0:01

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out! The

0:04

Joe Rogan Experience. Train

0:06

by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night,

0:08

all day! Mr.

0:12

Schellenberger, good to see you. Good to see you, man.

0:14

How you been, man? Every

0:17

day, every day. Neck deep

0:19

in the chaos of the world. I

0:21

made it to Brazil and back, so I'll put it that

0:23

way. What was that like? It

0:25

was intense, man. I mean, it was, it's still

0:28

going on. We

0:30

did Twitter Files Brazil. Right. And

0:33

three days later, I was back in March,

0:35

three days later, Elon just throws down and

0:38

starts to attack this main Supreme Court

0:40

justice, who's the guy that's now

0:43

banned X. So X is banned

0:45

in Brazil. They're in negotiations. But

0:48

it was very exciting to be there because, and

0:50

the Brazilians were just relieved. They were like, everything

0:52

that we thought was happening is

0:55

proven by the Twitter Files Brazil. And

0:58

they were just very grateful to Elon.

1:01

What did the Twitter Files, I know about the

1:03

Twitter Files America. I don't know about

1:05

the Twitter Files in Brazil. So

1:07

they, this is like one of the

1:09

most extreme forms of censorship we've seen

1:11

in democratic countries. India's

1:14

been pretty bad too, but this,

1:16

what they were, the worst of it was that they were,

1:18

Pull that sucker up. Is it too, okay. Yeah, so I'll

1:20

just bring it up to you. How's that? Good

1:23

to go. This is the

1:25

most dramatic part is that they were the

1:27

judge. This is a Supreme Court justice, who

1:29

is basically the dictator of Brazil, was

1:33

demanding that particular journalists and

1:35

politicians just be banned, not

1:37

only from X, but

1:40

from every other social media platform, which

1:42

is a tactic that we had

1:44

seen in earlier censorship files. We

1:46

had done something on something called

1:50

the Cyber Threat Intelligence League

1:52

with Taibbi, showing this,

1:55

it was an early military

1:57

censorship operation. And they had a list

1:59

of tactics. tactics, and one of them was

2:01

to get people banned on every platform. So

2:03

you're basically just depersoning people, just

2:06

destroying their career. You can't make a career

2:08

as a journalist or a politician if you're

2:10

banned from every platform. So

2:13

that was one of the most dramatic parts,

2:15

all in secret, all open

2:17

investigations ongoing, and basically nobody, there's

2:19

no checks and balances, there's no

2:21

chance to argue with it. So

2:25

that came out, and Elon responded like three

2:27

days later and was like, yeah, Brazil's like

2:29

the worst in the world, and just starts

2:31

attacking the Supreme Court Justice

2:34

as like Darth Vader and Voldemort and

2:37

doing what Elon does. Fast

2:39

forward to last month, and

2:41

they had a huge protest in Sao

2:44

Paulo, one of the largest free speech

2:46

protests in history, which was itself just

2:48

amazing and inspiring because, you

2:50

know, free speech has been something

2:52

that we didn't really think we had to fight for. So

2:54

to see like hundreds of thousands of people in the streets

2:56

of Sao Paulo was amazing. I was

2:59

there with a former president, he sort of sees me,

3:01

brings me up, I'm up on top of the stage.

3:04

He's just yelling at

3:06

the crowd, everyone's worked

3:08

up, he kind of looks

3:10

over at me and covers the mic, and he's like,

3:13

it's Schellenberger, right? He's like, Michael Schellenberger's up here, and

3:16

the crowd's just, they knew about the Twitter files.

3:19

Afterwards, we go down and it's

3:21

just, you know, it's just a

3:23

lot of emotion and anger,

3:25

but also hope. The Brazilian people are,

3:28

for me, it's like one

3:30

of the most exciting cultures in the world because they're

3:32

so expressive. The president, like while he's

3:34

speaking, he's like crying, you know, it's a

3:36

very like emotionally open culture. So

3:39

now, I mean, the question for Elon, they're having

3:42

to negotiate this, is do

3:44

you out of principle keep

3:47

X banned in Brazil to defend the

3:49

several dozen people that the government is

3:51

requiring be banned permanently? But

3:54

that means that 20 million Brazilians

3:56

are denied X as a platform.

3:59

Or You go along with what the government's demanding

4:01

and hope to fight for another day, and that's

4:04

what's happening now. The 12 people, it's 12

4:06

people? We

4:08

actually don't know, but probably under 100. And

4:11

what are they being accused of

4:13

that the government is saying is

4:16

so important that they need to be banned? Misinformation.

4:21

You can see every country in the

4:23

world is particularly obsessed with COVID misinformation

4:26

and election misinformation. To

4:29

give you an example of how

4:31

arbitrary and unjust it is,

4:33

there's one of the members of Congress who's one

4:35

of the most dynamic. He's not actually in the

4:37

party of Bolsonaro. That's the controversial

4:39

former president. He's in a different

4:41

party. His name is Marcel

4:43

von Hotten. And

4:46

he didn't even know this until the

4:48

Twitter files Brazil came out, and then

4:50

Elon did release because the House of

4:52

Representatives, Jim Jordan, asked for these internal

4:54

files from X. He

4:56

subpoenaed them. So we even learned more information from

4:58

those files. They

5:01

showed that von Hotten had ...

5:03

He was supposedly being deplatformed for

5:05

election misinformation, but it turned

5:07

out that the video he posted was posted

5:09

the day after the elections and it had

5:12

to do with labor issues, had nothing to

5:14

do with elections. And that's

5:16

just really common. I mean, you just see ...

5:18

It's just arbitrary rule by one guy. That's why

5:20

I say it's a dictatorship. And has

5:22

there been any debate or discussion? Has

5:25

anybody tried to hold him to the fire

5:27

as to why these people are being banned

5:29

and please prove that this is misinformation? Has

5:31

there been any sort of discussion? Oh, huge.

5:33

I mean, it's maybe one of the biggest

5:35

issues in Brazil. It's the

5:38

president of Brazil who probably

5:40

hasn't gotten enough criticism

5:42

for it because he's going along with it. He

5:44

defended the censorship. This is Lula. This

5:46

is Lula. I always heard that he was

5:48

a great guy when Jair Bolsonaro

5:51

was the president. That

5:53

the narrative was, Bolsonaro was a dictator. That

5:56

he was a bad guy. But I know so

5:58

many Brazilians from ... I know

6:00

so many Brazilians and they all love Bolsonaro. I was

6:03

like I am so confused about their politics over there I

6:05

don't know what's going on, but Lula was supposed to be

6:07

this guy that was for the people and To

6:10

hear that he is a part of this whole

6:12

disinformation Crackdown alleged

6:14

disinformation crackdown is so disheartening

6:17

Well, yeah, I mean for me personally the funny

6:19

thing is I had this just coincidentally I have

6:21

this deep relationship with Brazil because I lived in

6:23

Brazil in the in the early 90s. I was

6:27

Working I was actually working towards my PhD in

6:30

the semi-amazon. I went to Rio

6:32

in San Paulo I interviewed Lula

6:35

in 1994 sat across from him just

6:37

like I'm standing across from me right now And

6:39

I was your take on him. I love me at

6:41

the time I loved him and now it's you know, I

6:43

was on the radical left for right, you know up until

6:45

you know five minutes ago Up

6:50

until the Kool-Aid wore off. Yeah, I Mean

6:53

even until the Senate me really even up until

6:55

the censorship part. I mean when you start censoring

6:57

you're just like Not

7:00

to digress but it's kind of like, you know back

7:02

in the 90s We were anti-war pro free speech and

7:04

pro gay rights. Yeah now the left is

7:07

is pro-censorship pro-war

7:09

and Engaged in horrible medical

7:11

mistreatment of gay children in

7:13

the name of trans medicine

7:16

So it's like literally like who changed here,

7:18

you know My values did stay the same

7:21

at least on those things But anyway, I

7:24

mean I said across from when I just said,

7:26

you know, everybody says that you're gonna turn Brazil

7:28

into Cuba He does love

7:30

Fidel Castro, but he said absolutely not He

7:33

does There

7:35

no their bros. I mean, but it seems

7:37

like a bit of a problem The thing

7:39

is that in Latin America like like everybody

7:41

on the left even some of the center

7:43

left They actually had a lot of respect

7:45

for Fidel I know

7:48

I know it's amazing but they really did crazy.

7:50

Yeah, he's a very Fidels

7:53

a very he was a very charismatic

7:55

person. I actually met him too. Really?

7:57

I met all these guys. I met you This

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10:45

I mean, for me, it's like

10:48

Ronan Farrow. Well, the Ronan

10:50

Farrow, Frank Sinatra one is

10:52

just insane. Yeah. That is not Woody Allen's

10:54

kid. No. Like, no ifs ands or buts.

10:57

That one's more dramatic than the Trudeau one.

10:59

That one's crazy. I mean, that looks like

11:01

Frank Sinatra. What are the odds? Unless she

11:03

loves Sinatra so much, she like willed him

11:05

into existence in her own child. Yeah,

11:09

immaculate conception. Yeah. But

11:12

anyway, so I mean, I asked Lula directly.

11:14

I said, and I actually wrote an article

11:16

for a left-wing magazine at the time, I

11:18

said, are you gonna try to turn Brazil

11:20

into Cuba and have censorship? And he said,

11:22

absolutely not. Our socialism is gonna be democratic

11:24

socialism. And that was my attraction to Brazil

11:26

too, was that I mean, here you, I

11:28

mean, and to the Workers' Party and to

11:30

Lula. I mean, he was super, he had

11:32

all the stuff that you loved about the

11:34

left, but he was gonna respect free speech.

11:38

So I, you know, basically after the Twitter

11:40

files Brazil and the Workers'

11:42

Party, you know, and Lula just start defending

11:44

censorship, then I start going after Lula too.

11:47

And I'm like, you lied to me and

11:49

this is, you know, unacceptable. What do you

11:51

think changed? Wow,

11:54

great question. I mean, there's a way in

11:56

which it's the same thing that changed for

11:58

the left everywhere. I mean, this is the

12:00

question we're always asking, which is like... Right.

12:03

How? Because if you read the histories, I've

12:05

been... I'm now... By the way, I'm... So,

12:07

we're gonna spend three months in Austin every year

12:09

now, because I'm the CBR chair of politics, censorship,

12:12

and free speech at the University of Austin. I'm

12:15

the first and only endowed chair there. So

12:17

it's exciting. So I'm here and... You're welcome.

12:19

Thank you, man. Really, yeah, we just bought

12:22

a little house and... Nice. Yeah.

12:25

Nice. So, yeah, I mean, one of the...

12:27

Because of course, if you read the histories of free speech, particularly the

12:29

last couple of hundred years,

12:31

it's really the right censoring the

12:33

left. There's a few

12:35

exceptions, but I mean, overwhelmingly, all

12:38

the way back to the original

12:40

French parliament where they split...

12:43

The French con... Where they split people left and

12:45

right became a way to refer to liberals and

12:47

conservatives. Conservatives were about protecting

12:49

tradition, about propriety, don't say certain things.

12:51

That was like what conservatives were. And

12:54

then if you go to the United States, like the

12:56

one of the most dramatic instances of censorship here is

12:59

the early part of the 20th century with the Sedition

13:01

Act. And that's when they were arresting

13:04

socialists, incarcerating thousands of people. I

13:06

mean, it's a crazy period. And

13:09

so that was the... That's basically the tradition. That's

13:11

why when we were in the 90s and up

13:13

until recently, free speech was part of the left

13:17

tradition. So what happened? I mean, one of...

13:20

What's clear about the censorship that's going on is

13:23

it's counter populist. So they're going...

13:25

Jair Bolsonaro, like Trump, is a

13:28

populist candidate. So one thought

13:30

experiment would be, if Bernie Sanders

13:32

had become president in 2016, would the

13:36

deep state have sided with... Would

13:40

they have sided with the right,

13:42

with the Republicans to censor a

13:45

populist democratic party? It's

13:47

an interesting question. I don't know the answer to it. Clearly...

13:50

I would say the... If you

13:52

look at what the global elite,

13:54

which is kind of a center

13:56

left elite in Europe, Brazil, United

13:59

States, Canada... It

14:01

really wants to censor on COVID

14:04

elections and migration. And

14:07

they do the migration, mass migration stuff around hate.

14:09

So like if you criticize mass migration, it's hate

14:11

speech and you should be censored. So

14:13

clearly this is a reaction by the deep

14:16

state against populism, which clearly threatens them their

14:18

ability to build a wage war when they

14:20

want to wage war, to move people around.

14:23

I mean, it's huge. I mean, the mass

14:25

migration that's been occurring under Biden of course

14:27

has been happening in Europe too. And

14:30

everybody's like, what's going on? Like

14:32

why is this happening? Why

14:35

do you think it's happening? Well,

14:37

that's a great question. I mean, obviously the story

14:39

that the traditional story had been that this

14:41

is compassionate and it's the right thing to do

14:43

and want to bring people in. There's so many,

14:46

I mean, the Democrats and the Europeans, they went

14:48

so far with it that it actually hurt, it's

14:51

hurt them politically. Like Kamala may lose the

14:53

elections because of just the mass migration. It

14:55

was like the number one thing 60 Minutes

14:57

asked her about just now. You

15:00

know, in Germany, the AFD, which is

15:02

considered the far right party, far just

15:04

means anti mass migration. So

15:07

they went really far. I mean,

15:09

I think there's probably some truth to the idea

15:11

that Democrats are bringing in folks to increase

15:14

democratic voters. That's not a

15:16

conspiracy theory. That's something that

15:18

John Judas and Ruby Teixeira wrote a

15:20

whole book about called The Emerging Democratic

15:22

Majority, where they talked about how Latinos

15:24

are gonna side with Democrats. And

15:27

then another part of me just wonders if it's related,

15:30

is that there was a concern

15:32

that populism, because I

15:34

mean, the threat of populism is

15:36

that it's popular. So

15:40

the threat of populism is that

15:42

the people actually govern rather than

15:44

these deep state organizations

15:47

that have constrained, that pre

15:49

internet constrained what was acceptable.

