Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_PJ6TNCVrA
[Music] hello gavin hey pleasure to meet you in person in the flesh you too uh we obviously have a lot of friends in common and i'm glad to be here i'm glad to have you here and uh i'm glad to talk about we have a lot of shared interests but uh this survival signals that protect us from violence now this is uh i've always wanted to talk to you because you are uh truly an expert on preparedness and cautionary tactics and and what to do and not to do like in terms of security and how to protect people and how did what is your background like how did you get started in all this bad childhood violent childhood is the way i started when i was 10 years old my mother shot my stepfather in front of me oh jesus christ and that was one of many sort of gun incidents uh in our family and so i was your stepfather violent or something no he wasn't uh my mother was and um wow and that's unusual right it is it's the it is the more unusual of the two you know the two genders certainly men are more violent more often throughout history uh so i had that experience but and a whole bunch of others uh my mother was a heroin addict she committed suicide when i was uh 16. and so i saw a lot of stuff i saw a lot of criminality i saw a lot of violence and i guess i developed kind of like a an ambassador between the two worlds i spoke both languages you know if i had a few other disadvantages there's no way i would have uh you know succeeded in life i would have died young like if i'd been a black kid with the same circumstance i'd have been in big trouble and uh so that that life brought me to a fascination with when john kennedy was killed i was 10 and i was home from school and it it's just absolutely captivated and fascinated me not so much the issue of who killed him or the conspiratorial sides of these things which which are very real not so much that but the actual physics of how you prevent assassination and that interest stayed with me throughout my life and i eventually i've had an odd life so as i
tell you this story you'll you'll be ready for it to be unusual but by the time i was uh 19 i had already read and devoured everything i could on this subject which was pretty limited most of the stuff on anti-assassination strategies i wrote later in life but there wasn't a lot to read at the time and at 19 i got a job working for elizabeth taylor and richard burton and they were the most famous people in the world maybe not known to everybody today but she was a big movie star and he was a big movie star and at that time there was really only uh jackie onassis and elizabeth taylor and the queen of england those were the giant media figures now we've got hundreds of media figures uh and marilyn monroe who had died already and i worked for them starting as a kind of flunky do you know the word a gopher and then uh and through the course of everybody above me being fired i ended up being what's called traveling chief of staff and uh i traveled with them around the world i got to work with protectors and intelligence agencies in south africa and israel and mexico and all over europe and i learned a lot and i observed everything and when i was done i was 21 and i wrote a an article about public figure protection in the private sector for a law enforcement journal and everybody assumed i was a 55-year-old ex-fbi agent but i was 21 years old and so i used to get asked to come and give speeches and when i would arrive they would look around you know as your dad with you you know they'd look around and i had a mustache i used to darken it because you could see through it and and i gave speeches and uh and i got better and better at it and giving speeches you have to be you have to be right you know you get tested a lot by audiences and so i was driven by the idea of accuracy and uh and a good intellectual process because i didn't have i wasn't a former cop i wasn't an fbi agent etc later i became all that kind of stuff later i got appointed by the president of the department of justice advisory board and and work with cia and fbi and
all the things that have gone on between 10 years old and today by the way the reason i mention that is sometimes when somebody wants to say something shitty about me they say oh his whole training is that he had a bad childhood could we count the 55 years between then and now perhaps but ultimately i i developed a company that it you know is a consulting company that advises people at risk and and wrote books on the topic and did a lot of a lot of research and study on the topic so when you were 19 years old how did you get this job working with elizabeth taylor and richard burton it's a good question so i went to beverly hills high school my uh we were on welfare and food stamps but my grandfather got a one room apartment in beverly hills where we could lie and my sister and i would say we lived in beverly hills used that address so i went to beverly high and there i met a lot of friends who are still friends today and uh one of them was gina martin and gina martin was dean martin's daughter uh and uh and so i went to work for her mother for 60 a week which i still have by the way and uh the uh and one day elizabeth taylor came over to their house and uh gina and i my girlfriend and i we sat up at the ballast rod and looked through the railing and i thought elizabeth taylor i didn't really even know who she was but i thought this is going to be a big deal and and came this giant you know big hair and all the stuff and and then a few months later somebody called me and said uh she's looking for an assistant and will you go meet with her so i went to the beverly hills hotel to meet with her and she wasn't there her boyfriend was there i met with him i got hired uh can you type yes couldn't type do you speak french yes don't speak french why french they were going to france two weeks later wow so uh the uh i i got the job then i went home and i told my friends i got this job it's unbelievable and turned on the television and uh elizabeth taylor and richard burton have gotten back together
she's left her boyfriend and i see her you know going through the airport paparazzi and my career is over i've never even never even met her and then a few months later got another call and this time she was back in los angeles with the same boyfriend and we uh we had her and elizabeth richard burton broke up already three times when i was with him three times broke up and three times back together and then we so i started working for her she was she was great to me very very nice and uh and kind and one day she came into my office and she said i was working at the house and she said uh can you take me to the tropical fish place tomorrow uh and i thought yeah sure that'd be great and her boyfriend was a guy named henry weinberg and he used to take her and so i thought maybe he's going to be a little jealous or something but i figured i'll take her this means driving some rolls royce i've never driven i didn't have a car at the time and i was supposed to pick her up at her house meet her there at 10 a.m about 10 45 in the morning i wake up at home [ __ ] i have totally blown it i am i've missed the appointment completely i rush like crazy to get to the house get there by noon she's gone to the fish place and she comes into my office afterwards clearly to fire me and she says uh gavin thank you so much for what you did this morning that was that was a very admirable thing to do but you know i don't know what it is yet and she says you knew henry would be jealous and so you stood back and and let him take me to the fish place so that was great okay world i'm in so i kept the job wow and uh and then uh home one night and a friend of mine calls and says put on the television and it's elizabeth taylor back with richard burton has left her boyfriend and my career is over again so i uh i'm done finished it's over and a few weeks later she calls me and she says would you be willing to come to work for me and richard in europe i don't think i'd ever been to europe maybe i'd been one time to england at that point and i'm like yeah yeah yeah
and i say you know richard burton was an intimidating british actor and and uh so i said to her what should i call him do i call him richard do i call him mr burton and she said richard he wants to know what he should call you and in the background i hear i don't give a [ __ ] love [ __ ] i'm gonna have a rough time with this guy and then i show up and we we live in switzerland for a year live with them in their house and uh the very first night he comes to talk to me and we talked for like six hours i'm 19 years old wow and i love him and he loves me i don't just mean in that moment i mean through our lives and we stayed even after i left working for them we stayed friends until he died at maybe 50 50 years old from alcoholism wow so that was an interesting start just the way things the way things went well he must have been close to death then right because how old was he then he was uh he was 45 probably when we met or or maybe that's an interesting question i have to look you know i was in jerusalem a few years ago and i stayed at the same hotel where elizabeth and richard and i had stayed when we made a trip to israel and she had converted to judaism in in the 60s and because she was married to a guy named mike todd and so she was an enormous big deal in israel there were elizabeth taylor theaters when we landed the entire tarmac of the airport hundreds of thousands of people and i thought wow israel's really disorganized country they let everybody on the tarmac but it was obviously because of elizabeth being there and so i was learning uh quickly about this and this kind of stuff and uh and while we were while we were there many experiences went out with the kissingers and crowds and blah blah blah but many years later uh as an adult in my 60s i was at that hotel and i was looking around at all the pictures they had of of famous people and there i find elizabeth and richard and me and uh so it gave me the idea to download the diaries of richard burton which i had never read he used to keep a diary all the time when we were
traveling if he was drunk or in trouble i used to go get the diary out of the room so you know it wouldn't get stolen or by pop photographers or news media people or housekeepers or whatever and i always what handwritten yeah tiny tiny tiny tiny he'd be writing all the time and so i had two experiences with that diary that are good teachers for for my kids now uh one is that one day he went to sleep and he was on a bender he was an alcoholic and he was having a hard time and i saw the diary sitting just folded over the armchair and i thought well i better grab that so a housekeeper doesn't get it and i pick it up and i turn it over and i read it curious like what is he always right in here and my eyes land on these words must get rid of gavin when we get back to london good good teaching oh boy so now and now years later i'm at the king david hotel and i download this book and it's a book of his diaries and i think oh am i in there so i start looking around and i find uh passages uh that you know it's by this point it's been 45 years or so since i worked for them and i find these passages from him one of them says gavin gave us a long letter yesterday telling us that he's right about everything and we're wrong about everything i have no memory but it sounds like some young gavin move and uh and then you know other entries regarding me but one of them that really struck me is uh that he said there were days and days without any entry it'd be five days with no entry and at the end of it he would say lost five days five days gone and and i realized that i was a kid living with this couple and really had no idea uh what they were going through and what he was going through with uh with alcoholism and what she was going through with with drug addiction were they always like that or is this a response to the pressures of fame is it because one of the things that i've encountered and you meet a lot of movie stars and celebrity type people there's especially rock stars it's not just the the life on the road and the partying that goes with that but it's it's in response to the pressures
of so many people wanting your attention and so much so much focus on you a lot of them turned to something to dilute that yeah no question i mean elizabeth was famous from when she was 11 years old so she was starred in a big movie called national velvet she became an international sensation richard was not he grew up poor in wales and uh and then was thrust into this circumstance he was a stage actor and suddenly thrust into the circumstance of being with in this couple and uh and they had a lot of you know tabloid stories and and controversies but on your on your main point yeah i have a you know i've had a real uh front row seat on fame and the pressures that go with fame and it's highly unnatural circumstance right if we go back a thousand years there was no such thing right you could be known in your community you could be called the king caesar but nobody met you or knew you or saw you the vast majority of people you know had no connection to you and now you have people who uh are known to millions and billions of people if you're a female singer you're singing romantically to somebody if you're a female actress or male your face is closer to people than you would ever be unless you were going to kiss them or hit them you would never see all the little lines in somebody's face and have this kind of intimacy and i think physiologically our bodies are not able to distinguish between that which we see in media and that which we see in our actual lives and so it is an enormous pressure to have everybody you meet you'll recognize some of this yourself that everybody you meet will have some idea about you in advance everybody you see will have seen you first you're at a restaurant going like this they've already made you and uh and that's a weird distortion of you know you want to meet somebody and build a relationship right you don't want to meet somebody and they already have their 50 percent done right and now you have to undo it yeah and and uh you know
and and assert yourself years ago you know the beatles had a line that uh uh the whole world went crazy and used the four of them to do it and that they were the only four people in the world who didn't experience the beatles and so jamie had a very similar statement the other day i've heard that before but yeah just in the same way oh about the beatles well like me and him experience the world without without the dna that's right like we don't you know right because we're weirded out because we we're so insulated like the show is so small in terms of like the amount of people that work on it it's just me and jamie so me and jamie and whoever the guest is communicate we have fun it's just like a bunch of people you know three of us talking and it reaches millions of people yeah and that escapes us in this moment so all the people that are listening that are listening right now that are driving in their car and at the gym and wherever you listen to the show or watch the show these people experience the show we are a part of the show so for us it's just life so all the controversy behind it they can bring it into work and go did you hear about this guy that's on the jre that said this and that and like oh i heard that's [ __ ] or oh i know about that and then these conversations break out and all the controversy breaks out and we're blissfully immune to it yeah but the world has changed so much for us because when we go out then we experience it then we experience all these conversations and all the controversy and all the people and all the attention it's just strange yeah i think as i mentioned physiological because we're not physiologically prepared for it right when you meet somebody you don't have a place in your organism to put they already have a full opinion of me it's a little bit like racism or discrimination or a police officer's experience right a police officer pulls you over and everybody lies to him everybody treats him differently everybody's real real
nice or everybody's got a story to tell and so they're not engaging with the human being they're engaging with the uniform fame is a uniform it's on the outside of you that totally makes sense and especially i've always thought that of cops like that people need to take that in consideration when you and also that cops when they pull people over they're really genuinely worried about being shot and killed i mean you might think hey i was only going 10 miles an hour over the speed limit the cop is thinking this guy could be an on-the-run criminal and i could get shot in the face right now of course of course yeah cops are having a tough a tough run right now all over the country they really are so did they like elizabeth taylor and richard burton when you first started working with them were you uh old enough or aware enough that they were dealing with this pressures of fame and of celebrity and that they were diluting it through alcoholism and pills and that that's why they were doing that no i i really wasn't i had uh you know i was learning along the way and i they must have had experiences together where they say man this gavin kid could really take it but of course i'd have had this childhood already where the dramas that they were going through uh were were pretty mild uh my older sister said a thing years ago that some boyfriend of hers overturned a table in anger and was sort of moving toward her and she said to him you're going to have to do a lot more than that to get my attention because we were just low blood pressure we'd been through so much already as kids and so we went through this sort of uh you know academy of university of adversity and so i didn't see and didn't understand what their circumstance was at the time i certainly saw the the outer look of it but my view was and i think a lot of people have this view oh famous people they're built for it or they're just famous people they forget well they weren't just famous people two weeks ago or two years ago or two decades ago and so it's it's regular people to whom a circumstance occurs right it doesn't change anything about you as a person and how you engage with people individually but as something has
happened to you and and you specifically uh are a good example of it because of uh you know the the controversial element um by the way i don't think you're controversial i think what you know controversy gets made on the outside it doesn't get made in here uh i haven't seen a lot of you know hot arguments in here uh and so that thing gets stuck to you and it's basically a you know an outfit you're wearing and it's a you know it's it's your your life now yeah it's weird the for the most part most people don't interact with me like i'm controversial the vast majority of people that i meet are just friendly yeah the the problem is when people want something that's a problem like these people always want me to they want to give me a book or that they wrote or they want to talk to me about being on the show because of some experience they've had or that that becomes exhausting because they want to do it while you're eating dinner they want to do it while you're ordering food somewhere yeah i like this one that people come up to the table and i've been with so many famous people through my career and life that i've seen every variation of it and they say oh can i take a fast picture of you and if the person says yes well not with the fork in your hand oh so now you want to direct me and take a fast picture you know not like this is it becomes an entitlement there's a feeling of entitlement and a feeling of uh you know this is the the protocol for approaching a famous person is that i say to you can i have your autograph and you say yes no matter what you're doing argument with your wife difficult times in life you know just lost something just gain something doesn't matter this is the protocol that people know and they think that's the only one and of course what i've learned is uh stand back and leave people alone or call out a nice thing well definitely don't interrupt them when they're eating no they're just people eating and if you know i'm sitting there having a conversation with my kids and i've had this before where people come up and they they want a photo and i'm like we're having dinner yeah and you know and they're like come on man i'm like
