff is in heart dewormer for dogs i have heart dewormer for my dog i don't i didn't i don't even know who bought it but it was in my house and the other day i was like look at this what's in this and i pick it up and it's [ __ ] ivermectic really yeah and it was you know like heart like that company i think it's called heart that makes it right isn't that what it's called h-a-r-t or something like that card yeah is that what it is but whatev whatever it is it was four dogs there's a picture of a dog on it i didn't even know we had it in my house and i open up the package and i look at him like [ __ ] but what the but they didn't say that's it that's it that [ __ ] that shit's eye vermectin there it is so when they started saying horse dewormer like that was the thing that kept getting said over and over and over again horse d horse horse horse horse right like why like what happened there like how did that narrative get out there when you're talking about a drug that's been administered to i think it's more than 4 billion times 4 4 billion prescriptions have been filled for that stuff there's only like i want to say there's like 2 billion dog or two billion um horses on earth like how many how many billion horses are there i bet there's not even there's probably not even two billion horses so there's like no why would you confuse that a drug that's been given to so many people why would you confuse that as being primarily a horse drug 58 million there's only 58 million horses so we far out number horses this is something i i never knew yeah i was pretty sure of that yeah but the fact that you're talking about a drug that couldn't have been given to all the horses even if they gave it to every [ __ ] horse right yeah now this was amazing when they did that i mean i had arguments with other people in the business about this because i wrote a couple of stories about ivermectin um
mainly because the uh some of the internet platforms were shutting down people who were um who were talking about it right so companies like facebook youtube uh and youtube right um yeah sorry it was youtube uh had eliminated among other things like congressional testimony uh about this and that that seemed to me just crazy like yeah you know what even if the is wrong you have to leave it up there it was a public service it's you know you should be able to find it but um but reporters were absolutely convinced that this drug was evil because i guess because it wasn't the vaccine um and just the whole concept that people would be looking for some other kind of treatment or might or might welcome it was just deeply and profoundly offensive to them so they could they came up with this pejorative term the horse you know this horse dewormer thing and it was amazing the unanimity like as you said it was in every single story like the language was exactly the same yeah it was really strange right and one and even that is odd because again once upon a time your classic journalist was somebody like seymour hirsch and the whole idea of being a journalist was to not think like other people like you you were you were your own person you thought for yourself you you made your own decisions about things and that was valuable the whole point of the job was to be like that yeah because it it required somebody who had the ability to to look at every situation completely objectively and not be affected by peer pressure like that that was a prerequisite for being able to do this job well the idea that we're all going to parrot each other's thinking about things is totally alien to what this job is supposed to be about and now all of a sudden it's become the opposite it's become if you even try to opt out of doing that you know you're suspect you're gonna be
you're gonna be drummed out of the business which is just nuts it's very strange another thing that's one of my favorite things to watch is the um compilation of all of the people on the left talking about how they would never take the vaccine because you never know what's in it if trump's hands are on it oh god that it's gonna you know who knows what the long-term consequences of it are going to be right and this is uh biden [ __ ] biden when he was running for president who are you going to take the shot who knows what it's going to do to you there's no long-term test kamala's saying she wouldn't take the shot so many [ __ ] people and those same people are the ones that just take the shot man i know like that the same people the very same people the same people made it the same people you know they produced it they saw this is the same people yeah and and they came up with this whole phrase pandemic of the unvaccinated yeah right so the exactly the same people who were who were having vaccine hesitancy the year previously came up with this phrase and here's the parts that's shameful it's one thing for a politician to use a phrase like that that's clearly cooked up um you know with their consultants uh in whatever you know evil political lab laboratory they they sit around and decide how they're gonna you know do their messaging campaigns but then for for you know an anchor person to get up and repeat it like it's his or her own thinking that's just embarrassing you know like since when do we since uh you know let uh politicians write our material for us i mean it's it's it's just it's shameful it is but i think it's just the last death twitches of that business i just think this is a sign of the times and that if you think about it a decentralized source of news is really the only way we're going to trust it today something that is completely independent of a large corporation where they have a lot of vested interests a lot of vested interest in pushing a certain narrative those things they're
never going to be pure not anymore i mean whatever whatever the [ __ ] they did when they allowed pharmaceutical drug companies to advertise on television and we're on one of only two countries on planet earth that allows that they allowed the deepest roots of corruption and of influence to get in the way of all narratives of everything we say and do and the the [ __ ] sheer amount of money that's being generated by that is almost unstoppable you could never cut all those roots there's no way it's at this point yeah it's it's and that amount of money is nothing to them look at the amount of uh the profits that companies like you know mederna and pfizer are making right now and you know like the for to buy the ascent of basically all the networks all you have to do is you know send a tiny percentage of your quarterly profits to a handful of news networks and to them that's like mana from heaven i mean again the news business is so star for revenue um that they'll you know they'll bend to anybody basically did you see that i mean i know jimmy dore covered it but quite a few other people have realized it now the amount of money the that bill gates has spent on uh influencing media no i i i it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 million dollars geez he's donated to these various media organizations which for sure has some sort of an impact on how they cover him right well of course yeah and and look the once upon a time we were uh i've said it many times we were trained to know uh that for instance think tanks right like uh who who was funding them because think tanks are who get quoted uh in the new york times in the washington post right so they're generating research that goes to journalists and and like sort of surreptitiously that that ends up becoming what's covered and so that's how like the gates foundation for instance will work its way into coverage uh you know it'll sponsor research in an area like education that's one of the
things i'm covering now um and its research becomes you know uh [Music] it gets it gets into the news that way um but we were supposed to once have uh you know our ears up and be conscious of who was paying for all this this research where was that information coming from and you know people don't really even think about it now see if you can find that story jamie i'm looking right now i'm reading a article about someone uh last year actually was looking into it uh here i'll show you journalism skates keepers is what it's called um columbia journalism jfu is that uh was respected yeah i mean look they've had their issues but they're that's the top media criticism outlet right okay so this is last year says i recently examined nearly 20 000 charitable grants the gates foundation made through the end of june and found that more than 250 million going towards journalism receipts included news operations like the bbc nbc al jazeera pro publica national journal the guardian univision medium the financial times the atlantic the texas tribune gannett washington monthly lamonde lamont is that i say it yeah and the center for investigative reporting charitable organizations affiliated with news outlets like bbc media action the new york times neediest cases fund media companies such as the participant whose documentary waiting for superman supports gates agenda on charter schools journalistic organizations such as the pulitzer center on crisis reporting the national press foundation and the international center for journalists and a variety of other groups creating news content or working on journalism such as the leo burnett company and ad agency the gates that gates commissioned to create a new site to promote the success of aid groups in some cases recipients say they distributed part of the funding as subgrants to other journalistic organizations which makes it difficult to see the full picture of gates funding
into the fourth estate yeah and and as a reporter you may not may or may not be aware of all the different ways that money will get in you know uh work its way into the business but unconsciously it just sort of seeps in like right and that's how it works like you nobody comes and tells you well don't cover this um well maybe they do now actually uh or or you know take this approach to covering education you what ends up happening is you just kind of get a feel based on the reaction of your editor to whatever pitch uh you're giving at the moment hey would you you know would you be interested in the story about whether or not um you know this approach to uh standardized testing worked right uh and if the editor says yeah that's interesting maybe right then you know just never to broach that again right but if if it's with you know in the cert in the right ideological slant um they're going to be hot for it right interesting yeah and that's how it works that's how it works with everything it works you know in with foreign policy uh i mean when i worked in russia um if you sent a story if you pitch the story to an american editor about how uh the us-based the u.s funded reform effort was working and there was a growing middle class in provincial russia that was prospering and people were now taking vacations to ibiza and stuff like that you could get anybody to buy that story but if you came to them with a story about how actually um you know the trend the transformation of capitalism has been really slow people have lost their health care um there's an explosion of violent crime and an addiction and people are more and more gravitating towards right-wing politics uh you know in large part because of the the rapid changes that they weren't ready for um you could not get that story sold right so what ended up happening when i
was in russia is they kept sending back all these these positive reports about what was happening this was before putin um and americans got this idea that things on russia were going great you know uh and the the company was really prospering in fact you know i was doing stories when i was there about how money didn't even exist in in the in the villages like the only people who would actually have cash in in most remote russian villages would be pensioners because they would get it um you know once a month from the mail system uh i went to places where the people actually bought and sold things with uh moonshine like the russian equivalent of moonshine because that was like a unit of currency i think wow they were doing subsistence farming i mean it was completely [ __ ] like life in rural russia but if you picked up the new york times what you read is you know the emerging middle class was doing great you know people have people have vcrs and in samara and stuff like that and that's how it works like you you you get a sense of what they want you give it to them and you know over time you just stop thinking about it but it's it's it's not a healthy way to do it the idea that there's no currency at all and they're just subsistence farming and trading and trading in moonshine that's wild yeah i i actually did it myself it was the i did a story about this i used to travel the country with this guy who was a living around a professional clown so we would uh we would do these things where we would we would get jobs in you know provincial russia doing different things you know whether it was bricklaying or you know working in you know agriculture that kind of stuff and in one place we went to um you know we would do like a construction job and we get paid in what they call samagon which is uh like moonshine was it nasty uh it works oh megan murphy gave me some [ __ ] from mexico that it's how rough i can still it's like nightmares it's so rough she drinks it all the time
i don't know what's wrong with her but we opened up the bottle i was like jesus yeah it's like getting hit with an ore when you drink this stuff yeah yeah have you ever seen werner herzog's uh documentary happy people no although i love her but what was it about it's about people living in rural russia oh really life in the taiga happy people it's one of my favorite documentaries it's really fascinating because um these people live just hunter gatherer fisherman trapper existences and uh i they i believe they sell pelts and they'll use that for snowmobiles and tools and things like that but essentially all of their food all of their subsistence comes this is it comes entirely from hunting and trapping and they have no mental health problems they're all unreasonably happy they they're really like when you you know you're you're getting translations of them you know it's all in subtitles but they're talking about how happy they are and they they talk about all the things they love about this particular way of living and you know and this is what a man needs to do and this is what a trapper does and this is what a hunter does and this is what and they're talking about it with this this pride and this i i don't know man this like really unusual resolve like they found their niche they don't have this desire to escape like they enjoy life right and so he called it happy people and you know he's doing the uh the uh narration which makes it interesting too no his narrations are always great it's fun a year in the tigers what it's called it's [ __ ] great it's really good that sounds awesome yeah i mean it make it makes sense that uh you know whatever whatever it is we're doing um that that if you can avoid having to have interaction with that that would be sounds like it would be a great life do you feel an obligation because there's not that many of you um i mean i'm not trying to blow smoke up your ass but i will there's not that many of you out there there's not that
many people that i can say like i could send an article that you wrote and i go this is legit you know i'll send it to my friends like read this this is crazy thank you there's not a lot of you out there though like if the government wanted to change the news they just have to whack you and glenn greenwald and a couple other people and it would be a lot different out there that's real yeah as odd as that sounds there's there's not that many yeah it's it's a weird feeling i'm not um you know obviously i've been doing this for a long time but this current situation where the news is kind of split into three parts right there's right-wing media there's you know hashtag resistance media and then there's this independent thing where you know it's people like you and me and glenn and crystal and kyle and stuff like that it is small and an emergent and it's a lot of attention i think there's a lot of pressure on us to figure things out because we have we haven't figured things out like sub stack is really great for getting a couple of us paid a good deal of money but we haven't figured out how to do like in-depth investigative reporting we haven't figured how to pay for that right um foreign reporting how would you pay for that without crowdfunding it and if you crowdfunded it wouldn't everybody know what you were doing yeah i that would be a problem right it would be difficult i think the problem is that this model works because people really really like the content so they want a lot of it um but you know the job i used to do i you know i would take eight to ten weeks to write a single story but let me ask you this say if you have a story that you would normally get funded for by a large organization how much money are we talking about let's say if you have a really important story how much money were we talking about how much would it cost like say if you want to do a deep dive into the steele dossier so it would depend on what it was if it
were if it was like a book like thing you know i think you know how much book deals usually cost right but that's there's profit on the end of that right there's millions no there can be if you're lucky if you're lucky i mean i think mostly you know the investigative reporters you know they'd be mostly happy with any kind of six figure advance to do something like that uh in the magazine business if you were going to do a big whack at something like that you know 6 000 words 10 000 words you'd once upon a time you would get you know uh 15 000 20 000 to do that because you you know you need it to take a while to do that work feel like if there's like real stories out there there could be a fund that's dedicated to real stories and in place of an editor like who would have control over the narrative you could have a committee of people like yourself and kyle and crystal and sauger and and where you would have like a signal group chat where you talk about an issue like hey there's a thing we want to do on this you know it's probably going to cost 20 000 to get all the pieces moving you know can we can we do something like that and then i think easily you could have a gofundme or a you know whatever any patreon something along those lines where people just donate to this fund that goes towards journalism and then at the end of the year there could be an accounting of it so that everybody knows it's all legit and no one's siphoning money off of it i don't think that's that hard i i think it would work it would definitely work financially um you know propublica is sort of is based on that model the the the there's a there's only a couple of problems the pro one is that there aren't that many people who know how to do the job that well left like uh that's terrifying yeah no it is it's it's pretty scary i mean i think um
