#2465 - Michael Shellenberger

The Joe Rogan Experience

Train my day, Joe Rogan podcast my night all day!

Good to see you, sir.

Thanks for having me back.

My pleasure, always.

Yeah.

So much crazy shit going on in the world.

And even before we scheduled this, like more crazy stuff has happened.

The war broke out, all kinds of things.

Yeah.

How are you feeling about the President Trump?

That's an open-ended question.

Do you text with him and talk to him?

Occasionally.

Yeah, occasionally he'll send me a text.

I get these like truth social posts of, you know, things that he's saying.

But this whole fucking I ran thing, man.

Like, did you see this coming?

No, definitely.

I don't know.

I mean, who did?

I mean, when did he even decide?

You know, their national security strategy, they put on November.

Basically just said we've degraded their capacity.

It's a win.

There was no sense in which there would be additional action.

I think it ushers in a new paradigm.

Completely like the older post-war era is just over.

Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, articulated that.

The World Economic Forum.

Probably better than the Trump administration did.

Saying very clearly that older rules-based order is gone.

You saw AOC try to sort of articulate it.

But she sort of fell apart the Munich Security Conference in February.

So this is an administration that is, I mean, and I don't even think they're thinking.

I wrote a piece and I decided not to publish it because I was sort of like decapitation

doesn't really work for regime change.

But it's not clear that they're really out for regime change.

Or they're just asserting power, shaking up things.

I mean, some of it's art of the deal, changing the person that we're negotiating with.

That's Venezuela and Iran.

Is it really going to change those regimes?

I don't think most people don't think so.

But I'm not sure that that's what they're going for.

They're just going for an assertion of American power in service of American interests.

And then what happens in Iran, what happens in Venezuela?

I don't think they care that much about.

These are not behaving as though they do.

Well, not neither thing made any sense to me.

The Venezuela thing, I mean, look, they wanted him out forever.

And he definitely stole the election to get in there in the first place.

And he was a dictator.

But at least that one was at least clean.

They go in, kidnap him, get him out.

This one's nuts.

Like, and what's happening in Tel Aviv?

It's hard to know what's real and what's not.

Because there's a lot of fake video going around and a lot of weird posts on X.

So it's, you know, when I do peek in, it's hard to know.

And you have to listen to Grock.

And then Grock's dismantling a lot of the fake videos.

Mm-hmm.

Wait, wait, wait, wait are the fake videos that you're thinking of?

There's just like fake videos of, you know, like an insane amount of bombs dropping down in the city.

But it seems like there's a massive amount of destruction in Tel Aviv.

Yeah, I haven't checked in lately, but I'm assuming.

Was that just today or yesterday?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I think the president is, there's been some just, you know, Rubio said something about how,

oh, we had to act because we knew that Israel was going to act anyway.

And I think people interpreted it in Netanyahu, who's in the White House a lot.

This, I think this president has shown whether you like him or not, you know,

and there's certainly things that I'm unhappy about and have criticized.

But I think Trump is in charge.

Like he's making these decisions.

There's nobody behind him.

There's nobody to point for all of that, you know, the Russians or whoever's something, you know,

or these, now the Israelis.

You know, it's just he's clearly, I mean Elon gave him, you know, $250 million and he still,

you know, didn't give him even the electric car credit, you know, like,

like Trump is in charge, you know, like I think that's one of the big lessons from this.

And I don't think that I think that means that there's not a lot of like second order thinking here,

like, oh, what's the move after that?

He doesn't know.

He's just acting.

That's what's so wild about it is that this older foreign policy establishment,

which, you know, was like let the experts decide what the right foreign policy,

you know, all these think tanks, and that's just gone now.

It's just irrelevant in this presidency.

And I don't think it'll come back.

Like if you get a Gavin Newsome or a president AOC,

I don't think it's going to come back.

And I think that that's what the Prime Minister can.

I think that's what the Europeans are starting to realize is that this is a completely different world

that we live in than the one we lived in just a couple of years ago.

Which just doesn't make any sense to me unless we're acting on someone else's interests, like particularly Israel's interests.

It doesn't just didn't make any sense to me.

Like if they had supposedly dismantled their chances of making the nuclear bomb,

whether or not that's true, I mean, it's so hard to know.

He was unsatisfied, and just like he was like, I'm not getting anywhere in these negotiations.

And I'm going to replace the person I'm negotiating with.

It's just, you know, turn over the table, like change things up.

You're not getting anywhere.

And you could say he was too impatient.

And their view was the Democrats were going to be like,

I'm not defending it, I'm just saying, I think that's what explains it.

They haven't done a very good job explaining it because I think that it just sounds to some extent like what it is.

Which is that it's they're acting without, they're sort of like, well, does it result in regime changing in Iran?

We don't know.

They're acting without, they're sort of like, well, does it result in regime changing

around?

We don't know.

They might say that we want that or whatever, but that's not ultimately, they're not,

they're not acting on the basis of achieving regime change.

But just seems so insane based on what he ran on.

I mean, this is why a lot of people feel betrayed, right?

He ran on no more wars and these stupid senseless wars and then we have one that we can't

even really clearly define why we did it.

Well, but he said he's against endless wars.

Well, they're not.

They're all endless.

Well, if we hear Rumsfeld talk about Iraq when it first happened, they were talking about

like six weeks.

Six weeks.

Oh, yeah.

Six weeks.

Yeah.

But they put, that was ground force and I know that they've not ruled that out.

For me, that would be, they have, they have not, my understanding is that they've not,

I thought you said it now.

Yeah, no.

But they don't seem eager to go into, I mean, I criticized the Venezuela action because

I sort of was like, how are you possibly going to run Venezuela?

And then I think a little bit more time passed and I was like, oh, they're not, they're

not going to try to run Venezuela.

Like that's not what this is.

They wanted to take it over the oil.

Yeah.

And even there, I mean, the oil, it's not significant at any global level.

I don't, it's hard.

I don't even think it's really about the oil.

I don't think it's about the oil.

I don't think it's about the oil in Iran, either.

Well, the oil reserves are significant.

It's just the, the type of oil and how to extract it is extremely difficult.

That's the worst joke.

In the, like the big, a big abundant reserves are in the Amazon.

So you're talking about it.

What a nightmare.

It's super far away.

It's terrible.

You had a gorilla conflict.

If you had a gorilla conflict break out around those oil facilities, I mean, it's already

more expensive because you have to heat up that particular type of, it's, you know, it's

really heavy oils, if you heat it up to get it out of the ground, then you have to heat

it.

Transport's a total nightmare.

I just, I mean, and as a conservationist, I would say that would be the last place

I'd want to see us getting oil from.

There's a lot of other places that have, have oil.

We shouldn't be going into the Amazon.

So what if anything makes sense to you about this attack in Iran?

I don't know that I'm not, I'm not sure what I think of it.

I mean, I don't, I don't like it.

I don't like, I mean, the whole older system was that you had this international, you know,

security council would have to agree.

The Congress would have to agree.

That's all gone now.

I mean, it's just a totally different.

This guy is just acting, you know, he says, he's not getting where they want to get in

the negotiations with the Iranians.

So he says, we have some leverage over you and we're going to use it.

Similarly is real one of this is real has its own motivations, I think, but I don't think,

I think it's not quite accurate to say that I just don't think, I think all the evidence

shows that Trump is his own man and he's the president and like literally he couldn't

even give back, he couldn't even give Elon the battery subsidy that he wanted.

Yeah.

I get that.

I've never seen a politician, I mean, I've never seen a politician act that independently.

That's, I mean, a president act that independently.

So I'm skeptical of, I mean, I think that, I think that Rubio was sort of like, well,

they were going to attack and so we had to, you know, there's some of that, but I just

think Trump's doing what he wants to do.

And we should.

You really think it's that simple?

Trump's doing what he wants to do.

Yes.

Yes.

You don't think people are influencing him?

Because there's a lot of war hawks around him, right?

There's a lot of people that want this and have for a long time.

I mean, Netanyahu is in there, but then Tucker was in there a bunch.

But do you think Tucker has the kind of influence that Netanyahu has?

Well, I mean, I guess if you just based it on the outcome, then the answer is no.

But that's what I'm saying.

I just think, he listens to everybody, but I just don't think it's, Russians aren't behind

him.

I mean, Trump is, look what he's been through.

I mean, he's, you know, he's got where he is.

There's no way he's going to, they don't have anything on him.

That's why I know that.

I don't think they have anything on him.

But that's what he knows that way.

Well, he could.

But I'm not, we don't see any evidence for it.

Well, you wouldn't see any evidence until it broke out.

Sure.

And they released it.

Yeah.

And, and well, we'll get it.

I'm sure we'll get into Epstein, but I mean, I just think when you don't have evidence

of something, then you can't assume that it's happening.

I haven't seen any evidence.

I've seen evidence that Trump is fully independent with it, particularly this case of Iran, surprised

me.

I would have thought at a minimum, you'd give your largest campaign contributor the one

thing he wants.

I mean, doge was something he wanted to, but, and then I look at Iran and I kind of go,

you know, Trump is always one.

I mean, Trump has been, he said he doesn't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon for a really

long time.

I don't know the exact date.

But certainly.

Well, no one wants him to have a nuclear weapon other than Iran, right?

Yeah.

