Mike Baker is a former CIA covert operations officer and current CEO of Portman Square Group, a global intelligence and security firm. He’s also the host of the "President’s Daily Brief" podcast: a twice daily news report on critical events happening around the globe available on all podcast platforms. www.portmansquaregroup.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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We're up. All right, we're up, Mr. Baker. How are you, sir?
Really, that's it. We're just jumping right in.
Oh, my God, I just sat down. Well, there's so many things to talk about. Is there? Anything happen? A few things happened until I saw you. One guy got shot. Some guy.
And the guy who shot him, just his body vanished. Yeah. No police. Now, did he get shot?
Because I've seen a lot of people talk about this, like, no, he didn't get shot.
That's hilarious.
Oh, my God.
Do you think that he cut his ear like a pro wrestler?
Yeah.
Like, it's all fake.
The guy behind him got murdered.
That wasn't real? I saw it. Again, you would think that would be a clue, but I've seen things where they say, no, he didn't have any blood on him, and then he ducked down behind the podium just long enough. I'm thinking, are you fucking psycho?
They are psycho.
But then, to be fair, then... Well, no, that can't be fair. How can you be fair about that? There's no fair. There's no fair.
We heard gunshots. We saw a guy get shot who was shooting at him. The guy behind him got murdered. Yeah. A couple other people got injured. Life-changing injuries. Yes. Yeah, serious injuries. Yeah, serious injuries. I mean, it 100% happened. To say it didn't happen is insane. And then you had Joy Reid on TV saying, well, Biden got over COVID, which is basically the same thing. Yeah.
People are losing their fucking minds. And they're afraid. Everyone's afraid to be objective. Because if you're objective, somehow or another, you're helping the other side.
Oh, no. If you even try to walk a line that's somewhere near the middle of anything nowadays. That's me. Yeah, yeah, you'll get, well, there you go then. You get your ass kicked.
But I was telling Emily, I was telling my wife the other day that I consider that a really good thing because like, oh my God, this is like two minutes into it and I'm already mentioning the podcast, The President's Daily Brief. Look, I'm getting much better at this. Good plug. So on The President's Daily Brief, we try to just walk kind of down the middle. We just tell you the news.
Here's the top things that are happening. what I find is I get angry messages from both sides because I'm not staking out a position. I'm just saying, here's what's happening. And for the most part, we try to avoid context or atmosphere for the most part, but you're just pissing everybody off.
People want to get mad, first of all, that's the thing. Like Andrew Huberman was talking about that today, that the things that when they study, like what excites people, what people gravitate towards, it's 100% more potent to get angry about things.
Yeah, I think you're right. There must be some sort of chemical release in being outraged, right, that makes people feel good?
I think it's in our wiring, in our DNA, because we always had to look out for threats. So you find things that you perceive are threats or things that are going to be a problem, and you get angry about them, and you do it on social media instead of in the jungle.
Yeah, I think... With the Trump thing, though, I was surprised at how, because it was about a day and a half, maybe, maybe it was 36 hours, of, oh, fuck, how could this happen? Look what we created, this environment. We have to be more civil with each other. And that was a big push from the Democrats, right? You remember Biden and Harris talking about... We've got to be more civil.
We've got to dial it back and turn down the temperature. And that lasted, for that side, that lasted almost no time at all. Less than two days. Yeah.
And they were back calling him a piece of shit and a liar.
Yeah, and a threat to democracy, and he's got to be stopped. Unbelievable. And, you know, now to be fair, neither side really stuck to the idea. I would argue, if Trump...
If Trump had just said, you know what, from a strategic point of view, maybe it's not me, maybe it's not what I want to do, but from a strategic point of view, if after that attempt had happened and he had just walked that civil line and said, you know, I've had a reflective moment, and if he had kept the high road, think about the disparity there.
Because the Democrats, they would have, first of all, they would have gone crazy because they wouldn't have known what to do. But they also wouldn't have been able to help themselves. So they would have turned into, you know, they would have thrown the hand grenades again as usual. And then you would have had Trump over here being the reasonable one and being the reflective and civil one.
That would have been a good strategy.
Yeah, but it didn't happen.
No, it's not in his nature.
No, no.
That's the scorpion and the frog. I forgot about that story. That's right. The scorpion eats it right across the pond.
Yeah, exactly. It's the same thing. I mean, that guy loves to talk shit. He's calling Tim Walz Tampon Tim now. Yeah. He's so good at it. It's such a good nickname. He's so good at it. He's so good at that shit. Oh, my God.
Look at what we're getting. We're getting Harris and we're getting Walsh. Unbelievable.
What do you think about Walsh's descriptions of his military career? Because there's there's some issues there that people have. I don't know if he flat out ever said that he served in Afghanistan, but he certainly didn't dissuade people from saying that he was when they were saying he didn't correct them.
Right. There was things he did and he didn't. And you can look at interviews and and there's no pushback. There's no like, excuse me, you know, I didn't go to Iraq. Exactly. And I retired, you know, as my unit was deploying. And so... Well, you retired a couple months before. A couple months before, yes. What is the whole story behind it? They know that they're going, right?
It's not like they suddenly get a paper, you know, on one day. There's a buildup to that, and they're aware of it. And so, you know, even his personnel were saying, look, we all knew we were going. He knew he was going. No, okay, fine. He made the decision, right? But I think...
With his, what do you want to call it, padding of his resume for political purposes, obviously, when he was running for Congress.
There's more than one thing, too, right? He said he was a head coach. Yeah, he was a head coach. He was not a head coach. He was an assistant coach, which is an honorable thing. There's nothing wrong with being an assistant coach. Yeah. Absolutely. And he also inflated his actual rank, right? He was slated to achieve a certain rank. Right. And how did it go?
Like, he had to commit to the fact that he wasn't going to retire in order to achieve his rank? Is that what it was?
He didn't finish, essentially, the program, the coursework, you know, for a command sergeant major.
Can you explain how that works?
Well, I mean, he had the rank, right? He was awarded—I think he had gone to— Where did he go? I think he went to Italy on an assignment. Look, so he's in the National Guard, right? So first of all, there was sort of this, I've served for 24 years. He's not really saying that. His supporters and the people on the Democrat side say, well, he served for 24 years. Yes, he did. Okay.
But it's the National Guard. And that doesn't mean, I'm not disrespecting at all anyone who serves in the National Guard. It's a very honorable thing to do. I'm just saying they're kind of conflating, just like he did with his rank or these other things, the idea that somehow he was Over there for 24 years. Full-time, 24 years in the military.
And he was working as a school teacher, as you pointed out. He was working as a coach. Who knows? He could be a great guy. I'm just saying that there were statistics that said upwards of 70-plus percent of people have padded their CVs. So what he's done isn't unusual, but – It's very much, you know, highlighted now.
It's 70 percent.
Yeah. Yeah. It's a it's a look. I've got a I've got a service line in the company, Portman Square Group. I am a marketing machine. Thank you. And but we have a due diligence group that does nothing but right. Background investigations, due diligence. And so they spend a lot of time looking at people's CVs or resumes. And. It's a shocking number of people. And sometimes it's not really nefarious.
It's just, okay, maybe I misspoke or maybe I did put something in and I over-egged the pudding a little bit. But then like 10 or 15 years down the road, you've kind of ridden on that for all that time. And we've seen that happen where people suddenly get called out, right? Yes. You know, I don't read too much into the fact that he padded his resume.
I think it is just very disrespectful that he didn't push back on the idea that he was overseas deployed in combat or that he claimed that he retired in a position. I mean, I think they gave him a master sergeant title or rank when he retired, which is just one step below. Which is still honorable. Very honorable.
And it's nothing to be shameful of. Saying that, just stating the actual rank... It doesn't change anybody's opinion of him at all. So it's a lie that doesn't really elevate you.
It doesn't, and when you get called out on it, it just kind of makes you look like a dipshit, right? And that's something that he's got to deal with now.
But he did once say, he was talking about assault rifles, air quotes, assault rifles for the gun nuts out there. I get it. I'm on your side. But he said... But when he was talking... I mean, you can kind of assault somebody with a BB gun, right? Yeah.
But when he was talking about them, he said, weapons of war that I carried... I don't know the exact quote, but he was essentially alluding to the fact that... Yeah.
And again, was it was is it I don't understand it. Is it necessary? No. Did he feel that it helped in his early days running for political office? Obviously. Right.
Well, he's also seen Joe Biden get away with it. Right. Joe Biden has gotten away with lying about his record, lying about his accomplishments from the beginning back when he was running for Senate. Right. I mean, I'm sure you've seen that old video where he confronts the guy and tells him he's got a higher IQ than him and how he graduated at the top of his class.
All lies. Yeah. No, absolutely. And you're right. He's gotten away with it. Just like, you know, apparently the plagiarism and other issues and certainly now the mental decline. He's still president, I guess. I guess. He's kind of not.
He's kind of quit.
Who is in charge? That's the question I think a lot of people are wondering. Well, Kamala's on tour, so she can't be doing, she's out there doing concerts. Oh, she's going to do an interview tomorrow night. With Tim, though. With Tim. With Tim, because she's a strong woman, so she wants a strong man by her side.
Yeah, she does not want to be alone out there. Which is wild. You have to be alone. Who the fuck has ever done an interview, the only interview since they have been nominated by their party, right? Since they've been chosen. Who has ever not done an interview for this long?
Yeah, and then they... I get why, because they get away with it. Look, they've got a very compliant and incurious media for the most part, right? And they're just letting it go. Compliant.
It's more than compliant. I know. I'm trying to be nice.
Yeah, you're trying to be nice. Yeah, I'm trying to be nice. Complicit is a better word. Yeah. And so, and it's on CNN, and it's taped. It's not even live. Right. And it's the two of them. And- There is no way in hell. Maybe I'm going to be wrong. I hope I'm wrong. I hope it's a hard hitting interview where they ask.
I tell you what, actually, what I would love to have them ask first is, OK, vice president, I guess you have to say, Madam Vice President. How long were you aware of President Biden's mental decline? Because right up until the last minute, you were talking about how sharp his attack he was and how vigorous he was and how he was better than men half his age.
What I don't understand is how people aren't marching on Washington with pitchforks and torches over the fact that this small group, her and who else? Anita Dunn, the chief of staff of the White House claim a variety of that cabal is not that big of people who had daily contact with President Biden. And they just lied to the American public for a significantly long time.
They just deceived the American public. And nobody seems to give a shit. Well, it's also why was anyone believing it?
That's what was crazy. And we were getting shit on left and right during the campaign where I compared him. I said, Biden being president is like having a flashlight with a bad battery and going for a long walk in the woods. There's no fucking way. It's not going to make it. And people were saying, no, don't you know he stutters? Well, there's no evidence of him stuttering when he was younger.
This is crazy. Yeah. There's a mental decline there. There's nothing wrong with mental decline. We're all going to experience it someday, kids. But to say that it's not happening just because you don't want the other side to win is bananas.
And that's what it was. Anytime you called it out, because we all saw it, like you said, we're all heading in that direction. It's probably the one thing we all have in common. We all know what it looks like. Everyone's got aging parents or aging grandparents. And so we knew it intuitively, right?
Every time you saw him and he made a slip up or he faltered or he just kind of started staring off into space or he moved the way that he was moving, like you've seen your grandpa move. We knew it. But if you dared bring it up... You were just, I mean, you were just kicked in the ass, right?
And suddenly somehow you were ageist and you were, you know, hyper-partisan and you were just, and you were MAGA. The epitome of gaslighting. Yeah. Gaslighting to the extreme.
Because it was so obvious and in your face. It's like, no, it's not raining out. Like, what? Yeah. It's fucking boring. Like, what are you talking about?
Full gaslighting right in front of your face. Yeah. And so I would love that to be the first very first question. Can you explain to us at what point in time you actually became aware that he was in significant mental decline? Right. And again, that's I feel bad for the guy. I feel bad for anybody who's in that position. But he's the fucking commander in chief. Right.
He's the leader of the free world. So I think we have a right to expect more from that situation. But I don't think there's going to be none of those questions.
His last fuck you was saying that he wants Harris to take his place. That was his last fuck you. Because from what I understand, they wanted to have a primary. And they wanted to pick their own person. And they didn't want to have Harris.
Yeah, she was nobody's idea of the best, most competent, most qualified candidate. Up until they orchestrated this, whatever you want to call it, anointment or coronation or coup. You used to call it a coup. Call it a coup. It seems like a coup. Yeah. So until that point, she wasn't the preferred, but now she's fucking Beyonce and Joan of Arc.
Well, she had that one speech where she really fucking nailed it when she was talking about Trump. And this is after Trump even got shot when she didn't even address the fact that we have to be more tolerant. You mean that teleprompter speech? That teleprompter speech, she fucking nailed it. She nailed it. But when you get her off teleprompter, she's fucked.
Yeah. She's fucked. Well, I don't know this, and this is sheer speculation on my part, but I would be suspicious. I love sheer speculation. I know. As opposed to all the other times that I'm not speculating. I don't need facts. Yeah. But there's a chance maybe that they will know the questions for tomorrow night's interview ahead of time.
Oh, come on.
I know. Do you think CNN would do that? You're right. I take it back because I'm sure it will be a series of hard hitting questions and they won't let her get away with anything. And it's all going to work out fine. Look, all she's got to do is beat the Biden debate bar and people are going to say, yeah, she nailed it.
Yeah. Well, they're supposed to have a debate, right, on ABC. September 10th. And isn't the woman who moderates it a part of the Biden-Harris administration?
Oh, my God. I didn't know that.
Who is the woman, which has some sort of a connection to the Biden-Harris administration? The woman who is, find that out, Jamie, the woman who's moderating the ABC debate. Is it Joe Biden? You did great, Joe. You answered all the questions. And what did he do? He lied. He lied. Poor bastard. That poor bastard. If that was my dad, I'd be so fucking angry at her.
I'd be like, what are you doing to dad? They're just dragging him around, right? Unbelievable. Up until that moment, just drag him around. Juicing him up with Adderall and having him talk or whatever they're giving him. I want to try what he's getting.
Good. It's got to be good, right?
It's got to be tremendous. Imagine if you have a day when you're kind of tired and sleeping and your brain's not working that good.
yeah well i have several of those which by the way i should say this if you are having one of those days there's a study that came out about creatine creatine which most people think of as like a muscle supplement which it is but creatine actually helps performance when you're sleep deprived significantly That's interesting. Yeah.
Okay. Well, that's good because I'm constantly sleep deprived.
It's also great for cognitive function.
Yeah.
I started taking it on a regular basis.
My boys take it for their workouts. It's great for that, too. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I didn't know that about that, but I will definitely jump on it because I find myself... Like this month, August, I've been traveling like a son of a bitch, and I'm probably getting three and a half, four hours of sleep a night.
Yeah, that's not good.
It's not good.
It's not good as we get older, too. When I was young, I could bounce back from four hours sleep. Not that bad. Yeah. But at 57, it's rough.
Yeah, well, try my age. Creatine. Get on some creatine. Yeah, me and Joe Biden. God. But it is remarkable that... When you look at what's happened over the past month and a half, I mean, nobody – it doesn't seem – because, again, the media is playing along with this. Nobody's asking questions. Who's running the free world? Who's making the decisions at the White House?
It doesn't seem to be a major concern. Which is bizarre. Which is bizarre. But the – I get the Democrats, right? The Democrats are like, well, but Trump – It's always their answer. But Trump. And, you know, if I point out that maybe Harris, you know, is somewhat of a midwit, you know, but Trump. And so what is your argument back? I mean, what do you say?
Well, look, maybe you should focus on just having the best qualified candidate rather than saying, well, we just got to beat Trump. And that's not going to happen. But the fact that there's just nobody asking questions about things like that. When did you know that President Biden was in decline? Who was actually making the decisions?
Controversy surrounds ABC News anchor Lindsay Davis as debate moderator due to alleged bias against Trump. But doesn't she have some sort of a connection to the Biden or Harris administration?
I didn't see anything about that. No?
Okay. Who is Lindsay Davis? Find out who she is.
It could be speculation on your part.
No, I read something, some connection that someone had made. I should have saved it. Huh.
Yeah. So that's the 10th. But again, I would say that, hey, look, it's much like this, you know, this upcoming interview, right? She just got to get through it without a major screw up. And I think they're going to say, look, she did it. She's had her interview. It's all good. Yeah. I just don't think that people are that curious anymore.