you could have found uh a fair number of reporters who who knew how to do hardcore investigative journalism you know 10 years ago 15 years ago but the current generation has been raised on a different model that's based on being quick you know getting a couple of quotes putting something up fast and it's brief and it's more of a take than it is a dig right and so that mentality is of just investigative uh work is is disappearing so you'd have the problem of finding people who can do it the other problem is audiences don't necessarily love what we we call like you eat your vegetables journalism right like there's there's some of it out there there's plenty there are people who do good work but they have difficulty getting people to um to follow it because people do love the the [ __ ] that's out there right there they they eat up the culture war stuff yeah um so those are those are two problems i think i've always approached it that part of the job is is a sales job look you have to get people interested in stuff that's important you have to find a way to do it whether you're using humor whether you know you're using illustrations it doesn't matter whether you use fiction writing narrative techniques to get people hooked on something um you know that's that's part of the job i think uh and and you have to do the investigative stuff so it's it's it's a tough thing it takes a while to develop all those skills and they're not teaching kids in journalism to do that as much anymore do you think that with the rise of independent journalists do you think that it's possible that that might open up and people might look at that as a viable career path and they might say hey this is actually it's actually coming back i would hope so i mean if if the money's there it's the greatest job in the world i mean like you know this this job has taken me all over the planet i've gotten to meet every conceivable kind of person
on earth everyone from presidential candidates to professional athletes to people in prison to you know everywhere and you can go anywhere doing journalism um and you you get to play detective sometimes right which it's a really cool thing you got you got to do the work of you know coming to a situation and figuring out who did what and that's mentally and intellectually stimulating it's it's it's a great great job but people have been um i think they've been turned off to it because this new version of the job is much more like professional flattery it's much more political they're they're training kids to be like cortiers basically and they the people who come out of journalism schools now they they want to be close to power like they that that's the attraction for them is is the the idea of being the person who gets to sit next to a hillary clinton aide at a bar um you know at the end of a day and you know oh i know this person i or i hang out at a party with this person like that instead of you know going around the world or breaking a big story like that that that's what it is and uh i i think it's unfortunate because it's a cool job it is it's not just a cool job it's a cool job with romantic roots absolutely yeah i mean think about how many incredible stories have been broken and you know woodward and bernstein how many how people look at these people you know yeah think of the people who who've been journalists who've done such incredible things you know everybody from like ida tarbell to mark twain to um hunter thompson hunter thompson evelyn wall like you know yeah it's it's a great place for for if you if you want to be a writer i mean that that's how i got into it because i i i wanted to be a writer um but if you wanted to if you want to be a great investigator uh you know you can do that's a way into it too um you know there's the whole tradition of what we what we call participatory journalism where you do something and then you and
then you write about it um you know the george plimpton was famous right good for for you know playing professional football at the paper lion story uh but you know i've done some of that you know like doing you know work in russia or uh you know going undercover i lived in a church in texas uh for a while did you really yeah yeah actually the the john hagee uh church in san antonio um i sort of joined that church and wrote wrote about my experiences what are you doing there um so it was like an apocalyptic church is one of those churches that sort of believes the end of the world is coming did they have a date um they didn't have a date uh but they had they had all these crazy like we had a retreat um where they taught us to vomit our demons out into a paper bag uh so yeah we all got together and like we had to uh to do that so i had to pretend to be this like confused spiritually confused person i feel kind of guilty about it in retrospect it was kind of i'm not so sure isn't everybody a little spiritually confused we all are yeah i guess so but it's you know it's it it's a fun job i mean it's it's uh and and i think it's really really necessary too when done right i was just reading some they didn't have serpents did they did they use serpents they didn't no that's like the pentecostal thing right right yeah they're the ones who speak tongues too right well we did do that really yes oh yeah yeah i wasn't so good at that it all sounds the same it all goes into this it all sounds like a fake language like no one does it well no one does it where it's all like wow that sounds like do you um what is that um oh god there's a manuscript that they think is fake and it's been around forever the protocols of the elders of zion no no no no no the voynich what is it called um the something the voice man the spanish script that's it three point codes yes there's this ancient book
and they don't know how old it is how old do they think it is uh so they're thinking before it was like a long lost language and as time's gone on now they're kind of thinking it's not a language at all it's like someone just made up your english yeah oh they made it up but it's really good so it's it's confusing people see me and pull up some images of it so this it's got drawings and this language that they thought yeah it's really interesting it's old as [ __ ] but like look at how all the letters are written it's all beautiful and no one knows what the [ __ ] it says they have no idea and there's a lot of theories but for the longest time they were trying to decipher it and i think i i might be speaking out of tune here because they might have changed but i think they decided somewhere along the line that it's not really a language that someone just made up a fake language so i'm assuming that they had like uh linguists and code breakers stick a crack at it and they just couldn't it's early 15th century so somewhere in the early 1400s somebody so clear that was the uh manuscript decoded i don't think it has been right 2019 the manuscript was propelled back at the headlines once again when an academic made the explosive claim that he had success succeeded where everyone had failed and successfully decoded the mysterious text i think that's horseshit though i don't think that's true if if somebody 500 years ago made this beautiful thing but made it complete gibberish just to [ __ ] with us in the future that's kind of amazing right i really respect that yeah if that's what they did i don't know what they did yeah that's funny i i think they think that somebody might have made it to sell to someone like someone that might have made it in the early 1400s to sell as like some ancient text it currently consists of around 240
pages there's evidence that additional pages are missing some pages are foldable sheets of varying size most the pages have fantastical illustrations or diagrams some crudely colored with sections of the manuscript showing people fictitious plants astrological symbols et cetera the text is written from left to right the manuscript was named after wilfrid voynich a polish book dealer who purchased it in 1912. yeah i don't think that anyone has translated it there was so much [ __ ] back then oh yeah there was right that's hilarious that reminds me of the uh go ahead i was gonna say like the earliest books while i was reading something about some of the earliest somebody brought it up and then i read something something i think somebody brought it up on this podcast that's i remember reading through this i thought we had come to an answer but i'm i don't remember it i'm not finding it the answer whether or not it's legit yeah like even i thought they found out what some of the stuff was saying and it was just like nonsense or yeah i don't know if that's true i think it's really under debate but the earliest books the real successful ones were about like how to spot witches like everybody thinks like oh well once they started printing books that's when people started learning things like no no it's kind of like today right yeah there's a lot there's a lot of witch hunting going on today like like you think of like if if youtube was dominated by q and on q and on theories that was like ancient publishing yeah amazing first started writing because i never even thought of that i forget who brought that up someone brought that up on the show that the earliest books were about witches and and i was like what and they go yeah that was the most successful books at the time once they started printing books like how to spot witches right right you talked about it on the ninth episode but who was it that the ninth episode ever yeah oh jesus wow wow my memory is gone my memory is like a hard drive that's like a one gigabyte hard drive but i'm trying to stuff 18 gigs of information in there it just
spills over right and then someone will bring some i'll go oh yeah oh now i remember that okay i found the folder and then i'll you know yeah no for me i think i'm just actually it's shrinking in size that uh that hard drive yeah well it's it's definitely not working that good um but this voynich manuscript uh i forget what my point was it's uh just it reminds me of the um remember the amazing story about the zodiac code yeah uh when they published it and like the nsa the cia uh and the fbi like their cryptographers couldn't crack it but then this couple and like sausalito were just like sitting at their breakfast table and and they were the ones who figured it out oh is that true yeah it is true yeah it's it's in the original um zodiac books the the the the cartoonist robert gray smith we were going somewhere with this when i got to the voynich manuscript what the hell were we talking about right before that he just there was a point don't media business professional standards uh talking in tongues speaking in tongues that's right that's right so you you were just talking about gibberish um that fake languages that fake languages all sound the same also nobody does it where it sounds like wow that sounds like a good fake language no it's it's it's incredibly unconvincing except but it was very hard for me to do i've found like uh that was the hardest hardest part of the gig didn't jrr tolkien write a whole fake language to go along with the lord of the rings oh like hobbitish or something i think he did or elvish yeah yeah i think he did write something some elvish language i think he wrote a fake language to go along with his books so did um anthony burgess well he just basically took russian words and made them into slang for clockwork orange oh really yeah uh but uh yeah he had his his own sort of slang slang language that's a cool thing to do you know did this uh church that you did were they uh some of the people that did the pray the gay away stuff um so there there was a little bit of that
they did they didn't do conversion therapy exactly uh but they they definitely counseled people who were uh uh who are in that situation let's put it that way um i was i i thought about doing one of those but then uh where i would actually join one of those retreats um and see how they they went about trying to convert people but um yeah that never worked out there was someone who was a famous politician and their husband was involved in one of those things i'm trying to remember but her no no no it was a female politician and the husband seemed he seemed gay and he was involved that's a weird thing to say but you know some people do seem gay i you know it's it's like you risk being criticized and being called a bigot for saying that but if someone's talking like this it's very rare that's a straight person right right yeah yeah for whatever reason this is not a this is in no way a judgment against gay people this guy was doing pray the gay way stuff and someone did some investigative reporting and did something it was like this guy like clearly has a heart on and he's like behind me hugging me and telling me that you know jesus does not want him to be gay and that we're all gonna work through this and he he's like the whole thing was like uber bizarre that's crazy it's amazing that that that whole conversion therapy thing was was such a big deal like even 10 15 years ago yeah there have been you know a lot of changes in since then well changes in acceptance successfully but also changes in an understanding of homosexuality that it's this is not a choice it's like this like the idea that is a choice is nonsense right right and we although they're now changing the the the thinking on that really well i mean that's i not to wade into an area that's completely radioactive but you know they're too late it's the
you know the trans issue the whole idea that you the something like that is determined by biology runs a little bit counter to to current thinking okay so gender fluidity very different though right yeah the the reason why trans is different because there are trans people right that start off as biological males and they identify with being a female but they've had children with females and they've had relationships with females and then as they transition they remain attracted to females right this is very common so i don't think it's quite the same as gay it's it's very different in that it's whatever it is in the human mind that makes you identify with another gender it seems to have nothing to do with your sexual preference hmm okay yeah i know absolutely nothing about it so i know i shouldn't have fine well i i knew almost nothing about it until i got like attacked for attacking a female mma fighter who used to be male for 30 years and then wasn't telling anybody that she used to be male and transitioned and fought two different times against females that thought she was a biological female and beat the [ __ ] out of them like horrendous beatings broke this lady's skull like literally fractured her face it was scary stuff and when you watch the fights it the fights looked like a guy beating up a woman it wasn't like someone who's particularly skillful it was just wrong right and it was at a very low level of mma like if you if you saw like at high levels when someone has like the skills to protect themselves from someone who's the same size as them but physically superior then you would have less consequences because they just
know how to protect themselves better but these these women weren't that skillful so the strength and the the physical power was a huge factor right and i was [ __ ] furious because it was like this is crazy and in criticizing it and and being like very very vocal about it then i started having to like start doing research on this like what like why are people reacting this way like what is actually going on here it wasn't that one of the reasons they would they wanted bernie to disavow you yes yes so yeah and what's what's amazing about this is that um it's again it goes back to the same kind of instinct you know behind the lab leak theory process which is we've decided something right we're not going to discuss it anymore so if you discuss it uh you you're in the bad zone right and um you're not even allowed to bring it up not even allowed to bring it up and and so there are just so many the of these places in the kind of cultural landscape that are that are just you know no-fly zones for for talking about things well abigail schreier is experiencing that in you know like the most hateful and aggressive way with uh her book i believe it's called irreversible damage right which is all about rapid onset gender dysphoria that seems to be happening to a lot of young girls and they're trying to figure out what is going on when the percentage of people who identify as trans that are young girls is up several thousand percent right which is crazy yeah like what is what's happening obviously there there are people who don't think that's happening um and and think that that uh [Music] rapid onset gender dysphoria isn't a thing i i interviewed um abigail because she she also had a problem with the internet platforms uh you know i think it was with amazon right yes yeah um and again that's that whole phenomenon
