#2049- Coleman Hughes

2023-10-20 03:49:56

The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.

1Speaker 1
00:00:01.74 – 00:00:09.52

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Stream by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day!

00:00:13.52 – 00:00:15.38

What's up? Good to see you, man, what's cracking?

2Speaker 2
00:00:16.06 – 00:00:17.08

I'm good, I can't complain.

1Speaker 1
00:00:17.32 – 00:00:23.26

We were just talking about, you live in New York City. Yes. And whether or not the migrant crisis is a real thing.

2Speaker 2
00:00:23.30 – 00:00:42.76

It's a real thing. You notice it. It's a real thing, you notice it in Port Authority. And I think when Eric Adams gets in front of the country and says, I can't handle this, I think he's telling the truth. And some people have accused him of racism, bizarrely, but I don't think it comes from that.

00:00:43.38 – 00:01:15.90

I looked into this and the part people don't know about this story is really the full unfolding of it. It goes back to the 1930s. New York State made a constitutional amendment to the state constitution, which required the state to provide housing for the homeless, essentially. And it was sort of vaguely worded. So in the 80s and 90s, the courts in New York began interpreting that more and more strictly.

00:01:17.30 – 00:02:06.44

Almost no other state, I'm not sure if any other state actually has something in its state constitution requiring that kind of a thing. So basically, what happened is the judges ended up interpreting this more strictly. Obviously, the original purpose of this is for New Yorkers that are homeless to be housed. But they ended up interpreting it so strictly that when the Republican governors in Texas and Florida began sending a few thousand migrants up to New York City as kind of an FU to the liberal cities that have declared themselves sanctuary cities without actually having to deal with the kind of border crisis that Texas does, the first few thousand found that legally. New York had to house them.

00:02:07.24 – 00:02:46.32

And then word got down to Mexico that if you make it to New York City, you will not be turned away. Legally, you don't even have to be a citizen for the state amendment to apply to you. So what began as a few, let's say the first 10 or 15,000 were sent by the Republican governors as a kind of political tactic, has now become tens and tens, and tens and tens of thousands coming of their own volition to New York City. And it's the only state in the country where Mayor Adams has no legal recourse to send people elsewhere. He actually cannot do it.

00:02:46.42 – 00:03:12.00

He's tried to do executive orders, but he legally can't because it's in the state constitution. It's above his power. And now it's taken on a life of its own way, over and above what the Republican governors started. So this is why he's going to the national media and literally saying, I can't do anything about this. I'm trying to do something about this, but I can't.

00:03:12.00 – 00:03:20.70

And we're putting people up in Airbnbs for $100 a night, and the city will be bankrupt in X number of years if we don't find a solution to this.

1Speaker 1
00:03:22.28 – 00:03:39.80

I was looking at a video of the Roosevelt Hotel, which is no longer a hotel. They've essentially said this is now a center for housing migrants. And they've said the restaurant is no longer a restaurant, and sorry, that's just how it is now.

2Speaker 2
00:03:39.80 – 00:03:40.52

Yeah.

1Speaker 1
00:03:40.88 – 00:03:48.62

I mean, what do you do if you own the Roosevelt Hotel and you just wanted it to be a hotel, and now the state just says nope?

2Speaker 2
00:03:48.96 – 00:04:11.28

Yeah. I mean, look, I don't blame any of these people. If I was born in Mexico, we'd all be doing the same thing. It's just a smart thing to do from their perspective. But that doesn't mean, from our perspective, that we should just put out the bat signal to the whole world and say you can come to New York City and we have no legal recourse to move you anywhere else.

1Speaker 1
00:04:11.72 – 00:04:32.68

It's not just New York City. It's other parts of the world. It's strange that recently it's become this crisis where migrants are coming en masse to these places and just flooding them. Like is this orchestrated? Is this just a fact that they found out that they can do it and it's better than where they are?

00:04:32.68 – 00:04:47.74

And if they go there, these places that are, essentially, they're charitably minded and they would like to house people that are down on their luck, but now people are sort of taking advantage of that loophole and just swarming.

2Speaker 2
00:04:48.06 – 00:05:22.50

I think that's what it is. I think the whole Western world has become much more open to immigration recently. Obviously, America was open to immigration in the 19th century, but we were the outlier. All the other countries of the world, the default was closed borders, essentially. So I think the whole world has, out of empathy for the poor and struggling, has wanted to have more permissive immigration, but that sends an incentive to people of the world that they can now come, they can abuse asylum laws.

00:05:22.60 – 00:05:43.54

And again, I don't even blame people for doing this, because it's exactly what I would do if I were born in Guatemala or Syria. I would say, hey, I'm a refugee. This is my story. And I would probably lie about it in order to get a better life than the one life that I had. But this is just a true side effect of those compassionate laws is that people abuse them.

00:05:44.04 – 00:05:52.86

You get immigration pools that are vastly proportionally male, which is how you know that they're not refugees, because where are the women? Right.

00:05:54.92 – 00:06:14.86

And it's a side effect of the intended compassionate immigration policy. This is how this works. Thomas Sowell's great quote, there are no solutions, there are only trade-offs. The policy has a trade-off. It's more compassionate, but it also leads to, in the case of New York, what could be a serious fiscal crisis.

1Speaker 1
00:06:16.06 – 00:06:33.04

Someone told me this. I was looking to check into this, but I figured I'd wait until the podcast. Someone was telling me that the Biden administration is talking about sending people back to Venezuela, deporting Venezuelans. See if you can find anything about this.

2Speaker 2
00:06:33.46 – 00:06:34.60

Why Venezuela specifically?

1Speaker 1
00:06:34.66 – 00:07:00.22

Because Venezuela is dealing with a communist socialist government, and they wouldn't vote for that in America. Now, one of the things that's weird about this crisis is it comes at the same time as people trying to say that you should have no voter ID, and they've openly spoken about it in New York, that people who are illegal immigrants should be allowed to vote, which is really, look, I cannot talk shit.

2Speaker 2
00:07:00.22 – 00:07:01.42

They've been pushing for that for years.

1Speaker 1
00:07:01.56 – 00:07:04.34

I cannot talk shit, because I am the product of immigration, my parents.

2Speaker 2
00:07:04.34 – 00:07:04.94

Yeah, as am I.

1Speaker 1
00:07:05.12 – 00:07:23.44

My grandparents came over here in the 1920s, and that is just, you know, okay. That's why I'm here. Where'd they come from? They came from Italy and Ireland, and that's just why I'm here. So they came over when they knew that they could have a better life in America, and these people are doing the same thing, and I understand it.

00:07:23.86 – 00:07:40.94

But it's just wild that there's no requirements. It's like there's no background checks. There's no checks to see if you're on a terrorist watch list. You're just letting people through. Biden administration will begin deporting Venezuelan migrants directly to Venezuela.

00:07:41.56 – 00:07:43.56

I mean, that is just so transparent.

2Speaker 2
00:07:43.56 – 00:07:47.96

So the idea is Venezuelans are going to vote right-wing, like Cubans, because they hate socialism.

1Speaker 1
00:07:47.96 – 00:07:50.02

Exactly, because it's ruined their country.

2Speaker 2
00:07:50.42 – 00:07:52.04

What is his stated rationale, though?

1Speaker 1
00:07:54.48 – 00:08:13.82

Okay. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas confirmed that the administration has successfully negotiated a deal with Venezuela to execute the policy, but did not say whether Venezuela was getting anything from the U.S. in return. We are a nation of immigrants, and we are a nation of laws, Mayorkas said. at the same Thursday press conference.

00:08:14.32 – 00:08:40.24

Officials said that some migrants have already been identified for deportation. Starting today, the United States will begin direct repatriations of Venezuelan nationals back to their home country. In fact, we have already identified individuals in our custody today who will be removed promptly in the coming days, a senior official said. Venezuelans make up a large share of border crossings, and for years the U.S. has generally been unable to deport them because of frosty diplomatic relations with Venezuela.

00:08:40.80 – 00:09:00.42

Mexico has agreed to take some, but it remains a difficult issue for the administration and for cities receiving migrants. That is so transparent. Interesting. The fact that they're saying Venezuelans and that they're communicating with the Venezuelan government to deport these people, that's so gross. So gross.

2Speaker 2
00:09:00.60 – 00:09:02.80

Yeah, it's very strange, very weirdly selective.

1Speaker 1
00:09:03.28 – 00:09:12.34

It's just transparent. It's very obvious as to why they've been so loose about this border crisis thing in the first place.

2Speaker 2
00:09:12.84 – 00:09:19.94

And I assume you saw that Biden suspended 25 federal laws to start rebuilding the border wall. Did you see that?

1Speaker 1
00:09:20.34 – 00:10:07.16

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00:12:38.68 – 00:12:46.84

They're essentially doing the same thing that Trump did. They all do it. Obama talked about it in like 2013.. They've all talked about it.

2Speaker 2
00:12:47.16 – 00:13:21.48

Speaking of the voter ID thing, though, this is one thing that really made me crazy during COVID. For years, people on the left have been saying that voter ID laws are racist. I don't know if you've paid attention to this at all, but the argument is that Black people, and especially poor Black people, struggle to get IDs. It's never made much sense, because you need an ID to buy a six-pack, you need an ID to open a bank account, you need an ID. All these normal things that people of all classes and races have to do.

00:13:22.48 – 00:13:36.34

And then when in New York City, during COVID, they implemented the policy that to get into any restaurant, any gym, anywhere in the city, you needed VaxCard plus ID.

00:13:38.33 – 00:14:05.92

So me paying attention to the discourse for the past few years, I thought to myself, where is everyone on the left that said Black people don't have IDs? Shouldn't they be calling this policy racist and saying that we are excluding all of the restaurants and gyms and so forth to Black people because you need VaxCard plus ID and Black people can't get IDs? I'm doing the math here. I didn't hear a single peep from anyone of the usual suspects. And I said, this is how you know.

00:14:05.92 – 00:14:10.00

it's a fake belief. They never really believed that Black people can't get IDs.

1Speaker 1
00:14:10.00 – 00:14:53.18

No, it's not just a fake belief. If you want to say something's racist, you could make a much better argument that vaccine mandates are racist because the majority, at least in the beginning of the COVID vaccine rollout, the majority of the people that were refusing it, were African-Americans and Latinos. They were like, we don't buy this, especially when you deal with the Tuskegee crisis, when you hear about the times in the past where medical interventions are specifically targeted or there's been evil shit that they've done specifically to Black Americans. And they're suspicious.

2Speaker 2
00:14:53.66 – 00:14:53.82

Yeah.

1Speaker 1
00:14:54.74 – 00:14:55.38

Right, and so.

2Speaker 2
00:14:55.68 – 00:15:10.84

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, definitely. So I was always curious, was it – I think in the Black community in general, people are just more suspicious of the government in general, in every possible way, from dealing with the police to dealing with just –.

1Speaker 1
00:15:10.84 – 00:15:11.20

Court systems.

2Speaker 2
00:15:11.68 – 00:15:27.36

In any domain. Yeah. And they did make the argument that COVID itself was systemically racist because it was, at least in the beginning, it was disproportionately killing Black people. I thought this was, again, this is a very simplistic way of thinking.

1Speaker 1
00:15:27.70 – 00:15:27.96

Yeah.

2Speaker 2
00:15:28.14 – 00:15:58.26

I don't equate disparities with racism, but I noticed the Washington Post ran a story a few years later that maybe by 2022 COVID was disproportionately killing white people, right? Because situations change and it's just very complicated, right? Very few things fall equally along every population in life. And I asked the question, okay, did systemic racism change its direction? Is COVID now anti-white?

00:15:58.66 – 00:16:18.16

Well, no, the truth is that, you know, every disease has a different racial profile in terms of who it affects. Hispanics, for whatever reason, no one understands it. Hispanics have the lowest maternal mortality rates, lower than white people. Nobody gets it. It could be any number of things.

00:16:18.36 – 00:16:59.32

There are many cancers that preferentially – some kill Black people more often, some kill white people more often. If you look at the CDC charts, you'll just find every disease has its own profile. and rather than say, okay, this disease is racist because it has a disproportion, we should all back off the R word a little bit and realize that these things are very complicated, multifactorial, and to reduce it all to racism is just very –. we've gotten into this thing where we have a hammer and everything looks like a nail and the media knows that racism stories get clicks, so everything becomes about that.

1Speaker 1
00:16:59.32 – 00:17:27.52

Yeah, it becomes a failure of mainstream media. And that, Darren, what you're talking about, about the need for clicks, that's a huge part of this failure is that they rely on people paying attention. So to pay attention to a story, like, in order to be incentivized, it has to be something that outrages you or infuriates or scares you. And so those are the things that they lead with. And it's good and it's bad.