15:52

They narrowed the so-called Overton

15:54

window. With

15:56

populism, you get potentially

16:00

populations that say we don't want to go to

16:02

war in Ukraine, we don't want to support

16:05

foreign wars, we don't want to

16:07

have mass migration, and for a

16:09

variety of reasons, these

16:11

deep state organizations, by which I

16:13

mean Department of Homeland Security, FBI,

16:15

CIA, State Department, are

16:17

absolutely freaked out about it, as are the

16:20

kind of global elite that end up supporting

16:22

the NGOs pushing for that same agenda. George

16:24

Soros, you

16:26

know, Craig Newmark, Pierre Mediar,

16:28

the people that basically end up financing the

16:30

NGOs that the US government then comes along

16:32

and finances, which by the way is

16:34

another thing that we keep discovering, like we'll be in Brazil

16:36

and we'll be like, wow, these

16:38

NGOs are doing the exact same thing in Brazil

16:41

that they're doing in Europe, oh, and

16:43

they happen to be funded by George

16:45

Soros, they happen to have a fact-checking

16:47

groups that come along and fact-check as

16:49

a pretext for censorship, they do advertiser

16:51

boycotts against the social media companies in

16:53

order to control the social media companies,

16:56

obviously there was this huge infiltration of Twitter, I

16:58

mean since I saw you last, we discovered what

17:01

basically looks like a CIA effort

17:03

to take over the content moderation

17:05

at Twitter, it was former CIA

17:07

people, Alatheia

17:09

Group, which basically was,

17:12

we discovered these internal memos where they're

17:14

basically trying to come in and create

17:16

a special new content moderation, which is

17:18

of course code for censorship. How did

17:21

they frame that? They

17:23

framed it, it's so fascinating because of course we

17:25

can see all the memos and we have it,

17:27

so it's not a theory, they were addressing, they

17:32

basically were, in the internal, the

17:35

sales pitches from this Alatheia Group,

17:37

they were selling, they were basically

17:40

hyping the criticisms that Twitter was

17:42

getting for not censoring enough, and

17:46

then they were saying, well, we're going to

17:48

bring all this intelligence experience and we've got

17:50

these people that are really skilled at foreign

17:52

languages, I mean they were promising to bring

17:54

in people that spoke all these different languages,

17:56

and there was

17:59

some internal resistance within Twitter, but it

18:01

basically was on track to happen and

18:03

then Elon buys Twitter and

18:05

it all ends. What do you think would have happened if he

18:07

didn't buy it? I

18:09

mean, honestly, I go. I

18:12

mean, as long as you... I'm

18:14

careful. I don't want to engage

18:16

in hyperbole, but I do feel

18:18

like what we're seeing is totalitarianism,

18:21

that this is... It's not tanks

18:23

and torture chambers, at least not

18:25

yet, but this instinct, this demand

18:27

to control the entire information environment.

18:30

Because of course, the censorship is in service of

18:34

actually propaganda. They both

18:36

want to prevent certain information

18:39

from getting out and then they want to

18:41

promote certain information. And

18:43

that... I mean, I just

18:45

reread 1984 by George Orwell and it's

18:47

like, this is what he's talking

18:49

about. This is what he's worried about. So

18:52

do you think when social media

18:54

first came along, they sort

18:57

of underestimated the potential and

19:00

they let it become what it is

19:03

and then once it got so huge,

19:05

then they tried to infiltrate, like perhaps

19:07

after 2016, then they tried

19:09

to infiltrate and kind of realized it's

19:11

a little too late because there's just

19:14

too many people like yourself and sub-stack

19:16

people and podcasters, too much,

19:19

too many popular people on Twitter that have

19:21

huge accounts that are on it all day

19:23

long and monetizing it and acting

19:26

as legitimate independent journalists without

19:28

any sort of oversight.

19:31

Yeah, 100%. In fact,

19:33

it's not just that. They were using

19:35

social media to support... I

19:38

mean, CIA, Intelligence Community Defense Department

19:40

were using social media for Arab

19:43

Spring, for the

19:45

color revolutions in Eastern Europe. It was a weapon. It

19:47

was part of what they call hybrid warfare, you

19:49

know, getting people, you know, mobilizing people on the

19:52

streets to do regime change, to overthrow governments. I

19:54

mean, if you can... The

19:56

Holy Grail for... I mean, it's like Sun Tzu, you know, the

19:58

best way to win is by not having... having to fight. So

20:01

if you can not have to fire any bullets,

20:03

if you don't, if you know CIA 1.0 after

20:05

World War II,

20:07

you know, it's a crude military

20:09

overthrow of governments, CIA

20:12

2.0 regime change is you put a bunch of

20:14

people on the street, peaceful protest, get the head

20:16

of state to resign or call an early election

20:18

and then overthrow the government that way. So

20:21

social media was a tool of

20:23

US government statecraft for

20:26

whatever that period was when you know, Arab

20:28

Spring 2011 until 2016. And

20:33

then yeah, I think it was basically Brexit,

20:36

Duterte in Philippines is another right wing

20:38

populist that gets elected, Trump. And

20:41

even though I think the evidence is pretty

20:43

overwhelming that Trump was not elected because of

20:45

social media, he was elected because he defeated

20:48

his opponents and his Republican opponents in the

20:50

debates and then defeated

20:52

Hillary in the election, mostly through conventional

20:54

media. His

20:57

use of social media and those

20:59

other things clearly triggered a

21:01

reaction from these deep state organizations.

21:05

I like it. It's funny. I

21:07

just read this beautiful history of the printing press and Oxford

21:09

history and the printing press

21:11

at first, you know, 15th century,

21:13

first hundred years, the Catholic

21:16

Church is just like, we love the printing press.

21:18

You know, we're just cranking out Bibles and it's

21:21

going great. And then Martin Luther gets

21:24

ahold of the printing press and prints his

21:26

theses, which are mostly attacking the church for

21:29

corruption, for selling indulgences as a way to

21:31

pay for your

21:34

sins basically. And he condemns that and

21:36

he literally goes viral. I mean, when you read

21:39

like that history, you're like, it's

21:41

eerily similar to social media. I

21:43

mean, it's amazing because well,

21:46

I mean, long story short, there's like

21:48

a long period of revolutions and wars

21:51

and the Protestant Reformation and then the

21:53

counter reformation and they're like

21:55

the printing presses, they're like hiding them in people's

21:57

houses, the church and the government is trying to

21:59

arrest. people for having printing presses, the printing

22:01

presses go to Netherlands, they're sneaking the printing

22:04

presses into the Netherlands. And

22:06

so it's like, you can't help but see it,

22:08

you're like, wow, it's like VPNs. Because in Brazil,

22:10

when they were like, we're gonna ban X, we're

22:12

like, get a VPN, and VPN in, still

22:15

hard for people to post publicly, because that would obviously

22:17

show that they were on it. But still, it's like,

22:19

you're always, and this is sort of an argument, this

22:21

would be an argument for Elon to cut a deal

22:24

to get X back up in Brazil. And I'm not

22:26

saying that's what he should do, I'm just saying one

22:28

argument for it is that, stay in the game,

22:31

don't let them confiscate your printing

22:34

press out of, to

22:36

make out of principle or pride, because at some other

22:38

point, you're gonna be able

22:40

to find a way to work around that censorship.

22:43

Does Brazil have something similar to our First Amendment?

22:46

They have a line in their

22:48

constitution that is extremely strong, that

22:50

there should be no censorship for

22:52

social or political issues. The

22:55

problem is that their constitution is

22:57

so long, and it was created

23:00

by so many people, that

23:02

there's then all these other caveats.

23:04

Like you can't engage in racism, you

23:07

can't engage in hate, you can't,

23:09

there's the Nazis are, Nazi Party is

23:12

banned in Brazil. So there's

23:14

all sorts of other things that, I mean,

23:16

the constitution is full of contradictions, it's a

23:18

huge problem. It made

23:20

me, the whole experience, by the way, because

23:22

when you're growing up and you grow up

23:25

and you go to elementary school and high

23:27

school, and the teachers are telling you the constitution

23:29

of the United States is so special, and you're

23:31

just like, oh, come on, you know, like whatever.

23:34

But you realize when you get older, and you

23:36

realize the First Amendment, it's

23:38

so radical, because basically

23:41

every other country in the world, certainly

23:43

every other Western country, the progression of

23:45

free speech was, you would ask

23:47

the king for permission. He was like, oh, king,

23:50

can we criticize you for this? And he'd be

23:52

like, oh, okay, we'll allow you to do that.

23:54

But free speech was something gradually granted to the

23:56

people. Here, as soon as

23:58

they get the constitution done, Jeffers. and

24:00

other anti-federalists, the people that were pretty

24:02

skeptical about even wanting a country, were

24:05

like, we need a first,

24:07

we need a bill of rights, and the first

24:09

thing up there, it needs to be free speech,

24:11

and it's without qualifications. So the first

24:13

amendment doesn't say, it doesn't

24:15

say except for libel and defamation and

24:18

imminent incitement of violence. Those things were

24:20

built, those things were Supreme Court rulings

24:23

in the 250 years after the

24:27

the Constitution was ratified in

24:29

1789. And so that's why it's so amazing is

24:31

that like you just never,

24:34

I mean, I was, this history I just read of

24:36

free speech, it's so amazing because like you get all

24:38

this battles over how much free speech to have, is

24:40

it just for the elites, is it for the people,

24:42

then you get to the United States, and it's just

24:44

it's just a clear moment

24:46

in history where the founders of this country

24:49

were just like, fuck

24:51

it, like this is essential, like

24:53

the speech comes before the government,

24:56

the government, you don't have a government and then

24:58

have free speech, we have free speech as

25:01

an inalienable right from God or from our

25:03

Creator or just something that we're saying that

25:05

we have, and then you make a government

25:08

based on speech. So this

25:10

Orwellian idea that we hear, including

25:14

you know tragically from Barack Obama and

25:16

now his two secretaries of state, John

25:18

Kerry and Hillary Clinton, and

25:21

Bill Gates, they're saying we

25:23

have to have censorship to protect

25:25

democracy. It's like the most Orwellian,

25:28

un-American idea. It's anathema. How

25:30

is Bill Gates in this

25:32

conversation at all? That's what's

25:35

confusing, a non-elected official who

25:38

just owned a software company.

25:42

My colleagues don't want me to talk about, don't

25:45

be conspiratorial about this, there's other explanations. We've

25:48

already talked about George Soros, the

25:50

fact the FCC fast-tracked him

25:52

purchasing 200 different radio stations.

25:55

I mean that's kind of run-of-the-mill corruption. I mean

25:58

with Gates, you

26:00

get into Epstein, right? So,

26:03

I mean, so I'm not saying

26:05

this is the reason, but I mean, it is like,

26:07

this is not a theory. The

26:10

current CIA director, Bill

26:13

Burns, was at Epstein's apartment multiple

26:15

times. Bill Gates was there, I

26:18

believe, last time I checked, nobody knows how

26:20

many times actually Bill Gates was with Jeffrey

26:22

Epstein. He went out and did

26:24

this, you know, really, he did

26:26

this PBS interview where he just looks guilty

26:29

the whole time in his defense of talking

26:31

about Epstein. Is that with that woman where

26:33

she, when he says, well, he's dead now.

26:35

He said, oh. So, be careful. Which

26:40

is just the wildest thing to say. It's weird

26:42

that, yeah, like you're like, that's what he was

26:44

thinking. When she was like, why are

26:46

you, he's basically like, why are you going on and on

26:48

about it? He's dead. It's like,

26:51

well, we weren't talking about him, we were talking about you

26:53

and your relationship with him. Right, right. So,

26:55

I mean, look, so obviously there

26:57

is, there was

26:59

a sex blackmail operate. I mean, I'm 90, 95% on it. I

27:03

think the Wall Street Journal reporters who did fantastic

27:05

reporting on this are probably 99%. That

27:07

was a sex blackmail operation. They

27:10

were shooting film, there were one-way mirrors,

27:12

they were entrapping people.

27:15

There's known connections

27:17

to Mossad and I just don't believe that

27:19

Mossad operates in the United States without CIA

27:22

approval. So, the

27:24

prevailing theory is which, what most people

27:27

believe is that they brought these people

27:29

there under this premise that you're gonna

27:31

be there with heads of state and

27:33

industry and famous people and scientists and

27:35

this is gonna be an amazing place

27:37

where exceptional people get together. Then once

27:39

you get there, you get a little

27:41

loose. You start drinking

27:43

a little and perhaps taking in some

27:45

party favors and then there's ladies. Yep,

27:49

and they're underage. Yeah. And

27:51

then the next thing, and you don't know it, but

27:54

that mirror on the wall, someone's filming you. And

27:58

then you're owned. Yeah. I

28:00

mean look that's that's possible. I mean I'm

28:02

not something's going on in the fact that

28:05

they haven't been released Right client list hasn't

28:07

been released. Well or and that Epstein was

28:09

killed in yeah in jail I mean it's

28:11

clearly suspicious thing. I mean, I don't know

28:14

anybody that thinks whoopsie suicide. Oh, I've heard

28:16

people argue it Yeah, they believe it So

28:19

I mean look that you know that

28:21

could explain it. I mean look I think I mean

28:24

I think Soros really believes the stuff You

28:27

know I think gates. I mean there these are

28:29

people like when you get that powerful You

28:31

don't stop wanting more power You

28:34

want more power and so there's also you

28:36

need to Maintain power in order to protect

28:38

yourself from all this stuff that we just

28:41

talked about right? Assuming

28:43

there's you have skeletons in the closet. I mean we

28:45

do know one of his affairs with

28:47

a young Russian I think chess

28:49

player bridge bridge player. Mm-hmm. That's

28:53

Not contested that's established

28:56

When he was going through his divorce the

28:59

you know Melinda

29:02

you know like you see the leaks to

29:04

the New York Times about Epstein occurred while

29:07

she's negotiating Over

29:09

the divorce right so clearly she knew

29:11

something You

29:13

don't necessarily need that you don't need Epstein to explain

29:15

gates But I mean gates

29:17

he just came out with a Netflix documentary.