what if everybody did that then i'm not having dinner with my kids i'm not talking to them and i'm talking to you like you need to come on like you need to realize this is silly yeah i don't don't if i'm leaving when i'm leaving you want to take a photo sure i'll take a photo with you i'm leaving but when i'm sitting down i have a fork and i'm eating a food in my mouth like get the [ __ ] out of here so it's crazy is it inappropriate for me to ask for a photo right now i i brought you a book that i asked yes well i'm excited to read this book because uh a good buddy of mine really really enjoyed this book and uh he said it was very valuable to him and the the perspective that you have about this you know about security and psychology and and and threats of violence and all those different things because of your childhood and then because of your experience initially with elizabeth taylor and richard burton is did you know like when you started working with them that this childhood that you had and this this chaos would would help you form this career is that how you got into it like realizing that you were working with these famous people these famous people like uniquely vulnerable and that you could somehow another protect them way before that i think i knew at 10 years old i had a vision that there would be a company that that you know people who were at risk public figures might have a manager or an agent if they were in show business or a family office or a corporation or if they were religious leaders they'd have a church and they would also have this consulting company that i envisioned 10 years old and i'm not the only person who's had an experience like that where you you know you have some certainty about what's going on i have a dear friend who won an oscar and she designed her oscar dress at 10 years old what yeah no not an actress you know living in in massachusetts somewhere no chance of being an actress and when she got to college uh the acting teacher in the theater class said to the whole class on day one uh you know only one of you will ever make it in show business statistically and she looked around she
thought all these poor kids [Laughter] well she was right she was right but how weird is that when someone is right about something like that i think it happens with a lot of you know look as i get older it happens more frequently that something slips into the flow and i'm not as surprised anymore when things work together the way they do the universe is a got a lot of mystery to it and uh you know my uh my childhood and then the things i did afterwards uh were you know were sort of part of a part of a story and i don't take credit for crafting that story i didn't you know i couldn't get myself with elizabeth taylor or get myself with ronald reagan or cause these things to happen i guess but i watched the movie and it's been it's been super interesting so you're 19 years old you work with them how long does this relationship last i i worked with them and lived with them for two years two years yeah and then i wrote this um this paper uh that got picked up by the national justice uh national criminal justice reference center which is a part of the department of justice and given every police department in america back then yeah back then and uh the uh and it was a four-part series on not about the burtons but about public figure protection in the private sector and i was a good writer uh public figure protection in the private sector when you were 21 years old yeah yeah but it was only of interest to law enforcement but you weren't law enforcement back then you were just an assistant to two famous people well i had become i became there to use the lofty title their traveling chief of staff so when we would go to cities it was me who arranged security and logistics and i learned and i had this really good gift you might you might like from your own uh you know eastern self-defense training and that is that in the mind of the beginner there are many possibilities and in the mind of the expert there are few right the expert says oh we tried that that doesn't work yeah the beginner says why do they do it that way how about this way and that's been my whole career
i wasn't a cop i wasn't a secret service agent but i've worked with secret service now and worked on research projects with them and you know trained police departments all over the country and it isn't always the path of uh you know going to college and learning a particular skill i'm glad i didn't by the way i went to college for one course one class a criminal investigation and then when i got appointed as a senior fellow at ucla school of public policy and i had to give a little speech i thanked the dean because uh you're the first person to ever put me through college and i you know i've only been here for 20 minutes but uh you know i drove through princeton once was my my other college experience but look not everybody has the life uh that is in the system right and the system offers certain uh makes certain promises if you do certain things if you go to medical school maybe you'll become a doctor i think those promises get broken very often by big systems but uh i just had a different life a different circumstance and i did research just like a scientist and i met with people and i studied and we did experiments and we do all variety of things in my company but it wasn't at a university but that is a very unusual thing for a 21 year old to do with no real background in law enforcement other than the fact that you were you know coordinating with them when you were traveling with richard burton and elizabeth taylor that's strange you would write a paper and that that paper would actually be taken seriously yeah it was nobody thought i wrote it but it but it was at the time it was taken seriously and there wasn't a lot on the topic and most people who had experience in this field were were cops and and police departments have exactly zero training on public figure protection it's not you know it's it's its own discipline and much more so now and uh i i was just fascinated by it and uh and i still am so you leave this your in your early 20s and what do you do from then so the next thing that happened is uh friends and people that knew me would recommend me to others who were just becoming famous and so you know you
ought to talk to this guy gavin d becker maybe he has some advice for you and so a a good friend of mine at the time was a kid named sean cassidy and he became a big teen idol he was just my friend in high school and uh he went off he had an interesting experience too because he was our you know high school buddy he was a couple years younger than me we used to pick on him like crazy keep him in the middle of the pool at a friend's house we wouldn't let him go to the edge and until he was getting really tired because he was smaller than us and and uh we were uh what i would call the police no i call it fun bullies but it's the same thing yes bullies and um he went off to germany and had an experience of being the beatles we did not know it we didn't know you know you've got to come back and be in the pool again and be treated like [ __ ] again and ultimately he did become a big teen idol in america and uh and i was a natural person to give him advice and guide him through that circumstance he was like david hasselhoff in that regard like you would go to germany and you'd be huge in the beginning but then he became huge all over the world i mean that was the first place he was family it was yeah and he he became you know covered people magazine and big recording artists and all that stuff sister was in love with him when i was a kid yeah a lot of sisters and uh in fact we when we now as a as adults we would go into a restaurant and he could tell if the person seeding you was of a certain age we're gonna get a great table right some people would say oh you know i was a i was a big fan of your brother because his older brother david cassidy was also famous and then other people would say oh my god you were on my you were on my bedroom wall all through childhood of course they're now 56 years old is he still alive oh my god sean oh yeah david's not but sean is alive a big tv producer and uh and a tv writer smart guy but anyway so then i had an experience with him then he referred me to somebody else then comes a whole series of of clients and this company began to be formed and around 1980 a dear friend of mine morgan mason still a dear friend uh went to work for ronald reagan speaking
of controversial and unpopular that was like going to work for trump if out in hollywood you know ronald reagan was the worst thing in the world he'd been governor of california uh and uh so he went to work for ronald reagan and guess what happened reagan became president when everybody said you're wasting your time and he'll never become president and he called me and and gave me a job i was now i probably was 26 and he gave me a job as a director of special services group for the president's inaugural and this president because he he'd been in show business had all kinds of people coming frank sinatra and dean martin johnny carson et cetera and right at the beginning of my getting there john lennon was assassinated and the lenins had also hired me to do work for them if they went on tour and they were deciding whether to go on tour based on the success of a of his last record album called double fantasy and they decided uh not to go on tour i never met them at that time i did meet her later but uh so i went up to the uh to new york uh and we had this uh a bunch of meetings after he was assassinated uh sad memories and interestingly i learned later that i was at blair house i was now working for reagan we're now working for president-elect reagan as director of special services group and i was at blair house in the morning where the president-elect was staying and then i flew to new york for this meeting after john lennon was killed and i later learned that john hinckley made the same trip the same day and flew back the same on the same trip the same day he also went and stood outside the dakota building where john lennon was killed in getting up his courage to eventually shoot president reagan and and he shot him a few months later so then reagan became president and he was the oldest president at that time not anymore but he was the oldest president at that time and he appointed me as the youngest appointee ever at department of justice on the president's advisory board so i'm kind of giving you the the process of how this how this particular life happened and um i remember you know being on that
advisory board and there was the supreme court justice uh chief justice from arizona was on the board with me and a supreme court justice from california and the sheriff of san diego county and this kid you know we're sitting at the table at our first meeting and i as an ice breaker i said well has anybody here ever been arrested knowing that of course none of these people would have been arrested and every single one of them had a story about being arrested we went around the table i had mine they had theirs you know it would be i was standing in line with my you know 20 year old son and the guy behind me said such and such and my son took a swing at him and i took a swing at him and we all went to jail or it would be i was in college and my girlfriend called the police because i took the record collection and i got arrested every single one of them supreme court justices chiefs of police head of the pennsylvania crime commission all of them had a story of being arrested and my asking that question was an icebreaker that uh you know that made our relationship work suddenly this 26 year old kid in the room who doesn't know [ __ ] about [ __ ] was actually kind of interesting and uh so that led to some big research projects that i got done uh the biggest one being on uh assessment of threats to public figures and uh that i worked on for five years and that was published and became a big deal again in law enforcement and uh led to all kinds of things i mean and then i got appointed to something by by george bush also not the younger but the older george bush so it essentially started out as almost like a word of mouth yeah and then you just start working for people your reputation grows and then you do more and more research you get more and more involved in it yeah did you also find that there was a lack of understanding of what was necessary to protect people that like there was you know when you're talking about your beginner's mindset were there people that were doing it incorrectly and like what what flaws did you find i think the big yes is the answer and
it's a it's a good question because it was a you know in those days when john lennon was assassinated there then came a few in a row and they tend to group all kinds of sort of media age violence group so if you have a school shooting you'll have another and another within a geographical area right now by the way at the present moment in the united states we're having multiple victim shootings almost every day so something that you know used to happen every few months and be a giant story is now happening all the time we'll cover that maybe later but on your question i think the biggest mistake that people were making in public figure protection was the belief that threats a direct death threat i'm going to kill you was the most important communication that could be assessed in advance and that was simply not true what i learned through research and then later wrote about is that of every public figure attack you've ever heard of of everyone you've ever known where a public figure was killed not any of them were threatened directly by that by the person who killed them in advance so the and likewise none of the people who made a direct threat to a public figure later shot that public figure so when i started everybody was very uh you know responsive to a direct threat oh it's a death threat he says he's going to kill me and uh and i learned that other kinds of communications were far more indicative of who will show up and i learned that the the art and still today the art and craft of what i do and what my company does is try to avoid unplanned encounters unwanted encounters because if you avoid the all the unwanted encounters you're also avoiding the dangerous ones and you can be sure that nobody who travels a thousand miles to get a meeting with you or waits outside your house if you're a famous person is gonna hand you a check for a million dollars that's not what they're coming for it's always something for them and it's always something inappropriate because millions of people write fan letters or emails or are admirers of a recording
artist or or a politician or whatever but very few statistically speaking make what we call targeted travel you know get figure out where somebody lives or where they work and and travels to see them so my approach was different from others which was to try to detect as early as possible those individuals who might pursue encounters and from that to where we are now we now have the largest library in the world of threat material directed to public figures i think it's about six hundred thousand pieces of communication people who send blood people who send bullets people who said that blood oh yeah body parts yeah we've had everything like what kind of body parts we've had a finger uh we've had their own finger or somebody else's uh their own we've had explosives uh we've had facsimile bombs uh uh blood so somewhere their own finger off to send it to a celebrity yeah can you say who who they did to no um but uh i mean our whole podcast would be talking about weird things people have sent to public forum what was the message with the finger well i'll give you another one that i remember the message for which is somebody uh sent an animal they had killed and said um i killed this because it's it was beautiful like you oh jesus so there's no direct threat there but clearly somebody has that much emotional investment it's a you know it's a serious topic and so that is probably the biggest change i made in in my you know my contribution was that direct threats were not the most important pre-incident indicator and before that they were they were considered they were if you went to cops when i was starting and you said look we've got this person and and he's written 10 000 letters to one public figure he goes every single day to the mailbox to check and see if she's responded he's mentally ill he is uh he's lost his job and we're concerned about him cops would say well did he make a threat well it is a threat it's the circumstance includes hazard but uh in those days they responded only to
threats and now we've made a lot of progress in that that there are other kinds of communications that are pre-incident indicators i just want to give you and your listeners this uh little uh acronym which is pin pre-incident indicators so before everything that ever happens there are pins and so one of the things in my work and in my book and in the master class that i've done what we're trying to teach people about is what are the early pre-instant indicators of people in your life who turn violent or people who aren't yet in your life who turn violent in other words can we predict violence in advance and the answer is we can and so you go from this to i mean i don't want to make this big leap into the jeff bezos thing but it is um it's it's very fascinating to me you were involved in finding out how jeff bezos's phone got hacked and you were involved in connecting it to the saudis and that whole thing how did how did this all come about well i i have promised i wrote one um op-ed for the daily beast about this and in that op-ed at the end i say i'll never say another word on this case because i'm turning it over to the federal government now it's a few years ago so i what i can share is only that which has been public and a lot wasn't public but uh the the uh circumstance did involve mbs who's the prime you know the the prince of saudi arabia and he did send a a text with a video to jeff bezos they knew each other they had met they had exchanged phone numbers and embedded in that video was a a system that downloaded something that then later connects to a website and downloads something more sinister like pegasus ii which is a a system that governments around the world use to get into your phone and then they have full control of your phone so it doesn't immediately connect it doesn't download immediately because it's a bigger package what what you're getting in your first uh incursion into
a phone or laptop or ipad or whatever you're getting a uh a very small file a little executable file that then later reaches out uh via the internet and that executable file could be a website it could be and does it exist only on the physical phone itself or is it is it in the operating system and if you change phones and like upload to the cloud and then re-upload do you or re-download on a new phone does that does that spy software make it onto your phone again probably not but we don't know completely whether it does or it doesn't when a government wants you like the us government or saudi or basically there are there are two kinds of countries in the world when it comes to uh to incursions into uh smartphones there are original developers the united states china soviet union and israel so they're original developers of programs that do these things and then there are the purchasing countries uh mexico saudi arabia and all 190 other countries by the way i say 190 do you know there isn't even a consensus about the number of countries in the world countries can't even agree on that is that because of like taiwan and taiwan's a good example yeah so um so the best way i can put it to you is that if a government wants you from an informational point of view once you get into your phone um they have you uh the these systems are extraordinarily robust powerful as i learned more and more about them it's not actually my area of expertise cyber security but as i had to learn more about it for myself and for clients when the saudis wanted to get into a phone they could what if you're dealing what if you're communicating rather only through direct encryption devices or applications rather like signal yeah it's a very good question so if signal encrypts the the package going back and forth between the two devices over the internet so if you have uh interception between device a and device b it'll be encrypted and but that's not what happens with things like pegasus 2. pegasus 2 is a very high-end system and it's in your phone just like you're in your phone
everything you can do on your phone i can do from 7 000 miles away in some saudi government office wow and so signal doesn't help you with that i do think however uh by the way signal is a is a foundation it's not a for-profit company so i'm glad to promote it i do think they have something very valuable on signal and that is disappearing messages which is you can se if you and i were exchanging signal communications we could set in one week make all this disappear in one hour make all this disappear up to four weeks that's very valuable because otherwise our text messages look i was tasked to do this for myself when the saudi thing started which is i have to think about everything that's on my phone holy [ __ ] every communication i had you know for years every text i sent every photo every argument every joke that would be taken out of context you know it's a very hard thing to do because we're it's we're like a mind we're collecting all of this data right in the phone and so signal is valuable i think signal's a good a good service and uh but it doesn't solve the problem if a government wants you if a government wants information uh they they can get it through programs like uh like uh pegasus two right well how does pegasus two get on your phone well different ways it is a no-click uh incursion meaning you don't have to click on anything uh you you might you know typically you would get a text and you would open that text and that would download the little executable file or you would watch a video and it would be in the video but now the newest uh pegasus systems they don't even need you to do anything uh they can send you a message on what's happened even if you never uh even if you delete it even if you never open it they can get in your phone but what if you don't use whatsapp it's a help by the way i don't recommend whatsapp why is that because whatsapp has had a um for some reasons that i don't want to share and for some reasons that i do want to share whatsapp has had a particularly uh vulnerable circumstance with regard to uh with regard to uh people getting into other people's