I think that the, he was, he also put it this way, he was also critical of the Democrats

approach, which was the sort of the mainstream IAEA approved approach because of, of course,

under international law, Iran has the right to a nuclear, to nuclear energy and a nuclear

facilities, including nuclear, nuclear, nuclear, the centrifuges and the enrichment.

Iran has the right to all that under international law.

And so, and Trump doesn't agree with that and he's not going to let international law get

in this way.

So when you say he has a right to it, you're talking just about nuclear power.

Yeah.

Right.

Right.

But that includes enrichment.

So, you know, to a certain point.

Right.

But they've already surpassed that point.

Right.

I don't believe I, you know, if I'm wrong, I'll correct it on acts, but I don't think

it specifies the level of enrichment is part of the issue.

And then you've got these centrifuges.

And so it's all been a cat and mouse game.

I personally do not doubt from it that Iran wants nuclear weapons.

And that's what's been going on.

I think most people think that.

But the Obama administration was like we can do, you know, we can lift sanctions in exchange

for controlling their nuclear program.

Trump has not for a very long time agreed without approach.

I think he was criticizing it for many years before 2016 before he decided to run.

Definitely for the last 10 years.

Did you read the thing today that came out that they're discussing some sort of a leak

transmission that seems to be an activation of terror cells?

Iranians have?

Yeah.

I'm not, no, but I'm not surprised.

Right.

It sounds bad.

Yeah.

That's one of the things that obviously, that was the first thing I thought of was like

oh, great, are we going to get a bunch of Iranian suicide bombers in the United States

now?

It's obviously not.

Maybe suicide bombers, but I would imagine it would be something a little bit more destructive

than that.

It could be.

I don't know what they can get in.

I mean, there's Sean Ryan's been having folks on that say that.

Yeah.

People are getting in with heavy artillery.

I just don't know the status of it.

Well, the real problem is they can do it for four years.

The border was wide open.

Oh, yeah.

And definitely some people from the Middle East got through.

And we have no idea.

Like what is we?

I mean, I'm sure there are some intelligence agencies that have an understanding of what

the threat is.

I hope so.

I mean, I think we see that these terrorists are able to do incredible amount of damage with

pretty simple rifles.

You know, and sometimes was it the French, the club, that particular terrorist action,

there were other people that were using bombs that like only killed one or two people,

but the guys with the machine guns were able to gun down like dozens of people.

So certainly it's terrible.

That's scary.

I think none of us want to, I think that's where a lot of Americans when it happened.

The reason so many people were against it, believe the majority is against it, is because

you're like, great.

Well, we, you know, first of all, is there going to be another endless war in Second

of all?

Are we going to get a bunch of terrorist actions here?

I think if we did, I don't think support for the war goes up.

I think it goes down for sure.

Yeah.

I mean, it's just such a, I mean, the whole, the whole situation internationally has been

so tense already with what's going on in Gaza, with what's going on in Ukraine.

It's like, and to add this to the pile, it's like, I mean, it genuinely feels like there's

a real possibility that we might be entering World War III.

How would that, what would that look like?

I don't know.

I never expected Iran to start attacking, you know, they launched bombs into UAE, Dubai,

I mean, where else?

They expected that.

I mean, it makes Iran look, Iran looks pretty isolated.

I mean, I will say, you know, I was totally, obviously, maybe not, obviously, but very much

on the left and was opposed to all the stuff Reagan was doing, I remember even in the 80s,

but it's like he really did, I don't know how to say he was the only reason, there was

obviously a bunch of weakening within it, but I mean, he really did push back against

communism.

He challenged the entire foreign policy establishment on the basic view of just, you

know, of just, of just kind of keeping it, you know, keeping, keeping the communists

where they were.

And it said Reagan really pushed back against it and said, it got to be regime change,

it sort of almost had a moral, sort of there's a defense buildup, but a moral argument.

And I think it had a big impact to bring down communism.

So I'm, you know, the Iranian, it's, I'm, I'm obviously, I have very mixed feelings

about it.

The Iranian regime is just so evil and so awful that, you know, you're, you're, every

time you see videos of people taking these creates actions, you're like, somebody bring

that regime down.

On the other hand, that country is pretty, the, the people of that country are pretty

radical.

And the Shah in 1979, I just spent last night watching all the old 60 minutes from the

70s.

They're amazing.

But the, the Shah was really modernizing the country.

There was a lot of wealth coming in.

There was a lot of more inequality.

There was also a lot more state repression from his intelligence services.

But the country was, you know, full of radical Muslims who wanted, you know, that, when

all that instability, they wanted to river back to, you know, a radical Islamist regime.

And that's still, you know, I've seen other estimates to say that, you know, the current

regime is incredibly unpopular in Iran, but, you know, how that works out, it's really

hard to say.

But there is something, I caution my own, I talk back to my own anti-interventionist instincts

when I think about Reagan just being like, you know, we're not going to do just containment

strategy anymore.

We're actually going to talk back to communism because people deserve to be free.

And now, is everything better for, you know, is everything fine in Russia?

Maybe not, but I mean, communism was just awful, you know, just a totally soul killing,

you know, crushing, you know, a giant lie, I mean, it's awful to tallitarianism.

So I think we have to kind of keep that in mind.

And especially when you're in a moment of just such incredible chaos like we're in now,

I told my students, I'm like, you get to live through one of the most interesting moments

in history certainly in the last 80 years because the entire paradigm where the United States

had these allies and everything's going to go through the security council and we're

going to try to make it through the UN and there's got to get agreements and all this

stuff.

That's just gone.

I mean, it's just, it's gone to the part where they don't even, where you're kind of like,

how are you, what's going to happen inside Iran, they're like, that's not our concern.

We hope that there's an overthrow of the government, but they're not, we're not like going to

necessarily commit to that.

And they're also calling on the people to rise up, which is, you know, I mean, look,

look at what they did with the protesters, I mean, they killed thousands of people.

And look at Iran and Venezuela, they don't have internal, the opposition is not united.

There's not a united opposition with a united figure.

I mean, remember it was so interesting watching 79 when these protesters against the shower

going on, they're the left and the Islamists made an alliance in Iran, something I'm

very, it's something really interesting topic, I'm just only starting to explore right

now, but they made an alliance, they'd be holding up, I had, you know, they'd be holding

up the eye to hold a committee pictures in the street, like they had their guy.

And the left was like, look, we're just going to, you know, go with this guy, I think

he was making promises to the left around allowing, you know, more, you know, liberalism.

And then they came in, I just consolidated into this really hard line, Islamist regime,

but they had a guy, we don't have, you know, we don't have a guy in Venezuela, we don't

have a guy in Iran.

I don't know if there's anybody in Cuba really, you know, the, in the older regime under

like the Biden, the open society people, the open society establishment, they had somebody

for Venezuela, this machado woman, but Trump gets up there and he just goes, yeah, she

doesn't have enough support.

So she's not with us gone, you know, like they recognize that they don't have, there's

nobody with a opposition, you know, street cred that can come into power.

So I think they, and they know that they're not like unaware of that.

So I think some of the like, oh, they should rise up in whatever, it's a little half-hearted.

I don't know if they believe that that's going to happen.

There's certainly not, they don't seem to be offering them, you know, material support.

Right.

So it's just a symbolic gesture to talk about it.

Sounds like it.

And I mean, in this kind of the, this beautiful collapse of communism, which occurred so peacefully

with the Berlin Wall in the garden, eventually just sort of like, it's just in the vibes.

Yeah.

And the guards are just like, yeah, we're not guarding this wall anymore.

It's just over, you know, and it was just over and it was like, there's a kind of like

a moral collapse.

Not so sure that they're going to get that in Iran doesn't seem like it.

It seems like they've been preparing for this for a long time.

The Iranians.

Yeah.

They're dug in.

Now it's the sun.

And he's just part of the, he represents the, I was the IGRC, the security forces, I mean,

it's their guy.

It's what you would do.

It's rally around the flag.

It's classic.

What happens?

But, you know, you never, you never know.

I mean, these guys then might just negotiate more with the Trump administration wants.

I think the Trump administration is like, we'll just keep killing your leaders until we

get somebody in there that will make a deal with us.

I think that's, I think that's how Trump thinks about it.

Really?

That's my, that's my best guess.

You're smiling.

Do you think this is funny because it's funny because it's, it's so, Joe, it's just like,

you just look at all the think tanks and all the white papers and the state department

and the plane and whatever.

And it's just like, Trump's just, he's going to listen to Tucker.

He's going to listen to, yeah, and he's going to decide what to do.

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Is that good?

I don't know if it's good.

I mean, I just, we don't know yet.

I mean, I think part of it is, is it going to work?

Part of you guys, it moral and you're like, well, does it work to have better outcomes?

I don't know.

We're in a realm of absolute chaos.

We're also in a realm where AI is going to be powering autonomous weapons if not already.

I mean, that is going on.

That is so interesting.

This thing with the anthropic and the DOD and what's happening there, that is really

interesting.

So initially, anthropic was hesitant to allow them to use autonomous weapons, right?

I don't know the status of it, but you saw the open AI, the head of open AI autonomous.

It was the head of autonomous weapons, I think.

I'm not, don't, don't give me exactly, but she just quit.

Like a couple of days ago, it was on X, and it was just like a huge story.

So you have a bunch of, you have a rift in between, now, I think, Sam and Elon are both

on board and want to keep working with the DOD, but it looks like anthropic broke and

then, and then Hegseth was like, well, but then we're going to punish you for this.

