What's up? Good to see you man. What's cracking? I'm good, I can't complain.
we were just talking about uh... you live in new york city yes whether or not the migrant crisis is uh... a real thing it's a real thing it's a real thing you notice it uh... import authority and uh... i think when eric adams gets in front of the country and says i can't handle this i think he's telling the truth and some people have accused him of racism bizarrely but i don't think it comes from that
I looked into this and the part people don't know about this story is really the full unfolding of it goes back to the 1930s. New York State made a constitutional amendment to the state constitution which required the state to provide housing for the homeless.
essentially, and it was sort of vaguely worded. So in the 80s and 90s, the courts in New York began interpreting that more and more strictly. Almost no other state, I'm not sure if any other state actually has something in its state constitution requiring that kind of a thing. So basically what happened is the judges ended up interpreting this more strictly.
obviously the original purpose of this is for new yorkers that are homeless to be housed but they ended up interpreting it so strictly that when the republican governors in texas and florida began sending a few thousand migrants up to new york city as kind of an f u to the liberal cities that have declared themselves sanctuary cities without actually having to deal with the kind of border crisis that texas does
A few, the first few thousand found that legally New York had to house them. And then word got down to Mexico that if you make it to New York City, you will not be turned away legally. You don't even have to be a citizen for the state amendment to apply to you. So what began as a few, let's say the first 10 or 15,000 were sent by the Republican governors as a kind of political tactic.
has now become tens and tens and tens of thousands coming of their own volition to New York City, and it's the only state in the country where Mayor Adams has no legal recourse to send people elsewhere. He actually cannot do it. He's tried to do executive orders.
But he legally can't because it's in the state constitution. It's above his power. And now it's its own, it's taken on a life of its own way over and above what the Republican governors started. So this is why he's going to the national media and literally saying, I can't do anything about this. I'm trying to do something about this, but I can't. And we're putting people up in Airbnb's for $100 a night.
And the city will be bankrupt in X number of years if we don't find a solution to this. Oh, my God. Yeah. I was looking at a video of the Roosevelt Hotel, which is no longer a hotel. They've essentially said this is now a center for housing migrants. Right. And they've said the restaurant is no longer a restaurant. And sorry, that's just how it is now. Yeah. I mean, what do you do if you own the Roosevelt Hotel?
And you just wanted it to be a hotel. And now the state just says, nope. Yeah. I mean, look, I don't blame any of these people if I was born in Mexico. 100%. We'd all be doing the same thing. It's just a smart thing to do from their perspective. But that doesn't mean from our perspective,
that we should just put out the bat signal to the whole world and say, you can come to New York City and we have no legal recourse to move you anywhere else. It's not just New York City, it's other parts of the world. It's strange that recently it's become this crisis where migrants are coming en masse to these places and just flooding them.
Is this orchestrated? Is this just a fact that they found out that they can do it and it's better than where they are? And if they go there, these places that are, you know, essentially, you know, they're charitably minded and they, you know, they would like to house people that are down on their luck, but now people are sort of taking advantage of that loophole and just swarming.
I think that's what it is. I think the whole Western world has become much more open to immigration. Recently, obviously America was open to immigration in the 19th century, but we were the outlier. All the other countries of the world. The default was closed borders, essentially.
So I think the whole world has out of empathy for the poor and struggling has wanted to have more permissive immigration. But that sends an incentive to people of the world that they can now come. They can abuse asylum laws. And again, I don't even blame people for doing this because it's exactly what I would do if I were born in Guatemala or Syria. I would say, hey, I'm a refugee. This is my story.
And I would probably lie about it in order to get a better life in the one life that I had. But this is just a true side effect of those compassionate laws is that people abuse them. You get immigration pools that are vastly proportionally male, which is how you know that they're not refugees because where are the women? Right.
And it's a side effect of the intended compassionate immigration policy. This is how this works. This Thomas Sol's great quote, there are no solutions. There are only trade-offs. This policy has a trade-off. It's more compassionate, but it also leads to, in the case of New York, what could be a serious fiscal crisis.
I was, someone told me this. I was looking to check into this, but I figured I'd wait until the podcast. Someone was telling me that the Biden administration is talking about sending people back to Venezuela, to deported Venezuelans. See if you can find anything about this. Why Venezuela specifically? Because Venezuela is dealing with a communist socialist government, and they wouldn't vote for that in America.
Now, one of the things that's weird about this crisis is it comes at the same time as people trying to say that you should have no voter ID and they've openly spoken about it in New York that people who are illegal immigrants should be allowed to vote. Yeah, which is really, look, I cannot put pushing for that for years. I cannot talk shit because I am the product of immigration, my parents. Yeah, as am I.
My grandparents came over here in the 1920s, and that is just, you know, okay, that's why I'm here. So they came from Italy and Ireland. And that's just why I'm here. So they came over when they knew that they could have a better life in America. And these people are doing the same thing, and I understand it.
It's just wild that there's no requirements. There's no background checks. There's no checks to see if you're on a terrorist watch list. You're just letting people through. Biden administration will be importing Venezuela and migrants directly to Venezuela. I mean, that is just so... So the idea is Venezuela is going to vote right-wing like Cuba. Yes, like Cubans. Because they hate socialism. Exactly, because it's ruined their country. I'm curious, what is his stated rationale though?
Um, this is okay. The Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas confirmed that the administration has successfully negotiated a deal with Venezuela to execute the policy, but did not say whether Venezuela was getting anything from the US in return. We are a nation of immigrants and we are a nation of laws. Mayorkas said at the same Thursday press conference
official said that some migrants have already been identified for deportation. Starting today, the United States will begin direct repatriations of Venezuelan nationals back to their home country. In fact, we have already identified individuals in our custody today who will be removed promptly in the coming days, a senior official said. Venezuelans make up a large share of border crossings, and for years, the U.S. has generally been unable to deport them because of frosty diplomatic relations with Venezuela.
Mexico has agreed to take some, but it remains difficult issue for the administration and for cities receiving migrants. That is so transparent. Interesting. The fact that they're saying Venezuelans and that they're communicating with the Venezuelan government to deport these people, that's so gross. So gross. Yeah. It's very straight, very weirdly selective.
It's just transparent. It's very obvious as to why they've been so loose about this border crisis thing in the first place. And I assume you saw that Biden suspended 25 federal laws to start rebuilding the border wall. Did you see that?
Um, so they're rebuilding the border wall now. Yes. Yeah, essentially doing the same thing that Trump did. Yeah, they all do it. I mean, Obama talked about it in like 2013. Yeah. They've all talked about it. Speaking of the voter ID thing, though, this is one thing that really made me crazy during COVID.
For years, people on the left have been saying that voter ID laws are racist. I don't know if you've paid attention to this at all, but the argument is that black people, and especially poor black people, struggle to get IDs. It's never made much sense because you need an ID to buy a six-pack, you need an ID to open a bank account, you need an ID, just that all these normal things that people of all classes and races have to do.
And then when in New York City during COVID, they implemented the policy that to get into any restaurant, any gym, anywhere in the city, you needed VaxCard plus ID. So me paying attention to the discourse for the past few years.
I thought to myself, where is everyone on the left that said black people don't have IDs? Shouldn't they be calling this policy racist and saying that we are excluding all of the restaurants and gyms and so forth to black people because you need Vaxgard plus ID and black people can't get IDs? I'm doing the math here. I didn't hear a single peep from anyone of the usual suspects.
And I said, this is how you know it's a fake belief. They never really believed that black people can't get ideas. No, it's not just a fake belief. If you want to say something's racist, you could make a much better argument that vaccine mandates a racist.
because the majority, at least in the beginning of the COVID vaccine rollout, the majority of the people that were refusing it were African-Americans and Latinos. They were like, we don't buy this. Especially when you deal with the Tuskegee crisis, when you hear about the times in the past where medical interventions have specifically targeted or there's been like,
Evil shit that they've done specifically to black Americans and they they're suspicious. Yeah Right, so yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean definitely I so I was always curious was it I think in the black community in general people are just more suspicious of the government in general
Yes. In every possible way from dealing with the police to dealing with just court systems and any domain. And they did make the argument that COVID itself was systemically racist because it was at least in the beginning, it was disproportionately killing black people. I thought this was, again, this is a very simplistic way of thinking. Yeah. I don't equate disparities with racism.
But I noticed the Washington Post ran a story a few years later that maybe by 2022, COVID was disproportionately killing white people, right? Because the situations change and it's just very complicated, right? Very few things fall equally along every population in life. And I asked the question, okay, did systemic racism change its direction? Is COVID now?
anti-white? Well, no, the truth is that, you know, every disease has a different racial profile in terms of who it affects. Hispanics, for whatever reason, no one understands it. Hispanics have the lowest maternal mortality rates, lower than white people.
Nobody gets it. It could be any number of things. There are many cancers that preferentially some kill black people more often, some kill white people more often. If you look at the CDC charts, you'll just find every disease has its own profile. And rather than say, okay, this disease is racist because it has a disproportionate, we should all back off the R word a little bit and realize that
These things are very complicated, multi-factorial, and to reduce it all to racism, we've gotten into this thing where we have a hammer and everything looks like a nail, and the media knows that racism stories get clicked, so everything becomes about that. Yeah, it becomes a failure of mainstream media.
And what you're talking about, the need for clicks, that's a huge part of this failure, is that they rely on people paying attention. So to pay attention to a story, in order to be incentivized, it has to be something that outrages you or scares you. And so those are the things that they lead with.
It's good and it's bad. The good part is it's given rise in a major way to independent journalism. So many people have lost faith in what they deem to be corrupt, very biased, and obviously
corporate influenced mainstream media because they they'll hide certain narratives they'll you know if it's fox news they they will never criticize the right everything is about the left if it's cnn everything is about the right being fools and the the left being like the ones that are on the right side of history it's just
It's just shitty journalism. You know comedian Ryan Long, right? Yes. You've probably seen his skate where he takes footage of the BLM protests and the police brutality videos and he says, you know, I give half of them to CNN and half of them to Fox.
Now, what do you mean? He has this hilarious skit where he's like to cameramen, essentially, to media organizations. What do you do with that other half of the footage? You shouldn't just waste it. You should give it to the other side. So give the videos of police officers beating up protesters. You give that to CNN, and you give the videos of rioters burning down mom and pop shops to give that to Fox. It's almost like an infomercial for how he doesn't
Waste any bit of the animal when he cooks the food, right? It's it's it's very funny It's just it's a failure I mean actual journalism should be unbiased objective people discussing what is actually going on and that that is definitely not the case and that's part of what we're running into and you know when it comes to the the COVID deaths
I mean, so many factors were never discussed. And one of the big ones that seems to affect the African-American community more than other people is vitamin D deficiencies. The reason why there's so much melanin in African-American skin is because people in Africa deal with very hot climates and directs contact to sunlight. And so they have protection from that.
