Tim Pool

Yeah, last October, I...

I am, yeah. Awkward. No, but I agree. I'm 39, and I just had my first child, and it's amazing, and I just got married. And I do think for the millennial generation, largely. Every TV show, we didn't have these wholesome family shows. Everything was like Marriage is Scary and Bad and Mocking Marriage.

Married with Children.

Oh, wow.

But I understand that there were those moments where they loved each other, but it very much was this slog of like, oh, no, I'm married. It's peg. Oh, geez. So what do you think happens when these millennials grow up and they get these red pill dating guys saying everything they grew up hearing is true, but not comedy serious? And then they end up believing it.

20 years?

I guess technically, yeah. That's like something Dick Cheney does. It's pure luck. I am lucky.

Just look at me. We're both from Chicago. We both like the same music. We have very similar views. We're both lapsed Catholics. And it's like, I got lucky. Oh, I'm a lapsed Catholic. We could have a throuple. Pass. No, I am lucky. And, you know, it's weird how I see all these stories and people talk about marriage. And I'm like, it sounds like you got married to someone you don't really know.

I went to Catholic school and... Oh, well. Bill Maher.

Because Allison and I know each other very well, and we get along very well, and we're both very rational, reasonable people.

I know.

You know, it was funny though. I was talking to my wife and I made a joke. You know, I said, bitches be crazy, yo, which is a line from that movie.

And then she goes, are you kidding? She's like, I've watched you guys out there at the skate park. You guys are nuts. And I look out the window and one of our, one of our team writers is like trying to jump off a building. And I was like, She's right. Men are crazy in different ways. Different ways, of course. We got a guy who, so we bought these things called grabbos, okay?

They are handles with vacuums that you can stick to a wall. And I bought them because they were funny.

Yeah, it's okay. So it's this oval and it's got a handle on it. You take it, you press a button, put it on the wall.

Well, so one of our skateboarder team riders, Mike Noggle, decided he was going to jump up on his board against the wall, grab them, and then flip himself upside down. And then he fell on his head, and he had to go to the hospital. And so I said, you know, my wife is right. Men are crazy in different ways.

She wishes... She wants to be in Montana. Wow. Yeah. Where in Montana? Anywhere. Um, actually probably Wyoming and I don't, she loves skiing and, uh, I would, I would love to go there as well. In fact, we looked there before coming to Western Maryland, but it's impractical to try and do an in-person news show from Wyoming or Montana.

Because we're an hour from DC. So we, yeah, you land at Dulles and you're an hour, hour and a half and you're in the studio ready to go. Yup. I looked at Maine too, you know, cause we were, we were like far away, middle of nowhere, safer, more secure. And, uh, we need the internet. So East coast is best. Um, half the country lives on the East coast. Right.

So if we could, we would have done Wyoming and then, you know, been skiing and farming and whatnot.

Montana, Wyoming.

I think eventually, I think, you know, for us, it's... I'm a suburban guy.

No, I agree.

You know what's fascinating is my neighborhood from Chicago turned red. Yeah. So my audience, the biggest demographic location-wise is Chicago. And it's a weird position to be in because to see Chicago's liberal. My neighborhood was by the Midway Airport and it's a lot of firefighters and cops. And it's largely like Polish immigrant and then like white working class and Hispanic.

And it turned, it flipped for Trump in Chicago. And I think- Some parts of the Bronx too. Oh, wow. I think my politics are like, if you were, you know, I'm like a Chicago liberal, but the way things have gone, especially with like the woke stuff, This is where I end up in this position, and so does my neighborhood.

I think it's interesting to see my neighborhood reflective of my politics and vice versa.

You had a great bit on that.

Yeah, I'm not like, I just don't really drink because it doesn't, you know. It's smart. It's the worst thing for you. I'm kind of a health terrified person.

I think it's... To hate the other side.

Right, I agree. I think that, you know, when he announced selective tariffs, I was like, all right, let's go. Then when he announced universal tariffs, I was like, I don't know if that makes sense. I don't, what is he doing?