That's very consistent with the kind of nationalist vision, which is that, which the

Trump administration has, which is that your security strategy, your economic strategy,

your border strategy, it's all a single, your industrial strategy, it's all a single thing.

Your trade strategy, it's all a single thing.

And I think for Trump, it's just, you're either asserting power and using your leverage

and demanding more, or your engaged and managed decline.

You're just giving up, you know, and I, part of me, I'm, of mixed minds on it because

on the one hand, I'm with the kind of, I kind of go, let's invest at home, we have all,

you know, we have skid row to clean up, you know, we should be focused on that, not

on trying to do regime change or bombing other countries or creating other problems.

On the other hand, I think there's something right about defending the West.

I mean, defending Western civilization, you know, defending our institutions, our norms,

our liberal values, and nobody's done that.

And we just had a guy in power that was, that opened our borders, that kind of gave

a blank check to Ukraine.

It seems like, at a minimum with Trump, you have somebody that is taking responsibility

in ways where Biden would be like, well, we're going to do what, you know, we're going

to work with our allies.

And it was just all kind of, like, it was like, it was all kind of going to be decided

in this, in this, you know, what Kyrgyi Arvin famously calls the cathedral, you know,

just the single thing of the media and the think tanks and the academics and, and Trump

was like, it's not working.

And the working class of this country elected me to, to show strength and, to demand a better

return on our investment in terms of protecting our allies for our people.

So that part of it, I think, is really overdue and really necessary and assertion of why

the West is special, why we need to defend the West is bombing Iran and replacing the,

you know, the commanding with his son is, Masha'at, you know, is what's having to be

against.

Is that the right approach to that?

I don't know.

But I think we were, the system was, was failing.

I mean, the open society system, which was supposed to be this liberal, you know, you

know, system of tolerance that became intolerant, it became totalitarian, it created a censorship

industrial complex.

They, they weaponized the intelligence communities.

We, you know, started getting ourselves into conflicts that we, that was not clear why

we were in them, including Venezuela, I mean, sorry, including Ukraine, I mean, with

Ukraine, it's like, that war only continues because we continue to arm it.

Like if we stopped, if we just were like, let's just have the, just, you know, just cut

a deal wherever the border is right now, and you're just like, that's where it's going

to stop, then you can, I mean, I don't know, I'm not sure what's preventing that from Trump,

I think he's annoyed with Putin, but, yeah, I mean, my view is like, I don't see an interest

in that war continuing, I don't know how it's in the interest of the working, of working

class Americans or Americans, and I have the same questions about Iran and Venezuela and

Cuba, but I think that is a totally different paradigm than the one that we had from 1945

to 2024.

Well, the idea of tolerance for, you know, with the last administration, that seems just

to be a narrative.

It seemed to be a political strategy of keeping the borders open to increase populations

in blue states, raise the senses, get more congressional seeds, and then a path to citizenship

where you'd have permanent voters.

That's what it seems like.

And then there's also a ton of Medicaid fraud that's wrapped up in that that we're now

seeing.

Yeah, I think that's part of it.

I mean, the time is to the peace on why Biden left the borders open, and it was a funny

peace.

Like, there was this, it was, you know, part of it, he's so out of it, right?

Like, there was just, it was not clear, like, there wasn't clear, there was like a meeting

where he was like, yeah, we're going to just do this thing.

They kind of concluded that, I think Cecilia Munoz, who's one of the more moderate advocates

and was in the Obama administration, I think she said something like, Biden just wanted

to give the left, just felt like he wanted to give the left what they wanted.

And that's what, you know, the Soros think tanks and the, you know, the very progressive

immigration groups have been, you know, have been advocating, did the same thing on climate.

So it makes sense.

I know Elon talks a lot about how, oh, it's about importing voters and whatnot, maybe,

it's not even clear that that's a good, that's a strategy that's going to work, you know,

why not?

Well, because, first of all, we don't know that Latinos, like, why are like, why do we

assume Latinos are all going to, you know, vote for Democrats?

Well, if you've got them all on Medicaid and social security, the numbers there are,

it's actually more complicated.

Europe is definitely the case that you have higher rates of crime and higher rates of social

services among migrants.

Here are Latino migrants traditionally, you know, you know, really thrive.

You know, they do much better than the, mostly Muslim immigrants in Europe.

So I, you know, I skipped, I mean, the other thing, I, the statistic that I learned from

David Shore, who's like the one of the top Democrat pollsters when he was talking to Ezra

Klein after the 2024 elections, he was like, if all eligible voters had voted, Trump

would have won by three percentage points, rather than 1.5.

So it's also, so I always think it's kind of funny because the Republicans are always

like trying to make it harder for people to vote.

But under that calculation anyway, and maybe it's just Trump, maybe other Republicans won't

do it.

When you say harder for people to vote, what do you mean?

You mean mail-in voting?

Yeah, just the whole effort to, but the problem is mail-in voting has always been a vector

for fraud.

That's, it may be, I don't know how much of it there is, um, I've seen different things

on it.

Like decades people have been talking about mail-in voting, just being too open to fraud.

Well, but then maybe, but then the question is, does it really benefit?

I mean, in the words, if David Shore is right, if everybody who could vote had voted, Trump

would have won, like, basically by twice the margin.

Yeah.

Well, I don't know if that's necessarily true, but when I see laws like what California

has where you're not allowed to show ID, there's only, I mean, I've tried, tried to find

some sort of charitable way where that would make sense other than you want to open the

door for fraud.

There's nothing.

Well, narrative that they say, oh, poor people don't have like, you see Kamala Harris.

They don't believe that.

They don't have a Xerox machine, like, no, but you ever see the thing?

I think it was a guy, I don't know if you do it for free press.

A guy was going around interviewing, um, well, first he interviewed liberals at, like,

I think you see Berkeley and he was like, you know, do you think that you should have

to have an ID to vote?

And they're like, no, because black people don't have IDs and like, that's just, and then

he goes, he's hearing that.

No, I know, of course, but they believe that.

Yeah.

I mean, but then I don't know if you saw that it's an incredible video because then he goes

to like, I think he goes to Harlem or he goes to like a black neighborhood in New York

and he was just asking black people, it's like, do you have an ID on you?

It was like, everybody was like, yeah, like what's the matter with you?

Well, it's also we just got done with three years of you need an ID to prove that you

have been vaccinated.

So you need to be able to have that to go to work, to get on a plane, to eat at a restaurant.

It didn't make any sense.

It was so immediately contradicting what had just gone down, you know, months earlier.

It's just stupid.

Well, yeah, that was about, that was because the left wanted to control people's behavior

and on voting, they, the old, I know, because I, when I talked to my progressive friends

about it, what, you know, and family and friends, it's, it's very much like, no, we can't

put barriers in the way of voting because that's what they did during Jim Crow.

I mean, that's where it goes back to.

ID is not a barrier.

It's just an insurance that you're a citizen while you're voting.

And then they say there's really not much.

They say there's very little fraud.

I'm just telling you what they say.

I'm not saying I agree.

I'm just saying.

Who is they though?

Progressive?

Yeah.

Do you believe that?

That's horseshit.

That's a horseshit.

I think they believe it.

I'll put it that way.

Yes.

I do.

I think they just say it because that's the thing that everybody says.

I think it's a group thing.

I mean, I think if you sit down with any rational person and no one's watching, you know,

there's no cameras on them and you ask them, does that make any sense?

No one would say it makes any sense.

Most people in this country who are citizens have some form of ID or can get some form of

ID.

And it's entirely reasonable to ask people to prove that you are who you are if you're

voting for the president of the United States.

That seems pretty reasonable.

I find it totally reasonable and I support it.

I'm just saying that if you make it, I'm just saying that you may, Republicans may, it

may result in outcomes that are not the predictable ones that they think they'll get.

Just because Trump at least, and Trump is maybe, you know, a special case.

I mean, he was able to turn out reluctant voters, like he motivated people to vote because

people were fed up with what had gone on in the last four years.

And I think that open border was the biggest one.

I mean, it was one of the biggest ones because people just felt hopeless.

Like this is crazy.

Like what you're doing, you're letting in what's equivalent at least, if you're just

being charitable, it's 10 million people.

It was, it was huge.

It was being conservative.

It's 10 times Austin.

You let 10 Austin's in in four years of people who you have no idea who they are.

Yeah.

And Americans were on board with closing the borders.

And then when it came time to actually asking all the, getting those folks to leave that

came in, all those supports appeared, right?

I mean, well, it's not asking them to leave.

It's showing up at Home Depot and just rounding people up and raiding places and going to restaurants

and pulling people out of their houses.

I think people got very uncomfortable with the idea of militarized police wearing masks

on the street.

Yeah.

And then when you find out that these guys have only been trained for seven weeks and they

get a $50,000 signing bonus.

And then you find out that a giant percentage of them are Latino, which is kind of crazy.

You know, like the two guys who shot that guy in Minnesota, they're both Latino.

And yeah, I mean, that's what you get when you have completely untrained, unprepared people.

Well, that's just like that.

The whole Minnesota thing with Alex Prede is a complete clusterfuck.

I still have not seen verification of whether or not the narrative that makes sense is true.

But the narrative that makes sense was that there was an accidental discharge of his gun

as they were pulling it away from him.

And then that led to them thinking that maybe he still had the gun on him because you're

in the chaos of arresting someone.

Sometimes as he has a gun, a gun goes off and then they shoot the guy.