phones now having said that there are thousands of people right now all over the world working on nothing but getting into the new iphone operating system and then there's thousands of people at apple working on nothing but being sure that the new operating system is impenetrable and this just is a you know is an arms race that's going to go on it's going to go on forever so you you were saying that don't if you get a message through whatsapp but what if you don't get a message through whatsapp is that executable if just a blank text message comes your way and you don't open it less than that unfortunately you can get nothing at all with pegasus 2 you can get nothing at all they can enter a telephone number and they can get into your phone nothing at all no text messages so you have no idea whatsoever that's correct and that's a problem with you know zero day exploits which is you don't know what happened and you go on for months and months and months not knowing that somebody's in your phone uh is a is a problem and how do you find out if someone's in your phone well it depends on on the circumstance in in in the case you described uh i was notified by originally by somebody in cia then notified eight times by the fbi about the what information they had learned and then we began to do uh to do uh you know work on the phone itself and you learn about it in those ways which is very difficult by the way because pegasus ii i feel like i'm given a commercial for pegasus too but most people can't really can't buy it anyway but pegasus 2 is not sitting in an armchair waiting for you to arrive hey i'm over here it is extremely well hidden right down at the very core levels of a of a phone or or an ipad and uh but there are strategies for uh for finding it and they're challenging and they're evolving all the time there are you know whole organizations like uh citizen lab and a and a really great expert anthony ferrante who used to work for obama at the white house on this kind of stuff he's now in in private practice uh they've had a lot of success they even have found uh
uh pegasus two in the wild meaning before there was a reason to be suspicious they've identified it and uh it's a tricky game because it let's say you were targeted by the mexican government which happened a lot to people and uh you you have it on your phone and you think you are being monitored in some way so you get rid of your phone you turn it off you put it in the top drawer well pegasus will say hey this activity has just stopped self-delete it'll self-destruct so now you you don't even have any evidence that it ever happened even if you could get an fbi involved so pegasus sends a signal to the person that's using the spyware to tell you that that phone is not active any longer well they know they they see immediately hey joe isn't texting his friends anymore so they know that right away so they execute it independently nope it can happen internally because what happens remember when it's when it's turned off or the battery is taken out or a wide variety of things can happen that you know with a quote suspect phone it will self-destruct on its own after a few days of no contact that's one of the things they market i got all their marketing material uh and at the time you know when we were really doing this investigation we were getting a lot of content from around the world it is uh it's sold by a company called nso which is in israel based in israel and uh it's a very dark game all over the world uh involving governments and other powerful people and uh you know pho look most people say well what do i care nobody wants to get into my phone and they're right but if you are a person who is subject to uh to the interest of government anywhere in the world uh it's very hard to have privacy so if you don't get a message through whatsapp what are the other vulnerabilities like could you get a message through twitter can you get a message get a regular you could get a regular text a regular test pegasus one which did require that the user click on something but pegasus two is a no click exploit nothing has to happen so someone can just send you a text you
don't even have to open it not even send you less than that what i'm saying is that that the high-end pegasus system that's used by saudi arabia and other countries all they need to do is have your phone number that's it nothing more so they have your phone number they have access to all your photographs your messages everything turn on your phone as a microphone right now in this room turn on your phone as a camera right now and even it's so it's so smart let's say it makes an audio uh recording of a phone call and it doesn't download it right now it waits until the phone is quiet and it's you know late night in in the target destination like in your home it's late night and then it downloads it at night so that you don't even see a reduction in performance right and then people who are sort of watching the the cost don't see spikes of all kinds of activity in the case you talked about uh gigabytes of data was taken out of that phone gigabytes yeah how many gigabytes are on the phone no idea i don't know uh so so anyway yeah the the the short punch line on this is that there is no way to there's a lot of products being sold that do the best they can but depending on who wants you there really is no way you know if the central intelligence agency wants to get into somebody's phone overseas they can do it now is there a difference between operating systems like is there more of a vulnerability to android than there is to iphone i hear again not an expert but i hear that there's more vulnerability to uh to iphone but that might be because they are the ones that are targeted most often and that thousands of people are working on all the time yeah that was my question like what about one of those uh de-googled android phones that are becoming more probably better but i don't know you don't know because there's a lot of people that are swearing by those now that have moved to these operating systems that have been manipulated to the point where they don't send information you can't get tracked gps doesn't work all that stuff yeah it's good to have the you know the least the the lowest
number of apps you can have on a phone the better if you're talking about just using it for phone calls the challenge i have because i get you can imagine every product is brought to me usually given to me for free to try hoping that clients will want it or that my company will want it i see everything but the challenge is it's a moving target so if somebody says today oh we've got something great for such and such two weeks later people have been able adversaries have been able to work on it and it's an arms race and so it's sort of like saying hey i got this great new thing you know a catapult and i can throw fiery bombs over the wall of the castle that's not so interesting anymore now that we have tanks these things continue to evolve [Music] do you anticipate there ever being a time where they can circumvent that and there will no longer be exploits like that or is this just a new reality that people have to live with i anticipate it going in the other direction which is that it it becomes far more accessible for far more people and that anything we do you know online is is subject to to being intercepted and seen more and more you know a lot of people like i have clients who could be targeted by china could be targeted by russia could be targeted by france could be targeted by the united states by other companies by powerful adversaries and they often say well i just treat every communication as if it could be heard but the reality is that as human beings on a phone call we are unguarded right you don't want to have a phone call with me or a conversation that's that's completely guarded like this all the time and so the reality is that this is going to be a vulnerability in in people's lives uh period and it's going to expand expand sure and do you think it's going to expand to the point where regular people have access to everyone else's phone and all their data i think it will expand to where uh motivated people and not governments could get access to other people's data and you know there are even laws uh there's some in the uk where you know why should people be able to have a secret
encrypted communication what are they trying to hide government is challenged by it right yeah i've seen those people in power are challenged by that stuff and so well because we we might want to have a communication that the government isn't part of that would be the reason but uh but people in power don't like it and so slowly it will erode that way as well well those are some of the dumbest arguments ever like why would you want encrypted communication and there was during um after january 6 in particular there was a lot of talk of the dangers of encrypted peer-to-peer messages and applications which i thought was hilarious yeah like just because there's a few nuts that you know storm the capital you you want to have all encrypted messages illegal or encrypted messages apps you think they're a problem because a tiny fraction of the people that use it are up to nefarious actions yeah well it's a goofy you know the government equation uh throughout human history is always to uh uh protect its power as much as possible and the absolute wet dream of every government on earth is uh is the internet and the way we engage with it right i mean if you read 1984 still a fantastic book by the way interesting thing it's 70 years old that book and uh year before last 2020 it was the 17th best-selling book in the country it was a top 20 best-selling book wow isn't that encouraging though about people having their head screwed on right in other words that they were aware that some of what they're seeing is not just pandemic or is not just politics it is also a a you know profound gathering of power yeah and uh there's never been a day in human history not a moment that there weren't well-funded people close to people in power working on the best new weapon and or the best new method for controlling other people why was mbs trying to get into jeff bezos's phone hard always to predict what someone else you know what's going on in their heads i can just tell you the circumstances at the time uh included that uh that the saudi government was negotiating a
multi-billion dollar deal uh with amazon and so uh that's one uh i think the far more likely one is that jeff was the owner of the uh washington post and the washington post was employing uh jamal khashoggi jamal khashoggi and he was just really ramping up his communications that were making mbs crazy we had sources inside the the royal palace and the family and who said that mbs's first thing every morning was to open the washington post website and look at what was in there he was very stressed by it and as you may have heard he became so stressed that he uh you know ordered the killing of khashoggi yeah i uh followed that very closely and i had brian fogle on when he was promoting the dissident yeah and that documentary is terrifying yeah and the response by the world the world stage is terrifying too because they kind of just waited to see how much outrage was out there and then sort of accepted the fact that this head of state killed a journalist and had him dismembered in a consulate i mean the whole story is beyond crazy i mean flew a hit team with a coroner yeah amongst them i mean there's audio recordings apparently yes there are yeah uh so i worked on that case a lot and uh and know brian well and it's good that you mentioned the dissident because it's a fantastic documentary and it too got cancelled in every way possible yes and uh so it became very difficult to see i'm sure you can see it now well no it's not different it becomes difficult to promote that's what i mean well i promoted it yep um i think he had a really hard time finding streaming services to accept it that's what what i thought was fascinating that even jeff bezos who had been victimized by this uh intrusion on his privacy he wasn't willing to have it stream on amazon prime you could buy it and you know you could buy it on itunes but the amount of people that would buy something versus the amount of people that would stream something for free on netflix it's a big difference and he was just coming off of this icarus documentary which is award-winning it was a huge hit for netflix and he felt
like netflix is just going to have welcome him with open arms for his next project because obviously the guy's super talented yeah and they were like uh not interested that's how powerful that guy is yeah that's how powerful uh powerful people are in general and and you know uh brian fogle won an academy award for netflix their first one for icarus and uh and i agree i i i thought right alongside him of course netflix will want this this is a hell of a documentary this is incredible i mean you've seen it it's got amazing information and amazing insight but that is where we are we are in you might have heard about this we are in a cancellation culture you know with a tremendous amount of i heard about that you did i thought so you so you are paying attention to it yeah it's going on yeah going around like the flu yep and uh so uh that that is a you know the use of the word dangerous for example when you said you know it's dangerous for people to be able to communicate encrypted uh end-to-end encryption um anytime that word is is floated that something is dangerous uh what you want to hear that as is it's dangerous to government that's who it's dangerous to me governments have been in this game of using fear to control human behavior and to control their own populations throughout history it's there's never been anything else and so when we see anytime a government wants us to fear something it's very important to ask yourself and really learn about what that thing is is that thing worth fearing in the ways that the government is telling us because government wins from a frightened population all the time and there's been examples of it you know president woodrow wilson wanting to get support to get into world war one uh he formed a virtual police states like something out in 1984 with people uh you know fired and people losing their careers and people being lynched and new sedition laws and all variety of things that if you weren't with us you're against us and it was pretty severe so it's happened before yeah post 911 of course and uh and i just found an amazing one by the way i
want to tell you it's so amazing it's slightly off the topic of me but king charles in the 1600s banned coffee houses in england why because coffee houses were places that people gathered together and talked and they'd be a little you know uh amped up because of the coffee and they'd be feeling good with each other and so he put out a proclamation i'm quoting it here restrain the spreading of false news and licentious talking of matters of state and government and he said that this bold discourse that was going on this is really worth it uh that the public assumed to themselves a liberty not only in coffee houses but in other places in meetings both public and private to censure and defame the proceedings of state by speaking evil of things they do not understand and uh and causing jealousy and dissatisfaction in the minds of my subjects the king's subjects but i want to give you one more piece of this the following year he extends it to not just coffee houses but any place that sells coffee or chocolate or tea and i'm not joking by the way this is true and then the following year he does another proclamation and this one says spreaders of false news or promoters of anything malicious against the state will be considered seditious you know going against the government wow what year is this 165 16 72 73 74. so that's where fake news came from yeah no [ __ ] and uh that's right but interesting why why i wanted to share that with you is that here we are on you know the joe rogan experience which has had its share of of uh [ __ ] flung at it for literally just having conversations nothing nothing more going on in here no collection of weapons or plans to overthrow the government and i always like to remind people that these things are not new they're human nature meaning governments have done this always and uh and every word i just read in that thing it's amazing he wanted to ban coffee houses and now people want to ban end-to-end encryption or anything else that will uh allow for an actual open dialogue well there's people that are openly talking about amending the first amendment changing it and saying maybe we
shouldn't have so much free speech maybe free speech is a problem which is yeah crazy it's crazy that there's so many people that have a voice and have a say in matters and they're so short-sighted that that's one of the things that they would actually say yeah i think it is uh but it has existed before and i think it's important to remember that if you look at human history it's almost all tyranny and the united states and western europe is a tiny sliver of the pie it's a tiny period in human history in which we grew up um with freedom of speech and uh and we grew up with these protections from the court and from uh you know the constitution but it's not a it's it's not some permanent state of affairs it definitely won't last forever and i i say to people who want to change any amendment you might want to make an amendment to the amendments you know in the constitution you almost don't have to because major media companies have done it anyway right major media companies new york times cnn etc etc something your listeners might not know about called the trusted news initiative that's run by bbc which is a whole collection of major media companies from all over the world who decide together on how to handle certain stories and that's how you get uh you know five thousand headlines that say uh ivermectin is a is a horse paste uh ivormectin is a an animal drug in the same way that antibiotics are an animal drug meaning we have a shared biology with other animals and uh and it can be given to all kinds of of beings but of course it's a people drug won the nobel prize as a people drug given billions of times as a people drug but when you looked at what happened with you you had a monolithic approach in media where everybody said the same thing horse space horse paced and that's because of a monolithic approach in corporate media right now and so who's at the helm of that well the the bbc trusted news initiative is certainly the most organized version
that we're aware of but i think in any of these things like what we're experiencing for the last two years people want to find a single villain you know it's klaus schwab it's bill gates it's pharma companies whatever it may be because it's a simpler narrative and unfortunately it's not a simple narrative what happens is this many many people have competing incentives to exploit a new thing so for example when 911 happened and you know airplanes flown into buildings there came up companies that reinforced the concrete on government buildings as if they could stop a [ __ ] airliner ridiculous but the government spent millions of dollars on it on reinforcing windows and reinforcing you know the outsides of buildings my point being that for in our current world if you used to make perfume now you make hand sanitizer if you used to make bumper stickers now you make stickers that say stand six feet apart that are on the you know the floor of the supermarket uh if you used to make uh uh you know fabric uh scarves now you make masks and so everybody is inclined by the momentum of uh of commerce to jump on to anything that has everyone's attention in attention there is money to be made in the area of attention so when governments of the world say uh you know there's a virus and it if you're over 60 it'll kill you that was the first you know that was the original information and when that gets etched on the tablet it's very hard to change people's minds after that even though we learned that it was far more uh you know you were far more vulnerable if you were older if you were frail if you were i mean look at look at canada 70 of the people who died in canada whose deaths are attributed to covid were nursing home residents meaning what do you go to a nursing home for by the way you're dying that's it in los angeles county the average stay in a in a nursing home a a medicare nursing home is six months right i have six months to live yeah so so when we learned myself included i heard about the pandemic and thought oh