29:19

This wasn't some like off-handed remark He

29:22

was a whole Netflix documentary talking about specifically

29:25

at great length about why

29:27

we need to have Censorship apparatus

29:30

in place and he gave him multiple

29:32

reasons and one of them protect people

29:34

trying to tell you not to take

29:36

vaccines Right protect people from people

29:38

like you yeah But

29:42

Pete there's people that are

29:45

spreading air quotes misinformation about

29:47

vaccines right including real facts

29:50

Well, right that's what the most dangerous ones.

29:52

Well, that's what the most bizarre is that

29:54

he himself has changed his take on it

29:56

And he did it sort of it seemed

29:58

like to try to cover up the fact

30:00

that he was promoting it for so long and that,

30:02

well, it didn't work as we wanted and COVID wasn't

30:04

as bad as we thought. And

30:07

it didn't really offer the

30:09

protection that you need in

30:11

order to actually, it's not a

30:13

sterilizing virus. It doesn't actually kill the

30:16

virus. It doesn't keep you from getting it. So

30:18

it does allow transmission. So he kind of admitted

30:21

all those things, but like, oh, we'll do better

30:23

next time was sort of the gist of it.

30:25

Right. And this idea that you have to use,

30:28

you can't have people talking

30:30

about inconvenient things that eventually turn out

30:32

to be true seems crazy to not

30:35

push back on. And the fact

30:37

that he said that and there was no

30:39

response whatsoever in mainstream media, there was no

30:41

New York Times articles written about it. The Washington

30:44

Post didn't cover it and talk about how fucking

30:46

insane it is to say something like that, especially

30:48

after what we've been through. The gaslighting. Yeah.

30:50

I mean, I just did a debate with

30:53

Bill Nye in Florida.

30:55

He's the science guy. The science guy. Yeah. How

30:58

could you do a debate against the science guy?

31:00

Because I'm anti-science, obviously. He must be. And,

31:02

you know, I mean, I just pointed out

31:04

that simple fact that the, I just pointed

31:06

out the vaccine didn't obviously prevent infection or

31:08

transmission and the crowd, oh,

31:10

you know, how can you say that and

31:13

whatever? And it's like, because it, because everybody

31:15

knows it reduced hospitalizations and reduced death. And

31:17

I, I agree with that. I mean, that's

31:19

fine. But the point isn't, I'm not

31:21

arguing about the vaccine. I'm arguing that it didn't do

31:23

what they said it did and nobody's

31:26

actually, and then they just gaslight you as though

31:28

that were the reason they were telling you to

31:30

get the vaccine in the first place was to

31:32

reduce hospitalization and death. No, they were telling you

31:34

that it was going to reduce infection and transmission.

31:36

Well, everybody's seen that Rachel Maddow clip, right? But

31:38

here's the thing. If everybody took it, how do

31:40

we even know if it reduced hospitalization? This

31:43

episode is brought to you by the

31:45

farmer's dog. Dogs are amazing. They're loyal.

31:47

They're lovable. Like just having Marshall around

31:49

can make my day 10 times better.

31:51

I'm sure you love your dog just as

31:53

much and you want to do your best

31:56

to help them live longer, healthier, happier lives

31:58

and a healthy life. So

36:01

do we really know that it

36:04

prevented death? That

36:06

is a good question. You're dealing with so much. Honestly,

36:08

Joe, I'm not a COVID vaccine expert. But

36:11

I mean, even like saying that in front

36:13

of Bill Nye, the science guy, like he's

36:15

saying it prevented hospitalization and death. By what

36:17

measurement? Like

36:19

how can someone so confidently say that when we

36:22

know there's so much wrong with the vaccine? When

36:25

we know that it didn't stop transmission and

36:27

then we found out it wasn't even tested

36:29

to stop transmission. That was all a lie.

36:32

And the fact that they gave it to so

36:34

many pregnant women with no tests on pregnant women.

36:36

There's so much about it where people want to

36:38

say this one thing because they think it will

36:40

keep them from getting in trouble. And that thing

36:43

that keeps you from getting in trouble, the vaccine

36:45

was good because it prevented hospitalizations and deaths. I'm

36:48

like, how have you shown that? Like, how

36:50

do you show that? You

36:53

know, I'm going to go back and look at it.

36:55

I'm working with a new colleague who's an amazing expert

36:57

on the COVID stuff. But

37:00

yeah, it's not my area. I

37:02

mean, look, I think obviously

37:04

they sold it to us as though it was the polio

37:06

vaccine. And it was more like the best.

37:09

It was more like a flu vaccine. It

37:11

was a magic cure. Right.

37:13

It's not even like the polio vaccine. Because if

37:15

you look at polio, have you ever seen the

37:17

curve of when the polio vaccine actually comes in?

37:19

No. OK.

37:23

I'll send this to Jamie because it's quite fascinating. Most

37:25

people are under the impression that the

37:27

polio vaccine stopped polio in its tracks.

37:30

But the reality is polio cases

37:32

have radically declined before the polio

37:34

vaccine came along. It's

37:37

weird when you find it. I mean, that's

37:40

the problem with these goddamn rabbit holes. I'll

37:43

send this to you, Jamie. This is

37:45

a bunch of different vaccines that

37:48

we associate with stopping

37:50

particular diseases. And

37:52

what probably actually happened was there

37:54

was some sort of herd immunity

37:56

and is also the advent of

37:58

sanitation. You know,

38:00

people in inner cities are using outdoor

38:02

outhouses. There's stopping the use of DDT.

38:04

There's a bunch of different factors that

38:06

seem to play in that. But look

38:08

at where the polio vaccine comes along.

38:10

Yeah, that's amazing. Wow. Kind of crazy.

38:13

Yeah. Kind of crazy. Totally different than

38:15

the story we're told. Yeah. You

38:17

know another crazy statistic about polio? What's that?

38:20

What percentage of polio do you think is

38:22

asymptomatic? Oh, God, great question.

38:25

I'm assuming high, right? A lot? Take a guess.

38:27

50%. 99.

38:29

95 to 99. Depending

38:32

on who you ask. The majority

38:34

of polio cases today are vaccine-derived polio.

38:38

So there's a particular strain of

38:40

vaccine that causes people to get

38:42

polio. There's a particular strain of

38:44

polio, rather, that comes from that vaccine. So where

38:46

are you at? What's your bottom line on vaccines

38:48

right now? I am

38:50

not a vaccine expert. But I am

38:52

a person that has been lied to

38:54

for four years and so blatantly and

38:56

so obviously, when you look

38:59

at Fauci talking to Rand Paul and just

39:01

lying openly about whether or not they funded

39:03

gain-of-function research, the fact that he got away

39:05

with all that, the fact that

39:07

the White House tells you for the

39:09

unvaccinated, you're looking at a winter of

39:11

severe illness and death, just

39:13

scaring the shit out of people. And it

39:16

seems to me they were doing

39:18

that to maximize profits because they wanted to

39:20

keep selling these things. And a lot of

39:22

people got extremely rich. Many billionaires

39:24

were created because of the pandemic, because

39:26

of the COVID vaccine. It's

39:28

all very spooky to me because I

39:30

think there's a long history in this country of

39:33

people doing things for money,

39:35

knowing that people are going to suffer because of

39:37

it. It's just sort of a human

39:39

thing, if you can get away with it. It is illegal,

39:41

and you have the protection in place, and you know that

39:43

you're going to profit largely from this. You do it. It's

39:47

also in the United States is worse, because Europe

39:49

did not require the vaccine. In

39:51

fact, I believe in- They pulled it a lot quicker than we did,

39:53

too. I mean, they did not require for children in particular. I

39:56

just interviewed Tracy Hogue, and she was saying that

39:58

she spends a lot of time in Denmark. and

40:00

Denmark said, don't give your kids the

40:02

vaccine. And we said do and clearly. Well,

40:05

there's a difference between socialized medicine, right? I

40:08

mean, we're seeing it on the trans

40:10

medicine as well. The Europeans, because it's

40:12

a centralized socialized medicine, when Britain says

40:17

you should not give kids puberty blockers, they

40:19

end puberty blockers across all of Britain.

40:22

They did it first in the NHS hospitals, which is the

40:24

socialized medicine, and then they did it for the whole country.

40:27

And the conservatives did it right before leaving office, and the

40:29

labor comes in, they go, we're upholding it. So

40:32

what is the debate with Bill Nye, the science guy?

40:34

What was his position? Well,

40:36

in that case, it was just more like, they

40:38

were, I mean, it was kind of a collective gaslighting

40:40

where everybody has now, I mean, I think that it's

40:43

unconscious, by the way. I don't think they're deliberately doing

40:45

it, so maybe gaslighting's not fair. I agree. They

40:47

go right from, they just have forgotten. It's

40:49

like retconning, you know, the narrative. So

40:51

they just kind of go, no, no, it's about reducing

40:54

hospitalizations and death. It's like, but that's not the way

40:56

you sold it to us. So can

40:58

we just take a beat and acknowledge

41:00

that you've changed your justification for the

41:02

vaccine, which means that it's motivated cognition.

41:04

It's not like you're like reconsidering vaccines

41:06

now that they, because what you should

41:09

do is go, okay, the

41:11

vaccines didn't do what they said they were gonna do. They didn't

41:13

stop infection or transmission. Now, maybe there's another

41:15

reason we want them, and we should consider it,

41:18

but you should take a beat and pause before

41:20

you just sort of rush ahead to justifying vaccines

41:23

for some other reason. Right. And

41:26

what was his position? Just,

41:28

I mean, the most, you know, Peter, it's

41:31

just the same as Peter Hotez and all

41:33

of these guys. It's very authoritarian. I mean,

41:35

it's very like, I mean,

41:37

what he calls science is not actually,

41:39

what Fauci and Hotez and Bill Nye

41:41

call science is not actually science, because

41:44

science is a process. The

41:46

way they talk about it is more

41:48

like- A doctrine. Yeah, exactly, or in

41:50

a dictatorship, where it's like, science is

41:52

done by scientists. Well, actually, science can

41:54

be done by anybody. It's like journalism.

41:56

Like, you don't need a PhD to

41:59

do science. I

44:01

believe so definitely the idea to find

44:03

how he figured out Where

44:06

he initially came up with the concept of science,

44:09

but it was understanding

44:12

understanding nature through through Measurement

44:16

and I forget exactly how how he came up with

44:18

it But I'm 99% sure

44:20

it came to him in a dream that I believe

44:22

it was an egan angel that brought him this information

44:24

in a dream I mean all

44:26

these early scientists including new areas The

44:29

French philosopher mathematician believed that he had

44:31

three dreams in November 10th 1619

44:34

that revealed the basis for the scientific

44:36

method and his philosophical methods He was

44:38

possessed by a genius who revealed answers

44:41

in a dazzling light He went to

44:43

bed exhausted and dream three dreams He

44:45

envisioned reforming all knowledge understanding the nature

44:48

of existence and how to be certain

44:50

of that knowledge Descartes

44:52

dreams are considered a

44:54

philosophical Philosophers dream and are

44:56

considered to be authentic his interpretations of

44:58

the dreams are supported by Biographical

45:01

material neuroscientific theory and

45:03

psychoanalytic theory Descartes

45:06

dreams also the subject of the world

45:08

according to mathematics a series of essays

45:10

that examines the influence of mathematics on

45:13

society The essays consider how mathematics can

45:15

be applied to civilization how these applications

45:17

could be beneficial dangerous or irrelevant So

45:22

It came to him in a dream the idea of

45:24

it initially it's very interesting right that human beings live

45:26

for so long Before

45:28

the scientific method came along and now

45:30

it has become this weird

45:33

thing That's been captured by people

45:35

or so-called experts the spokespeople for

45:37

the science Which is always dangerous

45:39

when you have an enormous group

45:41

of intelligent people which the

45:43

United States is either the United States is

45:46

330 million people Some of

45:48

them have degrees some of them are just

45:51

brilliant people that have spent a lot of

45:53

time studying things and there's a lot Of

45:55

them there's a lot of people so when

45:57

you have all these people debating things and

45:59

you want to make maintain control and push

46:01

a narrative, that chick is very messy. And

46:03

the best way to handle that is to

46:05

have certain people be the

46:08

stern purveyors of the

46:10

science. That's it.

46:12

When you criticize Anthony Fauci, you're

46:14

criticizing science. That's right. Has anybody

46:16

said that? It's incredible. That

46:18

was a wild thing to say, but it's so

46:21

transparent because it shows how they really think that

46:24

you are, you are, and it's scolding. You

46:26

are not supposed to. That's the

46:28

same thing that happened when Martin Luther translated

46:30

the Bible into phonetic languages because no one

46:32

could speak Latin. No one had to read

46:35

Latin. They're poor people. But when

46:37

he translated it into German and all these different

46:39

languages people could read and said, hey, this is

46:41

up to you to interpret what God said, the

46:44

church was like, hey, fuckface, you're

46:46

cutting in on our racket. Like

46:48

we need people that are the spokespersons

46:50

for God. The

46:53

people that are going to tell you what God

46:55

meant. You don't get to decide what God meant.

46:57

That fucking dude is dressed like a wizard. He

46:59

gets to decide. So they're wearing

47:01

these crazy costumes that regular people don't get to

47:03

wear, which makes you think, well, he's got the

47:06

wacky costume and the fish head hat. He must

47:08

know more than me, which

47:10

is a weird play on authoritarianism.

47:12

It's a very

47:15

strange thing that people accept when people

47:17

have costumes on. Like if cops were

47:19

wearing Nirvana t-shirts and board shorts, you'd

47:21

be like, hey, fuck you, man. That's

47:24

a weird dude. But you were going 55 and a 50.

47:28

And he's wearing a uniform. Like,

47:31

damn, I'm getting in trouble with a

47:33

uniformed person. This is real. They've

47:36

proven it. They actually do studies where if

47:38

you put somebody in a white scientist's

47:41

coat or a white doctor's coat or put a

47:43

stethoscope on them, people trust them more. Sure. It's

47:46

just automatic. It's incredible. I

47:48

do. Yeah. I mean,

47:50

why not? They're scientists. They've got a stethoscope.

47:52

They know what my heartbeat permit is. So

47:55

the most unscientific thing is when people say things

47:57

like, the science is telling us to do this.