of okay it's controversial well that used to be part of what having a first amendment was all about you know we we talk about this stuff the whole the whole point of having it is is to protect discussions around things that are difficult yes right like we don't have it so that we can have obvious conversations right um and so if you think she's wrong uh you know let's talk about it right don't go to an internet platform and make it you know and and shut it down at the source and and make it impossible for somebody to have the discussion well it used to be the right that everybody was terrified of that was gonna burn books right and it was based on religion so now the left is doing it and it's based on religion also it's just a non-defined religion right a religion of wokeness like you have to have these parameters that you operate under and as soon as you step outside of those parameters you're supposed to be shut down and de-platformed which is the the term right it's essentially the same thing you're calling for a book burning right you're calling for a ban yeah and you're calling for a ban on someone who very some respected intelligent people agree with her have agreed with some of the things she said have disagreed with some of the other things that she said have discussed these things and realize that there is an issue here where people are malleable this is the concept right the concept is that there is some sort of social acceptance and embracing of people who are trans and that this could be a problem with some people who are easily influenced and maybe socially awkward or maybe even on the spectrum and then some someone comes along and says you feel weird because you're really trans and if you give that person testosterone one of the things that happens with the administration of testosterone in in in people particularly in girls is there's a euphoria that comes with it there's a sense of well-being there's uh you get confidence and they might start thinking this is what has been wrong with me all this time now these are not
my words these are not my opinions this is just explaining what this phenomenon supposedly how you can define it and and i've done zero research so i just want to be real clear about that i don't know if that's actually what's going on the yeah so so the the assertion is that uh you have people in clusters uh you know social clusters who are you know they call it the social contagion yeah uh phenomenon and there would be other factors too like therapeutic attention is also something that uh you know some people may think is is a positive right kids kids might uh experience um they might feel better about life uh because they're getting more attention from clinicians or teachers something like that but you have to test that right like that's the whole point is like it's we're not deciding at the outset whether this is right or wrong it's that the way science works is well let's let's do a study about that figure out what's actually happening um and instead it's like if you have the con having the conversation is now is now dangerous it's perilous right which is crazy to me like one of the reasons i became kind of politically liberal in the first place is because we didn't have those uh prohibitions uh you know the the comedian said all the forbidden things the intellectuals weren't afraid to have the scary discussions um i remember the the first thing i liked about noam chomsky was that it was that he stood up for the speech rights of some crazy holocaust denier right um because the the whole idea was uh you know you had you had to have dialogue and fight for it um and what we're doing now we're just we have this atmosphere where people don't want to they're they're just sort of deeply interested in in scaring people away from certain topics yeah which i i don't understand well a
great example of that is the aclu the aclu when it first started they defended nazis they defended nazis right to speak not defended their position as being accurate but defended nazis right to speak because they said that if you don't if if you believe in free speech you believe in all speech and even if it's wrong even if it's inaccurate you have to defend free speech now now they are like one of the locust organizations that's out there they they fly by this doctrine and you know their their positions on things are entirely ideologically driven yeah there was a great documentary called the mighty ira that's done by fire you know the the um and they profile howard glasser who is the head of the aclu for a long time and it goes into the whole mechanics of um what the decision uh was to support uh the the nazis and skokie and it was specifically based on the idea that all these aclu people had fought in the uh civil rights era that they had they had campaigned for civil rights and their whole argument was if you deny if you let the town of skokie decide who can and cannot march um in their town then you're going to have some southern town the next day uh deciding that a black organization or the naacp can't march there right are we are we going to make a million different authorities who are going to decide who gets to speak and who doesn't and that's a very compelling argument right and and it was deeply thought out and they were they were they were really really um you know they took it very seriously and from an intellectual level like um we know how offensive this is to people they they thought about how what it would mean to the residents of skokie who many of whom were holocaust survivors what it would mean for them to see those marchers go past their houses they understood how how uh you know if if anything is harm if any kind of
speech is harmed that is it right but still you know that this is a foundational idea in the united states is that we we we defend this because it's it's part of our identity and we're losing i think we're losing touch with why we have those ideas you know right and why it's so important to debate these ideas and that you know when people are confused they can see a better argument they could see someone who eloquently spells out why these nazis are wrong and then you go okay now i have a framework now i understand like if someone doesn't know why they're wrong like maybe someone's uneducated maybe someone grew up around people that were racists or nazis and then they get this compelling explanation of everything now you wouldn't have had that if you didn't have the nazis like you kind of need the [ __ ] and the bad people of the world so that you can say here's why they're wrong and then you know it gets messy and in the age of social media that's where it's weird because these [ __ ] never really had a platform before where they can get on these uh whatever platform social media allows them and they can develop massive followings saying crazy [ __ ] like and but that's still the same we have to realize that even though it's new and it's uncomfortable and you're seeing these numbers and you know people are being indoctrinated into these ideas what's important is to have a compelling argument against it yeah and to have that and to say hey this is why these people are wrong look here's here's the the most eloquent thought out articulate argument against that and then where reasonable people are allowed to look at these two things and go well clearly this these people over here are correct and clearly i see why these people are so [ __ ] up and this is what's wrong yeah doing it the other way just saying okay we're not going to let you see that idea um we're going to make sure that it comes or it comes to fix with a warning label or it's uh
we're going to make sure that person does not appear on this internet platform you know i mean you know what the streisand effect is right it's it's explain that to people the whole story behind that yeah i don't remember exactly what it's a house she had a house in malibu and it was this big beautiful house and they took photos of it from the air and uh she got pissed and she demanded it be taken down off the internet and when she did that everybody's like what house is that and it became way more popular and then everybody wanted to know where barbra streisand's house was and that became the streisand effect she was operating under this delusion that we were living in 1950 when you can get the newspaper to like take something down and that would be it that'd be the end of it but in the age of the internet it has the opposite effect intended and this and this gets back to what we were saying at the very beginning like this this idea that people have to understand that not every there isn't a solution to everything like right and i i think internet speech is the classic example of where people think there must be something we can do some thing step that we can take to make sure that these kinds of thinkers don't exist anymore and there isn't like it's logistically impossible for a company like facebook or google uh or twitter to scan individually each piece of content it's being created at two faster rate the only way to do it is to is to have a better argument and win on on that level culturally yeah um and they they think that there's some kind of sorry mechanical solution to this um and there isn't it's not and and you have to be comfortable with that like that's part of again that's part of what it being a person is is you have to deal with some things that are just you know disturbing yeah and you have to have messy conversations and you know and you're going to have to explain to your children what's going on here and who these people are great here's uh this is a related do you guys are you aware of this new
hate group march that was walking where all these guys were walking with american flags get back in the truck what's that they're really like yes they all jumped in the back of a u-haul truck together there has never been a thing that i've ever seen where almost immediately i was like those are feds uh oh did this happen i immediately like that's fake like my immediate feeling i looked at them first of all these guys are too slim i'm looking at these guys they're all in shape they're all thin they're they're uniformly marching with flags i mean there's no way these [ __ ] idiots would be this organized then someone did a deep dive on twitter i wish i could remember who but someone did a deep dive on twitter and found out that the account in which this whole thing went viral is a completely fake account that has no followers and was started about a month ago with an ai generated face it's a fake face as like the profile picture it's one of those pictures they take a bunch of people's faces and they smush it and make this one lady and then she had a picture of a dog in like one of her facebook posts but there's no engagement there's no interaction the entire account is only a month old and her post on this somehow or another went viral and this is what started the sharing of it but if you look at these people walking down the street with their masks on all dressed in black all wearing like essentially a uniform all holding the same size american flag and then eventually they all jumped into the back of a u-haul and were carted off at the end of this stupid [ __ ] march but if you watch this i'm like what are you guys doing what's this supposed to be some like right wing on hate group exactly exactly and they call themselves the patriot something or another patriot front patriot front you need to see this you can see we need to see the video we need to see the video because when you see them marching you look at them marching you go why are these guys in such good shape
idiots are unusually fat like there's some fatness to them like they don't have discipline right right it's not this is not these aren't wise folks that are eating correctly and i mean americans are most usually yes this is uniformly thin and fit looking with the same outfits on the same flags like you're telling me the fbi didn't know about these people right you're telling me the fbi is not monitoring fringe groups and they're they they were not aware these people were this [ __ ] organized out of nowhere they pop out with the same size flags the same outfit on goose stepping they're walking not gusting but you know walking in this at the same pace in the in a [ __ ] orderly line like who's who organized this this is them on their bus i was trying to i thought this was going to turn into the video then see the video of them walking is that the video that i'm watching they're linking the two blog posts so it's not gonna god there's gotta be a video of them walking i know i've watched it so here's the uninformed uniformed white nationalist group marches on lincoln memorial cnn's all in they're like we're all in on this come on show us look at these guys look at these guys where's the fat people how come they're all wearing the same clothes do that again what the [ __ ] is this is that have you ever seen anything that looks more like feds tell me that doesn't look like feds right it's like the 101st airborne bro look at this these guys are all runners these guys look like they just got out of buds i mean what the [ __ ] out of here they could be real right they could be they could they could be wrong matt tybee i'm an unreliable source and i'm a comedian but looking at that i'm calling [ __ ] give me that again give me that again uh yeah okay well this gets back to like the the the oklahoma ivermectin story where were you right they're all wearing windy winter coats yeah like you know look at this the [ __ ] out of here how do they all have like uniformed outfits on they have the same color pants
for the most part very little variation they have tan or brown pants dark blue shirts with a [ __ ] stupid flag on it this asshole's got a drum back that up look at the [ __ ] drum [ __ ] are you paul revere what the [ __ ] are you doing with that drum he's walking around with a band drum power drum line this is so stupid it hurts my feelings they all have flags keep that up there there's videos from them from like july but i'd like to see that again so you know what's so interesting about this though is that again oh okay i just need to see go ahead tell me so look at this i mean maybe they're real maybe they're real could be real but i'm calling [ __ ] they have the same [ __ ] size flags the same white coloring on their face the same tanned hats on get the [ __ ] out of here and why are they wearing masks by the way like because they're cowards right or they're feds yeah like right yes so your instinct when you see that well my i mean i'm suspicious of everything i certainly wouldn't put that up and be like chilling seeing like you know without looking into it a little bit you know yeah but again back in the day the it was the left that july 4th so they've been doing this for a while yeah oh so that's why this group marches through the heart of phil oh i remember this from philadelphia and look the same thing like they have the same shields the same irish line dancing so weird you think it's real if it is real it could be it's just weird they seem like feds to me they're too they're too fit but i know that doesn't mean that racist can't exercise i know racist exercise folks relax but i'm just saying when you're looking at that 42 chapters including pennsylvania new jersey they're linked to a group called vanguard america which gained infamy after the charlottesville virginia event they recruit on college campuses with flyers conduct flash protests and even
commit acts of vandalism could be i mean who knows uh there's enough [ __ ] on america for it to be possible just not i don't know if they're all they would all be thin like that um what was the thing recently where they found out that a great percentage of the michigan thing yes explain that these are the people that were trying to kidnap the government explaining i don't know i didn't cover the story but basically it was a an attempt to cover kidnapped uh governor whitmer right and they found out that a high percentage of the people involved were fbi informants which again back in the day would not have been surprising to people on the left because this is part of like the you know what you we were taught back in the when they had cointelpro yes and fbi informants were no you know it was notorious in the 60s and 70s this idea of having you know ajahn's provocateurs and in the crowd people who were throwing things that soldiers were coming back from vietnam uh to discredit the anti-war crowd right like uh the assassination of fred hampton the infiltration of the black panthers like you know all the stuff it was understood that the fbi did this stuff or and or that different law enforcement agencies did this stuff now now suddenly people on the left disbelieve instantly that this happens they they are reluctant to accept it now again you have to prove it in each case yes right so you can't you can't just you know you can't just assert that this or that person is a is a federal agent but you should have some healthy skepticism about each one of these things you know and and especially now with uh the way media and the internet works and virality oops sorry is that you yeah that is me i'm sorry jamie go ahead please go no i just sent jamie this
it's the great it's the greatest meme it's they're all dressed up like spider-man and all of them says fed fed fed another fed and then one says some autistic [ __ ] some poor guy that they trick into doing something you know that was the suspicion amongst the conspiracy theorists about the boston bombing right that they had radicalized those brothers and actually talked them into committing some sort of a terrorist act right right yeah and and right yeah again you have to look at it case by case but it definitely happens it definitely happens it happened in dallas that one guy that they got i believe he's from egypt he was 19 years old and they talked him into using a cell phone to detonate a bomb that they had provided him that was not really a bomb and when he used that cell phone to detonate the bomb then they arrested him so they set him up radicalized him brought him in told him you know you're going to do this thing it's going to be amazing you're going to be awesome so we were all up in arms about this when the first war on terror happened because we knew [ __ ] like this was going on whether whether it was you know infor informants pushing people to do things they didn't want to do or creating terror watch lists uh no-fly lists um putting people under illegal surveillance illegally detaining them we were we were all concerned about this you know at least liberals were yeah and and suddenly now that they're doing this other kind of war on terror this domestic war on terror um nobody cares it's it's as if those concerns no longer exist well they found a loophole they found a way to sneak it in and an acceptable socially acceptable way right exactly and that's kudos to the to the authorities for coming up with it because it's brilliant it's it is as a marketing you know especially trump is is obviously a huge part of this whole thing um you know selling to america the idea because you think about it before trump think about how unpopular the