Yeah.

I bet when you go, I bet when they do the proper evaluation of it, they're going to find

multiple mistakes.

I'm sure.

By the law enforcement.

That.

And then there was the thing with the woman who got shot where you have a guy who had

almost been run over just a couple of weeks before and been dragged in his car.

The guy who shot her had been dragged by another vehicle.

Oh, I didn't see that.

He got dragged like 300 feet to something crazy.

So when a car is coming at him, you could imagine this guy's got some PTSD from that.

And he should not have been so he should not have been no.

And also, I'll certainly it shouldn't have said that fucking bitch like after he shoots

her in the face too.

That's crazy too.

Yeah.

I mean, the reaction, just the heartlessness of the reaction was terrible, including by

the administration.

That's probably why Christy know him and that having to go.

But then on the other side, these protests are organized.

They're organized and they're paid for, which is also something to be take that people

need to understand.

These are not organic protests.

That's not organic that it just happened to be taking place in the very same place where

you found hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud, right?

This is one of the clearest, most obvious distractions you've ever seen, like in the

public arena where you have these people who are being paid to protest.

They give them money to go out there and protest.

They give them signs.

They're organizing it.

They give signal groups.

They're doxing all these different ice workers.

They find out what their license plates numbers are.

They find out where they're staying.

They go to their hotel, the cops, the local cops are being told to stand down.

So you've got it like this convergence of all these factors that lead to chaos and you

know, Mike Benz was talking about it and it was essentially saying it's a mathematical

thing.

That if you have these things play out, you're going to have a certain amount, it was

Mike Benz, right?

It was saying that it was a certain amount of people that are, you're going to have

incidences.

You're just playing it out over the numbers.

Certain amount of these protests, you have organized protests, you have untrained ice

agents, you have a lot of chaos, you have support for people screaming in the streets.

Someone gets shot, boom, and then it moves the needle.

This is calculated.

Yes.

They want this to happen.

They want it to happen this way because then this kills all the support for people that

you know, we're kind of on the fence, whether or not I should be deporting all the

legals, what, excuse me, what it should, excuse me, whether they should just go after

violent criminals and, and then there's these weird narratives like, oh, only 14% are

violent criminals that have been arrested, give us 60% are criminals, 60% of the people

plus were criminals.

And like what, by what definition violent criminals, like, what do you, is it okay if they

just coming here and rip people off, like, are you fine with that, it's just like the

violent ones we need to get rid of, like, I think they didn't, yeah, they did a fairly

poor job of it.

Like, why were they focused on, on Minneapolis?

I think most people don't understand how radical the left in Minneapolis is, it's a Midwest

different place, but it's actually got a long radical left tradition.

Yeah.

And as you were saying, I mean, Alex, pretty, he should have been arrested several days

before when he had a gun on him and got into an altercation with the police.

They should have arrested him then and then they could have, the judge could have done

a lot of different things, but they could have taken away his gun, they could have put

a restraining order on him.

So the next time he showed up and people will know to look for him, then he would have

been, you know, kept out of the area.

Do you know the story about the gun that he was carrying?

No.

He's carrying a gun called a SIG P320, which is notorious for accidental discharges.

Not, not mean there's lawsuits all over the place.

There's videos of cops in precincts bending over to pick something up and the gun goes

off in his holster.

There's a ton of these.

So I don't know if this is completely accurate because this is obviously the fog of chaos

of these type of altercations and situations, but there's a video that many people have reviewed

and it's their conclusion that if you watch the video when one of the ice officers removes

his gun, even though he does not have his finger on the trigger, has his hand on the gun

and his fingers on the slide, as he's moving off, it appears the gun goes off.

Now they've zoomed in on it and shown that it does look like the gun's going off and

it does correspond with the sound of a gun shot.

Okay.

It's just hard to know.

There is a sound.

You hear a gun shot in the video?

It's legitimate.

It's hard to know.

But if it was any other gun, like say if it was a Glock, I would say that doesn't make

any sense.

His finger's not on the trigger.

It's not going to go off.

But that gun is notorious for going off.

There's a guy online that he shows a video where he takes the gun and he manipulates the

slide and it goes off.

And it goes off without nothing touching the trigger.

No one's pulling on it.

It's just if you have the other problem is people alter guns.

Okay.

So the issue with the SIG was they had, I believe up to 2017, they had a lighter trigger.

And this lighter trigger, if the gun was dropped or if something happened to it, it was going

off.

And they determined it's, the gun does not have an internal safety, like some other

guns do.

It's not an expert, so I don't know exactly what the trigger mechanism is.

But my understanding is that the trigger mechanism is different than there are other guns.

If they have another gun that's notoriously reliable, it's a SIG P365, you could drop

that gun.

It's not going to go off.

It's not known for accidental discharge.

But the 320 is known.

And there's tons of videos of people demonstrating this online.

There's a video where they're on a range and a gun goes off and a guy's holster.

And the range instructor says, what the fuck just happened?

And this guy, he points to this, you know, the gun that went off and he said, is that

a SIG?

And he goes, yeah, he goes, get that fucking thing off the range.

So it's that notorious, it's one particular model.

And it just happened to be the one particular model that Alex Pretty was carrying, which

is fucking crazy.

Well, his behavior was really reckless.

I, it's really hard for people to hold two ideas in their mind at the same time, like

ice messed that up, I think, clearly.

And Alex Pretty, I mean, you see the earlier video, you know, where he kicks out the tail

light of the ice vehicle, and he's, I mean, he's got a gun in the waistband of his, of

his jacket.

He didn't buy the jacket.

He gets into this altercation with the police.

I mean, I had to, but when I posted about it, I didn't say this, but one of the other responses

were suicide by cop, people were like suicide by cop.

I mean, and I'm not making that claim, but I mean, his behavior was, I mean, the, the

recklessness of the gun choice mirrors the recklessness of his behavior in those instances.

And I heard people being like, oh, well, he, you know, he was just defending that poor woman.

There was a police officer engaged in a rest of a person, and Alex Pretty intervened

in that.

I mean, I think you can mess around about it.

Well, it was a little, I don't know if it was an arrest, the police officer shoved this

woman.

Yeah, he put, he was in an altercation with somebody.

Yes.

You don't go, in other words, people go, oh, you got to put yourself in.

What do you think you're like, what do you think's going on here?

Like, you should put himself in between that.

No.

The way the, the, the ice officer wasn't a police officer, right?

It's an ice officer.

Do you call them police?

The way the ice officer reacted to the woman did, that bothered me.

Like he just shoved this lady, like, like, step forward and fully shoved her.

That's when Alex Pretty gets involved, and then pepper spray comes out and then, and

Alex Pretty should have absolutely filmed that, should have filmed the whole thing.

That's exactly what it should have been.

A lot of people were filming it.

It was clear.

There's cameras all over them.

So, but don't, I mean, multiple angles.

Yeah.

So, but it's like, I just don't think that's appropriate behavior.

That's, that's not, that's not the tradition of like, man, I think there's a non-violent

left-wing tradition that's actually quite beautiful and spiritual and the row and Gandhi

and King.

That's not what was going on in Minneapolis.

Well, that's not at all what's going on.

This is a part of the problem with these things being organized, right?

Organized paid protests and also people being radicalized by narratives.

Then of course, very different than what was going on with the, the civil rights movement.

You have social media.

So people are like, radically pushed in one direction or another and it's not clear whether

or not that's organic.

It's not clear.

Is this the voice of the people or is this bot farms that are pushing things in one direction

or another?

Is it, I mean, there's a lot of people that I cautiously watch their posts on, on X where

I know that they're AI.

I know it's AI.

I can just tell by the way, right?

It's awful now.

There's so much AI slop on.

It's right now.

It's weird.

Yeah.

It's weird because it does muddy the water and it does fuck with discourse, but it also

radicalizes people.

One way or the radicalizes people towards the right, radicalizes people towards the left.

It's not good.

And I think this guy, whatever his mental health struggles were, they appeared to exist.

It seems like he was a troubled guy already.

So a thing comes along that defines them, a cause that they're going to stand up for

and fight for because their life's probably a fucking mess and their mind is probably a

mess.

And they look at this, they look at it like this is black and white, binary situation.

For sure.

Good guys and bad guys and let's fuck all these fascists and these kick and tail lights

and, you know, get involved in pushing matches with ICE agents is like, that's crazy.

And all that stuff should and can get you arrested.

Yeah.

I mean, I think on the organized issue, remember, like the civil rights movement was really

well organized.

Right.

But people weren't being paid for it.

It wasn't being promoted on social media, it wasn't people's job.

There are people in America right now that are unemployed that are paid protesters for

a living.

Oh, I mean, that's the entire, like, left-wing NGO sector is basically that.

Right.

Yeah.

I mean, that's like that.

We saw, I see the level of San Francisco and for homelessness.

They just go and you work at a government funded or Soros funded NGO and then you do all

that civil disobedient stuff on your free time.

But I was, I just think, I think that you were right when you're saying like, because I

think it's, the problem is not the organization.

The problem is that the organization in Minneapolis had a goal of causing exactly what occurred.

The organization around the civil rights movement was to desegregate soda counters.

Yeah.

Yeah.

One of them was about actually, I mean, the other thing is that brought, pulled back a

little bit further, Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement was about affirming

our liberal democratic western civilization.

Black people wanted to be a part of it.