And I'm, you know, but I'm not in, I think one of the problems that we've seen over the past several years with Trump is the immediate assumption that there's not, that he's a crazy person all the time. And so the only thing I can say is, well, you know, I vote for the guy I think this probably doesn't make sense to me, but I'll see what happens and we'll see if it makes sense.

Selective tariffs, I think, do make sense. But I do think that the way the Democratic Party has handled opposition has guaranteed the kind of Trumpian politics.

I try to, you know, every day I have a pretty intense schedule. I do a morning show, then I skate and I'm filming skating with my crew. And so I'm trying to make sure that every day I'm going to be at 100%.

What, what, what I saw in 20, so in 2020, I was not going to vote for Trump. I'll never vote for Trump. I don't like Trump. And I donated the max to Andrew Yang and Tulsi Gabbard. And my position, my whole thought process was, the Democrats are going crazy, and we need the moderate, sane Democrats to maintain control of this party and stop the insanity. Correct. And they lost. And they lost.

And so then Trump put out his statement around August saying— We're going to ban DEI in government contracting. We're going to do these things, blah, blah, blah. No new wars was big for me. I'm a very anti-interventionist for a lot of reasons. And so I said, I guess I'm voting for Trump.

Instantly, it was like the liberals, even YouTube, they all said, we're going to move your name over to this list. I kid you not. There's representatives at YouTube. They told me straight up that the liberal rep was no longer representing me and they were switching me to a conservative rep. It was the weirdest thing. Yeah.

And I'm like, it's not that I like who Trump is or that I'm like thinking that conservatives have a good policy. I'm pro-choice. The issue is that the, the, the, the, you can look at it right now. There's no, there's no charismatic leaders. There's no front runners. There's no policy position. It seems like the only thing they ever had is they have is the right is bad. Trump is bad.

Oh, all right.

And so I'm asking like, what are, what are our plans?

Are you referring to the guy who did steroids or the guy who's doing the weird medical treatments to- The guy who wants to live forever. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joe Biden ignored the court rulings twice on forgiving student loans and then tried to decree the Equal Rights Amendment.

But I'm not saying that to defend Trump. I'm just saying like...

But you know about Liver King too, right?

Just super ripped guy. Liver King. And his name is also, I think his name is Brian Johnson as well.

I think that's what his thing was. I didn't really follow him.

No. Oh. Well, but I think his whole shtick was he eats like raw meat and claimed that would make you ripped and manly, but he was doing steroids, so. Well, oh, he was. Yeah, I mean, that's what, I don't know, man.

There's a really good, I guess, I don't know if you'd call it a philosophical point that I've noticed that I think you're experiencing right now is I'm 39. So you lived through a lot of these administrations and these political cycles. Yeah. And you have experiences that I don't even know they exist.

Sure. My point is my experience in politics has been the Democrats have challenged more than Republicans. To be fair, Trump— Have challenged the court? Challenged the elections more than the Republicans have in extreme ways.

But perhaps because you're older than me and you've seen more than I have.

Okay, but— I'm saying that in 2016, I didn't vote for either Trump or Hillary, and then I got three years of Trump as working for the Russians.

Jonathan Chae went on MSNBC and said he may have been a Soviet asset since the 80s. And so for me, I'm like, I'm out. This is crazy. And so understand, and I'm not saying you're wrong about history. I'm saying that experiencing a political cycle over years is different from reading the condensed history books, which of course I do.

So to live through four years of a president, their term every single moment, the history books gloss over most of those experiences that we don't have as young people. So I have people on my show who are 25. And one of the people who works for us says, nothing ever happens. She's 24. And this is like a Gen Z thing. Nothing ever happens. And I said, are you kidding?

The past 10 years have been nothing but happenings. Here's the issue. When she was 14, she wasn't paying attention to politics. When she was around 20 years old and started, this was the natural state of politics in her experience. So this is basic. This is normal. And for me, it's crazy. And I think for you, it's crazy. But they grew up in this, and they've normalized it.

So my view is this, not to say that you're wrong, obviously. My point is when I watched the Democrats accuse Trump and Manafort and Carter Page and all of these things, especially when they fabricated evidence against Carter Page – I'm just like, wow, I can't believe the Democrats are going to this length to deny an election.

