#2088 - Yannis Pappas
2024-01-19 02:32:02
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Yannis Pappas. Joe Rogan. Yannis Pappas.
Yannis Pappas. How are you, my brother? I'm good, how you doing?
What's for the Foxcrackin'?
I'm doing good, man. Just enjoying Austin.
Are you enjoying the town of freedom?
I'm enjoying the town of freedom, yes.
This is the town of freedom. Yes. There's freedom here, this is the wild west. Yes, I'm enjoying it.
I'm enjoying it. I'm eating. I went to Suerte.
Oh, that's a good spot.
It was incredible.
Yeah, that's a good spot.
I think it's the best Mexican I ever had.
It's very good. There's a lot of good Mexican out here. Yeah. That's a good spot. That was good.
Yeah.
And, of course, hit the Terry B's on Martin Luther King Day, so it was empty.
It was nice. Suerte, you have the added benefit of being around people with masks. That's like East Austin.
I haven't seen any masks. You haven't seen any? No. Well, I did in Vancouver. I was in Vancouver before this.
They never stopped.
No, they're still going. Yeah.
It's wild. There's a San Francisco town hall meeting, and they passed a vote to stop for a cease fire in Palestine. I saw it. Yeah. Yeah.
And so they're all masked up, and they're dancing around, and they got blue hair. And somebody made a caption that this is literally South Park. This is literally an episode of South Park. They look like fucking complete maniacs left in this worn, torn, shattered hull of a city. And whatever's left is filled with human shit and tents everywhere.
They're dancing around that they've stopped a cease fire in Palestine. Yeah. Yeah. We voted for it. Stop.
Stop it.
They solved it in Oakland.
Like as if Benjamin Netanyahu is paying attention.
Right. Like that's going to work.
I guess I'll stop now.
You stop traffic on the way to the airport in New York, and that'll do it.
Yeah, that does it. That generally does it.
That's what Netanyahu was waiting for. He's like, all right, now. I've seen the error in my ways now.
Now I got to pull back.
Now I got to pull back.
I did go a little too far. Let me back up.
Yeah, let me back it up right now.
Dude, they're stopping traffic. This is serious.
I saw in Austin, I saw three people on the overpass just holding up a free Palestine thing, and I'm going like, all right, that did it.
Those people have amazing productive lives, and they're not crazy at all.
Yeah, not at all. No. They got a full schedule of things to do, and they took a lot of time out of their schedule to stand on top of the highway.
They're super healthy. They're really into mindfulness. They're on the ball every day. They get everything done.
Every one of them. Every one of them has an alert for what they have to do next on their very busy schedule.
Free Palestine. I wasn't going to.
Those people just- I saw your banner. Yeah, until the banner came up. Yeah, those people are just perpetuating the situation over there. It's like, the whole. is it right or wrong thing, it's like, it's obviously wrong.
Humans have always been wrong when it comes to that. It's always been about power, who's got more power and who has less.
It's very multi-layered. That's the thing about any international conflict. You can look at the mainstream media narrative. They did this, then they did that. Then it's like Ukraine and Russia.
You say, oh my God, Russia invaded Ukraine. This is horrible. That's most people's natural reaction to it. Then, when you go, wait a minute, was there a rule? Did they make an agreement to not push arms closer to Russia?
Did they consistently violate that agreement? Were they trying to move Ukraine? I was reading about them trying to move Ukraine into NATO. What? What?
are you, a Putin supporter? Are you a Putin supporter? No, wait a minute. Isn't this a very multi-faceted, super complex international conflict? that really is about a lot of things?
It's not just about Russia and Ukraine. It's about NATO. It's about nuclear arms being pushed closer to a superpower.
It's like, there's more to it. There's more to it.
There's more to all of it.
Usually that's why war breaks out is because it's so multi-layered. Then it gets to that breaking point.
It's just wild that they could still pull off war today. War, which is essentially like hijacking resources or controlling parcels of land. It's weird that they could still talk people into that today, because it's kind of an old hustle. It's almost like old radio. Yeah.
It's such an old hustle that you can get people to believe these people hate you for your freedom or whatever it is. Then you go over there, let's fucking shuttle up and go kick their ass. Yeah. It's kind of amazing, given what we know about the true nature of conflicts and how so many things are manipulated behind the scenes to force people into actual physical conflict. Then there's generals that sit in air-conditioned offices and they move their pieces around the board like chess pieces.
Yeah. Human lives. Yeah.
They don't fight. They're never in the front. Never. I don't even think Alexander the Great was in the front. I don't buy it.
He didn't live long.
Yeah. He didn't live long.
Alexander the Great, he's like 40.
Yeah. Didn't? they die young back then?
Oh, yeah.
He died of some sickness. He didn't die from a battle wound.
I think probably all died of sickness.
But can you survive if you're in the front? back then? It was like a human meat factory.
No, you're not going to survive. He was in the back. Most likely you're not going to survive. I feel like back then, sickness probably really kicked in when we started gathering together and throwing our shit out the window. Actual shit.
Human shit. If you think about the cities of ancient times before there was plumbing. Do you know how horrific that must have been?
History smelled. We don't remember.
No. We weren't there. We assume every place is like Target. Yeah. We assume every place is like a fucking rest stop on the highway.
You can go in and take a shit. No. Yeah. No, people were shitting out windows. They were throwing their shit in buckets.
According to Wikipedia, he was a very productive 20-year-old, 20-something. He was 20? When he took over as king. Whoa.
Yeah, he conquered the world. He was in his early 20s.
What a gangster. Look at this. By the age of 20.. Okay, he succeeded his father, Philip II, to the throne in 336 B.C. at the age of 20., And spent most of his ruling years conducting a lengthy military campaign through western Asia and Egypt.
By the age of 30, he had created one of the largest empires in history. Holy shit. Stretching from Greece to northwestern India. He was undefeated in battle and widely considered to be one of history's greatest and most successful military commanders. And wasn't he also gay?
He was bi.
Was he bi? That was way back then. Yeah.
Is that what he was? Yeah. Student of Aristotle. And there was, we read that question. Wow.
Tutored by, yeah, those relationships were uncomfortable.
Those guys all fucked, those kids.
They had eunuchs.
There was those? Yeah. They had eunuchs, and then they just had young boys. Yeah. What did it say about the Aristotle thing, though?
Can you go back to that quote, where it was? Yeah, it actually looks like something. Oh, it's right here. At the bottom of the page. What a huge page.
That guy did a lot of shit. It says, by the age of 60, until the age of 16, rather. Alexander was, by 16, he was too old. Aristotle's like, get out of here, you old fuck. Bring me a young boy.
