Matt Walsh is a political commentator, author, filmmaker, and host of "The Matt Walsh Show" podcast. His newest project is the theatrically released film "Am I Racist?" www.dailywire.com/author/matt-walsh Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Hey, great to be back. Thanks for having me. Your movie is really funny. It's really funny. By myself, laughing out loud hysterically today. I watched it in the sauna. I watched it in the gym. I watched it... It was... It's one of the best comedies I've seen in a long time. Because there's so many moments that are so uncomfortable. That means a lot. I appreciate that. Yeah.
That's what we're hoping for. The Robin DiAngelo one where you gave that guy money for reparations and you got her. She thought it was uncomfortable. Yeah.
That was kind of... When we had the idea for the film to talk about race, we knew we needed to get Robin D'Angelo. I didn't think we'd get her because I figured she'd be a lot more cautious. Yeah, savvy and cautious. But apparently she has no idea what's happening outside of her bubble at all. So she didn't know who I was. I mean, I gave her my name and she had no clue. Wow.
But we kind of went into that knowing what the end was supposed to be, if we could get her. We came up with that idea. We went to a bar the night before the interview and we came up with this idea. Could we get her to actually pay reparations to Ben, our black producer? And we had to kind of talk him into it. And, you know, it was really just like,
In real time, I was there for about two hours, and it was an hour and a half of the most mind-numbing conversation where I'm just – none of that's in the movie because it's just me, like, fluff questions. And I'm repeating back to her own ideas so she knows that I'm a safe person. Right.
It's a safe space, and then you've got to build to it and build to it and build to it, and then finally you get to a point where you can do something a little weird, and she'll probably go along with it. Yeah. And she did. I mean, you saw, we go through a whole, we have a whole series of exercises we want to do with her. And she went, she did it. She was game.
So that was, and that was one of the first things we filmed. So after we got that, we knew that, okay, we have a movie here.
I feel like you got your money's worth with her, seeing as it's $15,000. But I feel like you got robbed by the lady that got upset about the mascot.
50 grand you barely got anything out of her yeah that was well part of the point of the movie is that's why we put the price tags on the screen we want people to see how absurd it is so in a certain way it was like The higher they quoted the price, we said, great, we'll pay that because we want this in the movie. Right.
Because if all these people had said, oh, yeah, I'll do it for free or I'll do it for 200 bucks, just pay my travel, doesn't really make the point.
Right.
$50,000.
And then she basically said almost nothing. Right. But it was okay.
No one ever found out who the identity of the mascot is? No.
I don't think so.
It would have been hilarious if it was a person of color.
Well, it almost certainly was. It almost certainly was because if it was a white guy. They would have thrown him under the bus. Yeah, they would have. So the fact that they didn't. It's probably some like Hispanic kid or something.
And you got to imagine you can't see real good with that fucking costume. You ever put a mascot costume on?
I haven't, but I can tell that there's little eye slits. You can't even see what's below you. Exactly.
Duncan and I did a whole podcast where we pretended to be furries. Every podcast we do, we dress up. We'll dress up like Star Wars people or whatever. Spaceship people. We did a podcast as furries. We kept the helmets on for maybe five minutes. We're like, I can't fucking do it. And we both took them off. Props to the furries. If you could run around with this thing on, this is hard to do.
You can't see shit. You can't breathe.
So the idea that he missed those kids is like- The furries are doing a lot more than running around in those things too. They are. They are.
I think they designed special ones for that.
Yeah. I don't even want to know. Like a hatch. But it's actually a perfect example of what these people do, these race hustlers that-
something happened it was a little bit unpleasant yes not a big deal there's a million ways to interpret that it's just a normal human thing that happens in the world like things happen that are a little bit unpleasant you're disappointed your kid didn't get a high five okay it happens uh but for them they have one lens for seeing the world and the lens is through this left-wing racial ideology so everything that happens is colored by that right uh and everything is understood through that lens so anything i mean you think about uh
Michelle Obama, when she was first lady, she had multiple stories that she would tell about as first lady being discriminated against because of her race, allegedly. And one of them was she was in line for ice cream or something and someone cut in front of her. And she told this story in some interview, this very dramatic story about, well, they didn't see her because she's black.
And meanwhile, it's like we've all been cut. Lady, people have cut in front of all of us. It's just that if it happens to me at Walmart, I don't think of it racially. I just think, oh, this person is an asshole. Exactly. But for her, it's all racial.
But that's a crazy one to say that someone cutting in front of you a selfish act is somehow racist. That's like looking for racism everywhere. Because that kind of situation is so normal. It's so normal that some dick cuts in front of you.
Right, exactly. It's an unpleasant thing that happens to all people. And if you're not in the kind of race hustler bubble, you don't see it that way. But it's interesting that nobody wants to call that out.
Nobody wants to be reasonable. Nobody wants to say, well, is that like you just say, oh, wow. You know, you have to listen to it. That's part of the problem. Like you can't say, are you sure that's racist? Because then you're a racist apologist and then you're racist by proxy.
Yeah. And how do you know? So how do you know what's in that other person's mind? How can you ascribe motives to them? It drives me nuts that this is what we do now, where if someone does something or says something, someone else is offended by it. That person who's offended gets to decide.
what the intent was behind the other person's action to the extent that if the other person says, no, no, no, this was my intention, I'll tell you what it was, they don't get to have a say in the intentions behind their own actions. They are suddenly not authorities in their own behavior.
This other person who was the offended party gets to inform you what you meant by that thing, which is really what the, I mean, the move is called Am I Racist? But in reality, There's only one person who can answer whether you're a racist person and that's you. And if you don't think that you're racist, then you aren't because racism is a thought process.
And if it's not in your head, then you're not racist. You might have stereotypical views about people of other races. Everybody does to some extent. You might think things that are even insulting about people of other races, but it's not racist because racist means you hate people of other races or you think they're inferior to you.
Right.
But you could be not a racist person and think that whatever Asians are bad drivers. You know, you could think that that stereotype is true. Whether it's true or not, you just happen to think that that's a true thing about this group. Doesn't mean you hate them. Doesn't mean that you think that they're inferior.
It's just you can say frat boys are annoying and not hate men. Exactly. Yeah, exactly.
And most of the time, these stereotypes, they didn't just fall out of the sky. They're grounded in something.
If they did, it wouldn't make any sense.
Right. And nobody would be offended. That's the thing. Nobody would be offended by a stereotype that really was not true at all. Right. You're only offended because it rings true at least a little bit. Because otherwise it would just be – it would be absurd.
Which is why when you get – I mean in the movie we go – there's a section where we go kind of outside this bubble and we go down and we talk to bikers at a biker bar in the south. We talk to the poor black community in New Orleans. And the only reason we did that was just – Well, let's find people who are not – they probably didn't go to college, so they didn't get brainwashed there.
They're not getting the corporate DEI seminars. They're not reading Robin DiAngelo or any of these people. What do they think about this stuff? Are they worried about systemic racism? Do they see everything as racist all the time? And what we found is no. They're just not even – they don't even speak that language. When you say the term systemic racism to them –
They say, well, what do you mean by that? What is that?
Well, this was something that, like, people are always concerned about people being racist. But there's something that happened in this country somewhere around 2012-ish where things really, really ramped up. And it just became... it just became much more of a subject, a subject that was like constantly around, you know, worrying about racial bias and, and it, and it ramped up, right.
It ramped up to get to the point where you do have some of these race hustlers that are, saying everyone's racist. You must confront your unconscious bias. And you're just constantly hearing about it.
I think you're right that it was around 2012. BLM came into formation in 2013, I think. That was the Trayvon Martin thing. And so it's not a coincidence that it seemed like race relations in this country were improving decade after decade. They weren't perfect, but it seemed like they were pretty good. Much better than the 60s. Yeah, the 90s. I grew up in the 90s. It was not perfect, but...
I grew up in a diverse area. I went to public school. A lot of people of different ethnicities and races. We weren't talking about racism all the time. It was basically fine. And then something happened in the middle part of the first decade of the 2000s where it seemed like things started backsliding. And that's right at the time when Barack Obama was elected. And that's not a coincidence.
Like a lot of people have noticed that it's odd that we had a black president and then all of a sudden now we're having race riots again. And I think the reason is that when you elect a black president, I didn't like Obama. I didn't vote for him. I think his policies are terrible.
But you would think that at least one positive you could draw from that is that, well, at least that means that systemic racism is not a problem in this country anymore. I mean, if a black guy could rise to the top of the system and run it, then clearly the system is not racist against black people. And in fact, was overwhelmingly voted into that position by Americans.
which is true, so that is evidence that America isn't systemically racist against black people, but the race hustlers don't want us to draw that conclusion. They're worried that we'll look at Obama as president and say, okay, well, racism isn't a big issue anymore. And that's a problem for them because there's a lot of power, money and influence to be found in the racist racism narrative.
So they had to kind of like double up on their efforts to convince us that America is actually racist, which is why during Obama's term, that's when we started getting all these race hoaxes and the race riots and BLM. That's when things like people start talking about microaggressions and all this kind of nonsense because.
They needed to tell us that, yeah, you might think that this issue is kind of solved now, but it's not. Racism is actually worse than you ever imagined. It's lurking everywhere.
And now we're at a point, and then not long after that, they started tearing down Confederate Civil War monuments and stuff, stuff that's been there for like 100 years, which was always weird because 100 years ago, people could, whatever, walk by a Robert E. Lee monument and not care. It wasn't a big deal to them, black or white.
Now, all of a sudden, it's a bigger deal to us than it was to people whose parents fought. They had grandparents who fought in the Civil War or died in the Civil War. They were okay with it. And yet for us, what, the wounds of the Civil War are fresher or more raw for us than they were for people a century ago? It makes no sense. How are we less able to...
be objective and non-emotional about the Civil War than people who had family members. Ex-slaves were still living back then.
Well, I think it's because it's just like a religious ideology. Like when the Taliban started blowing up those ancient statues of Buddhas. Do you remember that? Yeah. Because like they could... They destroyed things that were a part of human history that we would have studied for thousands of years. And they destroyed them because they didn't go along with their religious ideology.
And I think part of the woke thing is this religious ideology that has to be followed. And you cannot stray from the lines. You have to stay inside whatever this ideology is promoting and telling you what to do. And one of the things was that you had to take down all these statues of terrible people.
And I remember Trump saying at the time, well, the problem with that is, like, eventually they're going to take down George Washington. And everybody thought he was crazy. Like, that's a crazy thing to say. But once they got past Civil War people, then they got to who owned slaves.
And then they got to taking down – they wanted to take down statues of Thomas Jefferson and eventually did get to George Washington.
Yeah. And that was always – it was always going to go that way because – George Washington, founding fathers owned slaves. Not only that, but they were rebels, you know, rebelling against a governmental authority. And if they had lost, then they all would have been hanged as traitors. And that's how they'd be remembered. Thankfully, they didn't.
But so there's a it's actually there's a there's a it's not that far of a leap to go from from one to the other. And, of course, the issue is that. Everybody who lived on earth prior to about, certainly prior to 100 years ago is racist by our standards today, every single one. There was no one who lived on earth 100 years ago who we would not consider racist anywhere of any race.
If you go back 200 years or earlier than that, almost everybody either owned slaves or was okay with slavery as an institution. You go back 500 years, And there was nobody on the planet who considered slavery to be wrong fundamentally.
They might have had issues with how slaves are treated in some context, but it took like thousands of years for it to ever even occur to a single human on earth that slavery is actually fundamentally wrong, which is a crazy thing. And that's actually an interesting thing you could talk about and think about. Like, why is that?
How could it be that it's so obvious to us, but some of the greatest minds of history, they never thought of it. But we can't talk about that because we have to talk about slavery and racism as if they're exclusively white Western phenomena.
Well, I've had friends that have a different perspective on the Obama situation. And my friend Willie was talking to me about this. And he was saying that what happened was when you look, one thing that we can be sure of is that race is surreal. There are real racists in this country. There's real anti-black racists, anti-Asian racists.
There's certain people that have hateful ideology in this country, just a certain percentage of them in the world. Those are real. And when Obama became president, those people became more emboldened.
And he said that he saw a lot more of that online and a lot more attacks, especially in uncensored online forums like 4chan and places where you can kind of get away with saying whatever the fuck you want. He said he saw a lot more of that on the streets.
And he said this is probably why he believed Michelle Obama didn't want to run for president, because she experienced so much of that hate while they're in the White House. Forget about hate for their policies and what you think about them as president and vice and first lady, but the racism hate.
So his perspective as a black guy was like, you had to be a black person to realize how angry people were that there was a black guy who was president, because that was real, too. It was real that racism in American racial relations in America had changed radically since the 1960s, certainly since the 1920s and 30s. And over the years, it's kept getting better. But in his mind...
there was something that happened where when Barack Obama got into the White House that the real hardcore racist got very vocal and he experienced it. And I think this is akin in some ways to what's going on with anti-Semitism online because I think there's always been a certain amount of people in this country and in the world that are like deeply anti-Semitic. And they just don't like Jews.
And when something happens where all of a sudden now it's OK to criticize Jews because of Israel's position in Gaza and what they've done, now you see anti-Semitism just pop out of the woodwork. I think there's something like that where people feel emboldened to talk about things. So maybe we just don't have an accurate account of how fucked up some people are.
But the general population, whether you're conservative or whether you're liberal, everybody kind of agrees that racism is a stupid thing. There's amazing people of all ethnicities and colors, and you should judge people, like Martin Luther King said, by the content of their character. We all agree with that. But there's a certain amount of people that are always going to be racist.
But when you start looking for it everywhere and saying everything is racist, first of all, it's an insult to real racism. It's an insult to the people that are the victims of real racism. When you consider microaggressions or cutting in line in front of you to get ice cream, there's people that are real victims of racism.
And pretending that everything is racist just minimizes that and, in fact, probably makes more people racist. It's going to make a bunch of dumb liberals drop to their knees or give you money for reparations. But it's going to make a bunch of other people really resentful. And it just polarizes us and drives people further and further apart. It's just genuinely stupid.
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. And I think that's true, what he said about— I'm sure that when there's a black president, we know there are real races out there. There are anti-black races, there are anti-white races, but they're out there. Social media was also really coming online around that time, so people had a forum to express this kind of stuff. And anonymously. Anonymously.
And so, yeah, those people come out of the woodwork. I'm sure that did happen. I don't deny that. The difference, though, is that that kind of racism is personal and individual. It's not systemic. It's not in the system. Right. And also... It's absolutely rejected by society. It's absolutely rejected by polite society.
So there's a reason why they had to go to 4chan or whatever to express those views, because you can't come out in public and say it with. And if you do, it'll be like the end of your whatever your career is. It's probably the end of it. And that's kind of that's the most you're going to when it comes. As you said, there's never going to be a time when there's no racists in the world.
So the most you can do is, okay, we're not going to have this stuff systemically. The system's going to treat everybody equally. Great. We've crossed that off the list. We've already done that. Actually, we've gone too far because we've got affirmative action where now you're discriminating against white and Asian people. So anti-black racism is out of the system. Fantastic. That's good.
