communism makes no sense at all totally opposed to human nature it never works it always evolves
into dictatorship it creates a power vacuum when you say hey there's no structure of power here
right we're all equal it's a flat line one guy usually gets up because that's human nature and
goes ah i don't think so i think if you're going to leave a power vacuum i'm going to take that
power vacuum corporatism hates competition it wants monopoly and oligopoly power whereas capitalism
loves competition and wants to free markets when mainstream media has you hooked you got no hope
because you don't have the right information you have propaganda you have marketing you don't have
real news when you're in the online world it's chaotic and don't get me wrong it's got plenty of
downsides right but within that chaos the truth begins to emerge trump is a massive risk because
of all the things we talked about earlier but there is a percentage chance that he's such a wild card
that he overturns the whole system and that is why the establishment is a little scared of him
the following is a conversation with cenk yuger a progressive political commentator
and host of the young turks as i've said before i will speak with everyone including on the left
and the right of the political spectrum always in good faith with empathy rigor and backbone
sometimes i fail sometimes i say stupid inaccurate ineloquent things and i frequently change my mind as
i'm learning and thinking about the world for all this i often get attacked sometimes fairly
sometimes not but just know that i'm aware when i fall short and i will keep trying to do better
i love you all this is alex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the
description and now dear friends here's cenk yuger you wrote a book yeah a manifesto that outlines the
progressive vision for america so the big question what are some defining ideas of progressivism
yes so in order to do that lex we gotta uh talk about where we are in the political spectrum
and uh in fact there's two different uh spectrums now people often think of left right uh and that's
true that exists but layered on top of that is now populist versus establishment so i'm center left
on the left right spectrum um but i'm all the way on that populist end of of the second spectrum
so where does progressivism lie within that well uh i would argue that it's exactly in those places
it's populist uh and it's on the left but it is not far left so far left is a different animal and we
could talk about that in a little bit so in terms of what makes a progressive so expand the circle of
liberty and uh justice for all and equality of opportunity now people will say well that seems
pretty broad and all american but is it think about it so expand the circle of liberty uh everybody's in
favor of that right no absolutely not so uh certainly the king of england was not in favor expanding the
circle of liberty and the founding fathers said we're going to expand it and they expanded it to
property white men and then progressives have been their progressives because they expanded the circle
of liberty they then from then on as we were perfecting the union progressives always say
expand it further include women include people without property include all races and at every turn
conservatives fight against it so that doesn't mean if you're a conservative today you don't want to
include women or uh minorities etc but but today you would say for example well i don't want to expand
the circle of liberty to for example undocumented immigrants and maybe you're right about that and
we could have that discussion in terms of a specific philosophy and i don't believe that undocumented
immigrants should immediately be citizens or anything along those lines but i do believe in expanding
liberty overall and the contours of that are what's interesting and then you see justice for all
everybody's for just no right now marijuana possession is still illegal in a lot of parts of the uh country
now a lot of right-wingers and left-wingers agree that it should be legal but for my entire lifetime
black people have been arrested at about 3.7 times the rate of white people and the entire country has been
fine with it so is that justice no they smoke white people black people smoke marijuana at the same rate
black people get arrested about four times the rate that is an injustice that an enormous percentage
of the country was comfortable with well progressives aren't comfortable with it we want justice for all
so the quality of opportunity is an interesting one because the far left will say so at least some
portions of them will say equality of results right so progressives just want a fair chance so free
college education but afterwards you don't get to have exact same results as either the wealthiest
person or we're not all going to be equal we don't have equal talents skills abilities etc there's a
lot of questions i can ask there so on the circle of liberty yes so expanding the number of people whose
freedoms are protected but what about the magnitude of freedom for each individual person so
uh expanding the freedom of the individual and protecting the freedoms of the individual it seems
like progressives are more willing to expand the size of government where government can do all
kinds of regulation all kinds of controls on the individual so lex what we're probably going to talk
about a lot today is balance and so a lot of people think oh i i'm on the right i'm on the left and
that comes with a certain preset ideology so the right is always correct the left is always correct
so there's two problems with that number one how could you possibly believe in a preset ideology if
you're an independent thinker it's literally by definition not possible if you say i lent my
brain to an ideology that was created 80 years ago or eight years ago or 800 years ago and i'm not going
to change it you're saying i don't think for myself i you know i bought into a culture and by the way
there's a lot of different forms of culture you could buy into religion politics sometimes uh racial
etc so that's why you need actually balance the same reason you need balance other than independent
thought is because the answer is almost never black and white and that gets into a really interesting
nuance because mainstream media in my opinion is the matrix and its job is to delude you into thinking
corporate rule is great for you and we should never change it and the status quo is wonderful so they
have created a false middle what mainstream media calls moderate is actually in my opinion extremist
corporate ideology so for example they'll say joe manchin is a moderate none of his positions are
moderate other than potentially gun control in west virginia he's not for gun control the people of
west virginia are not for gun control generally speaking so and he uses that and they usually have
these shiny objects where they're like you see this i'm a moderate because of guns or i'm a moderate
because i'm a democrat from west virginia but wait let's look at your positions you're against paid
family leave that pulls at 84 so you're a radical corporatist who say that women should be forced
back into work the day after they have birth you're against a higher minimum wage you're against
you're for every corporate position and they all poll at 33 or less so joe manchin is not at all a
moderate and this applies to almost every corporate republican and every corporate democrat
they're all extremists in in supporting what i call corporatism so you have to get to a balance in
order to get to the right answer so that's an interesting distinction here so you're actually as far
as i understand pro-capitalism yes which is an interesting place to be that's the thing that
probably makes you center left and then still populist it's you're you're full of uh beautiful
contradictions let's say this which would be great to untangle but what's the difference between
corporatism and capitalism is there a difference so i i really believe in capitalism i i don't think
that there's really a second choice um the in where it gets super interesting is the distinction
between capitalism and socialism because that's not at all as clear as people think it is and people
often say socialism and communism as synonyms when they're not synonyms right and so i view it as
there's basically four uh distinct areas it's obviously a spectrum everything is a spectrum right
on one end you have communism on the left and on the other end you have corporatism on the right
okay and i would argue that capitalism is in the middle and so communism we know uh state owns all
property you're not allowed to have private property so i will piss off a lot of people in this
show and so i'm asking for their patience please hear me out and because don't worry i'm going to
piss off the other side too okay so communism makes no sense at all totally opposed to human nature
it never works it always evolves into dictatorship because it is not built for human nature
we're never going to act like that it's not in our dna you could try to wish it into existence and
they have and it never works and it's because once you have almost no rules in terms of uh oh we're
all equal and even though communism eventually winds up having an enormous amount of rules right uh it
creates a power vacuum when you say hey there's no structure of power here right we're all equal
it's a flat line one guy usually gets up because that's human nature and goes ah i don't think so
i think if you're going to leave a power vacuum i'm going to take that power vacuum that's actually
really interesting way to put it because when everyone is equal nobody is in power and human
nature is such that there's everybody's there's a will to power so when you create a power vacuum
somebody's going to to fill it so the alternative is to have people in power but there's a balance of
power and then there's like a democratic system that elects the people in power and keeps churning and
rotating who's that is exactly it lex you got it exactly right in my opinion okay so that's why
communism never works and can never work so they it's an idea of like we're all going to work as
hard as we possibly can and take only what we need where when when has that ever happened in the history
of humanity right we're just not built that way so okay we can get into that debate with my friends
on the left etc now corporatism is just as extreme and just as dangerous and that is basically what we
have in america now what we have in america now and this is another giant trick that the matrix played
on everybody that they they did in a shell game and all of a sudden extreme corporatists like mansion
and almost every republican in the senate are moderates oh my god mitch mcconnell all of a sudden is a
moderate and uh etc as long as you're not a populist populists are never moderate okay but if you love
corporations and corporate tax cuts and everything in favor of corporations you're magically called a
moderate when you actually according to the polling have super extreme positions that the american
people hate and by the way that's part of the reason for the rise of trump we can come back to that okay
but the second shell game is taking out capitalism putting in corporatism but still calling it capitalism
okay so what is corporatism it is when uh corporations slowly take over the system and create monopoly and
oligopoly power so that snuffs out equality of opportunity so how do they do that and when people
say the the system is rigged they oftentimes can't explain it that well and then mainstream media goes oh
you sound conspiratorial rigged yeah i wonder how yeah super easy to explain it
here's one of dozens of examples carried interest loophole so that is for hedge funds private equity
the the top people on wall street they're that's part of their income they get two and 20 right so
two percent is a flat fee no matter what happens to the fund and twenty percent of the profits of the
fund goes back to the people who invested it it's not their money it's not their investment
what they're getting is actually just income it should be taxed at the highest rate but it's because
of this loophole it's taxed at a much lower rate at around twenty percent so do you know at what income
level you go above twenty percent if you're a regular joe it's at eighty four thousand dollars a year
so these billionaires are getting the same tax rate as people making eighty four thousand dollars a year
it's unbelievably unfair uh and that's corporatism taking over and starting to rig the rules i'm
going to pay less taxes you're going to pay more taxes okay so again i can give you dozens of those
examples so and mer mergers so that they get to oligopoly power that's how you rig a system lowering
the corporate tax rates making sure that there is no a real minimum wage making sure there's no
universal health care we all get become indentured servants of corporations they take away power from the
average guy give it to the most powerful people in the world so and but the most important
distinction likes is that corporatism hates competition it wants monopoly and oligopoly power
whereas capitalism loves competition and wants to free markets and i remember uh you know we started
young turks back in 2002 so we've been around for 22 years longest running daily show on the internet
ever uh and so we were pre-iraq war and iraq war stars and dick cheney starts handing out no-bid contracts
i'm like what part of capitalism is a no-bid contract you can't negotiate drug prices that's the most
anti-free market thing i have ever heard it's almost like communism for corporations they get everything
you there and there you get nothing right so it's it's preposterous it's awful and and it kills the
free markets and it's killing this country and it is the main ideology and religion of the establishment
are all companies built the same here so when you say corporatism uh it seems like just looking here at
the list of uh by industry uh lobbyists it seems like there are certain industries that are worse
offenders than others like pharmaceuticals uh like insurance oil and gas yeah so it seems to me uh it
feels wrong to just throw all companies into the same bucket of like they're all guilty no they're not
all guilty so let's make a bunch of distinctions here so first of all uh can you first of all are
they quote unquote guilty no they're doing something that is logical and natural right so if you're a
company do you want to pay higher taxes or lower taxes of course you want to pay lower taxes right
do you want to have higher employee costs or lower employee costs of course you want lower employee
costs right so but the government needs to understand that and protect us from that power that they are
going to exercise to get to those results and if you if you think free markets is there is no government
you you read it wrong go re go back and reread adam smith he says you must protect against monopoly power
if you do not protect against monopoly power you will have no free markets and he's absolutely right
so the second distinction is between small business and big business that's why republicans will always
be like oh we're doing this for small business that's why we got the biggest oil companies in the
world 30 billion dollars in subsidies what happened to small business right so i run a small business
and so if people were to say like hey uh maybe there should be exemptions for some of the regulations
if your company has less than five employees 10 employees 50 employees etc there's some logic in
that because businesses have different stages of growth and they have different interests and different
needs in those stages of growth and we want to facilitate small business growth because that's
great for the economy that's great for uh markets freedom etc but the bigger corporations even there
there's a third distinction it isn't that there are certain industries that are worse there's just that
there are industries that are better at lobbying so anyone who like right now number one donor in
washington a lot of people make a mistake they think it's apac or they think it's the oil companies or
the banks no it's big pharma okay and who has the most power in this country big pharma so we can't even
negotiate the drug prices i mean look guys think about it this way that's like saying okay here's a bottle of
water and normally in the free market that would cost about a dollar right and in the uh for medicare the
drug companies come in and go no i'm not charging a dollar for that water i'm charging a hundred dollars
and the government has to say yes sir thank you sir of course sir we'll pay a hundred dollars
that's that's why it's compared to communism because i can't imagine anything more diametrically
opposed to the free market than you the consumer have to pay whatever the hell a corporation
charges that's insanity let alone the patents let alone the fact that the american people pay for
the research and then they make billions of dollars off of it and we get nothing but robbed by them
so it's about lobby power oil companies have huge lobby power defense contractors who have huge lobby
power it's not that they're more evil it's just that they have figured out the game better and they have
basically taken the influence they need to capture the market capture the government and and snuff out
all competition well or a lot of uh figure out the game better so i think a lot of companies
are good at winning the right way by building better products by um you know making people happier with
the work that they're doing and winning at the game of capitalism and there's other companies that
win at the game of lobbying and i just want to sort of draw that distinction because i think it's a small
subset of companies that are playing the game of lobbying it's like big pharma so lex i first of
all you have to set rules for what makes sense not oh i don't like this industry or i don't like this
company or hey this company is not doing that much lobbying at this point they will later when they
realize what's going on so for example in my opinion apac has totally bought almost all of congress and
so now other countries are going to wake up and go wait you could just buy the american government
so apac is going to spend about 100 million dollars in this cycle and they're gonna and then they're
getting 26 billion back so every country in the world is soon going to realize oh take american
citizens that live there get them a tremendous amount of money and just buy the u.s government
right so that but for corporations they've already realized that on a massive scale right so for example
in the two industries you gave automotive so in new jersey about a decade ago or so
one of the most powerful lobbies is uh car dealerships so at the national level you got pharma
and you've got defense contractors etc at the local level guys who have huge power number one is
utilities number two is real estate and then car dealerships are hilariously among the top right
because it's local businesses that are you know financing the politicians at the local level so they
passed a law uh saying that uh you have to sell through dealerships but tesla doesn't sell through
dealerships and it was intended to bully intimidate and push out tesla out of the market they then did
that in a number of different states throughout the country so does that make any sense in a democracy
of course not why you could why do you have to sell your product through a specific vehicle or medium you
could sell it any way you like that's the most anti-free market thing possible why it was just
total utter corruption and but it's not but it's perfectly legal the supreme court legalized bribery
so then what happened in that case so then elon came in and gave campaign contributions and reversed
it so now we're in a battle where it's an open auction right different companies are buying different
politicians and then they're pretending to have debates about principles and ideas etc so now
let's look at tech um in the beginning facebook was not spending any money in politics or almost any
money in politics so what happens they're getting hammered they get it pulled into congressional hearings
and facebook's got fake news and oh my god all these trouble from facebook then facebook does the
logical thing oh it turns out i need to grease these sons of bitches okay so then they hire a
whole bunch of republicans consultants they go grease all the republicans and most of the corporate democrats
and then all of a sudden we're no longer talking about facebook at all and facebook are angels
and now we've turned our attention to who facebook's top competitor tiktok funny how that works okay
and by the way then donald trump goes oh and tiktok's big dangerous company they're working with china
okay and then jeff yas comes in on this cycle part owner of tiktok and he doesn't want tiktok banished
of course right so he gives trump a couple of million dollars trump turns around the next day and goes
we love tiktok tiktok's a good company right so that's a big contributor to uh influencing what politicians
saying what they think but it's not the entire thing right no it is it's 98 i'll go on mainstream
media and they'll be like oh i see what you're saying i can see how that influences politicians about
10 percent i'm like no no it's 98 so and even a lot of good people think it's 50 50. they have
principles and they have money no they have money and this smidge of principles that's why i wanted to
clarify 98 too okay so how do we how do we fix it so it's really interesting and nice that you're pro
capitalism and anti-corporatism so how do we create a system where the free market can rule
where capitalism can rule we can have these vibrant flourishing of all these companies competing against
each other and creating awesome stuff yeah so in the book i call it democratic capitalism as opposed to
bernie's democratic socialism right we can get into that distinction in a minute but um so as adam smith
said and anyone who studies uh capitalism knows you need the government to protect the market as well
as the people because so like why do we have cops because if we don't have cops somebody's gonna go
well i like lexus equipment why don't i just go into his house and take it right so you need the cops to
protect you and that's the government so people say oh i hate big government do you right it depends
right if your house is getting robbed all of a sudden you like the government but you also need
cops on wall street because if you allow insider trading the powerful are going to rob you blind
and the little guy's going to get screwed so that's this easy example and so if you don't have those
cops the bad guys are going to take over they're going to set the rules rig the rules in their favor
so that that's why you need regulation and so the republicans on purpose made regulation a dirty word
they're like all regulation is bad and and then sometimes on the left people fall for the trap of
all regulation is good a guy i like and um has a great analogy on this matt stoler he's one of the
original i would argue progressives and there's about four of us i'm sure there's more but that have
stayed true to the original meaning of progressivism and populism me matt stoler david sirota ryan grimm
okay and it used to be in that original blogger group there was guys like glenn greenwald and other
interesting cats right but they went in different directions so matt has a great line he says um
if somebody comes up to you and says how big a pipe do you want there is no answer for that it depends
on the job doesn't it right what are we doing what are we building i i'm going to tell you the size
of the pipe depending on the project so when people say are you in favor of regulation or against it
that's an absurd question of course you need regulation it just means laws right so don't
kill your neighbor is a regulation right so my idea is a simple one and one we're going to keep coming
back to balance so when my dad was a small business owner in new jersey and and they inspected the
elevator six times a year that was over regulation and i said to my dad so should they not inspect it
at all i'm a young kid growing up and he said no no you got to inspect it at least twice a year i said
why he said because in turkey sometimes they don't inspect it and then the elevator falls okay so so
bounds of reason correct regulation to protect the markets and to protect the american people yeah but
finding the right level of regulation especially in for example in tech something i'm much more familiar
with it's very difficult because uh people in congress are living in in the 20th century before
the internet was uh uh invented so like how are they supposed to come up with regulations yeah well
that's the idea of the free market is you should be able to sort of compete the market regulates and
then the government can step in and protect uh the market from forming monopolies for example which is
easier to do yeah but that's a form of regulation right but then there's like more check in the
elevator twice a year that's a more sort of specific watching micromanaging so lex here's the deal
there is no way around the the laws are made by politicians okay so and so you can't give up then
and go oh it's a bunch of schmucks who i think most politicians are just servants for the donor class
all right the you know the media makes it sound like they're the best of us oh they deserve a lot of
honor and respect and they kiss their ass etc i think generally speaking they're usually the worst
of us especially in this corporate structure right because they're the guys who their number one talent
is yes sir no sir what would you like me to do with your donor money sir absolutely i'll serve you
completely or 98 right so in this structure the politicians are the worst of us but at some point
you need somebody elected to be your representative to do democratic capitalism so that you have
capitalism but it's checked by the government on behalf of the people it's the people that are saying
these are the rules of the land and and you have to abide by them so that how do you get to the best
possible answer and which is related to an earlier question you asked lex which is the number one thing
you have to do is get big money out of politics everything else is near impossible as long as we
are drowned in money and whoever has more money wins and by the way when it comes to legislation
again that's true about 98 of the time like we predict things ahead of time people are like wow how
did you know that that bill wasn't going to pass or was going to pass it's the easiest thing in the
world and we like literally like teach our audience on the young turks watch you'll be able to see for
yourself and now like our members comment in they do these predictions they're almost always right
right because it's so simple follow the money so if you get big money out of politics and i can explain
how to do that in a sec um then you're at a place where you got your best shot at honest representatives
that are going to try their best to get to the right answer are they going to get to the right answer
out of the gate usually not so they pass a law there's something wrong with the law they then fix that part
they it's a pendulum you know you don't want it to swing too wildly but you do need a little bit
of oscillation in that pendulum to get to the right balance by the way i was uh listening to uh joe biden
from when he was like 30 years old to speeches he was eloquent as hell it's fun to listen to actually
and he has a speech he gives or just maybe a conversation in congress i'm not sure where where he
talks about how corrupt the whole system is and he's really honest and like fun and uh that joe biden
is great by the way that guy i mean age age sucks you know people get older but he was talking quite
honestly about like having to suck up to all these uh rich people and that he couldn't really suck up to
the really rich people uh uh they said uh come back to us uh 10 years later when you're like more
more integrated into the system but he was really honest about it and he's saying that's um
that's how it is that's what we have to do and that really sucks that that's what we have to do
yeah so we did a video on our tick tock channel then and now of joe biden this is when i was trying
to push biden out we should say you're one of the people early on saying biden needs to step down
yeah i started about a year ago because i was positive that biden had a zero percent chance of
winning and uh and it turned out by the way uh two days before he dropped out his inside advisors
inside the white house said yeah near zero percent chance of winning yeah so we were right all along
you got a lot of criticism for that by the way but yeah yeah we can come back to that yes i did
and which makes it tuesday for me uh i get a lot of criticism for everything uh and by the way
democratic party you're welcome so but uh biden's a really interesting example i'm really glad you
brought it up so the video on tick tock was just showing by and then by now and you're right biden
was so dynamic when you see how dynamic he was we did like side by side right and then you see him now
going like you're barely finished anyways right you're like oh that's not the same guy i get it