intelligence services were in 2014 2015 after the snowden revelations yeah you talked to snowden right he was one of the one of the most famous people in the world and he you know he we got the heads of the intelligence agencies lying to congress openly getting away with it people were they were furious right yeah uh and then all of a sudden in a heartbeat those exact same people the the people we were everybody was so mad at suddenly became heroes because they were the ones in the front lines you know battling donald trump right um and battling him by lying about him but by lying you know by lying about him incidentally yeah right like that like that that was that was fascinating comey became a hero comey john brennan yeah but then when you look at what those guys actually did you're like holy [ __ ] like you're not supposed to do that of course not yeah and and it this is all coming out now i mean i was one of the few like glenn was another one like there were there was a small circle of journalists at the time that you know the in the early years of trump who were just like something about this just doesn't smell right like it the the story just feels wrong uh intelligence sources especially anonymous ones are inherently untrustworthy uh and yet suddenly american audiences are trusting them on mass and they shouldn't you know and that's no different from it's ever been we should we we shouldn't have trusted them in when when the wmd thing happened um and you know people like glenn and myself pointed that out then and we shouldn't trust them now you know and but they they've people were so worked up about donald trump that suddenly they were ready to jump in bed with people like john brennan and comey and clapper and all these guys like these like horrible people it's so crazy but one thing that governments have been our government in particular has been really good at is capitalizing on a state of chaos and
using it to their advantage and this is something that happened post 9 11 with the patriot act and the patriot act 2 which i believe the patriot act has never been used to arrest a terrorist final i wouldn't know that find out that's true um but it has been used to arrest many drug dealers and to use on people who were you know air quotes enemies um but when chaos happens and they realize that there's some opportunity they take advantage of opportunities it's always been a part of history people have always done that well that seems like what's happening now and that seems like something that we should be concerned about absolutely look look it was transparently what they were doing after 9 11. uh everybody should be scared to death therefore we need additional powers to do a through z right and it's it was nuts the stuff they you know the fisa enhancements act and you know the patriot act the the no-fly list the watch list all this stuff the fbi's national security letters you know this this thing where they would the fbi sends a letter to a company tells them that they they um are are barred from telling their customers that they the that they're divulging their information to the fbi they send out tens of thousands of those letters there was an ig report about that actually there were a bunch of ig reports about that um and this whole regime of surveillance you know just got approved willy-nilly because the public was scared people were freaked out yeah no they they didn't want it to happen again so they they just said okay go ahead we trust you right and of course they they massively abused these programs um you know they started to do things that were uh that were really crazy like you know they using the enhanced secret surveillance tools uh as uh as evidence in criminal cases but it would be hidden in other words like if you you'd be charged with a drug crime
right uh and if you asked for discovery they would give you all the documents that they had to give you uh but they wouldn't let you know that maybe you were under surveillance or there was a fisa warrant you've been caught uh in some other way they don't have to disclose that stuff they don't have to disclose the national security letter stuff and so they it became like this separate legal system and americans just got used to it and and then when trump happened they were so afraid of him and all the all the possibilities that came with that that that now they're now they're willing to let all kinds of new tools be used on them yeah it's just crazy it's crazy that they're not nobody's more worried about it well when i heard joe biden say that the biggest threat to this country is white supremacy i was like okay what was going on here like what are they doing like what are they doing because look charlottesville was horrific right and when that guy ran over a bunch of people with his car in charlottesville it opened up the door to people saying like hey this is genuinely horrible it is scary it is scary but then they swoop in and say this is the number one problem in this country right like which is crazy to say because it's a small percentage of people that are [ __ ] mind that generally don't have much of an impact on our culture right but when the president says that white supremacy is the biggest problem that we face i immediately go who told you say that what are you doing what's point what are you planning right like what's going on here like how many people like clearly clearly there's a lot of people that were involved in january 6 that were out of their [ __ ] mind and really did think that they were going to take over the government right they really did think that donald trump was truly the president and they were queuing on all the way and they really thought but clearly there were some feds involved in that they were manipulating those people clearly if you i've not only seen that one guy we've highlighted him on the show there's this one guy that was telling people over and over
again they got to go in that building i'm telling you right now we got to get in there and that guy's never faced any charges and they know his name and it's like a real [ __ ] shadowy sort of a situation like what's going on here right because you know if the government knew that something was going on like that for sure they would infiltrate for sure they've infiltrated all these wacky groups that's just part of their job they have to kind of find out how dangerous they are i mean it's part of their job it would be a news story if they weren't right right it would be irresponsible right yeah they would yeah they would be incompetent so it's it is their job now once they're in there the question is how much manipulation are they allowed to do before it becomes their idea right which brings us to like the whitey bulger type situation right like we're you know explain that please well the the the fbi had uh an incredibly close relationship with uh he was an informant yeah with whitey bulger who the irish gangster in in boston who uh was an fbi informant and essentially they were sort of green lighting um you know his activities in order to get to the the italian mafia uh and you know but there was a there's a line you know that they crossed uh oh you know into into actively being involved right and yeah and questions how often do they do that you know right is that standard operational procedure right yeah we don't know i mean i think uh it's it's interesting that the the guy who's doing the process the the investigation into the russia good stuff now john doram was also the prosecutor in that case um i don't think that's a coincidence because he's you know but anyway uh but yeah no the the the thing with biden talking about um you know how white supremacy is the biggest threat it's clearly there's clearly something deeply wrong with this country that there clearly is domestic white terrorism there's no
question that it exists but they've become really really loose with that term like the written house case was a classic example for for me right of of how you just you have to be more careful about like they were calling him a white supremacist something the person that called him a white speaker the president called him like just just in the level of libel yeah we used to be afraid to do that right like you would have to have something that allowed you to say that this guy was a white supremacist before you put that on the air in print because you'd be afraid of being sued you'd be the end of your career yeah um and all they really had were some vague cultural markers right like would i tell my kid to pick up an ar-15 and go go to a protest absolutely not but you know as a journalist i can't call him that unless i have something more there was a the difference between calling it a protest and the air of fear and chaos that was prevalent when that whole thing went down this was post the george floyd riots and everything was crazy in los angeles they were lighting cop cars on fire there were pallets of bricks that are mysteriously dropped off at protest sites and windows were smashed through beverly hills they had an early curfew people have quick memories they have short memories and they forget how [ __ ] crazy it was like right after that george floyd protest or right after george floyd's murder when everybody was chaotic like the the country was in a state of chaos that's when that happened right so this kid was asked by i think they had a used car lot by the way have you ever seen the guys who uh he was told to they're indian i think they're indian i think i think if this is accurate i got another meme for you because i love memes oh i'll find it um i mean the other thing about that case was that it you know the the the protests in kenosha were about the jacob blake case which was yes
and you know i wrote a book about the eric garner case uh which was you know unequivocally a brutal police killing where the police were at fault like no question about it but the the the blake incident was much more complicated right right and there's a reason like if you look at the reasons why the the d.a and uh and the civil rights division of the justice department didn't file charges in that case is because there was a lot of stuff about that case that was you know made it made it there's a lot of gray area in terms of the decision making that the that the police made there and people naturally assumed this is this is what we do know we see something on on twitter we see like a 20-second piece of video we think we know the whole story but the rea the reality is most of the time the initial impression of news is wrong uh at least somewhere there's usually some kind of error built in and that's why we need the next two and three days and months to sort out exactly what happened but and in that case you know we we just didn't um there there were a lot of ambiguities that just got turned instantaneously into into a narrative that um you know that was really unfortunate there's also a frantic rush and to say that someone was racist or a white supremacist and there was a narrative that that was rewarded well this means i just sent you this is why i sent it i have a whole meme folder on my iphone that i just can't wait to use so he wanted to protect the business owned by these guys i don't know if they're middle eastern or indian or what they were it says shoots these guys and shows shoots three white guys right worst white supremacist ever not only that but one of the guys that he shot was
a repeat offender child rapist right the guy in the middle i mean he he raped multiple children mentally ill i mean yeah literally one of the it's just one of the worst crimes you could imagine but they sort of without hesitation people would do things like say well it's clearly a problem that they're um you know there weren't enough uh minorities in the jury in this case where their everybody involved was white um i think a lot of a lot of the news consumers were so sort of led to believe certain things just by the way by implication they were they they didn't always identify whether the people who got shot were white or black or anything they would just sort of say they were shot meanwhile they would say repeatedly that what that written house was white i have friends that are black that didn't know that they were white victims until the trial started right and that said dude i thought he shot black people they didn't they literally didn't know and so the the thing was it was a black lives matter protest he shot people they thought he shot black people they thought he was a racist and then the president calls him a white supremacist i got the picture right right and and you can see how that can happen yes if you if you're just picking up you know the newspaper or you're watching cnn and they're just neglecting to leave out certain details um which you know it has to be strategic and again this is this this gets back to what i was saying before it's not like anybody tells you to do this right you just sort of know that the story is gonna sell better or it's going to play better if you highlight certain things right and and i think that's what happens with you know with a lot of the people in this case and i it's it's uncomfortable to talk about this stuff because people assume that you have sympathies with somebody like rittenhouse or you know all the people
who lionized them on you know on fox fox news that's not it you just you just gotta get the stuff right you have a heightened responsibility to get it right when people are amped up and they're and they're mad and they're ready to go out in the streets and fight each other yeah that's when you have to be super careful about what you say you know especially in media it really highlights the importance of real journalism because this would have never taken place if real journalism had been steadfastly followed from the jump if people said this is what we know and this is what happened these are the victims these people were one of the things about like any kind of protest or any kind of chaos and this is something that is just part of human nature when people know that there's chaos and there's protest there's a lot of people that join in that really have nothing to do with it exactly and i think that's that's what was going on here particularly with that one guy who was the child i'm a rapist right and that happened all over the country by the way after the floyd thing and which was which is one of the reasons why the the reporting about that was was so disappointing right because there were there were lots and lots of reporters and i knew a few of them um who were kind of discouraged from talking about uh you know some of the ancillary stories right like okay this neighborhood has been damaged therefore elderly people can't get their prescriptions because the drugstore has been burned down or whatever whatever it is right because the because the implication is that the protesters their cause was unjust so let's let's not do that story um but in many cases these weren't really even protesters right uh in some places they were uh and in in some places they weren't right but that's but that's what the job is for you like we have to go out there and ask you know uh was this was this part of the protest was this opportunistic looting you know sorry you and this phone just put it on silent how dare you i
know i know i love your ringtone though it's very festive it is festive it's cute don't worry about it yeah listen man i'm the last person i've i've [ __ ] up i've done that um the the problem with being honest about that when there's a frenzy in the air which there most certainly was post george floyd is that it's dangerous and you know you can get attacked for just stating facts like um there was a lot of people on the right that were trying to say that he wasn't murdered and that he died of a fentanyl overdose and he would have died anyway and to those people i was saying [ __ ] you because like you have no idea what it's like to have someone lean on your neck for eight and a half minutes i actually do like i've had guys do jiu jitsu and put their [ __ ] knee on my neck for a minute or 30 seconds it's horrific to imagine being handcuffed and someone do that on the concrete not even a jiu jitsu mat it's it's impossible to overstate that you most likely are either you're going to go unconscious or something something really [ __ ] up is going to happen to you it's very very bad it's not as simple as he got a drug over so we have [ __ ] clear evidence of this guy kneeling on his neck for 8 minutes and 40 something seconds right there is no [ __ ] way that didn't have an effect on him and i think someone tried to do that they tried to make a point that it's not that big of a deal and they had someone do it to him and they tapped out early was it crowder did he do that someone did that i don't know who did that but my point is because of that there was a narrative where you weren't allowed to say other things about george floyd that were true like the fact that he held a gun to a a pregnant woman's stomach when he was robbing her like he wasn't a good guy he did all he should not have had that happen to him by any stretch of the imagination there's no world where what that guy did was okay but this is not a