In 335 BC, shortly after his assumption of kingship over Macedon, he campaigned in the Balkans and reasserted control over the, how do you say that? Thrace? Thrace. Thrace. And parts of Illria?
Illiria. Illiria. Illiria. You should be saying this. This is your native tongue.
This is basically, I went to Greece this summer.
How'd you like it?
Amazing. Yeah. Your people did some wild shit, dude.
Yeah, we did.
Your people did some wild shit. We did. When you're in a place where-.
Like Doug Stanhope said, I didn't do anything. Right. I was on the couch.
Your people. I'm saying your people. Your team. Yeah. You know, if the Lakers win, you didn't throw a ball.
My tribe. We won, you know?
Yeah, but the only thing we didn't do is create an empire, because we were too busy infighting, which is typically Greek.
Well, you know, you can't do everything. Can't do everything. Did a lot more than a lot of other cultures 2,500 years ago.
Did a lot with mathematics, philosophy.
Democracy.
Democracy. Yeah. We did a lot.
Yeah, a lot with drugs, too.
A lot with drugs, a lot with pedophilia.
Have you ever read that book, The Immortality Key? No. It's about the Illusinian Mysteries. It's this guy, Brian Murrow Rescue. And Brian's been a guest on the podcast before, and he's a scholar who is like a straight-laced guy, doesn't do drugs, nothing.
And he, through all of his courses, they were trying to figure out what they were doing in these Illusinian Mysteries. Why were people going from all over the world to have these experiences, and what were these experiences? So they recently discovered that inside these pottery vessels that they used to contain wine and beer in, they found ergot. And ergot is a very potent psychedelic. It's like a fungus.
I think it's akin to LSD. And so they're very, at the very least, were taking that in this one spot. And what they believe is that all of these transcendent experiences they had, the Illusinian Mysteries, they get together and figure out how to solve the world and let people vote and all that wacky, that's all, I'm tripping balls. This is my idea, shit. And it's literally the birthplace of democracy.
It's literally how the world changed for the better. And your people were doing it 2,500 years ago. And you can walk in the same spots where they walked. You can see the buildings that they built. It's weird.
It's weird when shit is that old. And you can just walk on it. Like the Parthenon, you can just walk around.
And you can marvel at how durable what they built is. Yes.
2,000 years is so long.
There will be. no, yeah, in 2,000 years from now, you're not going to see any strip malls still standing.
They'll literally be dust. They'll be dust.
They built things really well back then. Great effort too.
Yeah. To do that, like the kind of precision that's involved in the Parthenon, when you're walking around it and you see how all the stone is cut and how it lines up, and how massive the columns are, and how beautifully symmetric it is, it's so smooth and clean. These people didn't have engines. No, crazy. There was no engine.
This was all done by hand. Yeah. It was all, dink, dink, dink.
Slavery. Dink, dink, dink.
Oh, craftsmanship. Yeah. I mean, you weren't just getting the crudest of people. You're getting artisans. Yeah.
You probably worked against your will. Yeah.
To move those big rocks and stuff, yeah.
100%. Who the fuck knows how they did that? What the hell were they doing back then? They did some wild shit back then. When we think about like human ingenuity, oh, God, we're missing so much of like.
they didn't leave like, here's a book on how we did it. This is where we got the rocks. This is how we cut them. This is the best way to move them. If you move them this way, they'll fall on you and kill a few guys.
This is what we figured out over time. Yeah.
Yeah, it's crazy to think about. And I agree with you. I think it was drugs that opened people's minds up to like think about.
Yeah, it gave them a completely different perspective. Like Carl Sagan once said that about marijuana. I'm paraphrasing him. But essentially he was saying that it offers you a perspective that's not available without the drug.
Yeah. That's why I think mushrooms are getting popular for depression, right? It sort of takes you off those grooves that are created by the neuroconnections. Yeah. Just gives you a new perspective.
I wonder how much, I mean, there's certainly different kinds of depression. There's depression that's clearly something wrong chemically with some people. But how much of it is just from not being healthy? How much of not being healthy with your body and not being healthy with where your life is going? Like what kind of job you have, what you want to do with your life?
That's got to be some of it.
The friendships you have. All your friends suck.
Yeah, that's got to be a big part of it. And I think trauma. I think childhood trauma. I think childhood trauma kind of can make you depressed. Yeah, for sure.
Yeah. For sure. Especially abuse.
Yeah.
Abuse seems like the one that people have the hardest time shaking, because it wasn't even that they were ignored. It's that someone preyed on them. Yeah. And they have no self-worth. They're beaten.
They have no self-worth.
And they know that the younger the abuse or the neglect happened, the more of an imprint it leaves because your brain is forming.
It's fascinating stuff, man.
But we have neuroplasticity, and you can go to therapy, and EDMR is something I'm doing, and it's incredible. It's the only thing I've ever done that sort of works.
What is that?
EDMR was invented by Francine Shapiro, like in the 80s. accidentally. She's a psychologist, and now it's become sort of the gold standard for trauma treatment and PTSD and like vet, hospitals and stuff. And what it is is it's eye ED. It's eye movement desensitization and reprocessing.
So it involves moving your eyes in a very specific way while you process traumatic memories. Yeah.
I'm doing it now. It's crazy.
Oh, my God. You're hacking your brain.
You hack your brain, and you get into your subconscious, like your REM sleep state, and then you reprocess the memories. And when you're there, you start having vivid memories, and then, when you're done, memories start flying in out of nowhere. Wow.
How did you find out about this? This is wild.
It was interesting. I was in LA, right? So I have early childhood trauma, and then I've had some traumatic things happen to me later in life, and then the panic attacks started after I got shot when I was in my early 20s. I didn't know what they were back then. Like, I just didn't know what they were, so I'd just be having these panic attacks in the train just going like, what is happening to me?
So I've been dealing with it for like 20 years, and it would go away for periods. I'd have great periods, and then it would come back.
And after I had kids, I think I called you. I spoke to you once, and you were very helpful. But after I had kids, it sort of triggered a lot of these feelings that would come up out of nowhere and sadness. I'd be looking at my kids, and I'd get sad. I'd be playing with them.
I'd get sad, and I didn't understand it. And then I'd be in a hotel room on the road, and I'd just start panicking, and I'd be like, what is this? And so I was talking to my friend, Tracy Carnazzo. She's a comic in New York. She's funny, and she's one of these Italian girls who's just got a guy for everything.
You ask her anything. She's like, I know somebody. So she asked. She was like, how are you? And I just answered honestly.