right so and i got like five million views because because it resonates they're like yeah yeah of
course right but when he first started to the point you were making lex he wanna in fact i know because
i talked to him about this uh his very first bill was anti-corruption why because at that point
everything changes in 1976 and 78 the supreme court decisions that basically legalized bribery but remember
biden is ancient so he's coming into politics at a time when money has not yet drowned politics and in
fact the american population is super pissed about the fact that it's begun they don't like corruption
so early biden because he's reading the room is very anti-corruption and the first bill he proposes
is to get money out of politics okay but as biden goes on for his epic 200 year career in washington
he starts to get not more conservative more corporate because he's just taking more and
more money by the middle of his career he has a nickname the senator from mbna okay mbna was a
credit card company based in delaware and the reason he had that nickname is because there isn't anything
joe biden wouldn't have done for credit card companies and corporations based in delaware which
are almost all corporations okay so he became the most corporate senator in the country and hence the
most beloved by corporate media and corporate media has protected him his entire career until about a
month ago so for example in the primaries both in 2020 and 2024 if you said the senator from mbna
i guarantee you almost no one in the audience has heard of it if you heard of it good job you know
politics really well okay but the reason you didn't hear of it is because the mainstream media
wouldn't say that's outrageous of joe biden to be such a corporate stooge they'd say that's outrageous
of you to point out something that's true and something we reported on earlier okay and so they
protected him at all costs now finally when you get to this version of joe biden we he can't talk he can't
wonk he's he bears no resemblance to the young guy who came in saying that money in politics was a
problem now he's saying money in politics is the solution and in 2020 he said well i can raise more
money than bernie i i can kiss corporate ass better than bernie i'm the biggest corporate ass kisser in
the world so i'm going to raise a billion dollars and you need to support me now of course he doesn't
say it in those words but that was the message to the establishment and buddha just klobuchar obama
clibur and everybody goes that's right biden biden biden biden biden not bernie i don't know that
there's anybody in the country who instinctually dislikes bernie more than barack obama oh that's
an interesting i'm not taking that tangent at this moment let's because you mentioned mainstream
media what's the motivation for mainstream media to be corporatist also so first of all they're giant
corporations so they're all multi-billion dollar corporations in the old days we had an incredible
number of media outlets so you go to san francisco there'd be at least two papers and there'd be a
paper boy i'm going all the way back paper boy on each corner and they're competing with one another
literally they'd be catty corner right and one guy's going oh i hear all this details they're trying to
get an audience they're trying to get people interested so they're populist they're interesting
they're muckrakers they're challenging the government fast forward to now or not now but
about a decade ago five years ago in that ball in that ballpark now there's only six giant
media corporations left and it's an oligopoly right and they're all multi-billion dollar corporations
they all want tax cuts half of them are also especially about 20 years ago during the iraq war
half of them are defense contractors so they're just using the news as marketing to start wars like the
iraq war and then ge which owned msnbc makes a tremendous amount of money so much more money from
war than it does for media that media is a good marketing spend for these corporations now that's
part of it that they themselves want the same exact thing as corporate the rest of corporations do for
corporate rule lower tax cuts deregulation so they can merge etc but the second part of it is arguably even
more important so where does all that money in politics go so for example in 2022 it's just a
midterm election not no presidential should be lower spending a ridiculous 17 billion dollars are spent
okay on on the election cycle where does the 17 billion go almost all of it goes into corporate media
mainstream media television newspapers radio they're buying ads like nuts so we have a reporter at tyt
david schuster he used to work at msnbc fox news etc and david once did a piece about money in politics
at a local nbc news station and his uh editor or gm spiked the story and david goes into his office and
asks him so why this story is true it's a huge part of politics if we're going to report on this
issue we got to tell you what's actually happening so he says david come here he puts his arm around
his shoulders takes him to the big newsroom and he goes you see all this money in politics paid for that
that's really fascinating so big corporations are giving money to politicians to different channels
and then the politicians are spending that money on mainstream media and and and so there's a
there's a vicious cycle where it's in the interest of the mainstream media not to criticize the very
corporations that are feeding that cycle so it's not actually direct it's not like corporations are
because i was thinking one of the ways is direct advertisement like pharmaceuticals obviously advertise
a lot on uh mainstream media but there's also indirect which is like giving the politicians money the pot or
or super packs and then the super packs and spend money on the that's why media never mainstream
media never talks about the number one factor in politics which is money like we all know i mean you
now we as we talked about earlier we see it with our own eyes open auction any country any company
anybody that has money the politicians will now literally say i am now working for this guy
as trump says because he gave me a strong endorsement which means a lot of money right and so and the
press never covers it almost never right so you're telling me you're doing a an article on the
infrastructure build or build back better etc and you're not going to mention the enormous amount of money
that every lobbyist spent on that bill that's absurd that's absurd that's 98 of the ball game and the
reason they hide the ball is because they don't want you to know this whole thing is based on the
money that they are receiving and and by the way that one more thing about that likes it's that the ads
themselves actually they work and they work pretty well but that's not the main reason you spend money on
ads you spend the money in ads to get friendly coverage from the content from the free media that
you're getting from that same outlet and so since every newspaper and every news uh television
station and network knows that the democratic party and the republican party are their top clients they're
going to get billions of dollars from them they never really criticize the republican and democratic party
on the other hand if you're an outsider they'll rip your face off that's also really interesting so if
you're an advertiser if you're big pharma and you're advertising it's not the that the advertisement
works it's that the the hosts are too afraid not like explicitly just even implicitly they're self
censoring they're not going to have any guests that are like controversial anti-big pharma or they're not
going to make any jokes about big pharma they're not going to make and that and that kind of that
continues and expands that's really interesting sometimes it's super direct when i was a host on
i'm snbc i uh had a a company uh that i was criticizing in my uh script and management looked at it by
the way i used to go off prompter a lot and it drove them crazy not because i wasn't good at it i i think
my ratings went up whenever i went off prompter but because they couldn't pre-approve the script
and what do they want to pre-approve hey are you going to criticize one of our sponsors one of our
advertisers etc so they uh we had a giant fight over it and the compromise was i moved them lower
in the script but kept them in the story right so sometimes it's super direct like that but more
way more often it's implicit it's indirect you don't have to say it right so i give you a spectacular
example of it so that you get a sense of how it works implicitly so since g is a giant defense
contractor they own msnbc at the time of the iraq war they fired everyone who was against the iraq war
on air so phil donahue jesse ventura ashley banfield but ashley banfield they did something different
with okay she was a rising star at the time she goes and gives a speech in kansas not really even
having a policy position but just talking about the actual costs of this iraq war and how we should
be really careful they hate that so they take their rising star and they take her off air okay
and she goes okay good let me out of my contract it's okay i'll go because she was such a star at
that time she could have easily gotten somewhere else they go no we're not gonna let you out of your
contract why not well you're gonna pay me to do nothing yeah not only that we're moving your office
where are you moving it to they literally moved it into a closet okay and they made sure that
everybody in the building saw her getting taken off the air and moved into a closet the closet is
the memo right that's the memo to the whole building you better shut up and do as you're told
okay so that way i don't have to tell you and get myself in trouble it's super obvious there are guard
rails here and you are not allowed to go beyond acceptable thought an acceptable thought is our
sponsors are great politicians are great the powerful are great so how do we uh how do we
begin to fix that and what exactly are we fixing is that the the influence of the lobbyists the
influence of like it feels like there's uh companies have found different ways to achieve influence right
so how do we get money out of politics so it's very difficult but doable and we will do it so but in
order to do it the populist left and the populist right have to unite because and that by the way
that is why we have the culture wars that's why you're voting for trump no chance okay so we can get
into that in a minute so the culture wars are meant to divide us if we if we get united we have enough
leverage and power to be able to do it but uh you can't do it through a normal bill because if you do
it in a bill the whole point of capturing the supreme court was to make sure that they kill any piece
of legislation that would protect the american people saying the supreme court is also captured
by this oh 100 so okay so let me explain again people for the uninitiated they think oh that sounds
conspiratorial well in this case that's actually somewhat true because people now know about this
it's the powell memo right the most infamous political memo in history lewis powell writes a memo
for the chamber of commerce in 1971 that's basically a blueprint for how the chamber of commerce can take
over the government and lewis powell explains one of the most important things you have to do is take
over the media but even more important than that is taking over the supreme court because the supreme
court is the ultimate arbiter of what is allowed and not allowed and he says we need quote activist
judges to uh to help business interests on the court okay and then nixon reads the memo and goes
that sounds like a really good idea how about i put you on the supreme court and he puts lewis powell
the guy who wrote the memo on the supreme court where he's the deciding vote in bilani and uh and uh
buckley so bilani's those two decisions are 76 to 78 and what they say is yeah yeah i read the
constitution and it says that money is speech no it isn't and no it didn't that's not even close to true
they just made it up and they said okay and corporations they're human beings no they're
not that's preposterous right and they have the same inalienable rights as human beings and citizens
do and money is speech and speech is an inalienable right so corporations can spend unlimited money in
politics and there goes our democracy gone okay so citizens united just shot a dead horse with a gatling gun
and made it worse and put it on steroids but it was already dead in 78 so that's why every chart you
you see for the rest of your life you'll see this um every chart and about the american economy starts
to diverge in 1978 so until 38 to 78 we have golden 40 years of economic prosperity we create the greatest
middle class the world has ever seen and uh our productivity is sky high but our wages match our
productivity after 78 productivity is still sky high best in the world okay sometimes people oh the
american worker is lazy not remotely true we work our ass off okay but we just flatline and they've been
flatlining for about 50 years straight and the reason is because the supreme court made bribery legal
so in order to get past the supreme court you only have one choice that's an amendment and so you have to
get an amendment amendments are very difficult but so for example you you need two-thirds of congress
to even propose the amendment so well why would congress propose an amendment that would take away
their own power right because almost everybody in congress got there through corruption their main talent
is i can kiss corporate ass better than you can right so i they take the most amount of a person with
more money in congress wins 95 of the time right but the good news is the founding fathers were geniuses
and they put in a second outlet they said or two-thirds of the states can call for a convention where you
can propose an amendment and after an amendment is proposed then three-quarters of the states have to
ratify it that's what makes it so difficult because getting three-quarters of the states there's so many
red states so many blue states getting three-quarters of the states they agree is near impossible but there is
one issue that the whole country agrees on 93 percent of americans believe that politicians serve their
donors and not their voters so this is the one thing we can unite on if we unite on this we push our
states to call for a convention we all go to the convention together we bring democracy alive and we
propose amendments to the constitution and the best amendment gets three-quarters of the states to ratify
you go above the supreme court and you solve the whole thing so if 93 of people want this why hasn't
it happened yet i mean the obvious answer is there's a corporate control of the media and the politicians
but it seems like our current system and the megaphone that a president has you should be able to
kind of unite the populace left and right so it shouldn't be that difficult to do like why hasn't a
a person like trump who's a billionaire or on the left uh a rich businessman run just on this and win
well eventually they will right and so that's why i actually have a lot of hope even though
things seem super dark right now so uh and that's why i was for bernie so i can come back to that but
why hasn't trump done it as easy he's like what am i a sucker the guy gives me money i do what the guy
wants why would i get rid of that that's how i got into power and so that's how i'm doing it now
i get go to miriam edelson and say give me 100 million dollars and i'll let israel annex the west
bank right so i'll go to the oil companies and give me a billion dollars and i'll give you tax subsidies
i'll let you drill i'll take away regulation why would i stop that you think he likes money more than
he likes being popular because uh yeah there's a big part of him as a populist in a sense that
like he loves being admired by large masses of people yeah so and you're absolutely right but
that is the fault of maga and so maga you're screwing populace in a way that is infuriating okay and smart
libertarians like dave smith have figured this out and that's why he's just as mad at trump as i am and
and it's because he took a populist movement and he redirected it for his own personal gain
maga figure it out come on right and so if you say oh you think democrats have figured out that these
policies no they largely haven't figured it out either and i think there's blue maga and i could
talk about that as well but for those of us on the populist left yeah we're not enamored by politicians
and for example when bernie does the wrong thing we call him out well i'm not bernie's not my goddamn
uncle i don't i don't like him for some personality reason it's not a cult of personality you do the
right thing i love you for you do the wrong thing i'm gonna kick your ass for it right so but donald
trump does this massive ridiculous corruption over and over again and maggot's like i'm here for it
love it as long as you're doing the corruption i'm okay with it what is trump what does trump say
about getting money out of politics does he he says nothing about it go and maggot why haven't you held
him to account like so when bernie it helped biden take out 15 minimum wage from the senate bill
on the first bill that was introduced in the biden administration we went nuts we did a petition we
sent in videos to bernie our audience going don't kill it bernie don't kill it and so bernie then
reintroduced it as an amendment it got voted down but he did the right thing right that is us holding
our top leader accountable and saying you better get back on track okay because we're not here for
you and your personal self and grant aggrandizement we're here for policy right and if maggot was
actually here for policy they would have absolutely leveled trump on the fact that he i mean remember
what he ran on drain the swamp that's why he won in 2016 right i so i predicted on abc right after
the dnc and hillary clinton was up 10 12 points whatever she was and i said trump would win okay
and they the whole panel laughed out loud right they're like get a load of this crazy guy i said
he's a populist who seems to hate the establishment in a in a populist time and so and drain the swamp is
is a great uh slogan uh and i knew he would win when he was in a republican debate and he said
i paid all these guys before i paid them and they did whatever i wanted and i was like that's so true
right and people will love that and especially republican voters will love that i actually have
a lot of respect for republican voters because they actually genuinely hate corruption so what would an
amendment look like that uh helps prevent money being an influence in politics so i started a group
called wolf pack um and thank you wolf-pack.com and and the reason why i named a wolf pack is because
everyone in washington i knew would hate that name um it's a populist name and everybody in washington
snickers i know you're supposed to name it americans for america and just trick people etc no no wolf pack
means we're coming for you okay we're not coming for you in a weirdo physical or violent way we're coming
for you in a democratic way okay so we're gonna go to those state uh houses we're gonna get them to
propose a convention and we did it in five states but then the democratic party started beating us back
we'll get to that and uh and so uh we are going to overturn your apple cart and we're going to bring
put the american people back in charge so what does the amendment say number one uh a lot of people will
have uh different opinions on what it should say and that's what you sort out in a convention so for
example one of the things that conservatives can propose which makes sense is term limits
because with the reason why these super old politicians are in charge is because they provide
a return on investment so you know if you give to biden pelosi or mcconnell they're going to deliver
for you they love that return on ms they don't want to risk it on a new guy the new guy might have
principles ew or you know might want to actually do a little bit for his voters boo whereas these old
you know and every corrupt system has these old guys hanging around that help maintain power etc so
my particular proposal in the amendments would be a couple of things one is end private financing of
elections so if and look if you're a business person you're a capitalist you know this with absolute
certainty if somebody signs your check that's the person you work for right so if private interests are
funding politicians the politicians will serve private interests and then you're going to get
into a fight like elon did in new jersey where the car dealerships and tesla are getting into an auction
can i hear a hundred thousand a million two million three million right and now you got to go bribe the
government official that's called a campaign contribution and this is a terrible system right and the private
financing go to complete public financing of elections that's when the conservatives because
they've been propagandized by corporate media yes mainstream media got into your head too and right-wing
media got into your head too and right-wing media also financed by a lot of this corrupt interest and
so they tell you oh you don't want to publicly finance oh my god you'd be spending like a billion
dollars on politicians brother they're spending trillions of dollars of your money because they're
financed by the guys that they're giving all of your money to so can you educate me does that uh
prevent something like citizen united so like super packs are all gone in this case so all gone so
indirect funding is also indirect funding's gone direct funding's gone you you have to set up some
thresholds not everybody can just get money to run you have to prove that you have some sort of
popular support so signature gathering uh you would still allow for small money donations like up to
a hundred dollars something along those lines that's not five thousand or whatever it is now
yeah i think five thousand is too high but those are fine debates yeah you know but you basically
want to create an incentive everything is about incentives and disincentives again capitalists
realize it's better than anyone else right so you want to set up an incentive to serve your voters
not your donors so if you take away private donors well there goes that incentive and that's gigantic
right and then if you set up small grassroots funding as a way to get past the threshold
to get the funding to run an election well then good because then you're serving small donors which
are generally voters right so that's what you want and ending private financing is critical but the second
thing is ending corporate personhood so this is where you get into a lot of fights because you have two
reasons one is some folks uh have a principled position against it and they say well i mean
the sierra club is technically a corporation aclu is technically a corporation and so if you end corporate
personhood then uh they you know that could endanger their existence right no it doesn't endanger their
existence at all right so it doesn't endanger gm or ge's existence it doesn't endanger anybody's existence
corporations exist we're not trying to take them away i would never do that right that's not smart
that's not workable etc we're just saying they don't have constitutional rights so they have the
rights that we give them and by the way read the founding fathers is also in my book they hated
corporations the american revolution was partly against the british east india company and so the tea party
in boston was against that corporation they threw their tea overboard it was not against the british
monarchy and so they and all the founding fathers warned us over and over again watch out for
corporations okay because once they form they will amass money and power and look to kill off democracy
and they were totally right that's exactly what happened and so it's not that you don't have them
it's that you through democratic capitalism you limit their power they definitely they you can
give them a bunch of rights you say hey you have a right to exist you have a right to do this this and
this okay but you do not have constitutional rights of a of a citizen and so you don't have the right to
speak to a politician by giving them a billion dollars and you believe that the people will be able to
find the right policies to regulate and tax the corporations such that capitalism can flourish still
yes you know why because i'm a real populist and i believe in the people so that i drive the
establishment crazy because they don't believe in the people they think wow jake have you seen maga
have you seen these guys have you seen the radicals on the left we're so much smarter you know how many
ivy league degrees we have right and and we know what we're doing no you don't no you're everybody
to some degree looks out for their own interests right why i like capitalism and why i love democracy
is because it's the wisdom of the crowd and so in the long run the crowd is right oftentimes in the
short term we're wrong okay but the wisdom of the crowd in the long run is much much better than the
elites that run things the elites say well we're so smart and educated so we're going to know better what's
good for you no brother you're going to know what's better for you and and and so here's something
that a lot of people get wrong on the populist left and right they think oh those guys are evil
they're not evil i've i've met them i worked at msnbc i worked on cable i i went to wharton you know
colombia law i know a lot of those guys and so they're not at all evil they don't even know that
they're mainly serving their own interests they just naturally do it right and so they think the
carrot interest loophole makes a lot of sense right they think corporate tax cuts makes a lot
of sense you not getting higher wages you not having health care makes a lot of sense it doesn't
make any goddamn sense but they get themselves to believe it and that's another portion of the
invisible hand on the market so there's problems with every every path uh so the elite like you
mentioned can be corrupted by greed by power and so on but the crowd i agree with you by the way about
the wisdom of the crowd versus the wisdom the elite but the crowd can be captured by a charismatic
leader so the problem with populism and i'm probably a populist myself the problem with populism is that
it can be and has been throughout history captured by bad people but if you say to me trust the elites
or trust the people i'm going to trust the people every single time but that's why you're such an
interesting i don't want to say contradiction but there's a tension that creates the balance so
to me in the way you're speaking might uh result in hurting capitalism so it's it's easy to in fighting
corporatism to um to hurt companies so to go too far the other way yeah of course of course and so like
when you talked about corporate tax so what's what's the magic what's the magic number for the
corporate tax because if it's too high like companies leave yeah companies have so much power right now
this pendulum has swung so far and we're guys we're almost out of time the window's closing the minute
private equity buys all of our homes the residential real estate market we're screwed we're indentured
servants forever okay there goes wealth creation for the average american so your right legs this is
that it's not a contradiction it's a tension that is inevitable to get to balance the reason why people
kind of can't figure me out they're like well you're on the left but you're a capitalist etc that's
not a contradiction that's getting to the right balance and in order to do that like if you say
well if we change the system i'm afraid of change because what if the pendulum swings too far in the
other direction right well then you would be opposed to change at all times so if you do that it actually
reminds me of the biden fight right so i'm like guys he has he has almost no chance of winning he
stands for the establishment he can't talk but then the number one pushback i'd get from democrats was
yeah but what if we change it's so scary we don't know about kamala harris what if it's not kamala harris
it's so scary don't change and i'm like yeah but if you say change might be worse it also might be
better and you're at zero anything is better right and right now in terms of corruption in america
we're at 98 corruption so we got two percent decency left brother this is when you want
change and so to and and and lex if you actually have wisdom of the crowd just like in supply and
demand and how it works in economics it works the same way in a functioning democracy you go too far
you come back in so for example when reagan came into office me and my dad my family we were republicans
why at that point the mar highest marginal tax rate was at 70 70 is too high right now they then
he brought it all the way down to 28 that's too low right so and and but and that's how the the system
modulates itself already we were headed towards corruption and because it's the 80s now we're past
78 magic 78 marker right so and and even carter was way more conservative economically than people