This stuff where you're like, we want to, you know, open the border and defund the police

and basically start attacking all of these institutions of liberal democratic civilization.

That's different.

That's a radicalized left.

It's what gets not.

It's what gets not clear.

He defines it best as suicidal empathy.

I don't agree with Gat on that.

No, you don't think it's suicidal empathy because either suicidal or empathic because empathy

is, empathy is like what he applies that to a lot of progressive ideas, not just the

immigration thing.

I don't think he necessarily, I think it was actually long before the immigration thing

that he was talking about at suicidal empathy.

The idea being that you need the rule of law to have a safe and peaceful society.

That's what it's true.

You do.

That's what it's true.

You need no violence, you need no crime and when you're taking criminals and just releasing

them from jail and you have no cash bail and you're doing all these things, if you want

to put on the fucking tinfoil hat, you would do that because you want chaos because you

want chaos so you can have more rules and tighten down on people and have more control

over the civilization.

I mean, I think it's not empathic to allow more violent crime.

I don't think that's empathy towards victims, so I wouldn't call it empathy.

Not only that, but when you look at who these folks are and I spent a lot of time looking

at them and was one of them, they hate Western civilization.

They hate the United States of America.

They hate capitalism.

It's an anti-civilization thing that's motivating it and that's not to say that MSNBC watchers

don't feel, oh, I feel bad for that person, but I mean, I always, you know, it's like the

people I hear are complaining about ice.

They don't know any illegal immigrants.

They've never talked to them, other than maybe their server or that, you know, but they don't

even really talk to their gardeners or their, or their, you know, their, their maids.

It's like the idea that they empathy implies a deep understanding of someone's situation

and so I think it's a misdescription of empathy.

I think in some ways, it's more quite the opposite of that that they're actually not showing

empathy for all the people that are hurt by their policies, whether it's open borders or enabling

addiction or euthanizing poor and mentally ill people in Canada or trans-ing kids.

I don't think that those things are empathic and the person that's doing them, I don't think

is suicidal.

If anything, they're actually quite full of themselves and quite arrogant about what they're doing.

I mean, I use the word pathological altruism in San Francisco and I say it's close to

Monkhausen Syndrome by proxy.

Maybe it is Monkhausen Syndrome by proxy, but I don't think it's, I worry about, I worry

about affirming, because I think it's how progressive is going to go, oh, well, if we,

if the homeless are, are worse off, that's just because we care so much.

I just don't think that's the case.

Well, that's the homeless thing is nuts because the homeless thing is just a scam and we know

that basically because of California, like California, what's happened with the whole

homeless budget is so insane and that they vetoed audits of these budgets.

There's been $24 billion spent, no one knows where it went, there's no accountability,

and then the homeless situation increases.

Well, that's why.

I mean, remember, it's like, it's funny, like my students just did a, we have something,

we've been working on it too, like the Canadian euthanasia program, and it's like every

year the numbers just keep going up and up, and I remind you, when you interview homeless

service providers in San Francisco, they'll be like, yeah, no, we're doing an amazing job

every year.

We serve more and more people.

It's like, right, you have all the wrong incentives.

You're trying, you're, you have an incentive to serve, to, you have an incentive to create

homelessness, and that's what they've done.

Well, if you get more money, if you have more homeless, your incentive is now not to

eliminate homelessness because that's your job.

Right.

That's how you make all your money.

It was alert to that.

I, it was like, I can't believe this is real.

Like, when you find out the amount of money that's involved in homelessness, like that,

they spend $24 billion, okay, where'd that go?

Where, and then there's no accountability?

Okay.

There's no fraud.

You're saying there's no fraud?

Zero?

Well, I wish there was fraud.

I mean, somebody was sort of like, can we expose, you know, like, make surely expose

the daycare is not doing anything in Minnesota.

I was like, I wish the homeless service providers weren't doing anything.

Right.

They're stealing the money and then there'd be a lot less homelessness.

Well, so you think they're actually using the money to create homelessness?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, think about like, so San Francisco was like, between $100 and $120,000, a year per

homeless person, I think, I think LA at a bargain of something more like $25,000, that's,

that's just San Francisco, that doesn't count the $24 billion that California gave.

So that money's going to, you know, single resident occupancy hotel owners, it's going

to non-profit service providers who are just bringing food and, you know, alcohol and

drug paraphernalia to make it easier for people to do drugs and overdose and live in tents

on the street.

That's, it's very expensive to kill that many people that way.

That's what San Francisco has proven.

Right.

But it's really about the amount of people where that's their industry.

Yeah.

There is an industry in taking care of the homeless situation and addressing the homeless

situation.

And you know, Coli on noir, when he was on the podcast, he was explaining to me that he

went to San Francisco and he was like, why is it so bad up here?

Do they need money?

He's like, no, no, no.

This guy who's a lawyer is explaining, he's a lawyer as well.

He's explaining it to him.

Like, no, no, these people are getting money to deal with the homeless situation and some

of them making $4 billion a year and more, which is just nuts.

And then it's not getting better.

It's only getting worse and yet they still keep getting that money.

So it's like, there's zero incentive to make it better.

There's an only incentive to make it worse.

And then when you have no accountability, so there's no auditing over the money, $24 billion

is a lot of fucking money.

So where's, who's getting greased up?

Where's that money going?

Mostly it's into the, it's into the temporary what they call, they call it permanent, it's

propaganda work.

Propagand, it's a permanent supportive housing.

It's neither permanent nor supportive.

It's often warehousing addicts where they die.

I mean, we know that they die at very high levels in those little, this is a little crummy,

single-reson occupancy rooms.

They bought a lot of motels that were low income, low cheap motels, converting them, but

they don't really, there's no, I mean, all that money should have gone into a centralized

addiction and psychiatric care system.

How psych is what it should have been?

And instead, it's just, it's just kind of, yeah, it's just basically incentivizing people

to live on the streets and use hard drugs and die and overdose.

It's just so crazy.

I mean, if you wanted to make it better, you would have incentivized them and paid them

based on the amount of people that are no longer homeless.

Right.

But they don't do that.

But then the problem with that is, well, you're eventually going to fix it all and then

your business is going to go away.

Right.

And that's all happening.

I think it's, I think it's all happening unconsciously, like there's no room, there's

no like, you know, secret room where they're rubbing their hands and being like, oh,

they're going to make a lot of money this way.

It's just, you know, when you interview them, it's a very basic view.

You know, it's just, these people are victims, they're victims of white supremacy and capitalism

and, and so victims, everything should be given and nothing required.

Well, I think that's a nice narrative, but I think once you start getting monthly pay

checks from, from the homeless industrial complex, I think you're incentive is to keep

this party going.

Well, sure, but they, they, they, they, but they think it's good.

I mean, they, they go, this shows how, how good we're doing that we got a bigger budget

this year.

And that's how they, that's how they rationalize it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, I mean, it's a sign of a very sick society, hence the title of your book, San Francisco,

Sikko, which is a great title.

I mean, it's a sick place and it was one of my favorite cities.

It was an amazing city.

Well, California is in my Netflix special there in 2016.

So in just the amount of time in 10 years, it's completely falling apart.

When I was there in 2016, it was great.

With the, I mean, there was always a lot of homeless people there, but you have that

in any liberal city, but it was never an epidemic.

It was never like tense everywhere and shit on the streets.

That wasn't the case.

It was just, you know, it was a liberal city, a progressive liberal city, but it was cool.

There was a lot of outdoor music.

It was fun.

It was a great place to go to restaurants and people walked around.

It was a great city filled with intelligent, interesting, open-minded people.

Man, I lived there when I was a little kid.

I was there during the Vietnam War from age seven to 11.

I lived in San Francisco.

It's a little bit better now.

They cut a new mayor.

Yeah, a little bit.

I mean, I want to acknowledge, I can't lie about it.

It's a little bit better.

I agree.

I interview a lot of people still about what's going on.

It's still there.

What did you see would happen with the mayor?

With his security guard.

Yeah.

Yeah.

For sure.

You need to learn some fucking jujitsu.

The way you let that guy grab him, he didn't pummel.

He didn't do anything.

He looked like he had no understanding of what to do when that guy grabbed his body.

That was cool.

How is he a security guard?

That's crazy.

How can you be a security for the mayor if you literally don't know what to do in a

clinch?

I thought he looked like he didn't really see the guy as a threat or something.

Like maybe he thought he was just crazy.

Even if I didn't see a guy as a threat.

If a guy grabs me like that, I'm not going to let him get that person.

Yeah, he's a positional man.

He's probably cut his back of his head and set back on the ground on the body slamming

on to the fucking concrete.

And then, kind of a metaphor for the whole situation.

And then he just walks away.

And he walked away, like it was nothing.

Like he walked away.

Not even running.

Did you see though, because I saw that video, and I couldn't tell if the mayor actually

saw what was happening.

He was like, he was looking that way and his guy was here when they started physically

struggling with each other.

And then when they're struggling with each other, he walks off.

And then the guy gets bodyslide.

It was the weirdest video to watch.

Yeah, but because it is so nonchalant,

the most, yeah, as a metaphor for the city.

It's just a different angle.

The mayor actually is running off to get help.

Oh, he is, okay.

Running off?

Yeah, me and me refresh this real quick.

What was it?

Yeah.

Show me.

So there's the mayor right there.

Okay.

He pushes this guy here in a second.

The mayor sort of, as soon as he gets this side watch,

it takes off.