It's not accepted by mainstream society. Great. And then... So that's kind of it. I mean, what else can we do with this? You can't get inside people's hearts and make them not feel things. Those people are going to be out there. They know that it's not accepted in mainstream society. And I kind of think you could sort of move on from it culturally to other issues. It's not a major issue anymore.
but they won't allow it. And you're right that then it's got this pendulum thing where, okay, well, if you go after white people and you demonize them relentlessly, and you do it practically from birth now through the school system, some of those white people are going to end up being stricken by guilt, and they're going to walk around feeling like they're guilty for something.
That's the white guilt liberal thing. But then you're going to have others who... kind of become exactly what you accuse them of being because they're like, oh, you know what? If you're going to call me racist anyway, then, you know what? Fine. And there's going to resentment that builds up and then you actually create more of it, which I think they're happy about.
If actual racism is increasing in society, I don't know if it is or not, but I think the people that call themselves anti-racist are quite happy about that.
Well, business is booming. But the other thing is, like, think about Robert D'Angelo, who you said just lives in her own bubble and really didn't know who you were and didn't catch on at any point in time that any of this stuff was ridiculous. Right. Like these people that this if that's all you think about and that's all you like.
I have friends that live in California and every now and then I'll talk to them and some politics issue will come up and they give me this fucking CNBC. They give me this MSNBC, this fucking propaganda viewpoint on something that's so wrong, just so. And I just go, OK, I can't like you're you're in.
in your bubble there's no there's no real discourse there's no real there's no discussions about whether or not what these people are saying is correct it's just you're a part of this tribe and this is what you believe and I think that's the case with these anti-racist people too. Some of them might be like just hardcore grifters.
Like they could be playing three-card money or they could just get corporations to give them money by saying that everybody's racist. There's some people that are definitely like that. But there's other people that are just – that's their friend group. Like that's their social circle.
Their social circles, all people believe this stupid shit and they all yap it to each other and they say it like it's a mantra and they pray five times a day with it. You know, it's really like a religious thing.
I think it is like a – yeah, I think you're exactly right about that. That's why for me the more – So the grifters that are getting paid, that's not that complicated to figure out why they're doing it. They're getting paid. A lot of them. A lot of them are. And even when they're not, there's still power and influence. And they're being consulted as kind of these moral gurus, which strokes the ego.
100%.
That's rewarding. The more interesting thing is what about the people who go to those people? and consult them as moral gurus. I mean, in the movie we have this race to dinner where you got these white women who sit around a table and they invite these other two women, Cyber Rao and Regina Jackson, to come to dinner. They pay them to come to dinner and call them racist for two hours.
And it's like, why would you subject yourself to that? It seems like the most miserable experience to volunteer to be broken down and insulted and degraded, which is what happened to these women. I mean, I saw it. It's like two hours of them just getting... You're racist. You're racist. You're racist. They go around the table, confess their racist sins.
And then they all each go and they say what their racist sin, like, what's a racist thing you've done recently? They all confess. And I'm listening to it. It's like none of you have actually done anything racist. I listen to all your stories. None of that is racist. There's a woman who said that she's married to a black guy and she. Yeah. He's loud and she tells him to quiet down sometimes.
What wife has not said that to their husband?
Exactly. I get that once a month.
Right. I think my wife is racist. She could be. She could be. She's racist against me.
She sucks us against me.
So what are they getting out of it?
Well, they're getting out of it, first of all, they're terrified of being called racists. So they jump the gun. So they headed off at the path. Like, I'm going to make sure I'm not racist. So I'm going to become an anti-racist.
You know, I talked about this before, but when my kids were young, like my youngest was pretty young when they started doing this anti-racism thing at the school where they said it's not enough to be not – this was actually right after we left. So it was right after like the George Floyd things popped off. They said it's not good enough to not be racist. You have to be anti-racist.
You're talking about some of these kids – in that school are six like what are you saying it's not enough what what are you saying you saying a six-year-old has to be an anti-racist can't they just play with their toys can't they just go to the park and hang out with their friends can't they just play sports can't they just enjoy each other six-year-olds don't give a fuck what color somebody is
They don't. They all just play together. They just want to play with the people who are nice to them and who they have fun with and laugh with. And here you've got some fucking grifter who latches themselves onto some school system that's filled with all these terrified liberals that are just terrified of being called out for anything. And all the rules are changing and everybody's like, oh!
And so they bend the knee.
They bend the knee. And with kids, it's so insidious because... Yeah. Kids don't care about race. They notice it, though, which is fine. But then you give them like this complex from such a young age, which is so unnecessary. And that's why I mean, I remember when my oldest daughter was five, we were at the mall or something and a black family walked by and she pointed at them and said, what?
Why are people black? Why is their skin like that? She wanted to know, why does skin color exist? How do some people have different skin color than other people? And of course, I told her, to be polite, we don't point at people in public, so I told her that. But then we talked about it. It's okay to wonder that. It's okay to notice that.
I think with these anti-racist people, if I was listening to them, I should have... This would have been an opportunity for me to give her a whole lecture about racism and make her feel really bad for noticing that and asking about it. Yeah. And then you create this complex. And yeah, fast forward 20 years and she's one of these women at a race to dinner. Exactly. Yeah. It's awful.
But it's a very potent thing. I mean, white guilt, the fear of being called racist. It's hard for me to understand because... I get called racist all the time, 50,000 times a day. And it just rolls off my back. I don't care because it's just... It doesn't mean anything anymore. It doesn't mean anything. But for you and I, it doesn't mean anything.
But for a lot of normal people, especially... It's a death sentence. Right. To be called that is the worst thing in the world.
Yeah.
They're terrified of it. They'd literally rather be called anything than racist. Yeah. And then... So for them, once you... Those kinds of people... When that's the threat, when being called racist is a threat, you can get them to do anything.
Spoilers or whatever, but the last thing in the movie when I do my own anti-racist workshop with these people, and they're all real people, and we get them to join in on some things that are really morally repugnant. Because they're terrified of being called racist publicly. They can't stand that thought.
And the other thing that happens with kids is... If you have a thing like you're telling the kid they have to be anti-racist, well, some kids are going to use that as a platform to increase whatever social cred that they have. And they get feedback from it. It's positive feedback. And they get very vocal. And the more vocal, the more people are impressed.
And the more work they do, the more people are going, you're doing great work. And then you get what's essentially like the racial version of Greta Thunberg. Like, what is that lady? That lady's moral outrage at what have you done? How dare you? And everybody's like, yes, we like what you just did. And so now you do it all the time.
And so now somehow or another, a 16-year-old kid travels all over the world telling everybody they're bad. Flying around in jets, telling everybody they're bad for ruining the environment. And she gets to feel... Morally superior, morally superior, virtuous. And for a child to be in a position where they become virtuous is, you know, they love that. They love that.
To be in a position where they can lecture adults.
Yes.
Or adults are looking to them as authorities.
Yes. College kids love to do that. The moment they're out of their house, the moment they don't have their parents telling them what to do anymore, now they can tell other people what to do. And it's just like – it's one thing that you see online from people who have been bullied in the past.
Um, the people that have been picked on and fucked with, boy, they like to do it to people like online on Twitter mobs. They like to jump in. And I know a lot of people that have, that I've known a lot of people that have engaged in these things. I've, I know them personally, these feeble, weak, terrified men.
And they say the most heinous things about people like uncharitable, not knowing like what, what kind of response these words are going to have in that person. Um, And they bully these people because they've been hurt. You know, it's that hurt people hurt people thing. That's what it is. But they don't think it's as bad as bullying like in real life. Bullying is terrible.
You're going to hit somebody? How dare you, you fucking monster. Well, you're emotionally scarring people online every day. And you think you're doing it through this. It's like one of the things, Elon's talked about this, that one of the things that woke does, it allows really mean people. This ideology allows really mean people.
really mean shitty people to have a virtuous way of expressing that yeah i think that's that's right and also the internet i mean the whole idea that the internet isn't real we hear it all the time that's why i hate when people say uh well twitter isn't real life but and i understand what's meant by that when people say that but it actually is real life because
These are human beings who are communicating with each other. Now, there are bots, too. But if you're a human being on Twitter saying something, that's real life. It's not fake. This isn't happening in some kind of dream world. Right. But then people think that, well, okay, if I just say this on Twitter, I put it in a YouTube comment section, and it's this heinous, awful thing. It doesn't count.
It doesn't mean I'm a bad person because it's not real life. Which is like, that's like... Writing on a loose-leaf paper, calling someone a piece of shit and handing it to them, and then they get mad at you, and you say, hey, man, it's the paper. It's not real life. It just happened on the paper. It's a method for communicating. And so I think people have been...
Condition that in this world it's like a moral exception so you can do and say whatever you want and you don't have to feel bad about it. Right. And it turns people into sociopaths after a while I think.
I think it does too. And I also think it ramps up anxiety in a huge way for the people that are actually engaging in it. The people that actually do it, I think they're just fully anxious all day long. And I think it's terrible for mental health. Even if you're like quote unquote winning these verbal battles online that you're engaging in, I think it's terrible for everybody.
It's really terrible for the people that are just like all day long negative. Like there's an arguing with people. Like why do you want that in your life? That's a very unusual position to be in where all day long you're in conflict. That's only war. Yeah. In the real world, most of the day, there's no conflict. That's why conflict is so uncomfortable, because it's so unusual.
If you're used to conflict with people all the time, and you see some guy, and he's like, fuck you. No, fuck you. But if you're not used to someone saying, fuck you, and then all of a sudden, hey, fuck you, and you're like, what? Like, you're terrified. You're freaked out. Like, what's going on? Oh, my God, this is conflict.
The kind of conflict, verbal conflict, that people engage in online all day long has the same sort of effects on your psyche. You are perceiving the world to be this. This is one of the things that's so polarizing about this particular election, right?
That people are willing to accept propaganda because it feeds into their view of the world, which is that they're engaged in this moral battle, good versus evil. And both sides think they're good, and both sides think the other side is going to be the end of the world. And it's accentuated heavily by mentally ill people that are on Twitter all day long.
Yeah, I'm one of them. You seem fine. But, I mean, I am guilty of some of this. I do. I'm on it way too much, first of all. But then I have my excuse, which is it's part of my job. It's part of your job. I do often think if I didn't do this for a living at all, I don't think I'd be on any of this stuff. I think I'd be off everything.
If I was not a quote-unquote public figure, I would be off everything.
Because I don't know if you have a problem. If I go on vacation or something and I'm taking time, I have no issue putting it down. I have no compulsion to look at it. In fact, I have to, when I come off vacation, it's effort to get back. It's like, okay, I got to get back into this again. It takes me a couple days. Then after a couple days, now it's a compulsion again.
But I have to reignite this weird compulsion to constantly look at my phone.
I have a problem, too, in that I'm a comedian and that I'm also a gold miner, right? So what that means is when I'm going through my news feed, my news feed is the thing I'm the most addicted to. I'm mining for gold. Like, what's going on here? What'd they do? They did what? They fucking what? And I need those. Those are really important to me because, like, those can be my next hour of stand-up.
Those can be—they're chunks. And it's not every day. It's like I can go through 30 days of nonsense and just not one thing. But every now and then, there's a chunk of gold in there. I'm like, oh, I got one. And then I put that in my notes, and I justify endless scrolling to get to those gold nuggets.
But if you didn't do any of this for a living, if you just worked at Lowe's or something, do you think you'd still be – The problem is I'd still be me, and I still have this –
really intense curiosity i'm really curious about all kinds of things there's so many subjects i'm really really interested in i mean i would i would for sure still be paying attention to you know science issues and space travel and you know new discoveries and the universe and there's a bunch of stuff that i would just be ancient history ancient civilizations i would be there's no way i would not be fascinated by them because they almost have nothing to do with my job
Yeah, I think I think I would be the same, but I don't think I'd feel the need to. I would like to absorb all that interesting information, but I wouldn't feel the need to say, hey, world, here's what I think about this.
Right.
I would just absorb it.
The problem is if you do and you do it just once and then you get feedback and then people say, hey, I really like what you posted. Oh, great. And then and then all of a sudden you're connected and then you're like looking for this feedback. So you're trying to post things to get likes and you're trying to post things to get reposts and get comments and you're engaging in the comments.
And now now it's now you're fucked. Now you're locked into this weird ecosystem with these people you don't even know. They might be all stupid. They might be all really annoying people that you would avoid in real life. Like if you work with them, you're like, oh, there's Tom. Let me get the fuck out of here. And you go to the other side of the office. But now you're engaging with them.
People that you avoid having conversations with, you are now in mortal combat with words on Twitter. And it's fucking stupid.
And not only that, but their engagement with you is cheap.
they don't care that much so even if someone gives you positive feedback and they say oh that was a great tweet they've forgotten about it two seconds later right you're just they're just scrolling you're just the latest thing they saw and they're scrolling and they've already forgotten about it they don't care if they cuss you out because they're mad at you same deal they forgot about it two seconds later so yeah i guess it could be kind of intoxicating intoxicating to get the engagement but then it doesn't matter and that's one of the
That's one of the things that makes it so toxic is how sort of like nihilistic it all is. That's why... This never was an issue before, but now I feel like when I go on social media, I'm constantly seeing these horrific videos of people dying, like snuff films are all over social media now. It feels like a relatively recent development. And... That's really horrible what it does.
I don't even think we quite understand what it's doing to our minds. I actually think we are all traumatized from it. I don't use the word trauma loosely. But what's traumatizing is not only are you seeing somebody die, but it's a context. It's like you see this horrible video. Someone just got shot. And then you keep scrolling. And a second later, you're.
reading something about whatever, you know, a celebrity news or you're watching a cat video.
Right.
So it's like this, it's this horrific human thing that happened. But for you, it's just content. You absorb it that way. Um, And I don't know, after a while of just absorbing human suffering in this way, it's got to mess with your mind. Of course it does.
I mean, you're the product of what you take in, even if that information is, like, low impact. It's not the same impact as being there when the hitmen show up and gun the guys down in front of the cafe. I've seen these videos where it's just mass shootings. This one video I saw the other day of some gang violence situation.
These guys drove by, gunned these guys down, and then the guys started shooting back, and they were all shot while they're shooting back. Then the car backs up, and then they gunned them down more. It's fucking crazy. But it's not the same as being there. If you were there, that would haunt you for the rest of your life.
If you were across the street and you watched that happen, you watched these people die, it would haunt you for the rest of your life. But you get a little blip. Instead of getting a 100% dose, you get a little 1% dose. A little 1% dose. And you get them all day long. And by the end of the day, you're just like, what the fuck is the world?
Yeah. But it's a thing. It kind of should haunt you for the rest of your life.
Right. It's a horrible thing to see. But it's like Twitter in that it's not a full experience. If you were having the kind of exchanges that some people have with each other where they're just ruthlessly insulting and shitty to people, if you were having those in person, there's a high probability that that's going to lead to violence. Actual violence.
Like if two men are in a room and one man starts insulting this other person like really like viciously and talking about their life and their family and all kinds of crazy shit that people do online. There's a probability. It's more than zero percent that this is going to result in violence. But there's zero possibility of it online. It's just it's just free. It's a free shot.