47:59

No, no, no, no, no, no. Science

48:01

doesn't tell us to do anything. It's

48:04

describing reality. You can make predictions

48:07

of what would happen if you do different things, but that's not

48:09

science telling us what to do. Science can't

48:12

do that. And so- Especially when you stifle

48:14

debate. Yeah. If you're stifling

48:16

debate, you're stifling science. You are

48:18

anti-science if you are anti-debating about

48:21

science. Or at least the

48:23

data. It's very similar to free speech in

48:25

that same way. If you're just defending the

48:27

speech that you agree with, then you're not

48:29

actually defending free speech. Right. The

48:32

test of whether or not you're defending free speech, same

48:34

as the test of you're defending science, is that ...

48:36

Bring it on. Well, as

48:38

soon as you're censoring people

48:40

like Jay Bhattacharya and Peter

48:43

McCullough and Robert Malone, as

48:45

soon as you're doing that,

48:47

okay, how is ... These

48:50

people are rock solid credentialed

48:52

physicians. Peter

48:55

McCullough has the most

48:58

scientific papers published in

49:00

his field in human history. This

49:03

is a legitimate scientist slash

49:05

doctor, and he's telling you.

49:08

He's telling you. He's using

49:10

the actual methods that you're telling

49:12

people trust the science. He's actually

49:14

doing it, and he's got

49:17

a whole list of credentials

49:19

to his name. He's a very accomplished

49:21

person in this field, and yet they're

49:23

censoring him, because what he was saying

49:25

was going against narratives. Of course. Which

49:28

is ... So you're stifling debate, which is ... Everyone knows is the

49:30

wrong way to do it. Even if

49:32

he's wrong, the correct thing to do is to get

49:34

him publicly to talk

49:36

to someone who is right and

49:39

have the world see how this person who

49:41

is right is going to correct him on

49:43

the errors of his analysis. And

49:46

then we all learn. But instead, what do they

49:48

do? They try to get him booted off of

49:50

social media, which is very sketchy behavior. We

49:53

don't like that. It's like ... Well,

49:55

as Francis Collins said, we need to

49:58

do a devastating takedown of these fringe

50:00

epidemiologists. technologists, referring to the Barrington Declaration,

50:03

that Bhattacharya and the two other, and the two

50:05

of the- Martin Holdoff. Holdoff

50:07

and then, I can't remember, Sinatra Gupta

50:09

from Oxford, I think is the third.

50:11

But yeah, I mean, even a more

50:13

dramatic example is like, a lot of

50:16

the people that did the early pioneering

50:18

work showing that COVID escaped from a

50:20

lab were like anonymous

50:22

people on the internet, anonymous

50:24

sleuths. That is legitimate.

50:26

I mean, the idea, like credentialism,

50:28

credentialism is the enemy of science.

50:30

The idea that you need to

50:33

have some established credentials, in

50:35

part because the system reproduces

50:37

its own ideology. Professors, they

50:41

hire people and give tenure and give PhDs

50:43

to people who agree with them. That's how

50:45

they feel like their legacy will continue. They

50:47

don't normally promote people, the

50:50

younger generation, if they have radical

50:52

disagreements for them. So they're necessarily

50:54

gonna come outside of the establishment.

50:58

It's sort of like every other

51:00

institution where people wanna get ahead. You have to play

51:02

the rules. You have to play the

51:04

game by the rules that's established by the people that are

51:06

controlling the game. Yeah, it's conformism. It's

51:08

just bizarre when that happens with science and

51:11

mathematics and with all these different things that

51:13

we thought of as these

51:16

hard sciences, like it's information-based, data-based. And

51:18

it's even more dangerous when it's in

51:20

the health and medical context. I'll give

51:22

you another example. I mean, American Academy

51:24

of Pediatrics, my friend Marty McCarrie just

51:26

came out with this amazing book called

51:28

Blind Spot, yeah, Blind Spots, where

51:31

he looks at American Academy of Pediatrics, look at what

51:33

they did. They recommended letting

51:36

babies sleep on their stomachs that

51:38

resulted in the sudden infant death syndrome.

51:41

Babies, like many babies died from

51:44

that. Suffocated, right? Suffocated. They

51:46

recommended not giving children

51:48

peanuts and they

51:51

created the peanut allergy epidemic.

51:54

They, and now they're recommending

51:57

transgender medicine. In all three

51:59

cases... classic

56:01

emperor's new clothes, where like

56:03

kind of everybody in the room is like, this

56:05

glossary is racist and insane, or

56:07

telling parents not to give kids peanuts

56:09

is insane, because we've never had morality

56:11

since we started banning this. How did

56:13

it go on so long? I

56:16

think that's one of the things that, that

56:18

is one of the remedies, I think, of

56:20

the internet age and having these alternative

56:23

media. That is a remedy to basically

56:25

have people calling bullshit on it from

56:27

outside those institutions. Because, I mean,

56:29

this is American Academy of Peach Art. If you're just

56:31

an ordinary new parent, and you're,

56:33

you know, oh, the other one, by the way, is

56:35

infant formula, recommending seed-based, AAP

56:37

recommended seed-based infant formulas, which were

56:39

terrible for kids. And of course

56:41

we know that breast milk is

56:44

superior for all these reasons, and

56:46

the antibodies, and creating the immune

56:48

system response. So, I

56:50

mean, here you have the major organization recommending how

56:52

to take care of kids, with

56:55

not one, but four separate health

56:57

scandals that it helped to create.

56:59

Why should that organization even exist anymore? Right.

57:03

You know, and that's just like literally one of

57:05

the institutions, but if you kind of just go

57:07

down, you know, Harvard, New York Times, you

57:10

know, American Medical Association, and

57:12

you know, how about COVID? I mean, most

57:15

Americans agree now that COVID was invented

57:17

in a lab in China, escaped from

57:20

the lab. So you have another case

57:22

where these institutions are

57:24

actually creating the problems they

57:26

claim to be solving. You

57:29

sound anti-science to me. I

57:31

don't like anti-science. If that's what it is, sign

57:33

me up. I mean, this is actually the subject,

57:35

you asked me when I was here, you asked

57:37

me if what the new book was, and this

57:40

is what it is, Pathocracy is the new book,

57:42

Why Elites Subvert Civilization. And that's the big question,

57:44

is how is it like

57:46

that the institutions, and we're taking this concept

57:48

of iatrogenesis where the classic example is you

57:50

go to the hospital for some ailment, and

57:52

you end up getting an infection and die,

57:55

that's considered that when the healthcare

57:57

system creates sickness, taking

57:59

that. professionally

1:00:00

scrubbed. They didn't even find silverware in it.

1:00:07

The second guy that was recruiting people

1:00:09

to go fight in Ukraine. Well, he sounds like

1:00:11

a full-on loon. If I was

1:00:13

an intelligence agent and I was

1:00:16

trying to

1:00:19

do this kind of stuff, I would find people already out

1:00:21

of their fucking minds. Right. I'd reach out to

1:00:23

them. I was going to say, being

1:00:25

a loon doesn't seem to be disqualifying to be

1:00:27

recruited into intelligence work. Well, it seems

1:00:29

to be a very valuable asset. That's

1:00:32

what Lee Harvey Oswald was. He was a fucking loon.

1:00:35

They probably recruited him and knew all along that

1:00:37

he was the guy they were going to pin

1:00:39

it on. Right. This

1:00:41

kid is probably a very similar

1:00:43

case, the kid that shot Trump.

1:00:46

When you find out that this kid

1:00:48

was in a Blackwater commercial just

1:00:50

two years before, like,

1:00:52

what? Who's he in contact with?

1:00:55

Like, what? Was it Blackwater or

1:00:57

BlackRock? Oh, BlackRock, sorry. BlackRock. Yeah.

1:01:00

Just protecting you from any future lawsuits. I just

1:01:02

fucked those two up. It's a BlackRock commercial. I've

1:01:04

said it right and wrong many times.

1:01:08

No, I mean, it's amazing these

1:01:10

things. I mean, or even though I remember

1:01:12

the trans shooter, we didn't get her diary for

1:01:14

a long time. Well, it was very rough.

1:01:16

Like, some of it is leaked. I

1:01:19

guess it was probably people trying to

1:01:21

discourage hate against trans people. But the

1:01:24

reality is, the majority of the last

1:01:26

few school shooters have been

1:01:28

trans. This is also something

1:01:30

that's conveniently left out of the discussion. And

1:01:33

that's not even the real problem. It's not

1:01:35

like trans people are violent. The real problem

1:01:38

is psychiatric drugs. And that's the

1:01:40

thing that no one wants to make a

1:01:42

connection with. How many of these mass shooters

1:01:44

are on psychiatric drugs? And the answer is

1:01:46

the majority of them. Well, they say

1:01:48

that, but of course, I did a, I reported on the

1:01:50

guy that attacked Paul Pelosi, Nancy

1:01:53

Pelosi's husband with a hammer. Right. I

1:01:56

mean, he, first of all, I

1:01:58

reported out that, you know, you go to his house and

1:02:00

he was homeless and he was a drug addict and he

1:02:02

had mental illness and you go to his home in Berkeley

1:02:04

and there's a Black Lives Matter sign and a rainbow flag

1:02:06

and all that. But

1:02:09

the media all reported it that he was a right wing

1:02:11

Trump supporter. So

1:02:13

they were very- I didn't hear that at all. Oh yeah.

1:02:16

Really? Huge. That's

1:02:18

hilarious. Yeah. But in

1:02:20

that case they didn't hesitate to release that information

1:02:22

that he had been posting about QAnon and criticizing

1:02:25

the Democrats and whatnot. So it's clearly

1:02:28

ideologically selective of which

1:02:31

assailants political

1:02:33

information gets released. Well

1:02:36

and then unfortunately there was a bunch of conspiracy theories that

1:02:38

he was his lover and he was in the house. But

1:02:40

if you see the guy while he's talking to the cops

1:02:42

and holding the hammer and Paul Pelosi is trying to hold

1:02:45

onto the hammer, the whole thing is mad. Like why is

1:02:47

Paul Pelosi still having a drink in his hand? Like

1:02:49

dude you're in a mortal struggle with a man who

1:02:51

has a fucking hammer in his hand and you're holding the

1:02:54

hammer with one hand because you want to keep your

1:02:56

drink. I couldn't figure out why the cops

1:02:58

didn't just go grab the hammer in that moment. They sat

1:03:00

there and waited. I don't think they knew exactly what was

1:03:02

going on. It was very weird looking. It was very strange.

1:03:06

It didn't seem like Paul Pelosi was-

1:03:08

he wasn't screaming or in danger. He

1:03:10

seemed very calm. He's probably trying

1:03:12

to slow this guy down and relax

1:03:14

him and calm him down while the cops

1:03:16

were arriving and just didn't ever feel like

1:03:18

he was going to get hit in the

1:03:20

head with a hammer which is what wound

1:03:22

up happening. The video is so disturbing but

1:03:25

if you look at the man in the video

1:03:27

he's clearly out of his fucking mind. Right. You

1:03:30

know there's something wrong with that guy. Like he could tell

1:03:32

right away. Like here it is. Oh it's so disturbing. It's

1:03:34

so strange. Like why isn't

1:03:37

it- but I don't quite understand why the cops

1:03:39

don't rush in at that point. Right. Why is

1:03:41

Paul holding onto his drink while this guy's got

1:03:43

a fucking hammer in his hand? Yeah.

1:03:46

The guy's got two hands on it and he's got one. Maybe there's not

1:03:48

as much time that goes by as I thought. That

1:03:50

seems like they're struggling. The cops should have rushed in then. Yeah.

1:03:54

That's awful. Oh my god. Yeah.

1:03:57

Oh my god this is so horrible. That video is so horrible. And

1:04:00

also he's an 80 year old man, okay? For an

1:04:02

80 year old man to get knocked unconscious in the

1:04:04

head with a hammer like that, he's not gonna ever

1:04:07

be the same again. Yeah. You know, that is, that's

1:04:09

bad for a 20 year old person to get hit

1:04:11

in the head with a hammer. That's awful. For

1:04:13

an old guy like that to get KO'd like

1:04:15

that with a fucking hammer where he's snoring in

1:04:18

the c- I mean, I

1:04:20

think the pro- both sides, both left

1:04:22

and right, often attribute political motivations to

1:04:25

mentally ill people who, if you go through,

1:04:27

like, if you go through that guy's, David

1:04:31

DePaup, I think was his name, if you

1:04:33

go through- if you're going through the stuff

1:04:35

that he was posting, it's just a mix

1:04:37

of crazy left-right stuff. It was clearly mentally

1:04:39

ill. Yeah. Yeah. Um... And- but clearly mentally

1:04:41

ill, by the way, people, they

1:04:44

will adopt whatever ideology is

1:04:47

the most persuasive. Like, they don't really- they're

1:04:49

not objectively thinking about things, he's out of

1:04:51

his fucking mind. Well, we don't blame John

1:04:53

Hinckley Jr., we don't blame Jodie

1:04:56

Foster for John Hinckley

1:04:58

Jr.'s assassination of Reagan. Right, of course. You don't go,

1:05:00

if it weren't for Jodie Foster- Right, you know, he

1:05:02

was a Jodie Foster fan. Yeah. That's why- if it's

1:05:04

on her. Yeah, nobody says that. Yeah, so- He's

1:05:07

a crazy person. I mean, look, we're in

1:05:09

a- I mean, look, we're in a mental- I mean, we've been in-

1:05:11

our country is just in a

1:05:13

bad way in terms of mental health, right? We're just

1:05:15

not taking care of it. I mean, no country- I

1:05:17

mean, we have- we have a lot of guns, and

1:05:20

then you have no proper psychiatric or mental

1:05:22

health care system. Which

1:05:24

is crazy, because now you have telehealth and,

1:05:27

you know, we should have a bunch of ways to deal with it,

1:05:29

but it's just not who we are, I guess. Well,

1:05:32

it's also- Well, it's also very difficult to get people to

1:05:34

seek treatment. Yeah. And, you know,

1:05:36

and then also the treatment, especially in terms

1:05:38

of things like SSRIs, they have to try

1:05:40

a bunch of things on you. It's not

1:05:42

as simple. Everybody has a different level of

1:05:45

mental illness, right? And so there's also different

1:05:47

causes of this mental illness, and there's different

1:05:49

medications at work. Right. And they don't really

1:05:51

know until they try it on you. And

1:05:54

then we find out now that the entire

1:05:56

theory that it's based on, which is that

1:05:58

there is- some sort

1:06:00

of chemical imbalance is incorrect. It's

1:06:03

not true. So then, okay, we

1:06:05

have to take this holistic view

1:06:08

of the body and the mind and the

1:06:10

health of the individual based on lifestyle and

1:06:12

choices and community and friends and all these

1:06:14

different things that we don't want to take

1:06:16

into consideration. Instead, they're just giving people

1:06:18

pills. And they give

1:06:21

people pills and sometimes it works and

1:06:23

sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes it causes

1:06:25

a dissociation effect. These dissociatives, these weird

1:06:28

drugs that people take where they don't

1:06:30

even exactly know what the fuck they're

1:06:32

doing while they're doing it. Well,

1:06:35

and some, I mean, I think also, I mean, yeah, 100%. And

1:06:39

we also, unlike Europe and whatever, we don't allow,

1:06:41

we don't coerce, we

1:06:43

don't mandate antipsychotics to people with

1:06:45

schizophrenia or those kinds of treatments.