00:17:27.52 – 00:18:01.46

The good part is it's given rise in a major way to independent journalism. So many people have lost faith in what they deem to be corrupt, very biased, and obviously corporate-influenced mainstream media, because they'll hide certain narratives. If it's Fox News, they will never criticize the right. Everything is about the left. If it's CNN, everything is about the right being fools and the left being the ones that are on the right side of history.

00:18:01.68 – 00:18:04.66

It's just shitty journalism.

2Speaker 2
00:18:05.70 – 00:18:20.48

You know comedian Ryan Long, right? Yes. You've probably seen his skit where he takes footage of the BLM protests and the police brutality videos, and he says, I give half of them to CNN and half of them to Fox.

1Speaker 1
00:18:22.10 – 00:18:23.34

What do you mean?

2Speaker 2
00:18:23.34 – 00:18:54.50

He has this hilarious skit where he's like, to cameramen, essentially to media organizations, what do you do with that other half of the footage? You shouldn't just waste it. You should give it to the other side. So give the videos of police officers beating up protesters, you give that to CNN, and you give the videos of rioters burning down mom-and-pop shops to give that to Fox. It's almost like an infomercial for how he doesn't waste any bit of the animal when he cooks the food.

00:18:55.24 – 00:18:56.38

It's very funny.

1Speaker 1
00:18:57.74 – 00:19:12.26

It's a failure. Actual journalism should be unbiased, objective, people discussing what is actually going on, and that is definitely not the case, and that's part of what we're running into. When it comes to the COVID deaths,

00:19:14.56 – 00:19:49.22

so many factors were never discussed, and one of the big ones that seems to affect the African-American community more than other people is vitamin D deficiencies. The reason why there's so much melanin in African-American skin is because people in Africa deal with very hot climates and direct contact with sunlight, and so they have protection from that. The reason why people became white is because they moved to areas that are covered with clouds, like England. It's not a fucking coincidence that people there are pale as paper. It's because they're basically a solar panel for vitamin D.

00:19:49.62 – 00:20:24.34

Their body's trying to produce more vitamin D, and the way to do that is to produce less melanin. My friend who was a doctor in New York City said that when he was a doctor and he would find sick people that would come to the hospital and he would test them for levels of vitamin D, he would find oftentimes undetectable levels of vitamin T in some African-Americans who weren't supplementing and weren't getting sun exposure. And he's like, it is catastrophic for your health. It's catastrophic for your immune system. And none of this was ever discussed, of course, because there was a binary solution.

00:20:24.62 – 00:21:09.34

Like, it was this experimental mRNA vaccine or nothing, and any other solution was conspiracy theory, foolishness, anything else to improve your health, even on top of that vaccine, even saying, yes, you should get vaccinated, but also you should lose weight. Also, you should take vitamins and you should exercise, and you should eat better and don't drink, don't smoke. Do these things that are going to improve your overall metabolic health. There was zero of that, because it wasn't journalism. It was all promoted by people who are advertising on these mainstream media platforms, and that was what it is, and that's what we're dealing with.

00:21:09.44 – 00:21:37.84

And again, it's good and it is bad. The good thing is it's led people, I think, to have the lowest level of trust ever in mainstream media in our lifetimes. I mean, there was a recent CNN ratings poll. They got like 43,000 people watching CNN, which is insane. I mean, that is like an average comedian with 100,000 followers.

00:21:37.84 – 00:21:56.34

real. That's nuts. It's nuts that this massive, major, worldwide international news organization is getting 43,000 people watching their show, but it's because people have completely lost faith in whether or not these people are telling the truth.

2Speaker 2
00:21:56.66 – 00:22:36.86

So I watched your RFK Jr. episode, and I watched the whole thing very carefully. I read his books and checked the footnotes, and all of the people that are my friends, that are very smart people, really disagreed with the fact that I liked him. So I had to do a lot of soul-searching about what it is that resonated with me, but not with all of my intellectual and journalist colleagues, that I tend to agree with about 90% of stuff. I really had to do some soul-searching,

00:22:38.44 – 00:23:26.18

and what I came out feeling was that it wasn't that I agreed with RFK about every claim that he made. In fact, there are certain claims that he made that I double-checked that were flat-out wrong. It's that I felt the version of RFK portrayed in the mainstream media was a totally different person from the real RFK, and that there was a framing put around him that was so obviously uncharitable and bad faith. So, for example, if I told you, if I'm one of those people that was obsessed with getting fluoride out of the water, and that was my cause in life, as a journalist, what would you label me?

00:23:28.58 – 00:23:30.18

Well... Coleman Hughes, the...

1Speaker 1
00:23:30.18 – 00:23:32.20

Yeah, the conspiracy theorist.

2Speaker 2
00:23:32.30 – 00:23:33.64

Or even more neutrally...

1Speaker 1
00:23:33.64 – 00:23:34.46

The fluoride denier.

2Speaker 2
00:23:34.84 – 00:23:42.00

Anti-fluoride activist or something, right? Now, would you call me an anti-water activist? Ha! Well, of course not. That wouldn't make any sense.

00:23:42.08 – 00:23:46.00

Right. If I was someone that wanted to take, like, my mother's whole thing,

00:23:47.62 – 00:24:00.24

was she wanted to take high-fructose corn syrup out of food. She was very, this was a big issue for her. Would you call her an anti-high-fructose corn syrup addict, as a journalist, or an anti-food activist? Well, no.

00:24:01.88 – 00:24:35.70

So, RFK Jr., you know, and I don't think he's right about this, but, just as a matter of journalistic accuracy, his whole project with vaccines has been to take stuff out of the vaccines that he thinks is toxic, right? His most anti-vax, quote-unquote book is Thimerosal, Let the Science Speak. He's trying to take the thimerosal out of vaccines. Now, if I were describing this guy, even if I disagreed with every word he said as a journalist, I would call him an anti-thimerosal activist, not an anti-vaccine activist. Right.

00:24:35.82 – 00:25:30.64

Because why would you advocate taking A out of B if you thought B was also poison? What's the point of taking poison out of poison? Right. So, the framing of him in the mainstream media as an anti-vaccine activist, to me, seemed already like not at all the framing an objective journalist would put on the issue, even if he's wrong about the facts. And that clear bias in the treatment of him, rather than treating him like a normal politician and, you know, putting your perspective on it, putting this framing on him as a crazy guy, as a crackpot, that seemed to me, I think that is really what rubbed me the wrong way about how so many people were treating him.

1Speaker 1
00:25:31.04 – 00:26:07.14

Well, also, they don't understand his work before he became this vaccine skeptic, or this person who discussed the apparent connection between some adverse events and some adverse effects and some vaccines. He started off as an environmental lawyer and his work helped clean up the Hudson River. And you could research it. It's like he did amazing work and he held corporations responsible that were polluting. And because of his work, the Hudson River made a remarkable comeback.

00:26:07.62 – 00:26:27.60

And then these women came to him and they said, you are researching all these toxins and pollutants that get released in the water. I want you to do this with vaccines. And they started talking to him. And this woman came to his door and she said, I'm not leaving until you look at this. And she gave him a stack of files and documents and he started looking at it.

00:26:27.90 – 00:26:44.58

He started looking at the difference between ethyl mercury and mercury, or methyl mercury and ethyl mercury. What's the difference? And which ones are toxic? And why are they in the vaccines in the first place? And like, why are the manufacturers that make vaccines not liable at all for adverse effects?

00:26:44.72 – 00:27:10.14

And so he starts doing a deep dive in this and he finds out that it's all foreboding, right? This is all forbidden subject. If you talk about it, you'll be labeled a vaccine denier or an anti-vaccine person, which is like the worst anti-science pejorative that someone can label on someone who wants to be taken seriously. And he realizes that he has to go down this road. And I can't believe, he's like, I can't believe I have to go down this road, but I have to go down this road.

00:27:10.18 – 00:27:54.60

And he starts researching. And he starts talking about it openly and frankly, courageously. And there is some very bizarre, you know, correlation, not necessary, causality, right? Because it's not really being openly studied in terms of like, it's not like, it's not being discussed in mainstream media. It's not something that's being discussed openly in universities and taught in schools and medical school, but there seems to be a very, a rise in adverse effects and all sorts of issues that people are having once they started adding more vaccines to the rollout, which also happened right after they made these vaccines and the companies that manufacture them no longer liable for any adverse effects.

00:27:55.20 – 00:28:18.22

And it's sketchy stuff, because you can't talk about it. And whenever there's something that you can't talk about, it gets real weird because you can't just look at it and say, okay, what is actually going on? objectively? Let's not signal to everyone that I'm on the side of science and I'm the side of reason and I'm on the side of, you know,

00:28:19.96 – 00:28:37.32

what's best for the whole world. Let's just look at what is actually happening, and no one wants to do that, because if you even just start dipping your toes in those waters, people are like, wait, what are you saying? Are you a vaccine skeptic? Are you a vaccine denier? Are you anti-vax?

00:28:37.88 – 00:29:00.54

Which is not something that he's like, I've been vaccinated. My whole family's been vaccinated. This is not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is there are proven effects that mercury and aluminum have on human beings, particularly in their developmental stage, that seem to be detrimental. So why aren't we looking at this?

2Speaker 2
00:29:01.28 – 00:29:18.70

I think what happens when the experts, the real experts, abandon a line of inquiry because it becomes taboo, because everyone's blood pressure rises when the topic comes up and we have that caveman instinct that we may get socially ostracized for something, right?

1Speaker 1
00:29:19.08 – 00:29:19.72

That's a big one.

2Speaker 2
00:29:19.82 – 00:29:35.54

Totally. When that happens, the experts abandon a line of inquiry. The non-experts are going to come in and do the job and they're going to do it non-expertly, by definition. Right. So that's what I feel has happened around the conversation with vaccines.

00:29:35.54 – 00:29:51.26

The experts have been so dismissive of any skepticism, right? Yes. Generally, skepticism is a good thing. You're taught to be a skeptic, right? But the word is pejorative in this case.

00:29:52.28 – 00:29:53.82

And rather than really.

00:29:56.96 – 00:30:35.74

compassionately going into the evidence and saying, I'm going to go all the way down the rabbit hole with you and as an expert, I'm not going to talk down to you, but I'm going to explain to you what I may know that you don't, and I'm going to go into it with an open mind, knowing that some vaccines have turned out to be unnecessary in the past. Some vaccines have caused damage in the past. Rather than make the whole area taboo and just making everyone feel like a non-person who's there, the best experts should shine a light on it. Really, they should shine a light on it. And then someone, people wouldn't be necessarily running to a lawyer, an environmental lawyer, for their narratives about this issue.

00:30:36.26 – 00:30:40.98

And I think that that's what happens when the expert class abandons a particular line of inquiry.

1Speaker 1
00:30:42.02 – 00:30:48.34

Unquestionably. Yeah, that's a very good point. And then there's also the revolving door between the FDA and pharmaceutical companies.

2Speaker 2
00:30:48.36 – 00:30:49.32

Which no one denies, that.

1Speaker 1
00:30:49.46 – 00:31:07.12

No one denies. You cannot. There's clear incentives that are in place, just based on the past, just based on the fact that people have been able to parlay. these jobs, go from being a part of the FDA to being a part of Pfizer and being a part of all these other pharmaceutical drug companies.

2Speaker 2
00:31:07.56 – 00:31:10.82

So I don't know if he mentioned this specifically on your...

1Speaker 1
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2Speaker 2
00:33:50.94 – 00:33:56.42

I looked into this because of his book and talked about it on some other podcasts.

00:33:59.46 – 00:34:25.30

Around 2000,, the rota shield, the rotavirus vaccine, 7 of the 13 people responsible for approving that vaccine at the CDC and the FDA, 7 of 13,. so a majority, had direct financial ties to companies that were producing that exact kind of vaccine right at the time. Yeah. So you have to think to yourself, common sense, that's insane. That can't be how the system should work.

1Speaker 1
00:34:25.52 – 00:34:26.08

Without doubt.

2Speaker 2
00:34:26.16 – 00:34:51.42

Congress looked into it, and they reported on this. They said, this is a disaster. They had to recall the vaccine, by the way, because it was causing intussusception in infants. And we've sort of been assured that they've cleaned up their act since then, and that seems to be the narrative that they've cleaned up their act. I'm sure there was some panic and there was changing of policies, right?

00:34:52.02 – 00:35:22.32

But as a journalist, our job is not to trust the government. Our job is to verify. And the status quo, I looked into it recently, is that the CDC and the FDA, they're still allowed to appoint members of those panels who have conflicts of interest, so long as they're below a certain bar of conflict of interest. Now, who determines where the bar is? They determine where the bar is.