[ __ ] over 60 you get it you die so all kinds of cautions and care and concern then i got that first report that came out of italy which showed that 94 of the people had 2.7 fatal co-morbidities meaning they already had other diseases that could kill them i didn't and they already were elderly i wasn't they were in many cases overweight all variety of problems and the point being that it was highly age stratified it this disease is highly age and health stratified and so uh young people you know a kid in college you don't have a challenge from this disease now quickly if uh if dr fauci were in my pocket right now he would be climbing up here to yell at me oh yeah but we've got a lot of young people who are killed and first of all it's not a lot relative to anything and and secondly you know people get killed in car accidents life is a sexually transmitted always fatal communicable disease that is what life is right it is a condition that is sexually transmitted always fatal and communicable we cannot eliminate all risk and government always pretends they can after 9 11 the color codes it's a it's a red day it's a yellow day right the uk is using the color codes on this pandemic and it looks like comedy when you see it you know this is a yellow day and what what do i do duck not breathe you know stay under the kitchen counter what do i do with this information and then you see how do people actually die overweight heart disease diabetes et cetera et cetera et cetera et cetera and uh that was a little diatribe you just so this trusted news network like in the in this the instance of covid and uh in my recovery in particular they concentrated on one thing and that one thing was ivermectin and it was one of many things that i listed i listed uh zpac i listed uh prednisone i listed monoclonal antibodies and i said also ivermectin and i said iv vitamin drips and nad as well i think but all they concentrated on was ivermectin and then there was all these
stories like all over the world about me taking horse dewormer and it was very specific it was horse d murmur even though ivormecten by the way i found some stuff in my cabinet that was heartwarm medication for my dog that was ivermectin yeah and uh i was like wonder what's in this i was like well no this is ivermectin this is all after the fact and i was like holy [ __ ] this is ivermectin too but they had come up with one narrative one narrative that they all stuck to yeah and that was horse dewormer why do you think that's the case because like why would they be why would they concentrate on only one aspect of this laundry list of medications that i took well in your case you mentioned that one they did a similar hit job that was years in the making on hydroxychloroquine right i say years in the making you know for anybody who hasn't read uh robert kennedy's book called the real anthony fauci you can skip right to the last chapter and have your socks blown off in terms of things that are going on in the world it's got 3 200 citations everything is is very carefully uh researched and studied it's and it's been the number one book in the country for silently silently for you know we're coming up on 25 30 weeks now without a single review in the united states now when in our lives did that ever happen that a book is the number one bestselling book in america and nobody reviews it so it goes to the same question you're asking how you have a monolithic opinion that is that is uh foisted on the public and it's why joe this show has been so important not because you give people advice or you give them some specific you know guidance and tell them what to do but because you just give another you can hear another view any time you hear only the government view in world history that's been bad news and when in world history was it the good guys who were you know censoring books that's just not the way it works but i want to go to your questions specifically on ivermectin the the any treatment for covet 19 was a threat to
the emergency use authorization and a threat to um to vaccines the reason being that the emergency use authorization is not available if there are treatments available right so that's why they had to go nuts on hydroxychloroquine and why they had to go nuts on ivermectin because if there was a viable treatment available to the public then you do not get an emergency use authorization and what is the emergency use authorization the emergency use authorization allows you to go from step one to step 30 in a hundred days instead of 12 years right before you would inject something into somebody's body it used to be that vaccines took 7 8 9 10 and on the average 12 years to be approved by the fda this was 101 days and so ivermectin was a threat and if people knew it was a viable treatment or any early treatment by the way i mean how can you have a government health system that doesn't even bother to say to people through a pandemic take vitamin d take zinc you know there are many experts who feel that this was a pandemic of low vitamin d meaning that's a that's an absolute epidemic in america you know people don't go out and what did the government do stay home don't go outside watch television eat everything you can possibly eat and they don't say a word about your health and it's supposed to be public health but it isn't public health anymore it's much more focused on on specific outcomes i still haven't answered your question though yeah which is how it happens is it's this group of shared incentives so you have the pharma companies where the incentive is not small right uh pfizer upwards of 60 billion dollars already just on this one consumer product moderna in the 30s these are enormous enormous events and it's the best business in the history of the world because they have no liability they cannot get sued for any effect from these particular products and you know even
500 years ago when you went into the town square and you bartered with somebody to you know buy something off him if it turned out to be shitty you could bring it back to him and say hey man this thing you sold me isn't isn't what you said it was and you could you know engage with him not with pharma right no matter what happens from these particular products uh they cannot have liability so but how do all these media outlets share this narrative like what is their incentive what's their incentive well i i can't speak to to or pretend to know every incentive but i can look from the outside and see what we do know every major news program is sponsored predominantly right now by pfizer literally pfizer not just a company or drug companies in general but they've been pharma companies for for a decade meaning that's what if you watch regular television and you see commercials you're going to see pharma commercials all those commercials that you know tell you about the adverse effects etc do you think that there's a specific conversation that gives in this narrative or do you think that they know that their interest lies in keeping these pharmaceutical companies happy so that there's this sort of like understanding i think it's it's human nature i think you know it now can there also be conversations sure uh there's a you know the former head of fox who's died now i forgot his name fox news um he said to a good friend of mine um i will never put on he was talking about a particular guest who was perceived as going to speak adversely about vaccines he said i'll never put him on because pfizer is our primary you know this is how we run this place is based on these sponsors so that is just an incentive uh other incentives would be in the beginning in the beginning of this pandemic would be to get rid of trump meaning mainstream or corporate media had had enough they had whatever their philosophical beliefs were about trump and so all bets were off a very interesting example was the new york post story on hunter biden new york post oldest newspaper in america started by alexander hamilton for god's sake runs
this story about hunter biden's laptop and the the biden campaign he hadn't won yet floated the idea that it was all russian disinformation and uh 50 former intelligence officers wrote a public letter saying it has the earmarks of russian disinformation meaning it looks like it could be russian disinformation but the really bad thing that happened is twitter would not allow you to share the story and facebook would not allow you to to share the link so the story was literally killed and guess what two weeks ago the new york times has now come out and acknowledged that it wasn't russian disinformation it is uh hunter biden's laptop by the way i don't care about me i'm not a political person don't care about biden don't care about trump don't care about hunter biden it's not interesting but what is very interesting and important to me is the control of information in terms of censorship and i didn't like it i didn't like it either why do you think that they're admitting that it's real now probably because indictments might be coming there might be some kind of charge arising out of an investigation or you know the new york times has done this before big media companies do it which is um eventually they say everything right you can't believe it could possibly happen but eventually there'll be an article saying uh you know these 70 studies about ivermectin uh might actually uh you know speak to some remote impossible efficacy for this drug uh when the the pfizer you know ivermectin is a is a uh of a category of drug that pfizer's new drug is of the same category big surprise proteas inhibitors exactly yeah so it's also been shown to um stop viral replication in vitro all the way back to 2012 so and many many studies around the world my point here though is i you know you asked earlier about my life
and childhood i think by not living a conventional life i ask questions and i have a phrase in my company which is always go 10 questions deep so you don't just say oh there's going to be guards at every post you say well what are they told to do what is their instruction what are their instructions what's their qualifications are they standing together and talking or are they divided you know there's ten questions to ask to get to the real information and it might be it might be genetic it might be circumstance but some people yourself included uh are curious right and you can if you said something to me now that i'm i don't know if that's accurate i'm curious i want to look it up i want to see what i can learn about it um but people are not that way some people with government proclamations right and so it's considered everything you know fake news if you disagree with these particular public health officials and an interesting thing to remember about for example the fda 25 of new pharmaceuticals are later recalled they're not perfect the fda is not perfect they let things go out that later are found to be problematic opioids being a big example opioids for 11 year old kids which are current head of the fda who's been at the fda before and a consultant to 15 pharma companies in the interim of course he presided over you know over all variety of opioid problems that have led some of the biggest fines in in american history criminal fines against pharma companies johnson and johnson pfizer and yet today we've decided i have this fear please let me put it somewhere will you hold it for me government will you hold it for me pfizer you tell me i'm okay and like children people have done that and i encourage people ask questions that's a very good way of putting it the the fact that people put their faith in it's an industry that's been the most deceiving the most
ruthless the most willing to allow people to die for profit i mean when you look at what they did with vioxx you know that you know i had uh john abramson on the podcast to talk about that because he worked with uh that case and he's explaining how they knew that it was going to kill people they knew that it was going to have these sort of cardio respiratory uh problems and blood clots and and the like and it wound up killing someone in the neighborhood of 60 000 people yeah they and they were fined but yet they're still in business these are the same companies that people are defending as somehow another amazing because they've come up with this solution to what is this for many this existential crisis this this the terrifying reality of a virus that could is it's going to kill a certain amount of people no matter what you do and there's got to be some sort of a solution then there's this one solution that gets presented and everybody who thinks of themselves as being a good person or wants other people to think that they're a good person stops all questioning of this one group of companies that has been notoriously the most deceptive it's amazing it's amazing the willingness to just believe people that have been profit motivated and driven and willing to do whatever the [ __ ] it takes to get products to market regardless of whether or not they're even effective or more effective than the current products that are available that are safe yeah well i want to say since you mentioned vioxx that uh the president's nominee and the current head of the fda presided over the vioxx disaster as well and even went against a an advisory board recommendation and approved vioxx and so vioxx leads to fines of more than a billion dollars but he gets to be head of the fda again when abramson was on one thing that he told me that blew me away he said when scientists do peer-reviewed work on whatever the pharmaceutical drug company is working on at the time whether it's pain killers or anti-inflammatories whatever it is they don't get access to the data they
get access to the interpretation of the data from the pharmaceutical companies and then they do their papers i think which is [ __ ] madness it is and i think the public probably assumes that uh that trials like uh trials for a new uh pharmaceutical product um are you know the the material is studied by the government in some government lab and but that's not what happens of course these trials are run by the pharmaceutical companies using independent uh independent companies that are beholden to them and so going back to your original question about how you have a monolithic opinion i think the uh the corporate media in america at the beginning wanted to uh disadvantage uh trump and advantage biden and by the way i'm all you know i get it i get that people have strong opinions about uh about trump or about biden or about politics in general i think you can make a good argument that uh we'd be better off with a change and you could make a good argument we'd be better off keeping trump i mean you can go around that stuff all you want what happened though is that they succeeded at uh you know in a very close election they succeeded at uh at biden winning and that's not considered of course uh election tampering uh not letting the public know about the hunter biden uh laptop for example which would be a big thing in a normal campaign right the president's son and he's got references to the president inside his emails he's working with other governments i mean it would be a big it would be it wouldn't be nothing not just normal alleged child pornography all kinds of stuff so more more to be learned but here's my point that then it happened and there was success biden won and i think that then the overall structure that accomplished that now had a lot of power and simply did not stop using it because the next one you know it started around vaccine disinformation that's how the the trusted news initiative organized itself that we'll all we'll all find out what's true and we'll will tell the public that that's bad information and this is good
information but it then morphed to regular politics with the hunter biden thing and now i doubt it will be given up there are very few people in world history that give up power never yeah it just doesn't happen and what's fascinating to me is that so many people are willing to pretend that this isn't happening they're willing to stick their head in the sand and think that all these other folks that are making a big deal out of this they're trumpers or they're this or you know they have these biases that don't allow them to see the truth and you know and there's also a bunch of people that bought into things early on and because they bought into it they have this established narrative in their head and they're not willing to say they were wrong they're not willing to say that they had an incorrect assumption or that they bought into the narrative because the government was saying it and they were scared and they they wanted to have some sort of a feeling of comfort and also wanted to signal to all the people around them that they're doing their part that they're a good person yeah i think that's all accurate and and if you are a sports league for example and you have mandated that the young athletes get uh the vaccines and boosters for young athletes and then someone has myocarditis and collapses or dies the sports team does not want to say we were wrong right so they double down and we're seeing a lot of doubling down altogether and by the way i think it's awesome that people have their opinions whatever they are and however they got them what i strongly oppose is any effort to censor various views the idea that there is an okay scientist to talk on your show and that there's another one that's not okay to talk on your show is uh is itself a little bit alarming because you know your show in particular these are conversations you don't like it don't listen well not only that it's which scientists are talking about like are you talking about very respected scientists that are some of the most
published ever in their field yeah like i mean if you're if you're talking about people that are quacks that you can prove that they're full of [ __ ] and they haven't worked in years and they're just nuts and they've got schizophrenia like that then you're talking about one thing but if you're talking about people that are amongst the most published doctors ever in their field and you're saying there's something wrong with them because they have deviated from the narrative about one particular subject ever in their whole career yeah now you're mad are you sure yeah like how how how much do you believe in this we have a real problem in this country too with that there's only two countries in the world where pharmaceutical companies are allowed to advertise that's a problem yeah there's new zealand which is apparently far more restrictive than america and then there's america everybody else thinks we're crazy yeah yeah it would you know even when i was growing up you would learn about medications from your doctor uh who you hoped had you know got the best information and slowly throughout my life you now had people would come to the doctor's office with a nice briefcase and samples of the new pharmaceutical usually a cute girl and she would meet with the doctor personally he'd look forward to that meeting and she'd say oh here's a bunch of samples you can give out to people and here's here's our paper on how good and safe it is and on and on and on and some of those drugs were thalidomide uh meaning they weren't all perfect right and the idea that that that we think that a product uh this is the most successful product in world history by the way this makes coca-cola look like nothing all right this is a there is no other product in world history that billions of people have taken and that uh and that is going to be taken billions of times more as it comes into its fourth and fifth approved uh you know a booster here in the united states um so it my problem with all of it is i don't
even have to have a medical opinion uh i have to have an opinion that i want all the information just imagine you go to your doctor and he says so let me tell you about this product and uh and he says i want to give you this this uh piece of paper about the product and i said what about the other papers you have over there he says i don't want you to see those becky pardon i don't want to tell you that stuff what do you mean you don't want to tell me that stuff informed consent is telling me the two sides of the issue what's favorable about this product and what's unfavorable about this product so that i can make a decision well informed consent you know went out the window here in these last two years and i think that the something that i care about is that people be allowed to have a dialogue and have access to information they can make their own decision on anything but have access to information and i'm always stunned when people say i don't want to i don't want to see that guy that interview you know some interview you've had for example i don't want to watch that guy oh what do you know about that guy that you're not watching what is it you know about that guy well i read that such and such where what and you ask 10 questions and people fall off it about question number three right it's just articles of faith it's like a religion and uh it's just a belief system i look for somebody to invest my confidence in patchy looks like a good guy i'll do him yeah and it's not just a lack of information it's a withholding of pertinent information like that the cdc didn't want to release the data on the booster for ages 18 to 49. well let's go for let's that's right now let's go further than that they said it was going to contribute to vaccine hesitancy right like what the [ __ ] are you even saying how would it yeah or that would be misinterpreted that's what they said what does that mean all the more reason for us to to want to see it of course and to want to but that's not your job the point is that that's not your job your job is not to like your job is not to form a consensus opinion amongst the general public through the way you present things yeah