realize because we're already getting past it by the time it's in his administration but the bottom
line is yes you're whenever you have real wisdom of the crowd whether it's in business or in politics
you're going to have fluctuation you're going to have that pendulum swinging back and forth you don't
want wild swings communism corporatism right you want to get to hey where where's the right balance
here between capitalism and what people think is socialism yeah so i guess uh i agree with most
the things you said about the corruption i just wish there would be more celebration of the fact that
capitalism and some incredible companies in the history of the 20th century has created so much
wealth so much innovation that has increased the quality of life on average they've also increased the
wealth inequality and exploitation of the workers and this kind of stuff but you you want to not
forget to celebrate the awesomeness that companies have also brought outside the political sphere just
in creating awesome stuff look i run a company yeah and so i don't want companies to go away and and i
don't want you to hate all companies i think young turks is a wonderful company right we provide great
health care we take care of our employees we care about the community etc and we're building a whole
nation online on on those principles in the right way to run a company right um but guys we're at the
wrong part of the pendulum the companies have overwhelming power and they're crushing us we're
like uh that scene in star wars where the trash compactor is closing in on them the walls are closing
in we're almost out of time because they've captured the government almost entirely they're only serving
corporate interests we've got to get back into balance before it's too late and that's why i care
so much about structural issues so i formed justice democrats so that's aoc etc right that's people know
it as the squad they know it is just democrats etc i'm one of the co-founders of that and my number
one rule was no corporate pack money okay so you're not allowed to take corporate pack money by the way now
matt gates and josh hawley have stopped taking corporate pack money and they've become to some
degree on economic issues genuine populists it's amazing it happens overnight all of a sudden they're
holding they're talking about holding corporations accountable etc now just democrats wound up having
other problems they got too deep into social issues not economic issues there's a general sort of
criticism of billionaires right this idea now you could say that billionaires are avoiding taxes and
they're not getting taxed enough but i think under that flag of criticizing billionaires is criticizing all
uh companies that do epic that build stuff oh okay so create stuff that that's that's what i'm worried
about i don't hear enough like genuine you know i like celebrating people i like celebrating ideas i just
don't hear enough genuine celebration of companies when they do no because okay so are you right
not about companies but about capitalism yes because you know you look at life expectancy 200 years ago
and you look at it now and you go wow holy we did amazing things right so and what happened in the
last 200 years we went from dictatorships more towards democracy wisdom of the crowd we went from
you know serfs and indentured servants and a nobility that holds the land to more towards capitalism and
boom the crowd is right things go really well the advances in medicine are amazing and medicine is a
great example so and on our show i point all those things out and i say look we hate the drug companies
because of how they've captured the government right but we don't hate the drug companies for creating great
drugs that those drugs save lives they should save my life they saved countless millions upon millions
of lives so the right idea isn't shut down drug companies the right idea is don't let them buy the
government right so and and i know we get back into our instinctual shells so on the left there'll be
oh we should get rid of all billionaires why like how does that fix the system tell me how it fixes the
system and i'm all ears right my solution is end private financing then you can be a billionaire all
you like you can't buy the government right that's a more logical way to go about it i've never worn an
eat the rich shirt and it drives me crazy i'm like you would have eaten fdr right and fdr is the best
president most populous president in my opinion and so no there's wonderful rich people of course of
course there's a range of humanity right but you don't want to get rid of the rich you don't want
to get rid of companies but you also don't want to let them control everything so okay i'll give you
an example that's really and that informs a lot of how i think about things uh which is my dad so my dad
was a farmer in southeastern turkey near the syrian border no money um in fact his dad died when he
was six months old and he uh and so they were saddled with debt and uh no electricity in his house
like as poor as poor gets and uh he wound up living the american dream and so how did he do that what
what made the difference uh well what made the difference is opportunity right so i'm a populist
because my dad was in the masses right and and the elites say the masses are no good we're smart you're
not we're educated you're not uh we we at meritocracy we talk about that we have earned merit and if you're
a poor middle class you have not earned merit okay you're useless and worthless and i hate that so what
did uh turkey do back in the 1960s that liberated my dad they provided free college education you had to
test into it okay but the top 15 got a free college education at the best colleges in turkey so and my
uncle saved all of our lives when he came to my dad and said do you like working on this farm and my
dad's like fuck no right it's super hot it's super hard it says they got to get up at four in the morning
if they're lucky they have a family next door gives them a mule if they're not they got to carry the
shit themselves okay he's so my uncle told him work just as hard in school and you'll be able to
get a house a car pretty girls etc so my dad works his ass off gets into the school then he comes out
a mechanical engineer and starts his own company he creates a company in turkey hires hundreds of
people he then moves to america creates a company here hires tons of people right so do i hate companies
no my dad set up two companies and and i saw how much it benefited people i saw how much employees
would come up to my dad 20 30 years later in the street and hug him and they tell me as a young kid
your dad's the most fair boss we ever had and we love him for it right that's how you run a company
and he taught me the value of hard work but the reason i brought up here is because he taught me
look like skill and ability is a genetic lottery so you're not going to just get the rich to win
all the genetic lottery no there's going to be tons of poor kids and middle class kids who are
or just as good if not better you have to provide them the opportunity the fair chance to succeed
you have to believe in them so this isn't about disempowering anyone it's about empowering all of those
kids who are doing the right thing or smart and want to work hard so they can build their
own companies and add to the economy what what in general is your view on meritocracy so i love
meritocracy i wish that we lived in a meritocracy and i want to drive towards living in a meritocracy
so that's why i don't like equality of results so okay now people that are on the left will get super
mad at that and go what do you mean well okay brother let's say you're at work and you got one guy
who's working his ass off another guy let's go i don't care i'm not gonna do it right well the guy
who works super hard has to pick up the slack now he's working twice as hard right and now you want
the same results you want the same salary as that guy no brother no he's working twice four times ten
times harder than you that's not fair fairness matters i lived we wound up i mean this is we're in
the suburbs of jersey but we wound up in freehold eventually and we lived across a farm which is kind
of in central jersey it happens right and it was called fair chance farm okay i was like how did i
this is amazing right and i love that i that's the essence of america and that's what i want to go back
to so we've got to create that opportunity of not just because it's the moral thing to do but because
it's also the economically smart thing to do if you enable all those great people that are in
in in lower income classes and middle income classes you're going to get a much better economy
a much stronger democracy so that's the direction we got so again it's about balance but what do you
think about dei policies uh say in academia and and companies so the movement as it has evolved where
is that on the balance is that um yeah uh how far is it pushing towards equality of outcome versus
equality of opportunity okay so now we're getting into social issues right so this is where we all uh
rip each other apart and then the people at the top laugh their ass off at us and go we got
them fighting over trash issues they're killing each other it's hilarious and they're so busy they
don't realize we're running the place right okay but let's engage some people will look at dei and go
well that just gives me an opportunity just like anyone else i love dei another person will look at it
and go no that gives that says that you should be picked above me and i hate dei right so the reality
of dei is a little bit more complicated and so but you got to go back so first did we need affirmative
action in the 1960s definitely why all the firefighter jobs in south carolina as an example
are going to white guys all the longshoremen jobs in new york la wherever uh you have it are
all going to white guys because that's how the system was yes also in the north right
and so we now are in a civil rights area we decide we're going to go towards equality
minorities in that case mainly uh black americans had to find a way to break in i'm not trying to
like if you're a longshoreman and it's a good job you naturally want to pass it on to your son i get
your instinct i don't hate you for it right but we got to let black kids also have a shot at it right
so you need it in the beginning but at a certain point you have to phase it out so when i was growing up
it's now in the late 80s early 90s i hated affirmative action and i've been principled on it
from day one i and to this day i don't i'm not in favor of affirmative action i say it on the show
all the time why i'm a minority being a turk i grew up muslim i'm an atheist now but but generally
speaking a muslim uh is certainly a minority in america and pretty much a hated one overall uh so
but i didn't check off muslim or turkish or any ethnicity when i applied to college
because i believe in a meritocracy as we were talking about but we don't really have a meritocracy
now and so but so i can come back to that but but right now but so i didn't check it off because i
didn't want an unfair advantage uh because i want to earn it i want to earn it so now i'm in law school
and i'm hanging out with right-wingers because at that point i'm a republican and one of the guys
says to me about one of our uh black student uh going to colombia he says oh i wonder how he got in
here god that is the problem with affirmative action it devalues the accomplishments of every
minority in the country you have to transition away from it if you don't it sets up a caste system and that
caste system is lethal to democracy so does dei go too far in some instances yes but is it a
boogeyman that's going to take all the white jobs and make them black as trump would say black jobs
right and give minorities too much power etc no the idea isn't to rob you and to give all the opportunity
to minorities the idea is to make it equal but as the pendulum swings did it swing too far in some
directions yes the left can't acknowledge that and the right thinks can't acknowledge that of course
at some point you got to give a chance for others to break in so they have a fair chance by the way
michelle obama had a good line about the black jobs in the uh the dnc speech where uh somebody should
tell trump that the presidency might be just one of those black jobs anyway uh but why do you think
the left doesn't acknowledge when di gets ridiculous which it uh in certain places and
in certain places at a large scale has has gotten ridiculous because uh people are taught uh to just
be in the tribe they're in and to believe it a hundred percent like i've gotten kicked out of every
truck i'm the i might be the most attacked man in internet history partly because we've been around
forever and partly because i disagree with every part of the political spectrum because i believe
in independent thought and the minute you vary a little bit people go nuts and so the the far left
tribe uh is gonna go with their preset ideology just like the far right tribe is so for example on trans
issues we've protected trans people for over 20 years on the young turks we fought for equality for trans
people and for all lgbtq people for two decades we did it way before anyone else did when biden came
out uh in favor of gay marriage in 2013 we're like this is comically late so like we're all supposed to
like congratulate him in the year 2013 that he thinks gay people should have the same rights as straight
people and then he had to push obama to get there right so on the other hand i'm like guys if you allow trans
women to go into professional sports not at the high school level but professional sports but let's
say they go into mma or boxing and a trans woman i mean it happens in boxing it happens in mma
punches a biological woman so hard that he that she kills her right so you're gonna set back trans rights
50 years i'm not trying to hurt you i'm trying to help you you have to do bounds of reason so when i
say simple things like that and i say you give lebron james every hormone blocker on planet earth
he's still gonna dominate the wnba okay it would be comical he might score 100 points a night okay and
they'll say oh that's outrageous and they've some have called me nazi for saying that trans women or
that professional leagues should make their own decisions on whether they allow trans women are
in or not so why do they say that because they're so besieged they think we cannot give an inch we
cannot give any ground if you give any ground you're a nazi okay so we've got to get out of that
mindset you're not you can't function in a democracy and be in an extreme position and expect the rest of
the country to go towards your extreme position so why do you think we are not in the meritocracy
so because of the corruption it's so for example but there's also but remember corporate media
is the matrix and they plug you into cable right in the old days now it's a little bit different
because of online media but especially 10 years ago and remember we started 22 years ago so i've
been losing my mind over how obvious corporate media corruption has been for decades now right but no
one acknowledged it until online media got stronger but one of the myths that corporate media creates
is the myth of meritocracy not that meritocracy can't exist or shouldn't exist but they pretend it exists
today so the problem with that myth lex is that it gets people thinking well if they're already rich
they must have merited it by definition so all the rich have merit and the reverse of that
if you're poor middle class well you must not have merited wealth so you're no good we don't have to
listen to you and that's a really dangerous awful idea and so if we get to a meritocracy one day i
i'll be the happiest person in america but right now it's look here i'll give you an example that i put
in the book and they and it's not us this other folks did this youtube video i can't even quite find who
they were but it was a brilliant video um and they said okay we're gonna do 100 yard race but hold on
before we start anyone who has two parents take two steps forward anyone who has went to college take
another two steps forward anyone who doesn't have bills to pay for education anymore take two steps
forward they do all these things right and then at the end before they start somebody's 20 yards from
the finish line and a lot of people are still at the starting line and then they go okay now we're
going to run a race i think i was right next to the finish line wins and they go meritocracy okay
so the the challenge there is to know which disparities when you just freeze the system and
observe are actually a result of some kind of discrimination or flaw in the system versus
the result of meritocracy of the better of the better runner being ahead that's right there are some parts
that are easy to solve like so you know um if you donate it to a politician and he gave you a
billion dollar subsidy that's not meritocracy right so if you fall on the money you can see
the flaws in the system exactly and so and again nothing's ever perfect at any snapshot of history
right or of the moment you're going to be at some point in the pendulum swing but if you let if
you trust the people and you let the pendulum swing but not wildly then you're going to get to the
right answers in the long run so you think uh this woke mind virus that the right refers to
is is is a problem but not a big problem no so the right wing drives me crazy so look guys your instincts
of populism is correct your instincts of anti-corruption is correct right and i love you for
it and so and in a lot of ways the right-wing voters figured out the whole system screwed before
left-wing voters did i shouldn't say left-wing voters because progressives and left-wing have been
saying it for not only decades but maybe centuries right but democratic voters a lot of democratic voters
some of them actually like this current system some of them a lot of them have been tricked into
liking this current system and the left should be fighting against corruption harder than the right
but right now unfortunately that's not the case so there's a lot that i like about right-wing voters
okay but you guys get tricked on social issues so easily right so how many people are involved in
trans high school sports and a girl who should have finished first in that track
the you know race in the middle of indiana finished second first of all this is the big crime this is
and how many people are involved about 7 13 out of a country of 330 million people and you can't see
that that's a distraction right so and every everything they did that is like bait that the right-wing
media puts out there they run after i mean took across and doing insane segments about eminem should be
sexier uh potato mr potato head has gender issues guys get out of there get out of there it's a trap
okay yeah that doesn't mean that they're absolutely uh it doesn't mean there's larger scale issues with
things like dei that aren't so fun to talk about or viral to talk about an anecdotal scale there is
uh di does create a culture of fear with cancer culture and it does create a kind of culture that
limits the freedom of uh expression and it does limit the meritocracy in another way so you're you're
basically saying forget all these other problems money is the biggest problem so first of all on aoc
policy as an example and i don't mean to pick on her but she won through the great work of her
and shoykat chakrabarty and corbin trent and others who are leaders of the just democrats that
went and helped her campaign they were critical help and we all told her the same thing so it's not
about me me me and so we all said you've got to challenge the establishment and you've got to work
on money and politics first because if you don't work on money and politics and you don't fix that
you're going to lose on almost all other issues but she didn't believe us because it's uncomfortable
and all the progressives that went into congress they drive me crazy they think oh no no you're
exaggerating no these are and the minute they get in all of a sudden my colleagues right your colleagues
hate you and they're going to drive you out you're a sucker and and jamal bohm and cory bush what
did they do they drove them out marie newman drove them out right and because they're not on your
side they're not your colleagues and what happened to 15 minimum wage and i remember talking to one of
those congress people i won't leave out the name and saying hey you know they're not going to do
15 minimum wage and he's like oh cenk you're out of the loop nancy pelosi assured us that they are
going to do 15 minimum wage i'm like i love you but you're totally wrong moneyed interests are not
going to do 15 minimum wage you have to start fighting now right and they didn't get it so
they lost on almost all those issues because it's all about incentives and disincentives and rules
if you don't fix the rules you're going to constantly run into the same brick wall now the
second issue that we were talking about is in the culture wars the rest of us are stuck between the two
extreme two percenters right on both sides so the two percenter on the left goes you know if you're
a white woman you need to shut up and listen now okay that's ridiculous no you don't if you're a white
woman you have every right to speak out you have every right that every other human being has and so
would i love for one all of us to listen to one on each one another to have empathy for one another
and go hey i wonder how a right winger thinks about this i wonder how a left winger thinks about this
i wonder why they think that way right i love that and i want that so i want you to listen but i don't
want you to shut up so that two percent gets extreme and i and i don't like it but on the right wing you
got your two percent who think that that's all that's happening on the left and that's all that's
happening in american politics and they think the entire left believes that tiny two percent right and
so they hate the left and they're like oh i'm not gonna shut up i'm not gonna wear a mask i'm not gonna
do any of these things and i'm not gonna do any that's a freedom and and then a republican comes
along and goes oh yeah that thing you call freedom that's deregulation for corporations because you
shouldn't really have freedom companies should have freedom right and then guy goes yeah freedom for
axon mobile no brother they tricked you yeah the two percent on each side is a useful distraction for
yes for the corruption of the politicians via money still we're i'm talking about the 96 that
remains in the middle and the impact that dei policies has on them yeah so here here's where
it gets absurd i'll give you a good example of absurdity so um in in a school i believe in
california uh they uh noticed that latino students were not doing as well in ap and honors classes
so they canceled ap and honors classes oh come on what are you doing you're that's nuts no your job is to
help them get better grades get better opportunity etc that's the harder thing to do and the right
thing to do that your job isn't i'm going to make everything equal by taking away the opportunity for
higher achievement for other students if that's what you're doing and you think you're on the left
you're not really on the left i actually think that's like an authoritarian position
that a no progressive in their right mind would be in favor of
so but it's all definitional so here's another example of definitional communists like they say
oh my god kamala harris is a communist well when you're telling on yourself brothers and sisters
when you say that that means a i don't know what communism means and b i don't have any idea what's
going on in american politics kamala harris is a corporatist that's her problem not that she's a
communist she's on the other end of the spectrum right the i the idea that kamala harris would come
into office and say that's it there's no more private property we're going to take all of your
homes and it's now government property that all your cars etc she was not going to get within a
billion miles of that her donors would never allow her to get within a billion miles of that
that is so preposterous that when you say something like that it's disqualifying like i can't debate
someone who thinks that democrats are communists when they're actually largely corporatists you see
what i'm saying yeah so let's go there so when people call her communists they're usually referring
to certain kinds of policies so do you think um i mean i think it's a it's a ridiculous label to
assign to kamala harris especially um given the history of communism in the 20th century and what
those economic and political uh policies have led to the the scale of suffering that led to and it just
degrades the meaning of the word right but to take that seriously why is she not a communist so you said
she's not a communist because she's a corporatist okay but that that can't be okay everybody in
politics is a corporate just almost almost everybody in politics is a corporate but that doesn't mean
the corporations have completely bought their mind they have an influence in their mind and issues
that matter to those corporations yep right like yep outside of that they're still thinking for the
voters because they still have to win the votes barely okay so here let me give examples so you
you see what i'm saying so if you were just wanted votes um you would do a lot of what tim walls did
okay and and by the way a lot of what bernie did that's why bernie who had no media coverage went
from like two percent in 2015 to by the end about 48 percent because he's just doing things that
were popular right and that american people wanted etc right because he's not controlled by corporations
by the way neither is tom massey on the right wing side on the republican side right so it's not all
that's why i always say almost all right so if you're doing things that are popular people love it so
today what would kamala harris do if she actually just wanted to win right so number one she was
trying to pass paid family leave right now why it pulls at 84 percent and even 74 percent of republicans
want it why because it says hey when you have a baby you should get 12 weeks off bond with your baby
right now in a lot of states that don't have paid family leave you have to go back to work the very
next day or you have to use all of your sick days all your vacation days just have two one or two
weeks with your baby right so conservatives love paid family leave liberals love paid family leave
that's why it pulls so high so why isn't she proposing it it's not in our economic plan tim wall's
already passed it in minnesota he showed how easy it was if you want votes it's and then you know what's
going to happen if you propose paid family leave the republicans are going to go no our beloved
corporations don't want to spend another dollar on mobs right and they fall for that trap and then
you're in an infinitely better shape so why doesn't she do it she doesn't do it because her corporate
donors don't want her to do it 15 minimum wage layup over two-thirds of the country wants it because it
not only gives you higher wages for minimum wage folks but it pushes wages up for others and what do
the elites say oh that's going to drive up inflation no you shouldn't get paid anymore wait wait hold
on so you're saying all the other prices should go up but the only thing that shouldn't go up is our
wages no our wages should go up okay so these are all easy ones here's another one anti-corruption
why isn't she running on getting money out of politics it pulls it over 90 percent why isn't
trump running on it anymore he won when he ran on it in 2016 he didn't mean a word of it but he ran on it
it was smart they don't do it because their corporate donors take their heads off if they do so in
contradiction to that why did she propose to raise the the corporate uh tax rate from whatever 21 to
28 because that's easy because that is something that's super popular and she's not gonna do it
that's why so so guys this is this is where i break the hearts of blue maga uh blue maga thinks oh my god
these democrats they're angels and the right wing is and the republicans are evil and and they they work
for big business but not kamala harris not joe biden right okay well donald trump took the corporate
tax rate from 35 to 21 so that's trillions of dollars that got transferred because guys you got
to understand if the corporations don't pay it we have to pay it because we're running up these giant
deficits and eventually either they're gonna not eventually they keep raising our taxes in different
ways that you're not noticing they keep increasing fees and fines and different ways for the government
to collect money so we're paying for it and on top of that eventually they're gonna cut your social
security and medicare because they're gonna say oh we don't have any options left anymore yeah you don't
have any options left anymore because you kept giving trillions of dollars in tax cuts to corporations
so we're gonna have to pay for that so then trump then biden says oh my god i'm gonna bring corporate
taxes back up to 28 i'm like wait hold on they were at 35 you already did a sleight of hand and said 28.