00:35:23.40 – 00:35:57.16

And they're not required by law at all to report their deliberations publicly. So, as an objective outsider, I would like to believe, I would like to believe that CDC and the FDA, I don't think they're evil people, I don't think they're lizard people, I think they're whatever. I would like to believe that they're making good decisions. But as a journalist, you have to be able to verify it, or else why should I trust? So if they're self-policing and not required to report, I think people should be, this is my problem.

00:35:57.84 – 00:36:26.14

When Rand Paul is aggressively pressing Fauci about conflicts of interest in Congress, journalists should be like, this guy's doing our job. We're supposed to be doing this. Instead, they label him as some kind of bad person. Journalists are supposed to aggressively police the government. And when you don't do that, you end up getting people doing the job for you and they may not do it perfectly and they may overstep.

00:36:26.94 – 00:36:43.16

But shouldn't the response be, how come mainstream journalism isn't pressing Fauci like that? We should have done it, and we should have done it 10 times harder and more precisely than Rand Paul did it. That should be the response, not Rand Paul's a conspiracy theorist.

1Speaker 1
00:36:43.16 – 00:37:13.00

But the problem is money. The problem is, when you look at the incredible amount of money that pharmaceutical drug companies spend on advertising, they essentially have control of the narrative. Whether people are directly told not to discuss these things, it is most certainly on the table that they know that there'll be repercussions. And so they don't report on them. Look, if you look at the Purdue Pharma crisis, have you seen the Netflix documentary Painkiller?

00:37:13.56 – 00:37:16.18

It's not a documentary. It's like a docudrama series.

2Speaker 2
00:37:16.30 – 00:37:17.30

I saw the Hulu version.

1Speaker 1
00:37:17.92 – 00:37:42.74

I didn't see that one. That's dope, sick, right? That one's excellent too. It was great. But when they show how it's captured by money and when they show that they clearly knew that this was, it's an opiate, and they are addictive, and yet they somehow or another use the language, many believe, or some believe.

00:37:43.08 – 00:37:53.80

What was the exact wording? Some believe it is not addictive. Like who the fuck uses that for something that's going to be prescribed to millions of people? That's insanity. And it turns out, oh my God, it's very addictive.

00:37:54.30 – 00:38:26.10

Oh my God, it caused a massive opiate crisis that didn't exist anywhere else in the world. The United States had this opioid crisis that it was unparalleled. There was nothing like it anywhere else in the world. And it was directly because of the influence that these massive companies had, the amount of money they were spreading around, the revolving door between the FDA and these pharmaceutical drug companies, and the repercussions on millions of Americans. Who knows how many people died of overdoses?

00:38:26.32 – 00:38:35.76

Who knows how many families were wrecked? How many lives were lost, just destroyed by addiction from something that was prescribed to them as being safe and effective by doctors?

2Speaker 2
00:38:36.46 – 00:39:19.42

Yeah, no, it's insane. I know a few months ago, the city of San Francisco, I believe, won a lawsuit against Walgreens, for, it might've been hundreds of millions, I can check exactly. And in the report, in the discovery for the lawsuit, they were just talking about the sheer number of doctors who were found to be corruptly prescribed. It wasn't like one or two doctors. It was a number that was so high that I remember thinking, I mean, how can a person that reads this really trust their doctor after reading this?

00:39:20.16 – 00:39:20.28

Yeah.

1Speaker 1
00:39:21.36 – 00:39:31.38

You have to have a good doctor. Unfortunately, most doctors are captured as well, including researchers, and that's one of the things. Did you read RFK Jr.'s book, The Real Anthony Fauci?

2Speaker 2
00:39:31.62 – 00:39:32.10

Yeah, I did.

1Speaker 1
00:39:32.42 – 00:39:33.38

What did you think of that book?

2Speaker 2
00:39:34.96 – 00:39:52.88

So, my view of that book is that I don't jump to... RFK basically puts the worst possible interpretation of everything. Fauci did, kind of in the same way that Christopher Hitchens did with Bill Clinton, for example.

00:39:55.16 – 00:40:03.72

When Bill Clinton bombed the Al-Shifa factory in Sudan that was said to have weapons, turned out to have medicine, turned out to have no link to Al-Qaeda,

00:40:05.68 – 00:40:23.12

Hitchens wrote that he did this to distract the public from the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Now, that's possible. I can't rule it out. I'm not saying it's something he wouldn't do, but without direct evidence for it, my bar is that I don't jump to the worst motives. That's not how I tend to think.

1Speaker 1
00:40:23.46 – 00:40:40.96

Well, I appreciate that about you. You are incredibly reasonable and objective in that regard, and that is important. Hitchens, he was brilliant, but he was also angry, and he did like to throw rocks.

2Speaker 2
00:40:41.26 – 00:41:35.10

Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger, Gandhi. He wasn't factually wrong about any of his journalism about them, but there's often just uncertainty about why people do things, and a certain type of person jumps to the evil end of the uncertainty. I feel I'm kind of more in the middle. So Fauci made tons of horrible public statements, later found to be false, and of course, I think we all, everyone, would admit now that he suppressed Lab League for self-interested reasons, him and Francis Collins, but I think RFK, he strings together every mistake and assumes the worst end of that spectrum, which could be right, but it's not something, I don't like making those accusations without, like a flaming gun evidence.

1Speaker 1
00:41:35.32 – 00:41:57.36

Yes, and there's recent ones that people are talking about now, that this was from the Defense Department, and that this was, that COVID was a bioweapon. Well, you know, a bioweapon that accidentally got released. Like, do you have, would that hold up in court? Like, do you have enough evidence to say that publicly? And is it irresponsible to say that publicly?

00:41:57.86 – 00:42:34.76

Because what, like, my take on it from a clearly, obviously a non-scientist, is if I was a researcher and my education was in viruses, and specifically coronaviruses, I would be looking to do research on coronaviruses, and gain-of-function research is one way, whether it's dangerous or not, and the Obama administration, Obama outlawed it, he stopped it in 2014,. right? It's sketchy work, because what you're doing is you're making viruses worse. But are you doing it specifically to release them on people, or are you doing it to understand the viruses?

2Speaker 2
00:42:35.10 – 00:42:38.54

I think scientists do stuff because it's super cool to them.

1Speaker 1
00:42:38.54 – 00:42:39.74

Yeah, there's a lot of that.

2Speaker 2
00:42:39.86 – 00:43:02.00

Put yourself in the mindset of a scientist, they love this, right? Like, this is their whole life. If you tell them there's some new cool thing, we can now make viruses, we can insert specific strings of code into viruses that make them easily acquired by humanized mice. I mean, this is like giving a kid Legos, right? Yes.

00:43:02.10 – 00:43:29.88

So they don't have a bad bone in their body, but if it can be done, they will do it, because it's cool, and they will justify it to get funding. They have to justify it in terms of a public health rationale. The truth is, they're nerds, and they want to do it because it's cool, and I don't blame them. But the government's responsibility is to say, that is over the line, and that is likely to leak, given how common lab leaks are. We cannot be intentionally making viruses more deadly.

1Speaker 1
00:43:30.22 – 00:43:31.36

Have you ever been to one of those labs?

2Speaker 2
00:43:31.84 – 00:43:38.02

I've been in a BSL-3 lab. I've been in a lab of the same security as the one in Wuhan.

1Speaker 1
00:43:38.34 – 00:43:39.28

I went to the one in Galveston.

2Speaker 2
00:43:39.28 – 00:43:42.22

And I had no clearance to be in there, by the way. I had no clearance to be in there.

1Speaker 1
00:43:42.22 – 00:43:42.82

How'd you get in there?

2Speaker 2
00:43:43.90 – 00:43:47.40

Girl I was dating at the time was working in there. She wanted to show me the mice. Oh, my God.

1Speaker 1
00:43:47.64 – 00:43:48.42

That's so crazy.

2Speaker 2
00:43:48.66 – 00:44:07.94

At Columbia University. But this goes to show you, this is why, when I read that they were tweaking with coronaviruses in a BSL-3 lab, oh, BSL-3 must be very high security. I was like, no, no, I just walked into one a few weeks ago. With your girlfriend? Yeah, because no lab, every lab, is as secure as the people that work there.

00:44:08.10 – 00:44:08.84

It's just people.

1Speaker 1
00:44:09.08 – 00:44:09.54

It's human beings.

2Speaker 2
00:44:09.56 – 00:44:14.20

And they get tired. If you're on two hours of sleep, you forget to put your gloves on today.

1Speaker 1
00:44:14.72 – 00:44:20.46

That's the story of every horror movie, right? Of course. That's the story of, what is that, 28 Days Later? They're working.

2Speaker 2
00:44:20.46 – 00:44:21.40

on some virus.

1Speaker 1
00:44:21.64 – 00:44:22.08

Oh, you don't?

2Speaker 2
00:44:22.16 – 00:44:23.36

No, I can't handle it. Ah!

1Speaker 1
00:44:24.12 – 00:44:38.58

28 Days Later is an amazing one. It's the best zombie movie of all time. And it's a lab leak. It turns people into these ferocious things, which, by the way, happens in nature. What do you think rabies is?

00:44:39.48 – 00:45:00.74

Like, what is rabies? Rabies is a disease that affects animals, that makes them fearless and aggressive and makes them want to transmit that disease to you by biting you. And if you give it to human beings, it's like 100% fatal or 99% fatal, unless you take care of it within a certain time period. And with animals, it's fatal. And, you know, they have to get rabies shots.

00:45:01.02 – 00:45:16.66

It's one excellent example of how vaccines have really helped people. Vaccines have helped human beings avoid getting fucking rabies. You know, rabies is scary. Rabies is essentially a real zombie virus. Because it turns...

00:45:16.66 – 00:45:31.30

Have you ever seen an animal that has rabies? They just have no fear of you. They just want to come after you and bite you like a fucking zombie. So it's... Like, if I was a guy who was researching rabies, I would go, how do we make this even crazier?

00:45:33.38 – 00:45:47.76

How do we turn this into someone who, like, no longer needs oxygen and can just fucking exist in a zombie state? You don't need blood pumping to your muscles anymore. Now this parasite has taken over your body, which exists in the cordyceps mushrooms. Have you ever seen that?

2Speaker 2
00:45:48.08 – 00:45:48.14

No.

1Speaker 1
00:45:49.08 – 00:46:04.80

Cordyceps mushrooms infect ants. And they get into the ants' body. And ants recognize this and know that this thing is going to grow mushrooms. So the ants carry this other ant out of town. They get them the fuck out of town.

00:46:04.94 – 00:46:26.10

So before the cordyceps mushrooms blow and the spores spray through the air and infect all the other ants, these ants recognize, oh, this motherfucker's got it. We gotta get him out of here. And they'll carry him way the fuck out of town. Like, there's some sort of memory or some knowledge or understanding of the danger of this specific fungus that's growing on this dead ant.

2Speaker 2
00:46:26.26 – 00:46:26.96

That's amazing.

1Speaker 1
00:46:27.06 – 00:46:28.96

we gotta get him the fuck out of here.

2Speaker 2
00:46:29.46 – 00:46:31.18

Evolution is amazing. It's amazing.

1Speaker 1
00:46:31.42 – 00:46:56.44

There's another one where there's an aquatic worm that grows inside grasshoppers and convinces the grasshopper to commit suicide. It rewires the grasshopper's mind and commits it to jumping into water so that it can be born. So it comes out of the body of this grasshopper that's drowning and begins its life. Dude, there's a ton of those. There's another one called toxoplasmosis.

00:46:56.76 – 00:47:06.10

The reason why they tell women to stop, you can't touch cat litter. Because some insane amount of feral. cats have toxoplasmosis. Like, probably all of them.

2Speaker 2
00:47:06.30 – 00:47:11.50

Speaking of grasshoppers, for most of my life, I didn't know that grasshoppers and locusts were the same thing.

1Speaker 1
00:47:11.62 – 00:47:22.48

I didn't either until a few years ago, when we were looking at swarms. What do they call it? The Great Plains, when that was happening. When people lost all their crops. It's like a numbers thing, right?

00:47:22.82 – 00:47:24.50

Or some hormonal switch.

2Speaker 2
00:47:24.62 – 00:47:25.90

They get into some mode.

1Speaker 1
00:47:26.34 – 00:47:38.94

Yeah. Well, that exists in mammals too, man. It exists in pigs. With pigs, when they let a pig loose, like you see, a cute little pig that you see, oh, he's so sweet. You let that motherfucker loose, he will become a wild boar.

00:47:39.40 – 00:47:57.24

And it happens quickly. I believe it happens. the metamorphosis starts to take place within like six weeks or something. See if you can find that. But what happens is a body sends a signal, or the mind sends a signal to the body, or the system knows that you're on your own now, motherfucker.