good guy like to make statues of him and lionize him and make him out to be some sort of a hero that's not accurate either right but you couldn't say that yeah they made sort of a religious icon out of them right the the same kind of misreporting on the in the other direction happened in the garner case which i again i wrote a book about um there were a lot of people who tried to say that he was killed because he was diabetic and he was overweight um yeah and that clearly was not the case like i had i had police sources trying to sell me that off the record all the time that um oh you know he would he would have gone anyway right and look a watch the video but don't even just do that like read the medical examiner's report which says homicide on it uh you know yeah because they've determined medically the cause of death was and you know compression of the chest in other words you you can't just go off what somebody says about something you have to look into it and like look into it again and again and again and and you know in the case of garner like garner was somebody who had some pretty bad stuff in his his past going back a long way but had kind of turned his life around and was somebody who was known on the block as being a really good dude who broke up fights um you know gave all his money to his f to his family members one of the reasons his clothes were in such disrepair is that he wouldn't buy himself new clothes but he gave every every dollar to his kids wow like that's he was a good dude but you can't but these are these are details you gotta you know you gotta tell the truth about the other stuff like yeah i knew his daughter erica and when we talked about like how how she wanted to see the book done and i said well how do you want me to deal with the
stuff from his past you know um and she and she said look he was he was just a man right like you got to show all that stuff uh and i thought that was incredibly cool of her you know like she she uh she really admired her father she thought he had gotten through a lot of things but she didn't want him to be like a two-dimensional character you know that is very admirable um it's fascinating when you think how the times have changed since then because now there's not a chance in hell they would arrest him for doing that policing has gotten so loose they're so scared of arresting people for he got arrested for selling loose cigarettes he wasn't even doing it that's the hilarious part right right right he was that day he mean he he had done it in the past right but he wasn't doing it that day and they they physically manhandled him and they strangle them and you know and then they try to say it wasn't chokehold which is the same thing that i say about the the the thing with george floyd [ __ ] you yeah anybody who tries to say that do that to me i'm gonna tap out it's a chokehold he's [ __ ] strangling the guy like if you get a guy who knows how to choke you and i'm assuming the cop knows how to choke people you seem like a strong guy you get a hold of your neck like that that's a [ __ ] chokehold it's not just a restrain and it didn't have to happen one thing that has changed that i think i mean there's a lot of negativity there's a lot of negative [ __ ] that's happened from this whole defund the police thing and the fact that um you know the police officers feel so they did they don't feel like they can do their job anymore without risking getting in trouble for something like they're just a standard job so they're letting so many more things happen and if you look at the amount of crimes like the uptick in crimes post pandemic it's irrational i mean it's really wild what and that's another thing that i that was really disappointing to me after the um
after the floyd thing happened because nobody wanted to look at the the policy issue like why what's the biggest contributing factor to police brutality cases it's the number of contacts you have between police and people and a lot of that has to do with the heightened number of stops that you have through programs like stop and frisk um or in new york it was clean halls right like they're it's this this uh what they what they call the community policing techniques the whole idea is let's stop a gazillion people um we'll search them all right uh because or we'll pat them down that's based on a a a supreme court case called ohio v terry that allows police to do that if they have articulable suspicion that somebody's committing a crime they're allowed to pat you down so they used to not really use that that much the innovation in the 80s 90s and going forward was let's let's just use that a lot let's just start let's start stopping people all the time and patting them down right and they did it hundreds of thousands of times in new york they did it in every city in the country and what happens when you massively increase the number of times that police put your their hands on people a percentage of those contacts are going to go wrong right they just will somebody's going to get mad they're not going to want to see their their book bag emptied on on the ground they're not going to be you know they're not going to want to have somebody put their hands down their pants um and eventually someone's gonna say no like eric garner right and you're gonna have a death on your hands that was totally avoidable yeah right and so but you do need police for the real stuff like in other words if somebody's somebody's at a uh you know
shows up at his ex-girlfriend's house and starts waving a gun or a knife around and picks up a kid and runs for a car like that's when you actually do need the police to intervene and that's what got lost in this whole debate was like what do we what do we actually want police to do you know versus what have they been doing and there was almost no discussion of those policy issues it was it was just police are bad and you know therefore let's take their money away whereas there's there's so many instantly fixable things they could have done the most liberal cities have had the most irrational responses to it so like look the eric the garner thing is horrible right that should have never happened so here we go where we are now in san francisco you can steal 900 worth of stuff and you can't get arrested so now you're having mass lootings where people are just running into stores throwing stuff in their bag and then leaving right which is crazy like northern california is [ __ ] they're really and now la la is experiencing a rash of these smash and grabs they don't have any faith at all they're that there's law enforcement that's going to take care of these things so the their fear of the cops is like non-existent now they're just stealing things right it's happening so often that it's an epi they're they're literally calling it an epidemic like what do we do about this how do you stop this and how do you stop this given the the current climate the way people are viewing the police and the way the cops are viewing the support they have from the community and from the government it's kind of crazy well and and a lot of those ideas probably came from people who live in affluent white communities who don't know what it is to to occasionally need to call the police yes right they live in towns where the the police are basically there you know kind of for show or they do they get overtime to to do
traffic stops and or to you know a school parade and stuff like that they're not there for real crime right if you if you go into a tough neighborhood like where eric garner lived in in staten island there are debates in the street like um you know there'll be one group of people who say if this was a white neighborhood um they would never allow this much crime there'd be more police right and there and there there are people who are angry that they that there isn't uh a legitimate police presence like at all times to protect them from things right and there's another group that thinks the police are inherently bad and cause more problems than they create than they fix and they need to go away but that's the legitimate debate that happens in in those neighborhoods and if you look at the polls you'll see that you know it's not necessarily coming from the black communities that you the the the defund efforts aren't always coming from there right people who are most most in favor that are the people who have no conception of what the police are for you know and that's frustrating too you know and i think that was misrepresented after the floyd thing like people want they want better policing they want smarter policing they want they want police who are less um you know aren't so quick to use force you know they want more non-lethal force they want to be less less intrusive they want to be able to walk unmolested down the street and without without being assumed that they're dealing drugs or something or something like that but they don't want to be there to be no police at all right well minneapolis is experiencing that now they're trying to fix it because they did kind of defund the police but now they've experienced more crime than ever and they're like okay we've got to do something right and the the expression that i've read recently it's like we're trying to stop the
bleeding right you know that community leaders are talking about this like we've got to do something to stop the current climate of crime because it's actually worse than it was before george floyd it didn't make it better when we defunded the police it made it worse and then again it's such a reversal of i mean it's happening now too but we used to overplay crime stories in the media because that was how um that was how we you know we scared white readers of papers like the new york post into coming back over and over again they put big you know they put mug shots on the front page of every black suspect and you know that the whole idea was they were playing on the the fears of middle class white people and queens and the outer boroughs and stuff like that and they they gobbled that stuff up now they're kind of doing the opposite in some places like they're they're either under reporting crime or they're misreporting it um you know it's it's a strange phenomenon uh it's it's not it's not easy to see like where they're going with that well the wisconsin uh suv the guy who drove the suv into the the christmas parade is a great example of that right yeah i mean i i i it was odd to me that the that we haven't seen uh a lot of follow-up reporting on that like how about the way they wrote about it just the titles right accident caused by an suv caused by an suv or a crash or something like that uh and yeah i get back to like where where's the spirit of um just curiosity like i i want to know what that was right what was was like before i knew anything about who who drove the car what the person looked like anything your mind runs through all the scenarios is it somebody who's whacked out on drugs is it a terrorist attack is it is it a you know i thought i thought about charlottesville first you know right that was one of the things i thought about right so we want to know what our job is to tell people
you know what actually happened in these things and you can't just stop and suddenly have a lack of curiosity once you know things don't exactly fit i don't know if it just it just feels like they there there was a lack of resolve to get to the bottom of that well the difference between the way right-wing media covered it and left-wing was incredibly stark yeah i mean left-wing media didn't touch the fact that this guy had post-supporting hitler and that he had tried to run over his girlfriend in a car which is why he was in jail that he got let out on thousand dollars bail which is incredibly low for a guy who tried to commit vehicular homicide i mean it's [ __ ] wild yeah this trend of letting people out of jail easy that try to commit violent crimes and letting them off on very low bails and letting them right back out in the street is one of the weirder things that's going on right now one of the weirder things you see from these progressive district attorneys and in these liberal cities it's it's very strange and i don't understand the logic behind it i mean i i get it a little bit i mean i i was a strong believer in bail reform okay you know that you mentioned the thousand dollars amazingly eric garner got set a thousand dollars bail once for uh for something that wasn't even a misdemeanor like selling untaxed cigarettes is a violation it's like something you get a ticket for right but he got up you get a thousand dollars bill that's outrageous so again but somebody who commits a violent crime um so there's this whole galaxy of other people who get what they call like nuisance bail like in other words you know whether it's solicitation or you know disorderly conduct or vandalism or something like that what prosecutors have been you know they have this whole thing where they play games and they will try to get the judge to set bail just
outside of the person's ability to pay right like and you know they do an assessment of um you know where you live whether you have a job whether uh whether you have a telephone in your house all this stuff they know roughly what you can afford when they go to ask for bail and you know it's kind of a wink-wink nudge-nudge thing between the judge and the prosecutors and that's that's a really bad system that's why why there were calls for bail reform because what they were really doing was setting bail so high that people couldn't um they either had to make a decision to plead early right like or sit in rikers a place like rikers island and lose their jobs while they waited to adjudicate some really minor offense right so there's a there's a good reason for bail reform but you that doesn't mean that bail in all cases needs to be like eliminated right you know what i'm saying like like in in really in cases where there's a violent crime like that's what it's for right you know and and it just exactly that's the primary you can't paint it all with the same brush but i don't understand even the motivation of it i just it's it's like if you were a real tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist you would think that someone is trying to destroy this country and someone's trying to destroy these cities and what's the best way to do it well the best way to do it is to let violent criminals run loose in the streets and have everybody freak out and then you know come up with a solution for it yeah i i a lot of the ideas that are coming out of um you know what i used to consider like the liberal left or the democratic party they almost seem to me like they're designed to lose votes you know like like they're trying to give votes to the
republicans um who are of course equally crazy like in in their own in their own way but yeah stuff like that i don't i don't even know um where a lot of these ideas come from like i'm doing a story now about the loudoun county virginia education mess and just a lot of the thinking there it's like um yeah it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me what what what uh what a lot a lot of the sort of intellectual class of this country is um they just a lot of their ideas are just really strange these days they don't make sense but they're being supported those ideas are supported by enough people there's enough people that believe in them that i don't think it really is they're trying to get the republicans elected i think they think that this is progress and i think what you were saying earlier about how the kind of people that are calling for defunding the police don't really have police problems in their neighborhood right they just have this idea that if they are for defunding the police what they are for is the right side of criminal justice reform and that you know to be a progressive you have to recognize there's systemic racisms at the root cause of all these crimes and those need to be addressed and it's not just about locking people up in jail which you know makes sense i really do think that there are root causes to all of these crime issues that we have in inner cities whether it's baltimore or the south side of chicago or whatever that if they don't address those problems all the policing in the world is not going to fix it you and it's going to take generations because you're dealing with people that have dealt with these crime-ridden infested communities for decade after decade with no intervention whatsoever no help no i mean we spend countless amounts of money going overseas and fixing other countries we don't do a [ __ ] thing about horrendous inner city conditions and when then we get confused as to why they continue to put out violent criminals yeah it's
it's amazing because the the same people who 10 or 15 years ago were trying to fix uh the cities through essentially through brute force right so these were the people who were doing the stop-and-frisk programs the what they were really doing uh mainly these were democrats who were running these these uh they were had all the made the important positions in all the big cities and they were their campaigns were funded by wealthy uh real estate developers mainly right and they were using the police to imprison you know and arrest tens of thousands of people um casting a very wide net and trying to impose order that way those programs didn't really work they they caused a lot of instability they caused an incredible amount of resentment and they resulted in a lot of these police brutality cases and now they're swinging in another direction they're trying to take they're trying to take an opposite uh but equally irrational approach to dealing with the problem so they you know they try to solve it by shaking down it you know ten years ago is let's let's shake down every black person who walks into the wrong neighborhood in new york or or philadelphia or baltimore now somebody came up with a bright idea to well let's just completely not have police and um or defund that and you know put the money towards some other thing um i i think those ideas are a lot in many cases equally stupid um and it it's just an example of just intellectuals sometimes just uh shouldn't be allowed to make every decision you know um that that's that's sort of an overriding theme in a lot of the stuff that i've covered over the years i just don't know