okay then he gets into office and mansion says no 25 that's the highest i'll go and he goes okay fine 25
and then while you're not looking they just dump it they don't even do 25 it's still at 21. so i hear
me now quote me later i do predictions on the show all the time because you you should hold me accountable
you should hold all your pundits accountable if you held all your pundits accountable we'd be the
last man standing and that's kind of what happened okay so i guarantee you she will not increase
corporate taxes so would the same be the case for price controls or the anti uh price gouging that
she's so it's not price controls it's price uh it is price controls but i mean minimum wage is
price controls also now we're going to get into a lot of minutia but i'll try to keep it broad
so price controls are a disaster they never work if you say oh here's a banana it has to stay at a
dollar a pound and make up a number right well supply and demand is going to move and then that's
going to and so the minute it moves to two dollars of where the price should be then you're going to
run into shortages so we all know this it's a bad idea right but are there laws against price gouging
there already are and they're a good idea so why like you have a natural disaster all of a sudden
uh the water that was a dollar now they're charging a hundred dollars the government has to come in
democratic capitalism they come in and go no i'm going to protect the people so you're not allowed
to price gouge you know maybe charge two dollars etc but you're not going to charge 100 but it is
temporary we get we get that done we end the the problem there and then we bring it back to a normal
supply and demand okay so that's what she's proposing it's so that's all political because the
price gouging has already passed they did it in 21 and 22 and so now the grocery stores are actually
low margin business she really she says grocery stores that's how i know she doesn't mean it
because the grocery stores weren't the problem consumer goods were the problem yeah those companies
she's following the polls where most people will say that the groceries are too expensive so she's just
basically addressing saying the most popular thing yeah 100 and you could tell in which proposals she
means it and which proposals she doesn't because of the of the framing right so this is a mediocre
example but in housing she said we have to stop private equity from buying uh houses in bulk i'm like
curious that they put the word in bulk there why does it have to be in bulk why don't we just stop
them from buying any residential home like you could set up normal boundaries right for example charlie
kirk was on the young turks this week by the way sorry to take that tangent i really enjoyed that
conversation i really enjoy that you talked to that was like civil you guys disagreed pretty intensely but
like there was a lot of respect i really enjoyed that thank you brother that was like that was
beautiful yeah you and charlie kirk and i think anna was there yeah that's right so nice yeah quick
tangent and uh look i i've done a lot of yelling online okay and i i yell when a there's a issue that
you should be passionate about 40 000 people 25 000 women and children uh slaughtered in gaza if you're
not emotionally upset by that and you think it's no big deal i think that's a problem but when you add
gaslighting on top that's what drives me crazy and then when you add filibustering on top then that
sets me off so for all my life right wing has gone on cable and filibustered they take up so much more
time than the left wing guests and the left wing guests always like goes oh okay well he i'm offended
he's taking up too much time no brother go over the top go over the top you're not going to talk over
me i'm going to talk over you okay so and uh and then when you gaslight and you go oh no 1200 people
and israel being killed is awful which it is but 40 000 people being killed in gaza is no big deal
we should keep giving them money keep killing keep killing and that that's normal no it's not normal
i'm not going to let you say it's normal that's nuts okay when you like we were against the iraq war
there was only two shows that were on the air nationally that were against the iraq war us and democracy now
with amy goodman and and at the time i used to yell all the time because mainstream media would
gaslight the out of us we're going to be greeted as liberators me and ben manquist on the air ben
doesn't yell as much he's now the host turner classic movies but we're he's saying it in a calm
way i'm saying it in a screaming way we're not going to be greeted as liberators when you drop a bomb on
someone's head they don't greet you as a liberator stop saying insane things and seven out of ten
americans thought that saddam hussein had personally attacked us on 9 11. we got lied into that war by
corporate media okay now there's one there's a couple of good things that trump has done
one is get people to realize corporate media is the matrix right and so now and get them to an anti-war
position he himself doesn't have an anti-war position but his voters do and that's a positive
we can come back to that but these days the reason why the charlie kirk conversations are going great
and rudy giuliani and mike lindell and historically though we've been go back again 10 years 20 years
we've always been respectful when someone comes on our show and we have a debate as long as they're
not yelling i match the tenor of the host right you and i are having a reasonable conversation i'm not
raising my voice i'm not yelling at you for no reason right so now when charlie's not going to
battle anymore for like talking points i'm shutting off my mind all i'm doing is yelling at you then
i'm going to yell back at him but now he's saying okay let's have a reasonable conversation great i
love it i love reasonable conversations it was great it was refreshing and uh what were we talking about
you buying up buying up housing yes so charlie when he was on said hey listen you know i think that
there should be a cap though i forget if he said 10 billion or 100 billion in assets if you have less
than that you should be still be able to do real estate as an investment even if it's residential
but above that it gets to okay that's good no problem we can have a debate about that we can
figure out is the right number 10 125 no problem you could put in reasonable limitations but but we got
to get them to stop buying the homes so when kamala harris says oh we'll stop them from buying homes in
bulk i'm like okay there's the loophole and so they're going to use that loophole and besides
which it's not going to pass wall street owns the government so there's no way corporate republicans
and democrats which are about 98 of politicians are going to limit private equity and and so when do we
ever get a little bit of change when democrats are in charge they do five to fifteen percent of their
agenda and that's not because they're warm-hearted it's a release valve right oh see under obama we got
about five percent change and what was that that was obamacare right that was most of the change that
we got and what's the greatest part of obamacare and now a lot of right wing also agree almost all
of right wing agree about this portion which is they got rid of the bias against pre-existing conditions
why did they do that particularly because the country was about to get in a rage we all
have pre-existing conditions if you deny me when i'm sick what the is the point of insurance
right and the anger had gotten to a nuclear level so that release valve get rid of pre-existing
conditions let's go back to just milking them regularly and oh by the way put in a mandate
so that they have to buy it from us right do you know who originally came up with obamacare
the heritage foundation it was their proposal romney did it in massachusetts it was called romney care
so i think this is a super important election but i've earned the credibility to be able to say that
because in 2012 i said this is a largely unimportant election mitt romney and barack obama's policies
on economic issues are near identical obamacare was literally romney care right now the left says
oh the heritage foundation it's so dangerous project 2025 well brother they're the ones who
wrote obamacare and and you say that's the greatest change in the world right so they that's why the
democrats yeah i'll take the 10 change overall i think biden did about 15 obama did five percent but
they're gonna they'll also march you backwards by deregulating like clinton did and obama did the bank
bailouts like obama did but 10 is better than zero percent but it's not to help you it's the release
valve so the system keeps going is it possible to steel man the case that uh that not all politicians
are corporatists or or maybe how would you approach that for example this podcast has a bunch of sponsors
not i give zero fucks but about what they think about what i'm saying like i have zero control over
me um maybe you could say that's not that's because it's not a lot of money or maybe is maybe i'm a
unique person or something like this but um i just think it's possible to have and i would like to
believe a lot of politicians that this way that they have ideas and while they take money they kind of
uh see it as a game that you know you accept the money kind of go to certain parties hug people and
so on but it doesn't actually fundamentally compromise uh your integrity on issues you actually care about
i could steal man almost anything uh i guess still man trump i could steal man conservatives easily
right uh corporate politicians the hard one so first um there it's not all politicians we can start
out nice and easy tom massey uh now holly and gates taking uh not taking corporate pack money uh bernie
the squad they don't take corporate bank money you could disagree on either end of those uh folks on
social issues but generally they are a thousand times less corrupt they're more honest uh and part of
the reason you might hate the squad is because they're so honest they tell you their real opinion on
social issues that you really disagree with a lot of the corporate politicians won't do that because
they're trying to get as many votes as possible so they can fillate their donors uh when they get
into office and do all their favors for them okay but you see i'm already falling apart on the steel
making of corporate politicians let's like zoom in on that so if you take corporate pack money
you're that's it you're you're corrupted like can you imagine yourself say you're a politician you're a
president uh you're a human being you're a person with integrity you're a person who thinks about the
world you're saying if i was a corporate pack and i give you a billion dollars you still you'd be i
could tell you anything so lex everything is a spectrum humanity is a spectrum so can you find
outliers who could take corporate pack money and still be principled enough to resist this lure yeah
uh and and i would hope that i would be a person like that but i wouldn't take over back money but if
you force me to uh i think i would still stay principled and do it could you find 10 20 other
people in the country yeah but on average that is not what will happen what will happen is they will
take the money and do exactly as they are told i think most people have integrity okay okay so what i'm
more worried about is when you take corporate pack money it's not that you are immediately sold it's over
time over time over time that's true so yeah i get it um but i wonder if if the integrity that i
think most people have can withstand the gradual slippery slope of uh uh of the effect of corporate
money which if if what i'm saying is true that most people have integrity one of the ways to solve
the effect of corporate money is term limits because it takes time to corrupt people you can't buy them
immediately and then the term limits can uh for the listener jenka's uh shaking his head yeah no so
look you're right that uh over time it gets way worse and as we talked about earlier biden's a great
example that comes in anti-corruption winds up being totally pro-corruption by the end um and but he was
also here for almost all of it as we started in a world that was not run by money in politics and is now
completely run by money in politics so uh does it get worse over time cinema is a kristin cinema and
arizona is a great example that comes in as a progressive doesn't want to take pack money uh cares
about the average person etc uh over time she becomes the biggest corporatist in the senate uh and a total
disaster uh but if you say that the majority of uh politicians have been i don't know if this is what
you're saying majority of politicians have integrity um no let's start at the majority of human beings
and i think that politicians are not there are not a special group of like sociopaths i think they are
they lean a little bit towards that direction but they're not like only sociopaths going to politics
it's like you have to have some sociopathic qualities i think to go into politics but but
they're not completely sociopath i think they do have integrity because i sometimes for very selfish
reasons it's not all about money even for a selfish person for a narcissist it's it's also about being
recognized for having had positive impact on the world yeah i get it but all right so let's break it
down so first uh human beings then we'll get to politicians do human beings have integrity well it's a
spectrum so some people are have enormous integrity some people have no integrity so there is not one
type or character right so some people have a ton of empathy for other human beings and they literally
feel it like i feel the pain of someone else and i'm not alone most people feel the pain of someone else
if you see it on video a baby being hurt an overwhelming majority of human beings will go no
right you have empathy that's a natural feeling that you have some people have no empathy because
they're on the extreme end of the spectrum uh serial killers and donald trump okay and so i'm i'm
partly joking but not really he has never demonstrated any empathy that i have ever seen for any other
human being i'm going to trigger some right-wingers because they think every terrible thing he said is
out of context or joking or not real or fake news but his chief of staff didn't make it up he called
people who went into the military suckers and losers why why did he say that if just hang with
me for a second don't have your head explode okay i'm not saying the likes i'm saying to the right
wingers out there right so the reason is because if you're like trump and you don't you literally
don't feel the empathy you think why the hell would i go in the military get killed for someone else
what a sucker no i'm gonna stay out of the military i'm gonna stay alive i'm gonna make a ton of money
and i'm gonna look out for myself and he assumes because everybody does this you assume that everyone
thinks like you do but they don't so trump assumes everybody's as much of a dirtbag as he is and because
he doesn't feel it he doesn't feel the empathy and so he's like yeah you'd be an idiot a sucker
and a loser to go into the military and have sacrifice for other people so you see the spectrum
even if you think trump's not on that end and you think i'm wrong about that you get that there are
people on that end right so you have a spectrum of integrity empathy etc that's what i would call
your hardware you layer on top of that your software okay the software is cultural influences
your parents media your friends all these are cultural influences so now when you're
in certain industries they value more integrity so religious leaders if you're doing it right which
is also very rare right but if you're doing it right you're supposed to have empathy for the poor
the needy the whole flock right so that profession is incentivizing you towards empathy and integrity okay
and even then a giant amount of people abuse it right but okay good in politics it creates incentives
for the opposite no integrity and that software to your point over time gets stronger and stronger
and stronger until it takes over now you might have someone with a lot of integrity like tom massey
right uh republican from kentucky and you whether i agree with him or disagree with him on policy i get
that the brother is actually doing it based on principles and there isn't any amount of money you
can give tom massey for him to change his principles why he's on the principled end of the spectrum as a
human being right so is bernie they're on the same part of that that spectrum right but for most people the
great majority of the spectrum if you overload them with software that incentivizes them to not have
integrity they will succumb and now let's switch to politicians in particular why do i think that
they're on average far more likely to be on the sociopathic part of the spectrum because
of the incentives and disincentives so this changes every congressional cycle and when just
democrats were winning a lot it got all the way down to 87 and a half percent but on average for
congressional elections the person with more money wins 95 of the time it doesn't matter if they're
a liberal conservative republican or democrat or any ideology they have 95 okay so now let's say you got
the five percent that went in uh that are not hooked on the money well they're going to get a primary
challenge then they're going to get a general election challenge and 95 of the time the one with more
money wins so eventually this system cycles through until only the car almost only the corruptor left
wait one second is that is that real 95 so if you have more money
95 of the time you win huh yes
i'd like to believe that's less the case for for example for higher you get yes that's true you're
right so you know why so the presidential race is ironically in some ways the least corrupt
so let's dive into why if you're running a local race anywhere in the country you're going to get
almost no press coverage meaning congressional race right if you're running a senate race in the middle of
montana you're going to get almost no media coverage so that's where your money in politics has the most
effect because then you could just buy the airwaves you outspend the other guy you get all the ads plus
you get the friendly media coverage because you just bought a couple of million dollars of ads in the
middle of montana so the local news loves you the tv stations the radio stations the papers so some of
the papers are principle they might say oh no but overall they're not calling you a radical they're not
calling you anything and you're buying those races but when you get to the presidential race that's much
harder because presidential race you have earned media free media that overwhelms paid media perfect
example is 2016. hillary clinton out raises trump by about two to one but she loses anyway why because
trump got almost twice as much earned media as she did and the earned media is better it's inside the
content right it is definitely better so in a presidential election as long as you got past the primary
you could actually win with not that much money and and that's part of the reason why i have hope lex
because all you got to do is get past a republican or democratic primary and now that's very very very
difficult but trump did it right now he took it in the wrong direction but he did get leave a blueprint
for how to do it and so once you get to the general election you're off to the race you could do any
goddamn thing you like okay you could be super popular you don't have to give a about the donors
you can get into office you could bully your own party and the other party into doing what you want
and you can get everything done you could even get money out of politics so don't lose hope i mean we
even started operation hope at tyt and our first project was to knock biden out and everybody said you
guys are nuts that's totally impossible and we knocked biden out right did we do it alone of course
not we were a small part of it right but we laid the groundwork for hope and we laid the groundwork for
when he flopped in the debate people had already been told remember he's bad he's old he's not right
and the debate proved it if we hadn't done that groundwork and not just young turks obviously but
axelrod and carville and nate silver and ezra klein etc charlamagne the god john stewart all these people
helped a lot so that when the debate happened it confirmed the idea that out there that he was too old
and couldn't do it so my point is hope is you if you lose hope you're done for then they're definitely
going to win right hope is the most dangerous thing in the world for the elites so whether you're right
wing or left wing i need you to have hope and i need you to understand it's not misplaced we just got
to get past the primary and we're going to turn this whole thing around so you basically a presidential
candidate who's a populist who uh in part runs on getting money out of politics okay well then let's
talk about donald trump so to me the two biggest criticisms of trump is the the fake elector scheme
out of that whole 2020 election the fake elector scheme is the thing that really bothers me
and then the second thing across a larger time scale is the um the counterproductive
division that he's created in uh let's say our public discourse what are your top five criticisms of
trump okay so number one i have the same exact thing as you the fake elector scheme is unacceptable
totally disqualifying so the fake elector scheme was a literal coup attempt so he doesn't win the
elections for folks who don't know i need to explain why it's a coup attempt because you just
throw out words and then people get triggered by the words and then they go into their separate
corners right so the january 6 rioters they were not going to keep the building that was not a coup
attempt it's not like oh the maga guys have the building i guess they win right no that was never going
to happen so what was the point of the january 6 riot it was to delay the proceedings why did it
matter that they were going to delay the proceedings because if you can't certify the election they
wanted general confusion and chaos so that the republicans in congress could say well we don't
know who wants so we're going to have to kick it back to the states in the states they had the fake
electors ready remember the fake electors are not trump's electors there's both candidates have a
slate of electors biden's electors and trump's electors they go to the trump electors first
in this plan and the half the trump electors go no i'm not going to pretend trump won the election
when he didn't win the election so they're like now we got to come up with fake electors
okay so they enlist these republicans to go yeah i'll pretend trump won right and so they sign a piece
of paper that's fraud and that's why a lot of them are now being prosecuted in the different states
and so the idea is the republican legislature legislators then go we're sending these new
electors in and we think trump won arizona and georgia and wisconsin right that was the idea that
was the plan and then you come back to the house at that point when there are two different sets of
electors the rule constitutional rule is the house decides but the house decides not on a majority because
the democrats had the majority at the time they decide on a majority of the states they vote by
state and the republicans had the majority of the states so in that way you steal the election even
though trump didn't win you install him back in as president that is a frontal assault on democracy
and i loathe it and then trump on top just blabbers out well sometimes you have if there's massive fraud
in an election in other words i think i won i don't even think that i'm just saying
that i won right he says you can terminate any rule regulation or article even in the constitution
no brother you cannot terminate the constitution because you'd like to do a fake collector scheme
and do a coup against america fuck you okay so i'm never going to allow this wannabe tyrant
to go back into the white house and endanger our system and so you want to endanger the corrupt system
i'm the guy okay let's go get that corrupt system and tear it down if you want to endanger the real
system democracy capitalism the constitution then i'm your biggest enemy so i'm never going to take
that risk and you see it every time he goes to talk to a dictator look guys i'm asking you to be
principled right i asked the left of that and we drive away some of our audience when we do that
so we got the balls to do that to our to our own side so for the right wing be honest if it was joe
biden or barack obama or kamala harris that went and wrote quote unquote love letters to a communist
dictator who runs concentration camps you would say communist we knew it look at that and trump
literally says about kim jong-un we wrote love letters to one another i fell we fell in love if a democrat
said that they'd be politically decapitated right they their career would be instantly over right
but trump whatever is xi jinping vladimir putin i'm not don't get into russia russia russia but it's
just that he's a strong man right uh kim jong-un or any uh victor orban duterte in the philippines
anytime it's a strong man that says screw our constitution screw our rules i want total loyalty to
one person trump loves him he loves him he said once he's like oh it's great you go to north korea
or china and when the uh leader walks in everybody applauds and everybody listens to what he says
that's how it should be here no brother that's not how it should be here you hate democracy you
want to be the sole guy in charge as a populist you should loathe donald trump i agree on the fake
electric scheme can you steal man and maybe educate me on um there's a book rigged that i started
reading is there any degree to which the election was rigged or elections in general are rigged so i
think the book rigged the main case they make is not that there's some uh shady fake uh ballots it's
more the impact of mainstream media and the impact of big tech so rigged is another one of those words
that triggers people and is ill-defined right so let's begin to define it so the worst case of rigged
is we actually changed the votes right so a lot of trump people think that that's what happened
nonsense that didn't happen at all okay so then you move and by the way some on the left thought the
votes were changed in the 2016 primary and it was literally rigged against bernie no that did not happen
okay that is a massive crime and is very risky and is relatively easy to get caught people who are in
power are not interested in getting caught they're not interested in going to jail etc it is a very
extreme thing could it happen yes it could happen have i seen any evidence of it happening in my lifetime
not really given how much people hate this you probably just need to find evidence of
one time like one thing one vote being changed where you can trace them saying something in some
room somewhere that would just explode yeah just that evidence just doesn't seem to be there and
by the way for the right wing who say verify the vote goddamn right verify the vote right so you want
to do have different proposals like paper ballots recounts hand recounts which by the way you had not
the paper ballots but the three recounts and a hand recount in georgia and so many of these swing states
he lost he lost he lost there was no significant voter fraud now second thing in terms of uh of
rigging is voter fraud so how and the right wing believes oh my god it's voter fraud everywhere not
remotely true heritage foundation does a study they want to prove it so badly and it turns out no matter
how much they move the numbers the final number they got was it happens 0.0000006 of the time okay
it almost never happens they found like 31 instances over a decade or two decades so it's what counts as
voter fraud so a lot of times these days it'll be republicans who do it because it'll be and it's not
nefarious it's a knucklehead who goes and he's oh i heard they're having undocumented the illegals vote
so i voted for me and my mom even though she's dead but that's fair they're doing it yeah no brother
that's not fair that's not how it works you're under arrest so what about non-citizens voting so
it's preposterous of course non-citizens shouldn't vote and they don't vote but there's not you don't
have to prove citizenship when you're voting right no you do i mean it's so it depends on what you
mean by prove and when you vote right so you're not allowed to vote as a undocumented immigrant
so that happens up front when you go like again it's a hall of mirrors like there's so many different
ways to create mirages so the republicans will say well when you go to the voting booth they don't make