I was like, I'm good. And I'd give her like a paragraph. And she was like, it sounds like you didn't feel safe as a kid. She was like, let me get you in touch with this person who I'm friends with, who does EDMR. And then I got in touch with this therapist, and she's incredible.
And I started the EDMR journey, and it's the only thing I've done. And EDMR has a beginning, middle, and end. It's not like ad infinitum. It just goes on forever. It's like you're there to reprocess this trauma.
And so do you do it at a specific place?
I do it at Zoom. I love to Zoom.
You Zoom? Yeah. So you Zoom with someone who guides you through it? Is that how it works?
Yeah.
And you do it how often?
I'm doing it now twice a week. But you can do it once a week.
And how long is each session?
Hour. She'll go longer sometimes, though. Wow.
So do you feel like the chemicals moving around in your brain while you're doing this? Yeah.
Yeah, you do. And that's a big part of it is identifying the trauma in the body and how it affects the body. There's a book called The Body Keeps the Score. But I think his name is Bessel. He's a psychiatrist.
And he's responsible for all these trauma centers all over the country.
So this guy is doing it to this lady right now. He's going back and forth with his fingers. And she's following his fingers. And so she's supposed to be thinking about traumatic memories?
So then he'll bring up – he'll take her back through the – the first phase is like identifying the trauma. So it's a lot of talk therapy. So you kind of, you know, talk a lot, talk a lot, talk a lot. And then the therapist gets the idea of what you need to go back and reprocess. And new things will come up when you go back.
And then you'll reprocess it. It's not just hands. You can do – you can follow a ball. You can hold the buzzers in each hand. It's about stimulating both sides of your brain.
What's happening in mental health now is so fascinating because when you parallel it with, like, what happened in medicine, right? Like, we used to treat the symptom, right? So if someone had a fever, they treated the fever. But they didn't know what the cause was. So they put you in cold water or boiling water, whatever they did.
And then they found out about viruses and bacteria. So they started treating the cause. Now, in mental health, you're starting to see that revolution, because of, you know, the advances in neuroscience, where they can look at the brain and they can actually see, you know, what parts are responsible for what, where trauma shows up in the brain. They just did a recent study. It was a big study about how trauma is – doesn't – traumatic.
memories don't come back as memories. They come back – they light up in the part of your brain as if it's happening now, which makes sense. We knew that because, you know, when Vietnam vets start bugging out and they're in the supermarket or whatever, but they can actually see it now in the brain, that the brain is processing it as it's happening now. So, you know, converging neuroscience and psychology and all the things that they've known from all these different advances, and it seems to be in a place now where trauma is becoming one of the things that they focus on the most, like early childhood trauma or traumatic events. In war, obviously, we know that.
that's, you know, a big – that's the specific cause of what is bothering those people, you know, is what they've experienced. And so now they're targeting the trauma, but they have ways to treat the trauma with EDMR, with brain spotting, it's called, you know, a whole bunch of these tactics.
That's really fascinating. It's really fascinating when you think of – like I had this guy on the podcast yesterday, Joe Pfeiffer. He's an MMA fighter for the UFC, and he had a terrible childhood. Terrible, fucking, horrible. Beatings, just constant beatings.
It's just like heartbreaking to hear the story. But you've got to – it's just fascinating, like, as a human being, like whoever you are when you're listening to this right now, you are the accumulation of your processing of every experience you've ever had. As much as we like to claim autonomy and we think on our own, and we kind of do, and there's – like, again, there's definitely chemical problems. There's definitely people that just have a genetic defect, something – just like some people have diseases of all sorts of other parts of their body, they get diseases of the brain. That's fucking for real, 100%.
But you're basically just an end product of experiences and your interpretation of those experiences and the lessons and the way you've contextualized all those experiences, and they're all in your head, and that's your map of the world. That's your map of the world. So if you're in San Francisco, the, like, their map of the world is fucked. Like, their experiences, like what's got them to 2024, January 18th, whatever it is, is this result sucks. This result sucks.
Like, this is terrible. Like, you guys are out of your fucking mind. You're wasting your time. There's needles on your street. You guys are out of your fucking mind.
What are you doing? This result sucks. Those people are, they could have been in fucking Wyoming, like, hard-working ranchers, the same human. Could have been, like, a salt-of-the-earth fucking Kevin Costner, Yellowstone-looking motherfucker. It could have been the same.
It's just your experiences. Yeah. It's just, what shapes you? What directions do you go in? When do you get pushed down?
When do you get lifted up? Who gives you a hug? Who pushes you away? Yeah. And how does this play out?
Yeah, I don't think a lot of people know themselves because you've got to do all this work to know yourself, because your brain protects you in so many ways that you're unaware of. Like, they know. in neuroscience, like, your brain usually, when it's healthy, works in concert and sends information to different parts of your brain to process it. But when you have trauma or a chemical problem, or whatever it is, it doesn't work well. And in traumatic experiences, your neocortex shuts off and your limbic turns on.
And there's a survival reason for that, right? So if you're in a moment of fight or flight, you don't want to start reasoning. You don't want to go, like, you start philosophizing. You're just emotional. You're dealing with your survival reptile brain.
And so it actually shuts off. So people who have, like, panic and anxiety, it's hard to reason your way out of it because that part of your brain is shut down.
Now, imagine you have panic and anxiety already and you're already experiencing depression. And then they prescribe to you medication. And one of the side effects of that medication is suicide. Suicidal ideation. Ideation, yeah.
Yeah.
Imagine being that person and forced with that. choice. Like, this may help you, or you might just...
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, medication, yeah, it just.
That's a wild one, man.
Yeah, medication is.
It can help you.
It can help you.
But you can also.
. It can hurt you. You can go sliding down a hill and there's no trees to grab.
But every study they do, still till now, the medication is not the end-all cure. Like, it just doesn't... It can numb it. It can help you. It's definitely good if you're in, like, a jam.
Like, if you're really in a bad spot, it can.
. But when you do the medication, that's when you got to start doing the work. You can't just do the medication as an end to fix it.
But the medication is interfering with the natural system. You know what? I think it's going to be in the future. Medication is going to be, like, for mental illness. It's going to be like leeches.
Like, oh, they used to use leeches. They didn't know any better. Oh, they used to just put medicine into people. They used to give them chemicals. Oh, they didn't fix the brain?
No, they just.
. Chemicals. Right. Why didn't they do the rewiring? Oh, they hadn't figured it out yet.
Yeah.
But that.