And certainly on the Democrat side, the one thing they're always very good at is just doing what they're told and following a message, sticking to the message, and worrying about winning.
Yeah, I saw Bill Maher and Quentin Tarantino talking about it, whether or not she should do interviews. And Quentin Tarantino's like, it's really important that we just win. Yeah. That we just win. Like, are we the Dolphins? Are we going against the Raiders? Or is this the United fucking States of America? Like, what? What the hell are you talking about?
Yeah, you'd like to think that people are really concerned about the quality of their leaders, but I think it is more about winning, again, at least on the Democrat side. Sometimes I question whether Republicans understand that.
I think it's on both sides. I really do, because there were some people that posted a deceptive video, deceptively edited video, that made it look like Tim, you know, he has a son that has some disabilities, and it looked like he was yanking his son... in a mean way, but he was really just trying to get his son to not hit his head on the teleprompter.
So the teleprompter is this clear thing, the kid's walking towards it, and he just gives him a pull this way, like, let's go this way. And they just took that clip, like, oh, I bet he's mean. Look, he's mean to his boy. It's creepy.
The level of disinformation and misinformation right now leading up to November is astounding. Astounding. And it's becoming more and more difficult because of generative AI and Just a willingness to kind of disappear down a rabbit hole and believe whatever you want to believe, right? Nobody's questioning all this shit.
But it is, whether it's coming from outside influence, and we know the Iranians are very active right now. Obviously, the Russians and Chinese are always interested in screwing us up. But people, if they don't do it themselves... It's not as if this idea that the government is going to tell you what's good and what's not to read is amazing. They just arrested the Telegram CEO over in Europe.
Yeah, isn't that crazy?
Yeah.
I was going to ask you about that, too. So it seems like they wanted access to... to Telegram's messages because there were certain people that were posting things that had been a part of... There was a terrorist attack in Russia that they tried to get him to give up information about, but then they gave up on that and they left him alone. But now in France, they've arrested him.
Yeah, they picked him up three days ago, I think, four days ago.
Unfortunately, he's got this social media girlfriend who posts pictures everywhere she goes so they can fucking find him everywhere. Telegram CEO released from custody in Paris.
Aha, great. They extended his detention for 48 hours, and then they had to make a decision, I think it was by today, as to what to do with him.
Judge had until Wednesday morning to either charge him or release him, so they released him.
Okay.
I think the outrage of the world. Okay, so this is said, dual citizen of France and Russia was taken into custody Saturday. He was detained on an arrest warrant over accusations the platform was used for money laundering, drug trafficking, and other offenses. Guess what? You can say that about Gmail. Yeah, yeah. Should we arrest Google?
Yeah.
Because Gmail is used for money laundering and drug sales? Because it certainly is.
Yeah, and I think, well, look, honestly, I think there's some people in the States, if they thought they could get away with it, they would. That's what they would be pushing for. But with Pavel Durov, I think they were really upset with a couple of things. One is that...
Telegram has a history of not cooperating with criminal investigations, not releasing information or complying with requests from whomever it may be, Europol, Interpol, anyone. And so they basically figured out a way to say, look, because of your inability or your failure to moderate the content on your platform, on Telegram, We're going to criminally charge you, perhaps.
I suspect that's what they're going to do with this, but I think you're right. I think the outrage said, okay, well, let's let him go for now. But he's not – look, he got sideways with Putin. So he's a dual citizen of Putin.
Russia and France.
No, France and United Arab Emirates. Oh, yeah. And although the Russians Putin regime was very funny when he got arrested, they were outraged over the fact that they viewed this as a limit on free speech. That's a Putin regime. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my God.
Because you know how much they value civil liberties and shit. Especially dissenting opinions. Yeah. Oh, they love. There is nothing better.
Yeah. It's all about free expression over there in Russia.
Oh, God. Russia.
So let me ask you this before we get off topic about the assassination. Oh, yeah. Is it normal for there to be an assassination attempt and then no press conference?
Yeah. It is – because we don't have assassination attempts every week, it's kind of hard to say that is it normal to do this. But if there's a major world event, generally don't they have press conferences? Yes.
And it was – look, the whole thing, the protocols that weren't followed, the process, the fact that it was a cock-up of monumental proportions leading up to Thomas Crooks taking those shots – And then the afterwards. Right. Then the way that they handled it was another series. I mean, it's still to this day, this series of mistakes that there is no justification for it.
You can't look doing security at a an event like the Butler rally back in July where Trump was shot. Right now there's people out there going, I don't think he was shot. I'm pretty sure he wasn't. So I think that's, it's not rocket science, right? It's very labor intensive and detail oriented, but it's not, you're not building a spaceship, right?
You're going through the same process that you go through every time you have one of these events, right? And so you have a political rally like that. And it's not a national security event. So it's not the DNC. It's not the RNC. It's not the Super Bowl. It's not the Olympics. Those are national security events.
You have a year plus to plan and prepare, get all your resources together and figure out your game plan, your site surveys, all the rest of it. You still have time with these political events. Don't have a year, but you've got sufficient time. And they do it over and over again. And it's not tough. So you do a site survey and you say, OK, he's going to show up at Butler. Let's get out there.
And the Secret Service has primacy. They work with local state resources if they need to heavy up the security and they don't have the available resources. But they have the primacy. So they go out.
And the site survey, that whole process, the risk threat assessment and the survey is where you identify your timelines and your resources and your deployment of resources and all the various things, your command and control center, your communications protocols, all those things. But it's over and over and over again. There's a methodology to it.
And the Secret Service, you know, they do this all the time. so it does lead you to wonder how many more events in the past have they been, you know, not buttoned up and they just got lucky because there wasn't a shooter, but there's no way to excuse what happened, uh, because it was such a breakdown of, of events.
And, and then afterwards in the hot Washington, in the, the briefings that they did provide and going up on Capitol Hill and Kimberly Cheadle, the now departed, uh, director, um, It was a classic lesson in how not to do crisis communications. And she should have been the director who's now gone. She should have been out on the on the rally grounds that afternoon, that evening. Sorry.
And with a team and with the agent in charge. And it should have been very clear to everyone. The press all around that they were out there doing the investigation, assessing what had happened and people would be responsible and they would talk. But none of that happened. It was just a fucking goat rope.
So because it's Trump, if it was anybody else.
Yeah.
Like if that had happened, if there's an assassination attempt about Biden. Yeah. Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
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On the ear the same way. And they took him out and the whole deal. And, you know, they shoot the guy and there's an investigation. It would have been on the news constantly, constantly for weeks and weeks. It would have been lead story every night. More information in the assassination attempt on President Biden. Day 22. Yeah. Yeah, it would have been the same thing.
Right-wing, far-right activist, registered Republican, Thomas Crooks. Yes. Because apparently he was a registered Republican.
Yeah, he had donated, I think, $15 to a Democratic or a progressive group. And he had registered as a Republican. And he was all over the map. He had done research on Biden. He'd done research on Trump. So he was, you know, they're trying to posit a motivation because they haven't been clear about that yet. They're still trying to figure out a motivation there.
that he was just looking for an opportunity to carry out his vision.
We don't even know. Does he have a history of being mentally ill?
There was some talk. They're starting to develop a narrative that says, for the past couple of years, people were concerned about his mental health. There were a couple of people, I think, that had an acquaintance with him that were saying, well, we just assumed he was bipolar or depressive. He had researched depressive disorders that was on some of his electronic gear.
And so, yeah, I mean, that could be it. But, again, the bottom line is the whole process, command and control, resource deployment, communications process, all of it just completely fucked up on that day. And usually when you have a problem of that magnitude – with security. It's never just one thing. It's a series of things that compound.
And, you know, but then, you know, the acting director, Roe, you know, he goes up there and, you know, it was a few weeks back now, but when he first showed up to say, I'm the acting director and I'll go up to Capitol Hill and answer your questions, which he didn't really do, um,
You know, they were talking about, well, it's almost impossible to get all the elements talking on the same frequency, right? The local police are talking on their frequency. Secret Service talking on their frequency. Counter-sniper teams, maybe they're operating on a different channel. You can't combine those. Well, of course you can.
I'm just telling you for a fact that you can... There are capabilities out there and available to allow you to get everybody talking on the same sheet of music at an event like that.
Of course. And... To say otherwise is nonsense.
Yeah. Yeah. And it's also... Yeah, it divides logic, but it also... And I think that was the thing about this is why people were so shocked is because... You didn't have to be a security expert to look at this thing in real time. Well, how about the sloped roof thing? We couldn't get agents up there because the roof was sloped, and it could be dangerous. And it sloped like five degrees.
Yeah, that was the nail in her coffin when she came out with that bullshit.
The whole thing was insane because you had snipers on another roof. So what are you talking about?
Yeah, you had two counter-sniper teams, and... But again, when you go out to a place like that and you walk the grounds and you stand and you survey, right? And you fly drones around and you get a real sense of what you're talking about. In the early stages of a survey or an assessment like that, there are just certain things you look for. Right. You know, okay, there's the stage.
There's a tall building over there. How about the water tower? How about the water tower? Maybe we cover that down too. And I think... The transparency that we have on this right now is pretty much thanks to the local law enforcement. I mean, that's where we've gotten most of our information, right? They've shared body cam images. They've shared radio conversations.
And I think in part they're doing it because they're so pissed off, right?
Yeah, well, their conversations were about how they saw this guy in advance and they alerted people. He was walking around with a fucking range finder. Yeah. That's it. Is that a clue? You walk around with a range finder, they should just arrest you.
Yeah. It's shocking. And then he was there a couple hours ahead of time flying a drone. Insane. Yeah. But I think that the Secret Service, their go-to in the immediate aftermath was to point fingers at the local law enforcement. And so I think local law enforcement was like, fuck you. Fuck you. Yeah. And so they've been transparent where Secret Service hasn't.
Government, I tell you this, government hates to hold a press conference when they don't have all the facts, right? They're just not comfortable with it. And particularly something like this, the idea that the acting director kept saying about, well, we're not going to get out ahead of the investigation. Well, you know what? Sometimes there's times when you need to. Right.
And the fact that they failed to understand the optic of this right in the immediate aftermath and say, man, we've got to be so fucking proactive here. We've got to be more transparent than we've ever been before.
There's a lot of other things that disturb me. Here's one. Was there, is it normal for CNN to live stream a Trump press event or a Trump campaign event?
They normally, I mean, if they show it, they normally jump out of it after the first 10 seconds or so. Always lying again.
We've counted five lies. But I do have to say this, and I say this as a credit to CNN. It seems like they have made a concerted effort to be more balanced. And I think this is in the aftermath of firing Don Lemon and Brian Stelter and all those people over there that people were frustrated with. I think they have made a concerted effort.
Like there was a gentleman who was on who was talking about that everyone's blaming Trump for things, but that the Democrats have been in control of the White House for 12 of the last 16 years. And when he said that, it was like, whoa. That was a big moment, and no one had an answer to that. The undermining that Trump has done to our democracy and the threats and what he said.
He's going to be a dictator. He said he's going to be a dictator. On day one. Holy shit, man. He's joking around about closing the border. He's not going to listen to anybody. He's just going to close the border.
The 12 of the last 16 years. And you know what? Kamala Harris, if she wins, she's going to fix the problems.
She's in right now.
I know. Which is so crazy. Another part of the whole equation that I'm sure they won't get asked tomorrow night. When you talk about fixing the problems and making America, what are you, Ben, doing?
Maybe they will, and maybe they've already prepared for that. Maybe they have some sort of fucking spinny spin they're going to put on that to make it seem like it makes sense.
Somebody, I guarantee you, put everybody on the polygraph over there and say, somebody could just be a researcher or a producer or whatever. They're talking because you know the DNC and the campaign team have been, ever since they agreed, okay, let's do this interview, somebody's been beating on somebody to say, okay, where are you going to go with this? What questions are you going to ask?
And somebody's slipping that under the table.
There's no way they're not. They're all Democrats. I mean, if you're working for CNN, you're a Democrat, most likely. There's very few Republicans over there. Yeah, there might be some independents. There might be. Libertarians.
Yeah, there's a few. There's a handful.
Even though they're liberal-leaning, Jake Tapper, I think, is very fair. I think he's probably the most objective out of all of them, even though I'm sure he has his own opinions and biases. But they're not acting like journalists. They act like...
advocates for the democratic party and that's where it gets weird because you're supposed to be the news yeah well i think what happened a couple of things is is with cnn moving possibly this idea that they're moving a little bit towards the center and i will say you see more negative comments from from uh the the left right about cnn i think they're pissed off sometimes with cnn because they're not as objective
Because they're trying to move a little bit more. I think that's a revenue issue for them because I don't think they've made money since they've been around. But I think they're realizing that maybe there's more profit margin a little bit further towards the center than where they've been sitting.
Well, if they can convince people that they will actually be objective, people like me will listen. And that's the thing. I'm much more centered than I am anything.
Well, remember, you used to tune in CNN when shit was hitting the fan overseas. Oh, yeah. Because they had more field offices. They had more bureaus all over the world. And you'd turn on CNN to see what's going on. We used to have it. If you walked into a station overseas, CNN was always on. I mean, it still is for the most part.
Was it when Jeff Zucker got involved? Is that when things changed? No.
You know what?
I don't know. I'm not qualified to answer that. Because he put on some good stuff, too. He was the head of NBC when I was over there.
Okay.
When I was over there for news radio and Fear Factor. Maybe not news. No, not news radio. Fear Factor. He was the head guy over there. And when he went over there, he did a bunch of great things, like the Anthony Bourdain show. They were doing those interesting shows. W. Kamau Bell had a show on there. They were doing some cool stuff that was not just the news.
And I was like, oh, I like it, I like it. But then when they became, like, Don Lemon, at one point in time, do you remember when Don Lemon had that famous speech about what black people need to do? Pull your pants up, get your shit together. I was like, fuck yeah, Don Lemon. And where's that guy? Where'd that guy go?
That guy fucking vanished. There was no money in that. No, no.
There is. You just got to go to Fox.
Yeah.
Oh, God. You can't hang out at CNN with those kind of fucking... Come on. Objective opinions. God.
Yeah, it'll be... So, I think... Again, I think this interview that she's going to do, I get it. I understand. Why wouldn't you want to be in a comfortable spot? I think it's very bizarre that she's doing a joint interview with Walt.
If you want to show that you're ready for the job and you could possibly be the first woman president of the United States, and then you say, okay, my first big interview, I'm going to sit here with this dude.
Could you imagine if Trump did all his interviews with Pence? What? What?
Where is Pence? He's hiding. That dude's hiding. I don't even know where he is.
All those QAnon people, they don't like him. Oh, God, no. No, that's true. Oh, they think he's a traitor. Yeah. They think he's responsible for Trump not being still in office. There's nobody in the middle anymore. Oh my God, no one's in the middle, and if you're in the middle, you're an enemy.
You're the enemy.
Pick a fucking side. Pick a side. You guys need to stop. Cut the shit, man. We need about five different parties that are all relevant. Goddamn right. And right now we have two. And one of them is way more funded. Like way more funded. Fucking way more funded.
You see, they've raked in, the Democrats have raked in something like half a billion dollars. Nuts. Yeah. And they'll probably spend it all.
$150,000.
So there's all these donations that at least Project Veritas is claiming, and these people are claiming, we're not theirs. And this is that they're throwing money into this pot, and they're attributing it to all these people that probably don't even know it's being attributed to them. I think that's what they're alluding to.
I mean, the cost of this campaign is going to be north of a billion. You have to assume. That's so crazy. And you think about, yeah, if there was a way to take money out of it, if there was a way to take the term, enact term limits, and there was a way to have a meaningful third and fourth party, completely change the landscape here. And I think for the better.
I don't think there's any, I mean, in my mind, I don't think I can be persuaded otherwise, but... I just don't see that happening. Who's gonna vote against their own best interests, right? You look at the money that these politicians can make, and they can walk out the door, multimillionaires, On salaries, where that doesn't make any sense.
That's the other thing you need to get out of there is insider trading. Yeah.
Well, I think it's important that we all participate. It's a free market. I gotta go. I gotta go.
Oh, you know what? My wife is so damn smart. A hell of a lot smarter than I am. She's very smart. She is very smart. She's kind of spooky smart.
I know, right? You talk to her, you're like, yo. Yeah. Yeah. This lady's operating at a very high frequency. I know, which makes you wonder, why is she still with me? That's what they like, a nice dumb guy.