And that's a part of the problem as well, is that it's not a real human interaction. So you're getting like these little doses of shittiness from people, but you're not getting this one burst where you and this guy are about to throw down because he's like he's insulting you to the point where like this person is actually dangerous. Like this is actually this person hates me.
Like this could be a real bad situation here. And I think much like that exists on Twitter where you have these little shitty interactions, it's like 1% of real hate and it just adds up over time. That's the same thing as seeing violence, seeing all these executions, seeing all these botched robberies, seeing all these people that get murdered in some third world country.
You just get a little tiny piece of it all the time and it normalizes it. It's probably really, really bad for us.
Do you pay attention to what people say about you online? No. You never search for Joe Rogan? Nope. Never? Nope. Shouldn't do it. Yeah. It's not good for you. I'll admit that I've done it on occasion. It's just... It's nothing but... If you want to just destroy your self-image, you can do it pretty quickly.
Well, that's what they want. That's what people want to do when they say things like that. Like this is my opinion. And a lot of it is like really out of line. Like a lot of it is just like the worst possible – like I said before, like the least charitable takes, the least nuanced, this ridiculous caricature of a human being just to try to –
Just to try to demonize them to make yourself look virtually or virtuously Superior, it's just dumb. It's a dumb way for people to communicate and the kind of people that do it are all losers Yeah, there's no like really exceptional fascinating people that engage in that kind of stuff Well the thing that gets me I don't mind when people insult me.
I don't care I'm used to it. It's the lies like when I see something about myself That's just a straight up lie. Totally made up. And then it picks up traction and people are, sometimes it could be, you know, even someone photoshopping a tweet that I never said or whatever, anything. That stuff still, still like bothers me. And it, and then I try to tell myself, well, it shouldn't bother me.
But at the same time it should, it's like, it's normal for a person to be bothered by when you're being lied about and other people are believing a lie, I think it's a normal human reaction that I'm like, I don't want, that's not fair. It's not true. You know, you can attack me for things that I really have said and done, but that's, you can't do that. That's not true.
But then at a certain point, you just have to sort of give into it and realize this is the way the internet works, I guess.
Well, it's also who knows who's doing it. And at this point in time, we have to accept the reality of propaganda. And that there, you know, we've talked about this ad nauseum, but I'll say it again. There was an FBI former analyst did some sort of a study on Twitter where he was estimating the amount of bots versus this is like right around the time when Elon was saying that it's more than 5%.
He said he thinks it's about 80%. He thinks 80% of the accounts. Yeah. 80% of the accounts are fake accounts. which just stop and think about if you're in a country, okay? Let's imagine you want the politics of America to swing in a certain direction because we most certainly do this in other countries.
I mean, we don't have to educate people on the long history of interventionist foreign policy where we have gone in and installed new leaders of countries and organized all kinds of shit. So we do it and we do it and we know they do it. But isn't it like the cheapest way to do it? Wouldn't it be to do it on social media? Yeah. And if you did it, why would you do it with one account?
Why wouldn't you have a million accounts? I would have a million accounts. You just gotta get a computer that keeps making new accounts. And you run a program, it's not the most difficult thing to do. For people that know how to actually code operating systems, you don't think there's someone out there that can code a computer program
that can operate millions of different Twitter accounts, and you run it through some sort of AI that you've developed, some large language model on things to say about MAGA, or things to say about abortion, or things to say about conservatives, or things to say about liberals, and you put a fucking American flag in your little bio, or you put a pronoun thing, he, her, zee, zur, whatever it is, and then you just flood the internet with fake anger.
and fake discourse, and you lie about people, and you, anytime there's a post about anything controversial, you insert something in there that gets people even more riled up, you could get people, you could swing the vote. You could swing the vote in one way or another, especially with fence-sitters, with people that are not sure, like, I don't know, is Trump really the answer?
And then you get online, and you see all this hateful shit, or you might get on a MAGA forum, and you go, oh, they are eating cats. He was telling the truth. ABC's biased. And you could swing it one way or the other. And I think they're all trying to manipulate it.
All these foreign governments, and I think internally in the United States, I'm sure there are groups that are doing it too, that are manipulating things in one way or the other in a disingenuous way because it's available. And I don't know how to stop it. I think the only way for you to not personally be really... affected by it is you have to understand that it exists.
And then you have to recognize that, you know, some of these takes are not even real human beings. So instead of saying, Jesus Christ, people would think that way, go, maybe not. Like maybe this isn't, maybe there's a few people that think that way, but you're being led to believe that it's a huge movement of people. When it might not be.
But the problem is when it even if it's fake, people are so stupid that even if it's a fake thing that becomes a bit of a movement online with fake dumb people will jump in there and then it'll become a real thing. Yeah. Like you're aware of the the free bleeding movement that 4chan pushed. Yeah, I think I heard of that.
It became kind of real, didn't it?
It became real. That's what I'm saying. Or flat Earth is the same thing. It became a joke. People were fucking around at first. We've known the Earth has not been flat for a long-ass time. But now that's totally real. Now it's totally real. Now there's massive groups of people that think the Earth is flat. Which isn't. I can't. I can't. I don't know how that – yeah. Yeah, you can't.
But the thing is that's how dumb people are, that you can have a fake thing and say it enough times and enough people jump in and be on board with it, and then it becomes a real thing. And then you don't even have to use propaganda anymore. These morons are doing it for you.
The thing that gets me about the Flat Earth thing is – because I didn't realize that it was a real thing until, I don't know, a few years ago. I did – I wrote – I posted something about it. And all these comments from real people that – what gets me is – well, you have the people that say, yeah, I think the Earth's flat. And that's – you're just really stupid.
But I was more fascinated by the, like, 80 percent of people who – 80 percent of the flat Earth crowd. 80 percent of them, their take was, well, I'm not saying the Earth is flat. but I'm open to it. So I'm open to the possibility. I get it if you're just completely stupid and you got sucked into this cult thing, but what I don't get is how can you be on the fence about the shape of the earth?
Well, it's just people that really are not educated. That's number one. And people that believe that there's a collusion that's so large that all of the space agencies from Japan, from China, from Russia, all of them are liars. That all of them are colluding together to hide the true shape of the earth.
Because if we really knew the earth is flat, then it always is connected to some sort of a Bible thing. Like it's the firmament and they believe that we're hiding the fact that God is real. And somehow there's some mass conspiracy that all these world governments and every person that ever was involved in the space agencies, they've all hid from us.
Yeah. And the moon landing, you're not a – you believe in the moon landing, right?
I used to believe in the moon landing. You don't anymore? I had a joke in my act about it, that before COVID, I would have told you vaccines are the most important invention in human history. And after COVID, I'm like, I don't think we went to the moon. Yeah, I know that was in your – but do you actually think that? I think there is a less than zero possibility that we did not go to the moon.
Oh, my gosh. I know. Why do you think we went to the moon?
Because it's exactly what you just said about – well, there's a lot of reasons, but – The main thing is what you just said about the earth, the the the vastness of the conspiracy that would be required to fake that. It's so vast that it's just it's it's a lot more incredible to believe that we faked it than to believe that we just went and go into the moon. Don't get it's a massive achievement.
But I think the greatest human achievement of all time. But even so, to fake it would be even more massive because not only would you need all of these space agencies and all the different whatever people in American institutions to be colluding, but you'd also need foreign governments, including adversarial foreign governments, who at this point certainly would know we faked it.
and for some reason haven't blown the lid on it. So they're letting us take this achievement that they know. Why haven't the Russians come out and said... All those things you're saying are true.
I don't argue with any of the things you're saying. But one of the things that I think you have to consider was... If it's not possible for human beings to safely go through the Van Allen radiation belts and out into deep space without much protection and face the temperatures that are on the surface of the moon, which get up to 250 degrees and 250 degrees below zero in the shadows.
There's no environment there. It's hostile beyond belief. Micrometeorites are flying into the moon all the time. They're flying through space all the time. We've never had a single biological organism go out into deep space, pass the Van Allen radiation belts, and then come back to Earth and come back alive, except human beings during the Apollo missions.
Every single space station mission, every single space shuttle mission, All of them are inside 350 miles from the Earth's surface. The only time human beings have ever been past that and through the Van Allen radiation belts was the Apollo missions. And we were the only humans that were ever able to do that. The Russians never figured out how to do it.
No one else figured out how to do it but the Apollo astronauts. And we did it seven times, six successfully from 1969 to 1972. If you said to me, do you think that they could fake the moon landing today? I would say no. I would say no, no, no, no. People are going to be able to track it. It's very easy. They have satellites. They're going to know everything.
But in 1969, the technology was so crude that when they first showed the Apollo 11 landing – They didn't even show a direct feed to the networks. So like if you're on CBS News, you don't get a direct feed. What you do is you point a camera at a projection screen. So that's why the film looks so shitty.
The camera is pointed to a projection screen where you see the astronauts jumping around on the moon. And you see this weird, grainy, third-generation image, right? And we did it, and we have never done it since. And we've always said we're going to do it, and no one's ever even come close. No one's ever even gone into deep space since 1972. We also haven't been trying. We haven't been trying.
But we always talk about going back, including Herbert Walker Bush talked about going back. George W. talked about going back. They all talk about going back, but nobody ever gets anywhere. Right.
Well, I think that's because we lost the spirit and hunger for discovery.
We didn't just lose that. We lost all the technology from the Saturn V rocket. They don't even have that anymore. In fact, they don't even have the original film. They erased all the original footage of the Apollo missions. So you just have copies of everything.
You could develop the technology again. You can do all that. Sure you could.
If you can get through the Van Allen radiation belts into deep space with human beings and have them safely come back.
But I think what you're describing to me, all that does is highlight how incredible the achievement was. If they did it. Right. If they did it. Well, here's the main point. There's no evidence. Because saying that it was a hoax... is an assertion of... You're not just denying an event. You're asserting a whole other event that you say happened instead.
And there is evidence that we went to the moon. Now, someone who's a skeptic might say it's not enough evidence or it's not good evidence. There's, like, evidence. There's eyewitness... There's people that went and came back and told us. There's footage. There's a lot. There is evidence. But there's no evidence of the hoax. Like, no one has come and said, here's my affirmative evidence
evidence that this hoax happened, it's never happened, as far as I'm aware. No one's ever provided that evidence.
I see what you're trying to say. The evidence that they went to the moon, there's a bunch, right? There's moon rocks, that's one. There's lunar reflectors that they placed on the moon, that's another. And there's a couple problems with those. First of all, the Soviets put laser reflectors on the moon as well.
And also the moon itself, in many places where you shine lasers on it, it bounces back by itself. The reflective quality of the moon, the reason why the moon is so bright and white in the sky when the sun hits it, you get a certain amount of bounce back off of different things with lasers. Um, there's some photographs that are interesting. What was it? Was the India?
What was the one where they got the most high resolution photos of the lander?
I'm looking at a Wikipedia right now of all third party evidence of the Apollo mission.
One of the things that's interesting is they gave a moon rock to, um, was it a prime minister of Holland? Is that what it was? Which one was the moon rock they gave that turned out to be petrified wood? So the Apollo astronauts gave a moon rock to some foreign dignitary, and it turned out to be a piece of petrified wood.
They do have samples of moon rocks that came from the moon, but we also have those on Earth. In fact, Wernher von Braun in 1968, I believe, went to Antarctica. There's all these photographs of him in Antarctica. Antarctica is a great place to take moon rocks because Antarctica is just this gigantic sheet of white, and you can spot the meteorites in the ground. So this is the photo.
This is from what? What is this from? What is the – so this is an – yeah, Indian Space Research Organization's – I don't know how to say that word – Shandipur. Chandrayaan-2 orbiter captured images of NASA's Apollo 11 and 12 landing sites and lunar modules from 100-kilometer altitude. Apollo 12 image astronaut boots tracks are still even visible.
Due to the recent interest in another post I shared, I decided to download and view the raw imagery. So that looks like there's some kind of thing on the moon. Pretty good evidence. It is evidence that something's on the moon. It's not evidence that human beings went to the moon. See, we have things that are on the moon. We have things on Mars right now.
We had things that were – we'd shot things into space for sure.
Yeah. But it's evidence.
It's not proof in and of itself, but it is evidence. Listen, I'm not saying we didn't go to the moon. What I'm saying is the subject is complex. And it's not even a little complex. It's really complex. Yeah. There's a documentary called The Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon.
This guy Bart Sebrell, he was a guest on the show too, been obsessed about this his whole life and absolutely believes that we never went to the moon. And there's enough shit that you go, okay, if he's right about any of these things, it's weird.
One of the things was some of the photographs of the moon, they ran through one of those AI detectors that can tell you whether or not something's false or artificially generated. And it showed different images from, I think it was a Chinese satellite of the moon. They said this is legitimate. But then it got to these Apollo images and they said these have been doctored. Who said that?
This AI program.
All the images or a few of them? A few of them. But then other ones were found to be authentic.
I don't think so. I think they only ran a few images through. See if you can find those, Jamie. Find what they did. Again, this is not saying that we didn't go to the moon. It could be. And this was a fact with the Gemini 15 program where Michael Collins – there was a photograph of Michael Collins that they took in one of his –
One of his training exercises where he had those packs that they put on where they can move around while they're doing moonwalks. Not moonwalks, spacewalks outside of a – where they're connected by a tether. And he was like in this harness and manipulating this device.
And what they had done is taken a photograph of him training and then someone, probably some overzealous PR person, had taken that photograph and then blacked out the background and – tried to pass it off as a really clear photograph of him out there on a spacewalk, which is probably very difficult to get, right? You'd have to have another person at the camera frame it, right? They had this photo.
They're like, look, he did it. Let's just pass this off as the real thing, which is, you know, you're also talking about the Nixon administration where they were just full of shit constantly.
If you remember, this is where he tried to claim it was from, which is a Russian video.
Yeah. So there's different video where they ran it through and they said it was real. Was it a Chinese program? But when they ran the American ones, the American images, they said that they were doctored. Again, it doesn't mean that we didn't go to the moon, but it does mean, okay, there's that. That's weird. Have you ever seen the Apollo 11 post-flight press conference? No. Yeah.
It looks like a hostage video. Looks like a bunch of guys who don't want to be there. They look real fucking nervous and they look real deceptive. If you watch that video, it's weird.
Well, but I think that's just that's the temperament it requires to do something like that. Could be. It's basically it's almost suicidal to go to the right. And so you have to be like not barely even a human being. psychologically to do it. So that to me is just like, and they just went through this whole experience, but who knows what that does to the human psyche.
To even just be in the vastness of space, even on the space station, I feel like that would change me as a person.
Not necessarily for the best. Well, there's actually like a psychological condition that they talk about, this sort of understanding that we're all connected. It's like akin to a religious experience that many astronauts get when they go up to the space station and look down at the Earth and go, oh, my God, what are we doing?
Like we're all together in this thing and we're so alone in the universe. And for us to be fighting over these trivial differences and these stupid lines in the dirt that we draw when we are like just clinging to this ball in the middle of everything.