And do you know how they found out about that?

Ukrainian government officials shared it with the Democratic Party. Politico reported that. So... You have this Ukrainian interference in our election as reported by Politico. And I look at that and I go, wow, the Ukrainian government sent incriminating evidence to the Democrats? Crazy story.

Indeed. And the issue is, why wasn't that a scandal, that the Ukrainians were interfering in the election?

Yeah, I forgot the name of the woman. This is on Politico. You can just read their story. It was, I can't remember the guy's name who reported it.

You know, they're accusing me of working for the Russians now, and this is, or they tried. And so here's the story. I get contacted by a conservative personality. I've got three shows that I host, several that I have staff that host. One of them is called The Culture War. Right. We produced it for two years, Friday mornings, similar to this, sometimes debates.

There's so much weird stuff now. Like, I've had guys talking about, like, peptide things they take and HGH. And I'm just like, I don't know, man. I'll get old. That's what I'll do.

And I was reached out by like three different companies who said, we want to license something you're doing. And I said, we do our own internal ad sales. We don't need to license. Some offers were made. Some of them were really good. And I said, I'm not really interested because the ad sales I can generate exceed your licensing.

So I get reached out by this company in Tennessee from a well-known, prominent, conservative personality who works for one of the big companies and said, we've secured an investor. We want to license the show. We negotiated terms. Lawyer negotiated terms, market rate. Non-exclusive license for distribution. They could sell the ads on the show.

I get the money, the licensing fee, which basically, you know, I can choose to grow the show for two years or just license it now and take the money.

Maybe. Well, this didn't work out too well for me because what happened was at the end of last year, the DOJ indicted some random... I say random because they're not personalities from Russians who are apparently in some Eastern European country claiming that they were funneling money illicitly into this conservative company in Nashville to then promote Russian propaganda or something.

The narrative now is... Tim Pool was prosecuted for working for the Russians.

The real story is the DOJ launched an indictment and dropped it almost immediately with no evidence, accusing a conservative personality of illicitly taking money from the Russians without evidence, destroyed the company, destroyed their lives, and then impugned the honor of anybody who had done any license agreements with a Nashville-based company.

It's a crazy story.

Yeah, oh yeah.

Yeah, last October. I basically was just fed up.

With politics.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And I said, you know, before I started doing my nightly show, I work 16 hours a day plus.

Maybe. Here's the problem. And I know that you can relate to this. I've got employees. I've got staff.

But if I stop, then I got to fire everybody.

In some form, yeah.

I think people who claim otherwise are lying. Not always. But come on, you didn't try your hardest and grind your fingers to the bone to get here thinking you weren't going to do it, you know? No, exactly. You did it every day.

Yeah.

And it happens no matter what.

I mean, just me sitting here right now, you know, with you, you know, you have like, I would say that real time from my circle, I can't, I don't know, but I feel like it's the most consequential political show.

One of the biggest videos we have, I think, is us talking about what you said.

Right.

Yeah. I say similarly. But my point is there are people that I bring on my show who are in their 20s and I'm like, man, I've been watching you for years. And I'm like, one day you will be sitting where I am and I'll be retired and that's the way life goes.

You know what I'm really interested in? is real clear politics put out this aggregate polling by decade, age. I don't want to say demographic because it was like 18 to 29. Sure. And it was like 30 to 39.

And only one bracket was anti-Trump, and it was 70 plus. Yeah, I saw that. And then I think Gen X was a tie. And then there's, you know, I really want to talk to you about this too. They're saying that Gen Z is becoming more Christian.

I'm wondering what's going to happen in 10 years. The boomers are going to be moving on, passing on. I'm not trying to be crass, but it's true. Or retiring. You can say dead. They'll be dead.

And what happens to politics in this country? Not me, haters. Bill's going to live forever. Fucking haters and clickbaiters. The pot and the boo is going to make you young.

Yep, yep. And then Joe Rogan saved my life. How?

No, well, technically. So I had called a hospital because my temperature was low and I was shaking really bad. And I was like really bad pain. I wouldn't say the worst pain I've ever had.