A dumb guy, right. Yeah. You know, I'm good at picking things up and putting them down. That's all they need. Yeah, I can fetch things.
They need you to open up mayonnaise jars. Look at this. Hand Mike the pickles. Every now and then I walk over there and I just show her just so she knows what I'm around here for. That's right. I can fucking open shit.
God damn it. I will say this. The other thing about this is all three of my boys. I just got in from Florida this morning and I was dropping our middle boy back at IMG. He plays basketball down there. and he's constantly, and the older one, even the youngest one, they're constantly just hitting me. They're beating on me, right? Every time they walk by. Boy stuff.
Yeah, they can't walk by me without hitting me, right? Yeah. And I mean, now they're really putting some effort into it, right? They got testosterone now. Yeah, they got testosterone, and they want a title shot, right? Yeah.
And so they're all kind of getting to that point, and they're just like, I'll walk into the elevator yesterday with Sammy, and we get in there, and the door's closed, and he just wails on me. I go, what the fuck? Fuck you doing?
I was talking about this with Huberman, that the difference between a boy of 12 years old and a boy of 17 is only five years. Yeah. So you and I, in five years, basically probably be pretty close to the same, but hopefully we won't decline too much. Yeah. But from a boy at 12 years old, they can't hurt anybody. At 17 years old, they can fuck up grown men.
Yeah.
And it happens quick. It happens quick, and all of a sudden, yeah, it's like with the two oldest ones. I look at them. If I'm away, you know, I travel a fair amount, and I come back.
They got muscles.
They got muscles. They're bigger. They're taller. I'm thinking, holy shit. But it's like living in a house with Kato, remember? Wait, wait. We're really dating ourselves now. Yeah, exactly.
But he'd leap out of nowhere and just attack you.
And I'm thinking, what the fuck?
For the Pink Panther. God, yeah, exactly.
But so, yeah, we dropped him off yesterday. He's back there for his next year. And I will say that, you know, but to start about AMG, they told me a fact yesterday. And I was just talking about it with the guys outside before we started. Which astounds me. They graduated 88 ballplayers last year, basketball players, from seniors and their post-grad program. 88 of them.
82 of them are now playing college ball. Wow. That's astounding. That's pretty astounding. It's amazing. And that's just the one sport there. They cover most of the sports. That's pretty incredible. It's an amazing program. So anyway, but moving on.
I interrupted you. You were about to say something smart that your wife said. I was saying we're talking about the Trump thing and the objective thing with the news and all that jazz.
Fucking hell. I'm having a Biden moment now. What was I talking? Jamie, you remember what I was going to say? No, it'll come to me later on. Yeah. Yeah. I don't even remember what I was about to say.
We made a diversion.
Yeah, we disappeared down a rabbit hole there.
We're essentially just talking about the problem with narratives, that people – there's no one in the middle and that everyone is – if you're not on one side, you're a traitor. Yeah. You're an enemy.
And you do – I don't know. There's no way – I don't think there's any way to walk that dog back, right? Look, we had that moment after the assassination attempt, and like we talked about earlier, people were saying, yeah, we've got to be more civil.
It was like a mini 9-11. Remember after 9-11? Everybody was so nice to each other for weeks. That one lasted a long time. I remember coming to New York City, and we filmed Fear Factor after September 11th, and everybody was so nice. And firemen were treated like fucking heroes. Firemen got laid more than any other time. I mean, everybody wanted to bang a fireman.
They wanted to help those guys out.
I grew a mustache and pretended I was a fireman for a while.
All the first responders, cops, EMT guys, they all got mad respect. And everybody was a lot more peaceful and civil. And in Los Angeles, it was palpable. You had American flags on everyone's car. It was kind of cool.
And then you had the same with the military, right? I mean, shortly after, and then we went into Tora Bora, and then that whole thing kicked off. But there was a period of time, you're right. And usually, not that you want something like that to happen. I mean, look at the pandemic. I mean, the pandemic brought people together for a while. People were so nice to you.
In the beginning, I thought it was going to be like 9-11, where everyone's going to realize, hey, we're all together in this. Let's help each other out. Let's get through this.
Yeah, that didn't last. No.
Well, the thing that didn't last is... In spite of all the evidence that it's not as bad as everybody's saying it is, everybody wanted to say it's killing everybody. Did you see Kamala Harris's speech where she said 220 million Americans died? Yeah. And she didn't just say it once. She said it more than once. I've got it saved. I could pull it up if Jamie wants to find it.
But there's two different instances where she said two different speeches, 220 million Americans died from COVID. Yeah. Which is just insane.
We're now just a country of 110 million.
That's so crazy to say.
And yet we still have a housing shortage.
You can misspeak and maybe say 220 million Americans were infected. Yeah. Fact check. Kamala Harris said 220 million people in the U.S. died of COVID. Here's what she meant to say. Oh, she meant to say this. Oh, Snopes. Oh, Snopes. Hold her hand. It was a slip of the tongue. She meant, she's saying million instead of thousand. Okay. No. No, that doesn't work anyway.
That doesn't work either because even if you're saying 220,000, that's 220,000 died with COVID. You're not looking at it correctly. If it was four plus comorbidities for somewhere in the neighborhood of 75% or 80% of the people that died.
Yeah. But what we just saw there with that headline is – It's very subtle, but it's important, right? What she meant to say. How the fuck do you know what she meant to say if she said it twice? But you see this constantly, right? And again, it's very subtle. It's not straight up disinformation, but it's framing it. It's shaping a narrative. It's softening it. And it's definitely taken aside.
But a lot of people would read that and it would just go right past them. But it would be back there somewhere, right? Right. As, you know, if it was Trump, you know, Trump lied about the following, right? Right. OK. OK. I mean, that's that's good. Look, it's first of all, you're going to misspeak.
If you're doing those kind of things and you're working off a script and you don't have a script and you're just out there talking to people, you're going to misspeak. Yeah. And I say the wrong name all the time. I'll say someone's name and then Jamie will correct me. Did you mean it? I go, what did I say? Like, I don't even realize it when I'm saying it that I'm saying the wrong word.
People misspeak.
Yeah.
It's a normal thing. But.
That's a goofy one. It's and to repeat it. Yeah. Right. But look, and that's why, again, everything that we've seen leading up to tomorrow night's interview needs to be factored into this. Right. I just I understand why the Democrats are so wrapped around the axle, because they just they're so worried that Trump might win for whatever reason. They just can't fathom that.
And so a lot of them are just willing to overlook it. A lot of them, I think, understand that she's a half-wit. But I think maybe that's not fair. But look, every time I talk about her, people will say, well, she's so well-experienced. Look at her. She was an attorney general and a senator and a vice president. And I'm thinking, have you never seen people who have failed upwards?
I've met a lot of people who have had a lot of experience. And they're fucking dolts. They're gormless. Especially in Hollywood. Right?
You work on television. How many fucking executives have you run across? You're like, how the fuck did you get this job? And even the people under them don't respect them.
Yeah. But yet they're in control.
For the time being. Yeah. Then they're all living in fear, right? They're all living in fear of losing that office and those snacks. Yep. And the assistant. And they will. They eventually lose it. They eventually do. Yeah. But they're so paralyzed by fear, nobody's buying shows anymore. Right. And it's a remarkable industry right now. That's not what we're talking about, but it is fascinating.
Well, it's been gutted by the internet.
Yeah, it's completely gutted. People, they lived in fear before, but now nobody wants to green light anything. And if they do, they'll say, well, we'll buy six episodes. Right. Really? Okay, that's where your head's at? Yeah. So, yeah.
And then they're terrified of AI. Because AI is going to come along, and that's going to take away who knows how many jobs. I mean, I think Hollywood is going to get hit first. Well, maybe not. No, probably a lot of industries are going to get crippled. But I think Hollywood has got a real problem. They've got a real problem with writers.
They've got a real problem with video, editing, all that stuff. It's going to be done through computers way quicker. Yeah. Way more cost-efficient, probably better. You're going to get exactly what you want.
Yeah. It is shocking. I was a little bit late to the game, as I usually am on the technology side, right? And so I don't think I really understood just how invasive or... What's the word I'm looking for? For AI in its abilities, right? Even now, right? Yeah. It's going to be exponentially better here shortly, but... The ability to craft a very tailored message in almost no time at all is shocking.
And so you're right. But where my head goes is because, you know, I mean, anybody with kids I think goes there is that, you know, what I worry about is, okay, so at what point do we just, humans don't know how to fucking analyze and write shit anymore, right? Right.
And you'll have the people who, okay, sure, you've got to program this shit and you've got to curate all the stuff that it's picking up. But now it's collecting just AI-generated shit, right? It's not like it's going out there and getting the world's greatest human literature anymore. Now it's just scooping up all this shit that AI produced. But I worry about kids, right?
And, you know, the ease with which they can now put together an essay or a college application or whatever the fuck it is. I think we're just raising, you know, maybe we're just raising the next generation of morons.
Well, definitely the next generation of people that are completely dependent upon technology. I mean, kids can't even write cursive anymore. They stopped teaching that. Yeah. Yeah. Which is bizarre.
I know. That was always my favorite class. That was the only class I did really well in, was cursive. And phys ed. I did really well in phys ed.
I guess people think there's no reason to be able to write quickly, because now you just type things out.
Yeah, you type it out. I still write. Emily's much better at it than I am, but I still write a letter occasionally.
Well, you have to write your name.
Your name is in cursive. Yeah, but have you ever seen kids write their sign? You say, here, sign this. Yeah. No, they just spell it out, not cursive. So they don't have a signature anymore. They don't have a signature. That was a big day when you decided what your signature was going to look like. Yeah, I used to practice modeling. I modeled mine after JFK's. Really?
Yeah, because no one knows anyway. And so I just like, okay, John F. Kennedy signed it like that. And so I practiced for a long time just to get it looking like that. And that's a little piece of information I don't think anybody ever had before.
Now they do.
Now they do.
We're going to be definitely dependent. My kids have had kids in their class get busted for papers that they wrote on AI because they're so dumb. They don't realize like someone could just put the same prompt into AI and get the exact same verbiage.
And they do have, I mean, professors and teachers have, you know, the ability to use certain apps that will scan and see whether these things have been pulled together by AI. But I think it's like a lot of other things. The offensive capability is going to stay ahead of the defensive capability, right? Right.
So you're going to get better and better and better at – and the defensive ability to judge what's AI generated in the world of academia is going to lag. But it is. Yeah, I do think, and then going back to what we were talking about, the level of disinformation coming into November is going to be shocking, I think, for some people, even if they haven't been paying attention.
But a lot of people don't because a lot of people don't have the time. Yeah, I think when we get there, when we wake up and the election results are announced three weeks later.
Well, Pennsylvania's already saying they're not going to be able to do it on election night.
Yeah, what the fuck?
They used to. What did you guys do?
We used to. Remember? You go to bed and you knew when you went to bed if you stayed up late.
Not only that, there's no pandemic. So why do we have all these mail-in ballots?
Well, that seems kind of silly. Yeah. Yeah. We know what else seems silly. And I don't consider this to be voter suppression. Have a fucking ID to show that you're a U.S. citizen. That's racist. I know. I know. I apologize. But but I do think it makes sense. You go to 100 percent makes sense. I couldn't vote in another country.
You should not be able to vote here without an ID. Just like you can't get a driver's license. You have to have your fucking birth certificate. We have paperwork. It's there for a reason because people are full of shit. There's a lot of fraudsters out there. And if there's a way to mitigate fraud in the most important thing that we do, which is choose a leader.
It's one of the most important things we do. We exercise our right to vote. And if you're going to fuck with that, and if you are willfully making it so that it's easier to deceive people, that's crazy. That's crazy that we don't put a stop to that.
Yeah, you would think that that would be the default position is how do we mitigate the risk, right? And let's do it, again, fine, without voter suppression. Don't make it difficult for a particular community or group or whatever to vote. Of course not. But... I don't think it's asking too much to just say, okay, proof of citizenship, please.
That's not a big issue. In Texas, they've canceled out a million potential votes that would have been illegal. See if you can find that. Wow. So they found a bunch of people, I think a half a million that were registered to vote that were dead. And then there's a bunch of other people that were registered that were ineligible.
And so the way they're framing it in Texas, the way I saw it framed in one newspaper that Ken Paxton is going after Latinos because he doesn't want them to vote. 1.1 million ineligible voters removed from Texas voter rolls. So Texas has removed 1.1 million.
That's a lot, folks. Look at that, 457,000 were deceased.
Yes, 457,000 deceased people, 6,500 potential non-citizens. And so the top Texas Republicans have dedicated significant time and resources to targeting voter fraud, though cases in Texas are exceedingly rare. Well, I mean, the thing is... Just the fact that that's going on, that they found a million people that shouldn't be eligible. God damn, that could shift an election. How many people vote?
Oh, look, Georgia was decided by what, 12,000, 1,200 votes?
It was some ridiculously small number, right? And that's the way this is going to be in November. The only people that matter going into November, frankly, are the undecideds.
When you look at the accusations of voter fraud in 2020, does any of it stick? Does any of it where you look at and go, that is weird?
I would say that in our current system, I don't have any evidence of actual, you know, I can't point to actual moments and say, yeah, look at that. That was voter fraud. But I will say this. You may have heard me mention that I have a company, Portman Square Group, that does a lot of things, including fraud investigations.
You know, the President's Daily Brief, by the way, our YouTube channel, at President's Daily Brief, is killing it. I'm told. Congratulations. I'm told. I'm not sure.
So you, what, in terms of our system, I interrupt you to tell you how awesome you are, but the system that we have, is there any evidence that you can point to that says this doesn't look right?
Well, what I was going to say was that while I don't have evidence to a particular moment in time, As someone who's done a lot of fraud investigations, you look for the opportunity to commit fraud, right? And it's like what you were just saying a moment ago, right? If you can button it up and make it more secure, why wouldn't you, right?
And so we've created an environment where there's definitely potential for fraud. There's no doubt about it. More so than if you had voter, you know, I.D. or just you had to provide I.D. to show citizenship. And if you did it in person and if you got the results and you didn't have massive early voting and you didn't have drop boxes and, you know, ballot harvesting. But.
So we've got a process now that has created a wider playing field for people who may want to commit fraud. And so I'm a cynical person. So that to me says, yeah, there's going to be fraud or there has been fraud. Don't have specific examples, but I just know from looking at a lot of fraud over the years. That's the way it works.
Well, voter fraud has always been a thing. Yeah. Right. Voter fraud has been a real problem from the beginning of voting because people are creepy and people like to game the system and they like to cheat. They like to steal and they like to do things where their side wins.
And if they can figure out, look, just think about the way they talk about Trump, the existential threat to democracy, kleptocrat, all these crazy terms that they use. They like they can call him Hitler. And then everything you do to keep Hitler from being in power is a good thing, including fraud. Yeah.
You're justified because you're saving democracy.
Yeah. That's where it gets scary, because then guess what? Fuck face. You set a precedent. And now if the Republicans get in power and they do the same thing and use the same playbook, then they're stealing it. Yeah. Yeah. And you can't fucking do that if you care about America. If you really are a patriot, you can't do that.
Obviously, you had to make some adjustments to the way that people could vote, right, to accommodate the fact that you had a once-in-a-generation, hopefully, pandemic. I'm sure we're going to have another one. God damn it. The WHO has declared a global health crisis for Africa, for monkeypox. They released that. They stopped. They stopped it. Okay.
Let's try it because I think – let's look at that because I think that's also because of pushback because people are like, first of all, what are you talking about? Who's getting this?
Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's – I think they even pushed back on the name Monkeypox. It's Mpox. Mpox. Mpox. Okay.
Because it's offensive to monkeys.
Okay. To blame them for this.
Well, it was primarily an issue with the gay community in the beginning. So in the beginning, when they tried to call it a national health emergency, they tried to do this a couple of years ago. In the middle of COVID, when people were starting to be a little bit more active and less worried about COVID, they tried to push this Monkeypox thing. Yeah. But there's only four people died from it.
And it was primarily spread sexually.
Yeah, and they did say that the most recent, which was just within the past couple of weeks, I believe, alert or crisis alert for the entire continent of Africa was because it was more virulent. It was more aggressive.
I think they're saying it's spread airborne now.
Yeah, and so because it was going to be more aggressive or because it was proving to be more aggressive than they call it, but I forgot that they changed the name to MPOCs.
Did they drop the national or world health emergency? Did they drop that? Because I was reading something that said they did.