you show a passport yeah that's true but you showed it earlier when you registered right and so and we can
get into voter id laws there's all sorts of things but we gotta we'll speed up the spectrum right so
these things almost never happen voter fraud happens but super rarely uh and not enough to swing elections
and by the way sometimes if there is an issue they'll redo an election there is actually a process for that
and it happened in north carolina because republicans did voter fraud in this one district
okay and it wasn't the candidate himself it was this campaign person and they did ballot harvesting and
then but ballot harvesting again it depends on what you mean if you're just collecting ballots that's okay
he changed the ballots that's not okay and so they had to redo that election so um now the real
place where it gets rigged is before elections and there's two main ways that things get rigged one is
almost exclusively no that's not fair i was gonna say republicans but democrats do it too
in a different way so republicans will come in like brian camp is the king of this in georgia
so he was against trump doing it ex post facto he's like no you idiot we don't cheat after the
election we cheat before the election okay so they'll go well i mean you got to clear out the
voter rolls every once in a while and that's true because people die people move and you got
to clean out the voter rolls so then they come in and they go we will clean them out mainly in black
areas okay oh look at that there goes a couple of million uh black voters well some of those i
suppose are real voters but they'll have to re-register and then they'll find that out on
election day and oh well now sorry you couldn't vote this time remember to re-register next time
and so do they go hey we're going to take black people off the voter rolls no what they do is
we're having more issues in these districts right here's another way they do it how many voting boosts do
you have in the area so primarily republican areas will get tons of voting boosts so you don't have
to wait in line you go in you vote you go to work no problem you're in a black area run in a republican
state all of a sudden hey look that city well we sent you four voting booths oh you got a million
people there well what are you going to do i guess you got to wait in line the whole day you can't go to
work etc so that's the way i refuse to believe it's the re it's it's only the republicans that do that
i i would say so that's why i paused yeah that just seems too obvious to do by both
yeah no no the democrats are so weak likes they mainly don't do that but they do do
the third thing which is gerrymandering so both republicans and democrats also their favorite flavors
of uh yeah of messing with the vote okay yeah so gerrymandering is
the best way to rig an election that way the politicians pick their voters instead of the
voters picking their politicians right so all these districts are so heavily gerrymandered
that the incumbent almost can't lose they'll push most of the voters into one district most
of the voters in another district because they don't want competition right so they're then you're
screwed they the the vote isn't rigged but the district is rigged so that the incumbent wins
no matter almost no matter what right so that's why we've gotten so polarized because the gerrymandering
creates like 90 of seats that are safe so they don't have to compromise they don't have to get to a
middle they could just be extreme on either side because they already locked it up okay so that's the
number one way to rig an election now finally the last part of it is maybe the most important maybe
even more important than gerrymandering and that's the media so it just happened to rfk jr
it happened to bernie in 2015 it happens to any outsider right or left the media if you're an outsider
will say well radical uh number one they don't platform you right so they're not going to have
you on to begin with nobody's even going to find out about you if nobody finds out about you you're
done for right so bernie broke through that because he was so popular and the rallies were so huge
that he they could local news couldn't help but cover him jesus christ what are all these people doing
in the middle of the city right and he slowly broke through that but do you know that in 2015 as
he's doing this miraculous run against hillary clinton nobody thinks he has a chance and here
comes bernie and he's almost at 48 this is he had seven seconds of coverage on abc that year
they just will not put you on that is the number one way they rig an election bobby kennedy jr sitting
at 20 in a primary no town hall 20 is a giant number right and you're not going to do a town hall you're
not going to do a debate 12 in the general election a giant number in a general election
no town hall no debate if no one finds out about you they don't know to vote for you right if they
don't find out your policies corporate media rigs elections more than anything else in the world now
this is something you've been a bit controversial about but the general sort of standard belief is that
there's a left-leaning bias in the mainstream media because as i think studies show a large majority of
journalists are left-leaning and then uh that there's a bias in big tech employees of big tech companies
from search engines to social media are left-leaning and there that's a huge majority is left-leaning
so the the conventional wisdom is that there is a bias towards the left yeah so do you think first of all
i think you've argued that that's not true that there's a bias uh in the other direction but whether
there's a bias or not do you think that how big of an impact that has on the result of the election
okay so let's break that down uh tech and media are totally different so let's do media first and we'll
do tech so on uh mainstream media corporate media and i actually think that right-wing media like fox news
is part of corporate media they just play good cop bad cop and so in in that realm the bias is not
right or left except on social issues okay so and that's where that image comes from on social issues
yes the media is generally on the left and right wing sorry but like this started in the 1960s and
the right wing got super mad at mainstream media saying that black people were equal to white people
that's not the case anymore okay right wing calm down i'm not calling you all racist but in the
1960s were there racism was there racism of course of course they wouldn't even let black kids into the
schools right there was massive segregation in the south but a lot in the north as well and at that
point the mainstream media says well i mean they are citizens they should have equal rights and the
right wing goes bias okay yeah i mean you're kind of right it is a bias it is a bias towards equality in
that case uh but that is perceived as on the left now fast forward to today you don't have that on
the racial issues as obviously as much as you had it back then but on gay marriage that existed for a
long time where the media is like well they kind of should have the same rights as straight people
right and the right wing went bias right so okay you're kind of right about that but at the same time
i would argue their position is correct right so but can they go too far of course they can go too
far okay now but that's not the main deal guys that's to distract you the main deal is economic
issues and again we say it ahead of time and you can see if we're right or wrong right so we will tell
folks when we get to an economic bill you will see all of a sudden the guys who theoretically disagree
fox news and msnbc close ranks and you just saw it happen with price couch that issue of price
couching all of a sudden there's a lot of msnbc hosts cnn hosts washington post writes an op-ed
against it and everybody panics no no no no no no no you can't control anything a corporation does this
is wrong this is wrong right oh what happened i thought you guys were hated each other all of a
sudden you totally agree fascinating okay same thing happened on increasing wages when they were talking
about increasing the minimum wage stephanie rule giant screed against it on msnbc all of a sudden
fox news and msnbc agree right do not touch beloved corporations so now that gets us to our real bias
it's not left or right it's pro-corporate for all the reasons we talked about before corporate media
corporate politicians so if you don't believe me today whether you're on the right or the left
watch next time an economic issue where do they fall how do they react when anytime it's a corporate
issue where does the media go right so that's the real bias of the media and so since the real bias
of the media is pro-corporations that is not a left-wing position that is considered more of a right-wing
position i even think that's a misnomer because to be fair to right-wing voters they're not pro-corporations
they're not pro-big business they're not pro-corruption but the republican politicians are so
it gets framed as a right-wing issue right so if you think that they that the corporate media is too
populist you just don't get it they aren't they aren't they hate populism so now when you turn to tech
so text a complicated one because yeah people write the code if they're left-wingers they're gonna
have certain assumptions and they're they might write that into the codes of the rules and
so but they're also generally speaking wealthy they're usually white they're usually male and
those biases also get go in and there's a lot of people on the left who object to that bias right
okay but that's a fair and interesting conversation and one we have to be careful of and one we could
find them hopefully find a middle ground but that's not the major problem the major reason why big tech
gets attacked is because they are competitors of who social media competes with mainstream media so
mainstream media has been attacking big tech from day one pretending that it's a they're really concerned
yeah they're really concerned because that's their competition and they're getting their ass handed to
them so i did a story on the young turks about cnn article about all the dangers of social media
i'm like guys this is written by their advertising department okay and the advert and they in fact
they go to the advertisers and they find a rando video on youtube or facebook right out of billions
of videos and they're like look at your ad is on this video do you denounce and reject every big tech
company and every member of social media and the advertisers like yeah i do right meanwhile they're doing milf island on tv
okay i didn't know that okay there's literally a show that came out recently where it's moms
and their sons and they each other oh wow okay they don't they don't have sex with their mom
they have sex with a different mom or they date but then the show is oh then they go off into a corner
etc right i'm like you're doing this kind of like the worst degrading ridiculous immoral programming
and then you found a video on youtube that has a problem get the out of here you're just trying
to kneecap your competition let's talk about the the saga of joe biden so over the past year over the
past few months can you just rewind where where have you maybe tell the story of uh joe biden as you see
from the election perspective yeah so about a year ago i i i'm looking at the polling
and first of all i have eyes right and ears so whenever i see biden i'm like this is a disaster
and then i go and talk to real people and when i say real people i mean not in politics that's not
their job right because people involved in politics for media have a certain perspective and it's colored
by all of the exchanges in mainstream media social media etc real people aren't on twitter having
political fights they're not watching cnn religiously etc whenever i was at a barbecue you
guys all democrats and some barbecues yeah uh what do you guys think of joe biden like almost in unison
too old every real person said too old so i look at what real people are saying that's why i thought
trump was going to win in 2016. i go in the middle of ohio i can't see a hillary clinton sign for
hundreds of miles right there's trump paraphernalia everywhere right so that's not end all be all you
could say it's anecdotal but you begin to collect data points right but then the real data points are
in polling okay so now i'm looking at biden polling he's in the 30s no incumbent in the 30s has ever
come back to win so i'm like it's already over then all of a sudden oh my god trump takes the lead
with latinos it's it's double over by the later in the process trump took the lead with young voters
i'm like this is the most over election in history a democrat cannot win if they're not winning young
voters that's impossible trump's cutting into his lead with black voters this thing is over right and
i go tell people they're like you're crazy why do they think i'm crazy because msnbc is lying to
them 24 7 telling them that joe biden uh created sliced bread and the wheel and fire and by the and
my favorite talking point was he's a dynamo behind the scenes yeah i'm like okay let me get this right
it's like an snl skit right i'm like so behind the scenes he's like all right sally get me the memo
on that and we're okay we're gonna do this and i'm in command of the material then he goes in front of
the cameras anyways why would any politician do that why why would they be terrible in front of
the camera and great off camera doesn't make any sense but once you get people enough propaganda
and msnbc created blue mega right they'll believe anything so they believe that biden was dynamic and
young and that he was the best possible candidate to beat donald trump when in reality he was about the
only democrat who couldn't beat donald trump so number one i don't co-sign on a i don't care which
side you're on number two as you heard earlier i can't have trump winning it endangers the country
it endangers our constitution etc so i'm gonna do something about it and so i start something called
the operation hope on the young turks and we asked the audience what should we do right so there's
different projects in operation hope and but the first project that pops up is knock biden out of
the race okay and so then i ask our paying members on tyt i say guys you're gonna vote and then i'm gonna
do what you tell me to do if you say no i like biden or i think biden's the best candidate or even if he
isn't we're not going to be able to win on this so don't do it right should i enter the primary against
biden okay 76 24 go enter all right i'm a populist you tell me to go you're my paying members you're my
boss i'm gonna go okay so i enter the primary now i'm not born in the country so people are gonna freak
out about that i'm a talk show host like the establishment media despises me right so i'm not
gonna get any air time in fact we consider hiring the top booking agent in new york we talked to him
and he says well you know i'm actually in new york this week and he says i'm gonna go talk to those
guys and i'll come i'll come back to you and he was really decent because normally you know he charges a
lot just take the money right and go oh yeah yeah i'll get you on but he was a wonderful guy he said i
talked to them you're banned so don't don't do it like you're not you're banned at cnn you're banned
at msnbc and i think you're banned on fox news but i'm not sure okay so so long odds why do you do it
because if you think we're going to crash into the iceberg you might as well bum rush the captain's
course right i'm lunging at the wheel so what difference can i make well i can make a difference
by going on every show on planet earth and going he's too old he's in in the 30s he has no chance
of winning no chance of winning i go on charlemagne's show breakfast club right charlemagne agrees all of
a sudden we're having buzz and then people go oh charlemagne said he has no chance of winning then
charlemagne's on the daily show talks to john stewart john stewart does a segment not this is not
necessarily causal but buzz is building right so then john stewart does a segment if you remember and
people got super pissed at him too old can't win and all that buzz is building meanwhile unrelated to
us david axelrod and james carville and i'm like guys figure it out who does axelrod speak for the
top advisor for barack obama who is james carville the top advisor for the clintons this is the clintons
and the obamas sending their emissaries to say we can read a poll he's going to lose change direction
so when the debate happens we laid the groundwork if we hadn't laid the groundwork debate would have
been the first time that blue maga would have thought oh maybe biden can't win right but since
all of us said it and strange bedfellows i loathe nancy pelosi but she was on our side i got a lot of
issues with bill maher he was on our side right i got a lot of issues with axelrod and carville and they
were on our side so the people who believed in objective reality kind of independently made a plan
let's show people objective reality and we did and we drove them out and it made all the difference so
you think he stepped down voluntarily or was he forced out both so again it depends on what you mean
so was he forced out of course he was forced out you think he just woke up he's like oh yeah you know
what screw my legacy i don't want to be a two-term president i'll just drop out for no reason no we
forced them out of course we did right and when i say we i had a tiny tiny tiny role the people who
had the major roles nancy pelosi barack obama and all those folks but even they were not the main
driving force the number one driving force were the donors what is the source of power of bernie or
massey the people right what is the source of power for biden the donors the donors made biden
he is the donors candidate and the donors that's why he told the donors nothing will fundamentally
change that like you can if you say lex no cenk i think you're too extreme that biden works for the
donors 98 i think he only works for them 80 percent or 55 fine we could have that debate but you can't
argue that it isn't his source of power and you can't argue it anymore even if you're going to argue
it earlier because once the donors said we're not giving you any more money he didn't have any options
he couldn't he couldn't go on so but was he forced out at like knife point or something no so was it
voluntary yeah ultimately if biden decided to stay in there was nothing we could do about it and so he
had to voluntarily make that decision but he voluntarily made it because he had no choice left yeah i wish
he stepped down voluntarily from a place of strength
so i think i think presidents i think politicians in general especially at the highest levels want
legacy you know to me at least one of the greatest things you could do is to walk away from at the top
i mean george washington to walk away from power is i think universally respected especially if you got a
good speech to go with it and you you do it really well not in some kind of cynical or uh calculator
or some kind of uh transactional way but just like as a great leader and maybe be a little bit even
more dramatic than you need to be in doing it yeah i thought that would be a beautiful moment
and then launch a some kind of democratic process for um electing a different option
not only did i agree with you a hundred percent i reached one of the his top advisors one of the guys
you see in the press all the time as in his in his inner circle i never said that before because we
were in the middle of it and i'm never going to betray anyone's confidence and i'll never say who's
who it was okay but he was gracious enough to meet with me as i was about to enter the primary
and look it's smart too because get information intelligence etc is this guy going to be trouble
or not trouble right but at least he took the meeting and the case i made is exactly the one you
just said lex i said if he drops this about 10 months ago i said if he drops out now
they built statues of him right the democrats if you're a right winger you hate him i get it but
the democrats would have said he beat trump and protected democracy in 2020 and he steps down
graciously now to make sure we beat trump again in 2024 and he lets go of power voluntarily you're
he's going to be a hero an absolute hero but if he doesn't you're going to force all of us to kick
the living crap out of him and tell everybody he's an egomaniac which he is and he's doing this for
two so that he could be if you don't know washington in that bubble if you're a one-term president you're
a loser if you're a two-term president you have a legacy and you're historic he's running for one
reason one reason only my legacy i will be a two-term president i will be considered historic i'm like
brother now you're going to be considered a villain the villain of the story you're handing it right
back to trump you're not going to win and you know look at the numbers any political professional
knows you're not going to win so you have hero or villain and you get to choose but if you think
you're going to be a hero and beat trump that is not a choice you have that is not going to happen
and they didn't believe us but by then they did were you troubled by the um how kamala harris was
selected after he stepped down yes and no so i argued for an open convention and so
if biden had stepped down when we were trying to get people into the primary knock them out
then it would that would have been a perfect solution then all the governors could go in walls
bashir whitmer kamala harris goes in obviously they have a real primary at that point me and later
dean phillips came and me dean and i mean marionne wouldn't drop out me and dean would definitely drop
out because our whole point was get other people in the race make sure we win right so okay then you
would have had a great primary it would have been the right way to do it both morally you know
constitutionally etc but also as a matter of politics because you would have gotten a lot of
coverage for your young exciting candidates uh and you would have legitimized the idea that you're
protecting democracy okay so that didn't happen because of biden it is what it is so now when biden
drops out at least do a vestige of democracy go to the convention and do what it's designed to do
which is pick a candidate ezra klein made a great case for this in the new york times podcast that he did
that made a huge difference and he was great for doing that so i believe in an open convention but
i know democrats they love to anoint because they don't trust the people so they think the elites
are uh geniuses don't worry we'll pick the right candidate yeah i remember when you picked hillary
clinton had that workout right and i remember when you said joe biden was the right candidate in 2024
had that workout do not anoint right so but in the end they didn't so what happened was
biden does the first announcement he either forgot or on purpose didn't put kamala harris in there
so there's all this kumbaya now no they don't like each other okay and biden's been screwing her over
the entire she's time she's been vice president so he doesn't put her in the original statement and i'm
like whoa i do a live video in media i'm like kamala harris is not in the statement right in the middle
of my video they put out a second one okay okay fine kamala harris right because that's too much for
the president not to you think he was like really like somebody like stormed into the room and said
you absolutely must i i don't know i wasn't there but probably right or they plan i don't know but
the bottom line is it was glaring that he didn't put her in the first letter okay so he had to put
her in the second one fine no problem but obama pelosi and schumer did not endorse kamala harris
that's huge normally the democrats would all endorse her and would all say she's anointed
shut up everybody and then msnbc would scream shut up shut up she's anointed right but they didn't do
that so then kamala harris had to win over the delegates and i thought she would win them over
in the convention but she locked them up in two days and she i know because i know delegates because i ran
and the delegates are calling me saying she's on she's getting on a zoom right now with us right
she went to all the states and worked her ass off and locked up enough delegates to get the to get the
nomination in two days yeah but come on it's the biden endorsed of course so why is that and of course
why not say uh sort of lay out walls and shapiro and kamala harris and the options that say let's like
at least the facade of democracy of a democratic process there's what should happen and what is
likely to happen so should biden not have endorsed yeah of course i i think biden should have done the
same thing as obama and pelosi and not endorse and say hey we'd love to have a process where we figure
out who the right nominee is and at that point i'm really worried about kamala harris because she's
doing word salads non-stop right so i'm like don't make the same mistake we did before and just pick
someone out of a hat test them test them you get stronger candidates when you test them the
authoritarian nature of the dnc drives me crazy they don't believe in testing candidates they don't
believe in letting their own voters decide and look when we were in the primary they canceled the florida
election and then and they took me dean and marianne off the ballot in north carolina and tennessee
i'm like guys if you're going to make a case for democracy in the general election
and you cancel elections in the primaries do you not get how ridiculous you look how hypocritical you
look right so i didn't want them to biden to endorse anyone but i'm shocked that they didn't
all endorse her because normally what happens is they all endorse so bottom line lex is did she like
earning in a perfect system not even close right but did she earn it enough in this imperfect way where
at least she showed some degree of competence that assuaged my concerns yes so because a normal
democrat would bungle that they wouldn't go talk like hillary clinton wouldn't have talked to the
delegates she would assume that she's the queen and that they would all bow their heads she would you
know so the fact that she did elementary politics correct for democrats that's like a big win it just
really frustrated me because um it smelled of the same thing of over bernie in 2015-16 and rfk and just
the anointing aspect now they seem to have gotten lucky in this situation that it's very possible that
kamala harris would have been selected through a democratic process but i have to say listening to
the species of the dnc walls was amazing uh shapiro was really strong and kamala actually was much
better as compared to her as a candidate previously but personally don't think she would have been the
result of a democratic process so you don't often give your opinions but when you give the opinions
i actually agree 90 like a huge percentage of the time in this conversation so i fought for shapiro in
the primary and when she was trying to pick for a vp because i thought there's no way she's going to
pick walls he's way too not just progressive but more importantly populist right so i didn't think
she'd go in that direction and shapiro actually did a bunch of populist things in pennsylvania
that's part of the reason why he's so popular in pennsylvania he looks like a smooth-talking
politician but his actions are pretty good and so shapiro was great walls was great the obamas are
legendary even clinton at his advanced age makes terrific points in his speech where you go well that
one's hard to argue with right and so they all i'm shocked at the competence of the dnc shocked at it
but of all those likes so you can give a good speech and the obamas give a mean speech but i saw obama
as president you know he didn't deliver on that so but the one guy that stood out is waltz and the reason is
because he's a real person yeah real person populist we all got to work towards picking
the most genuine candidates so here uh on the right wing side for example i would prefer a marjorie
taylor green to a mitch mcconnell any day marjorie taylor green is genuine she she might be genuinely
nuts i don't agree with her she might be even more right wing than others but i believe that she means
it and i'll take that any day over a fraud corporatist like mitch mcconnell who's just
going to do what his donors command of him etc i gotta ask you because i also love bernie still got it
i love bernie i always have um i enjoyed his i think he might still do it but i enjoyed his
conversations with tom hartman he's a genuine one like bernie even if you disagree with him that's a
genuine human being yep so just talk about that is it trouble you that he's been over in 2015 16 and
again 2020 he seems to be and why does he keep like forgiving people yeah so i love bernie for the same