00:47:57.62 – 00:48:07.60

So your whole body changes. Your snout extends. The males grow tusks. They get furry, thicker hair. They literally become a wild boar.

00:48:07.74 – 00:48:14.56

I used to think a wild boar was a different thing. No, it's the same thing. Wow. It's one genus. It's Sucropha.

00:48:15.04 – 00:48:30.70

It's one specific animal. If you domesticate it, it's cute and it's babe. It's a pig. If you don't, it's this fucking plague of mammals that can have three litters a year. It starts having a litter when it's six months old.

00:48:31.30 – 00:48:38.88

Within a couple of years, they're 200 pounds and they eat constantly. And all they do is eat and fuck and make more pigs. And they're smart.

2Speaker 2
00:48:39.94 – 00:48:40.66

Wow.

1Speaker 1
00:48:40.96 – 00:48:41.30

Yeah.

2Speaker 2
00:48:41.58 – 00:48:42.30

Wow.

1Speaker 1
00:48:43.00 – 00:49:14.24

So we know that these things are fucking dangerous. And if we're monkeying around with nature, but also we know that there have been medical interventions. There's been medical technology. There's been research that's done, that's enhanced people's lives, saved people's lives, rescued people from fatal diseases, to cast light on the entire pharmaceutical industry, that it's like this horrible monster of a thing that's destroying lives. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

00:49:14.54 – 00:49:35.64

What it is is a bunch of people that are, like, you're saying, scientists who figure things out because it's cool. And they get married to people who just want to make money. And so they're stock market psychos. And there's a lot of psychos out there. And the psychos say, okay, we got this thing and we're making X, but I think we can get to Z.

00:49:35.82 – 00:49:51.14

We just got to get this guy to say this and this regulation to pass, and then we're in Z. And this guy is thinking of himself doing coke off a stripper's ass on a yacht. That's what he's thinking of. He's not thinking of saving the world. But the scientists that are making all this stuff, they're just fucking scientists.

00:49:51.52 – 00:50:10.36

And part of the problem with getting the money attached to the regulatory body and attached to the scientists is because then there's someone who doles out the funding. And maybe that guy is connected to the money side. And maybe that guy was actually a doctor. And now you've got this crazy situation when these doctors can't even tell the truth. Scientists can't tell the truth.

00:50:10.46 – 00:50:21.22

They can't talk openly about the reservations that they have about some of these specific types of research that they're doing. Like, hey, should we be doing this? They can't say anything. They can't. Because they're connected.

00:50:21.60 – 00:50:36.28

And if they get ostracized from that system, they're fucked. Their career is fucked. There's no recourse. They don't have anything to fall back on. So we've got a system, much like our governmental system, much like our media, that's captured by money.

00:50:36.28 – 00:50:44.60

And it's not that the journalists are bad people. It's just. that's the fucking game they're playing. That's the game they're playing.

2Speaker 2
00:50:44.94 – 00:50:53.76

Well, I think that the journalists, most of the journalists I know aren't necessarily captured themselves by money, but they may be captured by ideology and groupthink.

1Speaker 1
00:50:54.12 – 00:50:55.32

Yes, there's a lot of that, I'm sure.

2Speaker 2
00:50:56.80 – 00:51:12.88

But, so, for example, on the money end, I was astounded that it was not widely reported and that you have to get to someone like RFK Jr. to tell you this, that the NIAID had a financial stake in the Moderna vaccine.

1Speaker 1
00:51:14.12 – 00:51:15.86

Yeah, how much money did they make off of it?

2Speaker 2
00:51:16.34 – 00:51:19.76

One of the payments was like several hundred million dollars. That was one lump sum.

1Speaker 1
00:51:19.76 – 00:51:25.24

Well, that's not enough to affect the way people think. No, that's not enough to affect the way... No, I'm kidding.

2Speaker 2
00:51:26.24 – 00:51:30.06

I couldn't tell. I'm sorry. I was like, what the fuck? I couldn't help myself.

1Speaker 1
00:51:30.80 – 00:51:31.80

It's just so crazy.

2Speaker 2
00:51:31.80 – 00:51:34.46

One lump sum was like $400 million.

1Speaker 1
00:51:34.66 – 00:51:39.50

Oh, that's not that much. That's just a little taste. Right.

2Speaker 2
00:51:39.62 – 00:52:08.70

So, when I see the director of the NIAID, Anthony Fauci, former director, talk about the Moderna vaccine, as a journalist, should my default be to trust everything he says because he's the government, or should I say, he may be conflicted. Let's do what great journalism does and pressure, test everything he says. Demand the documents on everything he says. And what he says may turn out to be right. I don't assume it's wrong.

00:52:08.88 – 00:52:24.10

Right. But that should be. the job of mainstream journalists is to pressure, test everything. When you don't do it, my point is, it's left to the RFK juniors of the world, who end up getting certain things very wrong because they're one person. Right.

00:52:24.14 – 00:52:36.96

It's not what they do. And so, for example, like I told you, I was really going through all the claims in RFK Junior's book, because some of them are just insane, turn out to be true. Some of them are insane, turn out not to be true.

1Speaker 1
00:52:37.34 – 00:52:38.50

What did you find? that wasn't true?

2Speaker 2
00:52:38.74 – 00:52:57.06

So, for example, he cited a study. He said that the DTP vaccine in the 1970s hurt or killed one out of 300 kids. So, I clicked on the study. I read every single sentence of the study twice down. There was nothing in there.

00:52:57.06 – 00:52:58.32

that said one in 300..

1Speaker 1
00:52:58.32 – 00:53:00.38

What was the data that they gave?

2Speaker 2
00:53:00.64 – 00:53:12.44

It didn't even give a clear number, and the numbers you could piece together were orders of magnitude smaller than that. And I was surprised to find that.

1Speaker 1
00:53:12.98 – 00:53:22.56

Is that due to a lack of data? Like, there's an assumption that the VAERS system is grossly underreported, correct? Yeah.

2Speaker 2
00:53:22.88 – 00:53:24.62

Yeah, there's an assumption, but, you know, yes.

1Speaker 1
00:53:24.62 – 00:53:26.06

Is that an assumption? Is that proven?

2Speaker 2
00:53:26.38 – 00:53:35.00

I think so. I think that checks out. But with this claim, he was citing a specific study, and he put it right there, and it just wasn't in the study, right?

1Speaker 1
00:53:35.02 – 00:53:45.94

Right. So, you have to use the actual data that's in the study. That's what happens. If you're saying a study showed that, or if you're just saying the number and not saying where you're getting this information,

00:53:47.62 – 00:53:48.42

then it's...

2Speaker 2
00:53:48.42 – 00:53:57.04

He really cites every single one of his claims. This is why I thought it was such a cop-out that that guy you were in a little Twitter spat with...

1Speaker 1
00:53:57.68 – 00:53:58.32

Oh, Peter Hotez?

2Speaker 2
00:53:58.56 – 00:54:06.58

Yeah, Peter Hotez. If you're an expert on this, and you have this guy, that you're saying... Total misinformation.

1Speaker 1
00:54:07.24 – 00:54:07.52

Yeah.

2Speaker 2
00:54:07.68 – 00:54:36.18

He's got every single one of the claims he made on your show in one of his books with a footnote. Peter Hotez, if this is his job, and this is important to him, should absolutely spend the time... What could be more important, right? If you're saying that, I'm an expert in this, and this guy is dangerous for the world, you can't then say, well, I don't have time to go in his book and click on every footnote and show showing receipts for why he's wrong about everything. That was a total cop-out of him to say, oh, this is not worth my time.

00:54:36.32 – 00:54:39.82

You can't debate a conspiracy theorist. I don't think any of that is true.

1Speaker 1
00:54:40.08 – 00:55:09.98

Well, I think he's very anxious. And, you know, let me tell you my history with Peter Hotez, because I met Peter Hotez in, like, 2012.. I had him on an episode of Joe Rogan Questions Everything, and we were talking about viruses. And I found him to be a really fascinating, very intelligent man who's dedicated his life to trying to help people, specifically of tropical diseases. Because there's a real issue in tropical disease.

00:55:10.04 – 00:55:40.58

He was telling me that people that live in tropical climates, like, the vast majority of them, have some kind of parasites. You know, which is just, you know, and what he wanted to talk about was that. I think when COVID came along, there was this psychological angst that was overwhelming, even to people that are fairly good at keeping their shit together. Like, I think of myself as someone who's pretty good at keeping my shit together. I don't freak out too much about things.

00:55:41.26 – 00:56:14.14

And so, with COVID, I was like, all right, well, I guess this is a real thing, and we're going to have to, you know, hole up in the house for a while and two weeks to flatten the curve and make sure we have food and power. You start thinking about things like, okay, if I needed to get food for my family, if I needed to get out of here, how much gas do I need? Like, there's a real air. There's a feeling in the air where, like, okay, we're in an unprecedented state of the unknown and chaos, and this could get worse. Like, this virus could mutate into something that's just killing everybody.

00:56:16.28 – 00:56:37.94

That level of anxiety prompts people to look for solutions that are very binary, and it prompts people to dig their heels into what their decision is to do this. Like, should we go into the basement in the horror movie, or should we get the fuck out of here? I think we should get the fuck out of here. Let's go in the... We've got to go in the basement.

00:56:38.14 – 00:56:45.00

We've got to go in the basement. There's these decisions that people make in these traumatic situations. Like, do we hide? Do we run? What do we do?

00:56:45.70 – 00:56:56.30

And when they have a decision that they've made, like, the decision, there's only one decision. This decision is this. We have to take this one vaccine. That's the only thing that we can do. And everybody starts thinking, okay, well, wait, fine.

00:56:56.38 – 00:57:12.48

We have a solution. And everybody that's opposed to that, you're fucking it up! You're fucking it up for everybody! And I think that was the feeling in the air, and I certainly felt that when I... When CNN, was saying I was taking horse dewormer, like, when I was being attacked for taking out...

00:57:12.48 – 00:57:25.20

When I said that I was taking monoclonal antibodies and IV vitamins, all these other things, too, I was just saying, this is what I took, and now I'm better. Thank you. I gotta cancel my shows. That's all it was. It wasn't some political declaration or some anti-vaccine.

00:57:26.18 – 00:57:36.00

It was just. there was a reality of what I took. I told everybody what I took. But there's this feeling from everybody, you're fucking this up! You're gonna make sure people don't do it!

00:57:36.12 – 00:57:47.48

Because people wanted to believe that there was a way out of this. that was very binary, very simple. This is our solution. Everybody get on board. Everybody who's not on board is ruining it for the world.

00:57:47.66 – 00:58:19.70

And you saw the fucking cruel way people would talk... People who would think of themselves as compassionate, progressive people, right? Progressives, left-wing people, would... The worst thing about unvaccinated people dying because they didn't trust pharmaceutical drug companies that are captured by money and the media that is captured by them, their money, and the regulatory... The fact that people were just unwilling to look at the big picture because they wanted that fucking solution.

00:58:20.32 – 00:58:57.64

And I think when you're a person who's on the side of that solution and you're genuinely doing work to try to solve real problems that people have with parasites and diseases and all these different things, and then you're getting attacked. And then it turns out that, man, maybe a lot of the shit you said wasn't right. Now you're kind of stuck because you don't want to debate this. Because, even though you probably did it for all the right reasons, if you look at the actual effectiveness and whether or not it actually did what it was promised to do, it didn't do any of those things. And it did certainly cause some adverse problems in people that may or may not have had any problem with COVID.

00:58:57.78 – 00:59:05.82

They might have gotten over it quickly, like I did. So. now you're fucked. Now you're fucked. And now you're in this situation where you kind of have to defend it all the time.

00:59:05.90 – 00:59:42.60

And to go on a debate and talk about that, you would be so filled with anxiety because it brings us back to the decisions that people make during times of extreme crisis. We always want to think that the evil things that people have done in the past, false flag events, and all these different things that people have done in the past in order to start wars so that they can make more money, we want to think that that stops. Like, oh, we don't do that anymore. We don't do that anymore. It's a childlike impulse that I personally experienced when I was a young boy.

00:59:42.72 – 01:00:04.50

When I was a young boy, we were living in San Francisco, and my mom and my stepdad were hippies. And we lived in this, like, very progressive, very, like, hippie area. And when the Vietnam War ended, everybody was so happy. And there was this feeling. And I said to myself, I remember saying, oh, this is so good.

01:00:04.58 – 01:00:14.30

There's not going to be any wars. They figured out, the wars are bad. I remember thinking this when I guess I was like 10 or 11 or something like that, going, okay, there's no more war. Thank God. Because I don't want to go to war.