The reason why people became white is because they moved to areas that are covered with clouds, like England. And it's not a fucking coincidence that people there as pale as paper. It's because they're basically a solar panel for vitamin D. Their body's trying to produce more vitamin D. And the way to do that is to produce less melanin.
And my friend who was a doctor in New York City said that when he was a doctor and he would find sick people that would come to the hospital and he would test them for levels of vitamin D, he would find oftentimes undetectable levels of vitamin T in some African Americans who weren't supplementing.
and weren't getting sun exposure. And he's like, it is catastrophic for your health. It's catastrophic for your immune system. And none of this was ever discussed, of course, because there was a binary solution. Like it was this experimental mRNA vaccine or nothing. And any other solution was conspiracy theory, foolishness, anything else to improve your health.
Even on top of that vaccine, even saying, yes, you should get vaccinated, but also you should lose weight. Also, you should take vitamins and you should exercise and you should eat better and don't drink, don't smoke. Do these things that are going to improve your overall metabolic health. There was zero of that because it wasn't journalism.
It was all promoted by people who are advertising on these mainstream media platforms. And that was what it is. And that's what we're dealing with. And again, it's good and it is bad.
The good thing is, it's led people, I think, to have the lowest level of trust ever in mainstream media in our lifetimes. There was a recent CNN ratings poll, they got like 43,000 people watching CNN, which is insane.
That's an average comedian with 100,000 followers real. That's nuts. It's nuts that this massive, major, worldwide international news organization is getting 43,000 people watching their show. But it's because people have completely lost faith in whether or not these people are telling the truth.
So I watched your RFK Junior episode. And I watched the whole thing very carefully. I read his books and checked the footnotes.
You know, all of the people that are, you know, my friends that are very smart people really disagreed with the fact that I liked him. So I had to do a lot of soul searching about what it is that resonated with me, but not with
all of my, you know, intellectual and journalist colleagues that I tend to agree with about 90% of stuff. I really had to do some soul searching. And, you know, what I came out feeling was that it wasn't that I agreed with RFK about every claim that he made. In fact, there are certain claims that he made that I double checked that were flat out wrong.
It's that I felt the version of RFK portrayed in the mainstream media was a totally different person from the real RFK. Right. And that there was a framing put around him that was so obviously uncharitable and bad faith. So for example,
If I told you, if I'm one of those people that was obsessed with getting fluoride out of the water, right, and that was my cause in life as a journalist, what would you label me? Well, Coleman Hughes, the
Yeah, the conspiracy theorist or even more neutrally. Fluoride denier. Anti-fluoride activist or something. Now, would you call me an anti-water activist? Yeah. Of course not. That would make any sense. Right. If I was someone that wanted to take like my mother's whole thing was she wanted to take high fructose corn syrup out of food. She was very, this was a big issue for her. Would you call her an anti-high fructose corn syrup addict as a journalist or an anti-food activist?
Well, no. So R.F.K. Jr., and I don't think he's right about this, but just as a matter of journalistic accuracy, his whole project with vaccines has been to take stuff out of the vaccines that he thinks is toxic. His most anti-vax quote unquote book is Thimerosal let the science speak. He's trying to take the Thimerosal out of vaccines.
Now, if I were describing this guy, even if I disagreed with every word he said as a journalist, I would call him an anti-thimerisol.
activist, not an anti-vaccine activist. Because why would you advocate taking A out of B if you thought B was also poison? What's the point of taking poison out of poison? So the framing of him in the mainstream media as an anti-vaccine activist to me seemed already like not at all the framing and objective journalists would put on the issue even if he's wrong about the facts.
And that, you know, that clear bias in the treatment of him, rather than treating him like a normal politician and, you know, putting your perspective on it, putting this framing on him as a crazy guy, as a crackpot, that seemed to me that I think that is really what rubbed me the wrong way about how so many people were treating him.
Well, also, they don't understand his work before he became this vaccine skeptic, or this person who discussed the apparent connection between some adverse events and some adverse effects and some vaccines. He started off as an environmental lawyer, and his work helped clean up the Hudson River. You could research it.
He did amazing work, and he held corporations responsible that were polluting. And because of his work, the Hudson River made a remarkable comeback. And then these women came to him. They said, you are researching all these toxins and pollutants that get released in the water. I want you to do this with vaccines. And they started talking. And this woman came to his door, and she said, I'm not leaving until you look at this. And she gave him a stack of files and documents. And he started looking at it.
started looking at the difference between ethyl mercury and mercury or methyl mercury and ethyl mercury. What's the difference and which ones are toxic and why are they in the vaccines in the first place and like why are the manufacturers that make vaccines not liable at all for adverse effects. And so he starts doing a deep dive in this and he finds out that it's all for Bowdoin, right? This is all forbidden subject. If you talk about it, you'll be labeled a vaccine denier or an anti-vaccine person, which is like,
The worst anti-science pejorative that someone can label on someone who wants to be taken seriously. And he realizes that he has to go down this road. And I can't believe he's like, I can't believe I have to go down this road, but I have to go down this road. And he starts researching that he starts talking about it openly and frankly, courageously. And there is.
Some very bizarre correlation, not necessary causality, right? Because it's not really being openly studied in terms of like, it's not being discussed in mainstream media. It's not something that's being discussed openly in universities and taught in schools and medical school.
there seems to be a very a rise in adverse effects and all sorts of issues that people are having once they started adding more vaccines to the rollout which also happened right after they made these vaccines and the companies that manufacture them no longer liable for any adverse effects and it's sketchy stuff because you can't talk about it and whenever there's something that you can't talk about it gets real weird because you can't just look at it and say okay
What is actually going on objectively? Let's not signal to everyone that I'm on the side of science and I'm the side of reason and I'm on the side of, you know, what's best for the whole world. Let's just look at what is actually happening and no one wants to do that because if you even just start dipping your toes in those waters, people are like, wait, what are you saying?
Are you a vaccine skeptic? Are you a vaccine denier? Are you anti-vaxx? Right. Which is not something that he's like, I've been vaccinated. My whole family's been vaccinated. This is not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is there are proven effects that mercury and aluminum have on human beings, particularly in their developmental stage, that seem to be detrimental. So why aren't we looking at this?
I think what happens when the experts, the real experts abandon a line of inquiry because it becomes taboo. Yes. Because everyone's blood pressure rises when the topic comes up and we have that caveman instinct that we may get socially ostracized for something, right? Yes. That's a big one. Totally. When that happens, the experts abandon a line of inquiry. The non-experts are going to come in and do the job.
and they're going to do it non-expertly by definition. So that's what I feel has happened around the conversation with vaccines is that the experts have been so dismissive of any skepticism, which generally skepticism is a good thing. You're taught to be a skeptic, right? But the word is pejorative in this case.
And rather than really compassionately going into the evidence and saying, I'm going to go all the way down the rabbit hole with you. And as an expert, I'm not going to talk down to you, but I'm going to explain to you what I may know that you don't. And I'm going to go into it with an open mind knowing that some vaccines have turned out to be unnecessary in the past. Some vaccines have caused damage in the past.
rather than make the whole area taboo and just making everyone feel like a non-person who's there, the best expert should shine a light on it. Really, they should shine a light on it. And then someone, people wouldn't be necessarily running to a lawyer, an environmental lawyer, for their narratives about this issue. And I think that that's what happens when the expert class abandons a particular line of inquiry.
unquestionably. Yeah, that's a very good point. And then there's also the revolving door between the FDA and pharmaceutical companies. Which no one denies that. No one denies that. You cannot. There's clear incentives that are in place just based on the past, just based on the fact that people have been able to parlay these jobs, go from being a part of the FDA to being a part of Pfizer and being a part of all these other pharmaceutical drug companies.
So I don't know if he mentioned this specifically on your podcast, but I looked into this because of his book and talked about it on some other podcasts. Around 2000, the rotavirus vaccine, seven of the 13 people responsible for approving that vaccine at the CDC and the FDA.
7 of 13, so a majority, had direct financial ties to companies that were producing that exact kind of vaccine right at the time. So you have to think to yourself, common sense, that's insane. That can't be how the system should work.
Without doubt, Congress looked into it and they reported on this. They said this is a disaster. They had to recall the vaccine, by the way, because it was causing intussisception in infants. And we've sort of been assured that they've cleaned up their act since then. And that seems to be the narrative that they've cleaned up their act. And I'm sure there was some panic and there was changing of policies, right?
But as a journalist, our job is not to trust the government. Our job is to verify. And the status quo I looked into it recently is that the CDC and the FDA, they're still allowed to appoint members of those panels who have conflicts of interest.
so long as they're below a certain bar of conflict of interest. Now, who determines where the bar is? They determine where the bar is, and they're not required by law at all to report their deliberations publicly.
So, as an objective outsider, I would like to believe, I would like to believe that CDC and the FDA, I don't think they're evil people, I don't think they're lizard people, I think they're whatever, I would like to believe that they're making good decisions.
But as a journalist, you have to be able to verify it. Or else, why should I trust? So if they're self-policing and not required to report, I think people should be, this is my problem. When Rand Paul is aggressively pressing Fauci about conflicts of interest in Congress.
journalists should be like, this guy's doing our job. We're supposed to be doing this. Instead, they label him as some kind of bad person. Journalists are supposed to aggressively police the government. And when you don't do that, you end up getting people doing the job for you, and they may not do it perfectly.
and they may overstep, but shouldn't the response be, how come mainstream journalism isn't pressing Fauci like that? We should have done it, and we should have done it 10 times harder and more precisely than Rand Paul did it. That should be the response, not Rand Paul as a conspiracy theorist. Well, the problem is money. The problem is when you look at the incredible amount of money that the pharmaceutical drug companies spend on advertising,
they essentially have control of the narrative.
whether people are directly told not to discuss these things it is most certainly on the table that they know that they'll be repercussions and so they don't they don't report on them look if you look at the Purdue pharma crisis you've seen the uh... netflix documentary uh... painkiller i saw it's not a documentary it's like a docu drama series i saw the hulu version and i didn't see that one that's dope secret that was excellent it was great but when they show how
It's captured by money, and when they show that they clearly knew that this was, it's an opiate, and that they are addictive, and yet they somehow or another use the language many believe.
or some believe. What was the exact wording? Some believe is not addictive. Like, who the fuck uses that for something that's going to be prescribed to millions of people? That's insanity. And it turns out, oh my god, it's very addictive. Oh my god, it caused a massive opiate crisis that didn't exist anywhere else in the world.