I was fatter.

They were banning people off social media, shutting down anybody who brought it up. It was a weird time. And it still is weird. And there's... Yeah, I don't know.

Yeah, maybe. Well, so I'm not. I mean, it's not just about that there's people who, you know, they have livelihoods here. They've moved to the area. They have a Maryland, D.C. area. But it's, you know, the conversation I've had with Allison is... I could stop doing The Nightly Show, which currently is, it's typically the second biggest live stream news. It's the biggest live stream news podcast.

But Steven Crowder is bigger than us, but he's comedy news. If we want to lump it all together, we're number two. And it feels... We both feel guilty about saying, stop doing this show with a massive audience so that we can go and have... Like, we're rich. We can go do whatever we want. We can just go skiing whenever we want. We can fly to South America and go skiing any time of the year.

We feel guilty about that. We both kind of agree on that.

I don't know. I think it's like... We were afforded this... luxury and comfort.

I think that's going away. You know, like looking at everything you have and you're talking about the Mets and all this stuff, I think because of the—there's two phenomena that I think are going to break this. One is the decentralization of media through the Internet, but also the lack of new— Break what? Everybody wants to know what you think about things. Good. Thank you.

I don't—but it is true. You know, I go to, like, some of these media reporting websites and entertainment websites, and it's not just that Trump did something. It's how you thought about it. Oh, good. It's you, Ann Coulter, and Joe Rogan almost always. Interesting. Yeah. I don't know that we have that in 10 or 20 years. So I'll break it down entertainment-wise.

Not the way you guys are. So Timcast IRL, we do maybe like 700,000 to 800,000 viewers per night. which is nothing compared to where Anderson Cooper was 20 years ago. It's decentralizing, it's changing. And so we have a big audience. People talk like, wow, you've got this really big show. And I'm like, yes, but there's 50 other shows now that are comparable.

So I'll give you an example. I was at a bar and I went to the jukebox and I put in Bohemian Rhapsody. And what happened? Everyone in the bar started singing. Lit 100%. Everybody knows that one. The next song that came on, I didn't even know what it was. It was hip-hop R&B. Everybody broke apart.

And so back when we had very few radio stations and very few television channels, they had to be very selective about what they promoted, but they promoted to, like you said, like 40 million people. Who knows? So you had that time period. Now for us... I think that combined with the lack of new people. So Gen Alpha is about 40 million. And they're expecting that if we can't.

This is zero to, I think, 13 years old.

2012.

I think Gen Z ended. Gen Z just began. Gen Z is like 97 to 2012, I think. Yeah, Gen Alpha is 2013 to 2025.

So Gen Alpha is 40 million. Right. It's expected to be between 42 and 48.

Yeah, 81 to 96. It depends on which chart you use. Right. But there were 80 million millennials, and there were... Actually, no, I'm sorry.

Yeah, 72 million millennials right now, 69 million Gen Z, 40 million Gen Alpha. So talking about share, if in 20 years we're looking at Gen Alpha and Gen Z, the dominant generations, there's substantially, substantially less of them to buy products, to buy tickets, to know who you are. And there's an increasing competition from decentralization of media.

So I don't know how we end up with another Ann Coulter, Bill Maher, Joe Rogan personality. You know, like the Bohemian Rhapsody song. If I go to anybody in my town where I grew up with, they all watched your show. It's liberal Chicago, and everybody would put on real time. And Jon Stewart and things like that.

If I asked anybody who was on a daily show right now, they'd say, I don't know, Jon Stewart? I'd be like, one night a week, I think. And who are the other people? No idea. I think Jordan Klepper is one of them. Don't know the rest. To be fair, they have more than one host now. But I think everybody is choosing media that represents them, like you brought up earlier.

and it's easier than ever to get into, then there's going to be less people. You're talking about owning a piece of the Mets, and I'm like, I might have a big show, but I don't think I'll ever be able to afford owning a piece of the Mets or anything like that.

I think it's also bad for your heart, though, isn't it?

Are you allowed to say what was the value that they had put on the Mets? Not what you...