When I Google it, it's only showing me like two days ago there was an uptick in New York City. Oh, God.
Yeah, I wonder where. It's a bathhouse disease all of a sudden.
Wall Street? Yeah. Where? I see from like two weeks ago they had the alert, but I don't see anything about a recall or like a withdrawal or anything.
Hmm. Yeah. But the word be a withdrawal. Recall.
Yeah.
But I digress. Maybe try withdrawal. So we expanded the voting parameters or the ability to vote for that moment in time for the pandemic. And yes, you would think reasonable people would say, we don't have the pandemic. Let's at least go back to where we were before the pandemic. Right. In terms of when we could vote and and how. But that didn't happen.
And so then you have to ask yourself, being a reasonable person, well, why? Would people just love the new process so much? They thought, oh, my God, we have to keep this? Or was there some benefit to it that they saw? Anyway, again, I would be speculating if I pointed to a particular state or incident and say that was an obvious case of voter fraud.
But I do know for a fact that when you expand the playing field for fraud, someone's going to fill that gap. They're going to come in and take advantage of it. And like you said, people want to win.
I'm just scared because of the rhetoric. And I'm not just scared because I want one side to win. I'm scared because I think that by overzealously wanting their side to win and doing it so in a way that really isn't fair, that you set up a precedent where anybody can do that in the future. And they think they're justified in doing that.
And I feel like there's a lot of people that think 2020 was stolen. And Trump has said it over and over again. But by the way, Hillary said it in 2016 over and over again.
For several years.
Yeah. They said Russia. And then there's always people saying he's a Russian plant. Russia put him into power. Russian disinformation is why he got... And meanwhile... You know, they were actively doing disinformation on their own, especially with the Biden laptop thing. Zuckerberg coming out and saying that thing yesterday was fucking huge. Yeah. That was huge.
And releasing that statement because Mayorkas, didn't he, when he was testifying, he said they didn't do that under oath. So is that perjury? Yeah. Well...
You know, not being a lawyer, but I would I would think that you had you had conflicting things because you would also have you would also have someone in government, you know, almost bragging about the fact that, you know, look, we're getting this disinformation taken down during the pandemic. And so, yeah, Zuckerberg coming out and making this statement. I agree with it is huge.
It's sort of Zuckerberg going, eh, what are you going to do?
We're going to do better next time. Well, he said, we're not going to engage in that anymore. We're going to push back. And he said, they're not going to promote one side or the other.
There's a brilliant thought. Crazy. Yeah. It's crazy. Oh, my God. Really? So you run a free speech platform and you're not going to promote one or the other. Well, what a fucking douchebag to now come up with the idea. Right. Yeah. So and I'm sure he's a smart fellow. But he's a smart fellow.
But I think he's also in an enormous corporation. And it's not like he's the only guy pulling strings over there.
Yeah. I'm sure that's true. That's like when Musk took over Twitter and you had a lot of people jump and ship just, oh, I'm so upset because now I can't engage in this censorship that I've been engaged in. Yeah, exactly.
But it is a cesspool over there now. You see some wild shit on Twitter, but you have to see the horrible shit if you want to see everything. If you want to see everything, that means even things you don't agree with and don't like. That's part of free speech. And this is what Musk has been saying, and I 100% agree with him. And I wonder where we would be if he hadn't bought Twitter. I really do.
Because there wouldn't be a platform like that where anybody can freely talk about anything and not worry about being... Your account getting taken down and getting in trouble with the government.
Yeah. I mean, I don't think people would have migrated in mass to what's Trump's thing? Truth social. I don't think that didn't work. That didn't work out. And then he's got 90 million followers. I read on X now. Oh, yeah, he's back on X. He's back on, but he's already up to 90 million.
Yeah, it's not shocking.
Yeah, no.
Well, that's, and you look at polls on X when they've done, I think Musk might have done one. I think there's a few of them. It's like 73% said they're voting for Trump. Yeah. But you look on the polls that you see on television, Harris is ahead.
Yeah. Three points. Exactly. I was going to say, it's neck and neck, or Trump may have a two-point or three-point lead in a place like Georgia. But for the most part, she's pulled even and is slightly ahead.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Who the fuck are they polling?
This is the problem. Yeah. There were a lot of people arguing about how accurate any polling is anymore.
Well, look, in 2016, it wasn't accurate at all, right?
Because Hillary Clinton was like 84% to win. Well, somebody knocks on your door. They call you up and say, are you going to vote for Trump? There's a lot of people out there that may decide, okay, I'm going to vote for Trump, but I'm not going to tell you I'm going to vote for Trump.
No, I would never vote for him.
No, that seems unreasonable. So, yeah, again, I don't know that you can trust a lot of the polls for either side, right? But I will say there's gonna be one unhappy group regardless of the result.
That's what I'm scared of.
I'm scared of the violence Yeah, I'm scared that whichever side loses they they might erupt You know, it's got a whole keep their shit together, but I think Even above and beyond if people can do that and keep their shit together and not not you know Not get in into a violent situation. We're still going to be dealing then with four years of
of just dysfunctional bullshit, right, from one side or the other. Right. Just harping on this and people having investigations and committees up on Capitol Hill. And you get to this point where it's just paralysis. Right. Shit doesn't get done. And, you know, I don't know.
I think this one, I say this and then I piss off a lot of people who are very pro-Trump, but I'm really worried that, you know, because, again, I don't know. I don't have a dog in the hunt for either individual. I just like policies, right? And particularly, I like national security issues and homeland security concerns and things like that.
You can't really argue that the Republicans are the party of small government or fiscal responsibility anymore. But I think certainly for border concerns, for national security, I'm definitely on that side. So I'm worried that, you know, Trump is, he's got a ceiling, right? He's got all the people who are always going to vote for him. There's no doubt about that.
But you don't really have to care about, well, you do care about them, but you don't have to worry about them, right? That ceiling only gets higher and allows him to win if he gets some of those moderates and the undecideds, the people who- Well, I think that's where RFK Jr.
comes in. It could be.
And Tulsi Gabbard now as well.
Tulsi Gabbard, yeah. What do you think about that? That's interesting. It's pretty powerful. Yeah. I mean, a Democrat senator, she was a congresswoman for eight years.
I think she could actually move the needle more than RFK Jr.
Yeah.
That's a wild ticket.
I at least appreciate the fact that Bernie Sanders is consistent in his socialist beliefs. But I think, was J.D. Vance the best choice? Eh, I don't know. I mean, he's Ohio. Were we in danger of losing Ohio? I don't think so.
I think Trump likes a weak middle act. I don't think, you know, as a headliner, I don't think I want someone to upstage him. You know? It's like a lot of comics like that. They take a guy in the row with them. You want him to do okay, but not great. Exactly.
I don't want to be back there and hear this standing ovation.
Yeah, Ron White will fire a strong middle act. He tells me. He's open about it. He talks about it all the time. I want to be the funniest person on that stage, and if I'm not, you got to go. Yeah.
I love the honesty. So maybe that was it. But I was puzzled. I thought he might pick a female for his running mate.
Yeah, I thought so too, maybe. But I think maybe he's worried about some Republican men don't want a female. Or some people that are on the fence don't want a female.
Yeah. It depends if it's a hot female. Like who? Scarlett Johansson. Whoa. I don't think she's voting Republican.
Oh, yeah. Good point. She's not going to... She's not going to flop over to the other side.
Who's like a hot Republican female that's famous? Amber Rose. She's all pro-Trump now.
Never heard of her. You don't know who she is? No. Sidney Sweeney. Is Sidney Sweeney a Republican? I doubt it. She just hosted SNL.
But meanwhile, Trump did at one point in time, too.
Yeah, yeah.
That's what's really crazy when you watch Trump on The View from like 2015 when they all loved him. Yeah, that's right. Played that the other day.
It's nuts. They're all being cute with him.
How about Oprah? Oprah was talking about her and Trump running together.
I know.
And now she's speaking to the DNC that he's a threat to democracy. It's going to end it. And she's up there talking about income inequality. Like, hey lady. Yeah, I know. You're rich as fuck. Like, how is that equal? And also, when Michelle Obama was saying, you know, I think she was saying her mother or grandmother was always suspicious of people who took more than they needed.
You are worth so much money. I'm kidding me. That's so crazy.
God.
You did it on a civil servant's salary, which is insane.
Oh, they all do, right? Yeah. Look at... I haven't seen the latest figures, but I'd love to know the current personal wealth of AOC. You know, the bartender who turned congresswoman. Probably doing pretty well. I think she's doing quite well. Ilhan Omar. I think they're all doing fairly well. Even, to be fair, Bernie Sanders, who I just said stood on principle. But, you know, hey, he's making bank.
Yeah, I... I don't know. Maybe I'm drawing a blank on hot Republican women other than my wife.
Want to see a picture of Amber Rose? Sure. Show them Amber Rose.
No.
I didn't know where you were going with that. Take out a piece of a photograph that you tore out of a magazine.
What does she do? What is her actual job, Jamie? She had a baby with Wiz Khalifa.
I would say you could call her a model, probably. A model. Influencer model. Okay.
Influencer slash model. Maybe model first, influencer second. She a vlogger? That's a thing. She's got a forehead tattoo. What does it say?
no regrets something slash slash slash slash anyway pretty hot yeah well no for sure I'm not sure about the forehead tattoo though yeah I think that's gotta go but they can laser that off later but she likes Trump so that might be like the hottest one currently available
Okay.
Oh, she spoke at the RNC.
Look at her there.
Okay. Pretty hot. Yeah. There you go. Look, her forehead tattoo was in cursives. So, you know, there was some tattoo artist out there who still knows cursive. Back in the day. Yeah. Probably an older guy. Some grizzled guy. Popeye on his arm. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, yeah. Middle East's on fire. I wish we'd probably talk about that a little bit, maybe. Fucking Middle East.
Yeah, well, obviously there's Gaza, but there's also a lot of hot spots popping off.
Yeah. Yeah. There's a shit ton of hot spots going on right now. And it's all down to Iran. I think we've talked about this once or twice before. And I think I've been accused of promoting regime change, which I'm not. I'm saying, well, OK, I am as long, you know, but it should happen inside. Right.
From within.
And you'd like to think that one day and I'm sure that. Every administration in the U.S. for decades now has been imagining that would happen. That'd be a popular uprising that would actually change the regime. And then you might actually get something that could resemble long term peace.
But right now, all this crap that's happening related to Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, Islamic Jihad, militias in Iraq and Syria. It's all down to Iran, right? And just over the past, goddammit, over the past four days, this past weekend, Hezbollah and Israel had the largest exchange of fire that they've had in, well, in ages, right? And you have to go back to actual war between the two.
And I will say, this is the amazing thing. And this is why I think people always say, well, how come Iran hasn't retaliated for the death of Ismail Hanyai when they took him out in Tehran? Part of me thinks that the reason they haven't is because that operation to take out Khanye in Tehran, he was in a safe house on an IRGC compound in Tehran. So you would imagine that's a pretty secure place.
It's pretty buttoned up. And it's a safe house that Khanye had been to in the past on a handful of occasions. So, the idea that Mossad and other elements of Israeli intelligence could develop assets in Tehran within the IRGC that allow them to carry out that operation – if they did, I'm not saying they did, but if they did –
is remarkable, and it shows the depth of their abilities in terms of identifying targets for possible recruitment, and then working those targets, and then recruiting them, and then tasking them. Inside a safe house in an IRGC-guarded compound in Tehran, They had to have assets who were willing to walk in there with explosive devices, because there's more than one, and put them in there.
Those folks, you know, got off the X. They got out of country, you know, you would think. And they had to have a trigger there. They still had to have an asset who could say, you know, go or no go, because Kanye now is back in the safe house at, you know, midnight or 1 a.m. or 2 a.m. And so it's time to, you know, cross the red wire with the green wire. And... That's amazing.
And so I think, in part, that has completely freaked out. Maybe it says, how old am I? Freaked out. They're so freaked out. The Iranian leadership and the IRGC, they don't know what the depth of that penetration is by Mossad and others. And so the idea that this is happening, and I guess the point there is, then you look at what they did to the Hezbollah commander, Fuad Shukur. in Beirut.
And getting him to move, he was in a building, a multi-story building, and they wanted him to move up to his residence, which was on the top floor. And he was in his office, which was, I think, the second floor of that building. And they were able to orchestrate a call to get him to go up to the top deck so he could be an easier target, and they could minimize casualties, and took him out.
So now you've got that ability. You've got that sort of thing going on. How did they do that? Well, you have to have assets. You have to recruit people who are in a position to be able to do that, who have access, who can tell you things, who can identify something as simple as his routine. He typically goes upstairs to the top deck at 7 o'clock or whatever.
Or you have to have someone who's willing and has got access to make that call to get him to go upstairs. And how did they get him when he went upstairs? Drone strike. And drones have completely changed the game. Everything. But then this massive barrage that took place over the weekend between Hezbollah and Israel, amazingly –
The leader of Hezbollah, a fellow named Nasrallah, he has said, in the wake of that, he's talked about their attack. And he said that the timing of it was a quarter after 5 in the morning. 5.15 in the morning, we're going to launch this barrage. At 4.55 in the morning, Israel sends about 100 jets. over the border to attack launch sites, right?
So once again, they had this intelligence, this advanced knowledge, right? So I think that and a variety of other hits that they've been able to accomplish, Mohamed Def and some of these other characters, I think that the Iranian regime and the IRGC, right now, there's a level of paranoia. It's like the old IRA days. The IRA was worried about infiltration, you know, back in the troubles.
And it created a lot of infighting, right? It created a lot of disappearances. And you're getting that, too. After that Hanyeh hit in Tehran... A number of IRGC people were interrogated about, you know, they were trying to figure out where's the leaks here. And that just leads to an ever-widening circle of interrogations and disappearances. So in that infighting, I'm not saying it's bad. Yeah.
It's like getting a cartel to infight, right? Start killing each other. Anyway, so that's one thing that I'm thinking, because people are always asking, how come Iran hasn't retaliated for the Hanyeh hit yet? And part of it is also, I think they're worried about... legitimately getting into a direct conflict with Israel.
They understand that the U.S., regardless of where the Biden administration may be and how less they would like not to be in that conflict, they're going to have to be in the conflict. And so Iran can't win that. And so I think they're worried about that as well. So there's reasons behind it. But, you know, there's a lot going on. Israel has just launched a massive operation in West Bank.
So they're up in the northern portion of the West Bank going after militants up there. And Hamas and Islamic Jihad and some others operate in the West Bank, even though the Palestinian Authority runs it. So they're up north. They've just moved in overnight, basically. And they're going after terrorist elements up there. But Iran has been shoving weapons into the West Bank.
Because what they want to do is, if you think about where Israel is, you think about Gaza's on the west side, Hezbollah's up north, West Bank's over on the east. They want to create more of a front on the east side. And they basically got them engulfed. And so they've been funneling weapons and resources into the West Bank for several years.
They've got smuggling routes going through Lebanon, going through Syria, going through Jordan. So I guess my point being, all this shit is down to the Iranian regime and the IRGC. So when people talk about, we've got to get a ceasefire, we've got to work for a lasting peace, unless you get rid of those guys, there's no lasting peace.
Now, what happened during when Biden was in office, I guess he's kind of still in office, where they released somewhere in the neighborhood of $6 billion to Iran that they had tied up? Yeah.
They released it. And their point was it's where we're controlling it. We're not really releasing it sitting over in Qatar. And it can be used for humanitarian purposes only. And we're doing that in part because, look, they've had a policy of appeasement towards Iran for for the entire Biden administration.
And, you know, they've been desperate and they've been very open about wanting to get back into the, you know, the 2015 nuclear agreement that was created under the Obama administration. But the idea is, look, they essentially gave $6 billion. They advised the Iranian regime that you now have $6 billion available to you for humanitarian purposes, which, you know, it's all fungible.
So it frees up other money, right, that they can now use to help to resource the Houthis or help to resource Hezbollah or Hamas, whatever. They don't make a secret of it, right? It's like Putin talking about how he wants to recreate the old Soviet Union in some fashion. The Iranian regime has stated over and over again they want the destruction of Israel, right?