2Speaker 2
01:00:14.78 – 01:00:16.08

End of history fallacy.

1Speaker 1
01:00:16.24 – 01:00:34.48

Yeah, my stepdad, he didn't get drafted. He got lucky. But I knew people that went, and I knew people that went and came back, and they were fucked up. And I was terrified as a young boy, terrified of being forced to go to war, because that was the reality of the time. And you think that, well, that doesn't happen anymore.

01:00:35.94 – 01:00:45.42

All that Gulf of Tonkin, shit and all that, they don't do that anymore. They don't do that anymore. They don't do that anymore. That's like people figured that out.

2Speaker 2
01:00:46.06 – 01:00:47.82

So have you been paying attention to Israel?

1Speaker 1
01:00:48.16 – 01:00:49.72

I have been paying attention, yeah.

2Speaker 2
01:00:49.82 – 01:00:50.52

Yeah, I have too.

1Speaker 1
01:00:50.56 – 01:00:56.42

How could you not be? Yeah. It's terrifying. It's very terrifying. It's very, very scary stuff.

2Speaker 2
01:00:56.48 – 01:00:57.36

What is your view on it?

1Speaker 1
01:00:58.70 – 01:01:26.08

I wish I knew. Well, first of all, I wish I knew how. they didn't know that those people were going to do that. Because I don't want to talk about intelligence, because I don't know what I'm talking about. So if I start saying that the, you know, the government, like, that, they would have had the capability to make sure that none of those things took place and that they had infiltrated these organizations and they did get accurate information from that, and they were...

01:01:26.66 – 01:01:38.04

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2Speaker 2
01:02:53.60 – 01:02:56.86

So I can give you what the leading theory is of how the hell this happened.

1Speaker 1
01:02:56.96 – 01:02:57.52

Okay, please do.

2Speaker 2
01:02:57.52 – 01:02:58.24

Right now,

01:03:00.00 – 01:03:24.82

the belief is that, and I think we'll know more about this in a few years, that a few things happened all at the same time. It was a perfect storm. First, Hamas has been planning this attack for two years. And one of the leaders of Hamas actually said that they've been strategically lulling Israel to sleep by making it seem like they're no longer interested in a conflict. the past two years.

01:03:24.82 – 01:03:57.08

And Israel, even just a week before the attack, allowed more Gazans to come over the border and work in Israel as basically a reward for good behavior, right? They thought Hamas has gone into this mode, where they're more concerned about the economics of the Gaza Strip than about attacking Israel. So Israel was asleep at the wheel. Israel also had transferred a lot of IDF that would normally be at the Gaza border to the West Bank. It was also the Sabbath.

01:03:57.38 – 01:03:58.52

It was also a major holiday.

01:04:00.04 – 01:04:15.30

It's also, they've had the biggest protests in a generation, almost the same way America was during 2020.. Israel has been for the past several months over their judicial reform. So you put it all together.

1Speaker 1
01:04:15.60 – 01:04:17.42

Can you go into that a little bit, please?

2Speaker 2
01:04:17.66 – 01:04:49.76

Yeah, so basically, the judicial reform in Israel, Israel is not like the United States. They don't have a constitution. They don't have this kind of really beautiful genius system of checks and balances that we have where, you know, president can veto Congress and the Supreme Court has a check on everyone, right? And everyone keeps each other in check. Israel just has a single parliament they call the Knesset, a prime minister that has a lot of control over that parliament because he leads the majority coalition.

01:04:49.88 – 01:05:24.90

So basically, in Israel, the president and their Congress have a lot more power than in America. Historically, the Supreme Court doesn't have the power to say no to that. But over the past 30 years, the Supreme Court has been basically grabbing more power for itself under these things called basic laws, where they can now say to the Knesset, no, you cannot implement that policy in the West Bank. It violates human rights. They have more powers to check the majority party.

01:05:25.60 – 01:05:38.42

And that's come to a head now, because the Supreme Court is perceived as left-wing and sympathetic to the Palestinians. Just like in America. right now, the Supreme Court is perceived as right-wing.

01:05:41.40 – 01:05:49.20

And Benjamin Netanyahu is obviously Likud. He's the right-wing party and he's gone into coalition with these ultra kind of right-wing religious.

01:05:51.54 – 01:06:35.02

And so it's come to a head where, basically, the right in Israel feels the Supreme Court is just expanding its own power and is anti-democratic. And now they want to, judicial reform is basically stripping the Supreme Court of the power it's grabbed for itself over the past 30 years. Now, the left in Israel views the Supreme Court as the only protection against human rights violations and the violations of minority rights. So the left feels the Supreme Court is a great defender of Israeli human rights. And the right feels that the Supreme Court is an undemocratic institution that's been expanding its own power for 30 years and now needs to be reined in so that the majority can govern.

01:06:35.88 – 01:07:01.00

That's torn apart the country. It's absolutely the number one issue. every day, protests all over Israel. So you put all this together with Hamas, backed by Iran, and you also throw in the fact that Israel and Saudi Arabia are on the verge of a peace deal, which is huge. It would be the biggest news in the Middle East in a very long time if Israel and Saudi Arabia made peace.

01:07:01.10 – 01:07:33.20

It would basically put kind of the death nail in the coffin for Hamas, because Saudi Arabia is the biggest holdout now in terms of who has not made peace with Israel. So Hamas, from the point of view of Hamas and Iran, they think this is a last chance, kind of. We have to attack now, kill this deal, or we're dead forever. And they plan this thing meticulously for two years, intentionally lulling the Israelis to sleep.

01:07:35.06 – 01:07:58.40

And they have brilliant success, much more success than they expected to. Now, some people have said it's an inside job. I don't believe it is. I think if it is, we'll know that from reporting that comes out in the next two years. But at this point, I believe the theory that it was an incredibly successful attack by Hamas and a perfect storm.

1Speaker 1
01:07:59.28 – 01:08:30.80

Well, that all connects and makes sense, if that's the case. What's terrifying is that it doesn't seem... What's always terrified me about the Middle East is that there doesn't seem to be a clear way to resolve this. I mean, if Saudi Arabia and Iran, or rather Israel, came to some sort of an agreement and made peace and were able to establish that long term, that'd be a great step in the right direction. But other than that, like when you look at what's happened now, oh my God, the rhetoric from both sides, it's just...

01:08:30.80 – 01:09:06.38

Didn't we learn anything from World War II? Didn't we learn anything from the Holocaust? Didn't we learn anything from human beings' ability to other human beings to just turn them into a thing that's not them, dehumanize them? And that there's this impulse to do so that existed forever? because when we were tribal people that probably barely had a language, you had to be absolutely terrified of marauding male tribes that came over your border and wanted to kill you and take your resources and steal your women, because that's what they did.

01:09:06.38 – 01:09:48.62

And so we have this ability to look at other human beings as an other and get ruthless and horrifyingly violent, because that was the only way for us to survive for thousands of years. So it's ingrained in our system. But now it exists in the context of global war. and it exists in a time where you can manipulate media and spread false narratives, and governments are allowed to use propaganda. They're allowed to lie to people if it's for the overall better good of the nation.

01:09:50.04 – 01:10:09.96

It's wild. And that's the root of the issue. The root of the issue is how every human being sort of reluctantly admits that there's almost no way to stop all wars. Right now, if you had a magic solution to stop all wars in the world, what would it be? It doesn't exist.

01:10:10.38 – 01:10:42.64

That's terrifying, because the thing that we are scared of the most is global thermonuclear war. The thing that everybody should be the most terrified of. That we get so stupid that we wipe every human being off the face of the planet and we're more than capable of doing it some insane number of times over. And that they're playing with the very first steps of that game. They've moved the first pawn out onto the chessboard of the global thermonuclear war, chess game.

01:10:43.70 – 01:11:03.08

That is fucking the world. Everybody. Every single nation that's involved in every conflict. All these people controlling resources over a group of gigantic people with their representative, and they're saying these people are the bad people and they're saying you're the bad people. It's just like human beings have always done.

01:11:03.24 – 01:11:05.42

It's literally a part of our system.

2Speaker 2
01:11:05.98 – 01:11:13.62

So I agree with you that we are built and hardwired for deep levels of violence.

01:11:15.72 – 01:11:24.22

Those of us that have been lucky enough to live in safety and security, we may not realize the violence we're capable of, because we've never had to survive. Right.

01:11:25.96 – 01:11:36.00

But I do believe that there is a difference. You mentioned the lessons of World War II, right? We were capable of violence. Hitler was capable of violence. But we were not the same as Hitler.

1Speaker 1
01:11:36.54 – 01:11:36.62

Right.

2Speaker 2
01:11:36.90 – 01:11:50.88

There was an imperative for us to defeat him at almost any cost, and we did horrible things in that war. But people understand that there was a good side and there was an evil side.

1Speaker 1
01:11:51.02 – 01:11:51.20

Yes.

2Speaker 2
01:11:51.64 – 01:12:35.54

Now, I don't know if you or most of your listeners feel this way about Israel, but I do. I think that in this situation, Israel is the good guy and Hamas is the evil guy. I think some people feel Hamas is just acting like anyone would if you had taken their land and their freedom fighters that go a little bit overboard. I don't think that's what they are. I think they are a death cult that really believes what they write in their charter in the late 80s, that they want to annihilate every single Jew in Israel and replace it with an Islamic state and eventually have a state like ISIS.

01:12:36.18 – 01:13:13.32

And that what they did on October 7th with the barbaric slaughter, that's the point for them. That is what they want to do to all of Israel. And the difference is that Israel, though, like the American army, there's been many excesses, much to criticize. If Israel wanted to annihilate Hamas and the Palestinians the same way, Hamas wants to annihilate Israel, Hamas would be gone and there would be no Palestinians in Gaza. We know that Israel could obliterate them overnight.

01:13:14.16 – 01:13:32.60

Why don't they? Well, for mixed reasons, but because they don't want to. They want to live in peace fundamentally. And so I don't think the two sides are equivalent. here, though they're both capable of that universal among humans, which is cruelty.

01:13:33.08 – 01:13:38.66

I don't think these two sides are the same. I really think this is a situation where there is a good guy and a bad guy.

1Speaker 1
01:13:39.72 – 01:14:00.10

What solution could possibly be created that would somehow or another calm this down at this point? After that attack, it's so horrifying, but then the response is horrifying too. Who knows how many civilians have died in Gaza?

2Speaker 2
01:14:00.44 – 01:14:00.62

Yeah.

1Speaker 1
01:14:01.00 – 01:14:07.82

So we're terrified of both. And then there's this narrative that... What was the thing with the hospital?

2Speaker 2
01:14:08.44 – 01:14:35.04

Oh, yeah. So this has been going on the past 48 hours. Basically, what happened is the entire media, the Gaza Health Ministry, which is run by Hamas, said that Israel just bombed a hospital and killed 500 people. The entire media ran with this story. New York Times, BBC, everyone said 500 killed in Israeli airstrike on hospital.

01:14:35.50 – 01:14:53.64

And obviously this is monstrous, if so. Why would Israel bomb a hospital? Israel is known to have at least a policy of not bombing hospitals because Israel feels that it wants to generally respect what a war crime is, right? That's the policy, at least. So this went viral.

01:14:54.82 – 01:15:04.46

Then it turned out. actually most likely... It actually turned out 100%. the hospital wasn't bombed. It was the parking lot next to the hospital.

01:15:04.90 – 01:15:25.28

So that was the first inaccuracy in the story. Then it turned out it's very, very unlikely to be an Israeli airstrike and was almost certainly not a Hamas rocket, but a Palestinian Islamic Jihad. This is the other Palestinian terror group in Gaza. They launched a bunch of rockets. One of them was a dud and landed in the hospital parking lot.

01:15:26.70 – 01:15:35.80

And this is on video. Al Jazeera showed the video by accident, and that's part of how it's been confirmed.

1Speaker 1
01:15:36.34 – 01:15:37.12

What do you mean by accident?

2Speaker 2
01:15:37.58 – 01:15:58.62

So they were showing this in real time. I think it happened at like 6.59 exactly. It was either 6.49 or 6.59.. They were showing live footage, or footage they had just taken of a bunch of rockets leaving the Gaza Strip to go to Israel. And one of the rockets, you could see it was screwy.

01:15:59.00 – 01:16:28.58

It kind of blew up, and then you see a big explosion in Gaza right at that time. Turns out that's the exact time the hospital allegedly blew up. So that's how they knew. it was a rocket from inside, an accidental rocket from inside Gaza, rather than the Israelis airstriking it. So then all the New York Times, BBC, they all started slowly changing their headlines from 500 killed in Israeli airstrike to 500 killed in blast.