1:06:47

We're much more libertarian than that.

1:06:49

Right. I mean, this guy,

1:06:52

particularly the Pelosi guy, I actually, I

1:06:54

can't prove it, but my theory would be that

1:06:56

he, that there may not have been an underlying

1:06:58

mental illness. He had a rough life.

1:07:01

He did a huge quantity of drugs. You know, it

1:07:03

was just a set of people, as we've known from

1:07:05

LSD over the decades. There's some people that

1:07:07

take LSD. We're now seeing

1:07:09

it with the high potency marijuana. They never

1:07:11

come back. That triggers psychosis. Yeah. Yeah. And

1:07:13

it's probably, they already have a propensity for

1:07:16

it. The thought is that, I

1:07:18

forget what percentage of the population, I think it's 1% as

1:07:21

a tendency towards schizophrenia or will eventually become

1:07:23

schizophrenic. And then you take that 1%. That's

1:07:26

a lot of people, man. Oh, for sure. One

1:07:28

out of a hundred, you take one out of

1:07:30

a hundred, you give them a giant dose of

1:07:32

edible marijuana and they're gone. Well,

1:07:34

this is a, Mark Andreessen,

1:07:36

who you had on, was making this

1:07:38

point about ayahuasca, which is very fashionable

1:07:41

among the elite set. And I think

1:07:44

the point that resonates with me is, you know,

1:07:46

when I was working in San Francisco, after

1:07:49

the summer of love, 1967, when

1:07:51

all the, every shows up in San Francisco and

1:07:53

they're tripping out on acid, the

1:07:55

privileged kids, the educated elite, they go back to

1:07:57

Yale and Harvard at the end of the summer.

1:08:00

But the working-class kids, the kids that

1:08:02

were not as educated, you know, lower

1:08:04

middle class, they hung around in San

1:08:06

Francisco and got addicted to speed and

1:08:08

heroin. And that was the early beginnings

1:08:11

of the homelessness crisis. Was this after

1:08:13

the sweeping psychedelics acts of 1970, when

1:08:15

it made everything Schedule I? No,

1:08:17

this is back in the summer of love, which is 1967. So

1:08:20

even in 1967, they were doing speed? Oh,

1:08:23

yeah. So it was just something. The

1:08:25

number of speeds, it really starts with

1:08:27

the beats, you know, the, yeah, it's

1:08:29

the beats, right? The beatniks of the

1:08:31

early 60s. They're all, Karowak writes his

1:08:33

book on speed. Right. That's probably part

1:08:35

of it too, right? Like, I mean,

1:08:37

it was ubiquitously used during the Nazis,

1:08:39

during World War II. So speed was

1:08:41

around for a long time. The problem

1:08:43

with speed is it works. Oh.

1:08:46

It really works. Like, people take it and the people,

1:08:48

I've never fucked around with any of it, but the

1:08:50

people that I know that have tried at it all,

1:08:52

they tell you, like, you feel like you could do

1:08:54

anything and you get things done.

1:08:56

And that's attractive to everybody, whether you're a

1:08:58

hippie or a capitalist or anybody. You just

1:09:00

feel more empowered. Until you don't. Until

1:09:03

you don't. Yeah. Especially when it stops working well

1:09:05

and you keep taking more and more of it.

1:09:07

And the next thing you know, you're out of

1:09:09

your mind, you're losing your teeth. Right. Yeah. But

1:09:11

it is an important point because, yeah, people take

1:09:13

these drugs for a reason. They can be performance

1:09:15

enhancing. And there's a certain group of people.

1:09:17

I mean, you know, Carl Hart, you know, there's people

1:09:19

that write drug use for grownups. There's people, he's a

1:09:21

Columbia University professor. You know, there's

1:09:24

people that have a very high internal self-control

1:09:26

that are able to do these drugs. But

1:09:28

that is not the real problem is that

1:09:30

we don't develop human beings

1:09:32

with a level of self-control and a

1:09:34

level of discipline and we don't encourage

1:09:37

discipline. We don't encourage, and I

1:09:39

don't mean like disciplining a person,

1:09:41

I mean self-discipline. We don't encourage

1:09:43

this concept that to be able

1:09:45

to force yourself into doing difficult

1:09:47

things, you empower yourself and then

1:09:49

strengthen. You strengthen your mind and

1:09:51

you resolve and your spirit. And

1:09:54

you can, and if you genuinely gravitate

1:09:56

towards positive results, positive results.

1:09:58

results in your social life,

1:10:00

positive results in business, positive

1:10:02

results in artistic endeavors, if

1:10:05

you genuinely gravitate towards those

1:10:08

things, like that is

1:10:10

probably going to keep you on the right path in life

1:10:13

and that we should really look at things in

1:10:15

that way. Like there should be guidelines, like what

1:10:17

are you trying to do with your life? Like

1:10:19

why do you feel bad? Like what is wrong

1:10:22

with your body? What are you eating?

1:10:24

How are you sleeping? What kind of

1:10:26

people you're surrounded with? What happened to

1:10:28

you when you're a child? Did someone

1:10:30

beat you? Did you get sexually molested?

1:10:32

Like what is what demons are haunting

1:10:34

you and what in fact can be

1:10:36

done to help you? And even I mean I would even

1:10:38

leave off the lot. I mean you can do some of

1:10:41

that but I mean I just we

1:10:43

have this beautiful philosophy called Stoicism. You know

1:10:45

it's amazing it actually was we now understand

1:10:47

now that it was part became part of

1:10:49

Christianity for that's why because Christianity the

1:10:52

correction to Judaism of course that's all about

1:10:54

compassion and care but when

1:10:56

you lose the Stoicism part of Christianity and

1:10:58

all just becomes compassion the whole society gets

1:11:01

running around compassion that's where you

1:11:03

get victimhood ideology. You should absolutely should be

1:11:05

teaching because of course I mean the problem

1:11:07

with the focus on the trauma you know

1:11:09

it's like you start to everybody suddenly has

1:11:11

trauma and you can sort of become obsessed

1:11:13

with it as opposed to like no the

1:11:15

whole point of becoming a full human being

1:11:18

is overcoming adversity. It's going

1:11:20

through that that process. Stoicism

1:11:23

is a philosophy that gets you

1:11:25

there but it's been absolutely

1:11:27

denigrated you know like when I was

1:11:29

very right-wing is considered right-wing of course

1:11:32

it's the most emancipatory it's the

1:11:34

most liberating philosophy because it says it's all about

1:11:36

your mentality it's all about what you do when

1:11:38

you get up in the morning it's your mentality

1:11:40

it's your behavior as it's up to you yeah

1:11:42

it's not up to the government. If

1:11:45

you read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius it's

1:11:48

very progressive not only is

1:11:50

it very progressive it's very compassionate and kind

1:11:52

and considerate like one of the things that

1:11:54

he talks about is forgiveness it's a very

1:11:56

important quality that he believes that

1:11:58

you know he works on. It's

1:12:00

for everybody. He's not

1:12:02

saying, you know, there's other people like Nietzsche, which would

1:12:05

say, hey, most people can't cope

1:12:07

with the serious, but they're saying everybody has

1:12:09

this internal potential. It's a completely liberal, it's

1:12:11

what leads to the human potential movement, the

1:12:13

self-help movement. You get

1:12:15

to like, you know, I was looking at, you know, in 1964,

1:12:17

they passed the Civil Rights Act.

1:12:19

Within a few months, Lyndon Johnson goes and

1:12:22

gives this famous Harvard, I'm sorry,

1:12:24

Howard University speech, where it's

1:12:26

like, I was just shocking how quickly it occurs,

1:12:28

where it's just basically about all the problems of

1:12:30

the black community and how we still owe this

1:12:32

debt to the black community and how the black

1:12:34

community has been victimized. Like,

1:12:36

here's this moment where you could be

1:12:38

like, hey, look, we've just leveled the

1:12:41

playing field. We've got the Civil

1:12:43

Rights Act, it's going to end racial integration, that's

1:12:45

all behind us. Now it's up

1:12:47

to us as individuals. Instead they come out and

1:12:49

they go, now we've got to go

1:12:51

and we pity you and take care of you.

1:12:54

It's really toxic discourse. It's

1:12:57

awful. And it then has just, it's

1:12:59

just expanded to everybody,

1:13:02

including children, where like,

1:13:04

the part of the over-involved mothering

1:13:06

of children is to treat children

1:13:09

as though they're victims. Right,

1:13:12

forever. It's actually, and you

1:13:14

see how it really helps

1:13:16

the medicalization of everything. Much

1:13:19

of what we're, the trans medicine

1:13:21

is pathologizing and medicalizing

1:13:24

puberty. Right. Same

1:13:26

thing with pregnancy. Pregnancy often is medicalized,

1:13:29

is treated as something's wrong with you.

1:13:31

And we know the C-sections now, or we

1:13:34

think it also undermines the immunity that you

1:13:36

get from a vaginal birth. So

1:13:38

there's also- But it is important sometimes,

1:13:40

right? Sometimes in emergencies, but it's a classic thing

1:13:42

where it's just over-apply. Women with small hips. And

1:13:45

it's just overdone now. Right. It's

1:13:48

done, I mean, often you get professional women,

1:13:50

they're like, I'm scheduling my C-section. Right, right,

1:13:52

because they don't want to also blow out

1:13:54

the hoo-ha. Yeah. The reason why I brought

1:13:56

up trauma before is I think that's one

1:13:58

of the legitimate- uses of

1:14:01

psychedelics that I think it's

1:14:04

pretty provable that there's positive

1:14:06

outcomes, particularly MDMA

1:14:10

for soldiers. This is what MAPS

1:14:12

had been working on. And when

1:14:14

you ask people in the

1:14:17

service of their country to go overseas and

1:14:19

kill people and become a

1:14:21

part of a war and get shot at and

1:14:23

see their friends die, those people are going to come

1:14:26

back with unimaginable

1:14:29

strain on

1:14:31

their psyche, unimaginable. And

1:14:33

the one thing universally that these

1:14:36

people have sought help with that

1:14:38

has helped them has been psychedelics.

1:14:41

And it's huge in the special operations

1:14:43

community discussions of not just ayahuasca, but

1:14:46

ibogaine in particular, which is absolutely

1:14:49

non-addictive. I mean, and apparently

1:14:52

I don't have experience with it, but apparently

1:14:54

an unbelievably brutal introspective experience where

1:14:56

you see your entire life and it's sort

1:14:58

of laid out why your behavior patterns exist

1:15:00

in the way they exist. And

1:15:03

oftentimes they combine the ibogaine experience

1:15:05

with another psychedelic, whether it's psilocybin

1:15:07

or 5MeO, DMT, or there's

1:15:10

a bunch of different ones that they try

1:15:12

and all of it has to be done

1:15:14

in other countries. A lot of them it's done in

1:15:16

Mexico because it's illegal in the United States. But I

1:15:19

have personally talked to people, I have Sean Ryan

1:15:21

on the podcast the other day, a personal

1:15:24

experience of how it changed his life. I

1:15:26

know multiple soldiers where it's changed their life

1:15:28

and this is illegal.

1:15:31

And this is something that we should

1:15:33

be looking at every single tool available

1:15:35

to help people. Stoicism, absolutely. But soldiers

1:15:37

are the most stoic motherfuckers, those Navy

1:15:39

SEALs, they're the most stoic fucking get

1:15:41

shit done people you're ever going to

1:15:43

run into in your life. And

1:15:45

if they're still struggling, maybe these

1:15:47

things are tools. I agree with you

1:15:49

that both marijuana

1:15:52

and real psychedelics, hard

1:15:54

psychedelics like LSD, I

1:15:57

think there's certain people that shouldn't do anything. And

1:16:00

I think the only way we find that out

1:16:02

is we run real studies and do real tests

1:16:04

and really try to understand what, get some real

1:16:06

science behind the mechanism, behind these things and what

1:16:08

is wrong with these people that are freaking out

1:16:10

and what is the cause of

1:16:14

these psychotic breaks? What is the cause of

1:16:16

schizophrenia? Like especially when someone doesn't

1:16:18

have it and then develops it. So

1:16:20

some, there's some biological mechanism. There's something

1:16:22

taking place in the body that all

1:16:24

the wires get crossed and now this

1:16:26

person thinks they're getting Satan's talking to

1:16:28

them. So what is that? Well,

1:16:30

and some of it might be age related. Maybe

1:16:33

we don't want it. But not necessarily.