So why are they hanging out with this guy in the first?

That looks like they're in camera right there.

So the security guy started it and he doesn't know

what the fuck he's doing.

And there's the mayor over here.

Okay.

Oh, look at his, like, shitty technique.

Much better video.

And the other guy's a lot stronger than him.

So the mayor, he starts off on, he takes,

he starts running right.

He seems relaxed.

Okay.

Okay, he did start walking slowly and then starts with that.

That's gonna get help.

That guy started it all.

He pushed that guy.

If you're a security guy, the last thing you want to do

and there's one of you and two of those other guys

is deal with the situation that way where you push a guy.

I'm, I have to say, it's essentially said,

I'm always surprised when I see them do,

like that was the same thing that happened with the Freddie.

We're just talking about it.

What do you think this guy's probably armed too?

I mean, but also, he shouldn't push that guy that way.

I mean, the whole thing is fucking stupid.

Look at the chaos.

There's somebody else just running around

and they're homeless person or something.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The other guy's probably talking shit.

I bet that guy's funny.

I bet he's a fucking guy with a big coat on.

I mean, I don't, for the life of me,

none of it makes sense.

Right.

None of it makes sense.

The mayor walking off casually and then eventually running.

It doesn't make sense.

The security guy just walked up to those guys and pushed him

when your details take care of the mayor.

He should be escorting him around that

and getting him away from any potential trouble.

Like the brazenness of just walking up and pushing that guy,

well, you don't know how to fight at all.

It's very clear when you watch the way they grapple

with each other.

He doesn't know what he's doing.

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Seems like we're having a lot of security problems

in our society right now.

It's wild, right?

I can believe the pushing, I mean, that's the same

the pretty thing.

Like pushing, is that like an important law enforcement

technique?

I mean, what is that?

Well, not only that, he pushed a small woman.

The ice guy just completely, just full-on shoves

this small woman.

Which means he was emotionally out of control first, right?

I mean, he was angry.

He was angry.

These guys are not like special forces guys.

They're not well trained.

These guys are the seven weeks.

Seven weeks and a lot of them are financially incentivized.

Because if you get $50,000, if you're in debt,

and then you could take this job on,

when they get the $50,000, how long do they

have to stay on the job for to have that money,

to have that signing bonus?

Or is it one of those things where you get the $50,000

as a signing bonus, but you pay it like a record deal

type deal?

It's not really your money.

You have to make it up later.

I imagine it.

But still, if you can get $50,000, there's

a lot of people that will take that job.

Yeah.

They're just, yeah, it was just a bunch of bad choices,

made by the administration on that one.

Someone's Reddit comments saying they have no personal

experience, but they've heard that it's 50K over four years.

If you're in good standing at the end of those four years.

So you only get it after four years.

But that might not add to that.

But for some people that have no job opportunities and nothing

on the horizon, that $50,000 looks like, look,

it's an extra 25K a year or an extra 25K for four years,

for 50 for four years.

Another person says that's incorrect.

It's broken in 10 payments once at 90 days

then once every year for four more years.

Anyway, it's broken.

Be the way.

It's $50,000 that you would not have been able to make

ordinarily.

I mean, we had police shortages before 2020.

We had a bunch of police shortages after that, mostly

by police officers who were just felt mistreated by the society

or by their local mayors who said that they were evil.

Well, didn't a lot of cops resign when Adam Donney got elected?

Oh, I'm sure.

And then a COVID, and then a bunch of police officers

were driven out of drink COVID.

So there was already our security forces have been,

you know, and they were just people underestimate

how important it is to feel like important in your job

and respected.

And it's not just about the money,

because they would be offering more money.

But I think a lot of people are like, oh, no,

I don't want to be in a job where people are like

spitting at me or throwing urine.

People not just get a job where your life is on the line.

Yeah, your life is already on the line,

and then you're mistreated by the wider society,

which actually creates additional risks, you know,

as this chaos in Minneapolis shows.

So yeah, it's just people want to believe that they're doing

something that is appreciated by the community.

And so when the community decides that they're against

policing, your civilization's pretty far gone.

Right, but there's a difference between policing

and this ice thing.

The ice thing is a different thing, right?

They're looking at it differently.

It's not like you're watching a violent altercation take place.

The police show up and people are spitting on them.

Like you're trying to break up a violent crime.

This is different.

They're looking at it like in the progressive narrative

is like, no one's illegal on stolen land.

And we need to have open borders and illegals

or immigrants rather are the foundation of this country.

And you hear all that, those narratives.

The president and the president of the administration

wanted to pick a fight obviously with this left wing,

with activists in this left wing city,

they thought it would write down to their benefit

to show how crazy the left was and it backfired on them.

Well, I think they wanted to do something

about the amount of illegal fraud that was just recently

exposed in Minneapolis.

But I don't know if that's, but you wouldn't do it

with ice raids though.

I mean, but it's illegal immigrants.

If you have illegal immigrants that are responsible

for hundreds of millions of dollars at the fraud

and you know, at least some of them are illegal,

it seems rational that you would send

ice in to find out who's illegal and who's not

and put a stop to some of it.

And there's also this nationwide focus on this one place

because of the Nick Shirley videos.

Yeah, though I think that the motivate,

my understanding is that the motivation was to motivate

people that are here illegally to self-deport.

And so that that's the main part of the strategy

is this show of force because of course it's,

they wanted the publicity,

they wanted people to be scared in self-deport.

They claim that, you know,

one point, I think three million people self-deported

or at one point four and the other 400,000

or 600,000 deported through the normal channels.

And apparently they're just limited

to how many people they can actually deport

through the normal channels,

but they can get, people can self-deport, they can just go.

Right.

And because of course there's this thing called e-verify

where you just have the employers have to prove

that everybody you're employing is here legally

and they don't want to do that.

Drum administration doesn't want to do that

because they'll upset in particular

like the agricultural lobby,

but other construction, who depend on,

so it's a funny, it's not great.

I don't know, I'm not saying that there's,

that I have the perfect, you know, answer to the other one,

but obviously like politically the president

doesn't feel like they can do e-verify

and maintain support from the business community

for his political agenda.

So you end up,

but you end up with a kind of underclass

that's here illegally, but that's protected

because they're working in a sector

that the president and the administration wants to protect,

but then you're also self-deporting people.

I'm not sure exactly how they're thinking about it,

but that appears to be what the heart of their goal is.

Well, this was always, a lot of people on the left

back in the day would say that illegal immigrants was,

this was like a Koch brothers thing.

This was like a right wing thing

that they wanted this for, for exactly what you just described.

And that this is not a left wing progressive idea

and that what it would do is would lower the wages

for the lower class, the middle class of this country

and it would be bad for the citizens.

And so you don't want unchecked illegal immigration,

unchecked illegal immigration would just be for the right

because they're the ones who own these massive corporations

that are profiting off of illegal labor,

they don't have to pay them benefits,

they don't have to pay them healthcare,

any of the things that cost money.

Yeah, I mean, on the left was always balancing

a sort of open society.

They wanted, the Soros Foundation always wanted

to have a free movement of people to,

that was sort of their view of why,

on part why the Holocaust occurred

is that you couldn't move, at least the persecutions,

you couldn't move people as easily.

But then you had the working class

who were negatively affected by bringing immigrants

who had pushed down wages and unions

who were a big part of the Democrat party.

So the Democrats were sort of divided on it for a while,

but they managed it and Hillary and Obama would sort of,

if you look at when they were competing in 2008,

they were very carefully, like there was a whole thing

around like driver's licenses,

whether she would give them or not,

and Obama accused Hillary of kind of playing both sides

of it, you know, typical thing.

But they also both spoke out strongly against mass migration,

fast forward 10 years, you know,

fast forward much more than that.

It was at 16 years into today.

And now you've got a much more working class

Republican party who's unified around

keeping the borders closed

and restricting the supply of low income unskilled workers.

Because, I mean, it's just, I mean,

it was really weird to watch people

that are always defending supply and demand

and economics and economic policy,

then say, oh no, but having open borders

and having all these working class people come in

is going to have no impact on wages when obviously it would.

And I think that's now, that's also now gone.

I think that's another thing that's just Trump has just changed.

I don't think you're going to see Democrats going back

to advocating that kind of mass migration again.

Right, but you could see a world where they would push back

against what has happened,

what they would say, the barbaric nature

of some of these ice raids.

And then saying, this is a filter of what ice water

isn't that, too, if you'd like.

But you don't have to not have your bottle.

We don't care.

Oh, I think it's in the shot.

No, it doesn't matter.

We don't care.

It doesn't matter.

But you could see how they could go back

to a much looser border policy.

And get back to what they're doing.

Because it wasn't they won't, I think they won't.

I think the closed border, I mean,

I think that that sweet spot of public opinion

is like, people really want to close,

I think it was just really,

but I don't think public opinion supported

in an open border, even on the left.

No, during those last four years,

but yet they did it in any way.

And they were moving people to blue states.

They were moving people to swing states.

They were flying people and busing people.

They were doing it on purpose.

Isn't that also the, because the blue state governors

were more welcoming of them?

There's a little bit of that,

but there was also the idea that you're going

to juice up the congressional seats

because you're going to change the census.

Maybe although California lost seats, right?

Well, because California's done such a fucking

terrible job of governing their state.

It's so, that place is so crazy.

Like every time there's some new law

that they're trying to push through, some new bill.

And like, do they just want everyone to leave?