So then what would you say, or someone who is a full-on believer.
Not a full-on believer.
Someone who is a full-on believer in the moon hoax. What would they say to my other point that there is evidence we went to the moon. You can try to nitpick the evidence. There is zero evidence of a hoax because that's a whole other event that would have had to have happened. There is no evidence at all, not one sliver of evidence ever of that hoax having ever happened.
But I think that's a weird way to frame it, right? Is there evidence of a hoax of the JFK assassination that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone? Do you think there's evidence? Well, but the event itself being that JFK was killed happened. Right, but that's not the conspiracy. So the conspiracy is, did he act alone? And is there evidence that he didn't act alone? What do you think?
I'm very skeptical that he acted alone.
Yeah. Right. I don't know exactly what happened. Nobody does. Exactly. Same exact perspective. Same exact perspective about this moon thing. Like it may have happened, but this was a time of deep deception in the American world. This is a time after Operation Northwoods. This is a time after the Kennedy assassination. This is a time.
I mean, this is a weird fucking shaky time in terms of propaganda. This is after Eisenhower warned about the military industrial complex. This is like there was a lot of deception. Gulf of Tonkin incident. There's a lot of open deception. that the American people were being subject to. And then there's this Cold War between us and Russia, this space war for superiority.
We wanted it so bad, we brought in Nazis.
But I mean, the JFK is an interesting example. Because yes, there are things that I'm skeptical of that are claimed. I don't really have evidence that the thing didn't happen or that it didn't happen the way they say, but I'm still skeptical. So I get that. But it feels different to me because the JFK assassination did happen. The question is, how did it happen?
But if we're going to assert that a major historical event, probably the greatest, the most significant historical event in history over one of them did not happen at all. No one did it.
Then, like I said, that's so what you're actually claiming is that some other thing this this they went somewhere and they pulled off this hoax and they planned it and they did like an event happened where they were faking it. Right. And so what I would want to see. Has anybody come out, any whistleblower ever, to say, hey, I was involved in the shoot or I'm in Hollywood.
I talked to a guy who was there.
Well, that's not even evidence. Real evidence would be some sort of documentation, some sort of a way to go over – There's a binary code that shows the distance between the Earth and the lunar module at every stage of the journey. But that's missing. That stuff's missing. All the tracking data, they can't find it. All the original footage is missing.
And that could just be people are really bad with historical items. That's possible. But to say that... faking the moon landing would be a bigger achievement than actually going to the moon. I would say only if people could actually go to the moon. So here's the question.
Can we really, everyone wants to dismiss it, can we really send a biological entity into space, go through that radiation, which is thick, covering the earth, and have it come back alive? Well, supposedly... This is the only time people had done it. And supposedly the way they did it was by going through the top area of the of the earth where the Van Allen radiation belts.
It's like kind of like a donut that surface that covers the earth. It's not uniform. And there's an area at the top where you can go out. But according to Bart Sabrell, they didn't go that way because he would have had to launch from Antarctica to do that. It's not really possible that that happened, that they went that way.
So he thinks that if they did go through that, there is no other examples of living things that have done that and come back alive. And they've known that this is an issue. They've known that this Van Allen radiation belts, which is this band of heavy radiation that covers the earth and protects us. They've known that it's out there because they tried to blow it up once.
There was a thing called Operation Starfish Prime where they launched one of several nuclear bombs into the radiation belt to try to blow a hole through it. When did that happen? 67 maybe? It was Starfish Prime. But it did the opposite effect. Why did they do that? They wanted to see what happens. Shits and giggles? Well, they had so much power.
And, you know, you've got nuclear bombs and you can't blow people up, but you're still doing studies. So they're doing tests all throughout Nevada. I mean, that's what killed John Wayne. John Wayne got cancer because he was working on a set doing a Western. right next to where they were blowing up nuclear bombs. Like 200 people on the set got cancer.
Starfish Prime, high altitude nuclear test conducted by the United States, a joint effort of the Atomic Energy Commission and the Defense Atomic Support Agency, July 9th, 1962. So this is like while Kennedy was in office. They were trying to figure out how to, we will get to the moon, not in this decade, but in the other, or whatever he said. High altitude nuclear test.
So the thing it did, unfortunately, was it supercharged the bands and it made it have much more radiation. Not only that, it blew out power in some parts of Hawaii, I think. I think it cooked a few satellites, right? We talked about this the other day. It cooked a few satellites.
Okay, so can I ask this, though? Do we have examples? We're saying, well, we don't know if a human can go through the... I would say, well, we do know because they did.
If they did. Well... Listen, we know they sent people into near-Earth orbit. That's a fact.
Well, how do we know that if we don't know?
Because we actually can see that. We can see where they launched. You can follow the trajectory. You can know about the propulsion units that they used. You know about what they were trying to accomplish. And you can watch it.
So my question is, have we tried to send humans through the radiation belt and not been able to? Has that happened?
They never even tried that. They just did it. Right. That's what's even crazier.
So how do we know they did it?
The last time they did it was 1972. You don't think that's a little weird? Not really. No, no, no, no. Listen, listen. Even if they did go to the moon, let's say, I'll say they went to the moon. It's fucking weird. Everything from 1969 is easier, cheaper, and faster to reproduce today, except the moon landing, except space travel. I just don't think there's a will.
But we thought, what? I don't think there's a will.
Do you know how much fucking resources there is on the moon? Do you know how many valuable minerals are on the moon? And trillions of dollars of things that are very difficult to find in the United States are on the moon?
I don't think the people... In the 1960s, the American people cared deeply about going to the moon.
I don't think that these days – I think we should care about that, but most people don't care about – If we found out that we didn't have to dig for lithium, that we could just go to the moon and pull giant chunks of it out and not have slave labor and no one has to feel bad about using your iPhone, you don't think that they would do that? Of course they would do that if they could.
If you could have a mining station on the moon, no problem at all, totally safe, of course they would do that. It only takes two weeks to get there. People mine in northern territories. People mine in Canada in these horrible conditions, fucking freezing cold out.
But it probably takes a lot of time to get to a point where you can do that consistently.
Right, but it's so valuable. I know. The idea that they wouldn't do that and they haven't done anything even remotely close to that since 1972 is weird. I agree that it's...
I mean, weird makes it sound necessarily nefarious. I think it's... No, just weird.
It's very unusual. It's unusual technologically. It's incongruent. It's incongruent with technological progression. We have that with everything else. Everything else. Phones are in your fucking pocket now, and they have more computing power than the entire cluster that they used to launch the Apollo program. The Apollo program was a fucking giant room full of computers.
Your phone is significantly more powerful than that. Everything else got better except that. We thought that people were going to be going to space all the time. You ever watch that TV show Space 1999 when you were a kid? No. You're younger than me. There was a stupid show called Space 1999, and they thought, boy, by 1999, we'll be flying around spaceships and people will be living on the moon.
Every time they've done in the past, like after the moon landings, every time they did any sort of science fiction movie, it always involved colonies already established on the moon and on Mars and people traveling. Because we thought that was going to happen. Orville and Wilbur Wright, right? Think about the launch of the first airplane.
And then the launch of the Apollo program, it's only like 60 years. It's kind of crazy. The launch of the first airplane ever and dropping nuclear bombs out of an airplane is only like, what is it, 50 years? I think it's something kooky. Yeah. 50, 60 years. That's nuts.
I agree.
But then now you have supersonic jets like 100 years later. Now you have insane capabilities of like Air Force fighter jets. unbelievable power and maneuverability far beyond anything anybody would have possibly imagined when Orville and Wilbur had that stupid fucking bird-looking flimsy thing. So everything progresses technologically, except...
Well, but here's what I would say to that.
Except traveling to other planets.
I would say two things. Number one, I think that it does take... Yeah, we're kind of spoiled by the fact that there was this burst of incredible technological advancement. In everything. In everything.
In automobiles.
It doesn't necessarily... Not every facet of technology is going to continue at that pace forever into an infinity. So I think it does take... especially if you take a historical perspective, a longer-term historical perspective. It just takes a while to get from one thing to the next. It hasn't even been that long. I mean, 1969 was not that long ago from the historical perspective.
And especially if you want to do the next thing. I mean, what's the next thing? The next thing is to go to Mars. Most people agree. That's so much far exponentially farther away and harder to do. Sure. And so if that takes if it takes decades more to figure out how to do that, that doesn't seem that crazy to me.
And the second thing I'll say is that I do think I get your point about resources on the moon. There's a reason to go back. I agree. You know. practically speaking.
But it's just true that it requires a society that deeply values exploration for its own sake and is willing to make the sacrifices, is willing to send people off to do things just for the sake of exploration, knowing that they might die. I think we have almost no appetite for that now. Maybe the Challenger explosion was... You could point to that as the time when we sort of just...
We have no appetite for people. We don't want people to die for this anymore. I see what you're saying.
Here's the problem with what you're saying. The American people don't get a say in whether or not we do things. They don't get a say in whether or not we make a space shuttle. They don't get to decide whether or not we establish a new space station. No one talks about it. They just do it. We barely get a say in how much money goes to Ukraine.
Yeah, but it's got to be funded.
Right, but how much is funded to go to Ukraine? All of a sudden, they had $175 billion plus to fund this proxy war. Who decided that? It wasn't the American people.
It wasn't. But unfortunately, but politicians are the ones who decide it. People vote for those politicians. And unfortunately, there are a lot of Americans who are basically OK with sending money to Ukraine, which they shouldn't be. It's insane. I agree with you.
But what my point is, is that if you had a skillful politician who got on television and explained that we have found a solution to all of our energy problems and it's mining on the moon. And through this mining on the moon, we are going to increase the overall way of life for every single human being on on America's soil. We are going to raise everybody above the poverty level.
There'll be no impoverished people because we have literally found trillions of dollars. And very, very valuable minerals. And by using our United States taxpayer funds to fund this program and to finance it, we are going to allow the entire country to share in some of this wealth. And we're going to change energy distribution and consumption in this country in an incredible way.
It's going to be beneficial to everybody. And it's going to make a bunch of people really rich, too. But it's going to change the quality of life for every person in this country. And this is how we're going to do it. Everybody will be on board.
Yeah, but nobody's made that case, really.
Right, but you could make that case with the amount of minerals and the amount of valuable resources you can get, not just from the moon, but also from mining asteroids, which they're attempting to do now. If you can get people out there, if you really can get people out there... So here's the question.
If you couldn't do it, if they knew they couldn't do it, but they wanted to show that they could do it, could they... compartmentalize things, could they feed a computer program that is, instead of the actual binary data that shows the distance between the lunar module and the surface of the Earth at any given time, could they just calculate that out with computers? Of course they could.
Yeah, that's possible. Could they, if they couldn't get human beings into deep space and have them come back alive because they couldn't figure out a way to get through the Van Allen radiation belts and survive micrometeors and all the other shit that you deal with, could they... get enough people to shut the fuck up because it's in the best interest of national security.
Of course they could, especially in 1969. People were fucking terrified. They had just killed the president six years earlier. People were absolutely terrified of getting... under the sights of the intelligence agencies. And if you have top secret clearance, if you're involved in some sort of a project, like look at the Manhattan Project. People kept their fucking mouth shut.
They knew they were working on something of importance that was above and beyond their need to yap about shit.
But for the moon landing, you would need way more people involved. I don't know if you would. More institutions.
Because you actually have a real space program. So the space program's not fake, right? So let's just assume I'm a non-believer. I would tell you that the space program was absolutely real. The Saturn V rocket was absolutely real. The modules, the way they were able to parachute down into the ocean, 100% real. They did go into space. But how far did they go? This is the real question. And Bart...
Sibrel, the guy who made this documentary, he asserts that they went somewhere into Earth's orbit, like, you know, in space, but not through the Van Allen radiation belts and not to the surface of the moon and back. And that they had video footage that they had done in some scenario. Some people think it's in the Nevada desert. Who knows what it is?
But they had this footage of people bouncing around and they said they got it on the moon and then they brought this back.
Does he have any evidence of that event occurring? Would he say, well, I know they only went so far and came back because of this?
Well, he has a bunch of different things, and one of them is the one that's very hotly debated, and it's the... different light sources in the photographs. So a lot of the photographs from the surface of the moon have intersecting shadows.
So you have a shadow that's going this way and another shadow that's going that way, indicating more than one light source or a close-by light source that's coming in, not something that's millions of miles away like the sun.
there's those there's the photographs there's the photographs that run through ai he has this other video of what looks like them filming the earth through one of the round portal windows with everything blacked out in the cabin and then they pull down the things that were blocking off the other light sources and the cabin floods with light and it looks like they're in near-earth orbit and it's very confusing
Because you're like, well, what is that video? What exactly is going on there? Because if they really are in deep space and they really are filming this small image of the Earth, because that's all they can see from 200,000 miles out, well, why, when they take those things down, does it look like the whole cabin is filled with light? Why does it look exactly like they're in near-Earth orbit?
But that still goes back.
Have you ever seen it? You want to see it? Sure. For shits and giggles. Yeah, because we're in the middle of this stupid conversation. It's a fun one. It's one of the most fun of all conspiracy theories. Because if they did it, wow. First of all, if they killed the president, wow. And it seems like they kind of did that. So if they did this too, like what else did they do?
Like what other hoaxes were played on the American people if this is real? That's why it's fun. I'm not saying it's real. But it is a fun one. It's not as simple as the Earth is flat. That's a stupid one. But this is a fun one.
This is a fun one because you're dealing with the kind of power with complete control over the media, complete control over newspapers and what they reported, the interest of national security, the Cold War with Russia, the space war with Russia. We wanted it so bad we brought in some of the most heinous human beings that have ever lived to run our NASA program.
Yeah. It's not as dumb as Flat Earth, but it does remind – to me it reminds me of – to me it's in the vein of like Sandy Hook was a hoax.
No, no, no, no.
That's heinous. Not morally, not morally.
Let me show you the video. Let me show you the video. Jamie, you got that? Funny thing happened on the way to the moon. I know, but I can't. Is he hiding it? I know it's available.
Sure, sure. I'm not even, I have to figure out exactly what the video is I'm looking for. Proof. I know, I'm trying to, I'm digging through. I pick a video, I try to find it. It's not in there. I have to find another video. It's not like. Okay, you'll find it. Once I know the exact name of the video, it takes a second.
Okay, you'll find it. He'll find it once he does. Again, I'm not saying we didn't go. I'm saying this is a fun one and it's a weird one.
There's a lot of weirdness to it. Isn't it similar? Okay, because a lot of this comes from it's such an incredible feat that's so difficult to do that it's hard to believe anyone actually did it. Sure. Which I can understand that mentality. But the thing is, you can go back in history.