01:16:28.58 – 01:16:40.20

to, you know, at this point they may be saying parking lot next to hospital killed only 50 to 100 people. This is still an evolving story, and we're talking on Thursday.

1Speaker 1
01:16:40.94 – 01:16:46.24

So it didn't actually hit the hospital itself. It hit the parking lot next to the hospital and did damage to the hospital?

2Speaker 2
01:16:46.94 – 01:16:56.16

The latest is that the hospital's still standing, and it was only the parking lot next to the hospital, and a bunch of cars may have exploded as well.

1Speaker 1
01:16:56.84 – 01:16:57.32

So...

2Speaker 2
01:16:57.32 – 01:17:02.32

That's the latest, because they have pictures now. The next day they took pictures, and the hospital's there.

1Speaker 1
01:17:02.50 – 01:17:05.56

I thought they had photos of the hospital that was bombed out.

2Speaker 2
01:17:05.98 – 01:17:14.28

The New York Times, when they reported it first, they showed a picture of a different place in Gaza that was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike, not the hospital.

1Speaker 1
01:17:15.48 – 01:17:16.30

Oh, my God.

2Speaker 2
01:17:16.44 – 01:17:37.38

Yeah. So this is a... This is now, you know, I think there's an emerging consensus that it was a parking lot, probably not 500 people, probably more like 50 or 100, which is, again, tragic. Every life is tragic. But that basically, the legacy media took Hamas's word.

01:17:39.40 – 01:17:41.78

as fact, and then has had to backpedal.

1Speaker 1
01:17:42.14 – 01:17:51.56

Did you see the Babylon Bees joke about that? What did they say? See, if you can find it, Babylon Bees. I still can't say X, X page.

2Speaker 2
01:17:51.68 – 01:17:57.24

Yeah, I know. I'm right at that point where I'm transitioning to saying X without saying former Twitter.

1Speaker 1
01:17:57.40 – 01:18:00.42

I just keep saying Twitter. It's Twitter, you know? Sorry, Elon.

2Speaker 2
01:18:00.66 – 01:18:02.12

He really has an obsession with X.

1Speaker 1
01:18:02.24 – 01:18:11.80

Well, also, it's like, are you sending an X, or are you sending a tweet? Everyone says he tweeted. You don't say he X'd. It just doesn't sound right.

2Speaker 2
01:18:11.92 – 01:18:12.62

Yeah, it doesn't make sense.

1Speaker 1
01:18:12.90 – 01:18:14.36

But he can do whatever the fuck he wants.

2Speaker 2
01:18:14.84 – 01:18:15.28

Yeah, that's true.

1Speaker 1
01:18:16.28 – 01:18:25.34

So what was the Babylon Bees? The Babylon Bees had a funny thing about the New York Times and Hamas. There's something from two hours ago?

2Speaker 2
01:18:26.06 – 01:18:26.40

I don't know.

1Speaker 1
01:18:26.40 – 01:18:29.26

I saw it on my Instagram earlier today, when I was embarrassed to be looking at my Instagram.

2Speaker 2
01:18:30.20 – 01:18:31.94

Why embarrassed? I'm tired of it.

1Speaker 1
01:18:33.20 – 01:18:36.94

I can't stop being connected. My new phone has no apps on it.

2Speaker 2
01:18:37.06 – 01:18:37.96

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

1Speaker 1
01:18:38.08 – 01:18:42.16

New York Times patiently awaiting Zoom call from Hamas to see what they should print today.

2Speaker 2
01:18:43.06 – 01:18:45.36

Yeah, so this is about the hospital.

1Speaker 1
01:18:46.30 – 01:18:56.34

That is, the Babylon Bee, thank God they exist. Oh, yeah, they're great. Because they disprove the idea that it's only left-wing people that are funny.

2Speaker 2
01:18:56.50 – 01:18:56.70

Yeah.

1Speaker 1
01:18:56.88 – 01:19:03.84

That is not true. The Babylon Bee, they out-onion the onion often. They're amazing. They're much better than the onion.

2Speaker 2
01:19:03.92 – 01:19:05.40

The onion used to be great. It still is good.

1Speaker 1
01:19:05.66 – 01:19:22.38

They still knock it out of the park every now and again. But they're young, progressive liberals constrained by a certain ideology that doesn't allow them to poke fun at certain things. You know how much fun they could have with the trans issue? They can't touch it. They can't touch it.

01:19:23.16 – 01:19:26.90

Rachel Levy, they can't touch it. Leave it alone. Get out of there. It's too hot.

2Speaker 2
01:19:27.54 – 01:19:29.98

But you asked earlier, what is the solution to this?

1Speaker 1
01:19:30.14 – 01:19:30.42

Yes.

2Speaker 2
01:19:31.46 – 01:19:37.66

Look, I mean, we're not going to solve the Middle East here. But if I'm Israel right now,

01:19:39.80 – 01:19:59.94

I'm thinking we have to destroy Hamas. The same way, when we were bombed during Pearl Harbor, nobody thought, well, what's the diplomatic solution to Japan? We thought, these people want to destroy us. We have to destroy them. There are some situations that can be resolved at the negotiating table.

01:20:00.44 – 01:20:14.46

But there are others that have to be resolved through war, because one side is committed to the destruction of the other. And you can only get to the negotiating table when you've retaliated militarily.

1Speaker 1
01:20:15.90 – 01:20:29.66

Yeah. That's terrifying. That's a terrifying thought. What do you think of all, what was the latest pro-Hamas, pro-Palestine protest? There's been so many of them.

2Speaker 2
01:20:29.76 – 01:20:33.58

Yeah. They had to shut down Columbia University, my alma mater.

01:20:35.50 – 01:20:36.94

There's been a lot of them. Yeah.

1Speaker 1
01:20:37.12 – 01:20:43.30

What are they saying? What is their main perspective on this?

2Speaker 2
01:20:43.82 – 01:20:48.84

Their main perspective is that Israelis are colonizers in the Middle East.

01:20:50.82 – 01:21:07.34

That Israelis are not the indigenous people. It's settler colonialism. And that resistance is justified and that we ought to side with the resistance. We ought to side with the resistance even when they go overboard. That's their basic perspective in a nutshell.

1Speaker 1
01:21:07.36 – 01:21:16.40

Going overboard. That is a crazy way to justify paratrooping into a rave and just murdering people.

2Speaker 2
01:21:16.54 – 01:21:18.66

Yeah. Execution style.

1Speaker 1
01:21:18.98 – 01:21:36.70

And rape and murder and torture and killing kids and explosions. I was reading about these parents who were trying to find their son. They were hoping their son was still alive but that he had gotten his arm shot off by a machine gun. He was in a bunker and then he was captured. He was in some sort of a bomb.

01:21:36.70 – 01:21:40.08

shelter. Captured him and they have no idea where he is and they hope he's okay.

2Speaker 2
01:21:40.74 – 01:21:40.94

Yeah.

1Speaker 1
01:21:41.00 – 01:21:59.86

Just the horrific idea that some peaceful civilian could just be targeted like you would shoot a monster. Not even an animal. You shoot an animal, you eat it. It's like a monster. Just gun that monster down.

01:21:59.96 – 01:22:22.18

Leave it where it is. It's so scary that people are still willing to do things like that. But it is real. That's what we have to all understand. You can have these utopian perspectives of how you think the world should be, and I side with a lot of what they think about the inequality of the world.

01:22:22.18 – 01:22:57.66

I just have different solutions than them. My solution is not redistribution of wealth. My solution is figure out what's wrong with communities and rebuild them. The fact that we have these impoverished communities and that we've never spent any real engineering and money to try to solve these crises that have led to so many people coming out of these places and just being fucked from the jump and having no examples of people living good lives, no examples of people that are involved in crime, and just being swarmed by negativity and bad influences constantly. And the fact that we expect these people to rise past, that is complete and total insanity.

2Speaker 2
01:22:57.86 – 01:22:58.24

I agree.

1Speaker 1
01:22:58.42 – 01:23:22.54

And almost always perpetrated by people that, just like you, were talking about, people that have experienced peace most their life and have no idea that violence is inside of them or what violence really is. It's the same sort of thing. It's people that grew up where they really never had to worry about money. Maybe they weren't rich, but they weren't starving to death. They didn't have to worry about someone shooting them every day or killing their parents when they were on the way home from working, or whatever the fuck the problem was.

01:23:23.58 – 01:23:44.66

But for a large percentage of what we supposedly think of as a community, which is the United States, we should think of ourselves as a big community. We've ignored people that are fucked. It's like there's places that are just fucked, and we have to do something to fix that. If you don't do something to fix that, you're going to keep this disparity. You're going to keep this problem.

01:23:44.74 – 01:23:54.10

And the problem is far more... It's more solvable than so many other things that we try to tackle. We're trying to figure out how to cool the earth down.

01:23:55.82 – 01:24:02.16

That's great too, but let's fucking figure out how to make the country a better place.

01:24:04.18 – 01:24:23.28

instead of just saying that rich people are the problem. There's a lot of problems with rich people. There's a lot of problems with influencers. There's a lot of problems with people that have the ability to change laws and people that have the ability to sell you things that they know will kill you. They know are going to kill a certain number of you, and they can still sell them to you.

01:24:23.28 – 01:24:29.98

They can just say, hey, some may believe it's not addictive. Yay! And then they cut it loose.

2Speaker 2
01:24:30.70 – 01:24:53.50

Well, here's the thing. People like to throw money at every problem, but they don't love to see how the money is being spent. So, for example, we could use Hamas as the example. So much money has been thrown at the Gaza Strip, and they use it instead to build buildings and build water pipes. They dig up the water pipes and build rockets to go to Israel, right?

01:24:54.08 – 01:24:59.40

Use the water pipes as rockets? Yeah. They make pipes into rockets.

1Speaker 1
01:24:59.64 – 01:25:00.22

No way.

2Speaker 2
01:25:00.26 – 01:25:06.24

Yeah. They have a video, one of their own propaganda videos, where they show themselves doing this.

01:25:09.26 – 01:25:59.92

Billions of dollars has been thrown by Europe, by America, at helping the Gazans, because they are living in conditions that are indescribably horrible. A third world doesn't even justify how Gazans are living, but they're living under a terrorist party that actually doesn't care whether they live or die, because any Palestinian that dies from an Israeli airstrike, they go straight to heaven, according to Hamas. So Hamas, and they genuinely believe this. This is why I think people in the West, they don't remember what it's like to truly believe in religion, because the West has been pretty much secularized at this point, outside of some pockets. People that still believe in religion really believe it.

01:26:00.22 – 01:26:17.16

Yeah. Like during the Iran-Iraq War, the Iranians, they would send 13-year-old, 12-year-old boys over to be cannon fodder. They would throw them at Saddam Hussein, and they would give them a key around their necks to get them into heaven.

01:26:18.78 – 01:26:20.34

And the boys believed it.

01:26:22.70 – 01:26:34.36

You have to realize that people really believe these kinds of things, and you can't... So many people analyze a situation without putting themselves really in the shoes of a true believer.

1Speaker 1
01:26:34.92 – 01:27:01.52

Yeah, that's a very, very important point. In this country, when we start talking about true believers, we really talk about the negative ones. We talk about Westboro Baptist Church type stuff. We talk about the worst aspects of cult-like behavior that comes from some organized religions, and fanatical organized religions. So intelligent people in this country...

01:27:02.06 – 01:27:10.82

I mean, there was the big atheist movement that existed for quite a while. It seems they've kind of dissipated into something else.

2Speaker 2
01:27:10.98 – 01:27:12.40

Right. I noticed that, yeah.

1Speaker 1
01:27:12.46 – 01:27:35.24

But that movement of this rejection of organized religion and this sort of... Because the atmosphere that most of these academics exist in, most media people exist in, and most people that live in big cities exist in, is that there's a sort of kind of wholesale dismissiveness that's attached to organized religion.

2Speaker 2
01:27:35.64 – 01:27:35.84

There is.

1Speaker 1
01:27:36.72 – 01:27:53.42

And so because of that, they don't have the context, much like people that have never experienced violence, don't have the context of violence. When I see people talking about openly advocating for military interventions, things like, who, you? Are you going to go? do it? You want to go.

01:27:53.42 – 01:28:08.74

risk your face getting shot off because of information that may or may not be bullshit? You? Who's going to go? Oh, you want people other than you to go and represent what you think of as the good thing? Because you don't know these people, and if they die, it doesn't feel like anything to you.

01:28:08.98 – 01:28:39.94

But those people have families, and those people have children, and there's got to be a way that we minimize the amount of violence in the world, specifically the amount of violence. that doesn't make any sense. And this kind of violence doesn't make any sense. It's fucking terrifying. And if you have true believers that don't think it's terrifying and think it makes total sense, and you don't realize that people like that exist in the world, that that is a real thing.