And that's why they built up all these terrorist elements. They've got the same objective because their puppet master is Iran. So I don't want to oversimplify this, but it's not that hard to oversimplify because it's just the way it is. Iran is at the top of this thing and they're causing all of this instability because Iran
Ultimately, they want to see Israel removed from the map, which sounds to me like genocide. But, you know, it's it's Israel that's constantly accused of genocide. They're driving the narrative. The other side, Palestinian supporters and others have been very good at driving the narrative. And so I don't know. But so anyway, point being is the Middle East is a bit of a fucked up mess.
It is a bit of a fucked up mess. And it's kind of always a fucked up mess. There's never been a time in my life where you weren't worried about something popping off in the Middle East.
Yeah. Well, in part because we've had the same bad actors there with the same objective for all these years. Right. And. There's, you know, there's no indication that that's going to change anytime soon. Right. I mean, we don't nobody wants to get in the game anymore of regime change. Never seems to work out so good. It's a problem. Yeah. Oh, God. Nobody ever says Libya, right?
So I give you a lot of credit because nobody ever talks about Libya anymore. It's a hot mess. And we kind of agreed with the French and Italians to go in there and get rid of Gaddafi, even though he was... For a while, he was helping us out in counterterrorism. I don't want to make more than that than it is, but he was there and he would provide some assistance related to counterterrorism. But...
Suddenly, it was, oh, sure, we'll help the French and Italians. They were the only ones with any national interests in Libya to speak of. And now it's a disaster.
What did Gaddafi do that pissed them off?
Well... God, I'm having a Biden moment that you'd have to go back and I'd have to look and see what they were what they're arguing about.
It has to be something with money.
Yeah, I'm sure it was. You know, look, Libya was, you know, it's been a kind of a the the revenue stream coming out of Libya, such as it is for oil and gas has always been. mostly in the hands of the French, the Italians, their oil companies, so Total and others. I think right now, look, the place has 130 plus tribes. There's no central government. It's a massive place, right, to be fair.
There's no central government. There's warring factions now constantly. But I guess the point being that nobody ever talks about it anymore. Yeah. So we just disappear. We just let it go. It's like Afghanistan. Yeah. I'm tired of it. Let's get the fuck out.
It really got highlighted for two very specific reasons. One, the Hillary Clinton moment where she was being interviewed and she got a phone call or a text message saying that there is apparently an unconfirmed report that Gaddafi had been captured. And then he was dead. And so while she's doing the thing, we came, we saw he died. And she's laughing, which is just a terrible look for anybody.
Forget about someone who's the Secretary of State, but someone who... is a person who's talking about some guy that they just had killed, and she's laughing. It was just a crazy moment. So then everybody's like, well, what the fuck happened in Libya? And then there was the video of Qaddafi actually being captured by the rebels where they stick that bayonet up his ass, and you're like, yo.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like, that is a crazy video.
It's like hanging Mussolini upside down and, you know, beating him.
We don't have high-res photos of that.
We don't have video. The video is crazy.
When they're parading him around, you see the look in his eyes when he knows it's over. Yeah. When they've got him.
Yeah. Well, look, I mean, he was nobody's idea of a benevolent leader. Yeah, there he is right there.
Yeah. They're beating him up. See if you can get the video. The video is what's crazy. Yeah. The look in his eyes, the fucking terror in that guy's eyes. What's the real reason why they killed Muammar Gaddafi? If you could just go to videos or anything of it.
It was a bunch of other videos. That's why it looked like it was people doing their own commentary on it.
Yeah. Killed by a bullet in the stomach and a band-aid up his ass.
Yeah, it's a crazy video, man. The video is very, who shot Qaddafi? Probably everybody shot him eventually. Yeah. Interesting. Well, video certainly exists. You probably get it on Telegram of all places, which is where I would go. That's where I go if like when there was Ukraine footage, a lot of crazy shit that you could see, you would get it on Telegram because they wouldn't censor it.
And I don't exactly know how Telegram works because I don't use it that much, but I guess you could start a channel and then anybody can kind of go to your channel and you could post things. Is this it right here? Yeah, this is it. decoding Qaddafi's death I can help you with that so this is just them having him captured and he's bleeding and they're beating the shit out of him yeah they're not
Are they showing the thing or are you doing that?
I'm not doing it.
It's all in slow motion. So it's almost like stop motion video.
I think someone's probably talking. It says decoding the thing.
This is the end when he's already dead.
That video that said the real reason. Suggestions say he was trying to start a global currency for Africa or something.
Ah, well, that'll get you killed. Yeah.
God, that's why I never got into that project. Yeah, fuck all that.
Yeah, fuck that. But, yeah, I mean, to that point, yeah, we do tend to, you know, get in, get out. There might be a mess left behind.
Yeah, it never works out well. Yeah. I mean, even Iraq. Look at Iraq. The chaos, the fact that they didn't know that the Sunnis and the Shias were going to fight is nuts. How do you not understand there's two competing factors of Islam that are there?
Or the idea that we would think, okay, well, I guess the Taliban is going to keep their promise and they're going to worry about women's rights. That's important for them. Yeah, that's been one of their cornerstones.
Well, what's really important, we left them $6 billion worth of weapons. When they had that parade the other day when they're flying around?
Oh, a lot more than that in terms of monetary value. I mean, shit, you could go upwards of maybe $80 billion in gear. Really? All in, right? All in.
When they had that parade the other day and they got tanks and Blackhawks, you're like, what? Yeah, yeah. So they know how to fly that stuff?
So maybe, who knows? Maybe they'll ask that tomorrow night. Because I think it was Biden who said that. Yeah, here it is. Here's their parade.
It's like, this is fucking bananas. This is all our stuff, and they're all driving around with our stuff with fucking missiles. Like, they have missiles? They didn't have missiles? Now they do? This is fucking bananas. The fact that this is all our gear, taxpayers paid for all this stuff, and they just left it there. It looks good. Nice white walls. Look at that. Clean tires, armor all...
Well, it's a parade, you know. What the fuck?
It's a parade.
What the fuck? They have so much stuff. That's so crazy that these people were basically like tribal mountain warlords and now they've got Blackhawks.
Yeah, yeah. Well, again, going back to at the beginning and what kind of interview we're going to be looking at for tomorrow evening with Harrison Walsh.
uh you'd like to think that they say look you you've been here now for a while and you've been around and you've kind of seen a lot um you know would you like to talk about the afghan withdrawal you know maybe just you know talk about what's your policy towards you know the middle east what ask some serious legitimate questions but i you know who knows again i hope that happens i just don't think it i don't think it will i think they picked this for a reason
Yeah, I think this is going to be a nice little softball pitch. Nice underhand lobs. We know where the ball's coming. You can knock it out of the park. They're game planning right now, planning it out.
Yeah, I just, again, it's the lack of It's that thing that I don't I understand. And I keep saying the same thing. I get it. Their argument is always the same. But but Trump. But you would think, OK, set that fucking thing aside for a minute and ask yourself, is this the best choice you've got? Does this make sense compared to what you thought a month and a half ago?
But now, again, they're very good at this. So that's that's the thought I have is if the Republicans think somehow. And they thought it was a cakewalk, right? When it was Biden, to be fair, it was.
Everything got real complicated after she had that one good speech.
Yep, yep.
Because that's all people need to see, someone who seems younger, more vital, and acts presidential.
Right.
Or acts like a leader.
Yeah. Yeah, that's the part I'm having a hard time with. A leader.
Act like one in this small speech, and most people are low-information voters. When you think the majority of people are headline readers, they're not reading the whole article. Low information voters.
Yeah. Well, and certainly... Yeah, you're right. You get consumed with this, right? But then you have to assume that the vast majority of people, to your point, don't, right? They take a couple of headlines, they take a couple of things, and they go, fine, I've made my choice. I can't be bothered to think about it anymore because it's fucking boring or I've got too much else to do.
I've got to put food on the table. So, yeah, I suppose so.
Yeah, and they're also ideologically committed to a team.
and it's very difficult to get people to switch teams especially when the guy on the other side is someone like Trump you know if you have someone who's like a little bit more balanced like Vivek let's say Trump didn't exist and Vivek makes it like that's a much more reasonable person for most people he's got great temperament he's really good at staying calm in the middle of like heated debates and recognizing a person's point and then adding on to it I think he's
amazing at it yeah he's much more and he also he he sounds more familiar in the sense that he's you know he's eloquent about when he when he talks i was surprised that trump didn't pick him as vp yeah yeah maybe he didn't want it he said he didn't want to be vp maybe he's telling the truth maybe he wants to be president and he feels like this is not the time if he doesn't get the nomination yeah yeah that guy's brilliant
I think he said that. Didn't Trump say that he's going to put Gabbard and an RFK Jr. on his campaign staff, on his advisory? Something. It was more than just like an advisor or something like that. It was a fairly senior role in the campaign. Yeah.
Well, they're out there with him. Yeah. So it seems like that's the case. And that's a wise move on his part. Yeah. Because they're dealing with a massive propaganda machine that's been propped up to support Kamala. And they've done it in a weird way where they were just a few months ago talking about her as being a problem. She was a liability at one point. Oh, yeah. No, for quite a long time.
Openly discussed her as a liability. Yeah. And just in the short period of time, if all you do is look at what she's saying in a limited fashion because she hasn't said much about her positions on things compared to what she did say, again, same thing. Leading into this interview, you would think that's a lot of fodder for the person that's handling the interview, Dana Bash or whoever. Yeah.
To say, well, okay, wait a minute. You were all in on, pick something.
Oh, tax on tips.
Tax on tips. Here's the thing.
She was the deciding vote where they were going to go after waitresses for taxes on tips. He comes along and says, I'm not going to tax tips. And then she comes along just a short time. time period afterwards. And Parrot's the exact same things that he said. And now the most recent one, she's going to build a border wall.
She's going to build a border wall. She's all in on the border wall. $685 million. Get that done. When she had called it a complete scam and waste of taxpayer money just a handful of years ago, she was all in on EVs. We're going to get rid of fossil fuels. You're not going to be able to drive that fucking gas truck. And somebody smashed into my truck, by the way, the other day.
Yeah, I just got completely T-boned. This guy just pulled out into the road, didn't even look. I was staring at him. Probably on his phone.
Watching TikToks about Kamala Harris.
God, I love that Kamala Harris. And then he just, bam, right into my truck. And I swerved. Luckily, there was nobody on my left-hand side. But I swerved so I wouldn't hit him head-on, you know, engine block to engine block. So he caught the right driver's side front panel. And because I was swerving, it just took the whole side of that truck because he was still going. This was in Idaho?
This was in Idaho, yeah. Normally, I always think we've got great drivers in Idaho. But anyway, so that happened. How was the interaction between you and the guy? I was really angry. I was really angry. I pulled over, and he pulled over, and I was fucking livid because I could look at him. But I was moving. I was doing about 35 miles on a decent-sized road, right?
And there's two lanes on that road and two lanes on the other side going the opposite direction. And he just didn't even bother to say he was going to exit and come out onto the road and join the traffic. He just didn't even bother to wait.
he just he just pulled right in front so he yeah to your point he was he was busy doing something else and so i park and i'm just steaming i'm getting out of the truck and luckily emily was there luckily she wasn't hurt because she was in the passenger side and she said no no no you you sit here i'll take care of this because i was just so angry and uh and uh
In part because she was in the car, right? And in part because I was driving to the vet to pick up my big dog, the golden retriever. And thank God he wasn't in the back of the truck, right? Right. When we got hit. So anyway, but I calmed down after a while. The guy was, you know, fine. He was nice enough. He was very apologetic and all that, but...
Anyway, so – man, I can disappear down a rabbit hole quicker than anybody. So she's all in on EVs just a handful of years ago. She's – goddammit, we got to be all electric vehicles by 2035 or 2040. And she's on news shows talking about this. This is my policy. This is what I want. And now her staff is saying, oh, no, she never did that.
They just – they don't see anything wrong with telling people – That, you know, here's the truth. You just don't pay attention to anything that we did before. Don't pay attention to the fact that she's been vice president for all this time.
She has nothing to do with the Biden administration decisions, even though she was there, even though President Biden said, oh, usually she's the last person in the room when we talk about the important things. And now they just want everybody to buy this bullshit. Right. Because she's younger and she's a woman and there's a good vibe.
I wish that he would go and do a tell-all. Who, Biden? Yeah. Tell us what happened.
If he can remember.
How'd they get you out of there? I was in Vietnam.
And I was fighting the Smurfs. I was in a foxhole with corn pop. And, uh... Cannibals ate my uncle. Uncle Posey.
I think it was Uncle Posey. I mean, but if you could get him lucid enough for him to explain what they did and how they did it. Yeah.
And who came to him and what they said. You know what they did? You know what it is? It's the Democrats. I hadn't thought about this before, but they got a kind of a habit of this. Look what they did to RFK Jr. Look what they did to Bernie Sanders. Remember him? Oh, yeah. Pushing him out in 2016. 2016 and then again in 2020. Oh, yeah. So this is kind of in their playbook. Yeah.
So pushing Biden out was that they just, you know, turn the chapter back. Let's see. What do we do with Sanders?
I would have to say that it's very undemocratic.
Oh, it seems they're just doing this to save democracy by subverting democracy.
You got to save democracy by putting someone into the position to be running for president that nobody voted for.
Yeah.
Which is really wild.
Yeah.
Nobody voted for that. Well, yeah, I think Biden fucked them. I think by endorsing her when he was leaving, he fucked them. Yeah. Well, that's just my theory.
But think about this. How how would they how would they have come up with any other decision? Because if you think about what's his name? Shapiro in Pennsylvania or Westmore or these other candidates, even Gavin Newsom, although he doesn't have a hope in hell. Pete Buttigieg, who I think always fancies himself to be president. Good luck. Right.
All these people, though, that, well, what do they have in common? Well, they're white men. Okay. How could they possibly throw their hat in the ring against Kamala Harris and have a political future for the next election? Right, right, right.
Not get labeled. Exactly.
Yeah. And so they would have gotten the RFK Jr. treatment. And they knew that was probably the death call for their political career in the Dem Party. So they may not have had really any option.
But wasn't there also something about the campaign war chest? Like to get access to the money that was already in there, you had to be a part of the ticket?
Yeah, and so that was – I'm sure – okay, this sounds odd to say that cash might have played a role in politics. You think? It doesn't sound right. It's legal, isn't it? It doesn't sound right. I think it's – yeah, so you're right. That was a part of it. But the point being is maybe it's – it wasn't so much a – it was a very calculated, obviously, thing that –
nobody really cared about on the Democratic side. They were just waiting for someone to tell them what to do. And once they did and said, okay, it's Kamala, everyone was like, oh my God, she's fabulous. She's the best ever. She's the best ever. I know I said she was a midwit who's failed upwards spectacularly before, but now she's fantastic. And they've all lined up in really impressive fashion.
So anyway, that's- Their previous statements are all on record, unfortunately. Yeah. Yeah. Nothing dies anymore on the internet except for Gaddafi. He's definitely, he definitely died on the internet.
We came, we saw, he died.
He died.
Although I remember Trump. He died like a dog.
Died like a dog. Died like a dog. You ever see Shane Gillis' bit on that? It's fantastic.
So good. It's so good.
He has the best Trump impression. It is. It is really. Fucking dead on.
I wonder how long he had to work on that.
He's really good. Yeah. He's really good at impressions. But that one in particular, he doesn't do a lot of impressions, but the ones he can do.
I mean, it's not like Rich Little. Right. Right.
But he can make the noises, the Trump noises.
He does the sucking in, showing the lower teeth. That's so good. Oh, Baghdadi. Tied like a dog.
We have beautiful dogs.
That's the name of his specials, Beautiful Dogs.
I know this sounds wrong because what I really want is I want the Republican policies for, again, for national security and other purposes to be in place and to actually focus on important things down the road. And I don't want price controls. That's another thing, by the way, that she's walked back or her team has walked back. She came out with a price control idea for food, for groceries.
Which is fucking communism. Fucking communism. And also, we've got plenty of case studies that show it doesn't work. And not only does it not work, it fails really badly. And no case studies that show it does work. And they're walking it back already. They're walking it back. That's a week ago. Yeah. She reminds me. There was a... Peter Sellers, we talked about Pink Panther.
There was a Peter Sellers movie called Being There. And she reminds me of his character in Being There called Chance the Gardener. And he was basically just this adult, but people kind of poured their ideas onto him, right? And then imagined that he was brilliant and insightful and a visionary. Right.
Back to Kato.
Yeah. I can never get enough of that. So, anyway. God. We haven't even talked about Russia. Russia, Russia. Yeah. Yeah.