The United States had this opioid crisis that it was unparalleled. There was nothing like it anywhere else in the world. And it was directly because of the influence that these massive companies had, the amount of money they were spreading around.
the revolving door between the FDA and these pharmaceutical drug companies, and the repercussions on millions of Americans. Who knows how many people died of overdoses, who knows how many families erect, how many lives were lost, just destroyed by addiction, from something that was prescribed to them as being safe and effective by doctors.
Yeah, no, it's insane. I know a few months ago, the city of San Francisco, I believe won a lawsuit against Walgreens for, it might have been hundreds of millions, I can check exactly. And in the report in the discovery for the lawsuit, they were just talking about the sheer number of doctors who were found to be corruptly prescribing.
It wasn't like one or two doctors. It was a number that was so high that I remember thinking, I mean, how can a person that reads this really trust their doctor after reading this, right? Yeah. We have to have a good doctor. Unfortunately, most doctors are captured as well, including researchers. And that's one of the things. Did you read RFK Junior's book, The Real Anthony Fauci? Yeah, I did. What did you think of that book?
So my view of that book is that I don't jump to... RFK basically puts the worst possible interpretation of everything Fauci did. Kind of in the same way that Christopher Hitchens did with Bill Clinton, for example. When Bill Clinton bombed the al-Shifa factory in Sudan, that was said to have weapons, turned out to have medicine, turned out to have no al-Qaeda.
Hitchens wrote that he did this to distract the public from the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Now, that's possible. I can't rule it out. Not saying it's something he wouldn't do, but without direct evidence for it, my bar is that I don't jump to the worst motives. That's not how I tend to think. Well, I appreciate that about you. Yeah. You are incredibly reasonable and objective in that regard, and that is important, and Hitchens,
He was brilliant, but he was also angry, and he did like to throw rocks. Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger, Gandhi. He wasn't factually wrong about any of his journalism about them, but there's often just uncertainty about why people do things.
And a certain type of person jumps to the evil end of the uncertainty. I feel I'm kind of more in the middle. So Fauci made tons of horrible public statements, later found to be false. And of course, I think we all, everyone would admit now that he suppressed lab leak for self-interested reasons, him and Francis Collins.
But I think RFK, he strings together every mistake and assumes the worst end of that spectrum, which could be right. But it's not something, I don't like making those accusations without like a flaming gun evidence. Yes. And there's recent ones that people are talking about now that this was from the defense department and that this was, that COVID was a bioweapon. Well, you know, a bioweapon that accidentally got released.
Do you have, would that hold up in court? Do you have enough evidence to say that publicly? And is it irresponsible to say that publicly? Because my take on it from clearly, obviously a non-scientist, is if I was a researcher and my education was in viruses and specifically coronaviruses, I would be looking to do research on coronaviruses and gain a function research is one way
whether it's dangerous or not, and the Obama administration, Obama outlawed it. He stopped it in 2014, right? Yeah. It's sketchy work, because what you're doing is you're making viruses worse. But are you doing it specifically to release them on people, or are you doing it to understand the viruses? I think scientists do stuff because it's super cool to them. There's a lot of that. Put yourself in the mindset of a scientist. They love this, right? Like this is their whole life.
Right. If you tell them there's some new cool thing, we can now make viruses, we can insert specific strings of code into viruses that make them easily acquired by humanized mice. I mean, this is like giving a kid legos, right? Yes. So they don't have a bad bone in their body, but if it can be done, they will do it.
because it's cool and they will justify it to get funding. They have to justify it in terms of a public health rationale. The truth is they're nerds and they want to do it because it's cool and I don't blame them. But the government's responsibility is to say that is over the line, that is likely to leak, given how common lab leaks are, we cannot be intentionally making viruses more deadly. Have you ever been to one of those labs?
I've been in a BSL-3 lab. I've been in a lab of the same security as the one in Wuhan. And I had no clearance to be in there, by the way. I had no clearance to be in there. How'd you get in there? Girl I was dating at the time was working in there. She wanted to show me the most. Oh my god, that's so crazy. At Columbia University. But this goes to show you, this is why when I read that they were tweaking with coronaviruses in a BSL-3 lab. Oh, BSL-3 must be very high security. I was like,
No, no, I just walked into one like a few weeks ago. What's your girlfriend? Yeah, because no, look, no lab, every lab is as secure as the people that work there. It's just people. It's human beings. And they get tired. Yeah. If you're, you got two, on two hours of sleep, you forget to put your gloves on today. It's like, that's the story of every horror movie, right? That's the story of like, what is that 28 days later? They're working on some fires. Oh, you don't? No, I can't handle them. 28 days later is an amazing one. It's the best zombie movie of all time.
And it's a lab leak. It turns people into these ferocious things, which, by the way, happens in nature. What do you think rabies is? Like, what is rabies? Rabies is a disease that affects animals that makes them fearless and aggressive and makes them want to transmit that disease to you by biting you. And if you give it to human beings, it's like 100% fatal or 99% fatal. Unless you take care of it within a certain time period,
And with animals, it's fatal. And, you know, they have to get rabies shots. It's one excellent example of how vaccines have really helped people. Vaccines have helped human beings avoid getting fucking rabies. You know, rabies is scary. Rabies is essentially a real zombie virus. Because it turns, you ever seen an animal that has rabies?
They just have no fear of you. They just want to come after you and bite you like a fucking zombie. So that it's like if I was a guy who was researching rabies, I would go, how do we make this even crazy?
How do we turn this into someone who no longer needs oxygen and can just fucking exist in a zombie state? You don't need blood pumping through your muscles anymore. Now this parasite has taken over your body, which exists with Cordycep's mushrooms. Have you ever seen that? No. Cordycep's mushrooms infect ants.
And they get into the aunt's body and ants recognize this and know that this thing is going to grow mushroom. So the ants carry this other ant out of town. They get them the fuck out of town. So before the quarter-steps mushroom blow and the spores spray through the air and infect all the other ants, these ants recognize, oh, this motherfucker's got it.
We got to get him out of here and they'll carry him way the fuck out of town. Like there's some sort of memory or some knowledge or understanding of the danger of this specific fungus that's growing on this dead ant. We got to get him the fuck out of here.
Evolution is amazing. It's amazing. There's another one where there's an aquatic worm that grows inside grasshoppers and convinces the grasshopper to commit suicide. It rewires the grasshopper's mind and commits it to jumping into water so that it can be born. So it comes out of the body of this grasshopper that's drowning and begins its life.
Do there's a ton of those? There's another one called toxoplasmosis. The reason why they tell women to stop, you can't touch cat litter because some insane amount of feral cats have toxoplasmosis, like probably all of them. Speaking of grasshoppers, I know for most of my life, I didn't know that grasshoppers and locusts were the same thing.
I didn't either until a few years ago when we were looking at swarms. When the great planes, when that was happening, when people lost all their crops, it's like a numbers thing, right? Or hormonal switch. They get into some mode. Yeah. Well, that exists in mammals too, man. It exists in pigs.
With pigs when they let a pig loose like you see a cute little pig that you see oh he's so sweet You let that motherfucker loose he will become a wild boar and it happens quickly I believe it happens the the Metamorphosis starts to take place within like six weeks or something see if you can find that
But what happens is, the body sends a signal to the, or the mind sends a signal to the body or some, some, the system knows that you're on your own now motherfucker. So your whole body changes. Your snout extends. The males grow tusks. They get furry, thicker hair.
they literally become a wild boar. I used to think a wild boar was a different thing. No, it's the same thing. Wow. It's one genus. It's Sue Scraffa. It's one specific animal. If you domesticate it, it's cute and it's babe, it's the big. If you don't, it's this fucking plague of mammals that can have three litters a year, starts having a litter when it's six months old,
within a couple years they're two hundred pounds and they eat constantly and all they do is eat and fuck and make more pigs and they're smart wow yeah wow like so we know that
We know these things are fucking dangerous. And if we're monkeying around with nature, but also we know that there have been medical interventions. There's been medical technology. There's been resources done that's enhanced people's lives, saved people's lives, rescued people from fatal diseases to cast light on the entire pharmaceutical industry, that it's like this horrible monster of a thing that's destroying lives. No, no, no, no, no. What it is,
is a bunch of people that are, like you're saying, scientists who figure things out because it's cool and they get married to people who just wanna make money. And so there's stock market psychos. And there's a lot of psychos out there. And the psychos say, okay, we got this thing and we're making X but I think we can get to Z. We just gotta get this guy to say this and this regulation to pass and then we're in Z. And this guy is thinking himself doing coke off a stripper's ass on a yacht. That's what he's thinking about.
He's not thinking of saving the world, but the scientists that are making all these stuff, they're just fucking scientists. And part of the problem with getting the money attached to the regulatory body and attached to the scientists is because then there's someone who doles out the funding. And maybe that guy is connected to the money side. And maybe that guy was actually a doctor.
And now you've got this crazy situation where these doctors can't even tell the truth. The scientists can't tell the truth. They can't talk openly about the reservations that they have about some of these specific types of research that they're doing like, hey, should we be doing this? They can't say anything. They can't, because they're connected to the, and if they get ostracized from that system, they're fucked. Their careers fucked. There's no recourse. They don't have anything to fall back on.
So we've got a system much like our governmental system, much like our media that's captured by money. And it's not that the journalists are bad people.
It's just that's the fucking game they're playing. That's the game they're playing. Well, I think that the journalists, most of the journalists I know aren't necessarily captured themselves by money, but they may be captured by ideology and groupthink. Yes, there's a lot of that, I'm sure. Yeah. But so for example, on the money end, I was astounded that it was not widely reported and that you have to get to someone like RFK Jr. to tell you this, that
The NIAID had a financial stake in the Baderina vaccine. Yeah, how much money did they make off of it? One of the payments was like several hundred million dollars. That was one last time. Well, that's not enough to affect the way people think. That's not enough. No, that's not enough to affect the way. I'm kidding. I couldn't tell. I couldn't tell it. I'm sorry. I get to help myself. It's just so crazy that hundreds of millions of dollars was like 400 million. That's not that much. That's not that much.
That's just a little taste. Right, so when I see the director of the NIEID, Anthony Fauci, former director.
talk about the Moderna vaccine should, as a journalist, should my default be to trust everything he says because he's the government or should I say, he may be conflicted. Let's do what great journalism does and pressure test everything he says. Demand the documents on everything he says. What he says may turn out to be right.