. The fucked-up thing is, that trauma that you experience as a child or those bad... The trauma is a very overused word. Some people experience real trauma. So let me say this.
The negative experiences that you've had, both as an adult and as a child, those also made you who you are. if you're happy with the result. Like, if you're happy with how you're living, you're happy with what you're doing, those things were important to go through, unfortunately.
Well, it's just that you could do about them. It happened. You got to make the best out of them. And a lot of people do make the best out of them and turn them into something.
A lot of people do. It is possible.
And trauma's not necessarily the thing that happened to you. It's how you react to the thing that happened to you, I think. And everyone's different. Everyone has a different level of sensitivity and circumstance and genetic code. Yeah.
So I can't really judge anyone's trauma.
It's so.
. You can never know how another person feels. Yeah. You just can't know. You just can't know.
Unless you're on TikTok.
Then you can know.
But, yeah, I mean, if the human race has a chance, I think people need to start looking inward. Why am I really doing what I'm doing? Who am I really? What is this really about?
Also, this is so temporary. We're treating it like it's permanent.
It's so temporary.
You're treating your own life like it's permanent. And it's so temporary.
I've noticed a lot of successful friends I have, and a lot of successful people are so scared to just be happy because they think there's, like, this, deep fear of losing it.
Yeah, that's real.
So it's like if I stay miserable, I don't got to focus on the fear of losing it.
Yeah, that's real.
Because we all lose it at the end.
It's that, and it's also. you have a real fear of not being able to keep doing what you do. Like, whatever it is that you've done. that's successful, you just lose the magic. You lose the thing.
What is it? Now? I suck. You know, like, whatever it is. Now I'm not interested.
Now I'm not interesting. Now I can't talk. Now I can't do this anymore. I can't do that anymore. Nobody likes my music.
You know, my movies suck. Like, yeah, that fear, it's crippling. It's crippling fear. It's such a crazy fear.
Yeah, it's funny the way things are set up here. It's just funny. It's like, hey, enjoy yourself. Accumulate all this stuff, but you have to have this. You have this knowledge because we have these big brains.
Like, you lose it all. It's all going away.
It's all gone. Sinatra said that about everything he has. You know, they were giving him a hard time for giving away so much money and giving people things. Yeah. It's like, this is not mine.
I'm renting this. It's going to be gone.
Comedy makes everything okay. Yeah. That's why I think.
It makes it more fun.
It makes everything okay. It conquers everything. It means when you have a good sense of humor and when you're laughing in the right way, not just cackling by yourself in a room, but it just means you're mentally healthy. It's a sign of mental health and strength when you can laugh at horrible things. That's the way you conquer them.
Yeah. It's also a sign that you're recognizing nuance and you're playing with it. Yeah. It doesn't mean that you really think that this tragedy is great. Right.
You just find something horrible to say. that's hilarious about the tragedy. And sometimes you can only do that with your friends. You can only do that at a deli. Yeah.
You can only do that. having dinner at one o'clock in the morning, just talking shit. Yeah. Making each other laugh. Yeah.
But that's also a thing that I think we have really, that we're really lucky about. That's our big gift. Our big gift is each other. Like, as comedians, you know, I spend time with a lot of different people and a lot of, you know, different occupations, and I always can't wait to get back to comedians. I can't wait to get back to the green room with the mothership.
Can't wait to do sets on the road. It's just. the conversations are so much more fun. They're so fun.
Yeah, you can say anything.
And it's just fun. Everyone's just being funny and smiling and realizing, wow, we're so lucky. We used to be open mic night comedians, and now here we are about to go do a sold-out show. We're having dinner together at a restaurant and laughing. And then you go have fun.
Yay! And then the people have fun. Yay! Yeah, yeah. It's beautiful.
It's the ultimate connection.
And the amount of love that you get back and forth, like the amount of love a comic gets, the amount of love they give, the positive energy both for and back, that's like, very few people get to experience that in life.
Yeah.
You know?
And it's the only place that comedians can get it. Yeah. It's from other comedians. Yeah. Because we're jaded, and you can't.
It's harder for us.
Also, we can speak so freely. Yeah. You know, you can go, there's this fucking bit. It's just dead. It's got a thing, and it goes somewhere, and then it drops off.
And I don't know what the fuck to do with it. I've been trying to monkey around with different ways to say it and switch. And they're like, hmm. And then everybody will sit around and analyze it. And we'll analyze each other's bits.
And, like, you know, you don't have to say that part. Everybody already knows that. If you cut that out, it's shorter. You're right. Why did I say that part?
And then, you know, everybody just starts tinkering with stuff. And you can just, like, openly tinker. Yeah. With, like, phrases and ideas and setups. Yeah.
It's like a –.
So much fun.
It's like architects sitting with their contractors, figuring it out.
Yeah. If you've got a good relationship with the contractor. Yeah. I would imagine the architects and the contractors squabble a lot.
They do. I'm going through that right now. Are you? We're putting an addition on our house. Oh, no.
And, yeah, they squabble. And I'm like, who do I trust? The architect or the contractor?
Oh, no. It's a power struggle for Yana's papa's love.
You get in the middle. And it's funny, because I don't know anything. So you just got – you're at the mercy. You're just so vulnerable.
Yeah.
I don't know anything about what they're talking about. And I'm, like, just trying to look in their eyes and figure out which one's more honest. And I have no clue. It's just a guess. Yeah.
Someone was telling me that about the World Trade Center. They were saying the World Trade Center was designed to be hit by a jet plane. And I don't know if they're right, but what they were saying is, do you know how much corruption there is in construction? Yeah. And I was like, no, how much?
They go, oh, say, if it's supposed to get five bolts, if you only use four, do you know how much money you save over a whole building? If you make the steel that thick instead of that thick, do you know how much money you save? If it calls for, like, half-inch this, but you use quarter-inch that, do you know how much money you save?
You got to pay off the inspectors and all that, I guess.
I guess. Yeah. Are they really inspecting everything?
Yeah.
How does that work?
Yeah, you cross your fingers.
I don't know if that's the case. But my point was always, like, how the fuck do you know what's going to happen to a building until a plane slams into it and you get to watch? Right. Because there's never been a skyscraper that got hit by a plane before. Which makes it interesting.
You can't say, this is not how it should have happened. Like, we have zero idea what it looks like other than 9-11 when jets slam into skyscrapers.
A plane hit the Empire State Building. Big one.
What was that?
The 40?
Was it a propeller plane?
No, it was a big plane.
Like a jet? Yeah. Really? Yeah. How bad did it fuck it up?
It slammed right into it.