Well, that's spooky shit that's going on now, too, because Ukraine is now in Russia attacking. That's a...
If you had said, when we got together the last time, if you said, you think Ukraine might invade Russia? Right. Yeah. First time they've had an invading army on their turf since World War II. Crazy. And now, apparently, it looks like they hold up to, Ukrainian military is holding up to about 500 square miles of territory. Wow. And they've just made some moves in a different section of Russia.
Not the Kursk region, but the Belgorod region. And so they've had some incursions into there like they may think about maybe we're going to open up a second front. And it's, I mean, it is fascinating. The Russians have had, Putin initially kind of dismissed it a little bit. You know, he was sort of like, ah, it's just a one-time thing.
Then they hung in there and then they've established supply lines. And now there's 200,000 plus residents in that region of the Kursk region that have been displaced. So what do you got? You got a lot of population upset about this. Right. So now you got more news internally that isn't a good thing for Putin. He's always worried about, you know, sort of popular unrest like any dictator would be.
And so it's I mean, it is it is fascinating. And they've been you know, they've been using U.S. and NATO munitions. So remember, the first two years, the Biden White House was like, nope, you can't use U.S. munitions for striking targets inside of Russia. And then recently, it was, okay, just along the border. And now, you know, fuck it, they're well into the Kursk region.
And, you know, so it is, it's very fascinating. It's also very worrisome, right? You've got Belarus has put a third of their military on the border that they have with Ukraine. And Belarus is run by a guy named Lukashenko, who's basically a Putin puppet. So you have to wonder, are they going to try to stretch Ukraine resources thin? How long can they hold territory inside Russia?
I mean, I would argue that basically this is a ploy, and it seems like that's the way it's playing out with some comments from Zelensky over the past couple of days, that it's a move to try to strengthen their hand, to force Putin to the table, to come up with some type of negotiated settlement. And Zelensky came out and said, look, I've got a proposal that I'm going to present to Russia.
Biden or whomever's in charge at the U.N. General Assembly week in September, I think it is in New York. And he's being more open about now in the past day or so of talking about how this move into Russia is all about creating a better negotiating situation for them. And he's right. Right. The only way you get Putin to the table is.
And get something meaningful for Ukraine is if he's feeling pain. And this is causing him some pain. This is causing him to kind of rethink strategy, to worry about, again, sort of internal some dissent. So it's a fascinating time.
Now, when Trump has said that he can solve this quick. In the first day.
Yeah. First day in office.
How is that possible?
I don't think it is. I mean, look, he speaks in hyperbole, right? So he's just doing that again. He's just like, I'm going to solve this problem. But that's a self-inflicted wound because then it gives the Democrats a chance to say, well, he's just talking crazy. Also, if he gets into office and he doesn't solve it in a day, then it's more of a problem. Yeah.
I mean, maybe it takes him two days, in which case he'll be criticized. Yeah.
He really would be. Yeah. A full 24 hours after he promised. Yeah. Once again, he lied. Do you think it's possible to resolve? Like, what would be the ideal resolution?
Well, I think it is possible to resolve it as long as, again, as long as Putin feels like he needs to find a settlement. If he was making headway – look, don't get me wrong. they've had some successes in the eastern side of Ukraine, where they've been making an offensive against the Ukrainian military.
So while the Ukrainian military has been advancing and having some success taking and holding some territory inside Russia, at the same time, they've been having some real difficulties in the Donetsk region and on the eastern side of Ukraine. And But if Putin feels sufficient pain, then, yeah, he'll they'll find a settlement.
I think that settlement is going to look frustratingly like what the lines looked like before this whole conflict started. They're not going to give up. Russia is not going to give up Crimea. They're not going to pull all their military, all their their their personnel out of the eastern side of Ukraine. Right.
And so I think at the end of the day – and this will probably frustrate a lot of people who have been putting Ukrainian flags on their Twitter handles and waving flags and saying we stand with Ukraine. It's not going to look like Ukraine gets all its territory back. It's not realistic. So I think that's what the settlement is going to look like. But look –
I look at this from there's a lot of people out there, right? Rightly so. There's a lot of people who dissent with the whole idea of why are we helping Ukraine? I'm not going to wander into that minefield. I'm just looking at it from an operational perspective. If the U.S. wasn't helping Ukraine. Putin would own Ukraine by now, for sure. There's just no two ways about it.
Even with NATO support, NATO's been very good, EU's been very good. Without U.S. support, Putin would have Ukraine. So some people could care less about that. OK, it's based on your experiences. Other people think that's a horrible thing. And so I don't know. I'm just saying operationally, you know, if you look at it, you go, OK, our decision is we can't afford to lose Ukraine to Putin.
So therefore, we're going to dump a lot of resource and assistance in there. You know, so, you know, Bob's your uncle. I personally don't think, you know, Putin's the sort of person who stops when he gets something. Right. His next thought is, OK, now what? Because he's been very clear, just like the Iranians are clear about wanting to destroy Israel.
Putin's been talking for years about trying to rebuild the Soviet Union in some fashion. Right. Not the whole thing. So I take him at his word. I think he's pretty serious about it. But I also get the point why people say, well, holy fuck, why are we spending all this money on Ukraine? You know, that's why I'm not running for president.
Yeah, I mean, it is a lot of fucking money. It's a lot of fucking money. And we have to pay that money. That money is not... I mean, just printing money, it has consequences. It's not that simple.
You know what I love, though, is I do love Democrats now. I've heard some Democrats say, well, actually, look, this is a good thing. And these are Democrats saying, this is a good thing because... That money, well, in reality, the things that we're providing Ukraine are manufactured by U.S. companies. So they're making money, and that's a good thing for the economy.
Yeah, that's what Eisenhower warned you about, stupid. Exactly. What the fuck are you talking about? I do love that argument, though. Well, that's a new tact to take for the Democrats, is to argue on behalf of the military-industrial complex.
Exactly. It's such a strange way of rationalizing things when the left has always been anti-war. I mean, that's where things got real weird. The left has always been pro-free speech and anti-war.
And they're essentially the party that's trying to silence people under the guise of misinformation and disinformation, which a lot of that shit turned out to not be misinformation and not be disinformation. Right. Especially the COVID stuff with Jay Bhattacharya and all the different, Martin Koldoff, all these different people that got removed from Twitter and censored.
Alex Berenson, who's in a lawsuit right now with the Biden administration. You know, all those people without Elon Musk buying Twitter, they would essentially have been silenced. So all these dissenting opinions were legitimate people from Stanford and Harvard and all these people were labeled as kooks. Which is just goddamn crazy and very fucking dangerous. Very fucking dangerous.
You're allowing corporations to dictate what is true and not true depending upon how it's going to reflect their bottom line.
Yeah. And that's scary. I think people hate having this pointed out. I mean people of a certain persuasion. When you say things like, you know what, a lot of the things that people on the opposite side from where the progressives and the left sit – They turn out to be right, whether it's Hunter Biden's laptop, whether it's the bullshit of the Russian dossier, whether it's issues related to COVID.
And the idea that people aren't able to speak their mind and that somehow the Democrats have decided that they're OK with censorship because really the government needs to tell you what's safe to hear. It's like the Democrats supporting the war and the Republicans questioning whether it's a good idea. Topsy-turvy. Yeah, it's bass-ackwards. It's an upside-down world. It's an upside-down world.
That's what I'm trying to say.
Very strange. It's just strange to see how people just immediately abandon all their principles and side with whatever their party's saying. That's when you realize that it really is just a tribal thing.
Because the left silencing free speech and the left not recognizing that they were lied to by these corporations because they had originally sided with them and they had made these statements and they don't want to walk these statements back and it's too difficult to say that you were wrong. And then the pro-war stuff. It's just the whole thing is – and the fact that –
You didn't have better use for that $175 billion? You don't think they could have done it to help up? What about our infrastructure? What about our inner cities? That money couldn't have been invested in the United States?
Yeah. You want better policing? Invest in better training and hiring, right? More consistent training.
Subsidies for manufacturing, incentives to have manufacturing. That's something we really should have learned during COVID. Like, oh my God, we're so dependent upon other countries for our goods. For pharmaceuticals? Yes, all that stuff. Yeah, yeah.
Yes, it's fucking super difficult to get during COVID. Well, and it's still difficult to get. There's still shortages of, I was reading about, what's it called? Adderall. Adderall shortage, yeah.
Well, I think I know why there's an Adderall shortage. I think some people are taking it that really don't need it. Is that like Ozempic? They're just, yeah. Well, Zempic at least is helping people that are super fat lose weight, which is really important. We have a gigantic health crisis in this country.
We're eating poisoned food and too much of it, and people are – I mean, the obesity crisis in this country is unparalleled. There's never been a time in this country where half the people were technically obese. And I'm not talking about the body mass index thing either, which is like I'm obese according to that. Are you? Yeah. I'm 5'8", not even 5'8". I'm under 5'8", and I weigh 202 pounds.
I'm fat. I used to be 5'8". I'm shrinking. You're shrinking? Yeah. Like disc degeneration, which is what happens to old people. They get smaller and smaller. And I want to deny that I'm older, but God damn it, I'm fucking shrinking. And my back hurts. And one of the reasons why my back hurts, it's like years of jiu-jitsu too, weightlifting, but your discs get smaller.
They get smushed, and your spinal column gets closer and closer together. There was a race car driver, and he was one of the guys that did Le Mans back in the day, and they got him in his original race car to take a lap around Le Mans, and he couldn't fit the pedals anymore because he had shrunk four inches since the time that he had... Because everybody just...
shrivels up. It's gravity wins.
It's aging. It all happens. Gravity wins. Yeah, one of my brothers flew jets in Vietnam and that fucked up his back. His discs. Good God, the G-forces and all that.
Oh yeah, I couldn't imagine. But the point is, we have a massive health crisis in this country. The obesity crisis is really legitimate and it's terrifying that it's so prevalent and that no one's doing anything about it. And this is one of the things that RFK wants to do when he gets into office.
And he's talking about seed oils and he's talking about a lot of different things that are like terrible for health or ubiquitous in our diet. And to put some regulations on that stuff and to recognize that these are real issues and to inform people that these are real issues and not just let these big food companies just keep. I saw a fucking article today in Time magazine.
Wait a minute, Time Magazine is still out there? Time Magazine is still out there. See if you can find this cover, this article. It was, are super processed foods really bad for you? Oh, fuck. Seriously. This is the question. Instead of saying, wouldn't it be better to eat healthy, which everybody would agree, are super processed foods really that bad for you?
Well, I can help you out there real quick. Yes. No?
It says why they are.
No, no, no. No, no, no. No, no, no. That's not what I saw. That is not what I saw. I saw something very different than that, and I can find it. I'll find it in two seconds. Hold on. Give me a second because I know I saved it because I was like, what the fuck? Are ultra-processed foods bad for us? Hold on.
Here's one that says, what if they aren't as bad as you think?
Here it is. From yesterday. Aren't as bad as you think. Oh, what if ultra-processed food aren't as bad as you think. That's it. Well, they're not. They're a lot worse. They're fucking terrible for you. What kind of bullshit argument is this? This is real.
They are really bad for you. Jessica is passionate about the pupusas from Costco.
Oh, God, Jessica. How about have a banana? Get on the treadmill, you fucking idiot. Like, what are we talking about? I got a bag of pupusas. We're eating shit that's terrible, that's really bad for you.
That's sort of what the next thing says, I guess.
Okay. It all started in the summer of 2023 when author and infectious disease physician Dr. Chris Von Tuleken was promoting his book Ultra Processed People. While writing it, Von Tuleken spent a month eating mostly foods like chips, soda, bagged bread, frozen food, and cereal. What happened to me is exactly what the research says would happen to everyone.
Von Tuliken says he felt worse, he gained weight, his hormone levels went crazy, and before and after MRI scans showed signs of changes in his brain. As Von Tuliken saw it, the experiment highlighted the terrible emergency of society's love affair with ultra-processed foods. Okay, but you have to, this next part is really, is also really, Wilson.
Who specializes in working with clients from marginalized groups. Oh, marginalized groups. Was irked. She felt that Van Tuleken's experiment was over-sensationalized and that news coverage of it shamed people who regularly eat processed foods.
There you have it.
That's what you get. That kind of fucking language drives me goddamn crazy. In other words, the vast majority of Americans, particularly the millions who are food insecure or have limited access to fresh food, they also tend to be lower income and people of color. Yeah, they fucking covered the whole spectrum.
Wilson felt the buzz ignored this food apartheid.
Food apartheid.
Oh, God.
Fucking crazy. as well as the massive diversity of foods that can be considered ultra-processed, a category that includes everything from vegan meat replacements, which, by the way, are really fucking bad for you, and non-dairy milks, which, by the way, are really fucking bad for you, to potato chips and candy, which, by the way... Really fucking bad for you.
How can this entire category of foods be something we're supposed to avoid? Because it's not fucking food. It's not nutritious food. And if you eat non-nutritious food, you get fucking sick. Imagine linking that to racism and inequality.
It also said she got 80% of her calories from processed foods. Yeah, I'd like to see what that lady looks like naked. Yeah.
It was an experiment.
Oh, it was an experiment. Okay.
Okay. Just an experiment for 40 years.
I'm still running with data.
I'm experimenting with cheeseburgers today. God. And I'm going to have an experimental Coke. It marginalizes and shames people. Marginalizing, that kind of fucking language is so divisive.
I will say there's obviously a problem with, what do they call them, food deserts, right? Yes, absolutely. The inability of communities to access fresh foods, there's no doubt about it. If you want to eat healthy, it can cost more.
Right, but the solution is not to not tell people those foods are bad. The solution is to try to figure out maybe some of that $175 billion could have helped. You know how many free meals they could have given people, free healthy meals with $175 billion? If you really cared, the problem with this is a real problem. Those foods are delicious. Oh, they are delicious.
Cool Ranch Doritos and a nice cold Coca-Cola on ice. McDonald's sausage McGriddle. Oh, my goodness. Now you're talking my language. Those fucking McGriddles are delicious. It's a dessert with sausage in it.
I'm going to tell you a quick story. I won't bore you with this one. Well, I will probably bore you with this one. I was in the airport in DFW, Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. I was transiting through the airport with my wife. And thank God she was there. And we're kind of running to get to the flight to go to Puerto Rico. I was going to give a speech there. And...
We hadn't had anything to eat all morning, and so we passed by a McDonald's, and I go, God damn it, I'm just going to stop, and I'll just get a quick thing. So I got a sausage McGriddle, and I take a bite of it as we're kind of dashing towards the next flight, and I took a bite, and I thought, Oh, no, no. It tastes too good.
I can't eat this whole thing because I have this mentality that I'm going to have to throw this away because it's so damn good. I'm going to want one every day. And so I literally tossed the rest of it in there. That was the last thing I'd eaten. I got on the plane, had the Widowmaker, massive heart attack, went out. They had to get the plane off the tarmac. Oh, that was when that happened?
Yeah, that was when that happened. The last thing I had eaten was a bite of that fucking McGriddle. If you ate the whole thing, you would have survived. If I ate the whole thing, I probably would have been okay. I couldn't believe it. So I haven't had anything like that ever since. God, they're so good, though. I remember it. Still to this day, I remember it.
McGriddles are fucking delicious. Crazy. They're so good. If I'm just going to have a cheat meal of a breakfast food, I'm going McGriddle all the way. They nailed it. I know it's bad for you. I'm not saying you should eat it, but God damn, it's good. They knocked that one right out of the fucking park. There's something about the cheese with the sausage. The syrup in the muffin thing.
In the muffin thing. God damn it. I know.
It's a beautiful invention.
Someone online took the McGriddles and went to Chick-fil-A and got a chicken breast and put it in the middle. It made like an almost chicken and waffle sandwich. Oh, my God. That must be incredible. It sounds really good. What a great idea. I'm going to make a note of that.
What a great idea. Chick-fil-A is so good that even gays buy it. They know that the Chick-fil-A people don't like the gays, and they're like, I don't give a fuck. Give me that Chick-fil-A. I would like to know how many of the gays avoid Chick-fil-A. I bet it's like a very small percentage. They're like, fuck these people. They make a hell of a chicken sandwich. God damn it.
I should be more upset than I am. It's too good. It's too good. Where are we going to go? They're so good, they close on Sundays, and no one gives a fuck. Yeah. No, they don't. They're like, we don't even want that Sunday money, which would be... billions of dollars. They pass on billions of dollars of profit.