I don't assume it's wrong, but that should be the job of mainstream journalists is to pressure test everything. When you don't do it, my point is it's left to the RFK juniors of the world who end up getting certain things very wrong because they're one person. It's not what they do. And so, for example, like I told you, I was really going through all the claims in RFK juniors book because some of them are just insane, turn out to be true. Some of them are insane, turn out not to be true.
What did you find that wasn't true? So for example, he cited a study, he said that the diphtheria, the DTP vaccine in the 1970s hurt or killed one out of 300 kids. So I clicked on the study, I read every single sentence of the study twice down.
There was nothing in there that said 1 in 300. What was the data that they gave? It didn't even give a clear number, and the numbers you could piece together were orders of magnitude smaller than that. And I was surprised to find that. Is that due to a lack of data? There's an assumption that the VAIR system is grossly underreported, correct?
Yeah. Yeah. There's a some, but you know, yes. Is that an assumption? I think so. I think that, I think that checks out. But with this claim, he was citing a specific study and he put it right there and it just wasn't in the study. Right. So you have to use the actual data that's in the study. That happens. Right. So if you're saying a study showed that or if you're just saying, if you're just saying the number and not saying where you're getting this information,
Then it's he really should every single one of his claims. This is why I thought it was such a cop-out that that guy you were in a little Twitter spat with. Oh, Peter Hotez? Yeah, Peter Hotez. If you're an expert on this and you have this guy that you're saying total misinformation, he's got every single one of the claims he made on your show in one of his books with a footnote.
Peter Hotez, if this is his job and this is important to him, should absolutely spend the time, what could be more important, right? If you're saying that I'm an expert in this and this guy is dangerous for the world, you can't then say, well, I don't have time to go in his book and click on every footnote and show showing receipts for why he's wrong about everything. That was a total cop out of him to say, oh, this is not worth my time. You can't debate a conspiracy theorist. I don't think any of that is true.
Well, I think she's very anxious. And, you know, let me tell you my history with Peter Hotez because I met Peter Hotez in like 2012. I had him on an episode of Joe Rogan questions everything and we were talking about viruses and I found him to be a really fascinating, very intelligent man who's dedicated his life to trying to help people with specifically of tropical diseases.
because there's a real issue in tropical disease. He was telling me that people that live in tropical climates, the vast majority of them have some kind of parasites. And what he wanted to talk about was that. I think when COVID came along, there was this psychological angst that was overwhelming even to people that are fairly good at keeping their shit together.
Like I think of myself as someone who's pretty good at keeping my shit together. I don't freak out too much about things. And so with COVID, I was like, all right, well, I guess this is a real thing. And we're going to have to, you know, hole up in the house for a while and two weeks, the flat and the curve and make sure we have food and power. He started thinking about things like, okay, if I needed to get food for my family, if I needed to get out of here, how much gas do I need?
There's a real air. There's a feeling the air. We're like, okay, we're in an unprecedented state of the unknown and chaos, and this could get worse. This virus could mutate into something that's just killing everybody.
That level of anxiety prompts people to look for solutions that are very binary, and it prompts people to dig their heels into what their decision is to do this. Should we go into the basement in the horror movie, or should we get the fuck out of here? I think we should get the fuck out of here.
Let's go on the, but we've got to go in the basement. We've got to go in the basement. There's these decisions that people make in these traumatic situations. Like, do we hide? Do we run? What do we do? And when they have a decision that they've made, like the decision, there's only one decision. This decision is this. We have to take this one vaccine. That's the only thing that we can do. And everybody starts thinking, okay, well, we find we have a solution. And everybody that's opposed to that.
You're fucking it up. You're fucking it up for everybody. And I think that was the feeling in the air. And I certainly felt that when CNN was saying I was taking a horse to you, like when I was being attacked for taking out, when I said that I was taking monoclonal antibodies and IV vitamins, all these other things too. I was just saying, this is what I took and now I'm better. Thank you. I got to cancel my shows. That's all it was.
It wasn't some political declaration or some anti-vaccine. It was just there was a reality of what I took. I told everybody what I took.
But there's this feeling from everybody, you're fucking this up. You're gonna make sure people don't do it because people wanted to believe that there was a way out of this that was very binary, very simple. This is our solution. Everybody get on board. Everybody who's not on board is ruining it for the world. And you saw the fucking cruel way. People would talk, people who would think of themselves as
compassionate, progressive people, right? Progressives, left-wing people, the worst thing about unvaccinated people dying because they didn't trust pharmaceutical drug companies that are captured by money and the media that is captured by them, their money and the regulatory, the fact that people were just unwilling to look at the big picture because they wanted that fucking solution.
And I think when you're a person who's on the side of that solution and you're genuinely doing work to try to solve real problems that people have with parasites and diseases and all these different things, and then you're getting attacked. And then it turns out that, man, maybe a lot of the shit you said wasn't right. Now you're kind of stuck because you don't want to debate this because even though you probably did it for all the right reasons,
You look at the actual effectiveness and whether or not it actually did what it was promised to do. It didn't do any of those things. And it did certainly cause some adverse problems in people that may or may not have that any problem with COVID. They might've gotten over it quickly like I did. So now you're fucked. Now you're fucked. And now you're in this situation where you kind of have to defend it all the time. And to go on a debate and talk about that, you would be so filled with anxiety.
Because it brings us back to what the decisions that people make during times of extreme crisis. We always want to think that the evil things that people have done in the past, false flag events and all these different things that people have done in the past in order to start wars so that they can make more money. We want to think that that stops.
We don't do that. It's a childlike impulse that I personally experienced when I was a young boy. When I was a young boy, we were living in San Francisco and my mom and my stepdad were hippies. And we lived in this very progressive, very hippy area. And when the Vietnam War ended,
everybody was so happy and there was this feeling and I said to myself, I remember saying, oh, this is so good. There's not gonna be any wars. They figured out the wars are bad. I remember thinking this when I guess I was like 10 or 11 or something like that. I go, okay, there's no more war. Thank God. Because I don't want to go to war. End of history fallacy. Yeah, my step down, he didn't get drafted. He got lucky. But I knew people that went and I knew people that went and came back and they were fucked up.
And I was terrified, as a young boy, terrified of being forced to go to war, because that was the reality of the time. And you think that, well, well, that doesn't happen anymore. You know, all that, you know, Gulf of Tonkin shit and all the, and that doesn't, I don't do that anymore.
They don't do that anymore. They don't do that anymore. That's like people figured that out. They don't. So have you been paying attention to Israel? I've been paying attention. Yeah. Yeah. I have to. How could you not be? Yeah. Yeah. It's terrifying. It's very terrifying. It's very, very scary stuff. What is your view on it?
I wish I knew, well, first of all, I wish I knew how they didn't know that those people were going to do that. Because I don't want to talk about intelligence because I don't know what I'm talking about. So if I start saying that the government, like, that they would have had the capability to make sure that none of those things took place and that they had infiltrated these organizations and they did get accurate information from that and they were.
I don't, that would just be complete armchair speculation from someone who's not off. So I can give you what the leading theory is of how the hell is happening. Okay, please do. Right now, the belief is that, and I think we'll know more about this in a few years,
that a few things happen all at the same time. It's a perfect storm. First, Hamas has been planning this attack for two years, and one of the leaders of Hamas actually said that they've been strategically lulling Israel to sleep by making it seem like they're no longer interested in a conflict the past two years.
And Israel even just a week before the attack allowed more Gazans to come over the border and work in Israel as basically a reward for good behavior. They thought Hamas has gone into this mode where they're more concerned about the economics of the Gaza Strip than about attacking Israel. So Israel was asleep at the wheel.
Israel also had transferred a lot of IDF that would normally be at the Gaza border to the West Bank. It was also the Sabbath. It was also a major holiday. It's also they've had the biggest protests in a generation, almost the same way America was during 2020. Israel has been for the past several months over their judicial reform. So you put it all together. Can you go into that a little bit, please?
Yeah, so basically the judicial reform in Israel, Israel is not like the United States. They don't have a constitution. They don't have this kind of really beautiful, genius system of checks and balances that we have where, you know, the president can veto Congress and the Supreme Court has a check on everyone, right? And everyone keeps each other in check.
Israel just has a single parliament, they call the Knesset, a prime minister that has a lot of control over that parliament because he leads the majority coalition. So basically, in Israel, the president and their Congress have a lot more power than in America, historically. The Supreme Court doesn't have the power to say no to them.
But over the past 30 years, the Supreme Court has been basically grabbing more power for itself under these things called basic laws, where they can now say to the Knesset, no, you cannot implement that policy in the West Bank. It violates human rights. They have more powers to check the majority party.
And that's come to a head now because the Supreme Court is perceived as left-wing and sympathetic to the Palestinians. Just like in America right now, the Supreme Court is perceived as right-wing. And Benjamin Netanyahu is obviously Likud. He's the right-wing party, and he's gone into coalition with these ultra kind of right-wing religious
And so it's come to a head where basically the right in Israel feels the Supreme Court is just expanding its own power and is anti-democratic and now they want to, judicial form is basically stripping the Supreme Court of the power it's grabbed for itself over the past 30 years. Now the left in Israel views the Supreme Court as the only protection against human rights violations and violations of
minority rights. So the left is feels the Supreme Court is a great defender of Israeli human rights and the right feels that the Supreme Court is an undemocratic institution that's been expanding its own power for 30 years and now needs to be reigned in so that the majority can govern. That's torn apart the country. It's absolutely the number one issue every day protests all over Israel.
So you put all this together with Hamas backed by Iran and you also throw in the fact that Israel and Saudi Arabia are on the verge of a peace deal, which is huge. It would be the biggest news in the Middle East in a very long time if Israel and Saudi Arabia made peace. It would basically
put the death nail in the coffin for Hamas because Saudi Arabia is the biggest holdout now in terms of who has not made peace with Israel. So Hamas, from the point of view of Hamas and Iran, they think this is a last chance. We have to attack now, kill this deal.
or were dead forever. And they plan this thing meticulously for two years, intentionally lulling the Israelis to sleep. And they have brilliant success, much more success than they expected to. Now, some people have said it's an inside job. I don't believe it is.
I think if it is, we'll know that from reporting that comes out in the next two years. But at this point, I believe the theory that it was an incredibly successful attack by Hamas in a perfect storm. Well, that all connects and makes sense if that's the case.