I don't know. I mean, I was sick, but... With the age thing, too. So, I'm a skateboarder. I've been skateboarding my whole life.

Yeah, it's Tony Hawk's fault. He landed at 900, and then every millennial had to get a skateboard. Yeah. Now there's no skateboarders anymore.

No kids. Why? Skateboarding. There's not enough young... There's not enough... So, there's 40 million Gen Alpha. To be fair, like... It really is that skateboarders are, let's say this, I'm saying this in a punk rock kind of way, degenerates. And so when they found themselves in the late 2000s being millionaires, what did they do? Nothing. They bought big houses, they partied, and...

Now more than half of skateboarders are over the age of 30.

But you need an industry. So like Hollywood, music and entertainment had an industry. Sure, the rock stars were nuts. The problem with skateboarding is the rock stars ran the business. So the core industries that made skateboarding big were also running the business and...

Yeah.

You know what I think? So this is where we get into the tariff stuff.

There is.

Yeah, you just don't get paid for it anymore. I think the top earner in skateboarding off of the sport alone was like 400,000 for the year. And then it immediately curls down to the top 10, made about 100.

Well, maybe. The older skateboarders think that skateboarding comes and goes in waves and there's nothing you can do about it, but I don't believe that's true. It's an Olympic sport. You've got, you're going to have China, well, actually let me put it this way. I believe tariffs, I'm sorry, not tariffs, but free trade is one of the principal culprits for the decline in skateboarding.

And the proof of that is that in Japan and China, skateboarding has never been bigger. So one of the biggest skateboard brands, probably the biggest, the premier, it's called the Barracks, shut down in LA and it shocked everybody. And they're reopening in Japan. Yeah.

Where we offshored all of our jobs in manufacturing and the industry to China, now Southeast Asia has a massive booming skate culture. They even have a reality TV show, which is, it's like Ninja Warrior, but for skateboards. In the United States, you got a bunch of 35-year-old men.

Never.

You know, I do this talk show, I do this news show 20 years ago. Oh, I know. Well, it's your fault. 20 years ago, every Friday, me and my friends are hanging out at, shout out to Roger and my boy Brandon who works with me now. Where is this? Chicago. Chicago. And they were stoned off their asses.

passing the joint, blowing pot smoke into an iguana's face while we watched Real Time with Bill Maher. And I was, I don't know, 18 or 19 years old, and that's what we did every Friday.

You know, but I hear from you, it sounds like a mix a little bit of the understanding growing up and being responsible, but also the, you know, come on, do your thing. I guess my question is like, do you have a preference for what the future of this country and world should be?

Because I feel like you're... With politics... you're very in it. And there's a reason you, I, or anybody else wants to be involved in the goings on of the world is because we want things to be done better or right.

Yeah. You know, so I wonder when I say like things about being guilty, it's like, if I have this platform that is influential and I can, you know, like you said, people will listen to me and I can say, Hey, like, I think this is a good way to do things and that can make the world that way. That's why I feel guilty of walking away from that opportunity. You know what I mean?

Watching your show. I love it that they were blowing the pot smoke. And the iguana loved it. Who did? The iguana. It loved getting stoned. Oh, the real iguana. Literally, there was an iguana. And then one day, I guess, the iguana got out and started eating their pot. So it was like, this is not a good thing, but also kind of funny.

You're, you're, you're obviously an atheist.

Famously religious list. I saw it when you put it out.

I, I, I know I, I, I was, I was lapsed Catholic briefly atheist. Now I can, now I, I'm not Christian. I don't like the word deist, but I, The future, we're seeing this massive push towards Christianity and like young people. Yes.

Well, one thing I think is true is that conservatives had more kids in the 2000s. I know a lot of people want to claim these ideological victories where they say like we've read people. And I've pointed this out for years. No, just in like 2003, there were a couple of studies that came out saying that liberals were having less kids than conservatives.

Well, 20 years later, what do you expect to see? There's going to be more conservative people than liberal people just because the parents had kids.

I do think also that one of the more interesting trends, however, is that among Gen Z, irrespective of that, there's been a rightward ideological shift among men. And I think this has to do with contemporary politics, movies, games, culture, etc.