how we bounce back from this it is amazing to me the impact of one man's death um the george floyd death it's amazing because if you go from that point forward and obviously it's accentuated by the pandemic and there's there was a lot of buildup to it there's been many many cases of police brutality that were egregious and people were frustrated and furious but that was the straw that was the straw that broke the camel's back and the difference between the country the day before that happened and now is so stark that if you told me one death of a guy who was you know brutalized by the police and murdered in the way we saw all saw publicly is going to change the entire country i would have said how's that possible well i think at the time the the entire debate was turbocharged by the fact that donald trump was in office yes and this became as everything did during the period as hydroxychloroquine and the lab leak origin everything is a referendum on trumpism right so if george floyd is killed and joe biden is president is the reaction going to be the same i i kind of doubt it like i i think i think at the time there was an incredible amount of tension in the country the culture war was just getting hotter and hotter all the time and we were we had been moving from kind of uh mania to mania in the news environment um it was one thing after the other like it was the caravan story it was kids on kids in cages brett kavanaugh's nomination russia gate everything was a full-blown massive panic uh and that was that was how everything was covered during the trump years and you know i don't so i think that was a major factor in what happened with with the floyd story like it couldn't just be a police killing and they couldn't just fix the problem they couldn't just deal with that one person and they and they couldn't just look at
sensible policy alternatives it had to be a referendum on the entire united states right and and whatever it was was wrong with the country that had led to donald trump being elected and you know sometimes you know things aren't always necessarily um you know symbolic of something larger you know um i don't know they i think i think during the trump years there was a tendency to try to make panics out of everything and um you know that's that's not always healthy i'm gonna tell you something you're not gonna like to hear sure you know who your voice sounds like oh who elizabeth holmes oh my god the thoranus girl doesn't it your voice sounds a little bit like her fake voice really yes wow i think if you toned it down a little bit if you like high pitched your voice just a little bit can i monetize that in any way i don't think so i think it's too late um sorry that was not that's all right i'm too old to be self-conscious about stuff like that anyway you have a great voice it's just weird for a woman [Laughter] that's really funny my wife is going to laugh about that have you paid attention to that trial at all no i haven't i'm [ __ ] fascinated by it yeah i am fascinated by charlatans i'm fascinated by people who pulled the wool over incredibly rich people's eyes and and hoodwinked them by she had like she fit this perfect narrative that they were looking for this billionaire genius woman who's the the boss lady of this company that's gonna do bro groundbreaking new work on you know blood testing and it's gonna revolutionize the industry and help everyone and she had this you know fake voice and i'm i'm [ __ ] i'm so fascinated by her i'm so fascinated by the story yeah i know it is a great story i i love con man stories in fact that's one of
the reasons why i spent so many years covering the the uh financial crisis also some of your best work my my favorite book growing up was about a con man it was this book called dead souls uh by a russian writer named goggle um and it's about it's it's about a guy who basically buys a bunch of dead serfs uh and mortgages them because there was a loophole in russian law back then like the census was so slow that if you bought the equivalent of a slave uh the the state bureaucracy wouldn't know that that person was dead yet uh so you could you could go to a bank and mortgage your slaves uh and get cash for them essentially right so they got whatever i'm just sort of buying dead slaves but the um the you know con men are fascinating right they and and especially in the in the internet age there's so many different ways to rip people off um to scale that i i think the authorities are just always going to be a couple of steps behind i mean you look at um everything from bernie madoff to the 1mdb scandal in malaysia which was like an unbelievable story like uh just basically you know stealing you know billions of dollars from from investors around the world by representing you know a phony bond scheme it's just incredibly easy to do all you need to do is have the appearance of respectability and and have a bunch of people who are respectable that have already bought into it exactly that's the bernie right right you've seen the sting yes right so that that's that's what they call a big store con right where everybody you see looks like they're sort of a natural part in the environment yeah but actually they've been put there for a reason to sort of mess with your perceptions of things and um and that's what happened with uh with that with the theranos with 1mdb with all you know the the subprime mortgage scandals everybody looked like they were on the
up and up but actually they were all in on it you know uh and it there's just a lot of really interesting ways to rip people off in this environment it's fascinating when someone like bernie madoff can get so many people and i always thought really i always thought before i read your coverage of the banking crisis i thought there was someone out there who is really clearly paying attention to all of the pieces that are moving and i thought it was like straightforward like like a bad example maybe but like we understand how fast cars are because we know the engineers that have worked to develop the displacement and the engines and how the transmissions work and there's a clear trackable thing like you can't just come out with a car and say this car goes zero to 60 in one tenth of a second and and and everyone's like what what are you talking about where's this how is this being made and this new technology that no one's ever seen before none of that exists we have new tires and it's it works on gravity propulsion systems it doesn't even have anything to do with engines that you would have to it would be trackable right like an engine is trackable i thought finances were trackable you think it's funny well you think it's funny because you had to do a lot of research i did yeah so pull that microphone in front of you a little more sorry no worries so madoff was he was part of what he was doing was he was operating on people's belief in a non-existent regulatory scheme um we do have visibility into parts of the financial structure we have a pretty well regulated uh stock exchange for instance like i mean there are certainly problems there too but you can you can see every trade more or less right or you can see most of the trades actually i'm gonna get in trouble saying that that even but with bernie madoff he didn't even do trades there's nobody checking right right right like and so there you know there was an investigator harry markopoulos there was a guy sort of independently
kind of figured out there was something wrong with the situation and all madoff was doing is this a classic old school ponzi scheme you you you guarantee a certain amount of returns some people give you some money up front you take all that money you uh and then as new people come in you give the early investors a little taste as if those are investment returns actually all it is is just one big fungible pile of money um you know and there's no investment there's no nothing it's just it's just a con right he never was doing any trading he wasn't doing anything he just had a big pile of money and he was constantly bringing in new people but didn't he start off as an actual legitimate trader you know that happens a lot actually there are there are a number of people who start off trying to do it right no i don't i don't know if he he actually was doing trades uh like when when he when he when he stopped doing that i'm not sure but there there are a number of stories uh about people who start off like their hedge funds hedge funds don't really get checked right so if you're running a hedge fund and you want to do it right you have some kind of investment strategy you think is going to work so you get a whole bunch of high net worth people and you say can you give me 500 thousand dollars they all throw money in and you start investing and it doesn't work and then suddenly there's this temptation well i don't have to tell them you know i can i can put out a report that says we actually seven percent or or 14 this year uh and no one's gonna check because there isn't there isn't a body of the checks uh for that kind of investment uh so yeah i think the public doesn't know that there are all these um sort of blank spots in in the financial universe and um [Music] then that's why these these sort of cons proliferate uh and it's part of what i
think is motivating things like gamestop but like that you know there's this whole crew of people who are like you know what this system is so corrupt we're gonna we're gonna rig it for ourselves and we're gonna take some of these people down and that was why there was all this joy at you know blowing up a couple of hedge funds um because you know the system is using is it's you can manipulate it and they did it and that's that yeah i think it was interesting what happened there yeah it is interesting and it's interesting the steps they took to sort of combat what these people were doing it's like no no you can't use that loophole you can only use the loopholes that we're using right exactly just but it was such a clearly organized campaign like publicly organized campaign that's one of the things that made it so fascinating and that it was successful well yeah and and you know the the response by the authorities confirmed every suspicion of all these these uh the gamestop investors but it didn't break them like they're still holding you know what i'm saying like and that whole phenomenon is is fascinating actually like um and that that's another story that was massively misreported right i talked to a lot of the people who invested in gamestop and a lot of them were people who got ruined after the 2008 crash whose families got ruined after the 2008 crash and this was their way of kind of getting revenge on the system it's it's a it was a form of protest now for some people it was just a way to make money right um and they thought uh they could just profit off this the squeeze play uh but for a lot of people this this was like legitimately a political uh you know rage response and they didn't present it that way in in the news media they presented it as um
you know a gang of sort of upper class people who were trying to or middle class people were trying to manipulate the system for gain and they they edited out the the pain part of it that motivated a lot of these people my next door neighbor lost everything in 2008 back when i lived in california he um he had the property right next to mine and he would show up there was nothing built on it he but he had bought this really nice property with a great view and his dream was to build this you know dream home there and um i would watch him like clear it off all the time and one day he just walked up and started talking to him and i said when he when are you going to build here and then he gave me the story that he lost everything in 2008 and he had had everything all set up and he was getting ready to build and now he would just show up and like trim the grass and he was so [ __ ] sad yeah because he lost probably yeah he had probably had his money tied up in mortgage-backed securities so he lost he lost everything he lost all of his life's work and here he was i'm guessing he's in the 70s and then he stopped showing up and then i um got a hold of someone that i knew that knew him and he was suffering from some severe health problems and eventually wound up passing away so it's like this guy was just crushed by this just crushed and this is when i'm talking this guy's probably we're talking like right afterwards right 2010 right ish somewhere like there but i remember the look in his eye when he was talking to me about what happened with the banking crisis and the crash and it was so depressing because you should imagine if you put your faith in the system and you grinded your ass off for you know x amount of years and then you finally think you hit the finish line and then all this [ __ ] takes all your earnings away everything gone nothing left so so imagine that
story replicated like 15 million times or 20 million times or you know 25 million times yeah and it's it's all these people who've lost everything and not only have they lost everything they look on tv and they see that the people who did it got bailed out they got bailed out immediately and you know we're made whole again that the the the the wealth gap expanded after that but just take an example like we were talking about bernie madoff before bernie madoff's banker was jp morgan chase okay so the bank you know which should have been monitoring whether or not their client actually had a legitimate business you know uh didn't you know um that doesn't seem too much to ask yeah especially if it's their business right it's not like a business they don't understand like complex chemistry or something right exactly you know we were talking about the big store con like they're they're part of the con right like this guy banks with jpmorgan chase right so it's it's part it's part of the sales pitch like of course he's legitimate you know it's it's endorsed by the the biggest commercial bank in the country and i'm sure if you go to his office it's gorgeous and you look at some beautiful building that he's in and right so all these people see that you know banks like chase and goldman that were selling these mortgage-backed securities to everybody that were that were letting people like bernie madoff run wild that were involved in the 1mdb scandal in malaysia that ripped off that entire country and they see that they're continually bailed out like after the pandemic uh the banks had their best year uh in history in in uh
in 2020 no because what because why because when you have the the cares act um you know which is all that money from the fed that went to rescue everybody to to keep all these companies of business somebody has to underwrite all that lending right uh like the fed is basically lending all these buying all these bonds there's all this new lending to companies that's coming from the government well some private entity has to do all that underwriting so banks made like 140 or 150 billion dollars in profits just from underwriting in in 2020. so they all got rich off the bailouts for the pandemic you know and so and which is exactly what happened in after 2008 like not only did they get rescued for the actual crash but the whole the whole bailout they get they got additional money for servicing the bailout you understand like that so people when they they ask well why does something like trump happen it's because there's millions of people who look out there and say i got i got [ __ ] right those people got rescued and they don't know exactly why or how but they know something must be wrong you know and then somebody like trump comes along and says it gives them an explanation it makes more sense than what they're being told you know and so they vote for that person and that's that's what's going to happen now because the same thing is happening you know out during the pandemic like a lot of once again people are kind of struggling they're being ruined but the you know the one percent is kind of being artificially sustained by this this run of you know public support that's going to make them all rich and it's just going to drive that resentment even further well it's also the collapse of small businesses which is a big factor in this the the big businesses like target and walgreens and walmart they expanded and
they actually profited from the pandemic whereas these other stores that were forced to close down they were forced to not be open or to have extreme limitations they suffered greatly restaurants in particular right absolutely yeah and again this is another classic consequence of a bailout like after after 2008 there was a thing called the um the implied bailout so just the fact that the public knows that the government is never going to let jp jpmorgan chase or goldman sachs uh or bank of america go out of business allows them to borrow money more cheaply than some local bank right the government might let a local bank go out of business so when they go out into the open market to borrow money it costs more like the the investors um the people who are lending them money uh are going to demand more they're going to demand more from the from that small bank than they're going they're going to demand from chase because they know that the government's never going to let them lose uh go out of business they're not going to lose on that investment so that it creates artificially an advantage for the big company versus the small company uh and that's that's what happened with with the with the cares act like again the the market looks out at this and they say okay well american airlines is never going to go out of business like absolutely for sure uh you know there's the government's going to step in and recogni and save them uh they've demonstrated that now but maybe some smaller airline they might they might let go out of business you know what i'm saying yeah spirit or something yeah exactly so it it creates uh it creates this natural tension and another thing that happened you know after 2008 was the when they split up when when they took the failing