reason you're saying because he's a real person he's a populist he means it and that is so rare in politics
he's i feel like i'm diogenes and i went looking for the one honest man and found it in bernie and
so i did a video in 2013 saying bernie sanders can beat hillary clinton in a primary in 2013 that video
exists because why did i think that i didn't say it of any of the corporate politicians and the guys who
were supposed to challenge her and stuff because populist and honest right and the country's dying for
an honest populist dying for it right so love the brother now that doesn't mean that he's right on
strategy and he drives me crazy on strategy so two elements of that number one in 2016 and in 2020
for god's sake attack your opponent you said something about trump that i disagree with
uh where i'm defending trump okay you don't like what he did to the public discourse no i don't mind it
because i would and i'll tell you why yeah because at least he got a little bit past the fakeness like
he's a con man and he's a fraud overall and he does everything for his own interest but at least he
doesn't speak like a bullshitting politician right and he's not wrong that you have to bully your own
party to amass enough power to get things done and he showed that that's possible so the problem with
the democrats is civility so my whole life they're like oh no no don't say anything let's lose with
civility right so for example in debates on you know whether it's on tv online or whatever uh democrats
or people on the left are always saying i'm offended i never get offended no after i'm done you're gonna be
offended okay fight back fighting back wins and we couldn't get bernie to fight back in 2020 he he was
one state away he won the first three states he crushed in nevada all we needed was south carolina
but in order to get south carolina we all knew everybody on his campaign everyone who's in
progressive media we all knew you've got to attack biden if you don't they're just gonna tsunami you
you know corporate medias and the corporate politicians are gonna run roughshod over you
you have to make the case against them and so two times bernie flinched one in 2016 in the brooklyn
debate they asked did the money that hillary clinton taking from the banks affect her votes
and he said no of course it affected our votes of course it did you have to say yes and you have to
show it and prove it the bankruptcy bill when she was first lady she was totally in favor of the american
people and against the bankruptcy bill because it uh has the banks you can't discharge any debts that
the uh credit you know credit card debt and bank debt etc it's an awful bill it's one of the most
corporatist bills she was on the right side as a first lady she becomes a senator takes banker money
and all of a sudden she flips over to the banker side say it bernie for god's sake say it right then in
one of the debates in 2020 his team prepares attacks against biden they're not personal they're not
like i you can sense by now if i'm in a political race my objective is rip the other guy's face off
right yeah politically rhetorically never physically yes yes yes and so but i would get it to a point
where they'd think i don't know if i'm gonna vote for cenk but i know i'm not voting for the other guy
okay so you got to do that if you want to win so they prepare this he says i'm gonna do it he goes
on the podium and doesn't do it because he can't he's too damn nice he just can't attack the other
guy now that's problem number one in strategy problem number two something you alluded to
so biden gets into office bernie thinks they're friends they're not friends biden's just using him
so he uses him to get the credibility and then he eviscerates 85 percent of the progressive proposals
that bernie put forward biden throws away 15 minimum wage that was bernie's signature issue
doesn't even propose the public option dumps paid family for no reason i can go on and on and bernie
cosigns on it because he thinks he's in an alliance he thinks biden's on his side and he thinks we're
going to get things done and to be fair to bernie like i said earlier obama got only five percent of
his agenda passed and biden got 15 okay so you're right bernie you got three times more than under
obama but you're wrong that is not fundamental change and without fundamental change we're screwed
uh let me ask you about another impressive speech aoc uh is it possible that she's the future of the
party future president no uh so aoc in my opinion lost her way and so in which way so it's tough
talking about these things because people take it so personally right and and that's why you'll see
very few politicians on our shows because we give super tough interviews and the words on the street
right like don't go out young turks they'll they'll ask you super hard questions right so there's only
a couple do it like rokhana does it he's brave we'll get into shouting matches sometimes in the
middle of bills and stuff but at least he's there to defend his position i respect him for the tim ryan
a little bit more of a conservative democrat when he was in the house he would take on any debate etc
so there's a couple of good guys that do it but generally they don't so when this relates to aoc
because when aoc is running we do 34 videos on her we get her millions of views we founded just
democrats and and now launched it on the show our audience ryan grim documents it in one of his books
our audience raises two and a half million dollars for those progressive candidates overall uh and at
that point aoc and all those rashida talib etc they're all dying to come on a young turks makes
sense i would too of course it's not because it's the young turks in any media outlet and
most media outlets almost all the media outlets reject them we cover aoc more than all the other
press combined right and she wins for a number of reasons that's one of the reasons but there's many
others and she did a terrific job herself um she then takes shoikant and corbyn who were the
shoikant was ahead of just democrats and corbyn was communications director for just democrats
then shoikant made one of the most brilliant political decisions in arguably in american history
he said he called me and he said cenk i'm gonna go from head of just democrats to running aoc's campaign
and i'm like well the other candidates are gonna get pissed and you're staking the entire enterprise
on one candidate i'm like shortcut i'm not in it i'm doing the media arm you're you're in the in the
trenches you're the guy making the decisions so i'm gonna trust whatever you say you sure and he said
yeah i'm sure so him and corbyn go over to aoc's campaign aoc then wins that miraculous win then she
hires shortcut to be her chief of staff and she hires corbyn to be her communications director
within six months they're gone and once they're gone aoc then goes on an establishment path okay
because why were they gone oh they insulted one of her colleagues yeah that colleague who's a total
corporatist and was selling out one of our policy proposals if you don't call out your own side
you're never going to get anything done but if you call out your own side you become persona non grata
and it is super uncomfortable and we couldn't get them to do things that were uncomfortable now she's
gonna find that outrageous and she's gonna be very offended by that and she's gonna point to a bunch
of things she did that were uncomfortable and to be fair to her she does she has she's until that
speech she was pretty good on palestine when we desperately needed it she's pretty good on a bunch
of issues cory bush did that campaign on evictions etc on the capital stats that was great aoc's original
sit-in in pelosi's office that point we're all still on the same team it's a spectacular success
me corbin and shortcut are saying do it again do it again like now don't abuse it like don't be a clown
and do it every other day but like when it matters you need to be able to challenge pelosi right and
in my opinion she just got to a point where she got exhausted being uncomfortable it's like it's really
hard the media hates you and they keep pounding away and calling you a radical and you're destroying
the democratic party you're destroying unity so whereas if you go along all of a sudden you're a
queen and and now all of a sudden the mainstream media is saying oh aoc she could be the progress i
mean there's some degree to which you want to sometimes bide your time and just like uh rest a
bit and i think from my perspective maybe you can educate me she seems like a legit uh progressive
legit even populist charismatic young like a lot of time to develop the game of politics how to
how to play it well enough to avoid the i guess she doesn't take corporate pack money that's right
no she's still true on that um so i as far as i just looking in the over the next few elections like
who's going to be running who's going to be who's going to be a real player she just seems like an
ob like to me seems like an obvious person that's going to be in the race so while i fight for
the ideal i'm very practical so for example in
she wins uh and then one cycle later uh after 2020 um
um there's these guys who want to quote unquote force the vote and it was uh on the speakership
of nancy pelosi and they wanted to use it to get medicare for all i'm like guys forcing a vote is a
terrific idea on the speakership okay who's your alternative oh we don't have an alternative already
giant red flag okay um what's the issue you're looking to have them vote on medicare for all
oh you don't know politics so i love medicare for all we have to get medicare for all but if you if
that's the first one you put up without gaining any leverage you're gonna get slaughtered put up
something easy force a vote on 15 minimum wage or pick another one that's easy paid family leave these
are all polling great because if you force a vote on that you could actually win and if you win you
gain leverage and then you do the next one and the next one and then you do medicare for all not
gradualism that the corporate democrats do but actually strategically practically building up power
and leverage and using it at the right times so if i thought that's what aoc was doing i would love it
right so i don't need her to force a vote on medicare for all i don't need her to go on some wild
tangents that don't make any sense and is only going to diminish your power
but when they eviscerated all the progressive proposals and build back better
how did that happen mansion and cinema used every ounce of leverage they had they said i'm just not
going to vote for it i don't care okay uh you know the status quo is perfect for my donors so i
don't need you i vote no okay now take out everything i want and biden did right progressives had to push
back and say here is two to three proposals right not everything not everything two to three proposals
they all poll over 70 percent they're all no-brainers and they're all things that joe biden promised
we want those in the bill otherwise we're voting no at that point the media what would have happened
is the media would have exploded and they would have said aoc and the rest are the scum of the earth
they're ruining the democratic party we're not going to get the bill they're the worst you have to withstand
that if you cannot withstand a nuclear blast for mainstream media you're not the person because
you that's you have to go run that obstacle course to get to change if they had stood their ground
they definitely would have won on one to two of those issues instead they went with a strategy that
was called it was literally called trust biden all right so uh big question who wins uh who wins this
election kama or trump and what's kama's path to victory and uh if you can steal man what's trump's
path to victory yeah so there's not enough information yet so since i make a lot of predictions on air
and then brag about it unbearably um
yeah people are always they'll stop me in the streets they'll be like predict this like
predict my marriage brother i don't know anything about your marriage how could i possibly predict
something without having any information so in the case of the uh this campaign uh right now i got
kamala harris at 55 chance of winning okay which is not bad doesn't mean she's gonna win by 55 because
then that would be a 10 point margin that's not gonna happen right but i say around 51 to 55 but it's
nowhere near over because of a lot of things one uh the democrats are still seen as more establishment
and and people hate the establishment uh two
if war breaks out in the middle east which is now unfortunately bordering unlikely right uh if
that war breaks out all bets are off do you mean a regional war yeah like iran israel gets to be a
real thing not just a pinprick and a little bombing here and an assassination there but no we're going to
war right if that happens then all bets are off and no one has any idea who's gonna win okay and if
they're pretending that they know that's ridiculous because it's so unpredictable uh and then the third
bogey for her is if she goes back to word cells so that so there's three phases of kamala harris's
career she's not necessarily any different in terms of policy she's you can frame it in a bad way you
could frame it in a good way you could say oh she's just changing seeing which way the wind is blowing
and then oh she's a tough cop prosecutor oh and then she's doing justice reform when you need people
want justice reform oh she's a waffler right or you could paint it as she's pretty balanced right she
prosecuted serious criminals very harshly but then on marijuana possession got them into rehab and you know
what that's actually what you should do right so i'm not talking about policy so there you could have
one of those views about kamala harris and i get it i'm talking about strategic stylistically so kamala
harris until the second debate in the primaries in 2020 is a very competent politician who's in line to be
the next obama right she's killing it district attorney attorney general uh senator um and then
the first debate if you remember she won she had that great line about you know uh there was a little
girl on that bus that was integrating the schools and that girl was me and biden being the knucklehead
that he is he's caught on tape going you're like don't have that reaction brother okay because she's
criticizing his segregation policy on buses back in the 70s right so anyways so she's doing terrific
and then after that debate until biden drops out is it disaster area for kamala harris's career
in the primary she starts falling apart she can't strategize right she's for medicare for all no she's
not she's for medicare for some what's medicare for some i don't know right and she goes in the next
debate and telsey gabbard kicks her ass and then goes and then the third debate gets her ass kicked
again and she's starting to drift away then at this point this is funny um i have more votes for
president than kamala harris does because kamala harris dropped out before iowa because that's how much
of a disaster her campaign turned into when she was leading she was leading right so then she becomes
vice president and biden because probably because of that bus line jill biden caught tremendous
feelings over that line okay so biden's like here have this albatross around your neck it's called
immigration good luck i'm not going to do anything about it i'm not going to change policy but i'm
putting you in charge of it to get your ass handed to you okay and she does so that's a disaster and then
she starts doing interviews where she's like we have to become the chain to being but not the thing
we were and the unbecoming and you're like what is going on why can neither one of them speak yeah
and so but then the third act shocks me so biden steps down she goes grabs all those delegates in a
super competent way that we talked about earlier and then she goes out and gives a speech i'm like oh
that speech is good okay another one another one i'm like wait a minute these are good speeches no
more word salads then she picks tim walls and shocks the world i'm like that's the correct vp pick yeah
that is a miracle right and then she goes and does the economically populous plan all those proposals
about housing that people care about grocery prices that people care about real or not real that is
correct political strategy so this kamala harris is back to the original kamala harris
who was a very competent skilled politician and as i was uh telling you offline she's doing uh whoever's
doing her tick tock is is like blowing up and they're doing risky edgy stuff yes i did not expect that
from somebody that kind of comes from the biden camp of just like be safe be boring all this kind of stuff
so you have to give kamala harris ultimate credit because she's the leader of the campaign and she
makes the final decisions but there's got there's apparently a couple of people inside that campaign
that are ass kickers and they're and they have convinced her to take risk which democrats never
take and it is correct to take risks you cannot get to victory without risk so um the vice president
pick was is the bellwether when hillary clinton picked tim kane i said that's it she's gonna lose
because tim kane is playing prevent defense he's he's he's wallpaper i mean he'd be lucky to be
wallpaper he's just a white wall right he's just and when he speaks his white noise he never says
anything interesting he's the most boring pick of all time that's saying we already won haha okay
if kamala harris had picked mark kelly that's the tim kane equivalent okay oh he's an astronaut i don't
give a shit that he's an astronaut what is he saying is he a good politician does he have good policies
is he exciting on the campaign trail is he going to add to your momentum mark kelly he might be a
good guy but number one he's a very corporate democrat and number two it's like watching grass
grow he oh he's terrible at speaking if you ask me right so so i thought for sure she's going to pick
mark kelly right because that's what a normal democrat does or if they want to go wild and crazy they'll go to
bashir so i was like please let it be shapiro because he's at least not bad he's done some
populous things and he's strategic he's really smart i need smart candidates dumb candidates don't
help they don't have a mind of their own they can't take risks they're not independent thinkers they're
they're gonna lose so she picks the smartest most populous candidate boom boom we got a winner
that's a good campaign uh speaking of risks when they debate when uh kamala and trump debate
what do you think that's gonna look like who is who is gonna win oh that's not close kamala harris
will win yeah unless she falls apart unless she goes back to the bad era right that's risk number
three hold on a second for oh i guess in a debate you don't have you can have pre-written it seems like
when she's going off the top of her head is when the word word salad sometimes comes out sometimes
yeah we'll have to see right we'll have to see because she hasn't done any tough interviews she
hasn't really been challenged so i hope to god that doesn't happen that she doesn't fall apart you mean
yeah because i hope she does a bunch of interviews right oh definitely definitely i'm like i'm
this is gonna sound really funny i'm too honest but but i am like in in the context of kamala harris
probably shouldn't come on the young turks we do a really tough interview and it would hurt her okay
do you though like it it's tough but like you're pretty respectful maybe i just have my sort of uh
uh like i'm okay with a little bit of tension you're pretty respectful even when you're yelling
there's like respect like you you don't do uh uh like a gotcha type thing there's certain things you
could do like you said this in the past you can say a line from the past that's out of context
uh it forces the other person to have to define the context you just you know sort of debate type
tactics over and over like you don't seem to do that you just like ask them questions genuinely
and then you argue the point and then you also like hear what they say the only thing you i've seen
you do sometimes tough that you sometimes like interrupt like you speak over the person
if they are trying to do the same right which only if they're filibustering yeah if they're
filibustering but like that that's a tricky one that's um yeah it's a trick right no but lex the
problem for her coming on our show isn't that we would be unfair to her it's that we would be fair
so we would ask questions she is going to have trouble answering other core corporatista right i mean
like so biden said he was going to take the corporate tax rate to 28 and he barely tried you
say you're going to take it to 28 why should we trust you right you guys said 15 minimum wage and
then you took it out of the bill why should we trust you right those are very tough questions she's never
going to get that in mainstream media mainstream media is going to have faux toughness but in reality
they're going to be softballs right and so the debates you're right lex is is a little bit easier
because sarah palin proved that you could just memorize scripted talking points and she admitted
it later she's like she was super nervous she memorized the talking points and no matter what
they asked she just gave the talking point which by the way people barely noticed because that's what
all politicians do okay she just admitted it and so no trump's a disaster in a debate he's a he's a one
man wrecking crew of his own campaign so any competent debater would eviscerate donald trump i mean they just
on any given topic when he says something like here let's take one lunatic conspiracy theory that he just
had recently uh and by the way if you're a right winger and you keep getting hurt every time i say
he's a lunatic or i insult donald trump don't like you you sound like a left winger i'm offended i'm
offended i'm offended get over it get over it okay so we we have disagreements hear what the other side
is saying and by the way i say the same thing to the left okay i say you you think everybody on the
rights evil you're crazy no they just have a different way of looking at the world which by the way is an
interesting conversation we should talk about that in a minute too but so i i do it to both sides but
okay but trump says oh i i don't think there's anyone at kamala harris's rallies it's uh all the
pictures are ai okay so let's say he says that in a debate because he's liable to say anything right
you just say okay so you think every reporter that was there every photographer that was there every
human being that was there they're all lying they have a conspiracy of thousands of people
but none of them were actually there do you understand how insane you sound so this is a good
place to uh can you steal man the case for trump yeah yeah so trump is a massive risk because of all the
things we talked about earlier but there is a percentage chance that he's such a wild card that he
overturns the whole system and that is why the establishment is a little scared of him so if he's
in office here i'll give you a case of donald trump doing something right something wrong first and then
something right so he bombs uh soleimani the top general of iran and kills him that risks world war
three that risks a giant war with iran that devolves iran is four times the size of iraq if you're anti-war
you should have hated that he assassinated soleimani but after the assassination iran doesn't want to
get into it even though they're in a rage and they do a small bombing you can tell if it's a small or a
big one right so that's them saying we don't really want war but for our domestic crowd we have to bomb
you back right and that's when the military industrial complex comes to trump and says no you have to show
him who's tough and bomb this area and trump says no they did a small bombing not a large bombing i don't
want the war i'm not going to do that bombing that was a shining moment yeah for for me one of the
biggest steel man for trump is that he has both the skill and the predisposition to not be a warmonger
he i think better than the other candidates i've seen is able to end wars
and end them now you might disagree with it but in a way where there's legitimately effective
negotiation that happens like i just don't see any other candidate currently being able to sit
down zelinski and putin and to negotiate a peace treaty that both are equally unhappy with
so on the one hand uh almost all other politicians are going to be controlled by the military industrial
complex and that uh complex wants to bleed russia dry and that's what the ukraine war is doing it's a
double win for the defense contractors number one every dollar we spend you send to ukraine is
actually not going to ukraine it's going to u.s defense contractors and then they are sending old
weapons to ukraine the money is to build new weapons for us so a lot of people don't know that
so the defense contractors want that war to go on forever and they're an enormous influence in
washington the second win is they're depleting russia and russia has gotten themselves into a
quagmire like we did in iraq and afghanistan and they're bleeding out so they the military industrial
complex wants russia to bleed out for as long as humanly possible they actually care more about
their own interests of course than they do about ukrainian interests so in fact there's a good
argument to be made that ukraine could have gotten a peace deal earlier uh and we prevented it so but
the bottom line now is probably how a deal gets done is they let go of three more areas in ukraine
they already lost crimea they'd have to let go of three more regions and that is tough because at
that point russia's a little bit encouraged every time they do an invasion they get more land they
might not get all the land they wanted but they get a lot of land so that's it's a very difficult issue
but literally which which person if they become president will end the war trump will end that war
because trump will go in and he loves russia and putin anyway i just disagree with he loves russia
the implication of that meaning he will do whatever putin tells him i think he'll do 90 of what putin
tells him uh i just disagree with that i think uh i think he wants to be the kind of person that says
fuck you to putin while while patting him while patting him on the back and being you know but
out negotiating putin so i i don't like talking about russia because there's so much emotions that
go into that topic the right wing the minute you mention russia they're like oh it's a hoax and all
this baggage that comes with it etc to me russia is not any different than saudi arabia or israel for
trump you give me money i like you you get by my apartments i like you right if you don't give me
money i don't like you it's not that complicated so okay take like don't worry about the russia part of
it like the bottom line is trump thinks what do i care about those three regions of ukraine i want
to get this thing done right so he'll go and he'll say ukraine we're going to withdraw all help unless
you agree to a peace deal with russia and russia wants those three regions that's the peace deal
that's it so ukraine will lose a part of their country and we'll get to a peace deal yeah i i hope
not i hope not i think trump uh sees themselves and uh wants to be a great negotiator so and i personally
want the death the death of people to end and i think trump would bring that much faster
and i disagree with you at least that my hope is that he would negotiate something that would be
fair he's not his anti-war record is so complicated because moving the embassy in israel
and killing the top iranian general were super provocative and they could have easily triggered a
giant war there and then you know what's going to happen if you get into any kind of real war trump's
going to want to prove his buttons larger so then he's going to do massive ridiculous bombings i mean
i worry about nukes and so we had giuliani on the show in the on on the rnc and i asked him this question
i said you know i keep saying oh they wouldn't do it if i was in charge i'm like what does that mean
because it sounds like what it means is they wouldn't do it because they know if they did it i would do
something insane like attack russia or use nukes and rudy said yeah that's what it means so that means
you have to at least bluff that and you have to get them to believe that he's a madman that's the
madman theory of nixon and nixon and rudy said that too he was very clear about it but the problem is
if you get your bluff called and so if you actually attack russia you're gonna start world war three so
that's why yeah if you could if you could just get away with bluffing maybe but he's playing a very
dangerous game and he massively increased drone strikes on the other hand he didn't bomb iran further