And you could look at, for the sake of discovery and exploration, you can look at what other men have done hundreds of years ago that arguably is more impressive than going to the moon. Like what? I mean, you name it. Take any famous explorer from the 1500s to the 1800s, and whether it's Magellan or James Cook or Christopher Columbus or any of them,
What they were able to do, navigating this vast ocean, going to play, having no modern technology at all, being able to go from where their starting point, hit some little tiny island somewhere and then go around and navigating a world that they don't even know what it looks like. They have no maps. They have no GPS. They have nothing at all. I cannot conceive of...
how they could have ever done that. I don't know how in the world, not knowing what the world looks like, having no map, having no GPS, having no modern navigation whatsoever, how in the world could you possibly get on a ship launching out of France or Portugal or wherever and make it anywhere across the ocean? I don't know how you could do it.
It's incredible. But we know that it happened. It's incredible, but it doesn't compare because they do it now easily. So anybody can get in a ship right now and travel. You can get a small boat that you have enough resources and you have enough gas and you can travel through these routes. You can do it. It took them hundreds of years, though. But you can do it right now.
So it's way easier to do now. Right. So it's something that they did. That's incredible. No doubt. No argument. But something that could be reproduced today easily. Or at least possibly. I wouldn't say easily. It's a task.
But it also took centuries to get to the point where it could be easily recreated.
But it got better right after each one did it because they had maps now. And then they also used their sextants and they understood constellations in a way that most people don't today. And sextants, if you actually use them correctly and you understand which way the tides go and which way the water currents are going...
which way the flow was happening, they had a deep understanding of the currents of the Earth. They knew travel lanes. They knew which ways they could go with ships. So applying that to the open ocean, applying that to these continents they weren't even sure were there, it was very iffy, very dangerous, very courageous. But once they did it, then everybody else could do it easier.
And then they started doing it better and better, and then people started coming to America, and then ba-ba-ba-ba-ba, and now here we are. And now anybody can get in a boat. Anybody with enough resources can have a boat that can travel those routes. No one can just say, I want to go to the moon today and get their private moon craft and fucking shoot off into the atmosphere and land on the moon.
So no one's done that since 1969. That's a recent occurrence in terms of human history, but not technologically. The technology from 1969, it's like cave people shit compared to what we have today. So you really can't compare... The courageous, amazing deeds of these early explorers. Because what they did was absolutely fantastic. But they left a clear record of how to do it.
And then each person improved upon it. And now it's easy to do. But it was still, I mean. The spacecraft travel is not. There's nothing like that.
I would say 100 years from now. Perhaps. Maybe. Christopher Columbus was 300 years before James Cook, I think. The technology they were using was not that different. It was pretty similar. It didn't progress that fast.
Well, they had maps. They had maps and they had sextants and they had a detailed, at least crude, understanding of the shape of certain continents. Like, there's maps from the 1500s. There's maps from before that. There's plenty of maps that are rough estimates and pretty good job, actually. The cartographers back then were astonishingly good because it was so valuable to be good at that.
Now, this is the footage. So let's just watch this. So this is Neil Armstrong talking to Houston. So give me some volume.
Another segment.
Why is that? We're not watching the movie. All right, so let's do this. He and I will watch it with the sound on, and we'll tell everybody else to just go to the website or go to the YouTube video so we don't get pulled off of YouTube. We'll watch it, and we won't say anything, and then after it's over, we'll come back. So play it, because I want them to hear it.
That's enough.
So what do you think about that footage?
I mean, it's interesting. Yeah. I'm at a slight disadvantage because I'm going to assume that people have addressed some of those issues before. and have given responses to it, I'm going to assume. Like if I went to YouTube right now and looked up that video debunked, people have probably done that.
I'm sure someone has.
So I don't know what their response would be. So it's interesting. I just don't see it. So to me, I listen to that and I think, well, that's interesting. I look into that to figure out. The first thing I want to know is, okay, here's your claim, the claim they're making. I need to know what is the official narrative, let's say. How do they respond to that? Because I know they do. Right.
So I need to know that. Well, here's two problems with that video. One, the English accent. Those motherfuckers. If they want to sell you something on late night TV, they use an English accent because it makes someone look more intelligent, more sophisticated. The crescent insert. Why would they fake any of it? And then they got you with the music. The music is manipulative.
So they're manipulating you in two ways. They're manipulating you with the woman's voice, and they're manipulating you with the music. So you're saying they are manipulating you with the video. I'm saying they most certainly are manipulating you in that video. That video is not just the video. So what I would rather have is just the video and watch that. But we do get to see them say...
the distance they are from the Earth. Here's a couple of questions, right? What does it look like? What is the shine from the Earth from 200,000 miles out? And maybe in order to be able to film that, you have to block off the light from all those other windows because even though it's 200,000 miles out,
Just like the moon lights up the sky on a night where there's a full moon and you're outside, you can see. Like a really good full moon with a clear sky, you can see the ground. It lights it up. And the moon is one quarter of the Earth's size, and the moon is 250-plus thousand miles away. So if something is four times bigger...
than the moon and the blue from the earth's oceans, like when you see it from the space station, it is powerful. I mean, it is a potent reflector of sunlight. So you could say that he's just ignorant about how much reflection you would get from the surface of the earth from 200,000 miles away. And even though They are filming it by blocking out all the lights and filming it through this window.
That actually is the earth. That's actually what it looks like when you're in deep space. You could say that too. You just don't know. It's hard to figure out what's what. It's hard to figure out what's what. But when you see a video like that, you just go, hmm, okay, what is that? And I don't think it's impossible to fake people going to the moon. I think it would be very difficult.
It would require a lot of people to be on board. But I also think it could be compartmentalized. The people that make the rockets, what you're doing is you're making a specific part, and this guy's making another part, and you have the engineers put this thing together, and you launch this thing into space. The people that would have to know are the people that are actually charting the trajectory
of the Apollo mission, the people that are actually talking to the astronauts and explaining to them what to say during the press conference, the people that are engineering the whole thing. And you could probably get away with doing something like that with a few hundred people. And you could get a few hundred people of high-ranking people that have top-secret clearance to keep their mouth shut.
You could. I would just need some kind of solid evidence of that to believe that's true. Yeah, me too. This, to me... There are some things that we call conspiracy theories that I think are, you know, clearly true. There are some things that we call conspiracy theories that I think are maybe true.
But there are conspiracy theories that to me are just that they're just they're just they're not even theories, really. They're just kind of like fanciful, whatever projections. And the ones that I don't find convincing are where they usually start with. There's a so-called official narrative of a thing that happened. There's a couple of things about what actually happened that are kind of weird.
And we look at that and go, that's a little bit weird. And then the conspiracy theorists, in that case, they come in and they find these little tiny cracks, if you want to call it. And then inside the cracks, they shove this whole Hollywood cinematic narrative that they have created to explain what's actually a pretty tiny crack. You don't need this whole thing to explain that.
So with the moon thing, I mean, one of the first... Weird aspects of the moon landing that I think started kind of the conspiracy theories about it was the flag, the fact that the flag's moving in the picture. And so, yeah, it's like when you look at that, you don't really understand. You look at what that is where, because there's no wind on the moon.
But then you understand that, okay, for example, when you put the flag down, it creates reverberations. It makes the flag move. It's going to move for longer because there's no gravity. So there's an explanation for that. But if you're the conspiracy theorist, then you take the flag moving, and you're like, nope, the whole thing is bunk.
Have you ever seen the video footage of the astronaut hopping by the flag, and the breeze of him hopping by makes the flag wiggle? He doesn't touch the flag at all. The flag is completely stationary, and the astronaut hops by the flag, and as he hops by the flag, the flag wiggles.
Okay, are we saying that wouldn't happen on the moon?
No, it wouldn't. There's no air.
Yeah, okay. I haven't seen that.
Oh, we'll show it to you. It's weird. Listen, what you're saying is entirely correct. Everything you're saying is entirely reasonable and correct if they actually can get through the Van Allen radiation belts. If they can, this is stupid. This whole thing's stupid.
But if they can't really do that and they never have done that and the only time they say they've done that is these missions, it gets real weird. And since they haven't done it since then, it gets real weird. And it's not just that. There's other video. It's not just the one where the guy's hopping by the flag.
It's other ones where it looks like they're on wires, where they're being pulled up, where they fall down, they're being yanked up. The whole thing is weird. There's a lot of weirdness to the footage. The physics don't line up exactly the same.
If you go to the early days of the Apollo 11 footage and you look at the difference between when they were playing golf and jumping around the moon, they move different. They cover more distance. It's like it looks different. They got better at it. They get better at filming it. They got better at whatever they're doing. And then there's the other question.
Maybe they actually did do it, but the cameras weren't able to handle the radiation and the film, which, you know, you wouldn't even be able to send your film through the radar detector at the airport back then because it would get fucked up. You'd have to put it aside. Maybe the radiation space fucks up the film.
So even though they did do it, they show you recreations or show you these test runs that they did and they film it because the actual film footage is impossible to obtain. That's possible, too. Hasselblad, who made the cameras, didn't put any special protection in these cameras.
There was nothing about them that was unusual that would be able to withstand that kind of radiation and that kind of heat of deep space. Yeah. Steve, do you have that one where the guy walks by the flag and he hops around and it wiggles? I have it.
I typed that in and it's not really popping up, so I'm not sure which video. We definitely have played it before. I know, but if you take a look, that's what's popping up. It's not that one, I don't think. Is it?
Plant flag. No, that's not it. What did you write? Astronaut flag. Type in astronaut hops by flag. Flag wiggles. Wiggles.
I saw a bunch of videos of people asking, like, making recreations and seeing if this was even possible, but not the video.
Astronaut hops by causing a breeze to move the flag. Okay, that's it right there. Click on that. That's it. That's the footage. Okay. So watch. So he's going to hop by. Okay. See that?
Yeah, but he could have hit the flag.
Yeah, but he didn't. Look. Look at the distance. Look how far away he is from it. Pull it back again. See where he is? So he's in front. He's way in front of that thing. He hops by and it wiggles. I don't know. He's in the suit. The suit's pretty clunky. Yeah, but he's not close to it. Look at the perspective. Let's look at it in slow motion. So watch. He hops by. It just wiggles in the breeze.
That's a breeze, dude. So that might not have actually happened on the moon, okay? That might be footage that they filmed in Nevada desert, and the footage they got on the moon got all fucked up, and so they tried to pass that off on people, and they thought no one would know. It doesn't necessarily mean we didn't go to the moon, but that does look weird. And it's just not one thing.
If that was the only thing, you'd be like, oh, well, who knows? But there's a lot of them. He could have hit it. It's possible.
It doesn't look like he hit it. It looks like a breeze. Yeah, but then the other part of this is that they... So what? The people that went through all this trouble to fake the moon landing... How would they miss these things?
That's the other... Well, I don't think they thought people would catch it. First of all, you're dealing with a time where there's no VHS tapes. There's no internet, right? So you show it on television once. You get to choose what gets shown and what doesn't get shown. You film a bunch of shit. That's how they got that footage of them inside the crap filming through that circular hole.
Because they don't air everything on television, but you have archives. So you have all these archives and these kooks go through the archives and they find things like that. Okay, but that doesn't even mean that that was actual moon footage. That could have been some of the training footage.
I'll tell you what would convince me to, not that it's a fake, but at least would make me open to it. One thing that would shake my faith considerably in the moon landing, if Elon Musk were to come out and say, yeah, I don't know about this moon landing thing. Then, okay, fine.
And I'm not saying this is my whole reason for believing it happened, but Elon Musk, first of all, if the moon landing was fake, he knows it was. He knows it was fake. Sure. He's the richest man in the world. He's shown zero concern for propping up official narratives at all. Right. So he's a guy that would know if it's faked. There'd be no reason for him to continue that narrative if it was fake.
In fact, he could even say, you know, they faked it. I'm going to do it for real. I'll be the first one to go to the moon because they faked it. And he hasn't said that. So I also find that to be pretty compelling. The fact that he, as someone who wouldn't know, let's say the problem is that you and I, most people that talk about this, we have no like direct access to knowledge about space.
This is all being given to us by other people. So you got to go to people that have actually were working with this stuff. And so the fact that he has no time for this theory at all, I also find to be,
It's good. It is persuasive. Definitely. But also he has a contract with NASA and he has to be very careful about what he says and does. And for him to say something incredibly insane, like we never went to the moon, even if he believes it. That would be a big risk with zero reward because there's no way to prove, as you've said, there's no way to prove that we didn't go to the moon.
And to say that we didn't go to the moon is a kook take. What the fuck is wrong with you? You can say stupid things like that when you're a comedian who's a podcast host.
But if you have contracts with NASA and you run SpaceX and you are legitimately making some of the greatest breakthroughs in space travel that human beings have ever known, like what they're doing with those falcons when they have them land, fucking insane. Insane. Come back and land. I mean, we've never been able to do that before. And it's all because of Elon.
I mean, if he really is going to get people to Mars, something has got to be addressed eventually as to, you know, if they do it and they pull it off and it's easy and comfortable, okay, we probably did it in 1969. If they go to the moon and there's no problem going through the Van Allen radiation belts with no particular insulation other than what the spaceship had, maybe.
Yeah, they probably did it.
I will say, the moon landing hoax idea, it's barely even a kook take anymore. I think it is, but you're probably in the majority with your take on it. The last time I talked about this publicly, I got absolutely ripped to shreds. Of course. It felt like 99% against. And it's going to happen again in response to this conversation.
99% against you? Yeah. Against your take. So most people think that we didn't go to the moon. It seems. Maybe that's your followers, bro. I think if you get the overall internet, it would go the other way. The overall internet, most people would think you're a kook for even entertaining the idea that we never went to the moon.
Maybe, but it seems like it's shifting drastically. And a lot of that is people just have lost all faith in our institutions, which I understand.
Yes.
So people are – I mean, that was kind of the point of your bit, that people are – once you see that this is a lie, this is a lie, this is a lie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. That is happening. And I'm totally sympathetic to that part of it. But I just think that the moon landing, there's a lot of good evidence for it. And also, this is an emotional argument.
Yeah, it's an American thing.
It's one of our greatest achievements as Americans. Sure. You've got to pry that from my cold, dead hands. You've got to really show me something to make me willing to give that up.
I would tell you that one of our greatest achievements is faking the moon landing. I think it's an amazing achievement. I think it's an amazing achievement. It's akin to turning Kamala Harris into the most compelling presidential candidate since Barack Obama. There's things that they can do with propaganda and spin that are truly amazing.
And watching her become this celebrated character when just a few months ago everybody was upset that she was on the ticket. And, oh, my God, if Joe Biden dies and she becomes president, people are freaking out. Now all of a sudden everybody's like, yes, she should be president.
That's also wearing off, though. You think so? I don't think so. They were able to make her into a sensation, a political sensation, for about a month. I don't think she has that anymore. I don't think people are... Because you can hype somebody up and you can turn them into the next political savior through really good branding. They did that with Obama. But you got to have something.
There has to be something. They at least have to have charisma. I mean, Obama had charisma. So you at least have to have that. If you have a politician who has charisma, then the media can come in and they can do the rest and they can turn you into.
Well, she certainly has charisma when she has planned speeches and she gets to read off a teleprompter and maybe that thing in her ear. What do you think about that? You think that's legit? It could be. You see the company has responded? Yeah. What did they say? They definitely didn't deny it, and they said it looks very close to what our device is. Really? Go to their website.