Well, they drove the billionaires out, right?

Yeah.

I mean, I know they drove out David Sacks,

came to Austin.

I think Mark Zuckerberg moved to Florida.

I heard rumors this Steven Spielberg.

I don't know if that's, I don't want to spread

disinformation.

I don't want to spread misinformation,

but I heard he was leaving.

But yeah, it's called the,

the thing that drives me the most nuts

is when these progressive talking heads saying,

they don't want to pay their fair share.

With the amount of waste and fraud, why would you?

You don't think there should be some accountability

to how much fucking waste and fraud

that has been clearly demonstrated?

Like the solution is just give more money.

Oh, and they can do it because they have it.

So what, you just give more money

and now it's $30 billion goes to homeless

with no accountability?

Like, what are you saying?

Like, where do you think this money's going to go?

It's actually going to help people

and affect things in a positive way.

There's been no indication that that's the case.

That the real problem is,

they just haven't had enough money from the billionaires.

That's fucking ludicrous.

That idea is ludic, it's such a lazy,

intellectually lazy way of framing this whole discussion.

That's saying, oh, they don't want to pay their fair share.

Fuck you.

That's not what's going on here.

What's going on here,

you have a completely incompetent government

that's absolutely corrupt and they want more money.

Oh, yeah.

Gas is like $8 a gallon almost now.

That's bananas.

They were going to shut down.

I mean, the refiners are being shut down.

In that initiative, the billionaires tax is an SEIU initiative.

So meaning it's the union that covers healthcare workers

like nurses.

They're very radical.

Very radical left.

And the money is to provide Medicaid

for undocumented immigrants.

That's what they want it for, right?

So that's the whole thing.

And so you literally get the,

this is what people worry about democracy.

It's very democratic,

but you get these powerful unions

and they're able to change the laws like that.

I mean, it's called the Curly effect

because there was a Boston mayor named Curly

who made everything so bad for his political opponents

that they left.

But the consequence was that he ended up gaining more power.

So when everybody moves to,

when all the moderate Democrats move to Austin

or Miami or Denver or wherever,

California just ends up locked in more

to a progressive agenda.

That's the problem.

Well, I think the idea is that it's so good there

that most people are just going to tolerate

whatever new bullshit they throw your way.

100%.

And also, I mean, it seems like the tech community

is now backing the San Jose mayor who's running,

who's a very, he's a Democrat, very moderate.

But he's been critical of Gavin running for governor.

Yeah, Matt Mayhan.

So keep your eyes on him.

I mean, he's not, he's not like,

maybe the most exciting guy,

but he's definitely running as a moderate.

That might be because of some money.

Yeah, it seems like he's exciting.

People are like a problem.

I know.

They want, he might be enough to,

I don't know, it's hard to say,

but it does look like,

because I mean, look, there's plenty of,

the tech community only woke up politically in 2024.

That's how long it took.

And it really took things getting so bad

where they were telling Mark Andrewson,

as he said to you on your show,

that they were shutting off whole parts of AI.

The Biden administration was openly threatening AI

and this huge new, and there's concerns.

I'm not saying that there's not,

but I think that, I think at some point,

the tech community, which had been, you know,

either a leaning Democrat, you know, for a long time,

since the Obama era, you know,

or wanted to stay out of politics,

because they just wanted to focus on their machines

and their investments.

They don't really want to be involved in politics,

but they woke up in 2024 and so hopefully,

because it's not, I mean, when you see what Soros has done

and you really appreciate the power

that one billionaire can have,

you kind of go, why is there nothing like that,

you know, on the other side?

Why is it so dominated by Soros?

And so I hope that that's starting to happen,

but yeah, when you start to chase out the billionaires

and the billionaires just give up on California,

then it's gotta be whoever's remaining

to try to, you know, put the money behind the guy

that can get some change there.

Yeah, that's, I mean, I don't see a pathway

where California anytime soon turns around.

I don't see how it could.

I feel like it's, the momentum has shifted so far

in a terrible direction,

and the solutions are always tax more,

take more money from people,

and you see of this completely corrupt, irresponsible,

fraud-ridden, wasteful government

that wants more of your money,

and the solution is, if we take more money,

we're gonna make things better,

which is just insanity.

I mean, things that can't go on don't.

So, I mean, you could see it, right?

I mean, say Matt Mahan or somebody more moderate,

gets him to be governor,

Rick Carusa runs for LA mayor again.

I mean, honestly, like, if somebody can't defeat

Karen Bass after she let Los Angeles burn away,

which is now we now know for a fact,

was just totally preventable, absolutely preventable.

I was saying at the time,

now we know, they tried to rewrite the report,

but it's clear it was totally preventable.

How did they try to rewrite the report?

Well, the report said, here's all the things

that the fire department should have done

that didn't happen, and ultimately,

the mayor is the one that chooses the fire chief

and fires the fire chief,

and the mayor was warned.

And she goes to Fleistagana for this little junket,

presidential inauguration,

piling around when she should have been in LA

with a cometta command, headquarters,

and if she wasn't, then Gavin should have been,

Schwarzenegger towards the end of his administration,

they would just mobilize planes full of water,

these huge cargo planes, full of water,

before they were fires, just to start to circulate,

just to get ready to put stuff out.

This idea that, there was this idea promoted

that it was inevitable that the fires,

that eventually it's just, no, like it's absurd.

Like, of course you can protect it with adequate fire,

and put, oh, the pipes weren't big enough, no.

Like, maintain your reservoirs,

have water in them,

even the one that was not repaired yet,

which should have been repaired,

they could have kept,

they could have air-gapped the pipes

so that it didn't contaminate the water supply,

but left it for firefighting, they didn't do that,

they didn't station the engines,

where they needed a station.

Now, nobody was on, it's like,

they're not taking responsibility,

like they weren't taking responsibility for it.

So, anyway, to the point being,

get a new governor, you get a better mayor of LA,

you've got a guy in San Francisco now

who I think still has a lot of potential,

this latest video showing the chaos there,

but with that, I think it's time to fix him though.

That's not his fault.

His, you know, the criticism of him

is he walked away too casually.

That's it.

Yeah, so I mean, I think there is a way

for California to come out,

and my view is like, look, you've got,

it's on the tech billionaires.

They, you know, and I know some of them have laughed,

and obviously they don't need it,

but there's still a lot of billionaire rich guys

in California that are perfectly capable

of financing an alternative effort.

The vote, you know, 75% of San Francisco voters

want to arrest people using fentanyl in public.

They, they want to arrest them.

Okay, that sounds so, that's so taboo and progressive.

That's 75% of San Francisco voters.

So the voters are not, they're not the radical left.

Some ways they're radicalized

and they're hatred of Trump

and the Trumpet arrangement syndrome,

but I mean, everyone like Caruso and Mahan

and anybody else there will all just be able

to say they hate Trump like everybody else.

I think they've seen the consequences of these policies.

Oh yeah, there's, people are, people are really,

there's not like anything has changed that significantly.

They will, in fact, when I interview people in San Francisco,

they're a little reluctant to admit

that's gotten better because I think they don't want

to take any pressure off the politicians.

So I mean, I do think it's, it's rescuable, but it's hard.

When you say it's gotten better like Caruso.

Mostly the encampments are being broken up.

Now you see a little, you see more of that sort of thing

that we just saw in the video where there's like,

I call them like a little more like a nest.

You know, there's just a little home.

So it's not an entire encampment.

Like yeah, the whole block is broken up.

Not like that.

That's in Oakland.

Yeah.

That's in Skid Row.

Oh, Oakland's not.

Oakland is, Oakland might not be savable.

They had a chance to save themselves

and they ended up voting for the wrong person for mayor

and it's just as bad as ever.

So, but I think, if you get San Francisco L.A.

and a new governor in place,

I think you've got the makings to save it.

I've ever seen this video with Skid

does the subscription of what's going on in Oakland

and then drives across the county line

into the next place and it's immediately all done.

And you just see what the difference

between two different forms of government

and how it works.

I didn't see that one,

but I saw the one between Venice and Santa Monica.

Yeah.

I was there when the Venice and Santa Monica

was someone like, you're like,

why aren't there any tents there?

It's like, that's Santa Monica.

Yeah.

It's different.

Well, there's still some.

Santa Monica got bad too.

Yeah.

But they cleaned it up a little bit better.

But Venice is bananas, it's just,

but Venice is nothing compared to Skid Row.

Skid Row's 50 blocks.

Venice is okay now.

Venice is okay now.

Yeah, they cleaned that up pretty quickly

and then they, and then the voters fired their city council

member who represented them

who was total crazy radical Chesa Badine level radical

and replaced them with a more moderate person.

So, but yeah, it's like when you go to the beach,

it's not chaos.

No, I mean, I'm not, there's always,

but I mean, remember before it was just,

it was tense everywhere.

I mean, it was, hey, everywhere.

And they would dug in, you know, it was like crazy.

So, no, that's gone, but Skid Row, it's bad as ever.

Skid Row is 50 blocks.

50 blocks is so crazy.

50 blocks of tents and homeless people.

When we first heard that, I was like,

that's gotta be wrong, it's probably five blocks.

No, it's five zero.

50 blocks, that's an enormous amount of land

that's completely covered by homeless in campus.

There's like a whole genre of like influencers

when they first visit Skid Row,

because everyone hears about it.