your job is to give them the data and to allow the public health experts and the scientists to interpret that data in a way that makes the most sense to people your job is not just to say we're going to withhold this data because we personally don't feel that it's within the best interest to let people know the facts that's crazy and crazier is the way it's been accepted the fda for example went to court to not release the pfizer trials data that they had the safety data they asked for 55 years to release it then they they lost an early one they went back to court and asked for 75 years to release it now every time i say that i turn to you because every time i say that i have to tell people google it google fda pfizer 75 years because people don't believe it they don't believe that those guys stood in court and said we want 75 years to release this data by the way 400 000 pages supposedly that was read and fully absorbed by the fda experts in a hundred days so that doesn't seem likely it doesn't seem likely no and so you know this is by the way for me it's just one it's just one subject among many where um i i encourage people by the way even my books my books are about personal responsibility you learn it don't rely on the government don't rely on the police don't rely on the corporation to be sure the lighting in the parking lot is okay so now you're safe because they put lights up you learn about your own internal nuclear defense system and that so i my buttons get pushed around this topic because the misuse of fear causes extraordinary anxiety look what it's done you know in the whole world throughout history but you know in recent times and i want to tell you an interesting thing i mentioned earlier that you have the world you have world history and tyranny is the norm that is the default for world history and we're this tiny little sliver and it's quite an unusual experiment we're doing and have done in the western in western europe the united states canada
and it's uh to me it's something really worth protecting like you got a really you know no no we said free speech we mean free speech even if you got to listen to that guy on joe rogan who you don't want to hear turn it off but we don't want him to be censored for example and so what i've seen with fear it being used by by just in my lifetime it starts with fear of the other the russians russia is a country and they're going to hurt us they're going to send nuclear bombs toward us then it goes to communism sorry then it goes to communists their people then it goes to communism now we're down to an idea and after 9 11 it goes to you know terrorists then it goes to terrorism a strategy then it goes to uh you know you're either with us or against us and the point i'm making is that it gets smaller and smaller and smaller right down to the smallest particulate matter ever which is like talcum powder much smaller which is a virus and in all these things i just described to you only government can tell you if you're in danger and only government can fix it they have that in common right you couldn't even know whether you had coveted in the beginning for 18 months tests were not allowed as a public product what do you mean you couldn't go buy tests in the beginning well obviously i was using tests very early on well not not the very beginning very beginning we hired a service you were going and getting places yes people could do it as a service but there was not a consumer product that you could go into pharmacy so that took a year and a half yeah so government took 14 months so government took um responsibility to say you've got it now it's a little bit like you live in a village 500 years ago and there's the witch doctor but there were tests avail you could go to centers and get tested yes but you wasn't like have the consumer test you couldn't have it on your own in your home because i think they thought that people would do it incorrectly well okay that's a that's a generous thought but but honestly when you're stopping and thinking about it you're talking
about something that is important when you're reporting the number of coveted cases if someone's doing it incorrectly and they're getting a false negative but then they actually do have covit and they wander around spread it because they incorrectly used a home test like until they knew that it was i mean that's a big piece of information if you're talking about a pandemic especially early in the pandemic where people were legitimately concerned that it was going to kill everybody i mean in march of 2020 people were terrified of this if they had a test then and people people misuse everything so you're allowing the general public to take something and give them a false sense of security and they could potentially use that false sense of security to bypass safety protocol and go out and spread this deadly virus that makes sense to me that you would only be able to get tested in places where people are trained to do it correctly okay so why is it now available to everybody in the store well i think the concern about the virus is lessened because of vaccines and then because of previous infection and then because of education enough people have understood now that your vulnerabilities increase because of obesity your vulnerabilities increase because of vitamin deficiencies and all sorts of other factors that i think people have a more comfortable sense i mean there's still a bunch of like very paranoid people out there that are highly ridden with anxiety that still wear double masks when they're walking around outside i see them every day but there's always been people in our culture that are overwhelmed by anxiety and overwhelmed by fear and those you know there's a spectrum of course there's people that were maskless in the early days like look and i don't care and then there's people who are like cautionary but not sure how much risk is really truly involved i think we kind of have a as a general base of fear and anxiety over the virus it's greatly diminished and now particularly because of omicron because of omicron i think most people who get it and you know there's this weird narrative where people get it and they're they're sick but they go thank god i'm vaccinated because it was really
mild you know you should go get vaccinated like well i wasn't vaccinated it was really [ __ ] mild for me like this is a mild virus like you're just saying that because you want to justify the fact that you got vaccinated i think for the early version of the virus and for the delta vaccines helped a lot of [ __ ] people i'm not anti-vaccine in any way shape or form although it's been said that i am i'm not i encourage a lot of people to get vaccinated but i don't like [ __ ] i don't like false narratives and that's that's what's going on today you're seeing a lot of people that are saying things that don't necessarily make sense because it justifies their life choices or their choices when it comes down to testing though i think it's probably wise that it especially especially in the early days when we weren't exactly sure what's going on i mean it's easy to look at that as a monday morning quarterback and say they should have done this but when you're looking at what people did in the early days if you gave people home tests and they weren't good or they weren't good at it and they did a shitty job you would get a totally distorted idea of whether or not you were safe and you probably cost lives you probably well go to visit your mom when she's sick i hear i hear your position on that i think the concern of government was a slightly different one which is that if consumer tests were available we could decide on our own yeah we will have that wedding yeah we will go to that funeral yeah we will test everybody i believe in testing by the way i think it's great people who are concerned about getting them but do you think that they would stop people from doing tests because they wanted to control people they wanted to stop weddings they wanted to stop gatherings regardless of whether they were safe well of course they wanted to control people uh that's that is a that's a given uh the motive is the issue are you wanting to control people because it's in their own best interest to do so because they'll get sick less often or you're wanting to control people because it's your default position and when you get it
you know it's the it's the greatest wet dream you ever had what we saw with mayors and governors and and city officials of all kinds who sort of their inner their inner bureaucrat came out or or dictator came out um so the question isn't whether they wanted to control people they wanted to control the numbers as well and so when you when you have tests that are only done by official sanctioned locations that report back the information you have a far greater connection to the data right if i just do it at home that test isn't recorded somewhere right so i do think that in in all of the things i mentioned about governments and the narratives of fear that have been used they all have an element of only the government can help you and only the government can tell you whether you've got it i agree with you but i also think there's a real problem managing at scale you're managing millions and millions and millions of people to offer options when you're thinking about something that you really need to control which is a spread of a deadly disease to have options available for people which would create gray areas which look if you're not reporting if you just buy a home test and you decide whether or not it's accurate or inaccurate like you can get a home test and test positive for covet and just [ __ ] lie to people and say yeah i tested i'm good like if you go to a place and they tell you whether or not i mean there's still a there's an area of inaccuracy with all these tests right they're not 100 accurate but if you go to a place and you get tested at least they have an accurate recording or at least they have an accurate recording of the test results yes they don't know if their test results are accurate but they do well we tested a hundred thousand people and out of those people you know two percent of them were positive for covet so this is the this is the local infection numbers don't you think that that would be a valuable thing i think it was a valuable thing and uh i don't argue that it's valuable i argue that government steps in when there are opportunities you've heard i think that's true you've
heard the phrase that you know uh no crisis should ever don't never let a crisis waste steps in and the amount of control that comes around a virus because it scares people i mean everything you just said should apply equally to the flu everything you just said it does and that's what scares me what scares me is the notion that people might start using these same sort of draconian measures of control with something that we've always just accepted as a part of everyday life now a lot of people have accepted covet and they're encouraging people to accept covet as endemic and this is just a part of life now well that's always been how we accepted the flu but i'm hearing a lot of talk of mandatory flu vaccines yes i'm hearing a lot of talk of mandating things and that makes me nervous because i do know that there's a financial incentive whenever there's any kind of financial incentive and you do know that these financial incentives trickle down into media which shapes narrative for the entire population like as a whole we should be super [ __ ] concerned about that i i am it's one of the reasons i'm here i think that piece is it's not about the virus and it's not about the pandemic that is just the latest iteration of a time that can be used to imp empower government and reduce the power of the people and i give you a fast example if we had a community group of a hundred people and we got together to do something in the community and we said hey we'll let's have bob and susie be in charge they'll be the administrators right that's two percent of the people in our 100 person group and then bob and susie say hey everybody stay in their homes don't come out uh don't do this don't do that and start giving us all variety of instructions in that little democracy that we had this little hundred person democracy we would say we don't want two percent telling everybody what to do and we'd laugh at them bob and susie started saying ridiculous things now in the actual uh the non-metaphorical version of this it's a minuscule percentage of our population in any country controls the rest of the population and what do they
tend to like people in power what they tend to like is throughout history the king and queen would look over the castle wall first of all they always have a castle wall a question we can ask ourselves why is that but the reason is they look over the castle wall and they see the people fighting with each other they're disagreeing over things and they give each other a hug because that is the best news possible it's only when all the people agree that they have a risk of coming over the castle wall you follow my thinking so division itself that we are experiencing and which you know uh you're at the center of often um this whole idea that i won't it's really not to go down but my point is division itself is beneficial to those in power well that's one of the reasons why they love the whole right left paradigm but yet you see them all working together on certain things yeah government so you know i'm i i'm not an anarchist i'm very much a believer in the united states and its constitution and when you can deviate uh you know robert kennedy makes a good point in his book that there is no pandemic exception in the constitution and they knew what pandemics were right right they had had pandemics oh yeah and so there was he said there's no uh exception for liquor stores to be considered you know an essential business but there is reference in the constitution to churches which were closed so my my objection is that or my observation i should say doesn't matter whether i object my observation is that we all ought to care a lot whatever the reason when government seeks to assume a lot of power it's a little town in arizona a few months ago had three people escaped from their jail and the sheriff looking for the three people who escaped from the jail who embarrassed their sheriff's department did a lockdown of the little town everybody go home so they got to search for these three people with um without those pesky citizens going about their lives and going to work and going to restaurants so the idea of lockdown suddenly becomes you
know part of our accepted uh lexicon and so uh you know i have said throughout that i am also not anti-vaxx i am also not uh even anti-pharmaceuticals i'm we're going to need pharmaceuticals at different times in our lives you can't for sure and you can't speak about vaccines as if they're one thing right there have been vaccines taken off the market because they're dangerous there's the the gardasil vaccine that's downright dangerous and terrible and shouldn't be given to nine-year-old boys who don't have you know who cannot get cancer in their female sex organs they don't have female sex organs but nine-year-old boys right now are scheduled in the in the you know american pediatric association to get gardasil which is a very bad drug what is gardasil for it's for uh cervical cancer and hpv right but but they can get hpv yeah but the the nine-year-old boys jesus christ it would take us uh the whole show but hpv vaccine is a bad vaccine and it is a dangerous vaccine it is not worth it and hpv is not clearly demonstrably going to lead to cancer for your little girl in 40 years because you have these cancers that uh that are serious cervical cancer in your 50s so you're taking this little girl right now 9 years old 10 years old and you're saying gee i don't want her to get cervical cancer well it's not her we're talking about it's her in 40 years we're talking about and cervical cancer is highly treatable it's not a terrible killer and we don't even know if the vaccine works and so and it has a lot of serious problems the the package insert for that particular vaccine is macabre how so you read the the the side effects and the adverse events which you know they have to list in order to get uh in order to get immunity from prosecution uh from uh uh uh lawsuits and so that happens to be a bad one but rather than dwell on that too much tetanus is a good one right my kid got a big injury i'd be running into the other tetanus shot and uh you don't have to do it when they're you know in the in the crib polio is a great one there's there's many great vaccines polio have been beneficial you know
there hasn't been a case of polio since 1986 the united states but polio vaccine isn't so bad for you and so you know majority of polio in the world today is actually um vaccine uh you know form polio interestingly yeah we we showed that uh during an alex jones podcast he he brought that up that they were giving kids vaccines for polio in africa and that this was actually causing the children to get polio and i was like how is that real and he brought up an ap article yeah and i was like whoa like this is mainstream this is a mainstream article well it's like what i'm about to say now that the the early covet tests had about a 90 false positive rate is that real 90 and why i could bring it up so comfortably is i've got a new york times article that lays it out completely probably if he does new york times ninety percent uh coveted test you'll probably find that article no when false positive like how so was it false positive because it was a pcr test and they ran it at too many cycles that's that's an example and by the way our government you know we didn't have to run it at 45 cycles in 30 cycles other countries were running it at uh your coronavirus test is positive maybe it shouldn't be the unusual diagnostic test may be simply too sensitive and too slow to contain the spread of the virus so this is from when scroll down that's the july of 2021 just stay right there for a second um i'm looking for you're gonna many of the people are not likely to be contagious and identifying them may contribute to bottlenecks that prevent prevent those who are contagious from being found in time but researchers say the solution is not test less or skip testing people without symptoms as recently suggested by the centers for disease control prevention whoa instead new data underscore the need for more widespread use of rapid tests even if they are less sensitive keep going keep going keep scrolling down for a second not reading just scroll down scroll down scroll down so the rapid tests are better scroll down scroll down uh so listen to this in three sets of
testing data that includes cycle thresholds compiled by officials in massachusetts new york and nevada up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus a review by the new york times found so this is people that were testing positive that were testing positive at high cycles of pcr and they couldn't get they could wouldn't be symptoms and they couldn't make you sick well they've lowered the sim they've lowered the cycles of pcrs dramatically right i don't know about whether that's done nationally but it was recommended i just read one more quick paragraph the united states recorded 45 000 new corona cases if the rates of contagiousness in massachusetts and new york were to apply nationwide then perhaps only 4 500 of those people may actually need to isolate and submit to contact tracing but here's the point is that currently where they are right now and is it still possible for the virus to replicate inside their body and they would eventually become contagious good question because some are pre-symptomatic that is true meaning they were going to get they were going to get worse it just hasn't the virus hasn't replicated enough in their system but there's a reason that you saw countries all over the world have 80 percent asymptomatic cases right the the other way to say that is the way we would have said it pre-covered our whole lives is oh you're not sick right you don't have any symptoms right and 80 to 90 of the people having no symptoms is called not sick historically so now we're searching for something that the testing process allowed for a great deal of disruption in the united states i happen to believe in the test more for the negative than for the positive just fyi i'm sorry more for the positive for the negative because okay now you're going to take a nine out of ten chance and you're not i'm not going to come to your dinner party because i because i tested positive right i would do that um but and then i don't get sick and then i don't get sick and then i don't get sick and i never get sick that's not called you have covid that's called you're not sick right historically we did not call something a