Didn't do shit to it? B-25 in 1945.. Wow, that's crazy.
Yeah.
So listen to these pictures, I guess. Whoa.
And the buildings fell, not because of the plane hitting it. Oh, shit. Yeah.
So that's a big-ass, old-school plane. Yeah. Yeah, so it's a propeller plane.
Wow.
Where did it hit?
Bang, right there.
Wow. 79th floor. And it didn't take it out?
No. They're built not to.
Is that commensurate, though? Like, how did it hit? Did it hit just the wing? Was the guy trying to pull out? No, he...
But look at that. Definitely no jet fuel in there. What's that? Yeah, no jet fuel. Yeah.
No jet fuel.
Because the heat from the jet fuel is what took down the Trade Center, not the plane impact. So they say. But...
So they say. Yeah. But you know where they are, right?
I mean, well, they, you know, they did.
I don't know where they are. I was hoping I could just sneak that in. I wanted to get into that real soon. I'm like, Alex will tell you. Who is that?
Depending on what you're talking about. Let's go to dinner with Alex. Let's go to dinner with Alex. He's been freaking me out lately.
The 9-11 is, it's interesting to me. People ruin it by coming up with what they think happened instead of just stopping at, hey, it's fishy. It's a little weird just stopping there because you can't know, you can't know what the actual conspiracy was. But there's a lot of stuff that doesn't make sense on 9-11..
Well, whenever you run into a situation where there's a gigantic worldwide disastrous event, like that's an event that the whole world knew about, but you lie about some aspects of it. Like one of the things was, what did the United States get caught lying about Saudi Arabia, about their involvement early on with funding?
Yeah. They ignored it. I mean, the Bin Laden family was flown out before. Weird stuff.
Weird stuff. Weird stuff. Weird stuff. It's like, what if I wanted to do that? Would you be mad?
What if I had some fucking dudes from Afghanistan staying in my house and right after some shit went down, I illegally flew them out of the country. Listen, it's cool. Yeah. It's cool. That sounds like what a criminal would do.
That's right. That's right.
It just sounds like what a criminal would do. Yeah. Look, if I was running cocaine with the Colombians and right before the FBI came, I fucking shot some planes illegally filled with coke back to Colombia, I'm like, listen, none of this time. Don't worry about it. Yeah.
It's okay. It's good. It's good. But you're not allowed to fly right now. It's okay.
Yeah. It's okay. Yeah.
It's criminal.
It's just criminal enterprise. Yeah. It's okay. It's okay. We're just going to fly.
We're not going to tell you. Yeah. We're going to take the family of the dude who set this up and we're going to just fly.
We're going to get them all out.
And shut the fuck up. Yeah. Shut the fuck up. You want me to come here and investigate? Yeah.
It seems like there was some sort of a connection with Saudi Arabia. Shut the fuck up. What about Iraq? They have weapons of war. They're going to kill us all.
We're going to all be dead unless we get in there right now. Yeah. Let's go. Yeah.
It's sort of like with the Epstein thing. It's like, isn't... I just call her gasoline, because I hate pronouncing her first name. Just lying. Ghislaine.
Yeah. Why not... How come there's? no... They're not interrogating her?
How come they're not.
. She's just sitting there and they're leaking these slow leaks about...
Well, it's even crazier than that. It's like, talk to her. They have her.
Is nobody asking her any questions? Like, she knows everything. Torture her.
We can't ask her.
Torture her until she says everything.
any questions. It's not proper.
And how is she just sitting in her mansion? Like, while this was all going down, she's just sitting there. They can't find her. She hasn't been arrested.
She was in a cabin in New Hampshire.
Yeah.
She's.
You can find Bin Laden, but you can't find Ghislaine Maxwell.
Well, they found her. Yeah. They found her after a while. Well, she's solo. Bin Laden had a whole network of people protecting him.
Yeah. I guess.
Well, the craziest theory is that they didn't shoot Bin Laden. They shot Bin Laden's double. That's why they got rid of it. Like, there's so many wacko fucking flat earth conspiracy theories out there about everything.
Yeah. But some of them are not... Yeah. Some of them are just because people have access to information now and they go, wait a second.
You know what I also think, cynically? Yeah. I think there's a lot of really dumb ones, and there's a lot of ones that are like a little smarter than dumb. And then there's a lot of ones that are really smart. And there's a lot of ones that are like, oh my God, if this is true, this changes everything.
And they all lump them in together. Yeah. It's genius. It's genius. Because if you only look at the ones that are like, the Federal Reserve isn't federal.
Wait, wait a minute. Where is it? Right. It's private. What the fuck's going on?
Yeah. When you just look at one or two of those, it's so confounding that that's actually taking place right now. You need a little flat earth thrown in there, a little fucking pizza gate, a little Hillary Clinton's laptop. They're eating babies. So you can sneak in Epstein's Island.
That was a real place, man. Yeah. That was a real place. Yeah. And the way a place like that can kind of fly in under the radar is if there's a bunch of fake stuff.
Don't go to Antarctica.
There's an alien base. The more nutty shit they can get you to think about, the more real things you should be really concerned about. Sneak through.
Do you think that's intentional?
Or do you think people just spiral with other stuff? Yeah. Both things. I think it's both. probably.
It's both. Yeah. But they're playing on the fact. Even if the government wasn't encouraging people to go insane, they would still go insane. They would still have conspiracy theories.
But without a doubt, foreign governments are on TikTok and on Instagram and on Facebook, and they are influencing people to go in a very specific direction. And how much of a percentage is it? If their algorithm encourages trans-positive content, how much does that move the public narrative? It's not zero. It's not zero.
So if you've got two ships and they're both going in the same direction, parallel lines, and I could turn this one ship just like that, just a little bit. I just need a couple of degrees of turn. Over time, that, motherfucker's going to be way off course. Way off course. I think that's happening for fucking sure.
That's the way war is waged now.
And it's also happening with people that think they're doing the right thing. We were talking about Google the other day and how YouTube censors things. They think they're doing it. They think they're doing the right thing. Is this true that Gas Digital's, all their stuff, got taken off the air?
I think they got taken down again on YouTube, I think, yeah. I don't know if you mean their website and everything?
No, their YouTube page.
Yeah, they got taken down again, yeah.
There's one video where this comic that works with Lewis was saying that all they were doing in this podcast is talking about how big a guy's dick was. This guy had a giant hog. They were talking about this guy. And they got their shit removed for that. It's up.
now. It's back. It's a different page. So it's back. The specials and stuff.
So what were they saying? Maybe I'm looking at something, maybe it was a clip of something that happened in the past.