and on the other hand he started the process of withdrawal from afghanistan so not black and white
complicated record and one thing i'll give him another piece of credit here i think i'm taking
this steel manning too far uh but here's the the credit was that um he changed the rhetoric of the
right wing they went from the party of dick cheney war is great uh and let's you know
all muslims are evil and so he hates muslims too but that's a different thing right but like oh we
have to attack the enemy we have to start wars etc to now republican voters are generally anti-war and
hate dick cheney oh i'll take it i'll take it so that's a great thing that trump did even if he didn't
mean it even if he does these provocative things that could lead to a much worse war even if i'm worried
that he'll be so reckless he'll start a bigger war at least he did that right
and so i'm happy to have our right wing brothers and sisters join us in the anti-war movement and
and i'm not being a jerk about it like i love it and and any and so this is another thing the left
does wrong from time to time which is if you agree with a right winger two percent they'll be like oh
welcome in come on vote for trump come on in yeah water's warm right if you if you disagree with the
left two percent they're like that's it you're banished and you're a nazi well brother how are
we going to win an election if you're banishing everybody there is right so hold up these republican
voters are coming at your anti-war position take the win no they're maga and i won't deal with them
even when they agree with you that doesn't make any sense that doesn't make any sense take the win
right so when charlie kirk says yes to paid family leave when patrick bett david on his program says
yes roughly says yes to paid family leave take the win rfk jr you said uh some positive things for a
while about rfk jr uh and i think you said you would even consider uh voting for him given the slate of
people this was at the time when biden was uh still in um what do you think about him what do
you think about rfk jr as a candidate as a person he's been on the show right yeah yeah so he he was
on our show people love that interview you could check it out anytime right um and and why do people
love it whether they're right or left because we're fair we actually asked him about his policy positions he
explained them i challenge him and then he explains and we give him a fair hearing but i i knew bobby a
little bit before he ran when he was an environmental lawyer right uh and his legal work is excellent
um and and he's been on the right side of most of the issues for most of his life so a i like him on
that two on his wildlife the dead bear and the worms and all that stuff right so there's two important
lessons you should get about out of that well one's just about bobby but the other one's a general
one that's really important for you to know no matter what you think of bobby kennedy on the personal
front i have a friend that's very similar to him in fact he's one of my best friends and and i know
why i this is my theory on why bobby and my friend are led a wild life both of their dads young died
young when my friend's dad died he was 18 and his dad died in his arms and he has a motto what is
lived cannot be unlived so if i had a great time and i thought it was hilarious to dump a dead bear
at central park then i lived it and i had a great time and nothing you could do about it okay and
sometimes that'll get you in trouble and sometimes you'll have a fantastic time right and
and obviously bobby's dad was killed when he was young and maybe that got into his head of like
you better live strong and and you know live an interesting life and so i don't begrudge him that
even if i begrudge some of the things that he did in that life i get why he did it so i don't hate him
like other people hate him for some of those personal stuff right so and i like him for all the things
that he did positive holding uh you know fossil fuel companies accountable protecting communities
that had poison dumped into the rivers etc right so the thing that affects everybody is when he gets
like corporate media smeared the hell out of him and they didn't allow him to speak and then they did
the needle in a haystack trick so whenever it's an insider they find the best parts of their lives and then they
amplify so joe biden is average joe from scranton mother has been in dc for the last 52 years you
think we don't have eyes and ears okay like average joe from scranton who are you kidding so there's a
guy named fred thompson who's an actor and he was a senator from tennessee later and he had this great
little trick that he would do is a red pickup truck that he would campaign with right so he looks like a
regular joe right but he's a millionaire actor but here's the funny part he would drive to the red pickup truck
in a limo and he would drive back from the campaign event in a limo but the press never reported the
limo they only reported him in the red pickup truck as if that's what he drives see that's the theater
of politics why because fred thompson was a corporate republican so they loved him so they go
yeah sure yeah red pickup truck oh good old fred thompson right so but if you're an outsider and they
don't like you then they're going to look at the haystack of your life and they're going to try to
find needles so they've done this to trump they've done this to bernie they've done this to bobby kennedy
jr uh and with with bobby they're like oh there's some juicy needles in here okay so they find those and
they go you see this the only thing but you should know about bobby kennedy jr is that he found a dead
bear and put it in central park uh oh wait wait wait i found another one the other thing you should
know about bobby is that he once said in a divorce deposition that he had a brain worm that day by the
way it turns out that affects millions of people and it's not that big a deal right but look he is a
radical ah he is this defines him completely the spectacular case of that actually happened to me so i
ran for congress in 2020 and the new york times la times cnn they all butchered me with needles okay
so they said it's a long history of making anti-muslim jokes well first of all they didn't even say
jokes they said anti-muslim rhetoric i'm like i'm muslim dude i mean i'm an atheist but i grew up muslim
my family's muslim my background's muslim you don't think that's relevant in the story and they did it
based on one joke i told about and they said oh also of course i mean they say that i'm anti-semitic
that's like that's you start with that that's that's just baked in for everyone right so they said i
had made a joke about how orthodox jews and muslims they think that getting into heaven is a little
bit of a fashion contest okay so they the orthodox jews go in there with the russian coast from the
1800s and the giant russian hat you know the muslims going with their robe and the skull cap and stuff
and god's looking around going no no no oh nice outfit come on in right like do you really think
the creator of the universe gives a damn what you wear okay so the new york times took that and said
long history of being anti-semitic and anti-muslim right okay so there's this oh this is a famous
one uh relatively uh i did a joke about bestiality like nice a dozen years ago very nice so i start
out the joke nice and dry and i go look is the horse going to object if he's the one getting pleasure
now anna's my co-host she's younger at that time and she's like that seems like a bad idea i'm like of
course it's a bad idea okay but i'm being dry but some people are laughing in the studio and stuff
and then uh and then i say you know if i was emperor of the world i would make that legal
and they cut the tape if you watch the rest of the tape i say now would the horse object no
so but they cut the tape so the new york so originally a right winger did that and then a like
a establishment troll uh in that primary started putting out those tapes to everyone jake tapper
retweeted it didn't look to see if it's edited or not edited the new york times implied that bestiality
was part of my agenda agenda jesus please tell me that's part of your wikipedia that the the the bestiality
thing is part of your i don't know i don't know but guys so in that in those stories i'm not
important and even bobby kennedy jr is not important what it reveals about the media is what's important
so they're gonna find those needles whether it's and even if they don't have the needles you know
what we'll cut the tape before your joke uh jokes punchline right so we'll just run it and we'll lie
about you who cares right and so oh they also said that i had david duke on to share his anti-semitic
point of view if you watch the interview i told david duke you're an anti-semite you're a racist you're
a bigot you're an idiot right it was the toughest interview he's probably ever had in his life and
other journalists got mad at that part and they were like no guys you're just flat out lying like i i
watched the interview did any of you watch the interview he takes the guy's head off right and
so the new york times issued a correction on that one so they're like okay fine he was being sarcastic
when he said sure you're not racist dave okay well it's the one of the sources of hope to all this
is there's a lot of uh independent media now um but mainstream media has a lot of power still
and carries a lot of power do you think they're gonna die eventually yeah definitely so
two things about that that are super important first of all this is why i tell people to have
hope i don't believe in false hope right so if you think kamala harris is your knight in shining armor
she's going to come in she's going to get money out of politics she's going to ignore the donors
that's false hope that's crazy talk right so i why am i in favor of kamala harris i'm going to live
to fight another day i'm worried that trump's going to end the whole thing and then we're not going to
have an opportunity to actually get a populist win right so and i'm encouraged by some of the
things she's doing maybe she does even 25 of her agenda but i'm not going to give you false hope
that she's your savior right but i believe massively in hope and number one because it's true to to the
point that we were talking about earlier alex and how last 200 years have been choppy but overall
fantastic terrible things have happened in that time period some of the worst things that have ever
happened in history but overall life expectancy is higher everything is you know incomes are higher
health is better etc right so hope is not misplaced it's real it's empirical okay so now we talked
about how you could get money out of politics and that's a legitimate hope but media is another place
where we have huge hope so of all the corporate robots the most important robot is media so when
mainstream media has you hooked in at the back of your neck you're going to believe all these fairy tales
about how politicians are nice people and they're trying to do the right thing and donor money
doesn't have any influence on them right so once you unplug from the matrix um well then you begin to
see oh yeah hey look he took the donor money did what the donors wanted he took the donor money did what
the donors want 98 of the time right so then you see clearly so now what's happening at large
mainstream media is losing their power and now online media is swarming swarming swarming swarming and
so this goes back to why i started the young turks so let me touch on that here and then we can come
back to it if you want so in 1998 i write an email to my friends and i say online video is going to be
television and unsurprisingly and they say you're nuts that's never going to happen at that point
we're still doing aol dial-ups like right the online video barely exists and television's mammoth um
i say guys it's just a matter of logic like for me it's there's so many ironies i'm known for yelling
online sometimes but in reality i'm obsessed with logic so when you have gatekeepers gatekeepers pick
based on what they want what the powerful one in that case advertisers politicians etc they are never
going to design programming as good as wisdom of the crowd when uh people start doing online video i'm
like boom there's no gatekeepers this is democratized wisdom of the crowd is going to win so
if you start with no money and let's pick a different example not the young turks let's say
phil defranco he's been around forever okay and uh and he also does news and so phil starts doing a show
and he doesn't have any money just like us and so what does he what does he have to do to get an
audience he has to do a show that is really popular he's got to figure out a way how do i get their
attention how do i keep their attention and he starts doing a great show right
and so every year it's us and phil for best news show for like a decade right and meanwhile
i'm back over at cnn wolf blitzer still droning on from a teleprompter you put wolf blitzer online
without the force of cnn with him he gets negative seven views no one's interested in what wolf blitzer
has to say it's not personal i i don't know the brother right i'm just saying institutionally
logically etc so i'm like these guys are gonna win so when youtube starts we go on youtube right
away we're the first youtube partner so i am literally the original youtuber okay
nice uh susan wojewski uh the former ceo of the late susan wojewski
uh wonderful woman uh and if that triggers you again on the right you're wrong she was a terrific
person and uh and she when she started her own youtube channel uh i was the first interview
because we were the first youtube partner so so i love that so we're in that but let me connect it
back to the hope when mainstream media has you hooked you got no hope because you don't have the right
information you have propaganda you have marketing you don't have real news when you're in the online
world it's chaotic and don't get me wrong it's got plenty of downsides right but within that chaos
the truth begins to emerge and so for example young turks has had dozens of fights with different
creators throughout history why when you're number one in news online the algorithm rewards anyone
attacking you because then you get into their algorithmic loop it's not an accident that we've been
attacked dozens of times one we're independent thinkers so anyone if we don't match their ideology
they're going to attack us but number two they get in our algorithm loop it's too hard to resist
right so all of a sudden they think that we're being funded by nancy pelosi or the cia and then oh
we're off to the races there's another fight right but our competition is a graveyard and so we've
we won all almost all of all of those fights why because we try really hard to stick with the truth
with logic and we don't do audience capture even if our audience is going in one direction we don't
think it's right will anna and i will come out and go no sorry guys love you but rent control is not
a good idea okay etc so in that world the people it's going to take a while guys but people who are
telling the truth are eventually going to rise up and when they do now we're free and now the second part
is even more devastating for mainstream media because i'm a businessman right i keep looking at
their revenue for cnn etc and they have a massive problem and people don't realize how big the problem
is that thing's going to capsize i don't talk about it often because i don't want more competition okay
i'm i also have a company right in in the online world etc but but but i'm too honest i gotta say it i
gotta say it so there they have two revenue streams one is ads that's why they serve advertisers and
politicians are huge advertisers as we mentioned the second revenue stream depending on the company
is arguably more important which is subscribers so now what happens in a business normally is uh so
they started out low and then they got high and now they got a ton of subscribers at its peak cable
has 100 million households right so they're raking in unbelievable money from subscriber fees and they
got advertising on top so when you're all the way up here your costs start to rise why do they rise
because then the on-air talent has leverage and uh as an example there's many others yes the and so the
on-air talent like sean hannity says i do a program that brings in x amount of maybe 100 million maybe 200
million so give me 40 million a year and they do sean is making 40 million a year last i checked okay
so i don't know if he's still getting that kind of money and i'm just basing out on reporting right
but that's a monster so they have all these giant costs but the minute you lose you go from 100 million
now we're at i think around 70 million you just lost a giant chunk of your revenue now when your costs
are higher than your revenue nighty night it's been nice knowing you yeah it's going to collapse
and it's going to be painful but what we need guys it's like sorry last thing on that is we need the
print guys like ap reuters intercept the lever the serota runs whatever ryan's working on now it's at
ryan grim so we need those badly we need someone to collect actual information and do the best they
can and presenting it in an objective way we all got to support that so you can't lose text that's
so important the tv guys are just actors you can lose them overnight and it won't hurt you it'll help
you yeah just it's going to be a a messy battle for truth because the reality is there's a lot of money
to be made and a lot of attention to be gained from drama farming so just constantly creating drama
and sometimes drama helps find the truth like we were mentioning but most of the time it's just
drama and it can it doesn't care about the truth it just cares about drama and then the same as like
conspiracy theories now some conspiracy theories have value in depth and they allow us to question the
establishment institutions but the bottom line is conspiracy theories get clicks and so you can just
keep coming up with random conspiracy theories and they many of them don't have to be grounded in the truth at all
and so that's the sea we're operating in and so it's a tricky space too but lex look at all the people
who are the biggest uh now because we've now had a couple of decades at this right so uh i mean as an
industry so i would argue you're huge and you don't do that you don't do the conspiracy theories you
don't do the drama at all right um rogan is huge yeah maybe there's drama but he's genuine right i got
a lot of issues with some of his policies i mix opinions on joe in a lot of different ways but i
don't doubt that he's genuine and people can sense that right and he's huge we're genuine we're huge so
this is the market beginning to work yeah so speaking of joe let me ask you about this
ah here we go i didn't actually know this but when i was prepping for this conversation
i saw that you actually said at some point in the past that you can beat up rogan in a fight
yeah no you said that you have a shot it's a non-zero probability yes do you still believe this yes
but the probability is dropping it's dropping every day i think it's the probably the stupidest
thing i've ever heard you say so i didn't much i wrestled and did jujitsu and judo and all the
kinds of fighting sports my whole life and i just observed a lot of really confident large guys
roll into gyms he's ripped he could deadlift he could talk all kinds of and he's
believes he's gonna be the next world champion and he just gets his ass kicked yeah
okay and i've seen like i saw this uh israeli mma fighter taking on an anti-semite who was huge and
thought that you know he believed in like nick fuentes conspiracy theories or something and the
mma fighter dismantled him and i loved it okay and then he like we tweeted back and forth etc so guys
first let me just assure you i get it so now let me tell you why i said it and then
why i think it's a non-zero chance so michael smirconish had written this blog
like i don't know 10 15 years ago on huffington post we're both bloggers at that point and about
the wussification of america now he was saying the left is a bunch of wussies right so i wrote a blog
saying hey michael i would rather debate you so if you want to debate about how we're wussies let's do it
let's find them but you know you're mentioning physicality right and how you guys are tougher
so if you prefer only in a prescribed setting right and we're not going to go do it in the streets like
idiots right but if you want we'll have a boxing match or whatever you want and we'll see who's
tougher and he panicked and he cried uh to mommy uh which was ariana huffington and oh jake's
intimidating me right okay all right well who who's the wussy now right so that is not to actually
get into a fight with poor michael smirconish right it's to prove hey don't use rhetoric like
that that's dumb and this is me proving that it's dumb okay so now joe had said i forget what he said
at the time and he says something similar right and i'm up to here with joe at that point i don't
know if we'll ever talking yet right but uh you've been on a show and i really that was a good
conversation it was a great conversation it was a while back yeah yeah i hope he has you on again
yeah so i get it he i bet you i don't like this take you have a lot i bet you he hates it because
him as an mma commentator he gets to hear so many bros yeah it's all about the mindset bro
now the steel man the point you're making which i do think it's the stupidest thing you've ever said
but the actual intent which is whether you're left or right there's there's strong people on the left
like mentally strong physically strong like i think the whole point is not that you can beat
them but you're willing to step you're willing to fight if you need to that's it's 100 so it's not
like i believe i could beat them it's like i'm willing like all this you know calling
the people on the left wusses or whatever i'm willing to step in the fight even if i'm untrained
even if i'm out of shape i'm willing to fight yeah i get it i understand that but it's just pick a
different person um that's why i wrote down on my genuine curiosity is if you can beat up alex
alex jones versus jank you that that that the legitimately is i would pay for that because
you're both untrained um you both got i i would say the spirit no no he has look i'll give the same
fairness yeah i think i got an eight percent chance of being beating rogan you're you're lost i know i
got it all right and i think to be fair alex has an eight percent chance of beating me oh wow yeah okay
because you never know he catches you on a lucky punch i got punched in the ear once and you lose
your balance and then you're in a lot of trouble right so i can get lucky alex jones can't lucky it's
me against rogan is harder i like you if you said to me you don't have eight percent chance
um but alex does okay i'm not gonna it's it's fine right so why would does alex stand almost no chance
he asked me so first of all it's not just because i'm big and he's big one i wrestled oh you wrestled
yeah if you wrestled then you're like i watched this show with my kids physical 100 it's like a
korean show where they try to find out who's the best best athlete they have one thing where they have
to wrestle away the ball and keep it this big giant ball i'm like every wrestler is going to win every
mma fighter is going to win and every time they win and they're like dad how did you know that because
we get trained we're not going to lose to a non-wrestler in a wrestling contest it's not going
to happen right so you can get lucky but it's unlikely so one wrestling now that was from a long
time ago but at least you know the mechanics right number two i've gotten into about 30 actual street
fights in my life and you can say street fights not the same as mma of course that's true obviously
true right but it's not no experience it's some experience and the most important part of a street fight
is being able to take a punch in the face okay yeah knowing what it feels like to get punched in
the face yeah so i've been punched in the face i don't know dozens of times in my life i used to
start fights by saying i'll let you take the first punch okay so i didn't start the fights they just
started because they punched me in the face okay so and then and for alex the main thing and also true
for rogan is it's about willpower right so if you if if joe has a 92 chance in my opinion of knocking
me out or beating me because he has the skill and he's trained and he knows what he's doing so all the
willpower in the world isn't going to help you if you get kicked upside the head right so but in the
unlikely circumstances that i've worn him down right then i'm a little bit more in the ball game because i
got willpower for alex he doesn't have the willpower i have okay i'm because to me the idea of losing
alex jones is unthinkable i would do anything not to lose anything let me just say so that's beautiful
i love this i i would pay a lot of money to watch the two of you just even like wrestle but uh with joe
i think i just i i have to say it's like it's it's 0.0001 chance you have a chance before you even
get to the mentality and the other thing is on the mentality side one of the fascinating things about joe
is he's actually a sweetheart in person like this but there's something that takes over him when he
competes brother we've been around 22 years in the toughest industry in the world yeah right if you
like do you have any idea how hard it is to run a 75 person company and make money online and survive
after all the guys who took billions of dollars went i hear you tremendous willpower so but overall
you're i i this is not the hill i'm dying on okay joe would win i get it i think we're all allowed
one kind of um blind spot i suppose so you don't think a huge a big guy uh that still is in good shape
that was a wrestler that's been in a lot of street fights you still think point zero zero zero one
it depends on street fights but yeah point zero zero one i just see yeah and it's such a minute
disagreement because so take me out of it so you take out the willpower part of blah blah blah i think
it's one to two percent yeah he could catch the guy on about you know i think and get lucky i think
it's because i've talked to so i trained with a coach named john donahar and we talk about this a lot
and i think technique is just such technique is the thing that also feeds the willpower it actually
builds up your confidence in the in the way that like nothing else does in the in the more actionable
way because you won't need that much willpower no if the technique is back but like you don't have to
be like a tough guy to win debates if you're just good at debates right so i think people just don't
understand the value in sport and especially in combat of technique no i the a great irony is i
actually totally agree with that that's why measure the physical 100 technique's gonna win every day
like almost every time we're having a debate about whether it's eight or one or point oh one right like
it's either way technique wins yeah we agree okay beautiful in the uh one of the controversial things
you've done in the 90s as a student at upenn you publicly denied the armenian genocide which is the
mass murder of over a million armenians in 1915 and 16 in the ottoman empire um you have since then
publicly uh and clearly changed your mind on this um tell me the process you went through to change your mind
yeah so when you're a kid you're taught a whole bunch of things that's the software that we
talked about earlier right so cultural software is media family friends uh social media etc and so
growing up in any tribe whether it's a religious tribe or an ethnic tribe you're going to get
indoctrinated into that tribe's way of thinking so you take a turkish person who's super progressive
loves bernie believes with all their heart and peace and you tell them something about kurds
and they'll say oh no not those guys they're terrible and evil and we have to do what we do to
them uh you see that's the tribe taking over right and so uh you tell any religious person what's wrong
with the other religions they're like oh yeah yeah that's totally true you get to their religion tribe
takes over no how dare you i'm offended right so i grew up with turkish propaganda so uh i'll tell
you a couple of funny instances of it when we were kids we'd go turkish american day parade i'm like 10
or 12 years old it's in the middle of new york because i grew up in jersey that's why i got in all
those fights uh and uh and we would chant in turkish turkey is the biggest country there's no other
country that's even big and i was like this is crazy i'm like dad isn't this crazy america's big
china's big why are we chanting this nonsensical chant right so that's the beginning of beginning to