case of pneumonia or a case of the flu unless you had the flu right wasn't that your whole life right but the contagious aspect of covid it's so much more contagious than any of these other diseases that you're citing that the problem is that the consequences of being incorrect are so much higher because especially if you're dealing with omicron right even though omicron is very mild it's so contagious and i say very mild very i should say very mild for me so for some people i guess apparently not so mild i couldn't even believe i actually had covet i came in here and i had a canceled podcast i was like what like my nose is running i was like like this i go this is it i got worked out today i go covet and it never got bad never got anywhere the next day i was negative right and you were taking you were taking vitamin d beforehand you were taking zinc i take care of myself across the board it's not just those things it's many things it's exercise it's cardiovascular fitness it's sauna cold plunge massive amounts of vitamins it's all these things yeah i get iv drips i do a lot of things that are extraordinary in terms of like what the average person does well no risk factor is more important than good health and bad health why did this become such a focus for you though when who's a security expert well two things one is i had to advise a lot of people on how are we going to navigate life in this new circumstance everything from you know in the beginning we were told that it will live on packages that come from the store so you're cleaning packages or you can get a pizza delivery the outside of the box will kill you but the inside the pizza will be just fine you remember this period where you're cleaning everything you know you're wiping off the bananas before they come into the house and so it was my challenge to manage life for people during this circumstance and it's also just my general curiosity the second issue that affected me a lot is that uh we have a lot of i got 570 employees a lot of them young people and a lot of them out of the military and and we had our own four cases of myocarditis inside
we also had a young man come out of the military and come to our physical fitness requirements and while running on the track 33 years old fall down and die the he was not our employee he was applying to be an employee of ours and so it was in my interest to learn a great deal about whatever the risks are from both the vaccine and whatever the risks are from the virus and to do what what i think you know people wisely do which is compare the two things and make your decision about um how to administer it as an employer i had to decide was i going to mandate vaccines for example and so you looked at it in terms of the way you look at other security concerns what's the accurate assessment of threat exactly correct and i had a bunch of clients ask me you know i'm this age i'm in this general physical condition just not they're not asking me for medical advice but they're asking me for statistical information on you know what are the risks here so in the beginning after we got the italy information what you had to do to die of covid in the beginning if you were say 53 years old and fit first you had to get covered then you had to ignore it for a few days then you had to uh go to the hospital then 90 of people were sent home not admitted so then you had to be admitted then you had to go up to uh to the icu that's 87 didn't get to the icu and then you had to be on put on a ventilator and then you could die so there was a quite a series of things you had to go through in order to say this is a this is a giant risk to the individual to the right to a specific individual who's fit much different when you're looking at it from a public health perspective and you're looking at a global population that is uh you know you pick a number 40 uh obesity extraordinarily high amounts of diabetes for example and so i had to do a you know just a statistical look at at every kind of risk we do it when clients go to another country what are the risks in that country everything from you know being pickpocketed all the way to getting a disease what for example would you take a yellow fever vaccine going to a country with yellow fever yes
you would take a yellow fever vaccine but some people don't take the flu vaccine for example and the flu vaccine has the same wrap that you described earlier where people say oh i got the flu good good thing i got that flu vaccine it was milder what form of science is there that tells you it would have been worse if right it's just an unknowable thing and it's a genius marketing you know mechanism by the way so many people repeat that yeah i want to go back to something uh the uh that i said about about gardasil um which is that the commercials for gardasil are a little girl talking to camera and she says um do you know about this mommy do you know about this daddy after the it's you know the information so they think my little girl dying of cervical cancer and so it's a brilliant product because in half the circumstances that people get cervical cancer their parents will already be dead they've already bought the product given it to them two and three times by the way it has boosters as well and it is it is one it has one of the worst side effect profiles of any vaccine but it pushes the button here's a product your little girl the problem is vex not not excuse me not pharmaceutical drugs the problem is to be the if you can advertise if you can advertise you can manipulate people and change their opinion based on theatrics right you have music and people dancing and holding hands and spinning around in a wheat field like that is so manipulative and we are subject to manipulation and when it's something that is so important like making critical health decisions you know i mean how many of these you know consult your doctor and then they rattle off a list of things that could go wrong like your [ __ ] becomes a fire hydrant of blood like it's like there's so many of these [ __ ] commercials like so many times i'm watching television i'm like how many goddamn drug commercials are there which means i would like to know what television what percentage of advertisers are pharmaceutical drugs there's a guy
who can find out yeah like what percentage of television ads are pharmaceutical drugs and if you do news uh news programs i think it's just about everything uh is real pharma yeah everything's brought to you by pfizer 75 holy [ __ ] yeah holy [ __ ] brilliant products because people are sick in america it's not a healthy population that is a crazy number in 2020 tv ad spending of the pharma industry accounted for 75 of the total ad spend yeah good question now let's google this television news what percentage of the ads on television news are from pharmaceutical companies by the way joe have you ever seen that little compilation that says brought to you by pfizer i had it on my instagram page oh good brought to you by pfizer yeah anderson cooper brought to you by pfizer and it's it's it's never going to go away and we're unfortunately again they don't have that in england they don't have that in ireland they don't have that in [ __ ] egypt they don't have that they don't have that you name a country they don't have it and those side effects that you hear at the end of course cannot compete with the images you know the the the two old people and he gets another six weeks of life because of mulan yeah and it says you know life it's projected up on the thing they're walking through the field and then afterwards to say well the side effects are these terrible things and they always say i'm fast yeah and they're almost funny some of them obviously uh you know one of them i liked a lot was um feelings of euphoria well i'll take that [ __ ] right but that's what suicidal thoughts yeah yeah the the ones that give you suicidal thoughts but don't worry about it don't you want to not have diarrhea what are you saying yeah but it's like the problem is manipulative ads are effective they work if your person is sitting at home and you don't feel good and there's an ad that comes on and these people are living the way you would like to live
they're dancing around they're laughing and smiling you're like i want to dance around yeah i want to laugh and smile i want to be like these folks yeah like that that's one thing if you're selling toasters well it's innocuous it's not going to hurt anybody it's just a toaster but if you're selling something that could potentially change a person's entire life if it goes sideways you know you're giving me a good idea which is what about a law that uh prohibits uh uh pharmaceutical advertising like uh virtually every country in the world that would be an interesting thing for a politician to look at at the federal level oh my god would they come for him well they're coming just might even saying it right now they're coming for me and and you're already in the [ __ ] [ __ ] house so but 75 is such a crazy number when you think about the amount of money involved in now it makes sense thank you when you look at the narrative of all these television news companies and media companies all pushing the same thing they're basically pushing for their boss their boss now is the pharmaceutical companies if they've got that kind of money to spend 75 percent of the ads yeah i think it's more on news shows by the way i think it's just about everything on news shows jamie's in the middle of the differentiation because the news won't tell you the news those [ __ ] they're hiding it do you remember earlier when you said one of the things of being famous is uh people asking for something and wanting something yeah i want something what do you want uh i want to mention that the that gift of fear my book is now a master class oh that you're very good that's funny uh on the head please if you would uh there we go uh anyway that is now a master class uh that is uh 10 10 master classes it's available for free not charging anything it's at giftafear.com and it'll be on youtube for free as well you're kidding me there it is you are kidding me masterclass on personal safety and that is the end of my shameless uh my shameless uh advertisement oh except i want to say this what at the core of
that book it is really about people listening to their intuition and if you can imagine you know a woman in a in an office building late at night alone she's leaving her job and the elevator doors open up and there's a guy inside who scares her for whatever reason how he's dressed how he looks that he's there whatever it may be and she says i'm not going to be the kind of person who doesn't get in the elevator i'm not going to be the kind of person who judges this guy and so she gets into a steel soundproof chamber with somebody she's afraid of and there's not an animal in nature that would ever do that and so my work is really to encourage people just this one little thing which is to listen to your intuition and that master class is that i went back after this book is 25 years old and i went back and interviewed first of all i just got 17 women together every one of them had a truly profound experience of violence and i think that would be true if i got 17 people together in a room in america you know you'd either know somebody it'd be one you know one removed or it'd be you that had some experience much more so with women though right that's true and uh in fact there's a thing in the in the master class where we ask people on the street men and women when's the last time you thought about uh yourself being in danger and the men would be like [Music] danger no can't think of anything and the women would all be yesterday today when i parked last night where i park where i go uh so it's just a different world for men and women uh in society and it's uh so so a lot of that book is about you know listen to your intuition and and a lot of the master class the idea came from oprah that she did a bunch of shows with me and then 10 years later she did a 10-year anniversary show on this book and i thought and got some of the people together who were involved and i i thought well let me go back and get these people together and and do this thing where we just sit around and and have a conversation and i got you know a woman who whose child was killed at the new town school shooting someone else who's whose
daughter was killed by her boyfriend a man who shot his own brother by accident when he was a kid very interesting perspective because you never hear from that person you know you hear you get the news stories about the tragedy but the guy who has to go through life you know having had that accident that shooting accident and uh and then a bunch of experts fbi lapd etc and i think it can help people and i think it can help people now when there's a lot of fear and a lot of crime and a lot of demonstrations and a lot of upset in society right now uh in fact it's even you know i saw you talk about will smith even decorum in general is is being broken uh in this time in america in that a lot of people are on edge you have a lot more multiple victim shootings you have a lot more violence you've got these break-ins in california where 70 people break into a store yeah at the same time that laws are changing that says we're not going to prosecute in california most cities for anything over uh unless it's over 1500 theft so people just walk into a cvs and pick up something or a target store walk out yeah it's nuts so it's a hard time and i know there's a lot of fear and i always want to remind people that there are women who were killed by their husbands or boyfriends but the fear they were thinking about was terrorists you know during 9 11. so more people have died at the hands of boyfriends and husbands than died at 9 11. uh triple oh sure and and so we focus on the wrong things right we you know on our refrigerator we might have the doctor's name and number but we don't have the nuclear emergency search team phone number uh you know the black helicopters that the pentagon has because it's not in our thinking day to day and it shouldn't be but we let television news program our fears and years ago i was doing a book tour for for this book and a guy said to me well a television producer he said a little uh he had a guest on talking about the flesh-eating disease that has come and gone in our consciousness do you remember it there's a big news story you could get the
flesh-eating disease and uh and i met this woman who was going to be interviewed and and i thought later on she could have she could have told me about the fleshing disease before i shook hands with her i thought jokingly but she didn't and she i didn't get it and she didn't have it she only wanted to talk about her fear of it they couldn't find somebody with the disease so i said to the news producer you know what the [ __ ] what are you doing like this is a thing that six people got in another country why is this a news segment here he said well another he said a little worry never hurt anybody and i put it in one of my books because a little worry is the cause of hypertension and drug addiction and alienation from people in fear of each other and all this stuff that goes on programmed our fears programmed and my teaching is the things to fear actually have not changed they are each other they are the relationships you're in and so you have a choice when you're getting into a new relationship with an employee with a boyfriend or girlfriend uh you have choices and you can observe the circumstance you're in and you can predict violent behavior people can have that capacity just like every other animal in nature does you know if you see two two wolves come together on some mountain path and one of them puts his ears back and shows his teeth and his hair stands up on his back the other one and then he attacks the other wolf right the other wolf does not say oh my god i had no idea that was coming right but people do that every day they participate in their own victimization without recognizing that they have every piece of information that they need in their intuition which by the way the word intuition the root of it is in tear and it means to guard and to protect do you encourage people to take self-defense courses or to learn martial arts i do particularly a kind of self-defense class called sometimes called model mugging where you may have seen it where the uh the perpetrator is in a padded suit and for women who are not going to invest
years in some self-defense class it's very valuable because it teaches them to strike many women maybe most have never really hit anybody to hurt them and so with a padded assailant this kind of training often called model mugging and their other names for it which is available in every major city is something i really believe in because it lets you engage with somebody physically and prevail and and it teaches you a few uh tricks not at the level that somebody who takes martial arts courses but i like martial arts for every purpose for for uh for confidence uh for self-defense uh for health i think in every way so yeah even in this book uh more in my later books but in this book there's a discussion about about model mugging and that kind of engagement where you you sort of gain some muscle memory about what it is to actually strike somebody you know in my we have a different opinion on that good because i don't believe in that i just i don't believe you're gonna learn how to effectively hurt someone in such a short period of time and i think in particular for women the problem is just by their own and for because of their own anatomy they don't have the ability a lot of them i should say don't have the ability to actually harm someone hurting them you're just going to make them angry i don't think you really learn anything in those environments in those classes when i used to teach martial arts one of the things that i i had a problem with was trying to [Music] gently explain to someone that everything they had learned in one of those classes was useless like the idea you should drop to your back and start kicking up because you yes women have greater lower body strength than upper body strength all of this only would work on a [ __ ] everything everything about like it maybe it's better than not knowing anything but all of it would only work on someone who's weak and the idea that a weak person would attack a woman is very unlikely if it's a very strong powerful man you
may even anger them if you try to strike first a real fundamental understanding of actual martial arts is the only thing that's going to save you and in particular jiu jitsu a martial art where a lighter smaller person actually can prevail over a bigger person because they have skills and they understand techniques they understand positioning they understand leverage and they've applied it over and over and over and over again so that in times of extreme stress they can perform because most people when encountered with actual violence will freeze up because they don't know what it's like to be an actual physical conflict one of the great things about jiu jitsu is you are in constant violent conflict in class it's controlled but you're going full blast and because of that when a situation occurs and you have to grapple with someone you have muscle memory completely built in you will know exactly what to do it won't be a question of thinking it'd be a question of the leg is open there's the trip i get double underhooks we're down on the ground i move to side control block the punches block the eye gouges move to mount elbow to the face all those things are just going to be ingrained in your system you'll know how to stick a rear naked choking because you've done it thousands of times you take a [ __ ] class for a couple hours and you're like no and you punch the guy no and you're like yeah i'm out gonna go out there and stop mugging someone's gonna punch you in the [ __ ] face and you're gonna forget everything i don't believe in those things i don't like like i don't believe you can learn french in an hour i don't believe you can learn martial arts and how to defend yourself against a guy in a giant state puff marshmallow costume that [ __ ] doesn't work so it sounds like you have an opinion on this yeah man i have an opinion on it i i just think there's no shortcuts to self-defense there's no shortcuts to being able to take care of yourself and i think what bothers me is that there's some people that walk out of those classes and i don't know how they're taught if they're taught this way but they walk out with an interpretation of it
they're misinformed and i think they they have this false confidence that i think is dangerous and if you think you're just going to go around punching people you know that you think are a threat and that that's going to protect you because you took a class like that's not likely you want some argument yes okay um uh two things you're gonna love my book because it's got a great deal about what are the natural elements of the physics of safety and how it works and obviously avoiding a physical encounter uh that is dangerous is far and away the the better outcome but you know you said two things here that i want to play back for you one is you said i don't know what goes on in those classes i agree that's one the other one is you said maybe they will be slightly better off than they would have been i agree and so the fact is we're not going to get 220 million american women or young girls i've got two daughters to all become jiu jitsu experts and a little jiu jitsu is also dangerous you probably feel i don't think that's true well you know i took one lesson is that enough for me to okay that's what i'm just making at the same point that's less than a little okay a little a year i understand my point is though that having not being competent at something is not good in either circumstance so model mugging is six hours it's six weekends typically there are all kinds of courses and there are advanced courses as well but we just don't see that the same way because i have to leave people by the way my books do not say go to a model mugging class and that's the end of the book but you know how difficult it is to generate force right yes and i know how little sports you know it takes 16 pounds of force to break a knee for example listen and and that's what's talked about that's not going to work this is where you don't have practice and kicking knees well this idea that a knee is going to break and that's if you lean the knee sideways and let someone hit it well except that many women who've taken model mugging courses have had success