It was like a race to the bottom.

It was a race to the bottom of all these different cultural elements trying to one-up what was wrong with masculinity.

Oh yeah.

People, you know, uh, Man, there's one prominent cop. I think this is Donut Operator. I could be wrong, so forgive me if I'm getting the guy wrong. But he was a cop. No, I could be getting the guy wrong. But the thing that these cops deal with that people don't understand is they see these negative stories in the press all the time.

And yeah, when there's a bad cop doing a bad thing, let's lock him up. Let's put him in jail. But my dad was a firefighter. And he told me when I was younger, he's like, never be a cop because the things these guys deal with, you know, one day, like, you're getting a phone call about a domestic violence incident. You show up and some guy's screaming in your face, spitting on you, swinging at you.

And then you go and see a mother holding her dead son who got hit by a car in one day. And then these people are just, they deal with this stuff all the time. And then what happens is they go to a store where there's some minor altercation and they're not having it. And these people are like, these cops are assholes, man. And it's like...

That man just watched a child die and the mother scream, and now you're bothering him over some, like, petty BS at a supermarket.

You know, so it is pretty brutal. But then I do think, you know, I say this somewhat facetiously, ban the internet. Get rid of social media because it puts people in these bubbles where they only see the bad thing. And I think it's making people go crazy. So we're talking about the younger generation, right? Here's one really interesting phenomenon in the political polarization.

In the end of the 2000s on Facebook, the top content was police brutality. And there was one website that was one of the top global websites that only made articles about police brutality. Why? hit all the other algorithmic points, shot content, justice, anger. And so imagine you're 10 years old in 2010, and you go on a Facebook, maybe you're not supposed to, but you do. What do you find?

Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, mike.com, and they're blasting you with nothing but black man killed, black man killed, unarmed black man killed. The reason they were doing this was... So Facebook found that after around 300 friends or likes, the chronological feed becomes incomprehensible. And they wanted to make sure that people stayed on the page longer. So they created the algorithm.

That's why if you post, I'm getting married or having a baby, you will appear on the top of everyone's feeds. It's true. Yeah, it works. At the time, they didn't do this intentionally, but they created an algorithm that if it got shared more, it got promoted more.

And so what happened was first that these websites like Huffington Post found that an article that said something like racist thing happens would get more shares. So they made more of it. Eventually, a great example is Mike.com, M-I-C. It started as a Ron Paul libertarian freedom website. It was trending on the internet, doesn't it?

And then it turned into social justice, intersectional feminism, and police brutality because that was generating most of the shares on Facebook. So these younger kids who are 10 or whatever are inundated with nothing but this. What happens? There's this famous video where a guy goes to Venice Beach and he asks people, how many unarmed black men do you think were killed by police last year?

And they say 1,000, 10,000. It was nine. I know. And it's because the media, or I should say social media, was propping up select stories over and over and over again. And where it gets crazy is even the same story every week.

I completely agree.

Have you followed any of the Chicago stuff with Mayor, what's his name?

You want to know what's really fascinating about that?

Oh, he's terrible. But you know how he won? White guilt. Yes. Yes.

Well, wait, wait. It's good. So I actually took the electoral map of vote breakdown by neighborhood, overlaid it with the racial breakdown per neighborhood, and what did we find? Every black neighborhood, their top three candidates were black. Even people who weren't frontrunners or polling anywhere near didn't matter. The black neighborhoods did not vote for any white guy or Latinos.

The Latino neighborhood, guess what? Latino guys. The white neighborhoods, white guys. Except for one, the college liberal area of Loyola. Sure. They voted for Johnson.

And so even though Johnson wasn't- And that tipped the election? That tipped it. And so people thought there was this white dude that all of the suburbanites were going to vote for. Not the suburbanites, but it's Chicago, so it's not suburban. But like the outskirts and the Northwest. And he did really well.

But when Loyola college liberals was the one area where it was predominantly white that voted for the black candidate, put it over the edge, and this is what you get.

Did you mix your tequila?

Sip a little bit and then wash it. Okay.