Yeah, I don't know the specifics of it at all.
It was one of those, it was either an Instagram reel or one of them YouTube shorts, one of those things like that. Yeah. He was talking about how they took it down, because he was talking about how big a dude's hog was.
Yeah, that doesn't seem.
Oh, it's bullying.
Yeah.
It is a big dick. You're talking about Jeffrey Epstein's island. A lot of people don't talk about his ranch in New Mexico.
Yeah, and his mansion. I mean, it was popping off at all his spots.
He built a 26,700 square foot mansion with a sprawling courtyard and living room, roughly the size of the American home. Nearby was a private airstrip with a hangar and helipad. The property also included a ranch office, a firehouse, and a seven bay heated garage. Yeah, that sounds like an intelligence agent. Right out of a fucking movie.
Luring all the politicians into the honeypot. Yeah. And how many people died because of that?
We're never going to know. They're never going to let us, we'll never know.
What a fucking genius con. Yeah. What a genius con. You get some guy, you say he's a billionaire, you just give him a fucking blank checkbook. Which, when you're spending $170 billion on Ukraine, and $136 billion here, and $46 billion there, and we've got to upgrade that, and just let these people in, and that costs $30 trillion, like fucking, what's a billion?
That's right, yeah.
What's a billion to control literally the greatest scientists and entertainers, and politicians, and just get them all convinced? Yeah. Look, Bill's here. Look, look who's here. Stephen Hawking's here.
Look, this guy's here. Look, a set of Nobel laureates here. Look at all these brilliant, esteemed scientists. Look at these amazing conversations. Look how beautiful these women are.
It's like everybody says that if you went there, you'd be a real piece of shit. If you're going to a place where, I mean, what is the actual list? Who's on the actual list? You know, there's some pretty fascinating people. If you got invited to that party, you didn't know what the fuck was going on.
Magician David Copperfield reappears. Jeffrey Epstein court, poof, reappears. With lawyers suggesting he traded tickets for girls. Tickets for his shows? Is his show that hot?
Jesus Christ, how cheap are these girls? Because, like, how much do these tickets to his show cost?
I don't know. I don't know the magic hierarchy.
Talk about overvaluing what you're worth. Yeah. If you give me a sex slave, I'll give you tickets to my show.
I'll give you tickets to my magic show. Not even a Criss Angel show either.
But what a brilliant move. If you can, I mean, here's, okay, question number one. Were they all underage? Or some of them of age? Like, do we know how that worked?
Because even if they weren't under, underage is the best. If you want to get some blackmail, that's the best. But you still bust quite a few guys with, of age.
Oh, yeah.
Especially if you're giving them a little yay-o. We're on an island. There's no rules.
Yeah.
Woo! We're the elite. We're the fucking Illuminati, pew. Bam!
Yeah, just cheating on your wife is enough.
Enough. That's enough. Or publicly having it so that they can, like, trot it out there. Any time there's an election, any time there's a this, or there's a vote. they want you to vote in one way or another way, they always have that.
Always have that.
Just a little reminder out there.
And so you just keep that fucking thing in the back of your head, like, I got to shut the fuck up and toe the line. I got to shut the fuck up and toe the line.
There's no better way to control someone.
No better way. And it's, it's so brilliant and ancient. It's like an ancient strategy, you know? And it, it was, I, first of all, is there another one going on right now that we don't know about? Of course.
Like that, at that level? Of course. It seems like that guy was like.
So effective. Why would you stop? Like you, yeah.
I think you need a combination of things to do it at that guy's level. By all accounts, he was a brilliant guy, which is wild, right? And you have to be also a sick fuck, which he obviously was. And also an intelligence agent. So do you just become that sick fuck over the course of, like, you know, you hear about DEA agents, they start dealing drugs.
Once they get in there, they're like, they're like undercover. And then they fucking live the life. And they start actually dealing drugs. It happens. Yeah.
Do you think, like, maybe the guy just became a fucking sociopath, psychopath? So fascinating. From just dealing with the life that he was, that's his job. His job is to trick politicians into fucking underage girls. And get them coked up.
And bring them into this place. that's cameras everywhere. These fucking idiots don't know that there's going to be cameras everywhere. And you set this up? This is what you do for a living for 30 years, or however long you did it?
It's fascinating to think about. I think two things. I think everyone wants to be someone, right? Everyone wants to be someone, have an exciting life. And then I think people have a myriad of, they have a, you know, just your moral compass from your family, whatever's on a scale.
So that's a factor. But the more important factor is everyone has those moments in their life where things are offered to them. And you know you go this way, you're going to get some exciting stuff, but you're going to have to compromise your moral compass. And people make that decision. Fame and power, it's like the ultimate elixir.
It's also the people that you're around. Because, like we were talking about, we love being around comics. It's fun. It's our lifestyle. It's how we like to talk.
They like being around other sociopaths. They like being around other people that are taking over businesses, hostile takeovers. They like to be around the guys who influence foreign governments, the guys who fly over in private jets and sit with their legs crossed with Italian shoes on. You know? And they have conversations about clean energy and, you know, what they really want to do is control all the fucking food, control the farmlands.
You know, we have to reduce the methane from these cows, and the best way to do it is just take the cows away from the farms. If we just control the cows. If we have a climate change mandate and we control the farms, I mean, it's basically game over. They're literally doing that.
All bad guys have a British accent.
There's no reason why you would say we shouldn't have cows, unless you're a fucking complete sociopath. You're not going after the coal plants first. No, you want people to get rid of cows? Are you sure this is a good strategy? Do you understand starvation?
Do you understand how that works? You're not going to grow cows, are you? No, you need someone to grow cows, and you're going to take their cows away?
The fuck out of here. Yeah, why would they want to get rid of cows?
Because they want you to be completely dependent on them. The more you're dependent on them, and the more they can tell you what's good and what's bad and what you shouldn't be doing, and Giannis, we looked at your carbon footprint. Your carbon footprint is very problematic. It seems like in your job of stand-up comedy, you travel more than the average person, and you contribute more CO2, and they show you like a video of all, and we're going to have to get you to stop. It's like for the greater good.
For the greater good.
It has some benefits. Social credit scores have a benefit. Things are cleaner. They run a little more orderly.
Sure. You have to listen or you can't eat.
It's horrible. It's a nightmare, but there is some. Things do run better.
Well, it runs better for the government. Yeah, you have less dissent because you kill people. Yeah. I mean, China's doing a great job of showing how you can run it.
You can run it. Yeah, they're just doing it. It's a nice tight ship over there. Nobody's jaywalking. Yeah.