What's terrifying is what's always terrified me about the Middle East is that there doesn't seem to be a clear way to resolve this. I mean, if Saudi Arabia and Iran or rather Israel came to some sort of an agreement and made peace and were able to establish that long term,
That'd be a great step in the right direction. But other than that, like when you look at what's happened now, oh my god, the rhetoric from both sides, it's just, didn't we learn anything from World War II? Didn't we learn anything from the Holocaust? Didn't we learn anything from
human beings ability to other human beings to just turn them into a thing that's not them dehumanize them and that there's this impulse to do so that existed forever because when we were tribal people that probably barely had a language, you had to be absolutely terrified of marauding male tribes. They came over your border and wanted to kill you and take your resources and steal your women.
because that's what they did. And so we have this ability to look at other human beings as an other and get ruthless and horrifyingly violent because that was the only way for us to survive for thousands of years. So it's ingrained in our system. But it's now it exists in the context of global war.
And it exists in a time where you can manipulate media and spread false narratives, and governments are allowed to use propaganda. They're allowed to lie to people if it's for the overall better good of the nation. It's wild. And that's the root of the issue. The root of the issue is how every human being sort of
reluctantly admits that there's almost no way to stop all wars.
Right now, if you had a magic solution to stop all wars in the world, what would it be? It doesn't exist. That's terrifying. Because the thing that we are scared of the most is global thermonuclear war. The thing that everybody should be the most terrified of, that we get so stupid that we wipe every human being off the face of the planet and we're more than capable of doing it some insane number of times over. And that they're playing
with the very first steps of that game. They've moved the first pawn out onto the chessboard of the global thermonuclear war chess game. That is the world. Everybody, every single nation is involved in every conflict and all these people controlling resources over a group of gigantic people with their representative and they're saying these people are the bad people and they're saying you're the bad people.
It's just like human beings have always done. It's literally a part of our system. So I agree with you that we are built and hardwired for deep levels of violence. Those of us that have been lucky enough to live in safety and security, we may not realize the violence we're capable of because we've never had to survive.
But I do believe that there is a difference. You mentioned the lessons of World War II, right? We were capable of violence, Hitler was capable of violence, but we were not the same as Hitler. Right. There was an imperative for us to defeat him at almost any cost, and we did horrible things in that war. But people understand that there was a good side and there was an evil side. Yes.
Now, I don't know if you or most of your listeners feel this way about Israel, but I do. I think that in this situation, Israel is the good guy and Hamas is the evil guy. I think some people feel Hamas is just acting like anyone would if you had taken their land and their freedom fighters that go a little bit overboard.
I don't think that's what they are. I think they are a death cult that really believes what they write in their charter in the late 80s that they want to annihilate every single Jew in Israel and replace it within Islamic State and eventually have a state like ISIS and that what they did on October 7th with the barbaric slaughter
That's the point for them. That is what they want to do to all of Israel. And the difference is that Israel, though like the American army, there's been many excesses much to criticize.
If Israel wanted to annihilate Hamas and the Palestinians, the same way Hamas wants to annihilate Israel, Hamas would be gone and there would be no Palestinians in Gaza. We know that Israel could obliterate them overnight. Why don't they?
Well, for mixed reasons, but because they don't want to, they want to live in peace fundamentally. And so I don't think the two sides are equivalent here, though they're both capable of that universal among humans, which is cruelty. I don't think these two sides are the same. I really think this is a situation where there is a good guy and a bad guy. What solution could possibly be
created that would somehow or another calm this down at this point. After that attack, it's so horrifying. But then the response is horrifying too. Who knows how many civilians have died in Gaza? Yeah. So we're terrified of bolt. And then there's this narrative
That what was the thing with the hospital? Oh, yes. So this has been going on the past 48 hours. Basically what happened, what happened is the entire media, the Gaza Health Ministry, which is run by Hamas, said that Israel just bombed a hospital and killed 500 people.
The entire media ran with this story. New York Times, BBC, everyone said, 500 killed in Israeli airstrike on hospital. Obviously, this is monstrous, if so. Why would Israel bomb a hospital? Israel is known to have at least a policy of not bombing hospitals because
Israel feels that it wants to generally respect what a war crime is, right? That's the policy at least. So this this went viral. Then it turned out actually most likely it actually turned out 100% the hospital wasn't bombed. It was the parking lot next to the hospital.
So that was the first inaccuracy in the story. Then it turned out it's very, very unlikely to be an Israeli airstrike and was almost certainly not a Hamas rocket, but a Palestinian Islamic Jihad. This is the other Palestinian terror group in Gaza. They launched a bunch of rockets. One of them was a dud and landed in the hospital parking lot.
And this is on video. Al Jazeera showed the video by accident. And that's how it's part of how it's been confirmed. What do you mean by accident? So they were showing this in real time. I think it happened at like 659 exactly. It's either 649 or 659. They were showing live footage of or footage they had just taken of a bunch of rockets leaving the Gaza Strip to go to Israel. And one of the rockets
You could see it was it was screwy. It kind of blew up and then you see a big explosion in Gaza right at that time. Turns out that's the exact time the hospital allegedly blew up. So that's how they knew it was a rocket from inside an accidental rocket from inside Gaza rather than the Israelis air striking it.
So then all the near times BBC they all started slowly changing their headlines. From 500 killed in Israeli airstrike to 500 killed in blast. At this point they may be saying parking lot next to hospital killed only 50 to 100 people. This is still an evolving story and we're talking on Thursday.
So it didn't actually hit the hospital itself, it hit the parking lot next to the hospital, and did damage to the hospital? The latest is that the hospital still standing, and it was only the parking lot next to the hospital, and all a bunch of cars may have exploded as well.
So... That's the latest. Because they have pictures now, the next day they took pictures in the hospitals there. I thought they had photos of the hospital that was bombed out. The New York Times, when they reported it first, they showed a picture of a different place in Gaza that was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike, not the hospital.
Oh my God. Yeah. So this is now, I think there's emerging consensus that it was a parking lot, probably not 500 people, probably more like 50 or 100, which is, again, tragic. Every life is tragic. But that basically the legacy media took Hamas's word as fact and then has had to backpedal. Did you see the Babylon bees?
joke about that. What did they say? You can find it, Babylon bees. I can't still can't say X, X page. Yeah, I know. I'm still Twitter. I'm right at that point where I'm transitioning to saying X without saying former Twitter. I just keep saying Twitter. It's Twitter. Sorry, Elon. He really has an obsession with X. Well, also it's like, are you sending an X or are you sending a tweet? You know, everyone says he tweeted. You don't say he X. It just doesn't sound right. Yeah, it doesn't make sense. But he can do whatever the fuck you want.
Yeah, that's true. So what was the Babylon bees? The Babylon bees had a funny thing about the New York Times and Hamas.
There's something from two hours ago. I don't know. I saw it on my Instagram earlier today when I was embarrassed to be looking at my Instagram. Why embarrassed? I just get stopped being connected. My new phone has no apps on it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So this is New York Times patiently awaiting zoom call from Hamas to see what they should print today. Yeah, so this is this is about the hospital. Yeah.
That is the Babylon Bee. Thank God they exist. Like they disprove the idea that it's only left-wing people that are funny. Yeah. That is not true. The Babylon Bee is they out onion the onion often.
They're amazing. They're better than the onion. The onion used to be great and still is good. They still knock it out of the park every now and again, but they're young, progressive liberals constrained by a certain ideology that doesn't allow them to poke fun at certain things. You know how much fun they could have, like the trans issue? They can't touch it. Rachel of E, they can't touch it. Leave it alone. Get out of there. It's too hot. But you asked earlier, what is the solution to this? Yes.
Look, I mean, we're not going to solve the Middle East here, but if I'm Israel right now, I'm thinking we have to destroy Hamas. The same way when we were bombed during Pearl Harbor, nobody thought, well, what's the diplomatic solution to Japan? We thought these people want to destroy us. We have to destroy them, right? There are some situations that can be resolved at the negotiating table.
But there are others that have to be resolved through war because one side is committed to the destruction of the other. And you can only get to the negotiating table when you've retaliated militarily. That's terrifying. That's a terrifying thought.
What do you think of all, like, what was the latest pro-homos, pro-Palestine protest? There's been so many of them that are all over. They had to shut down Columbia University, my own daughter. There's been a lot of them, yeah. What are they saying? Like, what is their main perspective on this?
Their main perspective is that Israelis are colonizers in the Middle East. That Israelis are not the indigenous people. It's settler colonialism and that resistance is justified and that we ought to side with the resistance. We ought to side with the resistance even when they go overboard. That's their basic perspective in a nutshell. That is a crazy way to justify.
shooting paratrooping into a rave and just murdering people. Yeah. Execution style. And it's in rape and murder and torture and killing kids and explosions. And I was reading about these parents who were trying to find their son. They were hoping their son was still alive, but that he had gotten his arm shot off by a machine gun. He was in a bunker and then he was captured. He was in some sort of a bomb shelter, captured him. And they have no idea where he is. They hope he's OK.
Like this, just the horrific idea that some peaceful civilian could just be targeted like, you know, like you would shoot a monster. You know, not even an animal. You shoot an animal and eat it. It's like a monster, like just gun that monster down, leave it where it is. It's so scary that people are still willing to do things like that. But it is real.
That's what we have to all understand. You can have these utopian perspectives of how you think the world should be.
And I side with a lot of what they think about the inequality of the world. I just have different solutions than them. And my solution is not redistribution of wealth. My solution is figure out what's wrong with communities and rebuild them. The fact that we have these impoverished communities and that we've never spent any like real engineering and money to try to solve these crises that have led to so many people coming out of these places and just being fucked from the jump.
and having no examples of people living good lives, no examples of people that are involved in crime, and just being swarmed by negativity and bad influences constantly. And the fact that we expect these people to rise past that is complete and total insanity. I agree. And almost always perpetrated by people that just like you were talking about people that have experienced peace most of their life, they have no idea that violence is inside of them or what violence really is.
It's the same sort of thing. It's people that grew up where they really never had to worry about money. Maybe they weren't rich, but they weren't starving to death. They didn't have to worry about someone shooting them every day or killing their parents when they were on the way home from working or whatever the fuck the problem was. But for a large percentage of what we supposedly think of as a community, which is the United States, we should think of ourselves as a big community. We've ignored people that are fucked.
It's like there's places that are just fucked. And we have to do something to fix that. If you don't do something to fix that, you're gonna keep this disparity. You're gonna keep this problem. And the problem is far more, it's more solvable than so many other things that we try to tackle. Like we're trying to figure out how to cool the earth down. Like, that's great too. But let's fucking figure out how to make the country a better place.