It might be on their website. Somebody sent me something, and I just looked at it briefly, and I'm like, oh, this will probably come up today. I want to see it in real time. Because whatever the website is of the company that makes that thing, they've apparently addressed it on the website. But is that illegal? I don't know if it's illegal, but it's certainly incredibly unethical.
Unethical, for sure. But also, if they pulled that off with earrings, like fucking amazing. And it would explain because she stayed on script really well. Amazingly well. Amazingly well. Does it say anything about the presidential debates? No. The company's definitely responded. Maybe it wasn't their website. Maybe it was social media. What is the name of the company? I'm pretty sure this is it.
Okay. Google Nova Audio Earrings response to presidential debate. Nova Audio Earrings response to presidential debates. Yes. Um, I might've been a troll. That's why I wanted to see it in real time to find out what the fuck it is, but see if there's a website where they responded. Cause I think they did respond. I could find it. I know I saved it.
Company says Kamala's earrings strikingly similar to its Bluetooth device. Okay. There it is. Strikingly similar to its Bluetooth device offers to make ones for Trump. Okay. Imagine if Trump starts wearing earrings. First of all, that would never work because you can't tell him what to do.
Yeah, he would never. He's not going to listen.
It's not going to happen. He's free-balling. We do not know whether Mrs. Harris wore one of our products. The resemblance is striking. And while our product is not specifically developed for the use at presidential debates, it is nonetheless suited for it. Okay, there you go.
To ensure a level playing field for both candidates, we are currently developing a male version and will soon be able to offer it to the Trump campaign. The choice of color is a bit challenging, though, as orange does not go well with a lot of colors. That company's funny. They're funny. That's a funny company.
I would buy their shit. Bulletproof earrings for Trump.
Yeah, right? Yeah, I mean, how crazy is the conspiracy theory that he didn't actually get shot? That he cut his ear like a pro wrestler?
Yeah, that's another. Or that it was shrapnel, which to me would make even less sense. Because, yeah, it's a very minor injury because she just got nicked. But if it's shrapnel, you would expect, you know, marks all over his face.
Right. Or not. You know, the thing is shrapnel could be a small piece of shrapnel. You know, shrapnel's not uniform, right? So if it hits a railing, which apparently there is some shot, there's some video footage of, because I think there was nine shots fired total.
Yeah.
Was that what it was? Something like that. Something crazy like that. What about that, though? Trump sustained two-centimeter-wide gunshot wound to his ear. Okay.
The thing is, ears heal pretty quick. Yeah, and two centimeters. I mean, you can't see it from a distance.
I saw holes from when I got my ears pierced. Oh, yeah, but that's different. That's a hole. This is a scratch. I've gotten my ears fucked up a bunch of times from jiu-jitsu, and they heal pretty quick. It's foreheads heal quick, ears heal quick. Things around your mouth heal really quick. There's parts of your body that have a lot of blood vessels and they heal pretty quick.
He's old, which is odd for him not to have a scar. But it's not inconceivable that it could just scratch the surface and that would cause a lot of blood. Like if you get a forehead cut. Forehead cuts are crazy. It just pours blood down your face. But if you get a cut like on your knee, it doesn't even drip. You have to have a real cut on your knee to be dribbling blood down your shin.
The forehead is filled with blood vessels, as I think are the tips of the ears. So I think it would bleed a lot, and it might be a minor injury that bleeds a lot, and it could heal in a few days.
Also, even if he didn't get hit with a bullet, which he did, But if he didn't, it doesn't make a difference. He still got shot at. It doesn't change what happened.
And people behind him, one guy died and other people got grievously injured, like terribly injured to the point where it's going to affect them for the rest of their life.
The more bizarre thing about the shooting is that it's only been two months since it happened, right? Two months. Or not even two months. It's been like a month and a half. Mm-hmm. And we've moved on like it never happened. Like it never happened in two weeks.
In two weeks they stopped talking about it.
It's had no political impact whatsoever. Nuts. He got no polling boost from it. Reagan got like 12 points, briefly. Which just shows you the polls are full of shit. Probably. Yeah, full of shit. I mean, they are full of shit. But also, it would not shock me if, because we're so easily distracted, if people really did just forget and don't care a week later, two weeks later.
Well, as long as it's not in the news and it's not in the news, you don't care about it. Also, there was no press conference. So that's kind of crazy. There was no disclosure of all the information about this young man's prior history, what led him to this. They went to his apartment and it was professionally scrubbed. There was no silverware in his place.
There's also this bizarre thing where there's, you know how they get ad data where you can track where phones have been? Yeah. This one phone was going from outside of the FBI office in Washington, D.C. to where this kid is multiple times. So how did this kid get these explosive devices? How did he get up on the roof? How did they not flag him?
And you see a guy walking around with a range finder a half an hour before the event. That guy is going to jail. Like what are you talking about? There's two reasons for a range finder. You're trying to shoot something or you're using it for golf. If you're not playing golf, then you're trying to shoot something. That's the only other reason for a range finder. And that was like three hours before.
Yeah. They knew about that kid. They were aware that he was there. He somehow or another got on the roof with a rifle. The whole thing sucks. It stinks to high heaven. And then they cremate him. He's gone. They get his body. Someone snatches his body like five or six days after the event. And 10 days later, he's cremated. The whole thing is nuts. Who is this kid? Why did he do this?
Why did some 20-year-old kid take shots at the president?
Why didn't he have a scope? This is one where I'm totally open to conspiracy theories, only because there's not even an official narrative. They basically told us nothing. So we're left to fill in the blanks.
Not only that, think about how perfect it would have been for a plan to assassinate someone if you do get this lone, crazy kid... You give him whatever. I mean, there's been no toxicology examination of his body that's been released. Right. So who knows what the fuck this kid's on?
If you're going to try to convince someone to go shoot the former president, you'd probably dope him up with some crazy shit. Right. And then that would be in a system and they would be like be able to trace. OK, how do you get this? Let's let's talk to all the people that are on his cell phone, all the people that are in his email.
Let's investigate and find out where the fuck he got this stuff that he's on when he shoots at the president. You don't hear a peep out of that. So this guy somehow or another figures out how to get on the roof, take these shots, and then they kill him.
Now, if he shot and hit Trump, if Trump didn't turn his head at that pivotal moment where they're talking about it, and it's a headshot, Trump is dead, the world's in chaos, and this kid's dead seconds later. And then it's like that. Crazy kid who shoots the president, and that's it. And then, OK, now who's going to run as a Republican? The world's in chaos.
Yeah, it would have been a perfect plan if that kid just pulled it off.
Yeah, I mean, and I just I can't. I think about when I do like a college speech, we'll have a little we'll have a few security guys there. Yeah. And there's no way, if someone showed up with a range finder, they would not get in the building. Anyone that looks vaguely suspicious with any kind of bag is getting flagged. I've got three or four guys, and I'm just a guy giving a speech at a college.
That never would have happened. It could not have happened. They would have flagged, especially three hours ahead of time. So how does that happen with a President of the United States or a former president? It's impossible to wrap your mind around. It's not like they've come up with...
It's not like they've come up with some explanation where you could go, okay, well, now I can see how that might have happened. Everything we've heard since then just makes you even more confused.
No, it's insane. The whole story is insane. And the fact that it went away is even more insane. And the fact that there was a brief moment where even Biden was saying that we have to stop being so polarized and stop attacking each other and just try to help this country heal. And then a week later, fuck that guy.
That guy's a threat to democracy. Yeah. But I also think part of it, the fact that America seems to have moved on is nuts. Part of it, it's a political mistake. A lot of it's the media. Of course, they have no interest in talking about it. Some of it goes to the Republican Party. I mean, you had the Republican Convention, which was like two days later. So the timing is nuts. Yeah.
Even at the Republican convention, I just felt like the fact that this guy was almost killed two days ago should be like the centerpiece of this thing. I mean, you've got all the cameras on you for four days. And so everything you were planning for the convention should change now because of this. And it should take on an extra seriousness and just the whole tone should change. Yeah.
Hulk Hogan.
They've got Instagram influencers and they've got MAGA rappers from YouTube. It's just like you're not – you are not showing us how serious this thing is. And so I think that was a mistake.
Right. Well, I think you only want to address it once. And it's probably – look, he's got a great ability to push things aside. And it's one of the reasons why he didn't age like everybody else ages when they get into the White House. He kind of aged normal. He didn't seem any older when he got out as when he got in. He was the same guy.
And I think he's got this ability because so many people have hated him for so long. He gets attacked so often. He knows how to just shut it off and shut it out. And I think he probably did that with the assassination attempt too. It's one of the reasons why he said, I'm going to talk about it once and I'm not going to talk about it again.
And he's basically held to that other than briefly mentioning it, that he thinks he got shot in the head because of the way they talk about him, which I would agree. I mean, if we watch that, we've watched that footage right before the podcast of Trump on the Colbert show that apparently never aired. But Jamie says you can get it on Colbert's Web site.
It was on YouTube. I don't know why people... No, no, no, but it's just saying that it never aired.
It never aired on television. Is that true?
I don't know. Why would it be on YouTube?
Well, because sometimes things get on YouTube that never air on television, like Fear Factor. The Fear Factor episode that got us canceled. You can't watch it on television. It would never air on NBC, but it's on YouTube. You can watch it on YouTube.
There's things that get air. There's an article from it in the Atlantic from the day after. It's those things that go around.
Okay, so he might have actually been a guest. Yeah, he did. Okay, so he was a guest on it. But the way they talk to him, the way Colbert talks to him, and the way they talk to him on The View. The View is my favorite one. The view is wild when they're all hugging him and everybody loves him.
They both are. I think they're equally as wild because Colbert apologizes to him apparently in that for being mean to him. In the clip we watched, he tells him, I'm so grateful that you're running for president.
Yeah.
He said that.
Yeah.
And this was September of 2016 or 15. So this was, of course, after he'd already announced... A year plus before the elections. Yeah.
But everybody thought he was a joke back then.
Yeah, I think it was that they were happy that he ran, and they wanted him to win the nomination because they thought that he easily beat him. So he was really... This really is a Frankenstein kind of story from their perspective. Yes. Because they look at him as a monster, this monstrous figure, and they... The media deliberately created this. They gave him all the attention.
They sucked all the oxygen out of the room for every other candidate because this is the guy they wanted. And they thought we were going to annihilate him. There's no way he's going to win a general election. And, of course, he won.
And I think that's one of the reasons why ever since then they haven't been able – the media, they just can't – they hate him with an extra passion that they have not had even for other Republican presidents. And I think a lot of it is – It's like they're projecting because they realize that they did this and they just can't get over it, I think.
Well, there's definitely this overcorrection. Robert Epstein talked about that. Robert Epstein has done all that work on Google and these ephemeral instances of interacting with Google where it shows you with search results and with news stories that get brought to your feed that they're temporary. You don't record them. So he records all these.
And what he has found through his research is that, especially with people that are on the fence – like people that are 50-50, you can swing 50-50 to 90-10. Like people that don't know who they're going to vote for, you can make it 90-10 just through these interactions with Google. It's really shocking. What do you mean 90-10 in what way?
90-10, like say if you want Hillary to win or you want Trump to win, whatever candidate you choose, if you manipulate the search results, if you manipulate just the fill-in, you know, the suggestions, is Matt Walsh A, and then it just fills it in.
Just through that, just through the suggestions, they can manipulate it to a significant difference for people that are on the fence, that are independents or that are undecided. And he said you can take 50-50 and turn it to 90-10, which is fucking stunning. It's stunning.
Terrifying.
It's terrifying and it's unregulated. And one of the things that happened was after Trump won in 2016, there was some sort of a meeting at Google where they were openly talking about this. And they were talking about, we can't let this happen again, which is such a crazy thing to say, that we can't let the people decide who they want to be president again.
If that is what they said, if that is what they – and let's find out what the actual quote was. I could see how someone would say that if they worked at an insurance company and they're a pro diehard Democrat, blue no matter who, and they were like, we can't let this happen again. I could see how you say that if you're just an individual voter who doesn't really have an impact.
But if you're someone who can shift undecided voters from 50-50 to 90-10, as Robert Epstein is alleging, if that's true – That's a crazy thing to say because you're deciding you're going to decide the result of the election. And you don't give a fuck about debate and free speech and people being able to decide for themselves because you think that you're right.
And you think everybody else should agree with you.
You also think that you are or you've told yourself that you are the vanguard candidate. protecting democracy in our way of life. Which is crazy. Which is insane. Of course, the idea that you have to prevent people from voting for a certain guy in order to protect democracy is nuts. It's so nuts. But that's what they actually believe.
And when you tell yourself that, you convince yourself that, well, this is for their own good. These people are silly. They don't know. They're dumb. They're bigoted. They don't understand what they're doing. And so for their own good, we have to prevent them. We have to do whatever we can to prevent this.
When I talk to some of my hardcore lefty friends that are still left in L.A. that I was telling you about before, they say we. They say we all the time. We have to win this. They say that all the time. We can win if this happens. They say that kind of shit. And they talk about it like they're talking about the Dodgers. They really do. They talk about it like they're talking about our team.
And they're connected to all these other people in their community and they're all on this team. And it's weird, man. It's a weird little hack. It's just like hypnosis. It's weird that you can just do that to people.
It's weird that you can get people to just ideologically be captured and join this team and lose all ability to look at things objectively and just understand nuance and understand the influence of propaganda. And like, how many people are spending money on this? Like, why is all the news have this one specific narrative? And then Fox News is a totally different. What is going on here?
And nobody does that.
And not only can you get them to—obviously, they hate Trump, but to also demonize half of the country's population. I mean, there was just—I think it was MSNBC yesterday. One of these pundits was talking about Trump and said, well, he's despicable, he's terrible. But his supporters are, too. He said.
And they they went on about how terrible his supporters are, which is you're talking about tens of millions of Americans. A basket of deplorables. Right. But, you know, we take it for granted now. But 15 years ago, that would kind of be unthinkable. You just you wouldn't do that. You would you say whatever you want about a politician. You hate them. They're terrible.
But it was just generally understood that you don't you don't use that language to talk about all the people voting for these are American citizens.
Do you remember when Mitt Romney and Barack Obama debated? It was the most cordial, professional, respectful discussion of the issues and who could do a better job. Kind of amazing. Kind of amazing that that was – what was that, 2012?
Yeah.
Kind of amazing.
And I don't mind – because you can go back farther in American history and you can find – like back to the beginning and they're in Congress like beating each other over the head with –
fireplace pokers and that sort of thing and i don't you know there's an argument to be made for that kind of it certainly makes c-span a lot more interesting uh but that shows a certain passion for the issues i suppose but that's it's what we have now is different from that it's it's it's much more i mean there have been multiple cases recently of congressional hearings
where they start screaming at each other.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, AOC.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, AOC. And who's the other one? Jasmine Crockett, I think. And it's like a Waffle House. It's like, you know. No respect for each other, but also no dignity at all. No class. No respect for the position.