01:28:40.04 – 01:28:43.38

That's always been real. That was the Nazis. That is a real thing.

2Speaker 2
01:28:43.46 – 01:29:07.06

It's also most of human history, to your point. Yes, most of human history. Was Genghis Khan afraid of violence? Did he ever consider that violence was... So if you're dealing with someone who comes, or a group of people that are basically a cult that perpetuates that kind of mindset, that raises people, you know, the older brother raises his younger brother to believe that from day one, right?

01:29:07.30 – 01:29:15.18

Yeah. You can't address that like we would want to address, I don't know, if we had some dispute with Britain nowadays.

1Speaker 1
01:29:15.46 – 01:29:55.48

There's also this solidarity. in this. There's a community aspect that can't be ignored, where people want to be a part of something big. And when you connect a person who might have very dire circumstances otherwise, like the world around them is very bleak, but you connect them to this group of people that are also committed to this quest, that they believe is righteous and in God's will, that God wants this to take place, and that this is their directive on Earth. You can talk people into things, man.

01:29:55.64 – 01:30:13.64

You know, we've all seen Wild Wild Country. We've all seen documentaries on cults. Human beings are extremely malleable. I mean, it's not like all the people that moved to the cities just decided to move there because they're Democrats. Like, I'm a Democrat.

01:30:13.72 – 01:30:31.32

I'm going to move to where the other Democrats are and find my people. That's not what's going on. There's a hive mind aspect to human beings that just can't be ignored, because we don't want to be ostracized socially. We don't want to be kicked out of the tribe. So we're terrified of stepping out of line.

01:30:31.76 – 01:31:00.18

And so when you are in a terrible situation, you're much more likely to believe that someone put you there. You're much more likely to believe that there's an oppressor. You're much more likely to believe that that person's taking from you. If that's what you're told from the time you were young and you're told that the solution is to become a martyr and you're going to get to go to heaven, you can talk people into that with no options. It is real.

01:31:00.56 – 01:31:10.56

It's a real thing. And I don't know how to re-engineer that. I don't know how to solve that once people have already been down that path.

2Speaker 2
01:31:10.56 – 01:31:13.62

I think most of the solutions have been missed.

01:31:15.34 – 01:31:53.56

I think that's the hard truth, that the land was partitioned between an Israel and a Palestinian state in 1947.. The Palestinians rejected the partition and attacked, and that was the War of Independence. That was an opportunity for a solution. There was an opportunity, when it was occupied by Jordan and Egypt, for them to create a Palestinian state, but it wasn't in their interest, so they didn't do it. There was an opportunity in 2000, was the closest opportunity, when Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak met at Camp David with Clinton.

01:31:55.42 – 01:32:14.92

and Arafat walked away. And the difference between now and then is that Israeli society is now moving more and more to the right. And what that means in Israel is less and less. are they seeking a two-state solution, compared to 2000 or 2008,, when two-state solutions were offered.

01:32:17.00 – 01:33:12.14

And part of the reason Israeli society is moving to the right is because the ultra-Orthodox, or what we call Hasidic, often in America, in New York, they have communities. in Brooklyn, they have six kids per family, something like that. And so they started out as a tiny minority in Israel 75 years ago, and now a third, a third, of kids under a certain age, might be 18, are ultra-Orthodox. And they have more right-wing views, they're generally more pro-settling the West Bank, anti-two-state solution. So I fear that the Palestinian side rejected the only options, the only times that they were offered a state, and that those offers are not going to be forthcoming again in the future, because of how Israeli society is changing.

01:33:13.10 – 01:33:21.80

And so it's a very grim situation, because it seems like there's no solution, no solution that does not involve horrible bloodshed.

1Speaker 1
01:33:25.80 – 01:33:45.88

And there's horrors from both sides. That's another thing that people need to look at. They need to stop this idea that there's good guys and bad guys. Because there's things that people do when the other side is the enemy, that are absolutely horrific on both sides. It's always been the case.

01:33:46.86 – 01:34:16.24

It's natural. It's not like everyone on side A is pure. No, they're all humans. And when you're dealing with a group of people that want you dead, and you want them dead, they do horrible things. Like Abby Martin, who was on my podcast, talked about her experience going back and forth from Israel to Palestine, how scary it was talking to people that had been shot by soldiers, and people who were shot in the dick on purpose, and do crazy shit.

01:34:17.26 – 01:34:20.42

That's real, too. That's real, too.

2Speaker 2
01:34:20.60 – 01:34:22.00

You mean from the Palestinian side?

1Speaker 1
01:34:22.20 – 01:34:23.90

No, from the Israeli side.

2Speaker 2
01:34:24.22 – 01:34:27.14

Oh, yeah, no, that's what I mean. Yes. Yes, absolutely.

1Speaker 1
01:34:27.26 – 01:34:41.34

That's real, too. Yeah. So it's, you know, Israelis are human beings, just like all human beings. And human beings have good ones and bad ones. And they have people that do horrible things in horrible times.

01:34:41.72 – 01:35:05.46

I mean, there was a guy once... God, I forget the story. I think he was running for some office, and they labeled him as like a war hero. And he was kind of running with it. And then I believe he dropped out and then just started admitting the horrific things that he had to do during Vietnam.

01:35:06.00 – 01:35:12.32

And I think it involved... I don't even want to say. Do you know that story, Jamie?

01:35:15.12 – 01:35:17.80

I forget exactly what he said, so I want to keep going.

2Speaker 2
01:35:18.06 – 01:35:33.46

No, but I totally agree. Like every army that's ever waged, war has done horrible things. Horrible things. And not that they all do the same extent of horrible things. Some are really worse than others, but none are saints.

01:35:34.00 – 01:35:54.10

I don't think there's ever been an army that just truly behaved like a saint down to the last man. It's not... It's not real. It's not. I think that is, to your point, a fantasy standard that outsiders, who've never had to get their hands dirty to survive...

01:35:56.16 – 01:36:03.62

But obviously, it's a standard we should ideally want to hold people to. We should encourage the world's armies to behave better.

01:36:06.82 – 01:36:23.36

If a country is going to wage a just war, if you're going to say you have the right to wage war in this situation, I don't think that can be revoked. the second you find a soldier that does something horrible. Because by that logic, we could not wage World War II. Right.

1Speaker 1
01:36:24.08 – 01:36:25.46

That's important to talk about.

2Speaker 2
01:36:25.54 – 01:36:42.80

And that's going to happen. Israeli soldiers are going to do... The worst stories, I think, are yet to come. And we can have sympathy for the Palestinians without saying that Israel has no right to retaliate. That's my point of view, on it, at least.

1Speaker 1
01:36:43.58 – 01:37:06.58

Well, that's a balanced perspective. And, you know, I wish I knew more about the history of that conflict to see if there's any way that they could change the way they interact with each other. But I just don't. So it's just one of those things where you just see it playing out and you feel so helpless. It's made me so anxious.

01:37:07.02 – 01:37:38.74

Sometimes at nighttime, I think about Ukraine and Russia and I think about what's going on right now with Israel and Palestine, and I get so terrified. I get so terrified of the possibility of it just going off the rails and then nukes being on the table. Because I just... I know we haven't used one since 1945, but I feel like that is one of those things. when you look at history, like the invention of the bow and arrow, the invention of the atlatl, 2,000 years later.

01:37:38.94 – 01:37:49.14

How long before someone shot someone with it? Did they wait a while? You know, was it a few years? Was it a few months before someone shot someone with an arrow once they first invented it? Just because it's been...

01:37:49.14 – 01:38:07.00

Let's go to 100 years. In overall history of human beings, 100 years ain't shit. If you look at the 1700s, do you really think there's a big differentiation between 1720 and 1790? Or is there that much of a difference? I bet there's not.

01:38:07.46 – 01:38:34.90

I bet if someone did something today with a nuclear bomb, history would look at it the same way we look at every other thing that takes place over long periods of time. Oh, then there was the invention of the wheel, and then, X amount of years later, they put a fucking gun on top of that thing and started mowing people down. And this is just blips in time. We're just in the middle of it. So we think, well, mutually assured destruction is what's kept us from dying.

01:38:35.62 – 01:39:03.20

But has it? Or are we just waiting? Are we waiting for this fucking stupid game, this chess game, to reach a point where it's checkmate? Reach, a point where someone flips the table over? Because if you're dealing with people that aren't afraid to die, and you're dealing with people that are willing to kill everyone that opposes them because they genuinely think they're doing the will of God, they get a hold of a nuke.

01:39:04.38 – 01:39:29.28

If they're willing to kill, I've always said this, how many people is it acceptable to kill in one shot? If you say they bombed and killed thousands, well, that number seems to be reasonable for us. We're like, well, thousands of people died in 9-11 too, and that sucks, and that's really awful that thousands of people are dying. But if someone dumps a nuke and it kills a million people instantly, is that more horrific?

01:39:30.94 – 01:39:41.80

To them. To us, it scares the shit out of us because of mutually assured destruction. But is that more horrific to someone who really believes they're doing the right thing? If it's okay to kill a thousand people.

2Speaker 2
01:39:41.80 – 01:39:58.70

Look, if you're like Thanos, this is why Thanos was such an amazing villain, is because you could see deep in his mind. he felt he was a monk, like a monk for good, and that he had to snap half the universe out of existence to save the world. He was a true believer. He wasn't just some guy. that's, you know.

1Speaker 1
01:39:59.04 – 01:40:31.58

Right. Well, eugenics, when people talk about eugenics, if you were not a human being, if you were raising an animal and you wanted to do a very specific task, like dogs, for instance, you don't let the ones that are fucked up breed. Right? So you could see how someone who has no sense of humanity and no compassion for human beings that are unfortunate, you could see how they'd say, well, you've got to kill them. It's a creepy, scary conclusion to what your problem, your solution, is.

01:40:32.02 – 01:40:36.44

But you could see how a sociopath or a psychopath would go in that direction.

2Speaker 2
01:40:36.84 – 01:40:54.36

Well, we're going to have bottom-up eugenics very soon, as opposed to top-down eugenics being the government deciding who gets to procreate and not, based on racist ideas or anything like that. We're going to have very soon, like, I think, easily within the next three years,

01:40:57.28 – 01:41:31.68

you know, you and your wife getting a bunch of embryos, 15 or 20 embryos, doing polygenic analysis on those embryos and telling you which ones are going to turn out taller, which ones are going to turn out smarter, which ones are going to turn out less likely to be depressed. If you have a history of schizophrenia in your family, we can tell you that correlates with this set of genes and this one's less likely. So you're scoring your own embryos, which people already do, but now they just score it based on what's the biggest embryo, which is...

1Speaker 1
01:41:31.68 – 01:41:32.16

Is that what they do?

2Speaker 2
01:41:32.28 – 01:41:39.34

Yeah, like, you, prefer the bigger embryo because there is some scientific reason why it's maybe healthier or something.

1Speaker 1
01:41:39.96 – 01:41:41.76

What if it's like that dude from Mice and Men? He was big.

01:41:44.34 – 01:41:47.70

That might not be the way to go, kids. It might not be just bigger.

2Speaker 2
01:41:48.04 – 01:41:53.52

They have some reason, but they're going to get very precise with it very soon because of polygenic analysis.

1Speaker 1
01:41:53.92 – 01:42:12.18

Well, and then there's CRISPR, which, you know, they've already used in China, and, you know, they supposedly jailed the scientists that did it. What they were saying they were doing is they were doing something with a gene to make people impervious to AIDS, but what really was going on is they were making them smarter.

01:42:14.08 – 01:42:17.88

Yeah, see if you can find that, because I know I butchered that. If you're a scientist out there, sorry.

2Speaker 2
01:42:18.04 – 01:42:20.38

So in China, they're doing this? They did it. They did it?

1Speaker 1
01:42:20.46 – 01:42:34.40

They did it, yeah. Wow. And I believe the international response was, you know, people were pretty scared that this kind of stuff was going on, but here it is. China's. CRISPR twins might have had their brains inadvertently enhanced.

01:42:34.40 – 01:42:53.56

It was a mistake. Guys, we're just trying to kill this thing that doesn't really kill any people anymore. New research suggests that a controversial gene-editing experiment to make children resistant, not even immune, resistant to HIV, may have also enhanced their ability to learn and form memories. Yeah, you don't think that's an accident?

2Speaker 2
01:42:54.26 – 01:42:55.70

I'm sure it's on purpose, but...

1Speaker 1
01:42:55.70 – 01:42:57.54

I would hope it's on purpose. That sounds like a...