realize you're indoctrinated i'm in college and i read about some battle that the ottoman uh empire
lost and i'm like that can't be right uh the turks have only lost one war world war one right and then
i was like oh my god i'm an idiot i got taught that in third grade in turkey of course that's not true
that's ridiculously untrue right all those thoughts are in your head you don't even realize and so on
the armenian genocide i read the turkish version and and the turkish version has all of these this
evidence right so it's real in that it exists but here i'll give you a great example of it
uh i think it was colonel chester he's some random american uh military guy after world war one and he
says about the armenians after the mass uh march the force marches he says they return to the area fat
and entirely unmassacred okay i'm like hey that's an american colonel that's saying that so that's obviously
true you see that it didn't happen right or at least in the way that the armenians say now as a
grown-up i look at it and i go are you kidding me that guy's obviously trying to get a contract with
the turkish government right nobody returns from a forced march fat and entirely unmassacred right
so that's propaganda and so it and that one was so indoctrinated that it was tough to let go so in at
pen i write that op-ed etc and then over the course of time and so anna and i disagree on things from
time to time and we've been co-hosting now for she's been at the young turks for 18 years and co-hosting
for you know almost 18. and so she's armenian and by the way i love america i mean look at we came to
america because we love this country land of hope and opportunity that's part of why i fight so hard for
the average american for the american idea so here's a turkin and armenian doing a show together
and it becomes the number one online news show that's the beauty of america right so she's telling
me things and we're having some on-air discussions about it etc and then it just dawned on me like no
this was this too was obviously propaganda so at that point once you realize that it becomes easier
that's why i'm trying to unplug people from the matrix because once you realize it's propaganda
oh my god it gets infinitely easier to start telling what's true or not true so maybe by way
of advice how do you know when you're deluded by propaganda how do you know you're not believing a
kind of uh how do you know when you're not plugged into the matrix when you're plugged into the matrix
you have to keep testing it against objective reality okay they said something did it happen or did
did it not happen so here here's an easy one alex jones for a long time especially under obama kept
saying they're gonna put us on fema camps i tell you they're gonna stop us all in the fema camps and
they're gonna put us in and they're gonna let us out i know it i know it for sure right nobody's been
in a fema camp obama left there was no fema camps so what i asked like for the right-wing conspiracy
guys guys has any of their things ever come true like they always say all these crazy things
that never ever happen so the third time it doesn't happen can you please start to wonder
maybe i'm on the wrong side maybe and but but that's not just for right-wingers that's easy
right but it's also for mainstream media and that's where i get the biggest pushback
and that's where because my tribe is is what the kids call pmc professional management class
okay they're curious you go up the ladder you have this route that route etc and so for that class
the status quo is pretty good so when you get when biden gives you 15 change you're like what else do
you want that's amazing he just course corrected a little bit now it's perfect right but for the
average guy who needs a hundred percent change not 15 they look at it and they go what the
fuck he only did 15 and everybody's declaring him a hero right so those are the hardest guys to get
through on and those are the guys who get most mad at me not the right-wingers the establishment
that's why i i'm nails on a chalkboard for them because i'm on the left but i call out their crap
and their marketing and propaganda and that's why i mentioned earlier no one probably now he might not
even consciously know it but no one dislikes bernie more than obama because if bernie got into office
he'd embarrass obama by doing a lot more change and obama told us the change wasn't possible you could
only get five percent and so if bernie does 50 then obama's humiliated and his record and his legacy is
ruined right so he i don't think he makes that conscious decision right but it's subconscious
it's a way of thinking so if you're watching morning joe test him he says something that biden
is for 15 minimum wage when biden takes it out of the bill know that morning joe was lying to you
he says that biden said he was for the public option but he never even proposed it when morning joe
still defends him and and you see an objective reality biden didn't actually propose that bill
you know that they're lying to you test it against objective reality did it actually happen or didn't
i mean there's some of that just stealing some of the conspiracy theories do you think there's
some value to the conspiracy theories uh that come from the right but actually more so come from the
anti-establishment so i mean for me one i mean there's a lot that uh raise a bit of a question
um a lot of them could probably be explained by corporatism and the military industrial complex
but there's also a lot of them can be explained by creepiness and shadiness in human nature
epstein is an example of that there's a lot of ways to explain epstein
um including the basic creepiness of human nature um but there could be bigger explanations underlying
it so sometimes when we have long uh thoughtful conversations like this i'll say it depends a lot
and then people get frustrated by that but then you're frustrated by the world because it depends
so conspiracy theories if you say are they all right or are they all wrong already the question's
wrong so it depends what is the conspiracy theory so if it's you know some of the absurd ones we've
mentioned here that's easily disproven right um on the other hand um there's a conspiracy theory uh
about jfk's assassination which one's the conspiracy theory that lee harvey oswald from like 12 miles away
shot a magic bullet that went like this and hit like 13 people and came out uh kennedy's brain
or that the government might have wanted to cover up an assassination of the president for whatever
reason okay come on now i'm of course doing hyperbole and like the jfk enthusiasts will be like
no it did the bullet didn't actually go like this it didn't actually have 13 people i'm i'm i'm kidding
guys okay but in terms of is that conspiracy theory real that jfk was not just killed by lee harvey oswald
almost certainly right and so if you read real books with tons of information the most likely
culprit is alan dullest the head of the cia that he fired back when there was a deep state there
actually was a deep state they did coups against other countries leaders all the time but they tell
us oh they wouldn't do it to our own leader but remember it's not the cia he'd left the cia already
right so he get you know so i don't know if it was ex-cia guys i don't know if the mob was involved
i don't know any of those details but i know some things that are obvious that bullet didn't
magically hit him from over there as jack ruby killed lee harvey oswald jack ruby was a mobster
who on the record had said that he hated kennedy all of a sudden he became patriotic overnight
and shot the assailant who was unguarded maybe less likely okay so let's speed up though so my point
is yeah some conspiracy theories could be true it depends on objective reality right you get to epstein
again i always do it ahead of time because i want you to test me and see does it match objective
reality so i said the minute that it happened you'll have your answer based on whether the video in the
hallway worked or not if the video in the hallway works there'll be just as many conspiracy theories
but it'll show actually who went in and didn't go in okay but if the video in the hallway doesn't
work they definitely killed him okay so a couple of days later oh the video in that particular hallway
happened to not be working and the guards both happened to be on break at the same time
and the most notorious pedophile criminal in the country happened to be unguarded and that is the
one time he decided to hang himself listen man the only way you believe that is if you got mainstream
media to get you to believe that the word that the minute the phrase conspiracy theory is mentioned
you have to shut off your mind and you have to believe whatever the media tells you yeah well it's
interesting you just mentioned do you think the cia has not grown in power versus no no they've greatly
waned in power interesting so so in the old days the cia has an actual deep state and because the
country was run by a bunch of families right so you go to yale the skull and bones thing was real
right and you go to harvard he goes and half the look at the dullest family right half of them go into
government the other half go into banking uh why are the central american countries called banana republics
because we weed america did a coup against uh one of those countries because a banana company wanted it
okay because they're like how dare you charge whatever you want for your natural resource we american
corporations have the right to all of your natural resources at the lowest possible rate alan get rid of
these guys okay and and alan wood and so and sometimes they would go extra judicial right like
potentially with the jfk assassination so now and and by the way you pissed off j edgar hoover he was
just going to put a bullet in your head and we were done with you okay fred hampton among others so
um but nowadays that's not how the world works so a small number of families cannot control a country
and an economy this size new people pop up well mark zuckerberg wasn't part of those families elon musk
wasn't part of those families neither was bezos right for in for you to believe those conspiracy
theories you have to think that bezos and musk etc were like oh you guys are still running the country no
problem go ahead you're not gonna do that right so now we've gotten into a system where it's the
invisible hand of the market that runs the country but unfortunately it's for only for the powerful
and so it's more of a machine and they don't do and this is super interesting in ties to what we're
talking about earlier lex which is that they don't do political assassinations anymore they do
character assassinations that's the needle in the haystack thing so and if you do an assassination
of someone you build up their status they become a martyr and you build up their cause but if you do
a character assassination you smear the cause with the person and the cause goes down not up so the market
found a better way of getting rid of agitating outsiders well that's you know one of the conspiracy
theories with epstein is that he's a front for like a i guess cia and they're getting data on people
like creepy pedophile kind of data to the they can use to then threaten character assassination
and they put them in this way put the people in their pockets so look we're not in on it so we there's
no way we can know right but the i just always go back to logic so he has dirt on a lot of powerful
people he dies in a way that is an obvious murder and not a suicide and then you begin to think who
would have enough power to be able to get away with that crime and that is a very limited number
of either people or governments right yeah so that's probably your answer without knowing anything
that's internal yeah that's crazy we don't have the list of clients what is the best way to achieve
stability and peace in israel and palestine in the current situation and uh in the next five ten years
if people wanted to get to peace it's relatively straightforward there's already a deal the uh
that was negotiated the saudis agreed to it uh and they're an important uh player in this game uh
the palestinians and the israelis have initially agreed to it even hamas has kind of agreed to it
that deal exists and it's just waiting on the shelf to get done right and it's pretty straightforward
israel gets out of the west bank and gaza strip uh but they keep an x percentage it used to be four
percent then it went up to six percent it's probably a higher number now the palestinians keep losing
leverage as we go right so you remember how hard it was uh to get a deal on ukraine i thought
that's a very complicated one israel is much more straightforward get the hell out of the
occupied territories keep some of the god like those settlements are the worst thing they're cancer but
anyway i don't know there's but there is an answer to the settlements and it's probably that israel
keeps them even though that drives me crazy no right of return for palestinians there'll be symbolic
right of return for a couple of families and so palestinians go oh no way guys you have no leverage
take the deal take the deal okay so you're not going to get a right of return days there is not going
to allow millions of palestinians to go and vote in israel it would end the jewish state you have to get to
a practical solution so honestly the number one person blocking it now is then yahoo it's not even
that's obvious that's that doesn't take a lot of courage to say that he says publicly i don't want
a palestinian state i'm against the two-state solution he's been monstrous he's one of the
worst terrorists of my lifetime um so that's easy the right wing of israel has lost its mind
so the smotrich and the ben gavir is openly talking about ethnic cleansing and driving them
into other arab countries uh i mean this is the definition of ethnic cleansing so but is like
i know that the arabs are going to take the deal that saudi arabia cannot wait to take the deal because
they just want to get business going right you think hamas takes the deal so i had have a solution
where you don't need hamas but yes hamas would definitely take the deal hamas already publicly
said that they would even get rid of uh that israel doesn't have a right to exist but are we there's
so much propaganda in american media it's maddening right so and this idea that you don't deal with
hamas is so dumb so the reason it's dumb is you don't negotiate with your friends you negotiate with
your enemies well i don't want to negotiate with them i don't like them well then you're not going to get to
peace right but still there is a path that doesn't include hamas so make a deal with fatah that runs
the best west bank then they get right now fatah went into gaza strip they won't be able to manage it
because they don't have enough credibility they're mainly seen as in cahoots with the occupiers whereas
hamas is hardcore and fighting against the occupiers but if fatah delivers a piece not only a peace deal
but a palestinian state then they come in as heroes so you make the deal with them you let them
run the gaza strip and you empower them to drive out hamas that way they do your dirty work for you
in a sense right but good because hamas a terrorist organization they're not helpful and especially if the
palestinians get a state the violence has to stop immediately that's the whole point the trade is
you get a state israel gets safety and peace so no more rockets that israel no more rockets if you do
any other rockets when and israel does the barbaric thing they just did even i would say hey brother we
had a peace deal okay so if you violate a peace deal and you do a bomb they're going to do a bomb and
their bomb is much larger okay so that and by the way can it work it already has worked the israel already
did it with egypt so egypt was a hundred times hamas egypt gathered all the arab armies and actually
physically invaded israel when israel could lose and they did it several times and lex at the time
all not just the right like the the war hawks but most people thought there's no way egypt will keep
that peace deal oh they're suckers we're giving them the sinai peninsula back and then they're just
going to keep bobbing and attacking us there hasn't been a single bomb from egypt since the peace deal
peace deals work war gets you more war peace deals get your peace and and if you should never this is
true of all of life don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good so if you're saying well i'm not
positive that a peace deal is going to be perfect and and 12 more rockets might be fired well brother
what's what do we have now right we have endless rockets now if israel is supposed to be a safe haven
for jews and i get it and i want it okay then become a safe haven the way that you're a safe haven is
stop the occupation it's not complicated and and the reason they're not let's be honest the reason the
right-wing government of israel is not stopping the occupation is because they want to take more
and more land and so they have throughout time taken way more of the west bank than they had originally
and now netanyahu is saying i want a corridor at the in the middle of gaza and i want a corridor at
the border of egypt now we're back to occupying gaza physically let alone through power and etc
so bb has to go definitely what's the role in you of us in making a peace deal like that happen
it's gonna sound outlandish but i can get you a ceasefire almost overnight if bb's gone and because
the israeli negotiators have said publicly plea not publicly got leaked and it was in the israeli press
you have to give us a little bit of wiggle room if you don't give us a little bit of wiggle room
obviously they're not going to do the deal and he's like i know right that's why he's not giving
them the wiggle room so don't ask for land in gaza get the hell out of gaza you ceasefire that's the
easy part so the hard part is the occupation ending the occupation but even that i can get it to you in
two months as long as israel actually wants a deal so go to an election get rid of netanyahu put in
uh you know um benny gantz is benny gantz an angel no he's the one that ordered all the bombings of gaza
to begin with right he's look i benny gantz has got massive war crimes on his record so don't worry he's
not a softy okay but he's not my favorite guy in the world to say the least but benny gantz can do a
peace deal if he wants to so look only one group of people can actually settle this well there's
actually two groups of people one is the israeli population you vote in someone who wants to do a
peace deal you'll get a peace deal okay number two is the american president so if i'm the american
president i'm saying in a hypothetical right or any american president that actually wants to get a
peace deal done you just say i'm going to cut the funding israel will do the deal immediately
they don't say they want to cut the funding because apac gives them 100 million dollars
it's not complicated not one percent complicated yeah so lex tell me this okay so if the u.s president
said uh i'm going to cut the funding do you think that it might have a giant problem for netanyahu might
it hurt his government might they have to go to an election would israeli politicians let alone the
population begin to really really worry that they're going to lose an enormous source of funding and
weapons yeah absolutely absolutely so why wouldn't we use our leverage it's crazy not to use our
leverage yeah uh and this is where we go back to the steel man of trump it feels like he's the only
one crazy enough to to use that leverage by crazy i mean yes kind of sense bold enough not giving a
shit about convention not giving a about pressures and money and influence and all that kind of stuff
yes but with the biggest asterisk in the history of the world which is 12 chance he does that and
that's great but a huge chance he does the opposite and he goes let's call it 80 again 80 oh yeah miriam
wanted me to give israel west bank to israel so you have it guys now you just occupy the whole thing
forever okay a giant war oh yeah i'm gonna prove how tough i am i'm gonna nuke iran oh no what are
you doing what are you doing like this trump is a massive risk he's an enormous amount of risk if
you were running a company and not a country would you hire trump as your ceo everyone watching just
screamed inside their heads no okay you would never they take that kind of risk with your company
you got an 80 chance the guy's gonna blow up the company you're no way no way and you know it too
you if you're especially if you're a businessman you know you're not going to hire that loose cannon
to run your company it's it's unacceptable risk but you're not wrong we talked about it earlier but as
part of that risk there's a sliver in there that he could accidentally do the right thing we talked a lot
about hope in this conversation zooming out what gives you hope about the future of this whole thing
of humanity not just the united states of us humans on earth so why am i center left and not center
right it gets that question so you look at the polling not just here in america but in almost any
country and it almost always breaks out to two-thirds of one-third right two-thirds of the people say
let's be empathetic let's share let's be let's do equality justice let's be fair right one-third goes no
me me me me me me me okay that's just the nature of humanity and so and usually the same third goes
no change and the other two-thirds go well some change right so because if you don't do any change
you're you're never going to get to the right answer for the wisdom of the crowd to work for free
markets to work for everything to work you have to keep changing because the times change and the
culture changes and the situation changes right so that's why there's amendments in the constitution
because you need to be able to change the document from time to time be careful with it right but you
need to allow for an avenue for change so now why does the one-third keep winning in so many different
places because they have more money and power and by the way if you're more selfish you're more likely
to get more money in power right and i wish that weren't the case but it is and it these are not
blanket rules they're on average so that third winds up winning in so many circumstances but the bottom
line is we are a species that requires consent so i i mean i'm a stone cold atheist so uh so i don't
think we're kind of like apes i think we are apes okay and so and all the scientists out there are
going well of course we are everyone else is going that's crazy okay so when you look at it as a
species different species react in different ways snakes have no empathy because it's not in their dna
they and that's why we have a sense of what a snake does right so for good news is for higher level
apes like us bonobos chimpanzees and humans we all roughly want consent so a chimpanzee for example
who has a violent uh you know reputation and they are violent and unfortunately we're pretty close to
them uh but what people don't know is a leader doesn't win through violence especially for bonobos
they lead they win by picking lice off of other chimpanzees by going and doing favors going to a hunt
getting food and giving it to someone else because what they're gathering is the consent of the
governed and that's how you become the alpha you don't do it through physical dominance you do through
consent so that's how we're hardwired that's in our dna that two-thirds in the long run will win
and that and we will have empathy we will have change and that's the hope that we're all looking for
hope has got the numbers it seems like yeah and in fact one more thing lex yes look at history hope
and change always win and so again conservatives don't catch feelings there is a need for conservatives
because you have to balance things out if you just had even though wonderful two-thirds that still
wouldn't be the ideal system you need you need a winston churchill if you're in the middle of world
war ii you need someone to say regulating you know six inspections of the elevators is too many right
so you need that balance and conservatives have a role and it's a really important role
but having said that they're assigned to losing throughout history because they're fighting on
losing ground a conservative says no change but the world is constantly changing so they're destined to
lose that's why the founding fathers won against the british monarchy that's why the civil rights
movement won they didn't win overnight it took them a hundred years to get equal rights let alone past
slavery right so we won on women's rights we won on gay rights we keep winning but every snapshot in
in time makes it feel like we're losing there's a bad guy in charge we aren't living under corporate
rule etc but in the long tide of history change always wins so the empathetic generally speaking
left wing but again don't worry about the the titles right people get obsessed with the labels the two
thirds that's empathetic that includes a lot of right wingers right you win at the end in history
every single time so we fight forward we we we're tough when we need to be we need that willpower to
win any fight right but we're civil and respectful to the other side because they are us so progressives
all the time we say look and i this is like the ending of my book which is we for conservatives you
have a lot of empathy for inside the wagons so conservatives are great to their family generally
speaking to their community to their church to anyone that's inside the wagons but they have
they set up electric fences and barbed wire around their wagons so if you're on the outside you're the
others and you're going to get electrified and it's constantly right and so i like to think the left wing
has wider wagons so we view the world as more us and not you but the good news of that is if we win
we're not going to do medicare for only the left right we're going to do medicare for all you're
all going to get universal health care we're going to do higher wages for all the right wing is not
going to be left out and if we're and lex i'm going to tell you a fun story it's it's about my family
and and i'm sure that parts of it are apocryphal from because it's from like 500 years ago
um but uh but it gives you a sense of the the old mark twain quote if it's really mark twain's of
change happens really gradually and then all of a sudden so my mom's last name in turkish
is yawasha it means slowly it's a weird name even in turkish and so one day we're walking
past the mosque in istanbul when i'm a kid and it says on the mosque yawasha we're like what is this
okay so it's a small little mosque we go inside and my dad starts asking their mom questions okay
so he says why is the why is the mosque name that and he said well you don't know and he said because
my dad said my mom my wife's name is last name is yawasha he's like oh my god and he's like your
ancestor was the admiral of the ottoman navy when they conquered constantinople okay so
grandpa from five six hundred years ago came up with the idea so you can't ever conquer
constantinople because there's a giant chain in the underneath the bosphorus all the ships get stuck
on the chain there's cannons on both sides half the ancient navies in the world are at the bottom of
the bosphorus right so hasn't been conquered in over a thousand years nobody thinks it can be conquered
grandpa comes up with the idea of why don't we build giant wooden planks over land and grease them
and pass our fleet over land onto the other side everybody goes because whenever anybody poses a new
idea no matter how logical it is they go oh it's impossible no way it's gonna work oh you're crazy
this is an unconquerable city what are you guys even doing every day mem at the congress comes up to
grandpa and says all right how's your plan to do this project going and grandpa says slowly
and he names him commander slowly and one night after the whole thing's done they pass the entire ottoman
fleet over the land wind up in the middle of the bosphorus and the holy roman empire concedes they
surrender because change happens really gradually and then all of a sudden good story well jen thank
you for fighting for that change for many years now for over two decades now and uh thank you for
talking today appreciate it lex thank you for having the conversation thanks for listening to this
conversation with jank huger to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description
and now let me leave you some words from hannah arend totalitarianism is never content to rule by
external means namely through the state and a machinery of violence thanks to its peculiar ideology and the
role assigned to it in the apparatus of coercion totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating
and terrorizing human beings from within thank you for listening i hope to see you next time