You can't be yelling out, oh, baby girl. You're a congresswoman. This is crazy. And they're making fun of each other's wigs. Google versus Trump leaked video reveals executives' negative reactions to Trump's 2016 election victory. So what is the actual quote?
I didn't see the actual quote that we were trying to find. Stuff said that they weren't happy. So this was a confidential video that got released via Breitbart in 2016.
So he's saying here, hold on. He's saying here most people are pretty upset and sad because of the election. Imagine that, most people. Like, how do you know? Myself, as an immigrant and a refugee, I certainly find this election deeply offensive. And I know many of you do, too. I think it's a very stressful time, and it conflicts with many of our values. So scroll up. What else does he say?
He then added, too, like he hopes that there might be – I don't want to find where it was. This might have been right here. Yeah. Less convinced, he said, I find many of the things Trump has done very offensive.
I don't have very high hopes, but he could do anything. You have no idea. Maybe he will do something great. Who knows? Take a little bit of wishful thinking.
So Google pushed back that there wasn't any bias discussed in the meeting.
Well, that's bias right there, saying that most of us are upset, right? For over 20 years, everyone at Google has been able to freely express their opinions at these meetings. Nothing was said at that meeting or any other meeting. to suggest that any political biases ever influences the way we build or operate our products. So this is Google's official statement. So what else did he say, though?
Because the thing that Robert was alleging, that he was saying we're going to make sure it doesn't happen again.
I couldn't find that quote. I watched a little bit of the video with close captioning. Scroll back up so I can just read all those quotes. It doesn't say it, though.
Right.
Someone else that they're giving a quote of, not him.
I think a lot of us would agree this election was particularly hard. He said there was a lot of rhetoric.
There was a lot of rhetoric.
Yeah. Well, that's what elections are.
One of the things that's always interesting to me is that they are so desperate to stop Trump and that they act like it's, you know, the future of the planet hangs in the balance. Meanwhile... they still own everything when they own all the institutions, Google, you know, the federal government. So the truth is that Trump could get into office.
This happened last time he was in office for four years. They act like it was into the world. Then he's out of office and they basically reverse everything he did in like two seconds, a couple of executive orders, whatever. And, and most of it never took hold anyway, because the bureaucracy is entirely aligned against Trump. So, uh,
So that's the problem, is that even when Trump gets in there, he's handicapped in his ability to do anything because the entire federal government, he might be at the top of it, but everybody underneath him despises him, and they're all leftist. And they can just reverse it the second that he leaves. And yet they still act like if he's in there that it's the end of the world. They still can't.
You'd think they'd almost have an attitude. They're like, yeah, whatever, fine. Let him have it for four years. It still won't matter because we're still going to be in charge of everything.
Did you see the conversation where this woman was talking to someone from Trump's team, saying, worried that he was going to weaponize the judicial system once he got into office, that if he got into office, he would weaponize the judicial system and go after his enemies? Oh, wow. And he says, like, what... I can't imagine. What are you saying?
For you saying that and asking whether or not Trump would do that... You have to acknowledge the fact that that's absolutely happening to him right now. And then she tries to push back against it and he does a brilliant job of explaining how she's incorrect. I'm going to find this, Jamie, because this is a good one. Unless you could find it.
God damn it.
It's so hard to find things that you save on these little social media platforms. See if you can find it, Jamie. No, it was from a conversation between someone in the Trump administration, someone on his team. And I know I can find it if you just give me a second.
That Trump is going to weaponize the.
Yeah, that's her argument is that Trump is going to weaponize the political system. And, you know, this guy saying, how are you even saying that without admitting that he that they're doing that right now to him? God damn it, I'm not going to find it. I don't know where I saved it. Sorry.
Every time I type it in, all I see is stuff about Trump saying he would use... I know, but that's because of Google, and that's why what's-his-face is correct. God, I know I saved it. Shit.
Of course, the funny thing is that he definitely will not do that.
No, well, he didn't do that when he was in office. He could have done that to Hillary. He said he thought it would be a bad look.
Yeah, yeah, he ran on Lockerbocker, but he didn't. I mean, that's the thing. They always... Their criticisms of Trump, one of the reasons they don't really land is that they they're not hitting him in the places where like they don't even understand what his weaknesses actually are. They try to make him out to be some kind of dictator. That's that's the opposite. If anything, he has the opposite.
If anything, he has the opposite flaw that he's actually hesitant to wield power, even in times when he should. So, you know, if anything, that should be the criticism that you should use your power more. But he's probably the least dictatorial, you know, presidential candidate we've ever had.
Yeah, probably when you think about what he actually did when he was in office. But that's why it gets weird. It's like because they can say something and it can be not true. But yet enough people repeat it. And then it just becomes a narrative that everyone just I mean, like it's true that he's a convicted felon now. But is it true that it's that it makes any sense? No.
For you to say that he's a convicted felon. Like, OK, right. But what did he do? Do you know what he did? What he did is a misdemeanor. And it also had lapsed the, you know, whatever the fuck it is where you. Statue of limitations. Statue of limitations. Thank you. So and there's 34 counts for a bookkeeping.
Right. But they don't know what he did. The people saying that they don't know what he did. They don't care.
Right. They don't care. So they just repeat that thing that he's a convicted felon. I can't find this goddamn thing. It's driving me nuts because it was really interesting. I hate when I save something and I don't know where I put it, but I know I do.
And the funny thing is these are also people who otherwise would say that the court system is entirely corrupt, that just because you're a convicted felon, it really doesn't mean anything at all necessarily. Right. But in this case, they put a lot of stock in it.
Well, it's just we're in the weirdest time where people are willing to believe bullshit. It's not as simple as being able to recognize bullshit. They recognize it. They have it right in front of them, and they're willing to believe it because it's more convenient to believe it. Yeah. All right. I can't find it. I'm giving up right now.
Well, they said stuff like that for sure.
Yeah, I know they have. But this one was really interesting because you see this guy combat it. And the way he combats it is so interesting to see her squirm. Because, yeah, that's exactly what they're doing. I mean, it's not a terrible crime that he committed. And you're making it seem as if it's... something that he deserves to be in jail for the rest of his life for. And that's crazy.
That's a crazy thing to say. And that might actually happen if he doesn't become president. If he doesn't become president, they might actually lock him up for 25 years for that, which is essentially the rest of his life will be behind bars at Rikers.
Yeah, I kind of go back. That's the conventional wisdom, at least the people I talk to, that they say, well, if Trump doesn't win, he's going to jail. And so he's got a lot on the line here. I kind of think, are they really... Maybe it's naive of me to think, but would they do that?
Or would they rather just, he loses, Kamala wins, and then they'd want Trump to just fade into obscurity and never talk about him again? I don't know. I would tend to think that that would be, that they'd prefer that. But probably not. I mean, they...
Yeah, you don't know. It's just so hard to tell what people would or wouldn't do today. It's just the whole country seems so committed to their side. And I don't know what a solution to that is, and I don't know how we get past this and whether Trump wins or loses. Like, what happens? What happens next?
There's certainly a real thirst for vengeance. They want revenge on him. I think that's what it comes down to. Whether it helps them politically or not. Because I think that's the problem. If Kamala wins and then they really go after Trump and try to put him in jail, and if they actually do put him in jail, I don't see how it helps them politically.
I think that's just going to radicalize people on the right even more than they already are.
It will radicalize people on the right.
And for good reason, by the way. I'm radicalized by it. So it doesn't help them politically, but I think he has to pay the price for defying them for so many years.
But if he does get in office, then it gets very interesting because then it's like, what can he do now? Like how much different is his take on it now? Because one of the things that he said is the first time he got in, he didn't know anything about governing.
He's like, I had to find people and I picked some of the wrong people, but I know better now and I could do a better job of it now, which kind of makes sense. Because if I wanted to talk to him, one of the things I really want to ask is what is it like? The first when you actually get in there, they don't think you're going to be in there. And now all of a sudden you're the actual president.
Like, what is the resistance like? What are the communications like? What can you say about how you have these conversations with these people and how you how you govern, how you get things done? Yeah, how much power do you actually have? What is it actually like?
Because we all have this sort of mystical view of what it's like to be the actual president, but very few people, and only one ever that's not a part of the system has ever snuck through and attained that position. It's only him.
Yeah, I'd be interested to hear his answer to that. It wouldn't surprise me if, in a weird way, when you become president, you... You feel very powerless once you're sitting there because you realize that you're overseeing this just gigantic mammoth thing that's just so unwieldy. There's no way to really control it. Yeah.
And especially in his case, you've got so many people within his own administration plotting against him. Yeah.
is there a lot of people within his own administration now you think plotting against him or only then do you think it's just like backstabby politics that just what they do period i mean at the time there certainly was and i think but i think he also made some he made some bad choices in personnel he made a lot of really bad i mean bringing guys like john bolton in uh there's no chance that you're not going to be undermined by somebody like that um
And especially, you know, in Trump's first campaign in 2016, drain the swamp was was one of the was build the wall and drain the swamp and lock her up. You know, the two three big things. And you don't we don't hear drain the swamp nearly as much anymore. In fact, I don't think I've heard it. It's never said anymore. Right.
Which is unfortunate because that is actually that is that is the first thing that needs to happen if he gets in there. And what I would love to see is that. Okay, he's in there now. He got back in. They tried to stop him. They tried to kill him. They tried to put him in jail. He still got in there. He's not getting reelected. This is it for him. Four more years.
He's out of politics forever after that. And I'd love to see him just... I got nothing to lose now. They're going to put me in jail when I'm out of office. So I got nothing to lose. I don't care what these people say. And just ruthlessly push your agenda through no matter how much they complain about it. I'd love to see him do that.
I think that they're assuming he will, which is why they're so desperate to stop him. But I don't know. It didn't happen the first time. I hope it does.
It's also going to be very interesting to see what do they do to try to prevent this from happening in the future?
Because one of the things that has been discussed is cracking down on misinformation and that free speech doesn't include misinformation, which is a wild thing to say after what we just went through with COVID, where what people were saying was misinformation turned out to be 100 percent true. And not just about COVID, but about a bunch of things. Hunter Biden laptop story.
There's quite a few different things you could point to. Like, who the fuck gets to decide what's information? Only the government? You guys? The people that have lied about basically everything? This is a crazy thing to say and to be running on that and to get people to support that.
Just the lack of understanding of what it means to be able to freely express ideas and communicate and whistleblowers. Whistleblowers from corporations that are telling you about something they're doing that's illegal. Whistleblowers from government agents that are telling you they're spying on you when it's illegal. All that shit.
To have that be filtered through the government is an insane position. And yet that's something that they talk about. And this is something bizarrely that the left supports.
Well, even if because even if it is most of the stuff they call misinformation isn't. But in the case when there's something that is misinformation, it's just not true. That's being plenty of that goes around the Internet. That's still free speech, too. You have the right to say things that are not as long as you're not slandering somebody.
You have the right to make claims about the world that don't happen to be true. So the idea that that doesn't qualify as free speech is, of course, absurd. But then that also requires some central authority to be the arbiter of what is true and what is not.
Exactly. And it's like a childish view of truth and lies. It's childish. Because one of the only ways that people find out if something is correct or not is let someone say something that's incorrect. And then someone who knows a lot more comes along and corrects them. Right. Yeah. That's, that's how it works.
You know, like I had a Terrence Howard, you know, Terrence Howard, the actor, brilliant guy, but wrong about a lot of the things that he thinks he's right about. I brought him in with Eric Weinstein and Eric Weinstein, who's a genius, like a legitimate genius and a mathematician explained him like very patiently and carefully. This is why you're wrong. And this is what you need to know.
And you've got some good ideas, but you're off on all these different things. I'm an actual expert. And let me help you out here. And so anybody who saw Terrence Howard talk on the first podcast had this idea. Like, oh, wow, maybe he's right about all these things. Anybody who saw the second podcast with Eric, where Eric clearly corrects him and actually knows what he's talking about.
He's a brilliant guy. Now you have a, that's what free speech is supposed to be about. That's what it's supposed to be about. An actual expert comes and corrects everything. And then you have this look at it like, okay, now I see. Now it's been, but it's not silence Terrence Howard because he doesn't know what the fuck he's saying. No, it's like let him talk.
Now let someone who really knows what they're talking about explain to him why he's wrong. That's the benefit of free speech. And everybody who listens to that has a better understanding of all these different really weird, complex things that they're discussing that maybe otherwise you would never have illuminated in that way. You'd never really be able to understand it.
That's why I think the free speech thing is people act like it's a complicated thing. It's a complicated subject. Where do you draw the line? What is free speech? What qualifies and what doesn't? I don't think it is that complicated, really. I think it's just you should have the right to express whatever your opinion happens to be. Everyone should be able to say their opinion, their point of view.
Wrong or right, reprehensible or not, they should be able to say it. Yeah, you can't defame someone. You can't threaten to kill somebody. But those aren't really opinions. That's different. If it's just your opinion about what's happening in the world, it should be allowed. And it should be allowed legally. It should be allowed on every social media platform.
I think it's kind of simple, actually, to differentiate between that and the – because, yeah, there's certain kinds of speech that should not be allowed. We all understand that.
Yeah, it's complicated, and this childish idea that just handed over to the government to clean it up, that's not the answer. It is complicated. There are going to be people that say a bunch of things that aren't true. But the way to combat that is not put the government in charge of what's true, especially when they've been wrong so many times or they've just out and out lied so many times.
That's a crazy position for the left to take, the ones who are supposed to be the party of science and reason and the ones who are supposed to be the most educated. It's just a bizarre perspective just because you don't want Trump to win. You don't want this to happen again.
And hate speech, too, is the other label they use. Tim Walls said this recently about free speech. He said, well, of course you can't. Hate speech and misinformation doesn't count. But what is hate speech? Hate speech is just you're expressing that you hate something. People hate things. It's legitimate. There are some things we should hate.
So the idea that it's automatically illegitimate to express a view if it's communicating hatred is, of course, ridiculous.
It is ridiculous, but it's also a really goofy label that you can slap on basically anything. Like hate speech can get to the point where if you call Caitlyn Jenner Bruce Jenner, that's hate speech. That's dead naming. Dead naming falls under hate speech. And so what are you saying? You can't do that? Well, that's fucking ridiculous. I can call him a cunt, but I can't say his name is Bruce.
That's insanity. What world are we living in where you can decide what someone can and can't say by a label? It's such a net you're casting. Hate speech, it's completely subjective. Anyone can decide what's hate speech.
Right. And it implies that all hatred is automatically bad, or at least it puts the people in power and position where they can decide what kind of things you're allowed to hate and what you're not.
Right. And it makes things all equal to something like very benign versus something truly awful. It's all under this one stupid umbrella of hate speech.
Yeah. Hate crimes, too.
Where do you think we would be if Elon hadn't bought Twitter?
Different world, right? Yeah. I think Elon Musk is actually preserving free speech. One of the main people preserving free speech in America right now. And going into space. So it's always funny to me when people... When the left tries to nitpick and needle at him, it's like, this is one of the most significant human beings on the planet right now.
And literally one of the most significant human beings historically ever. Right. He's like a Nikola Tesla type character that people are going to be talking about 100 years from now.