1:16:35

Not necessarily with these high dose drug

1:16:37

experiences. If people do acid and then

1:16:39

they become schizophrenic, what is that? Some

1:16:42

people do acid and they figure out the

1:16:44

double helix strand of the DNA and they

1:16:46

have incredible visions like Francis

1:16:48

Crick. Other people they do it

1:16:50

and they're like, what the fuck? Like now

1:16:53

they're gone. The guy from Pink

1:16:55

Floyd, gone. Nobody

1:16:57

knew somebody when I was a kid growing up

1:16:59

who did too many drugs and

1:17:01

never came back. I know

1:17:03

multiple people that have had schizophrenic breaks

1:17:05

from marijuana. Yeah. I

1:17:07

mean, I like I'm

1:17:09

very open to it. I just, I

1:17:11

worry that we've, we have a quick

1:17:14

fix society still. Absolutely. And so,

1:17:16

you know, it's like you have PTSD,

1:17:18

you had trauma from, from say fighting a foreign war

1:17:20

or you were abused as a child or you were

1:17:22

raped as a woman. I think

1:17:24

those, you can get some insight,

1:17:26

spiritual insight, existential insight to confront

1:17:28

your demons, but you're still going

1:17:30

to have to get up every day and confront those

1:17:32

demons. That's true, but I think it's a tool in

1:17:34

the toolbox. And I think to demonize that tool because

1:17:36

some people have a bad effect on it. It's like

1:17:38

to demonize all the things that people

1:17:41

enjoy that you could consider legal vices

1:17:43

like gambling. I do not think

1:17:45

you should outlaw gambling, but I

1:17:47

think some people should not fucking gamble.

1:17:50

I grew up, well in my

1:17:52

20s, my early 20s in a pool hall. And

1:17:55

I played pool like eight hours a

1:17:57

day, played competitively and I was around.

1:18:00

a lot of gamblers, a lot of

1:18:02

gamblers. And it is a

1:18:04

disease like anything. It's a disease like

1:18:06

heroin. It's a disease

1:18:08

like alcoholism. These motherfuckers can't

1:18:10

stop. Those people shouldn't

1:18:12

gamble, right? They are gambling addicts.

1:18:15

And there's some people that should not do marijuana.

1:18:17

There's some people that should not drink. There's

1:18:19

some people that there's a lot of things that they shouldn't

1:18:21

do. They don't have whatever

1:18:24

it is that allows you to pick

1:18:26

up a glass of whiskey, have a

1:18:28

drink, and then the next day, boy, oh, I

1:18:30

feel like shit, I'm going to the gym. And

1:18:32

then you don't drink again for a month. There's

1:18:35

some people that realize there's certain vices that

1:18:37

you can do in moderation, and they're fine.

1:18:40

A cup of glasses of wine at dinner, and everyone's laughing

1:18:42

and having a great time. There's nothing wrong with that. But

1:18:45

there's certainly some people that cannot

1:18:47

handle that. And I think we

1:18:49

need to give those, if you

1:18:51

want a better, stronger society, we

1:18:53

need to develop tools for all

1:18:56

people to follow that will give

1:18:59

you a better life, including people

1:19:01

that have issues with alcohol and

1:19:03

gambling and sex and fill

1:19:05

in the blanks, drugs and whatever it is that

1:19:08

you're interested in and that you're addicted to, rather.

1:19:10

And I think there's a bunch of

1:19:13

tools that can be used if

1:19:15

used correctly. Just like I used to

1:19:17

say, you could take a hammer, you could

1:19:19

build a house with a hammer, or you

1:19:21

could hit yourself in the face if

1:19:24

you're fucking crazy. Hit papillosi. Or hit papillosi.

1:19:26

It doesn't mean that we should get

1:19:28

rid of hammers. Some people have used psychedelic

1:19:30

drugs and had incredible insight and has completely

1:19:32

changed their lives, and now they're better

1:19:34

for it. And then there's some

1:19:36

people that we can point to that lost their way,

1:19:39

and they're gone now. And we might not ever get

1:19:41

a better... Howard Stern talked about it famously. He took

1:19:43

acid and he was really fucked up for a long

1:19:45

period of time where he really thought he was going

1:19:47

crazy. And I think in that

1:19:50

case, it's very dangerous. There's also a dosing thing.

1:19:52

When you're taking something that's made in some

1:19:55

fucking hippies bathtub while he's listening to The

1:19:57

Grateful Dead, like what are the odds that...

1:19:59

you know exactly what the dose is. What

1:20:01

are the odds that this is pure? Especially

1:20:05

if you're doing a drug today, because if you're doing

1:20:07

a drug today, you're rolling the dice on whether or

1:20:09

not you're going to die of a fentanyl overdose, even

1:20:11

if you're taking something that you would think would

1:20:13

be completely benign. Like cocaine, no people are

1:20:16

doing that. Oh, cocaine is a big one.

1:20:18

That's a big one. But there's other stuff

1:20:20

that people are taking, like molly. They're taking

1:20:22

molly, and it's not really molly. It's laced

1:20:24

with fentanyl, and they die. They're taking street

1:20:28

drugs, like anti-anxiety medication, that are forged

1:20:31

drugs that are actually laced with fentanyl.

1:20:33

And they're dying from that kind of

1:20:35

stuff. There's people that maybe they

1:20:37

developed an addiction to benzos, and then their

1:20:40

doctor says, look, I'm cutting you off, and

1:20:42

then they fucking find it on the streets,

1:20:44

and they die from fentanyl overdoses. So I

1:20:47

think there's tools that could

1:20:50

be used. I think this panacea,

1:20:52

this idea that it's a one-shop-fits-all, you go

1:20:54

do ayahuasca, and now you're a better person,

1:20:56

I don't believe that. I think there's

1:20:58

a lot of work to be done. I think there's a lot

1:21:00

of work to be done, and I think there's a process as

1:21:03

we are growing as human beings. You start

1:21:05

off as a child where you don't get

1:21:07

to pick your parents, and they bring with

1:21:09

them a bunch of baggage because they were

1:21:11

raised by people in the 1940s, and

1:21:14

they didn't know what the fuck they were

1:21:16

doing. And they were raised by people who

1:21:18

literally came over on boats from Europe to

1:21:20

escape tyranny and chaos, and they

1:21:22

came over to America to do the

1:21:25

most desperate wage work you could

1:21:27

possibly get. Dock workers, steel workers,

1:21:29

factory workers, they would do anything.

1:21:31

They were desperate. They would take

1:21:33

any jobs. They would work on

1:21:36

railroads and whatever the fuck they could, because they just

1:21:38

wanted to be able to eat, right?

1:21:40

And they raised your grandparents. And then your

1:21:42

grandparents raised your parents, and then you're here

1:21:44

going, OK, what are we doing? And there's

1:21:46

some tools. Stoicism is a great tool. It's

1:21:48

a great tool. Discipline is a great tool.

1:21:51

I think we are blessed in this time that

1:21:53

you can hear a lot of speeches

1:21:56

from brilliant people. There's a lot of

1:21:58

great. brilliant people that

1:22:01

have talked about various ways

1:22:03

that they've overcome their problems on YouTube

1:22:05

and on you know podcasts and you

1:22:07

can learn a lot and some

1:22:09

of them use different tools some of them use

1:22:11

the tools of meditation and yoga some of them

1:22:13

use the tools of fasting and

1:22:15

some of them use stoicism some of them

1:22:17

use martial arts some of them used there's

1:22:20

a lot of different things that people do to

1:22:22

make themselves a better person and

1:22:24

I think to discount one

1:22:27

like psychedelics because there's a bunch of

1:22:30

people that abuse it and get fucked

1:22:32

up from it I think it's foolish

1:22:34

because the profound effects that these things

1:22:36

have should not be minimalized they shouldn't

1:22:38

they shouldn't be dismissed because they're illegal

1:22:40

they shouldn't be dismissed because of ignorance

1:22:43

and they certainly shouldn't be dismissed by

1:22:45

people who have not experienced them and

1:22:47

have not had those profound changes that

1:22:49

take place in their perspective on life

1:22:51

because there's a lot of people a

1:22:54

lot and I think it's probably been the going

1:22:57

on through the course of human history it's

1:22:59

probably what caused us to consider democracy in

1:23:01

the first place I mean if there

1:23:03

the whole have you ever read the

1:23:06

well have you ever read the Brian

1:23:08

Murrow rescue book the immortality

1:23:10

key no I have it actually

1:23:12

I haven't read it shows that's in there yeah

1:23:14

that's what it's all about it's all about the

1:23:17

illucinian mysteries and what these people would do they

1:23:19

were they were taking drug-laced wine and

1:23:21

they were coming up with concepts of democracy and

1:23:23

they were trying to figure out society in a

1:23:26

more equitable and even a peaceful way and there

1:23:28

were you know the philosophies that

1:23:30

they were coming up

1:23:32

with to this day people read their

1:23:34

stuff and it's profound and these people

1:23:36

were all doing drugs yeah we

1:23:39

we can't seem to find you know we do

1:23:41

freedom really well here in the United States we

1:23:43

can't seem to find the balance between that and

1:23:46

proper care for people I mean

1:23:49

the Netherlands has potency limits on

1:23:51

marijuana we don't right

1:23:53

but the thing about potency limits it's they

1:23:55

don't have a dose limit right

1:23:57

so even if it's potency so let's say Let's

1:24:00

get crazy and say 39% because that 39%

1:24:02

was like high THC apparently we looked it up

1:24:04

the other day It's like like crazy

1:24:06

THC that really fucks people up can get as high as 39%

1:24:09

They don't go that either Dutch government goes to 15% okay,

1:24:11

so here's my point three

1:24:14

hits versus one Okay,

1:24:16

so if you have 30% THC and you take one hit

1:24:18

oh my god I'm

1:24:21

so high if you have 15% THC you

1:24:23

take two hits But if you're a crazy

1:24:25

person you take 30 bong hits of 15%

1:24:29

THC you're gonna get fucked up you're gonna

1:24:31

get fucked up no matter what no one's

1:24:33

controlling the amount of pot Do you smoke

1:24:36

the Snoop Dogg smokes pot all day long

1:24:38

when you hang out with that dude that

1:24:40

dude sat there He rolled like eight blunts

1:24:42

in the course of a three-hour conversation. Just

1:24:45

can't relevancy had a disco machine The guy's

1:24:47

awesome, but I mean whatever tolerance. He has

1:24:49

is a preposterous And it's not that

1:24:51

guy who you know He's

1:24:54

in grad school And he does some bong hits

1:24:56

from his friends and has a schizophrenic break and

1:24:58

thinks that the government has put a recording

1:25:00

apparatus in his pencils you know

1:25:03

like people lose their fucking way and It's

1:25:05

not everybody and I think we have

1:25:07

to figure out like what is causing

1:25:10

it not Eliminated for the vast majority

1:25:12

of people who don't have that effect

1:25:14

Well, we're just really bad at it I mean like

1:25:16

I mean I think the bigger thing is you know

1:25:18

you go to Europe and it's like younger people will

1:25:21

drink alcohol In moderation right but isn't that because

1:25:23

it's always been legal And I think this

1:25:25

is the problem with the United States and

1:25:27

our demonizing of certain drugs like we celebrate

1:25:29

certain drugs Look, I own a bar. You

1:25:31

know I'm not opposed to alcohol, but alcohol

1:25:33

is one of the most destructive Drugs

1:25:36

that we have available, but

1:25:38

yet use socially responsible. It makes conversations

1:25:40

more lively It's a social lubricant everybody

1:25:42

has a great time As

1:25:45

long as you do it moderately or the right

1:25:47

way, but it has consequences We don't

1:25:49

do we don't do moderate right, but

1:25:51

the thing is some people can moderately

1:25:53

drink right we all agree to that

1:25:55

right You're not an alcoholic. I

1:25:58

quit. I quit drinking because I had a problem.

1:26:00

When did you quit? 2018. Oh wow.

1:26:03

September 21st. It's a good time to quit right before

1:26:05

the shit hit the fan. I

1:26:08

drink you know. I don't advocate prohibition

1:26:11

of alcohol but I would I would

1:26:13

advocate constraining sales and just putting some

1:26:15

limits on. I mean the potency point

1:26:17

that is well taken. Constraining how? Because

1:26:19

isn't this like constraining free speech? If

1:26:22

you're a grown adult you want to drink yourself to

1:26:24

death. So if you go over a man's house and

1:26:26

he has a wine cellar should he be arrested? No.

1:26:28

Why does he have so much wine? No. What are

1:26:30

you doing with that wine? If you drink all that

1:26:32

wine you could kill everybody in the neighborhood. No but

1:26:34

I mean I think you know

1:26:37

for example we've restricted it to liquor

1:26:39

stores at a supermarket. We've had don't

1:26:41

sales on Sundays. But that's only hard

1:26:43

liquor. You

1:26:45

can go to a supermarket and buy beer

1:26:47

and wine. When I was in high school

1:26:49

there was a three there's at 18 you

1:26:52

could drink 3.2 beer. Wow. I remember. And

1:26:54

then at 21 you could drink a higher

1:26:56

potency beer. So again your point is. How

1:26:58

old are you? 53.

1:27:00

I'm 57. When I was a kid they

1:27:03

changed the age from 18 to 21 before

1:27:05

I had 18. I was like fuck. Yeah. But

1:27:08

it didn't stop you from drinking. Maybe that was

1:27:10

local. Was that local? Is that Massachusetts only? No

1:27:13

it didn't stop me from drinking. Come

1:27:15

on. And nobody every but every kid gets together in parties and

1:27:17

they all figure out a way to But my

1:27:19

point is if alcohol if

1:27:21

prohibition had succeeded okay in the 1920s

1:27:23

and we had illegal alcohol

1:27:27

in the United States no one would know how to drink. It

1:27:31

would no one. It would be just and

1:27:33

you would know never know what the fuck

1:27:35

is in the drinking. You'd be still buying

1:27:37

drinks. People would still buy drinks. There'd be

1:27:39

jails filled with people who sold and bought

1:27:41

alcohol. And there'd be a bunch

1:27:43

of people that died because they got poisoned drinking.

1:27:45

Because they got drugs from they got their alcohol

1:27:47

from the cartel. But so Joe how far do

1:27:49

you go then? I mean do you sell meth

1:27:52

and fentanyl at 7-11? But this is

1:27:54

where it's a this is where it gets to be a

1:27:56

really interesting question right because why

1:27:58

not? You

1:28:00

shouldn't buy it, but why why

1:28:02

should it be that only criminals sell it

1:28:04

if we absolutely know that there's a market

1:28:07

for it? Well because if we allow people

1:28:09

if you listen to dr. Carl Hart who

1:28:11

to me is The most

1:28:13

brilliant person that I've ever met that does heroin all the time.