Instead of just saying the rich people are the problems. There's a lot of problems with rich people. There's a lot of problems with influence. There's a lot of problems with people that have the ability to change laws and people that have the ability to sell you things that they know will kill you. They know you're going to kill a certain number of you. And they can still sell them to you. They can just say, hey, some may believe it's not addictive. Yay. And then they cut it loose. Well, here's the thing. People like to throw money at every problem.
Yes. But they don't love to see how the money is being spent. So for example, we could use Hamas as the example. So much money has been thrown at the Gaza Strip and they use it instead of to build buildings and build water pipes. They dig up the water pipes and build rockets to go to Israel, right?
But you could also you can make the water pipes as rockets. Yeah, they make pipes into rockets. No way. Yeah. Yeah. There's a they have a video of one of their own propaganda videos where they show themselves doing this.
And billions of dollars has been thrown by Europe, by America, at helping the Gazans because they are living in conditions that are indescribably horrible. Just a third world doesn't even justify how Gazans are living.
but they're living under a terrorist party that actually doesn't care whether they live or die because any Palestinian that dies from an Israeli airstrike, they go straight to heaven according to Hamas. So Hamas, and they genuinely believe this. This is what I think people in the West, they don't remember what it's like to truly believe in religion because the West has been pretty much secularized at this point outside of some pockets.
People that still believe in religion really believe it. Like during the Iran-Iraq War, the Iranians, they would send 13-year-old 12-year-old boys over to be cannon fodder. They would throw them at Saddam Hussein and they would give them a key around their necks to get them into heaven. And the boys believed it.
It's—you have to realize that people really believe these kinds of things, and you can't—so many people analyze the situation without putting themselves really in the shoes of a true believer, right? Yeah, that's a very, very important point. In this country, when we connect—when we start talking about true believers,
We really talk about the negative ones. We talk about like Westboro Baptist Church type stuff. We talk about the worst aspects of cult-like behavior that comes from some organized religions and fanatical organized religions.
So intelligent people in this country, you know, I mean, there was the big atheist movement that existed for quite a while. It seems to have kind of like they've kind of dissipated into something else. Right. You know, I noticed that. Yeah. But that movement of this, this
rejection of organized religion and the sort of because the atmosphere that most of these academics exist in most media people exist in and most people that live in big cities exist in is that there's a sort of kind of
wholesale dismissiveness that's attached to organized religion. There is. And so because that they don't have the context, much like people that have never experienced violence, don't have the context of violence. When I see people talking about openly advocating for military interventions, things like, who, you? Are you going to go do it? You want to go risk your face getting shot off because of information that may or may not be bullshit?
You? Who's going to go? Oh, you want people other than you to go and represent what you think of as the good thing, because you don't know these people. And if they die, it doesn't feel like anything to you. But those people have families, and those people have children. And there's got to be a way that we minimize the amount of violence in the world, specifically the amount of violence that doesn't make any sense.
And this kind of violence doesn't make any sense. It's fucking terrifying. And if you have true believers that don't think it's terrifying and think it makes total sense,
And you don't realize that people like that exist in the world, that that is a real thing. That's always been a real thing. That was the Nazis. That is a real thing. That's also most of human history to your point. Yes, most of the truth. Was Genghis Khan afraid of violence? Did he ever consider that violence? So if you're dealing with someone who comes or a group of people that basically a cult that perpetuates that kind of mindset, that raises people
You know, the older brother raises his younger brother to believe that from day one, right? Yeah. You can't address that like we would want to address. I don't know if we had some dispute with Britain nowadays. There's also this solidarity in this. There's a community aspect that can't be ignored where people want to be a part of something big. And when you connect
a person who might have very dire circumstances otherwise, like the world around them is very bleak, but you connect them to this group of people that are also committed to this quest that they believe is righteous and in God's will, that God wants this to take place, and that this is their directive on earth.
You can talk people into things, man. We've all seen wild, wild country. We've all seen documentaries on cults. Human beings are extremely malleable. It's not like all the people that moved to the cities just decided to move there because they're Democrats.
Like, I'm a Democrat. I'm going to move you where the other Democrats are and find my people. That's not what's going on. There's a hive mind aspect to human beings that just can't be ignored because we don't want to be ostracized socially. We don't want to be kicked out of the tribe. So we're terrified of stepping out of line. And so when you
are in the terrible situation. You're much more likely to believe that someone put you there. You're much more likely to believe that there's an oppressor. You're much more likely to believe that that person's taking from you. If that's what you're told from the time you were young and you're told that the solution is to become a martyr and you're gonna get to go to heaven. You can talk people into that with no options. It's not, it is real. It's a real thing.
And I don't know how to re-engineer that. I don't know how to solve that. The truth is I've already been down that path. I think most of the solutions have been missed.
I think that's the hard truth, that the land was partitioned between an Israel and Palestinian state in 1947. The Palestinians rejected the partition and that was an attack and that was the war of independence. That was an opportunity for a solution. There's an opportunity when it was occupied by Jordan and Egypt for them to create a Palestinian state.
But it wasn't in their interest, so they didn't do it. There was an opportunity. In 2000 was the closest opportunity when Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak met at Camp David with Clinton and Arafat walked away. And the difference between now and then is that Israeli society is now moving more and more to the right.
And what that means in Israel is less and less are they seeking a two-state solution compared to 2000 or 2008 when two-state solutions were offered. And part of the reason Israeli society is moving to the right is because the ultra-orthodox, or what we call hecitic often in America, in New York, they have communities in Brooklyn,
They have, you know, they have six kids per family, something like that. And so they started out as a tiny minority in Israel 75 years ago. And now a third, a third of kids under a certain age might be 18 are ultra orthodox.
And they have more right-wing views. They're generally more pro-settling the West Bank anti-to-state solution. So I fear that the Palestinian side rejected the only options, the only times that they were offered a state, and that those offers are not going to be forthcoming again in the future because of how Israeli society is changing.
And so it's a very grim situation because it seems like there's no solution that does not involve horrible bloodshed. And there's horrors from both sides. That's another thing that people need to look at.
They need to stop this idea that there's good guys and bad guys, because there's things that people do when the other side is the enemy that are absolutely horrific on both sides. It's always been the case. It's natural. It's not like...
Everyone on side A is pure. And everyone's, no, they're all humans. And when you're dealing with a group of people that want you dead and you want them dead, they do horrible things. Like Abby Martin, who was on my podcast, talked about her experience.
going back and forth from Israel to Palestine, how scary it was talking to people that were, have been shot by soldiers and people that, people were shot in the dick on purpose and do crazy shit. Like that's real too. That's real too. You mean from the Palestinian side? No, from the Israeli side doing it to Palestine. Oh yeah, no, that's what I mean. Yes, yes, absolutely. That's real too. Yeah. So it's, you know, Israelis,
are human beings just like all human beings and human beings have good ones and bad ones and they have people that do horrible things in horrible times there was a guy once forget the story i think he was who's running for some office
And they labeled him as like a war hero. And he was kind of running with it. And then I believe he dropped out and then just started admitting the horrific things that he had to do during Vietnam. And I think it involved, I don't even want to say. See, do you know that story, Jamie? I forget exactly what he said. So I want to keep going. No, but I totally agree that like every army that's ever
waged war has done horrible things and and they not that they all do the same extent of horrible things some are really worse than others but none are none are saints there i don't think there's ever been an army that just truly behaved like a saint no down to the last man it's it's not it's not real it's not part that i think that is to your point the a fantasy standard that
outsiders who've never had to get their hands dirty to survive. But obviously, it's a standard we should ideally want to hold people to. We should encourage the world's armies to behave better.
If a country is going to wage a just war, if you're going to say, you have the right to wage war in this situation, I don't think that can be revoked the second you find a soldier that does something horrible. Because by that logic, we could not wage World War II.
Right. That's important to talk about. And that's going to happen. Israeli soldiers are going to do the worst stories I think are yet to come. And we can have sympathy for the Palestinians without saying that Israel has no right to retaliate. That's my point of view on it, at least.
Well, that's a balanced perspective. And you know, I wish I knew more about the history of
that conflict to see if there's any way that they could change the way they interact with each other. But I just don't. And so it's just one of those things where you just see it playing out. You feel so helpless. It's made me so anxious. Sometimes at nighttime, I think about Ukraine and Russia. And I think about what's going on right now with Israel and Palestine and I get so terrified.
I get so terrified of the possibility of it just going off the rails and then nukes being on the table because I just I know we haven't used one since 1945 but
I feel like that is one of those things when you look at history, like the invention of the bow and arrow, the invention of the adolato, all those 2,000 years later, how long for someone shot someone with it? Did they wait a while? Was it a few years? Was it a few months before someone shot someone with an arrow once they first invented it?
Just because it's been, let's go to 100 years. In overall history of human beings, 100 years ain't shit. If you look at the 1700s, do you really think there's a big differentiation between 1700 and 20 and 1700 and, you know, 90?
Or is there not much of a difference? I bet there's not. I bet if someone did something today with a nuclear bomb, history would look at it the same way we look at every other thing that takes place over long periods of time. Oh, then there was an invention of the wheel and then X amount of years later, they put a fucking gun on top of that thing, started mowing people down.
And this is just just Blips in time. We're just in the middle of it. So we think well mutually assured destruction is what's kept us from dying but Has it or is it or we just waiting are we waiting for this fucking stupid game this chess game to reach a point where it's checkmate reach a point where someone flips the table over and
Because that's, if you're dealing with people that aren't afraid to die and you're dealing with people that are willing to kill everyone that opposes them because they genuinely think they're doing the will of God, they get a hold of a nuke.
If they're willing to kill, I've always said this, how many people is it acceptable to kill in one shot? If you say they bombed and killed thousands, well, that number seems to be reasonable for us. We're like, well, thousands of people died in 9-11, too, and that sucks, and that's really awful, that thousands of people are dying. But if someone dumps a nuke and it kills a million people instantly, is that more horrific?
Is it to them? To us, it scares the shit out of us because of mutually assured destruction. But is that more horrific to someone who really believes they're doing the right thing? If it's okay to kill a thousand people? No, look, if you're like Thanos, this is why Thanos was such an amazing villain, is because you could see deep in his mind, he felt he was a monk.
like a monk for good, and that he had to snap half the universe out of existence to save the world. He was a true believer. He wasn't just some guy that's, you know. Right. Well, eugenics, when people talk about eugenics, if you were not a human being,
If you were raising like an animal, you wanted to do a very specific task, like dogs, for instance. You don't let the ones that are fucked up breed, right? So you could see how someone who has no sense of humanity and no compassion for human beings that are unfortunate, you could see how they'd say, well, you got to kill them.