companies um like washington mutual rather than like break them up into smaller parts they could become independent small enterprises what they did is they folded them all into the big companies they got companies like chase and bank of america to buy up these smaller entities so they they took they took an already concentrated marketplace and they made it more concentrated they made the big companies that were already too big to fail they made them even too big to failure you know what i'm saying so that's happening again um and it's it's again it's gonna it's gonna drive reason and then you add the fact that kind of small business people tend to be the kind of people who are you know republican trump supporters who are being vilified right and and you know that it's it's going to drive that resentment even further and we're only one year into this right yeah i mean we're it's 2021 almost 2022. what is this gonna look like at 2023 right right and what kind of a fever pitch is this country going to be in by then well i mean how how long can you can you put people under pressure and not expect them to go nuts you know i mean like i think if you people are going to look out they're going to see what happened after the pandemic well you know the banks have their best year ever the pharmaceutical companies are making ungodly risk-free profits essentially right like the government is making sure that um they will never have to compete uh or or give up uh you know the their patent protections on their vaccines they're gonna buy the they're gonna buy every medicine that they produce at full price and you know modern made what 11 billion dollars last year um you know they're they're all having record record um profit years the defense contractors got advances on all their contracts at the beginning of the uh of the pandemics they're doing great um you know
but small businesses aren't like you know it's it's they're rescuing the big enterprises they're and they're letting the small ones go you know it's capitalism for them and it's kind of socialism for everybody else for the big firms and that's just not going to hold forever it's also expanding the the power that pharmaceutical drug companies have and the concern with that is like it's not that pharmaceutical drug companies are inherently 100 evil no they produce drugs that are very beneficial to people and we we all are better off because of them you know there's there's drugs that help people with all sorts of diseases and all sorts of cures and great but all these corporations operate under the premise that every year is going to be better than the year before how the [ __ ] do you do that when you have this insane windfall you have this insane year where you're making untold billions of dollars like if somebody pointed out to me what moderna's first quarter of uh what what what like a quarter of this year looks like the difference between how much they made off the vaccines versus how much they made off of everything else and it's a giant percentage of the profit like yeah jamie maybe i think their their numbers for this quarter were like 3.4 billion i'm not i'm not sure it was something like that something crazy like that but more than three is the vaccine right it's something nutty like that mm-hmm but the point is you can't do that if they don't need them anymore like imagine if the vaccine cured everybody there's no more need for a vaccine it's a one-shot deal like polio or like the measles and then all that profit goes away well how you have us you have stakeholders you have stockholders you have you have a responsibility to your company you're supposed to have growth this year how come this year we're down 75 percent
we'll serve the pandemic's gone it's over no no no no no no no no we got to figure out a way to make more money like this is what corporations do this is and i'm not insinuating they're going to start a pandemic or fake pandemic or come up with some reason why should give people medications they don't need but this is a quality that corporations have absolutely and forget about the vaccine for a minute just look at other kinds of drugs right look at um you know drugs like adderall right suddenly we start finding out that every kid in the country needs to be medicated for aid you know adhd and you know that there are people trying to pass laws in various states that would that would mandate that as a treatment you know again there they have an incentive to try to create that market right or let's just say you know there's there's a drug that um if you split it into two generics it costs you know a dollar for people to use but there's a new drug on the market that combines both of them um and uh costs 80 a dose or something like that they're gonna they're gonna be incentivized to try to get people to take that you know that that drug instead of the two two separate generics um even though that's not good for you know the the consumer there's so many different ways that the these companies can you know sort of prey on people uh and and this even removes from the equation the fact that all a lot of their r d is publicly funded you know they get nih grants and you know and in the case of the pandemic they're you know they're specifically given a significant amount i'm sorry significant amounts of taxpayer money to research into the vaccines and they're going to make all the profits from that it doesn't make any sense not only that they have zero risk of ever being sued from side effects right yeah exactly they remove
the liability protection wild right that is wild it's going to be fascinating to see just if you were uh objective if you were an alien from another planet you're observing these industries you'd be fascinating just to watch without any horror how they figure out a way to try to make as much money if this if like say if the the virus goes away and you know whether it mutates into a form like what happened with the spanish flu where it's non-lethal and it gets to some new place where it's not what we have to worry about anymore like the omicron thing right the omnicron thing which seems to be no one has died from it so far right and this is wild that they're trying to declaring a state of emergency in new york city for something that no one's died from it was really funny the headlines they seem bummed about it right yeah that's weird yeah they do because well they're looking for fear but the what they're doing with pharmaceutical companies and advertising i want to play you this because i was watching this last night i was watching uh some fights and this came up and i i had to record it because i'm like this is one of the [ __ ] wackiest things i have ever heard in my life listen to what they're saying are the side effects of this [ __ ] it's about insomnia people that have fall asleep that sounds driving and making or eating food without remembering them the next day vigo may cause sleepiness during the day it may cause temporary leg weakness or inability to move or talk while falling asleep or waking up worsening depression including suicidal thoughts may occur this is like that scene from an airplane so ask your health care provider hey hey hey why would i ask the health care divider he just told me i might not remember walking around i might not be able to move i might want to kill myself just because i can't sleep oh by the way yeah yeah that's amazing but these ads are so crazy there's no other countries other than new zealand that allow these ads they have beautiful music they have people that are happy you watch this
video where this person this this uh ad this lady's lying there sleeping and plants are growing around her it's all gorgeous it looks like the best drug experience ever like i want that dress it sounds like finally i've got a solution to my insomnia but the the the idea that they're allowed to do this manipulative advertising on vulnerable people that are seeking some sort of a some sort of a solution to whatever health problem they have is god damn crazy yeah and then and it bleeds into the coverage of everything like during the pandemic okay fine let's let's let's assume just let's stipulate like i'm vaccinated like i i believe the vaccine works um you know i got my booster shot and everything but the the lack of curiosity in the press about questions like do kids really need it um is it absolutely necessary for somebody who's like under 12 to have to have a vaccine what if you've already had the disease like everything was off limits and this goes back to what we were talking about before it's like every story is all or nothing there's no in between anything you can't you can't even consider um any of these questions and it makes it impossible to to get to the bottom of things if you can't even start at step one and start looking at any of these questions well there's been a capture right and there's been a pharmaceutical company capture of the narrative and that is that there are no therapeutics there is the vaccine the vaccine is your only way and they've even been instructed in many places to deny people certain effective therapeutics what does this say okay pfizer bioentech and modern are making a thousand dollars profit every second while the world's poorest countries remain largely unvaccinated and this is the thing because they are not willing to give up their patent to allow poor countries to produce the vaccine right so they're
which incidentally puts the lie to all of the pandemic of the unvaccinated right like if you really believe that if you really believe that um unvaccinated people are the cause of all the suffering and shame on anybody who doesn't get the vaccine then you would push for a patent waiver so that everybody else in the world who with whom you are connected you know the world the world is interconnected yes uh if you really believe that that is what you would do you you would push for a patent waiver instead they are protecting the profits of these companies um very quietly like there's not a whole lot of you know controversy in the news media about whether or not the biden administration is going to lean on these these companies to to give up their cash cow um and yet and so they they're allowing the companies to just rake in these billions of dollars and they they villainize the people in this country who voluntarily don't get the vaccine like that's the problem well they've learned their lesson from ivermectin because ivermectin is now a generic drug and that's one of the reasons why it's demonized the fact that you can't you don't know no one owns a patent on it you can make it's very cheap to make now coincidentally africa is one of the least vaccinated places on earth and has the lowest number of cases it's [ __ ] bonkers and they don't know why they're trying to figure out why there's no real understanding of why africa with i think africa has like six percent of its population has been vaccinated but it has some of the lowest instances of covet infection on earth right right and why why is that that would be interesting to know right like and was a widespread use of ivormectin because of riverblindness and because of uh i think they use it for yellow fever i think for dengue i think it's used for other things as well and there's also a widespread use of hydroxychloroquine not
saying that that is that's the reason i mean maybe it's maybe it's some of these areas are not coming into contact regular contact with people from these countries that have high instances of infection i don't know what the [ __ ] answer is but it's kind of crazy yeah and and there are countries around the world that that have uh approved it uh ivermectin as a as a treatment japan uh yeah and i think there are people in south america too i'm not mistaken yeah um they need real studies is what they need there's too many there's a lot of messy studies out there apparently we talk to people that really understand the science behind it there's something like there's too many different studies some studies where they used it in prophylaxis or studies that used it early on there's studies that used it late term which is much clearly much less effective where it seems to have some potential is early on and in prophylaxis but again there is no rock-solid data right but what i found fascinating i had no idea when i took it that i when i took it with all those other things that i took that that one thing would be a big deal i really had no idea yeah i thought i would just tell people hey i feel good already it's only been three days right this is what i took and people would go oh well you should have got vaccinated i expected that but what i didn't expect was this one particular drug to be the thing that was on everybody's radar yeah because i read off a laundry list of things i said monoclonal antibodies i said um zpac what was the steroid that i took there was a steroid um prednisone thank you um ivermectin i said all these things i listed off everything i said iv vitamin drips i did all these different things that i talked and i said i feel pretty good right and a couple days later i was negative so it's like it threw in the fat flew in the face a narrative that the only way to survive this was to be vaccinated not only was it not only did i survive but i was better quick like really quick right and i was sick
like it wasn't like i had like it was there was no symptoms i had symptoms i mean i had a fever i i was sweating like a pig in bed i knew i was sick and then a couple days later i was better but all they chose to concentrate on is this one drug that is generic yeah which is wild and then and they sort of blatantly misreported it yeah you know the horse dewormer thing well the dumb part about it is that did they think i wasn't going to say anything yeah i know like i have bigger audience than you do like what are you stupid yeah significantly like how dumb is that but i don't think they i don't think they've internalized that yet no but and this this is like we were talking before about not being embarrassed about getting stuff wrong like it's it's not that hard to if you if somebody wanted to criticize you and not get it wrong they could have done it yeah you know what i mean sure but the the whole thing like oh he's taking horse dewormer like why is there no why aren't they ashamed of just being factually incorrect like the lack of um you know and any any kind of shame about that is a signal to audiences it gives you credibility and it takes it away from them i don't think they understood that though i don't think they understood that while they were doing it i think they thought that they were going to get away with it and i think until sanjay gupta came on the podcast they really had no idea right and then when he came on the podcast and it just didn't go so good for him that was that was a turning of the time that was a recognition like oh we've [ __ ] played a terrible hand here right this is not good right so therefore we're never going to let anybody go on your show again i'm sure i'm sure there's going to be that i'm sure you know which is um well i think they're probably going to clean house over there anyway i think uh what what's going to happen at cnn now i mean now that cnn is being run
by different people i think they're going to the i think the chris cuomo thing is like one step i heard they're going to replace the entire cast with the view they're going to take all the girls from the view that's going to be the news now would it be worse i don't know it would be better yeah it would be more entertaining and stupid i just kidding i i i hope they actually recognize that there is a market for objective journalism well yeah i mean that's that's abundantly clear i think the the substance experience has been it's been so fascinating for me um i thought it would work but i i had no idea that it would that it's like this uh it would work the way it's working yeah like just the the response is unbelievable and um a lot of it is just people are just so tired of being manipulated and talked to in a certain way yes you know they don't like being talked at you know or or lectured or whatever people who they don't even think are superior to them intellectually well they're not superior the whole point you know journalists used to know that we're not rocket scientists that's what that's why we're in this business most of us flunked out of something real like law or medicine or whatever right we're we're like professional test crammers we we get an assignment we try to learn as much as we can about it in 36 hours and then we when we we tell you about it we're not that smart it's you know it's it's it's it's a tough job you know but it's it's not like a a hard intellectual discipline but they are they they pontificate on the air and they pretend that they have this special access to special knowledge and and that they're a level above you know the common run of people which
is ironically a sure sign that they're not smart exactly which is funny like don lemon is a great example of that it's the surest sign that he's not smart is how smart he tries to pretend that he is and and it's so transparent yeah right uh and and i think that's one of the things that happens like you know when gupta came on your show he's just a guy like he's not he's not a bad guy necessarily he's a good guy yeah i think he's a good guy right but it's just it's kind of a wizard of oz thing where you know they're they're trying to project this image of all knowingness and um superiority uh more and you know moral rectitude uh infallibility um but all they're really doing is is telling people that they have a lack of humility and a lack of self-knowledge you know exactly and and it's it's really unfortunate because you know it wasn't that long ago that people like walter cronkite were the most trusted people in the country precisely because they they kind of had this attitude of you know well we're curious we don't really know you know like that was that was the way they presented the news back in the day like oh that's interesting let's tell you about this thing when did it shift i think i think it started with my with like my generation it started with the people after all the president's men came out because before that in my father's era journalism was a was more like a trade you know you were more likely to be um the son or the daughter more likely the son it was almost all male back then but you know of an electrician or a plumber or something like that it was not something that upper class ivy league kids went into and once upon a time like back in the 60s 50s 60s and 70s then it became a sexy profession after all the president's men after watergate everybody wanted to be woodward and bernstein