This is a part of what I call wokeness. Everybody's always trying to define it some way.

But I define it specifically as cult-like adherence to the liberal orthodoxy. And the reason why I say that is because being in media and cultural spaces for the past 15 years watching all of this, the conservatives like to say it's DEI, it's race, but that doesn't explain support for certain institutions, support for war in Ukraine, doesn't explain the Me Too movement.

These are all different things. It doesn't explain support for Islam particularly, which is the second biggest religion in the world. So it's not about critical theory or anything like that. It's about looking like you're virtuous,

So these liberals who live the way you're describing it want to make sure that as they're seen outwardly to other liberals, they are perfectly in line with what is virtuous and right. We call the virtue signaling. But it can manifest into literally anything. Like, again, supporting the second largest religion in the world. while claiming that they were oppressed, but massive.

I agree, yeah.

Are you fucking kidding me? And the narrative is, when I talk to some of these academics, like the anti-woke people, they're like, well, it's because they say that, you know, Gaza is oppressed. And I'm like... Sure, but they're siding with the second biggest religion in the world, which is authoritarian, fundamentalist. And I don't care if you practice whatever religion you want to practice.

It's fine. But it's strange to me to claim that Islam is oppressed in any meaningful way.

It's like a handmaid's tale, right?

Yeah, you know, and I'm not Christian, but I have a lot of friends who are, and I don't care.

I don't think God exists, but I don't believe in any scriptures or anything like that. I think man is fallible, and to write down books and then claim it's the word of God is silly.

Well, I didn't do that. At fifth grade, I left. And so what happened for me in Catholic school was they taught me nothing. They showed me a video of Adam riding a brontosaurus. I'm not joking.

Exactly. So they told us that the dinosaurs were too big to fit on the ark and the unicorns were too rambunctious. Not kidding, showed unicorns were dancing and ran away from the ark. And I'm like, so I remember.

One formative moment was when I asked my fifth grade teacher.

Right. So the Big Bang. We were learning it, fifth grade science.

Catholic school. And I asked my teacher, if the universe was in a single point and then expanded outward, is it possible that, I raised my hand and asked this, is it possible that at some point it stops and then comes back in? And she went, I don't know, moving on. And I was furious.

It's called the Big Crunch Theory. And it was dismissed 100 years ago. So what pissed me off was, reflecting upon it, I genuinely wanted to know what they were trying to teach. And they couldn't teach me anything. So what did I do? I went home and went on the internet and read to myself. And so immediately I'm like, fake. They have no idea what they're talking about. Their religion is BS.

I'm done. And so it wasn't like I was five, I was in fifth grade, I was nine years old. But this is when I was like, when I was like probably around 12 or 13 is when I was like, this is stupid. What are they even talking about? And like shellfish you can't eat, but they're eating it. These people don't follow this stuff.

But that's scripture. That's not God. And so what happened was I read about negative entropy and And it discusses the... I'm trying to simplify as much as I can. Everything tends towards entropy.

To a certain degree, but at some point it will become uniformity in the heat death of the universe.

An egg breaking?

So that is negative entropy, which can only exist— Yeah, so what is negative entropy? Exactly what you described.

Yeah, but that can only exist within a greater system of entropy. Yeah. And so I'm reading this, and I started reading about how matter coalesces. Hydrogen becomes helium. It diffuses the greater elements and things like that. The elements become compounds, becomes chemical compounds, becomes single cellular life, becomes multicellular organisms. I kind of view it like, on top of that, Fire.

For sure, for sure. There's a hyperpolarization happening among the younger generation that's substantially more pronounced than the older generation. And the younger generation is substantially more considering violence than the older generation did. So when you look at the polls, it's really interesting how the polarization expands. I can see that.

We know it exists. We can make it. And what is fire? It's the releasing of energy from, you know, carbon and oxygen slammed together and the energy gets released. And the energy was stored from solar energy, which we view as some type of fire. It's fusion, which we're watching in the sky, but it works similarly, right?

And so then my thought was consciousness exists, at least I can say for myself because I experience it. But if consciousness is a component that exists within the universe, mathematically, like in the code of the universe, same as fire, is there probability of a higher form of consciousness? Yes, completely.