1:28:15

I Don't know

1:28:17

if he does it all the time, but

1:28:19

he says it's wonderful You know he's he's

1:28:21

done it before and you also have to

1:28:23

take an account that he was a straight

1:28:25

laced clinician He was not a

1:28:27

drug user he was a guy that

1:28:30

was studying the effects of these things and realized that

1:28:32

there's a bunch of gas lighting as to what their

1:28:34

actual effects of the pure versions of these things are

1:28:36

and That this concept that

1:28:38

they are unbelievably addictive, and you can't

1:28:40

stop yourself. He thinks is false He's

1:28:43

smarter and more educated about that subject than I

1:28:45

am well I mean but look and the more

1:28:47

available it is The

1:28:50

more people use the more people use the

1:28:52

more addiction you get but can you see

1:28:54

that the same? Concept can be

1:28:56

used to con just same narrative can be used

1:28:58

to control free speech Well

1:29:00

free speech can you see it well in

1:29:03

the sense that there is limits to free speech We

1:29:05

don't allow free speech for immediate

1:29:07

incitement to violence fraud defamation We're a high

1:29:09

bar for defamation So it is but could

1:29:11

you see how you could say the problem

1:29:13

in our society? Is it a bunch of

1:29:15

people are saying things that are incorrect and

1:29:17

the only way to stop that is to

1:29:19

censor them The problem is the side is

1:29:21

that some people are drinking too much the

1:29:24

way to stop that is to moderate their

1:29:26

drinking and control them The problem with people

1:29:28

that are addicted to drugs is we need

1:29:30

to make drugs illegal so no one can

1:29:32

become addicted to drugs But it

1:29:34

doesn't work that way because humans don't work

1:29:36

that way and humans don't like other humans

1:29:38

telling them what to do It was just

1:29:40

you me and Jamie on an island and

1:29:43

I decide that coconuts are illegal And I'm gonna put

1:29:45

you in a cage that I created at a bamboo

1:29:47

if you if you drink coconut milk because I think

1:29:49

coconuts bad For you and everybody else is saying I

1:29:51

fucking love coconut. It's guys an asshole Well, that doesn't

1:29:54

make any sense right because I'm a grown adult

1:29:56

and I'm telling another grown adult to stop doing something

1:29:58

Yeah, that's how I feel about almost

1:30:01

everything that doesn't hurt other people. I

1:30:03

know, but we're looking at 112,000 deaths

1:30:06

from illicit drugs last year, as opposed to

1:30:09

But most of them are opioid overdoses. Yeah,

1:30:11

75,000 are phenomenal. Opioid overdoses accidentally, yeah, because

1:30:13

drugs are illegal. Well, no, it's not because

1:30:15

drugs are illegal, it's because they became more

1:30:18

available. Well, that's why. Right, but because those

1:30:20

drugs... But we don't have the drugs... Look,

1:30:22

it all started with the Sackler family, right?

1:30:24

It all started with oxycodone and all that

1:30:26

stuff. But the reality is that there's a

1:30:28

bunch of people that are addicted to these

1:30:30

drugs, and the way they're getting them is

1:30:32

by getting drugs that are tainted with fentanyl,

1:30:34

and that's a primary cause for the people

1:30:36

that are overdosing. Did you say like 70

1:30:38

plus percent? 75 percent is fentanyl. So that's

1:30:40

because of the illegal drug market. No. Listen,

1:30:43

it is, because if just those

1:30:45

opiates, pure opiates, were available,

1:30:48

you could make an argument that those 75 percent

1:30:50

would still be alive if they died from fentanyl

1:30:52

overdose. No, they would

1:30:54

also be dying of opioid overdose. Are

1:30:56

you sure? Well, I mean,

1:30:59

look, here, let me give you an example.

1:31:01

But there's a reason why they specify fentanyl,

1:31:03

because it's so much more deadly than the

1:31:05

pills. But, Joe, Europe does not have this

1:31:07

drug death epidemic. Well, they also don't have

1:31:09

an opioid crisis, because they didn't prescribe it

1:31:11

the way we did. Well,

1:31:13

right, so they made opioids too much... Right. Opioids

1:31:15

were too available, then heroin was too available, and

1:31:17

now fentanyl's too available. But it wasn't available... The

1:31:20

solution is not to make it more available. But

1:31:22

it wasn't available under... It was available under false

1:31:24

pretenses. First of all, they lied about it being

1:31:26

addictive. Of course. And there's a

1:31:28

lot of documentation of this. Not only did they lie,

1:31:31

they testified about it. So they

1:31:33

knew it was addictive. And then there was

1:31:35

also never an opioid that was prescribed as

1:31:37

an everyday thing, because pain is something that

1:31:39

you shouldn't have to live with. That's

1:31:42

what the... When I asked the Dutch,

1:31:44

why don't you have an opioid epidemic? They didn't

1:31:46

say, because we don't have greedy pharmaceutical companies. They

1:31:48

said, because the doctor... When you go to the

1:31:50

doctor, the doctor doesn't say, you have

1:31:53

some pain... And this is... The Dutch are

1:31:55

famous for this. Do you have some pain? Yeah, you'll have some

1:31:58

pain. Take some Advil if you want, but you're still gonna have pain. you

1:32:00

just had back surgery or whatever. So

1:32:02

some of it is the culture of entitlement.

1:32:04

But it's also they don't have a financial

1:32:07

incentive to push this medication because they have

1:32:09

socialized medicine. This is

1:32:11

part of the problem that we have in

1:32:13

this country. And we accept all sorts of

1:32:16

socialized things like the fire department. That's basically

1:32:18

a socialist idea. We're all going to

1:32:20

contribute. It's all equal. The fire

1:32:22

people work for everybody and they put out fires

1:32:24

because we all need firemen. And

1:32:26

sort of with public schools. Very similar.

1:32:28

But when it comes to medicine, we're

1:32:30

very wary about that. But the

1:32:33

problem is then people profit off of how

1:32:35

much they can sell you. And when you

1:32:37

have some monsters like the Sackler

1:32:39

family and what the fuck they did,

1:32:41

that's how you create this opioid crisis.

1:32:43

Let's imagine that wasn't the case. So

1:32:46

let's imagine this sweeping act in

1:32:48

1970 does not take place. And

1:32:50

all of these psychedelics, whether it's

1:32:52

psilocybin, including marijuana, which

1:32:54

is made illegal because of prohibition,

1:32:56

prohibition went off and then they started, you know, they

1:32:59

went after marijuana. That was a new thing. And, you

1:33:01

know, William Randolph Hearst and Harry Anselinger. It's a

1:33:04

long story, but it was really more about hemp

1:33:06

as a commodity than it was actually about the

1:33:08

drug. That's why they even called it marijuana. Marijuana

1:33:10

was a name for a

1:33:12

slang name from wild Mexican tobacco. Didn't

1:33:14

have anything to do with cannabis. So

1:33:17

when they passed that, they made

1:33:19

everything illegal, all these things illegal.

1:33:22

And so then when the government

1:33:24

comes along and takes this incredibly

1:33:28

dangerous and addictive

1:33:30

substance like oxycodone and

1:33:33

says, let's say you guys want

1:33:35

to sell it? We'll make sure

1:33:37

the guys that are deciding whether

1:33:39

or not you could sell it

1:33:41

get a cushy job in the

1:33:43

pharmaceutical drug companies afterwards, we'll hook

1:33:45

you up if you hook us

1:33:47

up. And then that's what created

1:33:49

the opioid crisis, not opioids being

1:33:51

illegal, right?

1:33:53

Or not being legal rather. Well, becoming

1:33:55

available, but they became more available, but

1:33:57

they became, you're describing ways they became

1:34:00

more available. But it was just heroin. If it was

1:34:02

just heroin, no one was doing heroin when I was

1:34:04

a kid. Well they weren't

1:34:06

doing as much. Very rarely. But

1:34:08

now everyone knows someone who knows someone

1:34:10

who's died of oxycodone or Oxycontin. Or

1:34:13

at least is addicted to it. But

1:34:15

so the problem is, in other words,

1:34:18

you want these drugs to be less

1:34:20

available, not more available. But who's to

1:34:22

decide? That's the problem. And when you

1:34:24

decide- Well, society. But when you

1:34:26

decide, well certainly for people of a certain age, we

1:34:28

all agree to that. You shouldn't be able to do

1:34:30

that when you're 16 years old. It's

1:34:32

crazy. But if you're a 35 year old

1:34:34

man, who's to tell you that you shouldn't be able to try

1:34:37

heroin? I mean you have to make

1:34:39

a decision as a society. Because I mean look,

1:34:41

so Carl is right that most people that do

1:34:44

opioids or heroin don't become addicted. The people

1:34:46

that do become addicted, most of them are

1:34:49

able to quit on their own. So only

1:34:51

a small percentage of people become so addicted

1:34:53

that they die from it. But that's a

1:34:55

hundred and twelve thousand deaths a year. So

1:34:57

are we going to just condemn the

1:35:00

most vulnerable people? In other words, the hundred and

1:35:02

twelve thousand people that died of drugs and drug

1:35:04

poisonings and drug overdoses last year are by definition

1:35:06

the most vulnerable to those drugs. Are we just

1:35:08

going to sacrifice a hundred and twelve thousand people

1:35:10

from drugs so Carl Hart can get high on

1:35:12

heroin? I don't think that's the argument. For me

1:35:14

that's not a good calculation. No, I don't think

1:35:16

that's the argument. That's not a fair calculation. I

1:35:18

don't think that's the argument. But then what's the

1:35:21

alternative? Well, first of all, we've already established that

1:35:23

75% of those people

1:35:25

are dying because it's illegal. Because

1:35:27

it's no. Because it's fentanyl. Well,

1:35:29

but heroin is illegal too. Right. But

1:35:32

they're not taking heroin. If they think they're taking

1:35:34

heroin, they're getting fentanyl. They're getting poison because it's

1:35:36

illegal. Yeah. But the number here, I'll

1:35:38

say it's a little bit more complicated that it was 20,000 deaths

1:35:41

in the year 2000, 112,000 deaths last year. It

1:35:44

was going up before fentanyl.

1:35:47

So yes, it's hard to overdose on heroin.

1:35:49

Oxycodone for sure kills people. Let's be clear

1:35:51

about that. I'm not saying it's harmless, but

1:35:54

it's not heroin. It's different. The

1:35:56

curve goes up when they start

1:35:58

prescribing it. goes up

1:36:00

and they start giving people prescription pills and

1:36:02

telling them they need it after an accident.

1:36:04

If you just had heroin available,

1:36:07

do you think without recommendation people

1:36:09

would gravitate towards heroin? People

1:36:11

generally learn. This is one

1:36:13

of the reasons why you learn from other people's

1:36:15

failures. There's not a lot of people that are

1:36:17

crack advocates because crack didn't really work out good

1:36:19

for fucking anybody. No one's out

1:36:21

there telling people to take crack. But if the

1:36:23

government came out with some sort of, or not

1:36:26

the government, a pharmaceutical drug company came around and

1:36:28

the FDA approved it, and it was some sort

1:36:30

of a medication that gave you the exact same

1:36:32

effects as crack, but they told

1:36:34

you this is a great drug for people to

1:36:36

overcome timidity. Timidity is a real

1:36:39

problem in our culture. We're going to compete with

1:36:41

China. They would pathologize timidity for sure. Yeah, I'm

1:36:43

not kidding. I'm not kidding. You could do that

1:36:45

because that's essentially what they did with pain. And

1:36:47

that's how they snuck in heroin. But it wasn't

1:36:50

heroin. It was synthetic. But using that synthetic heroin

1:36:52

and using it so ubiquitously and prescribing it is

1:36:54

what caused that epidemic. You trick people into getting

1:36:56

addicted by telling people it wasn't addictive and then

1:36:59

telling people they need it because of pain. And

1:37:02

then, of course, your whole body's in agony because

1:37:04

it's addicted to this stuff. And when you get

1:37:06

off of it or you try to get off

1:37:08

of it, you're in terrible, terrible pain. So

1:37:10

the key is just stay on it. That's

1:37:13

the trick. So if we didn't

1:37:15

have that happen, and in 1970

1:37:17

they didn't pass this act that

1:37:19

told people that things like Ibogaine,

1:37:21

that cure people of addictions, actually

1:37:23

we rewire the mind in some

1:37:25

substantial way that stops all

1:37:27

those addictive pathways and stops people from

1:37:29

wanting to engage in these self-destructive behaviors

1:37:31

because it makes you so aware of

1:37:33

why you're doing it in the first

1:37:35

place. We made all of those illegal

1:37:37

at the same time. If that hadn't

1:37:39

been done, we would have a much

1:37:41

greater... If they hadn't been done and

1:37:43

if all of these compounds had been

1:37:45

pursued under the

1:37:47

name of real science, and we actually studied

1:37:49

them openly, and you had the brightest and

1:37:51

most brilliant minds running tests and studies and

1:37:53

trying to figure out what's going on and

1:37:56

what's good and what's not good and what's

1:37:58

the right way to take it and what's

1:38:00

the wrong taken, you wouldn't have the influence

1:38:02

of the cartel because you wouldn't have this

1:38:04

insane, I mean who

1:38:06

knows what the actual numbers are, but

1:38:08

it's hundreds of billions of dollars that

1:38:10

are being earned south of our border

1:38:12

by these ruthless, murderous gangs who control

1:38:14

the drug trade because it's illegal in

1:38:16

the country that has the most demand

1:38:19

for it. Yeah, although let me respond

1:38:21

to that

1:38:23

last part, but remember

1:38:25

Obama comes in and he restricts opioid prescriptions

1:38:28

around 20, I think it was like 2009,

1:38:30

2010. So

1:38:32

people are now going into

1:38:34

fentanyl directly or from marijuana.

1:38:37

They're going direct in.