It's a creepy, scary conclusion to what your problem, your solution is, but you could see how a sociopath or psychopath would go in that direction. Well, we're going to have bottom-up eugenics very soon, as opposed to top-down eugenics being the government deciding who gets to procreate and not based on racist ideas or anything like that.
We're gonna have very soon like I think within them easily within the next three years
You know, you and your wife with a getting a bunch of embryos, 15 or 20 embryos, doing polygenic analysis on those embryos and telling you which ones are going to turn out taller, which ones are going to turn out smarter, which ones are going to turn out less likely to be depressed. If you have a history of schizophrenia in your family, we can tell you that correlates with this, this set of genes and this one's less likely. So you're scoring your own embryos, which people already do.
but now they just score it based on what's the biggest embryo, which is... Is that what they do? Yeah, like, you prefer the bigger embryo because it's... there may be some scientific reason. What if it's like... maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man. Maybe hell man
Well, and then there's CRISPR, which they've already used in China, and they supposedly jailed the scientists that did it. What they were saying they were doing is they were doing something with a gene to make people impervious to AIDS, but what really was going on is they were making them smarter.
Yeah, see if you find that because I know I butchered that. If you're a scientist out there, sorry. So in China, they're doing this. They did it. They did it. They did it. Yeah. Wow. And I believe the international response was, you know, people were pretty scared that this kind of stuff is going on. But here it is. China's CRISPR twins might have had their brains inadvertently enhanced
It was a mistake. Guys, we're just trying to kill this thing that doesn't really kill any people anymore. New research suggests that a controversial gene editing experiment to make children resistant, not even immune, resistant to HIV, may have also enhanced their ability to learn and form memories. Yeah, you don't think that's an accident? I'm sure it's on purpose, but I would hope it's on purpose. That sounds like a great accident. Yeah. If you're a parent, after your kid is born, you're going to spend
Who knows how many thousands of dollars? If you send them to private school, you can send them $20,000 a year for some fancy private school to make them smarter and happier. But you wouldn't invest a little time at the beginning and effort at the beginning to make them smart.
Right, especially if it only costs like a couple hundred bucks or something like that. I get that one is icky and sci-fi, but if you remove that element of it and just look at it for what it is, if it's reliable, why would I not want to make my kid smarter? Smarter people live longer, they're happier, etc. That's pretty clear in the data.
So is that clear in the day that smarter people live longer? I think up to a point smarter people have. But you was here by every other. I drank whiskey and smoked cigarettes and I'm 105 years old and I feel fucking great. Those guys exist too. What's up with those guys? I don't know. They just have, I don't know, amazing dragons other than their brain.
But actually, there is, I don't know if you've seen this, one of the smartest guys in the world, IQ-wise, is like a crazy white supremacist.
Really? Yeah, he has like a 190 or something IQ. Wait a minute, are you talking about that guy? They did a documentary on him back in the day, the smartest man in the world. He was a bouncer. I don't, I don't recall whether he was a bouncer or not. Maybe let's make sure that we're not talking about the same guy because I don't want to disparage this guy. But this guy was, they did like a documentary on him. Like he's, he was like a fuck up all through school, but he was just genius and just got moved around a bunch of times. But
You know, he's a big, thick guy. He looks like a bouncer, this guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Man with the world's highest IQ, Christopher Langen is gaining a following on the far right. Yeah. So are you saying that this guy's a white supremacist? That's what I was. That's what I read. That's what you read where, though. This is 2019. So...
They've likened him to Alex Jones with the Thesaurus. Langen now in his 60s has been a curiosity for nearly 25 years, a man who has clocked his own IQ somewhere north of 190. Albert Einstein wasn't quite there apparently, who has mostly worked as a bouncer in a bar, never attained any significant professional roles or published any serious academic work. He's been the subject of several profiles from Esquire magazine to Malcolm Gladwell,
It makes an appearance in Outliers, the documentarian, Aeromorris, even interviewed Langen. He's an interesting guy. He's very intelligent. When you hear him talk, he's obviously able to retain an incredible amount of information in his brain. But over the years, it says in this article, but over the years, he has garnered a following that overlaps considerably with fans of the far right internet content.
overlaps, doesn't mean he's far right, right? We can agree to that. He invades against the academic establishment for not accepting his papers about his proprietary theory of everything. He frequently touts his IQ. Okay, so he's got flaws, inviting the interest of alt-right readers. Okay.
What does that mean? Inviting the interest of all... Just because people read him. I don't like the style of journalism. I don't like this at all. I'd like them to just quote him. Exactly. This is horseshit. Inviting the interest of all... By the way, I've read that about me. And writers who subscribe to the belief that IQ is racially determined and a sign of racial superiority.
Okay, look what he's saying though. He's inviting the interest. He's not saying this. It's saying he's inviting the interest of people who believe and writers who subscribed to the belief that IQ is racially determined and a sign of racial superiority. It's not him saying that. It's saying that people who like him think something fucked up.
One of Langen's posts, an obituary for the intelligent guerrilla cocoa, wherein Langen suggests that the U.S. would do better to admit African guerrillas as refugees than African people, was praised by the daily stormer, the neo-Nazi bloc. So what did he actually say, though? So yeah, this is, you know, I think, as I get older, the more and more suspicious I am when they don't just quote. Right. Because... Well, that usually, if the quote is knocked down,
evidence you put the quote yeah jamie i don't think you should click on that because i think that's just the the people that believe that i q is racially determined but i would like his story that right but okay i was just like to see what his quote was
because it seems like they would put that quote in there if that quote was so probably yeah it was such a problem why don't but you can't see why at the end of the day there's no substitute for just listening to the person the words out of their mouth and making up your own mind
I don't know if that guy has a 190 IQ, but he's obviously very intelligent when he talks about things. He's very smart. He's also a bouncer. He's kind of a hard-ass, and he's got an ego. He knows he's smart, too. Yeah, I don't like that about people.
It's uncomfortable, but sometimes- People that go around telling you they're IQ, it's like- I know, it's kind of gross. It's insufferable. It is, but there's also people who are insufferable when they tell you about how well their business does. They're insufferable when they tell you they have a big dick. Whatever it is, people are insufferable, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they're stupid. It just means that they have flaws.
The thing though is that smart people can get things very wrong. Yes. Because not all smart people have a good temperament to absorb evidence that doesn't confirm their belief. Not all of them are intellectually honest. So to me, I think IQ is one thing, but intellectual honesty and
general psychological, mental maturity, emotional maturity to totally different things. Yeah. But isn't it interesting how you, even though you didn't have the information, we're saying he was a white supremacist. There you go. Yeah. So this is something that I fall victim to this too. We all do. I shouldn't just repeat things that I read in one article without having done the primary source stuff.
I try not to, but I catch myself doing it too. But it's also a function of, it's a part of this thing that you just can't have all the information. You know, it's not possible, especially when you talk about all the events and all the things in the world. It's just, you're gonna fuck things up. Do you find anything about that guy's quote?
I'm trying. There's a lot about him. So I'm trying to dig through that then. I just like to see the quote that he said about African gorillas. I don't think it's actually a quote. He was saying he's got a blog where he talks about he's got long right. He writes. He's got tons of writing. He's got some stacks guys been writing for a long time. Yeah. There's so many profiles on him. There's videos asking if he's completely made up if all this is bullshit. Well, I just think he doesn't have the sort of academic
You know, it doesn't have PhDs and he's not accepted. So even if he's really intelligent, people are going to dismiss him just because he's not a part of that system. But I want to know what he said that made them say that. Right. Me too. Because I don't like the way they were framing all the things before that, where they're saying that people who also believe this like them, you can't do that. Because how many people like them?
The guy's got a sub-stack that has 100,000 followers, and you find a thousand white supremacists, and you say some people who like that believe that Jews should be exterminated. Come on. That's not him. You can't do that. That's bullshit. That's not journalism.
You're pushing a narrative. That's like a narrative. How a lawyer in a courtroom would grill the other side, right? That's not journalism. No, it's not. And it's uncomfortable because this is something that we all fall prey to, and you just openly admit it that you did. I have two. I read a headline, and I was just like, oh, that must be real. It's time to get into this. I don't know any time. There's not enough time in the world to research all the different things that'll freak you out.
But you were talking about just intelligence in general and the ability to manipulate intelligence in embryos. And I think that this thing with China, where you're saying that it's overall good to increase a child's intelligence, like who would say that's not good?
Like, would you rather you could be dull-witted? Like, well, this billy could be dull. Or what we can do with CRISPR is buy a significant margin, increases ability to memorize things, and you'd go, oh, yeah, what do I have to do? It's really safe and effective. We're just going to do this little gene editing. And then all of a sudden, Billy's a fucking genius. Of course you would do that.
And that's just the beginning. That's the beginning. But then what happens is they mess up once. They make Billy stupid. They make Billy. Maybe Billy's a psychopath. Maybe Billy's the American psycho. He's really smart, but he's a fucking evil person. Right. And there's some massive class action lawsuit against one of the companies. Look at the companies now, maybe. Don't they be amused for the greater good of the human race? Come on. The lobby Congress to make an immune force. 100%.
They've done it with vaccines they can do with other things. The president's been set. We'll see about that. We'll see about that. Somehow, I don't know. These companies may not have very much power at first. They may have nowhere near as much power as the pharmaceutical lobby. What kind of regulations are in place to prohibit this sort of experimentation? I think none so far. That's not good.
But it's not bad either. I think it's just a function of human beings, creativity, innovation, and this desire to constantly make things better. And we do that with computers, and we do it with cars, and we do it with everything. We do it with solar panels, we do it with fucking everything. We're gonna do it with us. But the thing is, we're gonna miss some things.
there's beauty that comes out of people's tortured experiences and how it gets expressed in art. And if you eliminate all the negativity of life, you're going to miss out on a lot of things that bring us joy and inspiration. And that's what's that that's the real conflict. That's what's fun. How much, you know, when they every time you have an ecosystem,
That has a problem, and they introduce an invasive species into the ecosystem to solve the problem every time. It gets fucked. Unintended consequences. Unintended consequences are off the charts. Australia is a great example. They brought in feral cats to deal with some of their pest problems. And now feral cats have like
decimated ground that's right birds they think everything stinked so now they're trying to kill all the cats yes people hunt cats in australia so when you have like bow hunting journals in america bow hunting journals in america where it looks magazines and stuff people hold up pictures of like a whitetail deer that they're going to eat you know it's like oh we got venison for dinner tonight and look at this beautiful buck that we harvested
in Australia, they hold up, some of the magazines hold up dead cats, too. Like, look, we got rid of this motherfucker. And it's a house cat. And you're like, yo, that's great. It's like, for some people, it's like a dog. You know, the way I feel about my dog, some people feel that way about a cat and to see a cat with a fucking arrow hole through its chest. And the guy is holding it up like I did a good thing, mate.