Just like fire can be a forced fire, can be a star, or even a gigantic supermassive black hole. Consciousness exists in the universe as a component of the universe. Thus, the universe experiences consciousness. So I wonder if God then is not scripture-based, but that there is something beyond our singular consciousness that You get where I'm trying to go with it? I don't know.

I'm from Chicago. What can I say?

But I'm not trying to say that there's like a being watching over us and dictating something.

It couldn't, I mean... It's more like... The logic that is the universe is the Einsteinian God, they call it. Viewing, you know, our human experience and our emotions are unique to us.

I think it's wrong.

No.

The show was terrible. If you take the laugh track, it didn't work. But let me elaborate. Science is wrong all the time. Yeah. And so I think the Big Bang is what we know so far.

But there's already theories about the Big Bang may have been what's called a white hole. Are you familiar with that? No. The other side of a black hole. And so string theory, unified M theory, I don't really follow this stuff as much as I was 20 years ago. But one idea is that the universe is a 12-dimensional structure.

And basically what happened with our universe is someone took a piece of rubber, pinched it, and then blew. It's expanding as matter is pouring into it, but that's just one balloon of the universe being blown up in a much larger universe of multiple dimensions. I really don't know.

So I would say the bulk of our viewers are probably in their 30s. So we have 18-year-olds too, but they're a smaller percentage, but basically 25 to 54 is who watches us.

Because one is socially acceptable.

I really do appreciate you having me.

I hope you had a good time. I know everyone's going to, they're going to yell at me saying, why weren't you yelling at Bill Maher?

I appreciate you having me. Yeah. My friends are super excited that we're here.

I actually lived in Westwood for a week. Westwood.

Got a lot of people in their 30s. And what ends up happening is, and this is true for people on the left or right, doesn't matter who you are, someone's going to take something you said, it's going to be pulled out of context. Of course. And then it makes people go nuts. So... You know, there's so many of these things that are absolutely wild for me. I don't have the worst of it.

There's other people in media that have it substantially worse than I do. Their Wikipedia pages are just rife with weird fake nonsense that's made up.

Absolutely. It goes both ways too. My fans think they know me based on seeing my face for, you know, well, to be honest, I do like five hours of recording a day, but those that watch, they watch several hours a day and they think this shows them everything about me.

And, um, To be honest, the people who watch me are much better informed as to who I am than the people who don't. But they still have this probably rose-colored glasses view of who I am and what I represent and stuff. So better.

Yeah, they're fans.

I agree, but, you know, it is a weird position for me to be in. I was talking to some friends before the show and I was saying, like, I think that if you and I discussed policy solutions for the country, I'd probably be to the left of you.

Probably most ways. You like Bernie.

You know?

But the issue is, today I feel like what defines someone politically is not, it's not the policies they want, but it's what they believe to be true. Correct.

I'm a big fan. He's amazing. Yeah. And they call him far right now.

What makes someone liberal conservative is what they think is true.

He's right. Yeah, no. And it's just, it's just, I, uh, I worked for, uh, ABC started a, uh, ABC new division did a joint venture in 2014 called fusion. And I was at vice and I moved over there. And then they told me that the new trend was going to be called mission driven storytelling, uh, And I said, what does that mean? And they said, there's no such thing as objectivity. Everyone is subjective.

So we're going to tell the stories that our audience wants to hear. I had a meeting with the president and he was talking to me about this. And I said, does that mean if there is a news story that is true and important, we would choose not to report it because it might upset our audience? And he said, yeah, I think that's fair. The company went bankrupt. They fired everybody.

But this wasn't unique to them. They were chasing the trend. One of their marketing guys told me explicitly, we want to maximize shares because we have to maximize views. We have to maximize views because we've already sold a set amount to the advertisers. One company bought 500,000 views from us. We don't complete that contract until those views are delivered. How do we deliver them?

Angering moms. Middle-aged women who are angry share more than anyone else. So we're going to write stories that do that. That's actually what he told me. So it was social justice, it was racism.