hunter thompson helped make it a little bit sexy you know rolling stone all that their coverage and it became a place for you sort of upper-class white kids to try to make their way it became a fashionable profession and i saw you know this sort of transformation because when i when i started covering uh presidential campaigns on the plane and this was back when presidential campaigns had planes full of journalists they don't have that anymore like now there's only a couple who follow the people around like everybody's doing it by wire service reports now for the most what did it used to be like so you would have like if if you were following john kerry in in 2004 which i did you would have carrie and any aids would be up in like the equivalent of the first class section and the entire back of the plane would be media right and you know 80 90 100 reporters you know a couple of uh you know some of them would be camera people some of them would be tech people but what was so interesting for me is there was a mix on the plane some of them were sort of the old hands who had been doing this since the 70s um and they were much more kind of skeptical they were much more likely to look at politicians like they're all pieces of [ __ ] i don't really care like in both parties i don't believe anything they say but i'm gonna sort of report it like that's my job but this new newer generation the younger generation they were so excited by they were jazzed by the proximity to an important person you know and i think it was symbolized by something like primary colors you remember that movie yes so you know that was written by a journalist um
joe klein uh originally it was anonymous um but it you know who had a close relationship with somebody on the clinton campaign and that became kind of the model of what campaign journalism was all about like you were an insider you were somebody who was in the know uh behind the rope line with the campaign and that was what everybody wanted they wanted to be like one of those people like who who who got the secret who knew in advance what the candidate was going to say but you know and whereas the the older grouchy types were the ones who were trying to bust the candidate for something you know uh or trying to catch him in a lie or trying to figure out who was actually you know funding the campaign or you know that kind of thing and so that was where i think the difference started i think it started in the 90s and in the early 2000s and now it's like a hundred percent like all those old types are gone yeah it's depressing wow yeah all of them i remember uh in fear and loathing on the campaign trail hunter s thompson was talking about how he had freedom because he wasn't coming back and so many of these guys were coming back and so they had to sort of like follow some protocol or follow some rules and you know he did like when he was uh pretending that hubert humphrey was on drugs yeah making up the fact that a brazilian doctor had come to work on him like he had this freedom to do that right they didn't have and he had the freedom to look at it honestly to look at it the way he thought the [ __ ] he was yeah and you you should always as a journalist you should never expect to retain your friends um because you will eventually have to write something negative about somebody who you become friendly with so if you go into this business to be socially successful you're in the wrong business you you you should be comfortable being a loner
um you know only you have friends with people that you know follow the sort of morals and ethics that you do right yeah that is possible isn't it it is possible but for the most part if you're trying to be friends with people you're covering no that it's not going to work right right and so what what what's regrettable about now is a lot of the people who are um who are in journalism they're they're upper class they they are socially the same people that they're reporting on where whereas there used to be much more of a class difference there you know you never had a phenomenon before well it was much more rare before to have a situation especially in local journalism where you know the the reporter was somebody who saw himself or herself as being like traveling in the same circles as the mayor or a senator or the ceo of a company like you know they just didn't really mix like that so they were outsiders who were who were who were reporting and they didn't really they didn't really mind offending people because what the [ __ ] they're they're not my friends um but these people are all friends like rachel maddow and and democratic party politicians they're they're friends have you ever seen a video of chuck schumer and stephen colbert dancing together oh god i can't even imagine you need to see it do we do we have time to see it yeah you need to just see them dancing together and and i feel the same way about comedians that you do about journalists you know like you you can't be friends with those people because there's gonna come a time where you have to talk [ __ ] about them dennis miller ran into that with george bush i remember being incredibly disappointed because i was a dennis miller fan as a comic he
was a very good comic you know his his hbo special was brilliant he had some great [ __ ] great jokes great one lineup absolutely um but then he said he was going to give george bush a pass because he's his friend and he wouldn't make fun of him look at this chuck schumer's got the mask on and look at colbert no mask spreading spreading pandemic viruses look he's dancing high-fiving and dancing with chuck schumer what is this well what what kind of signaling is this can you imagine bill hicks [ __ ] dancing with a senator jesus christ well colbert was never really a stand-up so i mean i guess he has that no but i mean but he was a comic when the colbert report was on i mean he was a that was he there it was really good he was great yeah he was great and that show was a great take off of a [ __ ] pompous ridiculous republican exactly i mean it was [ __ ] really good and then when you see this you're like wait a minute what the [ __ ] what are you doing right what the [ __ ] are you doing or and why were you doing the other thing before like right was it was it to be to do this well i think what happened and i'm just gonna guess but i think what happened was he had this brilliant character it was amazing on the daily show then he does the colbert report it's amazing there it's a great show right and then they offer him the [ __ ] carrot what's the carrot the carrot's a late night talk show right and the late night talk show for i guess kind of my generation was the thing that everybody wanted kimmel and fallon and all these guys like if you got to host the tonight show or your jimmy kimmel's got his own show you got your own show you got the letterman show you got the this show that that show that was the thing man right you could get your own show like that like you were [ __ ] in if they offered it to you you took it right took it but then to be that show guy he has to be a different guy so now he's not colbert from the show was this genius
parody now he's just stephen colbert right that's who he is they destroyed the essence well by giving him something the best example of it was when jon stewart came on and jon stewart was doing that bit about the lab league theory and kobara is jumping in and stepping all over it right well i'd like to see some evidence of that like he's like [ __ ] up the bit clearly stewart who is a great comic is in the middle of a bit right yeah exactly colbert is trying to he's like a pant you can see the panic in his eyes this is not going along with the narrative so he's like he's hamstring the bit right which is crazy to see yeah because he his whole body is like physically mortified by the the idea that he's sending off the wrong signals now he is the boss of this show and this show is going to allow this this this wild reckless talk about the lab leak you know it's a great story that that's like sort of apropos to all this is um in seymour hirsch's book uh it's his memoir reporter there's a story about how in the early 90s the cia wanted everybody to know that they had caught i think it was an israeli spy um and so they called up persh because hersh was the biggest uh you know investigative reporter in the country and they invited him in and they s they said uh look we're going to show you all this material right they brought him into a room and they just gave him a whole packet of stuff right but he couldn't like his entire body rebelled he's like i had spent my whole life getting the things i could not be handed the things you know what i mean because it's just not in his nature right like to be you know to be spoon-fed right and like i think that's true with with comics with any kind of journal is like once once you start getting
you know handed things then then you're you've lost yeah i mean they have you at that point and you got to get out of that habit you know it's like or you just never you can't cross that line you can't cross that line you can't go but if you want to be on a talk show you have to cross that line there's no other way you get on that show you can't get on that show and have some real counter culture narrative that is not approved and sanctioned and you you spit it out there on nbc for the masses when was the last talk show that was that that had like a counter culture i mean letterman in the 80s maybe letterman yeah letterman well letterman was rebellious i don't know if he was counter culture but he was certainly rebellious and certainly the favorite of the people that weren't taking it all seriously the people that wanted the tongue-in-cheek jabs at the celebrities and you know whereas like jay leno was letting everybody on and oh you're hilarious oh that's great that's awesome right there was no no attacking letterman would you know mock you and you were in uh he was in on the joke i i remember when um you know my father used to work for nbc and when uh the uh the tech workers name it the union when they went on strike uh and nbc brought in a bunch of scabs uh to cross the picket line and do you know do all their work for them letterman used to get them to screw up basically like in other words the cameras would like go back and forth so he was he was taking a dig at management which was which was kind of cool like you know i thought that was an interesting thing you do it on purpose and tell them to [ __ ] up yeah exactly right that is funny that is funny well he was a very smart guy yeah and you know a funny guy like the funniest of all those if you if you go back and look at like the guys who have hosted talk shows and we're really funny at it he's the best yeah i think he's the best i think he's the best talk show host of all time i i i love that he was a weather man before he uh
before the he he had the talk show i think he didn't get in trouble for predicting hailstones the size of canned hams [Laughter] that sounds like a lot of hope that's a true story yeah yeah yeah he's um it's interesting because his netflix thing didn't it wasn't the same it seemed um it just wasn't it just didn't feel the same well i mean you know apart from you know you and chappelle like who's doing sort of i don't know i mean like the the the the comedy scene to me i don't know it just seems like uh sort of network television there's nothing funny there on network television but in the clubs it's one of the best times ever is it really yeah there's a lot of daring [ __ ] out there bill burr who's one of the best of all time he's he's phenomenal and he's he's killing it right now he's he's fighting it you know he's not giving in to it at all he's fighting it and there's there's a lot of guys like that out there now there's guys coming up like tim dillon andrew schultz you know mark norman shane gillis there's a lot of funny [ __ ] young guys that are coming out that are dedicated to real stand up the way there's a lot of people out there that are dedicated to being journalists and they're just trying to find their way through and they really respect real journalism they don't want to be a corporate hack right they want to be a real journalist there's a lot of comics like that that's great i mean and they must be real the the stupider and more restrictive this environment gets the the better the audience responsibilities oh it's phenomenal it's really incredible it's incredible to see because you know i work with all these guys we do clubs together and we do shows together and to see the response to this you know risky material material that like like all dave's stuff the stuff that got him canceled air quotes you know like my that my god was he murdering i mean murdering we did a series of shows together
and he's [ __ ] he's one of the greatest of all time yeah and also being attacked for bit but it's you can't comedy can't be safe it's not possible right it can be safe with some jokes but like in its entirety it's not going to be safe and the comics that are like real recognize that and they also recognize that we've got to stay together we've got to stay together we're going to help each other because the more we support each other the more we get through this the more the audience realizes like oh this is what they do this is not like they're not in court giving affidavits on their their viewpoint they're trying to say funny things right and in doing so you're going to cover very controversial topics you need to say things that are outrageous to say but that's the point and occasionally you're going to say something that is a miss right oh all the time right that's the only way you find out if it hits right when when you're especially when you're working the clubs the whole idea is like i'll do a joke away and as i'm doing it i'm like i gotta get out of this like this is not the right way to do this i'm doing it the wrong way i'm saying in a way i'm taking a chance and i'm going down a dark alleyway and i i hit a dead end right i got to figure out i got gotta get out of this and this is part of the process of creation because you really only create comedy you write in silence alone but you create it really with the audience's involvement and you never really know how it's going to go over the ground you don't know you have ideas you know you kind of get it you know how to do it right you know the process you trust in the process but you really don't [ __ ] know until you're there and if someone takes a little snippet of that and tries to take particularly if they take a snippet of that and they put it in quotes right you know it's like you are you know that's not what it is like you're pretending that this is a real opinion this is comedy you know just like bob marley didn't really shoot the sheriff right yeah this is not real and that's and if you you take away the ability to screw it up like it yeah it drops of its essence basically well we use
yonder bags now for a lot of shows which which helps that because everyone's phones are locked up they don't oh right because everyone just wants to film everything now which is bad for the experience watching it just take it in just like you take in everything else in life like we have to learn how to take things in and enjoy the moment so i mean i went to see the stones recently and i'm guilty of it too because i took a couple pictures and some video but i'm like god i need to just take this in how many times am i gonna get to see mick jagger and keith richards alive on stage jamming and have it be really good keith richards hasn't looked alive since like 1972 but he's moving though no he's animated no that's great so listen man we learned a lot today we learned that those patriot [ __ ] might be real i think we learned that there's a lot are they i don't know i think i think there's some involvement i think there's some involvement i'm suspicious i'm suspicious of their outfits but we learned they might be real we learned um that your voice sounds like elizabeth holmes a little bit that is amazing i can't wait to tell my wife you know it's really when you have the microphone in the wrong place oh you got your phone here like you bring it to your neck yeah now yes you know it was more like when the microphone was these mics are weird like they have to be like right in front of your face and if they're here they give you like sort of a subtlety to the way you're talking and then you sound like a little bit so i said so i sound like a female corporate con artist if not no you only sound like that one because you can't it's like you know like you can't say that any man sounds like sam kinnison other than sam kinnison [Laughter] you can't say that any female sounds like a liz she doesn't even sound like her you know that's a that's how you know that's part of the reason why she got busted was that friends from college like what the [ __ ] is that girl talking like that for oh my god so it's like the unabomber thing like somebody who knew her exactly people who knew her from college were
like what is going on with her voice what is this what is this thing you're doing um see that's a lesson never have you know if you're going to be going to crime don't have friends in college or like start the [ __ ] early right like in high school and they come up with like a lacrosse injury for why you're uh she got hit with a high speed ball to the neck and that's a damage to vocal cords um listen thank you very much for everything you do thank you i really appreciate that you're out there it means it means a lot not just to me but to a lot of people that you are a legitimate objective source of information and it means a lot it's so so important likewise i can't tell you how much it makes me laugh that uh your viewership is so much more massive than the uh than the the news stations i just i just get a kick out of that it's confusing it's i have no idea how it happens i'm really baffled i'm not kidding like every week when it's still number one i'm like still crazy i don't know what the [ __ ] happened there's there's there's no plan behind this right that's what's so bizarre about it right but it's hilarious well thank you no no i mean i mean that in a good way yeah yeah i find it hilarious too yeah it is it's like okay yeah um your sub stack tell people how to get to it yeah uh table.substack.com um a spell eb for people don't know t a i b b i and then you are what is it m ty e b on m on twitter yeah do you have an instagram as well um god i don't even know it okay i'm barely barely on it so it's just it's really just those two things dotsubsec.com uh and um yeah and thanks for having me on my pleasure anytime open invitation i appreciate you thank you bye everybody [Music] [Applause] you