at prevailing during violent encounters and so if you accept the premise that's your premise you said it which is it may leave people a little bit better off it's not designed to to you know make them into mma fighters it's designed to give them some courage to resist and run because resistance is a very important part what do you have available to you if you're a woman raped and let's remember which one of us has interviewed 25 000 of those women so you have the ability to comply and then run away if you get an opportunity you have the ability to resist you have the ability to resist and then comply or comply and then resist so you have you have a few options and the generally speaking i won't be there with some victim at their you know at the time of that emergency but generally speaking um resistance is more valuable and resistance in getting away is most valuable and they're you know you talked about a big predator for example there are basically two kinds of predators i'm going to speak global categories men who are who are practicing predation against women there's two types there is the persuasion predator that's far and away the most common doesn't need to be strong doesn't need to be big he's not using force he is using persuasion to get you into that place that location where you can't get away and where you can't call for help that's the most common persuasion predator the other one the power predator very rare he just charges out of nowhere like a bear and he's brave he's bigger he's courageous and i agree with you that for the power predator other than the ability to get away quickly you are not going to have a successful fight with a power predator it's two percent of the predators in the world but not in the western world but nonetheless i agree with you on that but for the persuasion predator the teaching early for your daughter and my daughters what what am i being persuaded to do here why why is this person not listening to me when i say no why is this person wanting to go to this more remote location why is he saying lock the door at the end of work when he's the manager and i should all of those early intuitions are how you actually
save your life or save yourself from a from a violent well that all makes sense to me that i had no idea that it was six uh hours or six weeks of doing it yeah that actually makes sense more too because you're explaining to people possible scenarios and how to get out of them i just don't like the idea of giving people false confidence about their physical prowess and maybe this is on my own personal bias from actually being a martial arts instructor and talking to people that were saying do i really need to learn this because i learned that i can just palm strike you in the nose and you know man you palm strike a guy in the nose like there's a very high likelihood that's going to not do much well so i don't think our our uh disagreement is enough to end the friendship yeah no i don't think we're even disagreeing because i think in many ways i'm ignorant to the protocol that they're prescribing if they're doing it for six weeks i think there's something about long courses where i don't think you can get anything this one woman that i'm referring to was one of my my former students she had taken one class and you know there was this one class where this guy had this big blue foam thing on and she was explaining what you know what she told her to do and i'm like god you don't want to be on your back like you want to run away you want to get the [ __ ] out of there like this idea that you're going to be on your back and you're going to kick someone that [ __ ] that's not gonna work so you you just did something joe that is such an interesting example of uh joe roganism which is you went from your opinion which is very well informed because you have a lot of experience and then you heard some new information and then you said you know maybe i don't know enough about those classes well as soon as you said six i get it yeah but i want to give you this compliment uh from a 67 year old man to a who knows what you are 54. there you go so i have so much more wisdom but the compliment i want to give you is that very few people do what you just did and i see you do it all the time and it's a it's a kind of a hallmark of this show which is it's okay i also see you get criticized for it oh he begins with one opinion he ends up
with another opinion you mean human being you mean thoughtful curious person um so i just i was impressed it was just fun to be sitting over here and see you have a strong opinion and then see well there's something more i need to know about this if more people in america would do that we would not have mandates and why am i opposed to mandates because mandates for for uh uh you know vaccination is one step away from mandates for anything else my um my opinion on this is uh you know i'm talking about women's self-defense courses but in many ways it's actually not about women it's about men having a delusional perspective of their own ability to defend themselves which is very very common more common than with women women in many cases are physically more vulnerable than men in most cases and so when someone is teaching self-defense course again uh i probably shouldn't have said that i don't agree with it because i don't know how they're running their course but i've seen a lot of women's self-defense courses and i'm like man that is not going to work and it i really get upset by giving people false confidence there are so many men out there that have this delusional idea of their ability to defend themselves and it's so crazy and it's it's amazing how the ego can play tricks on you to the point where there's men out there starting fights they have no idea how to fight it's real legitimately like to back to speaking french it's like having an argument with someone when you don't even understand their language right like you you might know paulie francais and you're literally getting in a [ __ ] debate with them this is what it's like to get into a physical altercation if you don't know how to defend yourself so i want to share two things with you in in my company we employ a lot of people who are coming out of the military and we have a training academy they go to and one of the things that we're using is uh is attack dogs uh police dogs and what we do is we put somebody in a bite suit and we have a variety of exercises one where they're put in the back of a van and they are told you have to feed the dog if it comes over the seat it's going to get to your your legs your hands and
your head are all not covered so you got to feed the dog and so you're just like this with this dog right here that wants to hurt you right the dog don't know anything but want to hurt you right and then there's another exercise where you run and you're chased and the dogs are pretty good at judo they're you know these are trained police dogs they want to pull you down and get you on the ground but the reason we do that training and we've had a lot of people go to the hospital in that training so it's not [ __ ] it's very real is the specific point you were making which is the grappling the sweating that this thing really wants to hurt me if people haven't had that experience right then they get into a fight and it is they're they're basically in trauma immediately instant trauma yes and they freeze as you said and so i i'm just agreeing with you and i have a question for you but you go first i think there's there's some real value in giving people some examples of scenarios that you should avoid there's some real value and giving p before it ever gets to a physical encounter giving people some real clear boundaries you should never let someone cross particularly women my concern is and i have a deep concern about this is people having a distorted perception of their ability to defend themselves because i see it from people that think that they know how to fight from men more than even from women yeah but from women i think the consequences concern me far more because with men i worry about men getting beat up by other men because they're delusional and they'll start fights but that i'm not thinking of them as a victim the way i'm thinking of a woman as a victim so when a woman has a distorted perception because of a class an erroneou i mean just like there's so many of these goddamn self-defense classes that are teaching them nonsense and you know one of them is like kick the knees out like are you good at that are you practicing kicking knees how hard it is to kick someone to [ __ ] me by the way another one of the classes another type is called impact training and that one is six weekends uh and uh and it's teaching a lot it's teaching some verbal engagement it's teaching to know when you're in trouble it's
teaching to understand that you don't have ways to run it's teaching a lot of things and so my question goes back to your question which is could people be better off you've got over here you know uh 60 people who would take jiu jitsu and do it for 10 years and then i've got over here 80 million people who won't and so something you know you still want to give something to these people in terms of training and you'll see a lot of it in that master class it's just a lot of training about recognizing the situation you're in most people are victimized because of their own cooperation with the victimizer they're cooperating what about weapons do you encourage people to carry a weapon do you encourage them to carry tasers or mace or like especially women like how do you handle those type of stuff other than through my work there's in my company uh you know my clients have protectors so they have uh bodyguards with them and they're in a different circumstance but if i were just talking to sort of the the public as i do through a book um i do like pepper spray i think it's a valuable thing to remove the vision of somebody uh who who uh has put you in a situation where you're in fear you know in terms of recommending like what i recommend somebody have a gun in the bedside drawer no because it depends i don't have enough information yet you got to tell me who we're talking about who are we talking about what degree of training are they going to go to there's an example in this book in the gift of fear where a woman while she's asleep uh takes the gun from underneath her pillow and shoots herself in the face thinking it's her asthma medicine and so my concern yeah yep true story my concern about firearms jesus christ in the bedside table for example is that you're asking somebody it's like asking somebody to fall into a deep sleep and then wake up clear-headed wake up going 80 miles an hour in a 16-wheeler truck right because that's and and perform
well swerve at the right time that's the situation you're in when you're awakened in the middle of the night and there is a an intruder in your bedroom but let me ask you this wouldn't it be better if you get woken up in the middle of the night because there's an intruder in your home to have a gun than to not have a gun well the example i gave you though was not an intruder in your home the example i gave you was an intruder at the foot of your bed and so now i don't know the answer depends on the who the person is you have to you know a gun is not it's a fantastic consumer product it lasts longer than the consumer that buys it right it lasts for hundreds of years if well taken care of and people pay 300 500 for the gun whatever it is and they now believe just like you feel about self-defense they now believe oh i'm safe the guy in the gun store says this is the one that'll do it for you yeah it'll do it for you if you're smart if you're sober if you have some detection system downstairs that gave you some heads up if you are reasonable if you're not shooting your 10 year old kid if you're trained if you're trained thank you and so you know i think it's about it's in my second book about 75 percent of people shot by in the home our family members or friends but isn't that generally like acts of violence committed it's it's conflict and and accidents so i haven't is it most of them conflicts or is it most of them accidents i don't know but too many of them are accidents whatever the number is and so you know i have a strong belief in uh in smart guns this is a very controversial topic as well because there isn't a smart gun consumer product there's one coming that's very good why because the the smart gun just like my phone uh cannot function unless it's being operated by the owner who's authorized my my thumb print my face whatever it may be and so the the good smart gun that is coming uh is uh it is facial recognition and fingerprint recognition both and it cannot be shot by the nine-year-old son of the plumber who's looking around your house on a saturday while you're not thinking about it and so the accidental shootings to me there's a lot on them in the master class as well are by far the
most tragic these situations where the eight-year-old kid kills his six-year-old sister or kills his mother uh or you know those lives are all ruined right the dead person is easy but the other lives are all ruined so i'm i'm a believer that in when you ask me do i recommend guns um i own hundreds of guns because of my company so i'm not anti-gun i'm not for gun control but i am a believer that uh it it really is a matter of who's the person what's their level of training and what's the circumstance and so if let's say you had a dog if you have a dog downstairs that gives you a heads up that somebody's going crazy now you have some time to gather yourself you have some time to arm yourself if you have a firearm that you know how to use all good but if you just have a gun in the bedside drawer and it sits there for 15 years and you think you're safe now that's as bad a mistake is the mistake you're talking about with taking a 20-minute you know self-defense class yeah i agree i agree wholeheartedly i think that's uh that that is a a genuine issue with the accidental shootings and a genuine issue with people being delusional and their ability to use that in a high stress situation where they really you know adrenaline is so crazy and anxiety so crazy when you're in the middle of a thing like that you have tunnel vision you can't see well if you don't know how to stay calm under pressure if you don't experience a lot of physical stress and you don't know what to do either way that's the reason those courses are important because they do give people the ability to understand what it is to be engaged pushed down knocked over struck and even that by itself is valuable for somebody to not freeze up in quite the same way forget whether they win the engagement that's a different question but what we have exercises for example if you ever come to our uh to our academy and we're moving our headquarters to san antonio by the way so our academy is going to be here but we've got a jet there an aircraft that's got the engines taken off and is used for we put people in it we fill the thing with smoke we turn off the lights and say get out guess what most people
can't do get out so because they've never had the experience your academy is what like what is the company we train people in public figure protection so right they go through 18 weeks altogether but the the essential protection skills the earliest academy is at a facility right now it's a 70 acre place in uh in los angeles i hesitated because it might be 170. shows you how disconnected i am but the we have a jet aircraft we have uh we have pools that are used to really stress people this is relevant to your point we put people in the pool and a little like i used to do with my friend sean cassidy when i was younger we don't let them near the edge we get them into panic we pull them down from underneath uh so we have we have the dog thing and all of these things are called stress inoculation right if you've never had it what you're describing you know that people break into the house and suddenly they're going to shoot somebody and make a split second decision and they've never had any of those experiences uh they they won't do as well as they would do right an experienced soldier versus a you know some other 18 year old kid or a police officer who's been in some shootings we are trying to train your heart rate to stay low right if you engaged with me physically if you and i were going to fight and a few minutes ago the argument was getting pretty close i think if you and i were going to fight you'd have a lower heart rate than some other guy who's never had a fight right and with a lower heart rate you get to what you were talking about you get to avoid panic you get to make decisions like we have a thing where we have a vehicle and there's a sniper and we're shooting at you while you're walking a protectee to the car and it's we're hitting you with simunition it's you know it's we don't wear any protective gear it hurts it makes you bleed and it's stressful and it's noise and all that stuff and then you have to operate car key for example or operate fingers are this big when you're
panicked you can't even call 9-1-1 so a lot of what we're training to do is training for uh stress inoculation and for courage by the way you can come to our academy i would love to yeah you'd be good at it it sounds fun because the dog thing isn't something you'll get somewhere else a lot of stuff you wouldn't get somewhere else and uh and and we've had a lot of clients come to the academy and it's interesting and had clients kids come and we don't you know you can get injured but we don't uh we're more careful uh clearly than we are with our actual sure and you know years ago we had an employee say well i don't want to have marks on my back from being shot at by simunition goodbye if you're worried about marks on your back from simunition why don't you go with the client to you know to zimbabwe in two weeks when they're at some controversial event giving a speech and so we're we're training increasing the likelihood of courage do you um provide like i know there's some companies that create kevlar clothes is that stuff legit like i've seen that online and always wanted to talk to someone about that a little bit so we do very much believe in body armor depending on what what's going on but these are just clothes no this is not i'm gonna get to that okay and so all that stuff gets sent to us as i said earlier for free i'd be the biggest consumer of of a product if it was a great product but there are clothes there are suits there are definitely overcoats that work real well because an overcoat's already bulky right but a garment like what you're wearing now it will come that you can have something that will stop a bullet going through a thin garment problem is it can't stop the energy right and so you you need you know people have been shot cops you've heard about where they have a steel plate in in the body armor in addition to the body armor and we have that body armor where you can slip in a steel plate very light body armor well what's that about well that's because if you get hit there you don't even have to deal with the trauma right when you get shot with a cop get shot wearing a bulletproof vest even a heavier type
they're hurt right it's not it's not easy i believe very much in body armor by the way for for our protectors anybody who's in a position where they might have to engage with a gun and they think they're there because like a cop thinks you know you're there because you might have to to engage in a gunfight body armor is very valuable but thin clothing not yet it's just not there yet so the impact still happens but it's not getting the penetration that's true it's not getting the penetration of the bullet but it's still getting the penetration of the energy and so that's the piece that isn't resolved why body armor like a vest that a cop wears is many many many many layers and it's a bit if you felt it it's a bit you know wide and strong and it does do some disbursement of that energy something as thin as you're wearing or i'm wearing might stop penetration but not stop the energy and still the energy is the problem but isn't there still some benefit in not being penetrated isn't it at least a slight diminishment of the amount of trauma that your body it's probably more than slight uh so uh uh these are such great uh joe rogan questions because this is what you do you you keep going i love it uh probably more than slight benefit probably a substantial benefit whether we're there though in terms of all the fashion and all the clothes that people want to wear i'm not recommending to people anything that i've seen yet and i've seen some pretty nice stuff now i do recommend conventional light body armor under your clothes if you're doing the most controversial speech of your life or you're an at-risk public figure or uh or you're a protector in our company or a cop of course a secret service agent very few wear it but more should wear it secret service agents don't wear body armor it's it's optional and it's a i think it's a mistake because one thing that you want to protect you to be able to do is stop the bullet from going through me yeah something like a 2-2-3 or something going through me and into you right so the excuses for all variety of people who choose not to wear body armor movement and comfort is comfort i'm hot