1:38:39

Yeah, they fucked everybody because they got addicted

1:38:41

then they pulled the rug out from under. Yeah,

1:38:43

so I mean I'm not denying any of

1:38:45

like, yeah, I mean ultimately kids need to be

1:38:47

raised right, you need more self-control, you need

1:38:49

more delayed gratification, 100%. I also

1:38:52

support marijuana decriminalization. I mean drugs have

1:38:54

two dimensions, right? There's one dimension which

1:38:56

is the inherent toxicity of the drug

1:38:59

and the other dimension is how you

1:39:01

use it. Marijuana, nobody's ever overdosed from

1:39:03

it, nobody ever dies, you do get

1:39:05

psychosis, but I mean really compared to

1:39:07

other drugs marijuana is fairly low toxicity.

1:39:10

Alcohol, you know actually when

1:39:12

you read the history of alcohol prohibition it

1:39:15

did actually have health benefits, alcohol prohibition because

1:39:17

people drank less, but I agree, I agree.

1:39:19

I mean I think alcohol, like

1:39:21

I think it should be legal, I

1:39:23

like the Dutch model, I like the restrictions because

1:39:26

I think it does, it doesn't

1:39:28

prevent people from getting it, but it

1:39:30

just it is constantly saying hey be

1:39:33

careful with this. Right. But meth, heroin,

1:39:35

fentanyl, I think absolutely illegal, do what they

1:39:38

do in Holland. I mean they chase people

1:39:40

down, they chase cocaine, do they, is there

1:39:42

no cocaine in Holland? Of course there's cocaine

1:39:45

there, is there heroin? Sure, but they chase

1:39:47

it, makes it more expensive

1:39:49

because it's less available. Now

1:39:51

you get to you get to kind of go well okay

1:39:53

so then you get to we have a real world case which

1:39:55

is marijuana. We've legalized marijuana

1:39:58

in California and many other states. The

1:40:01

criminal element controlling the marijuana growth

1:40:03

and industry in California is larger

1:40:05

and more violent and more dangerous

1:40:08

than it was before we decriminalized

1:40:10

it. Do you know why though?

1:40:13

Well, I mean, I think it's mostly because the

1:40:15

market for black – the black market for marijuana

1:40:17

is still much larger than the market for legal.

1:40:20

In other words, you can buy marijuana for much

1:40:22

cheaper, you know, informally through your dealer on the

1:40:24

street than you can if you go into the

1:40:26

store. And some of that's – I

1:40:29

will grant you that it's because the California –

1:40:31

you can imagine when California decides to make

1:40:33

marijuana legal, it's going to add a huge

1:40:35

amount of tax and it goes and requires

1:40:37

a set of costs so that legal marijuana

1:40:39

is just much more expensive. That's part of

1:40:41

the issue. Yeah. But the issue

1:40:43

is a little bit deeper. My friend John Norris wrote a book

1:40:45

about this. It's called Hidden War. And what

1:40:47

happened was he was a game warden. So he was

1:40:49

a guy that would check fishing licenses and stuff like

1:40:51

that. In California. In California. Yeah.

1:40:55

And they found out that cartels were growing in national forests. Yes. Because

1:40:58

they made marijuana legal, growing it

1:41:00

illegally was just a misdemeanor. So because of

1:41:02

that, 90% of

1:41:05

all the marijuana that's grown to all the places

1:41:07

where it's illegal, all the states that it's illegal,

1:41:09

comes out of California. Right. And

1:41:11

it is made by the cartel. So it's the same sort

1:41:13

of a situation. Even though

1:41:15

it's legal in California, it's – there's

1:41:18

an illegal market and this is the safest

1:41:20

place to grow it because it's just become

1:41:22

a misdemeanor. And we are also a very

1:41:25

unique country. We have these wide

1:41:27

swaths of land that are public that people

1:41:30

could just go out on and just

1:41:32

go for a walk in the woods. There's no restriction.

1:41:34

It's ours. It's yours. And so they go out

1:41:36

there and they set up shop and they use unbelievably

1:41:39

toxic, poison pesticides

1:41:41

and herbicides. And

1:41:43

that shit gets in your illegal marijuana. It's

1:41:46

the same thing. It's because it's

1:41:48

illegal that is causing all the violence.

1:41:50

It's not necessarily because it's being taxed

1:41:52

and because there's a black market. The

1:41:54

black market is because it's illegal in

1:41:56

other states. It's not because

1:41:59

people don't want to – taxes on weed. Weed is

1:42:01

so cheap. Not the legal

1:42:03

weed. Yes it is. It's so cheap.

1:42:05

It's so cheap. It's more expensive than

1:42:07

the illegal weed though. For sure, but it's

1:42:10

still so cheap. In terms of

1:42:12

the efficacy, if you think about how much it

1:42:15

costs to go drinking, like you go to a bar

1:42:17

with your friends, it's like at the end of the

1:42:19

night you're buying rounds for people. It's hundreds of dollars.

1:42:21

Hundreds of dollars of weed will put you on Pluto.

1:42:24

You will be on fucking Pluto. If you go

1:42:26

to one of those places in LA that has

1:42:28

like a store where they're just like an Apple

1:42:30

store, you go in and buy weed. For five

1:42:32

bucks you could be fucked up for a week.

1:42:35

Oh no, I get it. Compared to alcohol.

1:42:37

It's cheap. It's cheap in terms of

1:42:39

its effect. Even if you're paying 39% taxes, which I think

1:42:43

they were doing in Colorado, which is

1:42:45

the first state to make it legally,

1:42:47

fine. It's still cheap. It's

1:42:49

not that expensive. I don't think it's driving

1:42:51

the black market to undercut people. I think

1:42:53

that's bullshit. I think what's going on is

1:42:56

the black market exists because it's illegal in

1:42:58

other states and you develop these enormous criminal

1:43:00

organizations and they infiltrate legal stores in California

1:43:02

and they do a lot of shady shit

1:43:04

in California too, but they exist because it's

1:43:07

illegal. So you think if marijuana were legal

1:43:09

and across the whole United States, there would

1:43:11

be no black market? There would be, but

1:43:13

it won't be a powerful unit

1:43:16

like the cartel in Mexico. The cartel

1:43:18

in Mexico is like a government.

1:43:21

It's like an enormous

1:43:23

terrifying government of people

1:43:25

that are profiting off

1:43:27

of drugs because drugs are illegal in the United

1:43:29

States. If everything was legal here and you could

1:43:31

grow it yourself. Marijuana, I'm

1:43:34

with you on marijuana, not cocaine, not heroin,

1:43:36

not fentanyl. Let's just start off with marijuana.

1:43:38

Let's just start off with marijuana. Marijuana was

1:43:40

legal in this country and you could grow

1:43:42

it yourself. It's so cheap

1:43:44

to grow. It's literally a weed, right? It

1:43:46

grows like it's easy. It wouldn't be hard

1:43:48

for people like a guy on the block

1:43:50

grows it and sells it. And if

1:43:53

it was just legal to do that instead

1:43:55

of the government getting involved, then you'd have

1:43:57

no black market drugs. be

1:44:00

a plant like a fucking tomato where you

1:44:02

could grow tomatoes and sell tomatoes and you

1:44:04

can go to the farmer's market. Look at

1:44:06

my tomatoes. It should be like that. I

1:44:08

mean, I think that's where it's headed. My

1:44:11

understanding is that that's where Florida is headed.

1:44:13

Is that where Texas is? Where's Texas? Texas,

1:44:15

it's illegal, but it's decriminalized in the city

1:44:17

of Austin. And then

1:44:19

the Attorney General, Ken Paxton, apparently doesn't

1:44:21

like that and he wants that to

1:44:23

stop. I think most of the

1:44:25

people that want marijuana to be legal don't

1:44:28

necessarily use it and don't necessarily really understand

1:44:30

what it does. And there's

1:44:32

this idea that it makes you lazy, which is

1:44:34

my favorite. I know some of the

1:44:36

most motivated people ever and they smoke weed all the

1:44:38

time. I think it makes you more compassionate. I think

1:44:41

it makes you more creative, more

1:44:43

considerate. It makes you think about things

1:44:45

in a different light. Carl Sagan was

1:44:47

a famous cannabis user and

1:44:49

he has a very famous quote about

1:44:51

cannabis, but there's states of

1:44:53

mind that are achievable and cannabis that he

1:44:55

doesn't think are achievable any other way. He

1:44:57

was an inveterate cannabis user. So is Terrence

1:44:59

McKenna. And what's your view of age limits

1:45:01

then? I think it should be just

1:45:03

like alcohol. Yeah. And

1:45:07

I think it would be smart for parents

1:45:09

to explain to kids that there are some

1:45:11

drugs that are really fucking dangerous and don't just

1:45:13

say all drugs are bad. Just

1:45:15

let them know. And if you have a history of

1:45:17

mental illness in your family, which many people do, mental

1:45:20

illness seems to be something that's

1:45:22

inherited, that some people have a

1:45:25

tendency towards certain mental states. There's

1:45:27

a lot of arguments about that. I'm not the

1:45:30

one to say yes or no, but maybe you

1:45:32

should not do these things if your family has

1:45:34

a tendency towards schizophrenia, if you've had your own

1:45:36

mental struggles, if you've had moments where I know

1:45:38

people that have had schizophrenic breaks or they've come

1:45:41

back. I have a couple of friends

1:45:43

that had real problems and now they're normal again

1:45:45

and not with medication. They just sorted it out

1:45:47

and they figured it out. Oh, for sure. And

1:45:50

they came back. So I mean, we're dealing with the... I mean,

1:45:52

I think it's always so important to remember that when you're... The

1:45:55

people that have the worst problems are definitely

1:45:57

a small minority, but the question is how...

1:46:00

How many people are we willing to sacrifice? How many

1:46:02

people do we sacrifice every year because of alcohol? How

1:46:04

many people do we sacrifice every year because of sugar?

1:46:06

Do you know that heart disease is one of

1:46:08

the biggest killers of human beings in this country?

1:46:10

And how much heart disease is preventable because of

1:46:12

lifestyle and diet? A large percentage.

1:46:14

So should we say, why is cake

1:46:17

legal? Because you can handle cake, Michael?

1:46:19

That doesn't make any sense. Michael, we've lost

1:46:21

five million people this year because of cake.

1:46:23

And you're saying that cake should be legal

1:46:25

because you like cake? That's crazy.

1:46:27

So you can get all fucked up on cake?

1:46:30

These poor little diabetic kids? I'm actually trying to move away from

1:46:33

cake. You don't care about these diabetic kids? No, I mean, you

1:46:35

can make the argument for anything. I would just say... You can

1:46:37

make the argument for everything. That's my point is that freedom is

1:46:39

the most important thing. Yeah, but okay, but what about fentanyl then?

1:46:42

So you're going to want to sell fentanyl? Fentanyl is essentially

1:46:44

poison. Fentanyl, the LD50

1:46:46

of fentanyl is so small, you could barely

1:46:48

see it. You know that, right? Have you

1:46:50

ever seen what a lethal dose of fentanyl

1:46:53

looks like in comparison to a penny? Yeah,

1:46:55

I mean, I've interviewed many, many people smoking

1:46:57

fentanyl on the streets. Unbelievably terrifying. So that

1:47:00

is a poison and that is something that

1:47:02

was invented to try to make a more

1:47:04

potent opioid. I don't think that...

1:47:06

It's a miracle drug for people in hospitals.

1:47:08

I mean, it's a miracle drug as a

1:47:10

pain med. I mean, for women giving birth,

1:47:12

for back surgery. Is a miracle. Fentanyl is

1:47:14

a miracle. Fentanyl is a fucking kike. No.

1:47:17

But it's an opioid, right? So I'm just saying... Oh, yeah.

1:47:21

It was wonderful. Sure, but why

1:47:23

wouldn't morphine work? Why wouldn't

1:47:25

something like that work? Okay, so here's another... So this is...

1:47:28

So I... But something that we know that people

1:47:30

can tolerate. Right. Well, in Vancouver,

1:47:33

they had this experiment where they said, we're going

1:47:35

to go give hydro

1:47:38

morphone, which

1:47:41

is an opioid, as a harm reduction to

1:47:43

people that use fentanyl and heroin. And it's

1:47:45

been a total nightmare because it gets diverted

1:47:48

and people will sell it in

1:47:50

order to buy fentanyl. Kids end up

1:47:52

with it. I mean, I think you have

1:47:54

to remember... Every time you add drugs to the

1:47:56

drug supply, you add... You increase

1:47:58

supplies. the same thing, that's

1:48:01

alcohol. Okay, kids buy alcohol from a

1:48:03

cousin who's willing to buy it for

1:48:05

you because alcohol's legal, kids can get

1:48:08

alcohol. It's the same thing, but it's

1:48:10

crime. What you're talking about is

1:48:12

crime. So you're talking about preventing

1:48:14

crime, right? Because that's all it is.

1:48:16

It's illegal to do what you say those people are

1:48:18

doing. We also want to prevent addiction. Right, but it's

1:48:20

illegal to do that with morphine. There's laws already that

1:48:22

prevent you from doing that if you want to follow

1:48:24

the law. There's

1:48:27

people that are willing to break the law

1:48:29

and do this if there's a reasonable law

1:48:31

that gets put forth in terms of age

1:48:33

of use, age of discretion. Honestly,

1:48:36

I mean, no one's going to buy it, but it probably should be

1:48:38

25, especially for males.

1:48:41

That's enough frontal lobe fully forms. Your

1:48:45

decision making is all fucked up, and if you're hitting

1:48:48

the bong every day while your brain

1:48:50

is forming and this frontal

1:48:52

lobe is under development, of

1:48:54

course it's going to have an effect on it. If

1:48:57

you're on Prozac, it's going to have an effect on if you're

1:48:59

drinking every day. There's a lot

1:49:01

of substances in this country that can do

1:49:03

you wrong, and food is one of them.

1:49:06

I don't think that we should be telling people

1:49:08

what they can and can't do. I think we

1:49:11

should be explaining what you should and shouldn't do.

1:49:13

I think that's the best way to handle this.

1:49:15

With food, I would say the tobacco model is

1:49:17

wonderful. We did an amazing job with reducing tobacco

1:49:19

use in the United States just through ... I

1:49:21

mean, there was some reduction in

1:49:23

availability, reduction in advertising, and then

1:49:26

moralizing against it. The culture

1:49:28

changed. It's not cool anymore to smoke cigarettes, at

1:49:30

least ... Well, it's a revealing of the actual