2Speaker 2
01:42:57.54 – 01:42:58.28

It sounds good.

1Speaker 1
01:42:58.32 – 01:42:58.84

...great accident.

2Speaker 2
01:42:58.92 – 01:43:20.20

Yeah, it does sound good. Look, if you're a parent, after your kid is born, you're going to spend who knows how many thousands of dollars. If you send them to private school, you're going to send them $20,000 a year for some fancy private school to make them smarter and happier, but you wouldn't invest a little time at the beginning and effort at the beginning to make them smarter?

1Speaker 1
01:43:21.30 – 01:43:24.54

Right, especially if it only costs like a couple hundred bucks or something like that.

2Speaker 2
01:43:24.64 – 01:43:40.26

I get that one is icky and sci-fi, but if you remove that element of it and just look at it for what it is, if it's reliable, why would I not want to make my kids smarter? Smarter people live longer, they're happier, etc. That's pretty clear in the data.

1Speaker 1
01:43:41.34 – 01:43:43.52

Is that clear in the data that smarter people live longer?

2Speaker 2
01:43:43.80 – 01:43:45.96

I think, up to a point, smarter people have...

1Speaker 1
01:43:45.96 – 01:43:47.20

But you always hear about that guy who just...

2Speaker 2
01:43:47.20 – 01:43:47.68

...every other...

1Speaker 1
01:43:47.68 – 01:43:57.24

I drank whiskey and smoked cigarettes and I'm 105 years old and I feel fucking great. Those guys exist too, man. They do. What's up with those guys?

2Speaker 2
01:43:57.50 – 01:44:00.08

I don't know. They just have, I don't know,

1Speaker 1
01:44:00.80 – 01:44:02.42

amazing genes... Other than their brain.

2Speaker 2
01:44:02.68 – 01:44:12.46

But actually, you know, there is a... I don't know if you've seen this, but one of the smartest guys in the world, IQ-wise, is like a crazy white supremacist.

1Speaker 1
01:44:13.32 – 01:44:13.68

Really?

2Speaker 2
01:44:13.84 – 01:44:16.16

Yeah, he has like a 190 or something IQ.

1Speaker 1
01:44:16.52 – 01:44:21.94

Wait a minute, are you talking about that guy? They did a documentary on him back in the day, the smartest man in the world. He was a bouncer.

2Speaker 2
01:44:22.86 – 01:44:25.58

I don't recall whether he was a bouncer or not.

1Speaker 1
01:44:25.96 – 01:44:43.62

Let's make sure that we're not talking about the same guy, because I don't want to disparage this guy. But this guy was, they did like a documentary on him. Like, he was like a fuck-up all through school, but he was just genius and got moved around a bunch of times. you know, he's a big, thick guy. He looks like a bouncer.

01:44:43.80 – 01:44:51.28

This guy. Man with the world's highest IQ, Christopher Langan, is gaining a following on the far right. So are you saying that this guy is a white supremacist?

2Speaker 2
01:44:51.46 – 01:44:53.36

That's what I read.

1Speaker 1
01:44:53.70 – 01:44:57.54

That's what you read. where, though? This is 2019.. So,

01:44:59.22 – 01:45:29.52

they've likened him to Alex Jones with a thesaurus. Langan, now in his 60s, has been a curiosity for nearly 25 years, a man who has clocked his own IQ somewhere north of 190.. Albert Einstein wasn't quite there, apparently, who has mostly worked as a bouncer in a bar, never attained any significant professional roles or published any serious academic work. He's been the subject of several profiles, from Esquire Magazine to Malcolm Gladwell. He makes an appearance in Outliers, the documentarian, Errol Morris, even interviewed Langan.

01:45:30.10 – 01:45:50.28

He's an interesting guy. He's very intelligent. Like, when you hear him talk, he's obviously able to, like, retain an incredible amount of information in his brain. But over the years, it says in this article, but over the years, he has garnered a following that overlaps considerably with fans of the far right internet content. Okay.

01:45:51.58 – 01:46:04.10

Overlaps doesn't mean he's far right. Right? We can agree to that. He invades against the academic establishment for not accepting his papers about his proprietary theory of everything. He frequently touts his IQ.

01:46:04.56 – 01:46:11.84

Okay. So, he's got flaws. Inviting the interest of alt-right readers. Okay. What does that mean?

01:46:12.10 – 01:46:14.82

Inviting the interest of alt-right readers. Just because people read him.

2Speaker 2
01:46:14.86 – 01:46:16.04

I don't like this style of journalism.

1Speaker 1
01:46:16.04 – 01:46:16.98

I don't like this at all.

2Speaker 2
01:46:17.06 – 01:46:18.70

I'd like them to just quote him.

1Speaker 1
01:46:18.82 – 01:46:33.02

Exactly. This is horseshit. Inviting the interest of alt-right, but, by the way, I've read that about me. And writers who subscribe to the belief that IQ is racially determined and a sign of racial superiority. Okay.

01:46:33.22 – 01:46:46.90

Look what he's saying, though. He's inviting the interest. He's not saying this. It's saying he's inviting the interest of people who believe. And writers who subscribe to the belief that IQ is racially determined and a sign of racial superiority.

01:46:47.16 – 01:47:08.10

It's not him saying that. It's saying that people who, like him, think something fucked up. One of Langen's posts, an obituary for the intelligent gorilla Coco, wherein Langen suggested the U.S. would do better to admit African gorillas as refugees than African people, was praised by the Daily Stormer, the Neo-Nazi blog. So what did he actually say, though?

2Speaker 2
01:47:08.12 – 01:47:14.72

So yeah, this is, you know, I think, as I get older, the more and more suspicious I am when they don't just quote.

1Speaker 1
01:47:14.94 – 01:47:15.34

Right.

2Speaker 2
01:47:15.58 – 01:47:21.78

Because usually, if the quote is knock-down evidence, you put the quote.

1Speaker 1
01:47:21.78 – 01:47:35.26

Yeah, Jamie, I don't think you should click on that, because I think that's just the people that believe that IQ is racially determined. I know, I was going to find his story that way. Right, but, oh, okay. I would just like to see what his quote was. Yeah, I'll find it.

01:47:35.40 – 01:47:44.66

Give me a second. Because it seems like they would put that quote in there if that quote was so... Probably. Yeah, it was such a problem. Why don't...

01:47:44.66 – 01:47:45.10

But...

2Speaker 2
01:47:45.10 – 01:47:51.92

You can't... This is why, at the end of the day, there's no substitute for just listening to the person, the words out of their mouth and making up your own mind.

1Speaker 1
01:47:52.22 – 01:48:02.06

I don't know if that guy has a 190 IQ, but he's obviously very intelligent. Yes. When he talks about things, he's very smart. He's also, like, a bouncer. Like, he's kind of a hard-ass, and he's got an ego.

01:48:02.80 – 01:48:04.42

You know, he knows he's smart, too.

2Speaker 2
01:48:04.94 – 01:48:06.56

Yeah, I don't like that about people.

1Speaker 1
01:48:07.60 – 01:48:09.40

It's uncomfortable, but sometimes...

2Speaker 2
01:48:09.40 – 01:48:11.72

People that go around telling you their IQ, it's like...

1Speaker 1
01:48:11.72 – 01:48:12.80

I know, it's kind of gross.

2Speaker 2
01:48:12.98 – 01:48:14.06

It's insufferable.

1Speaker 1
01:48:14.24 – 01:48:23.64

It is, but there's also people who are insufferable. when they tell you about how well their business does. They're insufferable. when they tell you they have a big dick. Whatever it is, people are insufferable.

01:48:23.96 – 01:48:29.12

But it doesn't necessarily mean that they're stupid. It just means that they have flaws.

2Speaker 2
01:48:29.40 – 01:48:46.74

The thing, though, is that smart people can get things very wrong. Yes. Because not all smart people have a good temperament to absorb evidence that doesn't confirm their belief. Not all of them are intellectually honest. So, to me, I think...

01:48:47.32 – 01:48:50.02

IQ is one thing, but intellectual honesty.

01:48:52.56 – 01:48:58.20

and general psychological, mental maturity, emotional maturity, two totally different things.

1Speaker 1
01:48:58.40 – 01:49:04.98

Yeah. But isn't it interesting how you, even though you didn't have the information, were saying he was a white supremacist?

2Speaker 2
01:49:05.04 – 01:49:08.94

There you go. Yeah. So this is something that... I fall victim to. this, too.

01:49:09.16 – 01:49:16.30

We all do. I shouldn't just repeat things that I read in one article without having done the primary source stuff.

1Speaker 1
01:49:17.02 – 01:49:25.54

I try not to, but I catch myself doing it, too. Yeah. But it's also a function of... It's part of this thing that you just can't have all the information. You know?

01:49:25.78 – 01:49:35.06

It's not possible, especially when you're talking about all the events and all the things in the world. It's just... You're going to fuck things up. Do you find anything about that guy's quote? I'm trying...

01:49:35.76 – 01:49:45.42

There's a lot about him, so I'm trying to dig through that. I'd just like to see the quote that he said about African gorillas. I don't think it's actually a quote. He's got a blog where he talks about... He's got a long writing...

01:49:45.42 – 01:49:49.16

He writes... He's got tons of writing. Right. He's got a sub stack. This guy's been writing for a long time.

01:49:49.58 – 01:50:00.98

Yeah. That's why there's so many profiles on him. Mm-hmm. There's videos asking if he's completely made up, if all this is bullshit. Well, I just think he doesn't have the sort of academic...

01:50:02.46 – 01:50:11.88

You know, he doesn't have PhDs, and he's not accepted in... It's not... So even if he's really intelligent, people are going to dismiss him just because he's not a part of that system. Mm-hmm.

01:50:13.54 – 01:50:18.00

But I want to know what he said. that made them say that.

2Speaker 2
01:50:18.24 – 01:50:18.92

Right. Me too.

1Speaker 1
01:50:19.10 – 01:50:39.06

Because I don't like the way they were framing all the things before that, where they were saying that people who also believe this, like him. You can't do that, because how many people like him? The guy's got a sub stack that has 100,000 followers, and you find 1,000 white supremacists, and you say, some people who, like that, believe that Jews should be exterminated. Like, come on. Right.

01:50:39.64 – 01:50:45.66

That's not him. You can't do that. That's bullshit. That's not journalism. It's...

2Speaker 2
01:50:46.24 – 01:50:53.34

That's like how a lawyer in a courtroom would grill the other side. Mm-hmm. That's not journalism.

1Speaker 1
01:50:53.58 – 01:51:05.76

No, it's not. And it's uncomfortable, because this is something that we all fall prey to, and you just openly admitted that you did. Totally. I have too. I read a headline, and I'm just like, oh, that must be real.

2Speaker 2
01:51:06.02 – 01:51:07.10

Yeah. I don't have time.

1Speaker 1
01:51:07.10 – 01:51:19.90

to get into this. Yeah. I don't have any time. There's not enough time in the world to research all the different things that'll freak you out. But you were talking about just intelligence in general and the ability to manipulate intelligence in embryos.

01:51:20.04 – 01:51:36.16

Mm-hmm. And I think that this thing with China, where you're saying that it's overall good to increase a child's intelligence. Like, who would say that's not good? Like, would you rather it could be dull-witted? Like, well, this Billy could be dull.

01:51:36.42 – 01:51:53.88

Or what we can do with CRISPR is, by a significant margin, increase his ability to memorize things, and you'd go, oh, yeah, what do I have to do? That's really safe and effective. We're just going to do this little gene editing. And then, all of a sudden, Billy's a fucking genius. Of course you would do that.

01:51:54.42 – 01:51:58.12

Yeah, I would. And that's just the beginning. That's the beginning. We're going to...

2Speaker 2
01:51:58.12 – 01:52:00.16

But then what happens is they mess up.

1Speaker 1
01:52:00.72 – 01:52:01.16

Oh, yeah.

2Speaker 2
01:52:01.68 – 01:52:05.20

You know, they make Billy stupid. Yeah. They make Billy...

1Speaker 1
01:52:05.20 – 01:52:10.70

Maybe Billy's a psychopath. Maybe Billy's an American psycho. He's really smart, but he's a fucking evil person. Right.

2Speaker 2
01:52:11.36 – 01:52:15.48

And there's some massive class action lawsuit against one of the companies. Well, the companies.

1Speaker 1
01:52:15.48 – 01:52:19.10

will be immune. They'll be immune because it's for the greater good of the human race.

2Speaker 2
01:52:19.34 – 01:52:21.72

Come on. Yeah, they'll lobby Congress to make it immune first.

1Speaker 1
01:52:22.08 – 01:52:26.44

100%. If they've done it with vaccines, they can do it with other things. The precedent's been set.

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