Like, in that world, they fucked that system up so badly that the cat is now the bad guy. The cat is not your little friend like, but he went, you're a little friend. No, now the cat's the bad guy and you can shoot him and take pictures of him. So it's a question. If we, through gene editing, get rid of schizophrenia. Yeah. Does that also dial the clock down on creativity in general a bit?
Who, yeah, who knows? Does a guy like Kanye get born in such a world? Right. Right. Well, he's a great example of that. Whatever issues he has, I think he thinks now that he's autistic. I think that's what he's been openly saying. But whatever issues he has, that guy is a fucking tornado of creativity. Like his mind is when he wanted to do the podcast, okay, one of the things he wanted to do is make a set that was a womb.
And we're going to do it in there. He goes, uh, he was like, your studio is ugly and it's boring. I really said, he said, would you allow me to design your studio? I go, yeah, do whatever the fuck you want. This is going to be fun. But Jamie got COVID. So it all got thrown into a monkey ranch and we need someone else to engineer it. And so we just did it in my little shitty studio.
But that guy is just always trying to think about sustainable housing. He's trying to think about new forms of currency. He's designing clothes. He's writing fucking songs constantly. His brain, the same thing that makes him blurred out things that are questionable and you probably shouldn't have said it. That same brain is responsible for an insane amount of art. I think that's right. Yeah. I think it's true of Elon too.
And when he was medicated, he didn't like it. They cut that off. Like this superpower. It's like telling Superman, like you have to wear a kryptonite coat. Why? I'm fucking Superman. I can handle this. The color just gets drained from the world or something. Probably something will come of that. I mean, he's been quiet for a while now. I haven't heard anything about him. I haven't abandoned him recently.
It was kind of crazy. What did he actually eventually say? What was the big thing that he said? He said that he loves Hitler because he loves everyone. Yes. And Alex Jones really tried to get him, gave him every opportunity to walk it back. And he was like, oh, seriously, saying you like the Nazi uniforms. You like the aesthetic of Hitler. He goes, no.
I love Hitler. He really just stepped right into it. He didn't take any of the exit doors that Jones was giving him. Well, you got to understand his personality, too. He's a guy that does not like being told what not to do. That's right. When Obama called him a jackass, he immediately started supporting Trump after that.
Remember, he was wearing the Make America. When people were saying that Trump was bad, Kanye was like, no, no, no, I'm with Trump. And there was a concert that he did. He said he didn't vote, but if he did vote, he would have voted for Trump. And the whole crowd was like, boo. One thing I've noticed about people, as I've gotten a little older, is that
If a strategy has been working for someone their entire life, they're not going to get to 50 years old or 40 years old and suddenly change it when it stops working. So if you're Kanye, you're a random kid from Chicago.
And you became like a decent producer, but like everyone else, you came to New York with big dreams and you didn't get noticed for a while. And then the second you did get noticed, the second you tried to rap, everyone told you you were crazy. And not just everyone, the top experts of rap in hip-hop, Jay-Z's record label, the people that would most know, say, look Kanye, you're a good producer, but take it from us. We're the top experts in the world. You don't want to get into the rap game.
And he says, you know what, I'm going to do the really dumb thing and say no, you're all wrong. And then he becomes not just a good rapper, but the best rapper in history. So this strategy of a bunch of people that are the smartest people, and then by the way, he did the same thing with fashion.
Everyone, the smartest people in the world said, Kanye, you're a great rapper, but trust us. We know more than anyone in the world about this industry. You can't make it. And then he does it better than them. So a guy for whom that strategy has been working, he's just been calling his shot like Babe Ruth over and over again and getting it every time against the odds. He's not going to wake up at 45 years old. And when people say, you can't vote for Trump, he's going to say,
Yeah, I should listen to them this time. Right. Good point. And I've noticed this about other people too. It's like if they have some weird strategy that's really worked for them, you can't tell them to change it halfway through their life. Yeah. Elon's the same way. I think it's precisely connected to his extreme success of all the ventures that were supposed to fail that had you put anyone else at the helm, they would have failed, Tesla, SpaceX,
Um, just constantly having the smartest people in the world tell him he can't do something and then doing it. He, he's, uh, you know, he's immune to a chorus of very smart, well-meaning people telling him don't say that. Don't do this. Right. Because it's worked for him his, his whole life. And, and so I think the point is the flaws people point out in these people, they may be genuine flaws, but they are the flip side of the coin of their success.
Yes. They're inseparable. Such a good point. Yeah. Such an important point. And, you know, I think when people get in a situation like, we've never seen a person get in a situation like Kanye, where he was one of the biggest entertainers on the planet Earth, if not the biggest. And then all of a sudden it becomes persona non grata.
But that's never really happened before like that, over words, over saying, and a guy who clearly has a penchant for saying things that are outrageous. And he's always done that. And he clearly goes on rants, you know, where I don't even know if he knows where he's going sometimes. Like he went on a crazy rant when he met with Trump. Did you ever see that one?
Yeah, it's one of my favorites because Trump is so happy that Kanye is there. He's like, this is great. This is great. I'm just going to listen. Like, if Kanye was opposed to him and was saying the same kind of things, how do you think Trump will respond? It's like, what? What? What are you talking about? Where did you get? Your education. What kind of talk is this? And see, instead, he's like sitting there going, like, Trump's smart. He's sitting there. He's letting Kanye rent.
Kanye is trying to change make America great again. To make America great or something or keep America, I forget what he was doing, but he had this idea in his head that this was bad for black people and we want to make it change into this thing.
It's just a wild dude. He's a wild dude. I think he's a bad person. He's not a bad person. Although I stretch the imagination. I don't think he's gonna be persona non grata forever. No, he's talented, man. I'm motherfucker, but put out a new album. It'll be a real fungus into it. And for most people, all will be forgiven, especially. I think people will give him a pass because of mental illness. Like, I don't think he'll be canceled forever. No, he's too good. Yeah. He's too good.
To this day, to this day, people listen to Michael Jackson music, to this day, to this day. I want to rock with you comes on and everybody goes, oh man, you don't think, oh that's that guy went crazy and had wild facial reconstructive surgery and may or may not have molested kids. You don't think that.
You think that guy was looking good when beat it comes on, you know, you know, you don't think about those things. Doesn't matter. It's pretty. It's there was. I do remember there was like one week where people considered not listening to Michael Jackson and then everyone at the same time was like, ah, it's too good. It's too good. It's too good. It's too good. Got to be starting something. When you hear some of those songs, you're like, God damn, that deal was good.
Yeah. He was so good that they played him on rock and roll radio in Boston. I remember I was in Boston and it was WCOS which was like the local rock station we would all listen to. It's almost like classic rock like Arrowsmith and Led Zeppelin and shit.
And the DJ comes on, this is back when DJs can still play whatever they wanted to play. And he came on and he said, look, I know this isn't rock and roll, but I'm gonna play it anyway because it's so good. And he played Billy Jean. And it was so good that people didn't give a fuck that it was Michael Jackson. They didn't think it was disco or, and they didn't give it a label. They were like, wow.
Undeniable. Just undeniable. And that's Kanye. Kanye's got some bangers. Oh yeah. I got Kanye in about 10 songs on my Green Room playlist. And when we're in the mothership and those songs come on, everybody's like, oh shit, here's another one. He had so many of them. So many of them.
so many of them. And that's that same mind. That same mind that says crazy shit. That same mind is just fucking going. It's just going in a bunch of different directions with like
like a fucking thousand horsepower engine. And we're here in civics. Yeah, exactly. That's what's going on. The rest of us are not like that. No, I mean, we're different. We're different. And we need people like that. We just need them to not say things that hurt people's feelings. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. They'll say things that disparage entire groups of people. And I don't think he means to do that. I don't think anybody, I don't think he's a bad person by any stretch of the imagination. But I think we have to recognize that there's some mental illness that is extremely beneficial. Yeah.
and that when these people are behaving and expressing themselves in a certain way, they're just unwell. And it might be momentarily. There's people that get into manic states and they say things, then they have to call people back and say, I'm so sorry. I was freaking out. I'm not supposed to be drinking and I drank and I'm on this medication and I fucked up and it's like, yeah, okay. But as a society, just cast someone. I mean, like Adidas stopped their contracts with them and everybody stopped doing business with them. It's like,
I don't think you get rid of bad ideas by doing that. So everything I said about Israel on your podcast, no one can say that I'm a Hamas defender, right? I'm very pro Israel. But there are people right now that for expressing pro Hamas beliefs are being, you know, there's companies saying we're never going to hire you to college kids.
There's all kinds of stuff like this is going on, where I'm totally against it. I think people should be absolutely free to make these stupid arguments, and we should inform them, we should argue, right? We should have a conversation, even when it's like a really bad belief. But do you think that you would want someone to work for you if you found out that they were pro-terrorist?
No, probably not. If some guy says he's into ISIS. No. And he wants to work for your company. But you would say, hey, I'm not going to hire you because you've decided that you're a pro taliban. I wonder about that. I wonder about that because I want to say yes, but
You know, my friend, my friend, Noam Dorman, who owns a comedy seller, he says that he has people working in his kitchen. This guy, both his parents are from Israel, very pro-Israel. It's actually the most important issue to him in life, perhaps.
He has people working in his kitchen from the Middle East that believe all the propaganda all the anti-Semitic propaganda that they've been fed that many people in the Arab world are fed they believe the Jews are controlling the media the Jews are everything right and they're totally anti-Israel and Maybe some of them would even are even happy about the Hamas attack
But he says, as long as they keep their politics out of work, they don't alienate customers and we treat each other with respect, I'm not going to say I'd fire you or I wouldn't hire you. You know? Well, good for him. That's a very beautiful and Jesus-like way of approaching the world.
Yeah, but I think ideally it should be more and more the way we approach the world because I don't think you persuade people by persecuting them. The difference between that and someone, like someone holding beliefs because they came from a particular part of the world is very different from someone going out on the street
and yelling it, holding up banners and flags, using bull horns. And that is what someone might do at a protest. So if you were at a pro-ISIS protest, and you were screaming about ISIS's caliphate, and that this is the just way of life, and this is what God wants, like, I probably don't want you working at Subway.