That's how you make an iPhone. You get people to follow rules.
Yeah.
And they, you know.
If that comes over here, that's the end of creativity. That's the end of everything. Because you're just going to have to shut the fuck up. You're going to have to toe the line. And we already know that the line is nonsense.
We know that the line is not really intelligent. people that are assessing objectively what's going on in the world and giving you a reasonable version of the events. We know that's not really what we're seeing in the media. Right. We're seeing people that are deeply influenced by advertising budgets, by what kind of companies advertise on their shows, by the investors who own stock in the company.
There's narratives, and they're not necessarily even remotely honest. Right. Like sometimes they're off the charts fake.
Right.
Right. And they get printed in major newspapers.
Some of the propaganda in the beginning of the Israeli Hamas war was that the Israelis bombed a hospital and 500 people were killed. It was printed in the New York Times. I remember that. They didn't hit the hospital. They hit the parking lot next to the hospital.
I think a lot of that is the rush, too, to get to the story. first, because there's so much competition. Everyone's just putting things out. Nobody cares about the retraction anyway.
Well, also, that's a juicy story. If Israel really did bomb a hospital, oh, my God, this is genocide. It really helps that narrative. Yeah.
Like I was watching this documentary last night, and the media did that to this couple, because the movie Gone Girl was out at the time, so they just started calling her Gone Girl, and she made up this whole story of being kidnapped. She did get kidnapped. She did get raped. Oh, my God. But the media was just making fun of her, calling her Gone Girl, because it's a juicier story.
They just ran with it. The police department, too, was all convinced that she was a Gone Girl. People just marketing and advertising and subterfuge. It works. It just works.
That's why advertisers spend billions of dollars on it,
because it works. Have you ever seen Nancy Pelosi talking about it openly? Talk about the wrap-up smear?
No.
You know, Nancy's been in politics for a long time. She's been a long time. And she's a genius with her money.
She's very good. She beats the market a lot.
It's amazing that someone who's never made more than $170,000 a year is worth $150 million. Yeah. And she does better investing in the stock market than Warren Buffett or George Soros.
Yeah, she's always beating the market.
So I don't know what happened. Maybe she had a senior moment, and she just started explaining how you lie. I mean, this can't be AI, is it? I think it's real, because it's from a couple of years ago. It's called the wrap-up smear.
Yeah, there's an AP assessment that says it's been taken out of context. I was trying to get to what the context was. What context could it be? She's describing a wrap-up smear. The assessment says she was describing a tactic she accused Republicans of against Democrats.
In other portions of her response, not shown in the clip, Pelosi makes it clear she is not talking about her own party. Oh, I don't necessarily think she's talking about anyone in particular. What I'm saying is that what she revealed is that it's a play. If you're a football player, and they call a play, you know that play. Like our callback in stand-up comedy.
This is what she's doing. She's talking business. She's talking business. I'm not saying she's even accusing anybody of this. The claim was that it was.
The claim was saying that it's how Democrats get the media to legitimize lies. Oh, okay. But what was fascinating to me about it was just this open admittance that it's all bullshit. Just saying, like, not decrying this thing and saying it's a genuine problem with communication. That we have deception, and it's tolerated, and that it's not punished.
Willful deception like this. And there's a thing called a wrap-up smear, and this is a horrible thing that they do. It wasn't that. It was like, this is how it's done. Watch it.
Play it from the beginning.
Stop.
What?
You smear somebody with falsehoods and all the rest, and then you merchandise it. And then you write it, and they'll say, see, it's reported in the press that this, this, this, and this. So they have that validation.
What's going on? The news person's about to start talking. That's why I was trying to cut it off. The assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh. This is where I was trying to not get too confused on what.
Okay, so they were connecting it to the assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh. They tried to keep him out of the Supreme Court, right? Is that what the Fox News story was trying to do? Five years ago when this was posted. Yeah.
But what I was getting at was just that. she's describing a tactic. This is what we do. You know, we fake, and then Johnny comes in to the right. I pass off the football to him.
He sneaks around behind me. We run through the fucking line. Let's go. She's talking business. Even if she's not saying that the Democrats do it, this is how we do it.
She's talking business. Yes.
Yes. And that's how it works.
She's not horrified. Imagine if you were in that same position, and you had been given information. For whatever reason, the current administration thinks, Giannis Papas, let's have a very smart, funny guy, and he's going to be the guy that kind of explains what's going on. And you have to explain what a wrap-up smear is. Would you not feel morally obligated to say something about how atrocious activity like this is when it comes to critical decisions that people are making?
People that are probably not that informed. People that are going through their day busy. They have jobs. They have bills. They have stress.
They have all kinds of stuff going on. They don't have enough time to pay attention to what's going on with that Supreme Court guy. So if you're openly discussing strategies where you would deceive people in order to get a narrative passed, that's clearly untrue, because you don't want that guy in office politically, and that's not horrific to people. That is anti-American. It really is.
And you can think you're doing it because you're a good American, but that's how communism gets started. That's how dictators take over. They come up with justification for why they can bend the rules. The rules are the fucking rules.
Yeah, once you compromise the rules.
You got to let people vote. You got to let people. There should be, and I think there's got to be a good news. What is that, 1440 News? Is that what it's called?
I don't even know what that is. There's some news site that is, I think that's the name of it. I signed up for it. I don't even remember what it is. They're trying to just give you facts with no narrative.
Like, here's the events of the day.
Ground news? I love ground news.
I don't know what the sources are, like. if they're on the ground. What they're doing is they're trying to do it without a left wing or a right wing spin.
Well, ground news tells you it rates.
That's it, 1440?
? I don't know, is it? Yeah, that's it. Do you have to sign up for it? I don't even know.
I can't tell if this is just a sub stack. 100 plus sources, so you don't have to. Culture, science, sports, politics, business, and more, all in a five minute read.
People are, if you're a Fox News fucking zombie, you're a Fox News zombie. You're not checking what MSNBC has to say. What's that Rachel Maddow lady, what's her take on this? Is there some fucking, is there room in the middle here?
No, you don't want to live in that, you live in the Fox reality.
You don't have any time. No one has any fucking time, be honest. They don't have time to be sorting this out, so if you're fucking lying, and you're doing it because you think it's a good strategy to get your politician in place, that's dirty, that's anti-American.
Yeah, it is, but I'm sure it's the way it's worked from the beginning.
Bro, think about what they took Nixon out for.
Just spying, just a little spying.
Just a little spying, not that big a deal.