And then you see like their tweets are just like,

they're just like, all I couldn't believe,

like I think it's like maybe Ben Shapiro

or there's various conservative influencers

who've gone to Skid Row and they're like,

I had no idea.

There was a common idea until you see it.

There was a comic from the comedy store

that filmed something.

He went like undercover and he had like in this past,

he had some, I don't think,

I think currently he was sober when he did this,

but he decided to go there and film

and stay in one of these encampments

just to show what it was like.

And this is like 2006-ish somewhere around there

and it was fucking nuts, even back then.

And we talked about the story of how Skid Row

with the whole Jerome hotel and how it all started.

Skid Row is the place where they would take

all the homeless people and all the people

that were problematic and they would move them there

and keep them there.

And the idea was that you just keep them out of Beverly Hills,

keep them away from Hollywood.

We're doing movies and we've got famous people walk around.

We can't have homeless people.

Just snatch them up, take them downtown and contain them.

So they had them contained in this area

and they call it Skid Row and then it just kept getting bigger.

It's not that different from the tender one

in the sense that these are places

where the single resident,

those are places where the really cheap hotels were.

They were like often for like working people

that were in town temporarily, like temporary hotels.

Some of them would just be cages.

There were no walls, like you would just get your own.

That was how primitive they were.

And then it just evolved over time

and then they became, all of them became subsidized

for the homeless.

But yeah, it's, I think California, I think it's important.

I think with Trump and again,

like him or Haydom or disagree whatever,

you see the potential of this country in particular

to make a big change.

And I think that it's ultimately resulted

from a unleashing of social media made it all possible.

It's allowed for people to get accurate information

for the first time and a different paradigm.

So I don't want to lose hope on the Golden State.

But you lost hope on Oakland.

Yeah.

Yeah, but maybe I never had hope for Oakland.

So one point, I'm Oakland was great.

Yeah, I mean Jerry Brown actually brought it up a bit.

Got it more development there.

But yeah, it's all about governance.

Yeah, it is.

Yes.

Hey, can I use the bathroom?

Yeah, sure.

We'll pause.

We'll grab back folks.

I just sent Jamie something funny

that someone just sent me about San Francisco.

This is this guy.

I think he calls himself the gay Republican.

The gay Republican?

There's a lot of those actually.

But which is, it shouldn't shock people.

They're closeted about the Republican part now.

That's the thing.

Well, it depends on how wealthy they are.

I mean, some of them are pretty, you know, Peter Teal.

Pretty open about it.

He will, he was, yeah, but it's Republicanism.

What's this?

Fran Transit.

We refuse to release crime surveillance videos

because it will make people racist.

Releasing videos would create a racial bias

in the riders against minorities on the trains.

Why would it do that, San Fran Transit?

Why would it, why would it create a bias?

Is there a reoccurring theme among the people

committing crimes?

You could say that about European crime statistics as well.

That's also why the Germans actually, in particular,

but I think other European countries

did not want to release.

Right.

But they did get them out.

They have come out now.

And the UK?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So let's move on to happier subjects.

Shall we?

So what do you think about all this UAP talk?

It's one thing that Trump has said that he's going to release

whatever files that they might have on UAPs,

alien terrestrial beings.

Oh, it's Jess.

I talked to Jesse Michaels about it.

He is highly skeptical.

And he said the people that are involved are all old guard.

And it's just going to be a bunch of horseshit.

Maybe.

Just first of all, look, I think whatever

you think about the phenomenon, this is amazing.

I mean, the president just said he's

going to release all these things.

So after decades of saying, we're not interested in this.

We're not following this.

We're shutting down blue book.

There's nothing there.

They're like, he's saying.

So I mean, that right there is, I think, amazing.

And I thought the whole thing was amazing.

Obama comes out and he goes, well, there's definitely aliens.

Oh, but they're not an area 51.

Unless they're hiding it from presidents, which

is like a well-established conspiracy theory.

So to have Obama even say that.

And then Trump comes up and he goes, Obama

revealed classified information with a little grin

on his face, because he's a little rivalry with Obama.

I might help him out by declassifying.

And then a few hours later, he did.

I mean, I, what can't you like about that?

I mean, I think that, well, it's theater.

That's what you can't like about.

It's theater, but I mean, we just saw something really

comes out.

This is just another distraction to keep us

from thinking about all the other things that are going on.

But you can't be so, I mean, we should get

into Epstein files too, because I think I have

a different view of Epstein now.

But look, I just think we've been asking for more transparency

like we had in this very brief period in the mid-70s

with the church committee hearings.

It really took a whole watergate.

It took something big.

It's been over 50 years.

We got a lot of Epstein files.

Yes, there's some missing.

But we got JFK files, Amelia Earhart files,

and now we're going to get some UFO files.

Is it going to be everything, of course not?

Like there's just no way.

But I don't think like, I think we should hold,

but we should be happy that there is an acknowledgement

that there's a lot of government files

and that there's some commitment to release them,

because I do think like, it's easier to get

new Epstein files released after you have

some Epstein files released than if you have none.

And I feel the same way about UFOs.

Okay.

So it's easier to get more UFO files released,

but like release, like did you want?

What I think one of it is like, what do we want?

And I've been, you know, I respect John Greenwald a lot.

He runs something called the black vault.com,

where he has been foyering.

He's been issuing, you know, freedom of information

and direct requests on UAP, but also a ton of other issues

since the mid 90s, when he was like 15 years old,

he became obsessed with doing a foyer request.

And he has identified a number of documents

that we know exist with redactions.

One of them is the UAP task force,

which has a line that just says potential explanations.

You know, the first explanation is redacted, it's blacked out.

The second one is, you know, some sort of natural phenomenon.

Number three is blacked out, it's redacted.

Unredactives.

I mean, come on guys, you can't tell me,

well, we have to protect our sensor data.

Come on guys, I mean, like that's not sensor data.

Tell us what the potential explanations are.

On terms of the sensor data, John also made a great point.

Do you remember when the Pentagon released the video

of the Russian jet dumping fuel on one of our drones?

There's like a famous video where they show,

as I hostile act by the Russians jumping fuel on our drone.

When was this?

Just recently, I mean, must have been within the last year or so.

So like, they're not, we do see, they do release,

you know, warfare, various times they do release things

and you can kind of go, okay, that means that we have,

I don't think what I'm saying is,

the main excuse has been not to reveal our methods

for getting, you know, we're just talking about UAP here,

getting, you know, photographs and video.

We know that a huge amount of it exists.

They haven't even released the full, you know,

gimbal and go fast videos.

There's a whole bunch more video left.

Really?

So just really, yeah.

So the video that came out, those were whistleblower leaks,

right?

Eventually, they released them formally, though.

The Pentagon did.

So there's much more of that.

So, and the, particularly started interrupting,

but was the gimbal or the go fast

where there was many more crafts?

I believe that there was, so there's three videos, right?

It's gimbal go fast and then what was the one where,

the TicTac video moves out of a frame.

My understanding is that there's significantly more video

for all of those.

And then I also, my understanding is also,

there's just a lot of other videos,

particularly from those two incidents,

certainly have, there's so much more sensor data from,

because we know those incidents had a lot more going on,

right, than just was filmed by those videos.

So I think that now, there is, I was going to say,

the UAP community, there isn't really an organized one,

although Jesse's doing an amazing job of organizing it,

we should be really specific and say, you know,

here's what we want.

I did a piece with John Greenwald,

Representative Nancy Mace wrote an open letter

to the intelligence and military community saying,

here's a set of documents that we want to release.

So I think the good news is we're like, look,

President has said he wants this.

We've identified a bunch of documents,

identified a bunch of videos in film.

Yeah, I mean, are they going to withhold stuff,

are they going to mislead probably,

but that's been the story for 80 years.

Oh, yeah, you saw the age of disclosure, right?

Yes, of course.

Okay, so I think they make a really good point

in age of disclosure that if they did release things,

the real problem is misappropriation of funds

lined Congress and the fact that some of these,

you would assume that the way these things are being handled,

if they do have crafts, if they are,

if there is some sort of a back engineering program,

that back engineering program is going to be held

by a military contractor.

So, so whatever the contractor is,

whether it's rocket dined or whoever has it, right?

You would imagine that the other competing groups

would be very pissed off that they didn't have access

to this thing and they think it's too.

The misappropriation of funds lined Congress,

people could go to jail, also, most likely fraud.

There's gotta be tons of fraud.

If there's so much money that's being like shuffled away

into these black ops projects,

if there's no oversight, then who knows

where the money's going, right?

So there's a problem there, if you open up the books

and people go, why was there a hundred million dollar

check written here?

Where's the 2.3 billion that's missing here?

And, you know, I'm, yeah, I have doubts now.

I mean, I have to say, I didn't finish watching it,

but you know, Jesse just dropped a video with him

and Eric Weinstein and Eric Davis.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, Eric Davis, yeah.

So Jesse, Eric, I haven't seen that yet.

Yeah, I found it really, it really made me question

whether there's any there there.

What does Eric Davis do?

Eric Davis, you know, who he is?

He's got the bushy beard and he's in age of disclosure

and is part of the whole, you know, big low,

you know, that whole a sap atyp.

He was a, I don't know if it was exact.

He was a scientist.

Okay.

But he was sort of talking about like,

because I think Eric Weinstein was asking these really

hard questions like, okay, well, like,

how many people are in this, you know,

reverse engineering program?

And what is it?

And I just found his answers to be very thin.