And he'll, you know, SpaceX will launch a rocket and it'll blow up or something. Stephen King was making fun of him. Right. Yeah. You'll have someone like Stephen King, like rocket blew up. It's like, dude, your rockets don't blow up because you don't build them.
I mean, not only that, like he made this tweet about how it damaged the ionosphere that when it blew up. But do you know that that like heals up in like 40 minutes? You didn't even bother looking into that. Every time they punch a rocket through that shit, it damages it. But it heals. It's like you punch a hole through a cloud.
And a lot of times when they say that the rocket malfunctioned or something, it's actually doing exactly what it was supposed to do. This is a test run or whatever. Yeah, they have to test tolerances and parameters.
I mean, they have a lot of them blow up. That's what you have to do until you get one that doesn't blow up.
Yeah. And you need and we just need people in the world. This is very much the it's like the Teddy Roosevelt man in the arena, you know, speech. You need people in the arena who are actually trying to do stuff, do important things. You need people like that. Yeah. And of course, social media gives a platform for people who are like not doing anything at all.
To just sit and snicker at the few people in the world who are trying to achieve something?
Yeah, but that's okay. That's okay, too.
That's their free speech.
You know, if that's what Stephen King wants to do today, let him go. Who cares? You know, it's interesting to watch. All of it is interesting to watch. You know, there's a lot of people out there that are fools, and they serve as education to others. You see the folly in their actions and behaviors and how stupid they look and how ridiculous this whole thing is, and it's there for you.
You learn from those people. You have a better understanding of human behavior. You have a better understanding that people are capable of, you know, being really interesting, intelligent people, but also being buffoons at the same time.
and that we're all subject to all these various influences, and especially through the use of social media, which just, like I said before, it's an anxiety-creating machine. And there's so many of these people that are attached to it that are so deeply rooted in these online conversations and so disconnected from the natural world. And it's odd. It's odd to watch. But they're there for you.
They're there for an education, an understanding, a greater understanding of the weird nuances of human thinking. Because that's genuinely what this whole thing is all about. All the ideologies and all the left and the right and immigrants are great and immigrants are terrible and they're eating ducks.
All of it is just human thinking, trying to figure out what's the correct and incorrect way that we all cohabitate and what's the best way for all of us to sort of get along.
Yeah. I mean, that's the catch-22 of social media because it could be – If you use it exactly the right way, it does give you access to all these human beings and the way that they're thinking about things, which can be quite enlightening. But most people don't use it the right way.
You have to use it the right way.
And this is also why, in my opinion, none of my kids have smartphones or social media. They're going to get bullied.
They're going to get bullied.
Well, they're not on social media.
They're going to get bullied. How old are your kids? Our oldest are 11. That's young enough. They shouldn't have social media. Yeah, I agree with you there. But as they get into the high school ages, I think it's a new world. We're navigating it. They should learn how to navigate it, too.
I think it is very addictive, but also there's people that know how to walk away from it and know how to self-regulate, and I think that's a valuable skill that I think everyone's going to have to learn.
Yeah, I think once you... I mean, we haven't quite decided when we're going to introduce this stuff to the kids. But once you get into high... At a certain point, yeah, I don't want them to be 18 and it's their first time ever holding a cell phone. Right. Because then you're just... Then they have no idea. We haven't given them the tools to understand how to use this stuff. Right.
Like the emotional and intellectual tools. So you got to introduce it at some point. But... Most kids today, I don't know what the latest figure is, but millions of kids today have smartphones by the time they're like eight or nine years old.
A lot of my kids, you know, with friends when they come over and they're eight, nine, ten years old and they've got phones, I just think it's like, it can only harm them. You understand, as a parent, you're giving them something. At this age, they cannot use it appropriately or correctly. They don't have the tools for it. They're not old enough. It cannot help them in their life.
It can only harm them. It can only do damage to them.
I think we're going to look at it 20, 30 years from now the same way we look at people smoking. I think we're going to think, what were we doing? What were we doing giving kids those goddamn phones? What did we do? We don't even know what the kids of today who are on the internet who are subject to the same sort of horrific images that you and I were talking about earlier.
What is that doing to people long term? I never got exposed to anything like that when I was seven. How many kids are getting exposed to murder videos when they're 10 years old? Probably quite a few. Pornography. Yeah. Oh, that's the craziest one, right? Because that was a hard thing to get. It was difficult. When I was a boy, we'd find magazines in the woods. You knew a guy who had a VHS tape.
Oh, my God. It was crazy. No one can find it. Now, kids have it on their phones, and it's instantaneous. You have 5G on your phone. You can go to any porn site anytime you want.
Yeah. I mean, the average age of first exposure to pornography now is like... I think it's around 10 years old. I mean, it depends on, I guess, what study you look at, but it's young. And it's not just... Because, yeah, people sometimes will dismiss the harms of it because they'll say... They'll say, oh, yeah, I found a Playboy under my dad's mattress or whatever. Not the same.
It's not at all the same. I mean, the kind of thing you're being exposed to, how often you're being exposed to it, how ubiquitous it is now, how readily available it is, it's not at all the same.
Well, you know, we had the guys on from that Chimp Crazy show. You know that new show on HBO where the people have pet chimps?
No.
Crazy. It's the same guys who did Tiger King. Oh. And it's amazing. It's on Max. It used to be HBO. And one of the things they said is that chimps get addicted to pornography.
Really?
Yeah. They get addicted to pornography and they watch it all the time. Like these certain chimps that get older, they give them iPads, they give them phones, and they show them, you know, they get on the internet. And if someone shows them pornography, they get addicted to pornography. That's crazy. That's crazy. And they start sexualizing human beings.
Well, that kind of goes to show there's something primal about... Even just the... Well, obviously with pornography, but the phone, the... Even like my two-year-old twins. They don't have phones, obviously, but... Just something about the phone itself. Even if it's off, they just like to have... It's a cool object. Yeah.
And our kids, we will... They don't have tablets and all that stuff, but if we go on a long car trip, it's the one time we make an exception. If we're going on a 20-hour car trip, just for our own sanity, we'll let them have tablets in the car, just with games and books and stuff. But... Then we get wherever we're going, we take the tablets away, you don't get them anymore.
But there's like a detox period of like two or three days where they're jonesing for it. They're constantly, they can't, they're constantly asking for it. And once you get past that, they're fine again. But there's a real, it's like there's something, it creates this compulsion and kids take to it really quickly.
And it just becomes, it's like a, it becomes another limb for them, part of their, part of them somehow really quickly. Yeah.
Yeah, it's weird.
And the addictions to phones, which we all have, then the addictions to social media, which a lot of people have, and then you get these weird insulated groups that live in echo chambers, and that's, I think, one of the things you highlight the most about this show, this Am I Racist film that you made, is the struggle sessions where these people all get... The first scene where you...
before they know who you are when you're you're going and it's sitting there and and talking to these people about these things like who are you like where do you live how do you think like this like what is going on in your life you've been exposed to this version of the world that seems so ridiculous to someone who's not in that bubble so ridiculous that it seems fake it seems like you're doing like a borat thing
Yeah. And it's yeah, we've gotten that with the movie. People ask, is it is all is that all real or did we stay? It's all totally real. We didn't script any of it. And that in particular is a yeah, it's like a support group for white people who are struggling with their white grief because they they have privilege and they're grieving their whiteness and their privilege.
And there's this woman, Bershia Wade, I think his name is. a black woman she'll do these sessions with white people where she'll kind of like talk them through their whiteness and people yeah people pay money to go and sit around and uh and talk to her and that was another one that was like an hour and a half two hours in the room in real time when did they start figuring out who you were uh
At some point, midway through, they started looking at me strange because I was intentionally making it really awkward just because it was funny. But then, as you can see in the movie, I get emotional because I'm on my own journey of self-discovery. And I had to leave because there's one rule that all these people have. We ran into this multiple times.
If you're white, you're not allowed to cry in front of black people because that's white tears. And you can't shed white tears around black people because white tears are manipulative. So in this place, she had a cry room. She said, if you get emotional, you have to cry. We have a room. Get away from us and go cry over there. So at one point, I left to the cry room because I was getting emotional.
It's a very emotional experience to confront my whiteness. And... I guess while I was gone, they started talking to each other. Like, who is this guy? They looked it up, and they were Googling. And then I came back. The whole thing had changed. The tone had changed. They kicked me out.
It's a great scene. They called the cops. When the guy is saying, he's trying to hold your hand, trying to grab you, and you're like, I do not consent to be touched. He's like, I'm not going to touch you. I'm just going to answer your questions. Come, I'll answer your questions.
He's going to answer your questions. Like, what kind of answers are you going to give me, buddy?
That guy, too, I can say. One of the people in that group was a professional cuddler, actually. It's not in the movie, but we just know that about them. They get paid to cuddle with people? Yeah, one of the people in the group. Jeez. A cuddlist is what they call it. Jeez. They're fringe people. We thought about somehow we could put up a lower third on the screen. But it seems fake.
It's like people don't really professional cuddler. Come on. But this is too crazy. These people exist out there. This is a world that they live in. Yeah. They go to events like this and they're, they're very, they feel they have a lot of guilt for the fact that they're white. You know, uh, there were people crying in the circle. I mean, they were getting really emotional talking about it. Oh,
There's the part where she says, think about being white. What emotions come up when you think about being white? And then everyone goes around and they're like, oh, I have revulsion. I just feel, I cringe. I feel cringe. Really? This is you. You're talking about yourself. It's just, it's sick. It's a sickness.
Yeah. Well, it was very funny at the end too. We tried to get people – spoiler alert – tried to get people to self-flagellate. Yeah. Well, there's – And just a few people are like, that's it, I'm out.
Like slowly you lost like a bunch of people over the course of it.
I didn't think, I mean, we had that planned as our last exercise when we bring the whips out. And we debated like, is anyone really going to take a whip? I didn't think anybody would. I thought that this would be, because we needed an end for the scene. And so I thought I'd bring the whips out and everybody would leave. Yeah. And so then that would be the end.
And then that would be, that's our, cause you know, it's a narrative we're trying to tell story. So that would be the thing that shows me I've gone too far, but then they started taking the whips. And I'm like, I don't think I can actually have you beat yourself right now for like liability. I don't know if I can do that. Um, so I was not expecting that.
We lost a lot of people. And yes, who's the most racist person in the room.
Yeah, there was really the, uh, right before that. I mean, you know, it's spoilers, I guess, but, uh,
when i'm berating my uh my racist uncle um and uh well i don't know you gotta watch it but you gotta watch it yeah that that was for me the the most shock making the movie the most shocking thing to me that happened that really took me back was in that moment and the way they responded to it uh which i was not expecting and it's kind of dark yeah they got aggressive with them yeah yeah
It's a great movie, man. And it's just like What is a Woman in sort of the same vein of just it almost feels like satire. But you realize it's not. It's just ridiculous. But you do a great job. And you do a really good job of staying calm and deadpanning. Because I don't have that skill. I would not be able to hold it together. I would have to start laughing. At some point in time, I would crack.
I wouldn't be able to not enjoy it in the moment. That's the thing.
You don't enjoy it in the moment because it's really unpleasant in the moment. You're in this environment with these... Insane people. Yeah. It's exhausting listening to this. How did you develop that skill to do that, though? Because that's a skill. I don't know if I... I can't say I did anything to develop it.
It's more just... I just know what... We're making a movie, so I'm aware of that the whole time. Obviously, if the cameras weren't rolling, I wouldn't be reacting the same way. So I'm just kind of keeping that in the back of my mind. This is what we need for this scene. But the main thing is we want, with both movies, the whole point is to create an environment...
where the other person feels comfortable saying what they actually think and what they really believe and doing what they would really do. And that means not react because if you laugh at them, they clam up. If you argue with them, if you show any real skepticism, They clam up. They're not going to tell you what they really believe.
And then it's a boring movie because all you're getting are the talking points. And that's especially the case we found in this... That was the case with What Is Woman? We're talking to the trans activists. But in this, when you're talking to the race hustlers, they've been doing it for a lot longer. The race hustle has been around a lot longer than the trans hustle.
And they're pretty good at what they do. And they're usually pretty sensitive to...
detecting when someone's being skeptical and if they get that then they they're they kind of go into a different mode and they go into this kind of hr dei mode where everything's very sanitized very surface level they're not gonna they're not gonna tell you the stuff about how you know all white people are inherently racist and they're not gonna do they're not gonna get into the really brutal terrible racist stuff um so we just thought making this movie how can we
Just create an environment where they'll really be themselves.
The kookiest version.
Which with What Is Woman, all that required was just kind of being a blank slate and asking questions. With this one, it required more of an affirmatively agreeing with them approach. and demonstrating that I'm fully on board with this.
There's like a feel that you have when you go into it. Like if I was there and I didn't know you, I'd be like, I think this guy's fucking around. There's just an edge, just a touch of it, just a touch of it that makes it even funnier because you're hanging in there and you're being dead planned.
But there's some moments where like one of my favorite moments was you asked Robin DiAngelo what mansplaining was. And then when she gave you a definition and you mansplained her, you corrected her. And she didn't even pick up with what you just did. Yeah. I was proud of that. It's very subtle. It's very subtle. I was stretching when I was watching that, just laughing really loud.
Because it was like, you just... Oh, my God.
She did. But the thing is, she did kind of. And I think you can see it on camera. In the room, I could tell she was kind of like... What did you just do? She was trying to figure out in her head. I think she was trying to sort through it. Like, is he...
but I think she just couldn't, uh, she couldn't, the possibility that she was in the room with someone who doesn't already agree with her about everything. It's like unthinkable to her. She couldn't, she couldn't fathom it. She probably, that was probably the first time in like 20 years that she'd been in a room with someone who doesn't agree with her on everything.
Has she responded to the movie at all? Uh, No, she took down her Twitter page. So most of the people in the movie have taken down their Twitter pages, deleted them. So they're kind of going into a bubble somewhere. I mean, the truth is there's not a lot they can say because, listen, if we deceptively edited it, if we pulled any trick like that, they'd happily come out and say that.
But they know that we didn't. Everything that's in there is what they said. We didn't change anything. Yeah. It's all real, and they know that, so what can they say? And especially in Robin DiAngelo's case, you know, it goes in a direction. She's willing to do some things that are quite embarrassing for her, and... But, you know, we didn't put a gun to her. We didn't force her.
Right, right. So what can she say? Well, listen, man, congratulations. It's really funny. It's great. And I think it's a great way to expose how ridiculous some of this shit is. You can expose it by being angry and yelling and arguing with people on Twitter. But to do it the way you did it and just make it a hilarious hour and a half movie is really good. So kudos.
Thank you, man. Appreciate it.
Congratulations. All right. Tell everybody where they can see it. It's on dailywire.com. Actually, it's in theaters.
Oh, it's in theaters. It's in theaters right now. Oh, nice. Nice. You can get tickets at mracist.com.
Nice.
Nice. We're trying to get it out to make it available to whoever wants to see it.
It's very funny, folks. All right. Thank you, Matt. Appreciate it. Thank you. Bye, everybody. Bye, everybody.