One-seventh of a potential revenue stream for the week.
And one of the most successful fast food chains in the country. And they're like, nope, we like Jesus more than we like money. And the gays are saying, we're not really into the gays.
We like Chick-fil-A more than we care about.
I went into a Chick-fil-A the other day and the fella that was serving me, I have a feeling that fella might have been a part of the alphabet posse. Really? Yep. And he's working at the Chick-fil-A. So maybe he doesn't care.
Or he's an asset, right? They put him in there. He's an intelligence asset.
Or maybe. That could be. Or maybe he's like Uncle Tom. You know, that kind of a deal.
They probably don't use that term.
It'll be Uncle Bruce.
Remember Bruce used to be a name for gay guys? It's not really anymore. It's not. It wasn't in Australia because everybody's a Bruce or a Sheila. So you couldn't do that. But you know what else? Well, never mind.
I was about to start talking about words you can't say. I got in trouble with my kids because I was driving down the road and I said something and the oldest boy was like, Dad, I don't think we can say that anymore. And I said, really?
And then I found myself like George Carlin driving in the truck with all three of the boys just reeling off words. And they were horrified.
Because they've grown up now in this environment. Right.
This woke environment.
We didn't have that shit. I'll tell you what.
They don't have that in Texas. High school kids are the most unwoke kids I've ever been around in my fucking life. It's crazy listening to these kids talk. They're saying wild shit because it's a rebellion.
So they're like little punk rockers. It's also crazy to hear them talk because they've invented a whole new fucking language. Oh, yeah. Like skibbity. Oh, yeah, skibbity. What the hell is skibbity? Exactly. What is... Do you know? I don't know. I don't know.
Also, Sigma. Sigma?
Yeah, I've heard that.
They say Sigma, which apparently is cool, I think.
Yeah.
It's confusing? You're so Sigma?
Yeah, I think Sigma is good. I think it's good? Yeah, I'm confused over what Skibity is. But there's, I just, there's a whole language. Giat? I like, yeah, Giat.
I like sus. I like they say sus.
Yeah, that seems like, oh, here we go.
Do you understand the meaning of Skibity? Skibity is a term relating to restlessness, paranoia, and inescapable dread. Oh. What? I don't think they're using it the right way. That doesn't sound right. I think they're, oh, it could also mean good or best. Okay.
I've heard Skibbity Toilet come out of a couple of my kids. Oh, boy.
The best shit? They took a Skibbity Toilet?
What the hell is Skibbity Toilet? Oh, yeah. What does that mean?
Page not found. Too hard. The government, they're censoring the Skibbity information.
This is not good. Skibbity, Ohio. Rizzler. Rizzler. Rizz. I know about this. What's that? Rizz is when you got games. When you're a player. Charisma. When you're a player. Charisma. That's right.
Slang for charisma. And a Rizzler has a lot of charisma. Oh, I want to be a Rizzler.
Wow.
There's a kid. That's his name. Oh, wait.
The Rizzler.
The little kid. The little kid.
He's always doing like this. He's always kind of like looking at the camera, going like that. Yeah. I like that. My kids have pointed that out to me. I like some of that. There he is. Yeah.
Look at that fella.
And his buddy, Justice, I think is his buddy's name. Unstoppable Defense Alignment. Look at him. Look at him.
I like he's got the pose.
He's got the wrist, right.
He's a little concerned. I'm quite concerned.
He looks like a Jersey mob boss in a way.
Like a son of a Jersey mob boss.
Yeah, yeah. Like John Gotti V. Yeah, so they... Yeah, but going back to that fucking thing about processed foods, that sort of shit is what I hate because you're absolutely right. Rather than try to help people by talking the truth... God forbid, right? We say, well, we've got to protect them. We don't want to shame them. We don't want to marginalize them.
So instead of talking and saying, look, we know that you have, you know, that it costs more or whatever, but here's the honest to God's truth about it. These foods are, you know, it's a slow walk to death, right? Right. And so, yeah, but, you know, I think there's... What's her name? She's going to be doing an interview tomorrow night. Dana Bash? Kamala Harris? Kamala Harris.
You got a Biden moment. See, that's why I can't criticize Biden. You need creatine. I do need creatine. But anyway, so she talks about these price controls on food as if somehow that magically is going to sort problems out. It will just make this whole issue of access to food worse. It just fucks things up in terms of the supply chain.
And so that's why, I mean, she's not doing it, but her team is already walking this back, an idea that she had just thrown out at the DNC. She's like, we're going to do this. And the other bullshit, all these other ideas, but $25,000 for first-time homebuyers.
What are they doing in California? Have you seen this proposal to give loans to illegal immigrants? Yeah. I saw a top line headline for it.
Are they just flat out buying votes? Like, what are you doing when you're doing that? Well, what are you doing when you cancel debt for students, right?
But what about the citizens that want home loans?
Yeah.
Like, how are you giving, you're incentivizing people to be illegal aliens is what you're doing. 100% full stop. If you allow that, you're incentivizing people to become illegal aliens.
Well, you're also incentivizing people to raise the price of their home. You tell me that we've got a program now to give $25,000 to first-time homebuyers. Now, suddenly, my $300,000 house is $325,000. Thank you very much. Exactly.
It's a nonsense proposal. Yeah, it's all these things. They're saying it just to win the election. And that's what it is. And that's why they're walking them back so quickly as soon as people push back against it. There's a wild thrashing going on right now publicly. And it's so fascinating to watch, like them just trying to lick their finger and find out which way the wind's blowing.
Which is what they're doing. They're throwing ideas against the wall. Normally you would do that behind closed doors and come up with a platform with all your policies. You still go to their website. They still don't have their platform with all their policies and what we're going to do for major issues of the day. So instead, they're just throwing this shit on the wall in public.
And if the public likes it, then they stick with it. If they don't, like with the price controls or the EV idea, then they back it off, right, in full view as if we're just supposed to go with it. And a lot of people do.
And a lot of people do. The blind allegiance towards your party is so real, particularly from the Democrat side. It's so fucking real. At least Republicans have a thing called a rhino, right? Republican in name only. Yeah. So at least they're suspicious of people that aren't like they seem to think that there's some infiltrators into the organization.
They're not entirely on board with everything that all the Republicans agree with. And they'll have some infighting about that.
Well, we've got all sorts of categories now. We've got the never Trumpers, right? We've got them. Outfits like the Lincoln Project, which as far as I can tell is just a grift, right? These guys have just figured out that there's cash to be made by lining up with the Democrats, right? And we can get all sorts of donations by saying, look, we're former Republicans and we'd never want Trump, right?
There's money in those hills, right? You can mine that for a while and they've managed to.
Especially politicians.
Yeah, yeah.
Which are not exactly the most... I mean, there's some fucking shenanigans going on there, I don't have to tell you. It's like, these aren't the people that are like... It's that speculation again.
...the most character-driven statements. Yeah.
They're not like... Oh, God. But you can't... I guess I get cynical because I don't see how it changes. I look around and I think, well, how do we... How does it get any better, I guess, is the question, right? And it's certainly not going to get better in the next short-term cycle, right? And I maybe... Maybe if – well, I don't know. I don't know how you get people out of the trenches right now.
It's like World War I and get them to kind of stand up and at least make a little bit of move towards each other and say, okay, we got to figure this shit out. We got a lot of serious problems. There's more crises overseas right now than we've had in a very long time. Shit that could really, really – get fucked up pretty quick, right?
Whether it's what's going on in Russia and something happens, and next thing you know, Putin decides, ah, fuck it, you guys are lobbing U.S. missiles deeper into Russia. I think it's time for us to deploy something. And whether it's that or whether it's Xi Jinping deciding, screw it. Time to go into Taiwan. Time to go into Taiwan. We don't even know who's running the White House.
So let's give it a go. I don't know. And you've got the Middle East, which I think people always assume, well, that's a self-contained problem. It's just there. But... The chance for that to go sideways, you know, right now. Right.
I mean, if if they're successful and, you know, encircling Israel by meaning that, you know, they dump enough weapons into the West Bank and they get some of their militant elements there to say suddenly you got a three front war with Israel. At some point, there's going to be some really undue pressure on any U.S. administration to step in. That shit gets ugly.
We've got thousands of people crossing the border who probably have really bad, nefarious intent that we don't even know who they are. Millions, but I'm just saying, in terms of actual people who may be on the terror watch list, you've got a lot of people who have come across. The vetting that goes on on the southern border is minimal at best. They don't have access to international databases.
It's not like they're getting people crossing in from China or crossing in from Turkey or Pakistan. I'm not picking on any particular country, but pick a spot and work with those home country liaison personnel to say, what do you got on these people? They simply are checking to see whether they're listed in the U.S. criminal database. And if they're not, it's like, fine, here's your appointment.
We'll see you in court in a year and a half or whatever. You're free to go.
It's not even a year and a half. It's like five years.
Five years, yeah. It's really sad. There's tens of thousands of kids they can't account for. And again, the White House or the Harris team wants to act as if she had nothing to do with anything.
She was the border czar. Remember when they were trying to say that she wasn't the border czar?
Yeah. The same people who called her the borders are on TV.
But this is what's so crazy is that they don't know that they said that. Do they not know that people are going to find it and they're going to post it? Do they think that somehow or another those videos are hidden from the public? I think, again, they don't care, right?
They don't care. They understand, I think, that most Americans have a very short attention span. Right. We live in a world where you can ride out just about any storm, right? I mean, and redemption is just around the corner, right? I mean, you know, look, what's his name? Jeffrey Toobin whacks off on, you know, a Zoom call. It wasn't that long ago, really, in the scheme of things.
He was off TV for like a year. Yeah, now he's back. Now he's back. You know, so, you know, that gives hope to all those people out there who can't control themselves.
God, that was a weird, you know. I suspect he's not the only one, right? Oh, they dropped like flies.
It was a big problem. That's the problem with, like, working from home. You got a camera on a guy with a computer in a locked office.
Yeah. Yeah. But, I mean, I've never been on a Zoom call where I felt like that was, you know, you're not like, well.
Well, it makes you wonder, like, what kind of control do you have over your life if you have to whack off so bad that you do it in the middle of the day while you're on a call? On a call. You don't even wait until the call ends.
All right, now, Bob's going to run through the second quarter numbers. Oh, fuck you.
Second quarter fucking numbers.
What is in your mind, you fucking psychopath?
Oh, God.
It's weird. But it also just shows you that these people that are holding themselves up to be these moral authorities, no, you're just a fucking pervert. You're just another nut. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Another nut who's putting on a mask when you get on television and pretending you're something great.
Yeah. So I think that's what it is. I think there's this sense that it doesn't matter, right? You can say anything. You can get away with it because people aren't going to really care at the end of the day. Right.
And, you know, so while common sense would make you think, well, I'm sure actually they'll be, you know, they'll be fact-checking themselves and they'll be thinking about these things and they'll be more reflective and more analytical. That's just, that's all bullshit. It doesn't actually work that way. Yeah, it's all bullshit. Yeah, yeah. It's all bullshit. But I think that there will be
I think – I don't know. I'm just thinking about the aftermath of the election.
Well, I'm scared. What I'm scared is that people will become accustomed to the fact that the president is not in control of the government anymore and that that's OK. That's a scary thing, too, because whether you like Biden or don't like Biden, like Trump or don't like Trump, at least you attributed the commander in chief. You were like, that's the guy. That's the president.
And now it's like, well, if he's not the president, because he keeps going on vacation now. He's not even talking anymore. He's probably disgruntled. And we got a bunch of months to go, kids. We're sitting here talking in August. We got whole of September, whole of October. End of November with no president.
Yeah. And again, you know, I guarantee there won't be that question tomorrow night with one of the two potential successors to be the leader of the free world, supposedly. That question won't exist. It won't be, well, who, tell me about the decision-making process. If the president some time ago said that, or the White House said that he's really good from 10 to 4, you know, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.,
And things don't get better over time. They get worse. How is he doing now? And if that's the case, what's the decision-making process like at the White House? And what kind of role are you playing in it? And by the way, can we ask one more time, when did you know that he was in decline? And were you just telling the American public the complete opposite? He's not fucking Sharper's attack.
So when did you know that? And what was the decision process around that in terms of deceiving the American public?
How did they go with him even back in 2020? How did they do that? How did they not see what everybody saw? How was that the best option to win?
It wasn't as bad, to be fair. It was not as bad. It was not as bad. But it was bad. Well, you could kind of predict it, right? Oh, I predicted it. Yeah. Yeah.
Side comment.
I was like, come on, man. He's not going to get better. He's not as good as he used to be.
When he was vice president, he was way better. Yeah. Not as good as I once was. Yeah. Not as good once as I ever was. Thank you, Toby Keith. Yeah, I think he was the safe bet, right? They certainly weren't going to go with Sanders. They already kicked him out once four years before.
Yeah, they weren't going to go with Sanders. But there's a lot of other people that could have stepped up. There's a lot of governors who could have. I mean, Bill Clinton kind of came out of nowhere.
Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, Bill Clinton. Yeah, that's true. That's true. It was it. But it was I would also argue it was even that most that recent time it was a different time. Right.
Not only that, but I think Clinton probably wouldn't have won if it wasn't for Ross Perot. I think Ross Perot, a lot of people who were more conservative, right leaning, went with Ross Perot. And afterwards, they changed the whole criteria for being involved in the debates. Because they're like, we can't have this happen again.
Right. So they shift that game. Yeah.
The whole Commission for Presidential Debate shifted, which is, by the way, a privately funded thing. Yeah. Which is crazy, too.
I think there's also this upcoming debate. Look, one of the things that Trump should be very thankful for is the rules that they established for that first debate with Biden. The only debate with Biden where they said, OK, we're going to cut the microphones off. You're not allowed to speak. That worked like a charm. Right. It did. Kept him in check.
Yeah.
And so I'm not sure whether that's the case for the 10th September debate with with Harris. But it does look like now her campaign team is arguing that she should be able to have notes. Right. And they didn't have notes previously. Right. They were just like, she needs notes. So I think they're pushing for that now. That's, you know.
Let me tell you something as a comedian. Notes are not good. Here's the problem with notes. You know you have those notes. So you're thinking about those notes while you're talking. And you go to those notes. You can write notes while you're debating. Like they gave him a pad. You're allowed to write things, but it's a blank pad. Right.
But if you have those notes, you're going to be looking for them, and that's an added distraction. You've got to be so dialed in that you don't need those fucking notes, especially on television, because the pressure is clearly something that gets to her. Yeah, then that laugh comes out.
Yeah, well, it doesn't come out in debate, but she's much better at talking if you don't have pressure and lights on her. I know people that know her that say she's intelligent.
Okay.
So it could be that she locks up when she has to talk, which is a real thing. People, they freak out with also. Imagine the kind of criticism that lady experiences on a daily basis. If she just reads comments on Twitter, her fucking head would spin, right? So all day long, she knows how many people hate her, how many people think she's an income poop, how many people think she's terrible.
You could say the same thing for Trump, though. 100%, but it obviously doesn't affect him. It doesn't affect him, that's true. He's used to being famous. Fair enough, yeah. He's been famous his whole life.
So for him, he's like, just fucking water off a duck's back.
But she's been in the limelight for a long time. Yeah, but she ain't good at it. She ain't good at it.
Some people are not good. There's a lot of people that are famous forever, and the anxiety accentuates over time. It heightens. It gets worse. Because now the pressure of all these people hating them actually starts to freak them out.
You know, it sounds like you're going to vote for her.
Is that what it sounds like?
That's what MSNBC did.
You know what MSNBC did? Do you know that? They took a clip of me talking well about Tulsi Gabbard, and they tried to attribute it to Kamala Harris. They edited it, and they posted it on their TikTok. Holy shit. Yeah. Oh, and then my stepdad called me up because he texted me that he was glad that I was suing MSNBC because there's this article that I'm suing them. I was like, I'm not suing them.
But they did do that.
They did do that. I saw that part that people were losing their minds because they said you had endorsed RFK Jr.
Yeah. I like him. Yeah. That's all I said. I said he speaks reasonably and he talks about the issues. He doesn't attack people. I think we could all use more of that in this world. That's all I fucking said.
Shocking statement.
Yeah. And they're like, he's endorsing.
He's endorsing. See, they want you to have a side. Yeah, exactly. And again, going back to what you said, it's tribal. Yeah. But OK, well, you know what? Hey, I'm glad to hear that people that know her are saying she's intelligent because one of them is going to win.