and i said well you know it's it's i've had this with my you know people in my company over the years it's hot because it's 102 degrees outside it's not hot because you're wearing body armor you want to know what's hot accelerated lead that is hot and so you know we have an absolute policy absolute requirement body armor and every assignment that makes sense yeah um so the so the the answer is like kevlar clothing might help you a little bit but it's not enough yeah and it's not there yet in terms of being flexible enough that you would wear it right i mean if i asked a client would you please wear this it's enough to get a client to take half the precautions we asked them to get but will it get there i think it will get there it won't stop energy but i think it will get there i was looking at a an online company that was selling bulletproof clothing that people wear over their their vests that the clothing itself would stop the penetration of a bullet yeah there are suits and there are various things but the heavier the jacket you know i see uh putin uh wearing it all variety of public figures who are at risk the heavier the jacket uh the more likely it is to contain from a fashion point of view the body armor and make a real difference uh you know the lighter it gets the less effective it is that's just the way same thing with bulletproof car you know we've got a bunch of armored cars bullet resistant not bulletproof and uh you know you go very thick and you get better and you go you know you go the lightest one where the window can go up and down normally and it's not as good right um when it comes to preventative measures or precautionary measures how far do you take things like in terms of like your own personal do you in terms of like complete anarchy the society collapses do you have like a like uh a getaway place i do and uh but it also you know i make this pitch to clients often uh because it also has other value right i have a home in another country that's awesome in fiji it's already been written about and is we've got a 25-acre organic farm we've got our own well we've got our own power supply but it wasn't built as a
doomsday location it was built to we love fiji and i've got you know i adopted eight kids there and raised them so it's a big part of my life but really yeah wow um one died during lockdowns because of lockdowns uh 31 years old so i'm pissed about that but what happened is he got diagnosed with leukemia which is not that serious if you're 31 years old i mean it's a serious disease but you're not going to die and so we would normally just get on a plane and go to australia australia wouldn't let him in and uh lockdown then new zealand wouldn't let him in then the united states wouldn't let him in we finally got india to agree to take him and he died the night before the flight after six weeks of bullshitting with these countries to let in somebody who who needs care uh so that was a that's horrible pisser but yeah i i i raised 10 kids all together two of them uh here with me who are 12 and and uh about to be 14. why did i mention that oh fiji so i believe in having a place and but it also needs to have other value i'm not really big on the bunker that you never visit right have a place that has value and years ago a client said well yeah but when things go to [ __ ] you can't get there uh and i said well you don't wait for things to go to [ __ ] right you see you don't wait for riots in the streets of los angeles uh you see all these indicators and you say all right now i'm so glad i have that place in fiji or wherever it is you get out early yeah the the drag however is that some clients of mine have places in canada for example uh well guess what it's it's uh not a good place or or new zealand or australia right right right i expect i won't go to new zealand or australia for the rest of my life how why is that just the the nature of how that society both of those societies but i'll take australia became uh you know so so uh dictatorial and totalitarian over this issue the the abuse of citizens it was really dark and somebody said to me can you believe it you know they were they were
immigrants originally and they were prisoners they should really resist and not like this kind of treatment and uh and i said yeah you have to remember they were also the prison guards right that's also part of the of those also they're unarmed that was a big argument for the second amendment yeah it was a big argument like that that kind those kind of draconian measures stopping people from working unless they apply or comply with mandates yeah would never work in america by the way speaking of mandates you saw that uh washington d.c event against the mandates that had a bunch of doctors speaking and firemen and all kinds of people so that is happening again april 10th in los angeles uh and i support it because again i don't need any medical opinion i don't need to like or dislike a particular pharma product to support the idea that uh that mandates uh are destructive today you might love it because you're afraid of covid tomorrow it'll be something else and tomorrow it might be you and so so i really believe in the people who are standing up and saying that mandates themselves without regard to why mandates themselves are destructive and that's april 10th in los angeles you'll find it somewhere i think it's stop the mandates dot com stop the mandatesus.com something like that so i encourage people to to go and if you're lucky enough to be on the joe rogan show you talk about things you believe in i i hear you that's a it's one of those topics of conversation where people don't like to say that because if you say i don't believe in mandates you get er you get pushed into this anti-vex category in fact they've actually i was just going to tell you definition yeah please go ahead oh is it just the the definition of anti-vaxxer is now somebody who opposes vaccination and opposes mandates that seems crazy that should be called anti-mandate uh not anti-baxter but yeah that seems crazy because a lot of those people are actually vaccinated that are saying this more than a lot more than you're talking about the doctors and the hospitals you know we had 34 000 medical workers fired
in uh new york in new york for for not wanting to get vaccinated it's not a smart decision especially since some of them actually had natural immunity because they had covet that was one of the weirder things where they were denying natural immunity denying that it's a thing now they're coming out and saying just starting just starting but they're saying that it's more effective more effective yeah just starting uh you know but but then you got somebody like uh paul offit who was saying uh the only way out of this is vaccination there's no other way out of it who's paul offit a big time uh consultant to cdc just a big one of the big time vaccine doctors uh vaccine promoter you know when i talk about vaccines or you say anti-vaxx you got to remember we're talking about a suite of products that are all different people think vaccines it's like saying do you use drugs exactly i drink coffee exactly correct yeah so do you so you know pharmaceuticals there's great ones you know give it give it to me when i get a bee sting please give me the thing i need give me penicillin if i get that's right absolutely but you can't say here's one in a black box i'm not going to tell you what it is i'm going to force you to take this one i'm not going to tell you what's inside just shut up and turn it over and i'm going to withhold data on the adverse events that i'm not so i'm not so attracted to right and so does you know i'm not anti-vaxx but each one of the products is a consumer product that the public has to assess and make a decision do you think over time this is going to be looked at unfavorably do you think like history when they look back on this moment we're going to learn from what like this the way human beings reacted and mass to this yeah probably the reason i'm saying probably and and this is a bit uh discouraging what i'm going to say is that you know i mentioned throughout human history governments have been in the business of how can they control the only population they really care about it's not the enemy it's their own population and that is just human nature right if you're if you're made the chief of the village you don't want to not be the chief of the village right and so that process has been getting more and
more perfected over time uh 1984 orwell predicted that you know television and electronics and other things would be important parts of this and and god bless him uh he was right so what my concern is is that maybe the methods of controlling populations are close to perfected that is a concern i have meaning with technology as it is with social media pushing the buttons that you're a bad person if you say this or that like i'm a bad person today right i've opposed mandates what do you want people to die do you want to kill people do you want to kill my grandmother that's not actually what i said i said i oppose mandates for as possible additional government control i do and i see what the mandate is that's right and there's a there may be a place for draconian actions by government but you have to choose that very very artfully and carefully because you're never going to get it back yes that's that's what's important and so if we you know it's it turns out it's most of our conversation today about that subject which uh you know people asked me what i was going to talk about i said i don't know it's joe rogan so what's he going to ask i have no idea what it's going to be but this my reality is that that we have a beautiful experiment in america an extraordinary constitution you realize when america was formed the idea that you would say to the king you can't come into my house with your goons the king would laugh at you and kill you on top of that right so we were a country in a pendulum swinging away from uh from control by one individual and every country on earth today that's controlled by one individual is bad news saudi arabia uh uh russia is an example and so north korea yeah and what what's a country that isn't our country and so it's a very beautiful thing and i'm really i want to answer very directly the question about will we look back on this and think wow that was a you know that was an overreaction yes of course intelligent people would look back on this one day and say that was an overreaction it was an overreaction to imprisoned japanese people and put them in you know in prison camps in 2000 i mean in world war ii uh and we're now making amends for
that and we're compensating people and but we were scared we were scared that the japanese were going to be you know we'd been attacked and similar reactions right now that's russians that's right that's right that's right exactly and so not similar i should say i mean obviously there's no internment camps but there's a lot of fear yeah and so and and who will use fear all the time uh people in power yeah right so i i'd like to think we will look back soon by the way and say well wait a minute uh maybe we weren't so right about this and this and this and this and maybe that was a little much uh and and maybe we shouldn't have had children in school wearing masks that don't work that they're not wearing properly that are under their nose anyway but they have to do it maybe we shouldn't have done that to kids developing their language skills who can't see mouths and maybe we shouldn't have frightened these kids to think that everybody is there is there is going to kill them because they're carrying a virus and to touch the doorknob and then somebody sprayed that doorknob all this [ __ ] went on and is going on in some schools right now so maybe we shouldn't have inoculated 12 year old kids with boosters after they had myocarditis for god's sake maybe we shouldn't have done all that that's true what i'm concerned about though is will the information even become known because you and i both talk to a lot of people and you say what about this this fda thing wanting 75 years and they said that's not true that's fake that's fake news sorry to interrupt but do you think we have because we've got to wrap this up soon but do you think we have the potential for an uncensored social media network that's not a dumpster fire because there's been some attempts at uncensored social media but a lot of them are not that good you go there they're filled with [ __ ] and trolls and i don't even know if the people that are posting on those are real people or if they're people that are been sent over there to try to ruin these companies we don't but everything you just said applies to facebook with the only difference being that facebook
will censor certain kinds of things right and has tens of thousands of people to do it by the way so will we get one i would take it even with all the [ __ ] for example there's you know the the streaming service is like a bit shoot and give me another one uh odyssey uh and there's one i'm forgetting rumble rumble thank you very much um i'm sure i could find all kinds of things on rumble i would hate but i'm not looking for [ __ ] i hate right and if i hate it i might not watch it or i might watch it because i'm curious but i'm a 67 year old intelligent thinking person right i'll just i mean porn is like this right porn is downright destructive if you find the darkest most horrible thing you can imagine and your kids find it i think it's it's bad news but they have to learn in life like i did what am i going to look at where am i going to give my attention what am i going to believe what am i going to question right and for me the process of questioning government is what makes this country extraordinary that is and if we're not allowed to question the king if the king can just say as biden did by the way if you get this injection you will not get sick and you will not spread it to anyone else that was not true right i don't think he's lying by the way i just think he doesn't [ __ ] know but that's a problem when your president can say that and i can't question it and that's that's the moment we're in and so long answer to your question is will we look back with help uh from you and others to just provide an alternate view and let the consumer decide uh maybe we maybe we look back on it but it's also possible that it will disappear well it seems that there's the potential for an extraordinary shift in our ability to us ascertain what's right or wrong if someone created a social media platform that was uncensored that did abide by the freedom that we expect from the first amendment i know it doesn't apply to private companies that's the argument always these are private companies but when you get to something like twitter that is so extraordinary influential
it's reaches i don't know how many people are on twitter but it's [ __ ] insane amounts of numbers and information can spread so quickly on there good and bad real and false but you've got to figure out a way to not censor people especially not censor people that just have disturbing but accurate information like the hunter biden laptop story that alone the fact that that alone was removed from twitter should disturb the [ __ ] out of people that just want the truth especially when you realize that that was a a factor in choosing the president yeah and clearly the administration is not doing well i mean i'm not a trump supporter and i'm i didn't vote for him but i'm saying if you look at what happened yeah and that had of absolute influence on the election and on the planet earth and i i agree with you and i think that you know many people i know and you know joe if we talked about the hunter biden laptop they say oh that's russian today yes say that's russian disinformation because the new york times article was this big that has them coming around but all the other stuff was so enormous it's gonna take time yeah and and it's got to take a a re we need to get hold of our free speech platforms again like i could say something here presumably i have you know free speech in your presence and if i said certain things you'd say get the [ __ ] out of here like i i i don't agree with that that's too far i don't what are you talking about that you know we all have a lot of course yeah words can get us to yeah and and controversy and words can get us to argument and words can get us to solution of course so the words are the key as uh you know our friend sam harris would always say it's so important to have good discourse uh yet our friend sam harris is also uh taking a very strong position doesn't want to hear anything about you know an alternate view of uh he's very much endorsed the the um the alternate view and uh and took issue with some guests you had and you know this idea that you platformed guest you mean a [ __ ] famous doctor uh who's one of the developers of of the mrna vaccine platform that's being used right now he should his opinion we just don't want to
have is that what it means so a lot of people have you know it's a mixed model these days and i think if we can capture again the idea here's the point main point if facebook were less controlled then people know they have to be more careful meaning right now they're just being told daddy's going to take care of it you won't see anything you shouldn't see daddy uh zuckerberg or daddy government and if you said hey man you're gonna see a lot of [ __ ] on here so be careful have your kids be careful you're gonna see a lot of opinions that aren't true be an astute a consumer of information there is a an experiment done in switzerland where they removed all the stop signs from certain communities and sweden pardon me and it actually worked that people were more cautious you know as you come into an intersection there was no stop sign right they reduced signs it's a wikipedia article you can find it won't be that interesting but um the idea was it transferred from government to you the responsibility to stop at that intersection and look around and it actually improved safety right people knew i can't rely on this you know what am i going to do that's that sign says go 50 miles an hour uh i'm going to do that and i'm still going to have a crash i'm still going to have accidents so it moved the responsibility to the to the driver and if we did that with social media which is of course there's all kinds of [ __ ] you know where you find [ __ ] by the way novels human beings movies yeah being human well it also used to be a gigantic part of the internet was like it was just chaos and and why didn't ruin society when that was the case no it made things uniquely interesting because it was a first moment in time where we had access to information in that way and having these nannies and gatekeepers in in the form of facebook and twitter it's not helping us it's dividing people even further and it's polarizing the strong elements of the far right and the far left yes and i i think that's extremely detrimental
because i think most people lie somewhere in the center and they have ideas from both sides and if you give people the ability to debate things to have controversial or maybe even incorrect opinions but then someone comes along and shows how those opinions are incorrect if someone's paying attention who's an outside observer they get a chance to see the argument play out and they form their opinion based on what's a stronger position yeah what's a stronger argument and nobody telling us what the truth is yeah like i want to decide what the truth is especially when these people are people like the president who gets [ __ ] wrong all the time sure these are not people that are good at this what'd you find oh facebook bug led to increased views of harmful content over six months what is this but the story just broke while we were alive i sort of saw some headlines going around uh they found some stuff that was supposed to be demoted you know for nudity violence downranking and it was being actually promoted instead of being whoops the opposite and it'd be interesting so we'll see if the country falls apart because of six weeks of nudity people failing naked people and having sex yeah uh gavin thank you very much your book of gift to fear has been out it's been out for a long time uh and uh i'm gonna start reading it i haven't read it yet but i heard it's excellent i promise you enjoy your our conversation it was it was great thank you very much i really appreciate you you too all right uh if anyone who wants to get a hold of you what's the best way uh uh gdba.com gavindebecker.com is one way do you use any social media no no no no no good for you no and um and then the gift of fear dot com website they can see that uh that uh master class for free and i'm i'm glad to be rich enough to do it that way i am glad you're doing it that way too thank you very much bye everybody [Applause] [Music] you