And they don't want to do anything about the Epstein client list, and they don't want to do anything about whatever the fuck Hunter Biden was doing with Russia, and Ukraine, and China. What were you doing, bro?
They're selective about what they're going to take.
What were you doing over there? Yeah. Hey Joe, why does everybody have millions of dollars? Yeah. Where did all that come from?
Yeah.
Why are you on the board of a major energy company, and you're a crackhead? Is it to curry favor with the vice president?
Why did Joe Biden get a million dollar a year job teaching at UPenn, that was funded by a Chinese grant?
Yeah.
I shouldn't say it's funded by a Chinese grant, it happened right after China gave him a bunch of money. This fucking dude doesn't even have to show there, they just tell everybody he's teaching there.
And he also plagiarized, got caught, and there's no consequences.
Dude, we had Joe Biden night at Stitch's Comedy Club in Boston. In 1988, when he was running for president, he got busted, I think it was Robert Kennedy's speech, and someone else's speech. He used big chunks of people's stuff, and he got busted, pre-internet. And it was so egregious and so bad that we did Joe Biden night at Stitch's Comedy Club. You would go up and do my act, and I would go up and do your act.
We would just go up and do acts of our friends.
Fitzsimmons and I used to go and watch it. It was hilarious. Yeah.
There's no consequences.
There's no consequences. No consequences. It's not just no consequences, but there's so many videos of him. People keep wanting to talk about Trump lying and Trump being a bully. I'm not saying he's not.
I'm not saying he's not a crazy individual, a bombastic individual, but why are you ignoring the other guy's lies? Because if you care about truth, we should be going, shit, look at this mess. That's what we should be doing.
It's the same reason why those people won't say that Trump did anything good. He did do some good things when he was in office. He was right about some things, and he did do some things that were effective. But they'll never admit it, because it's all team ball.
The guy who was the head of Google, how do you say his name, Chamath?
I don't want to fuck his name up. Brilliant guy. But his take on it was Trump. was the wrong guy with the right strategies, wrong guy with the right message, wrong guy socially, politically, lightning rod for the wrong kind of people, the right guy in terms of it seems like those policies were more effective. There's just so many things that are fucking weird right now.
That's a good point. Yeah. That is a good point, yeah.
Well, he's brilliant. He's a brilliant guy, and you have to be brilliant to be someone who was at Google, which is an incredibly left-wing organization, like most super genius tech people are very left-wing. And then to look at that in a nuanced way and to be able to step outside of the ideology and say that, because that's the truth. That is the truth. He was an early exec at Facebook.
I'm sorry, Facebook. And again, same kind of thing. Same thing. Yeah, super genius tech guy. But the way he describes it, see if you can find him saying it, because the way he describes it, you're like, thank God.
he's saying that and not a moron, because what he's describing is the actual points, and he's making very good points about it.
Well, I mean, we're less dependent on foreign oil. I mean, he was right about the border. Look at the border now.
The border now seems to be on purpose. It seems to be on purpose. It seems to be that there's some sort of a strategy to either flood the country. Tim Dillon thinks it's cheap labor for construction.
That's got to be true.
It's got to be a factor. It's got to be a factor. Cheap labor is probably a factor. And then another factor is this push to have them be able to vote. You know, it's a weird one.
Like, they're doing that in New York City. They're pushing to give illegals the right to vote. But then the wildest thing that Texas is doing is just shipping all the people that show up because these states want sanctuary cities. Like, yeah, because you're not on the border. Okay, we'll just ship them to you.
So Texas is just shipping busloads of illegal immigrants to New York. Like, this is your mess.
It's the perfect example of the difference between theory and reality. It's like. everyone up there is inferior. I love everybody. Everyone's great.
There's no such thing as an illegal. And then, when it becomes your problem, and that's why Texas is doing it, they're going, okay, now you're going to deal with what we're dealing with, so you're going to feel what it's like, and now you guys got to pay for it, and you have to figure out what to do.
Change your policies.
Yeah.
There's a lot of people in the left and the center that are going just like, make it go away. They're just going, I don't know, just throw them in the water. Just make it go away, but don't tell anyone.
Here it is. Is this it? Yeah, that's it. Talk about Trump derangement syndrome. Yeah.
Okay.
We'll take two minutes. Let me restart.
Hillary Clinton, I voted for Joe Biden, but this is the honest assessment. The guy did, for the things that he was supposed to do, a good job. And for where every other president found a way to, frankly, make our situation a little bit worse, specifically around wars, he did not do that. And that is a huge accomplishment that I think needs to be acknowledged. As a Democrat who has been left homeless, who is now definitely in the center, but probably leaning increasingly right, I'm left yet again with an appreciation, despite the messenger, of the message of the Trump administration, because what those guys did was pretty incredible in hindsight.
These Abraham Accords, the Accords with Israel and the GCC, the almost Accord between Israel and Saudi,
to really be able to find a long-lasting peace is just a real example for the world. And those guys did a lot of really good work. It's a miracle, actually, when you look at it. What they did, despite the fact, listen, I'm no fan of Trump, and I am too homeless. But this is where, can I say this?
If you want to objectively look at what they did, it was good work. It was great work. You have to. And in fact, this is a moment where you have to start to re-underwrite, is one's Trump derangement syndrome causing more damage than anything that Trump could have actually done? And I think the answer is yes, because it's now causing us to not see that good work, and then embrace and extend it.
So much of the work that happened in that administration turns out to have been right. And that's what's so frustrating for me. The work on the border wall. We didn't like the messenger, so we killed the message. Turned out it was right.
Issuing long-term debt to refinance when rates were at zero. We didn't like the messenger, so we killed the message. A structural piece in the Middle East. We didn't like the messenger, so we killed the message. When are we going to stop shooting ourselves in the foot?
And when are we going to actually see and take the time to look past who is saying things, and actually listen to them word for word?
Boom. So good.
Well, that's why he's going to win this election. if they let him run. He's going to win. Well, I think the abortion thing really shot the Republicans in the foot. I think a lot of women are not happy about that, whether they publicly say it or not.
I think it's a gamble. It's like, what percentage of people are pro and what percentage of people are against? And how many of the people that are actually going to vote, the real hardcore, you know, red till I'm dead, how many of those people are pro-life? Probably a good number. And the other ones are not going to vote Democrat just for that issue.
I believe, with Trump, with everything except killing babies, I'm not going to vote for him on that. I just think you should be able to do that. Very few people are going to do that, unless you currently need one right now, you know, and they might sway your judgment. But very few people, if, like most, of the chips are stacked in this one direction, but there's just one.
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