And so for the good of the country, she's got to have some intelligence to have climbed the ladder the way she climbed the ladder. Like at least some intelligence knowing Willie Brown's a good guy to become friends with. I mean, she's got to have, there's no way you get that far without something going on. I just think she's real bad at talking.
Yeah.
And especially talk, well, real good in that one speech, though. That was another thing people got mad at me, because I was talking about how great that speech was, because it was fucking great. Say it to my face, and the whole place went, yeah.
But if you've got a teleprompter, and you've rehearsed it, and you've got speech instructors there talking to you. Yeah. and saying, emphasize this. Try it again. Try it one more time. Of course you're going to give a great speech.
Make sure you hold. Oh, you're going to give a knockout speech. That's all people need in this day and age.
But that's not critical thinking. It's not the ability to analyze. It's not the ability to make quick decisions. It's not the ability to show leadership. And that's all of those things. And again, people will keep going the same thing every time I say this. Trump. And I'm going like, look, I'm not talking about Trump right now. I'm talking about over here. I'm talking about the other contender.
And I don't know. And more than that, I just worry about the policies that, again, they haven't enunciated many of them, but I do worry about what they've thrown against the wall so far. Yeah.
A lot of these socialist-leaning ideas are very disturbing. Yeah. And there's another thing that she's talked about, about equity as opposed to equality and literally talking about equal outcomes, which is fucking insane. That's insane talk. That doesn't work because you're not going to have equal effort.
The whole reason why this country works, the whole reason why capitalism works is because of competition. That competition should be fair. But there is a reason why some people succeed more than others. And a lot of it has to do with effort. Yeah. There's a lot of luck involved, there's a lot of nepotism involved, there's a lot of shit involved, but also hard work.
And if you want to have equality of outcome, you're going to have no incentive for people to work hard.
You know what, to that point, my youngest boy, Muggsy, was telling me, he came home from school, this was towards the end of last year, and he was kind of chuckling to myself. So what are you laughing about? He goes, oh God, it was funny. And he talks just like this. He says, yeah, it was very funny.
He says, we had a project in class where the teacher, I forget which subject it was, but anyway, the teacher handed out a paper, a test, And he explained, okay, here's a test. I know it's a snap test. I know you guys weren't expecting it. But I want you to do your best. And you weren't expecting it, so I'm going to take all the scores and I'm going to average them out. And that'll be how you do.
So my boy sits in the back there and just doesn't do fuck all. He got like one question answered and he was like, well, fuck it. Because he's smart enough to think... All right. You know, fine. If all we're going to do is take all the results and smush them together and everyone's going to. Yeah.
And so there were there were some people in there that were really pissed off, which was the teacher's point. Right. Right. And when they found out what had happened, because they had really tried and they'd gotten very good grades. And then there's Jack was like a two out of a 100. And he gets the same result that they did. Exactly. Look at me. So he said, no effort. I got what you got.
But he saw it. Right. And I thought, well, I'm not sure whether I'm proud of that or not, but I think it's entertaining.
Well, if he's not dumb and he doesn't like the class and he thought it'd be fun to just like get a good grade by doing nothing. He gamed the system. He gamed the system.
The system sucks. Which is how which is how this whole thing would work when you talk about, you know, equal education.
at the end of the day... It's just nonsense talk, and it's only talk for voters. It's talk to try to get people who aren't doing well to say, well, with her, I'm going to do well.
Yeah. Everything's going to be fine. Look what they're giving me. They're canceling my debt. Oh, they're talking about canceling my debt. They're talking about giving me a first-time home payment. They're talking about, you know, sticking it to the rich people. They're talking about price controls. They're talking about rent controls. Yeah. Good God. We start doing all that shit.
You know, you think the economy has some issues? I mean...
Yeah, no one who's an economic advisor thinks that's a good idea. No one who understands the economy.
I mean, I think that one thing that they're obviously... probably somewhat happy about, they've got to be happy about it, is that moving into the election, you know, it does look like the Fed's going to cut rates, right? And I'm sure there's going to be a lot of people on the right who are going to say, oh, of course, the Fed's doing that for political reasons, right?
Well, it's good for the country. It's good for the country, yeah. And that's where we've gotten away to. Interest rates are fucking crazy right now.
They're crazy. Home buying, car loans, everything. It's fucking nuts.
And that's another problem. You talk about, you know, So the perception everybody's got, not everybody. That's not right. But right now, the perception of the economy is it it sucks. Right. It's not good. It's not good. I'm not I'm not comfortable. I'm not I'm not saving money. I'm spending more money on everything.
And but for the past year or so, you've had the White House telling them just the opposite. Things are looking good, right? We're really doing well. And, you know, so there's this lack of credibility, right, that exists, not just from the White House or from this particular administration.
You know, I guess a bigger point is people just don't have, you know, a lot of trust in a lot of things related to the government. They don't believe they're politicians. They don't believe they're government agencies, right? I mean, look at everybody talking about it. We've got to disband the FBI. We've got to shut down the Secret Service.
No, the Secret Service didn't do any favors for themselves. Holy fuck.
But yeah, the CIA, they're talking about getting rid of the IRS. Okay, and substituting it with what? Yeah, what are you going to do? Yeah, what? You're going to rebuild it from the ground up? You don't think you're going to have the same problems? Yeah. And what are you going to do with all the things that they're investigating overseas? What are you going to do?
What are you going to do? What are you going to do with all the national security threats? We're going to tear down. We've got to shut down the CIA. Okay, so you think we live in a benevolent world. You think that, okay, of course, it's a human endeavor, so it can always stand improving. Of course. And same with all the other government agencies out there. With everything.
Yeah, but this idea that you're going to tear institutions down because you're pissed off about...
Whatever it might be Let me ask you this when he's speaking of that Yeah, one of the things that Trump said was that he was I think was Pompeo that talked him into not releasing the Kennedy files Yeah, yeah, and he Trump said that if you saw what they showed me you wouldn't release it either. I
Yeah, yeah, I know. I saw all of that. And honest to God, I don't have a secret that I can reveal. But what do you think it is, though? When you hear things like that, do you get concerned? What's in there?
I mean, to me, it sounds a little bit like, you know, National Treasure, that movie with Nicolas Cage, where, you know, the secret book that they have, and they open the book, and they read what all the presidents have told them about things. You should watch it. It's actually a very funny movie. But, yeah, what do I think it means? I don't know.
Is Trump speaking in hyperbole, or is there some... Well, there's got to be a reason why they don't want to release it.
Well, yeah. So what could a reasonable reason be?
Yeah, I think part of it is... I think that there's this tendency on the government's part, once they classify anything, it's really tough to get them to back off of that. It's really tough to get them to declassify information. I would argue they should, right? At this point, nobody is still alive, right? And so you would think at this point, they'd say, eh, okay, fine.
There can't be a sources and methods issue here, right? They can't be like, well, we're worried about if we open up this file, even if there's not like some smoking gun that said... They did it. But even if it's just on the margins, like Lee Harvey Oswald went down to Mexico. We know that because – with the Russian embassy down there.
We know that because we had an asset who reported on it from inside the Russian embassy, whatever it may be. They're all dead. Right. There's no. So I would argue just, yeah, fucking declassify it. Let it go. So I don't know. I don't have a good explanation for it. But what if it says that the CIA killed Kennedy? If it says that and it's backed up, then that's a come to Jesus meeting for me.
But literally, yeah. I'm going to – yeah.
I'm probably going to have to rethink my position on a lot of things. Yeah. Well, I think that's what they're worried about.
Yeah. And if that's what he's saying and that's what they're actually worried about, that would be a real problem. It would be a real problem that could undermine a lot of the national security issues that we do have. Oh, fuck yeah. Sure. Absolutely. And the power the CIA has.
Yeah. I mean, if that was the case – but think about this. Yeah. We talked about this before. I've always felt like the MLK, like Martin Luther King's, was more unsettled. That there was just something from an intuitive point of view, from an investigator's point of view.
And it's not investigated the same way JFK is.
Was not, no.
No, and you don't hear about it the same way you hear about JFK.
Right, and it was more of a... there was more of a, of a sort of a local thing, right? It was, there was, you just felt like, you know, the, there was more of a, of a element of a, I don't know, various local, um, players engaged in a local police, state police, whatever it might be.
And, you know, and possibly federal side and all kinds of, it was just something unsettling about that whole incident. So, um, Yeah, I mean, look, any of these things would significantly undermine past where it is now. I mean, already people have distrust.
But if it was proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the CIA killed Kennedy, that would be a giant issue.
It would be a giant issue. And then... Then what happens? Then what do you do? At that point, who knows? Because, look, I'll be honest with you. Of course, I'm going to say what everybody expects me to say. The agency, and I can only speak from that point of view.
I can't talk about the Bureau or Secret Service or others, but the agency does some tremendous work in pursuit of protecting national security interests. I believe that. And I believe that most of the people that are involved are patriots. Yeah. But I will say, if that were to be proven without a doubt, because they declassified that paperwork, none of that shit's going to matter.
All that good work. Right. All that. I don't even know where you'd go with it, right? I mean, the church, you know, they basically wanted to disband the agency at that point, right?
That was in what year was that?
That was the 70s, yeah. And that was, you know, look, Carter put Stansfield Turner into the agency basically to try to— I would argue, dismantle it. So there was a period of time when, and also after, of course, after World War II, they just shut down OSS. It was like, yeah, we don't need it.
So would that create a moment where the public's just saying, fuck this, we don't need it, we'll just maybe, we'll see. But I guarantee you, something bad would then happen. And they would say, well, we need to reconstitute it in some fashion. Let's do it.
Especially if it's publicly known that it's not there anymore and foreign actors know this.
You've got to have these organizations. So that's a hypothetical that... But it's like every organization.
You're going to have bad apples in the organization. Like cops. I think cops are overall very important and very good. But when you have a bad cop... That bad cop, especially if it's on video, now people think of cops as only being that one bad cop.
Right, right. Defund the police. Same.
And by the way, Kamala Harris.
Kamala Harris, yeah. She was a big part of that. You know what? This part always surprised me. Defund the police. So we don't want as many police on the streets. OK, first of all, the logic train on that one, because somehow what all the bad guys go away then. Well, there's no police, so I don't need to commit any crimes. Everything will be better.
Or we put community people in their social workers and whatever. Instead of saying in a logical fashion, saying, OK, clearly we had some bad eggs. What we need is better police. What's that going to mean? That's going to mean more money. We need to actually fund the police. You need more training. The police need more training anyway. Look at the Secret Service. Good God.
Those guys, in terms of their amount of actual consistent on-the-job training they get. is minimal at best. And so it's the same with the police. The first thing to always go is the training budget, right? So to me, that never made any sense. But you're right. Harris was also on the side of defund the police. I don't think she would ever bring that up again. I think that moment in time has passed.
Well, we've seen the disastrous results.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Tim Wells, speaking of... you know, look at Minnesota, Minneapolis, right? That was kind of ground zero for defunding police.
But at least you put tampons in the boys' room.
Yes, you know, because, yeah, my God, don't get me started. That was another thing. My boys, my boys constantly, thank God for them because that's how I learned what not to say and get myself in trouble.
Right, you got to know the temperature of the young kids today.
I got to say, look, is this skibbity or is this not? You know, what the fuck? Is this Sigma? What's going on here? I got the riz going. Yeah.
Well, Mike, I don't know if we resolved anything.
I think we might have a couple of small issues. What's your prediction? Can I ask that? What's your prediction for the election in November? What do you think is going to happen?
I don't know because I think there's a lot of time between now and then. And look, someone... Whether that guy was acting alone or whether or not he had help, someone tried to kill Trump at least once. There was an interview where Trump was outside talking to someone and said, I've been told we shouldn't even be out here. We shouldn't be outside. There's some issues.
So there's probably other threats. We know that there was an Iran assassination attempt. There was something involved in that that was stopped. I guarantee there's people that want him gone.
And to say now I know what's going to happen in November, things change so quickly and it's so nuts and our memory is so short and everything happens so fast and the news cycle is just flooded with new things constantly. I don't know what the fuck is going to happen.
Look at the short window of time from – Say, let's go with the 13th of July, the rally when it was shot through the RNC, right? From the perception, I was out in Milwaukee for something else, but I was out there during the RNC. And... Everybody 100 percent was convinced we got this in the bag. Right. Short period of time later, Harris is supposedly in the lead. Yeah. You know, Biden's gone.
He's he's pushed off the surface there and she's in. So you're right. You know, between now and fucking anything, maybe the aliens visit.
Maybe that's the only thing that's going to save us. The aliens? Yeah. Maybe that's the only thing. I don't even know how I feel about that. The more I talk about it, the more I feel like someone's lying to me. The more people I have on that talk to me about aliens, the more I feel like there's some nonsense going on. There's a layer of nonsense in that stuff. Yeah.
I saw that interview you did with- Lou Elizondo? Yeah, Elizondo.
Yeah.
Well, if what he's saying is true, pretty fucking fascinating. There really is something bigger than an oil rig that's going 500 knots underneath the ocean, and they have video of it. It'd be kind of nice if you released that. They really do have 4K video of these crafts moving at insane speeds that are very high resolution, and you could see exactly what you're looking at. That'd be nice.
I saw his explanation for why they wouldn't was because, well, we don't want to tip off the aliens, you know, that we know about it. I'm thinking... Is that the explanation? Yeah. So like if we do, if we say that, you know, if we alert the public, then suddenly they'll know about it and they may move up their plans to attack us sooner. And my my thought was I'm pretty sure if if if they can.
build what they're building and move that way. They probably know what we're doing already, right?
Yeah, and they probably have the ability to stop anything we're trying to do. Yeah. We're talking about something that can get here from another galaxy. I have a feeling they're a little bit more advanced than us. Yeah. When you go to the Amazon jungle and you visit an uncontacted tribe, you're not really worried about arrows if you have a tank.
Yeah. God damn it. I was promised in the late 60s, admittedly, I was young, a jet pack. We're all going to have jet packs. Flying cars, remember? Flying cars. It didn't happen to this day. I'm still pissed off about it.
Yeah.
Yeah. But anyway.
Do you imagine how bad people drive if they were just flying around? Thinking about that idiot that T-boned you with that idiot's in the sky checking his phone and he slams into you and you both go crashing into a target. My truck would be a fucking mess at this point.
Both sides. Not just one side. Both sides. Now, I think we did solve a couple of things, but...
I think we had a fun conversation. That's all I expect. But I always wanted to get your perspective on things because you're one of the few people that actually knows what they're talking about with these things.
So I appreciate you very much. Thank you. And if you don't mind me mentioning one more time.
Yeah.
thank you for the invite that we had for UFC 303. Oh. I took my boy out there. Nice. He had the time of his life. He hadn't been to the fights before, and he's a UFC fan, so he knows what he's doing, or he knows the players. Yeah. Had a great time out there. Oh, good. It was a great card. Glad you had fun.
That was a great card, too.
Oh, 303. It looked like it might not be. Right, but it pulled up. Yeah.
Pulled up at the end.
Really? Yeah. Very nice. Yeah, that final one with Pereira was great. Yeah, gosh.
That's fucking terrifying. Holy shit. He's so terrifying. Oh, my God. Yeah.
No, it was really good. And I thought one of the best ones was Macy. Oh, yeah, that was a great fight, too. Yeah, she did really well.
Yeah, it was a great card. Yeah. Anyway, the Vegas fights are always fun. But thank you.
I appreciate that. My pleasure, brother. All right.
Tell everybody one more time, your podcast, how to get a hold of everything.
Yeah, it's the President's Daily Brief. It's available on all podcast platforms. It's twice a day. You're in, you're out. We tell you the key things. We don't take up a lot of your time. And then Bob's your uncle. And then we do a weekend show. And you can find that on our YouTube channel, at President's Daily Brief. And it's also on the first TV. So we're kind of all over the place.
It's doing very well. And I think it's doing well because of what we talked about. It's just the news. Yes. And it's concise. And it's just the top three or four issues going on at that moment. But it's just the news. It's not like some opinion thing where I'm spending a lot of time telling people how to think about it.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, occasionally I might let something slip, but for the most part. So I think there's an appetite for that.
1440?
This is like objective news. I get an email. I'm on the email list. Yeah, that's it. Okay. I recommend that. It's very good. Excellent. Mike Baker, thank you very much, brother. Appreciate you.
Likewise.
Bye, everybody.