#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism

0:00:06 The following is a conversation with Cenk Yuger, a progressive political commentator and host of the
0:00:11 Young Turks. As I’ve said before, I will speak with everyone, including on the left and the right
0:00:18 of the political spectrum, always in good faith with empathy, rigor, and backbone. Sometimes I fail,
0:00:25 sometimes I say stupid, inaccurate, ineliquent things, and I frequently change my mind as I’m
0:00:32 learning and thinking about the world. For all this, I often get attacked, sometimes fairly,
0:00:39 sometimes not. But just know that I’m aware when I fall short, and I will keep trying to do better.
0:00:46 I love you all. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the
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0:01:22 to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please do check out our sponsors. I enjoy their
0:01:30 stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Seili, a brand new eSim service offering
0:01:36 several affordable data plans in over 150 countries. I’ve had a bunch of experience when I was
0:01:46 traveling. Where was the legitimate pay in the ass to get a sim card or an eSim working? And being
0:01:55 abroad in the foreign land, far away from home. All these signs and ways of life you don’t understand
0:02:01 all around you. All that combined with the fact that you don’t have access to this little tablet
0:02:09 of wisdom, which is the smartphone. It can be a real pain in the ass. So a great eSim that works,
0:02:15 easy to set up, is worth its weight in gold. That said, when I was in the Amazon, it was also nice
0:02:20 to have no reception whatsoever, to be completely disconnected from the world. At first, it was
0:02:28 painful. But after going rapidly through all the stages of grief, I was able to discover freedom.
0:02:36 I was able to, let’s say, quiet the mind to a degree that I’m not usually able to in the business
0:02:43 of urban life. And the smartphone certainly is a thing that creates that turmoil in the mind.
0:02:49 You can always look and something in there can just perturbate the mind and now it’s off to the
0:02:58 races. So not having a smartphone to do that is a really nice catalyst for peace. Anyway,
0:03:02 when you are traveling, you should have a smartphone and it should work and it should be easy.
0:03:12 Go to salee.com/lex and choose the one gigabyte salee data plan to get it for free. That’s salee.com/lex
0:03:18 to get one free gig of salee. This episode is also brought to you by Policy Genius,
0:03:25 a marketplace for insurance, all kinds, life, auto, home, disability, and so on. Really nice
0:03:32 tools for comparisons. Having talked to Peter Levels, I realized how awesome it is to create a
0:03:44 website that compares stuff, whether it’s hotels, neighborhoods, and whatever else. It’s nice. Some
0:03:48 of it is an interface challenge. Some of it is a data challenge, all of that. When a company,
0:03:52 when a service does it well, it just makes life easier. You can compare stuff, you can choose
0:03:59 the thing that’s right for you. I know how powerful it is because most people do it poorly.
0:04:04 And it’s a real pain in the ass. Like with hotels, booking hotels, and I just saw, I need to check
0:04:10 out a little bit better that Peter threw up hotel list. That looks really exciting. You’ll be able
0:04:16 to compare all different kinds of hotels. Anyway, Policy Genius does that for insurances. You know,
0:04:23 insurance is a fascinating thing because basically life is full of risks. Much of progress in a human
0:04:32 life occurs when you take risks. You can use insurance to kind of muffle the pain felt when,
0:04:37 after taking the risk, the negative consequences are experienced. So it’s really interesting just
0:04:44 looking at the landscape of human experience and seeing how insurance muffles the lows.
0:04:51 It can create a floor, a protection against the lows, especially the real lows. And it works,
0:04:55 of course, because a lot of people don’t experience those lows and therefore they’re
0:05:02 funding the people that do. It’s a fascinating system. And I’m glad we figured out a way how to
0:05:07 take risks together in this society and help each other out financially for the people who
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0:05:21 just $292 per year for $1 million of coverage. Head to PolicyGenius.com/Lex or click the link
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0:05:33 PolicyGenius.com/Lex. This episode was also brought to you by AG1, the thing I just drank.
0:05:40 And I sometimes drink twice a day and I’m traveling for a bit here and I don’t have travel packs.
0:05:47 And so I will be going without AG1 for a couple of days and I’ll miss it because it makes me feel
0:05:54 like home. So I need to get the travel packs. It’s just a really, really nice multivitamin
0:06:01 that provides a nutritional basis for a crazy physical and mental existence. All the crazy
0:06:08 stuff I do that wise. I’m still doing mostly one meal a day, mostly low carb. And so for that,
0:06:12 you know, it’s nice to make sure you’re getting all the right nutrition. I find when I’m extremely
0:06:20 stressed, my ability to enjoy long run or enjoy a hard training session in jujitsu is diminished.
0:06:28 The physical challenge is a kind of catalyst to let whatever the underlying reason for the stress
0:06:34 come out and pass through you. And maybe you even get a chance to let it go. But when you’re in it,
0:06:41 sometimes it’s rough. Anyway, jujitsu is still a huge source of happiness for me. I think the
0:06:46 puzzle of it, I still try to train with a very large variety of people from white belt to black
0:06:51 belt. As I’ve talked about with Craig Jones, it could be sometimes a little bit difficult.
0:06:55 Certain people, especially the lower ranks go a little bit too hard. So you have to figure out
0:07:01 that puzzle, let them submit you a few times, kind of let them chill out. But it’s still a fascinating
0:07:10 puzzle of human psychology, of human sort of biomechanics from arms and legs and sort of
0:07:17 pressure and dynamic movement and transitions, all that kind of stuff. It’s just a fascinating game.
0:07:22 It’s a fascinating dynamic game. It really is not like chess, because chess is a static game.
0:07:28 There are elements of chess, but it’s not discreet. It’s continuous. And sometimes the
0:07:33 subtlest movements make all the difference. And the timing of those movements can make all the
0:07:38 difference. Anyway, go check out AG1. They’ll give you one month supply of fish oil when you sign up
0:07:44 at drinkag1.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by Masterclass, where you can watch over
0:07:50 200 classes from the best people in the world and their respective disciplines. I really enjoyed
0:07:57 the one that Martin Scorsese did on filmmaking. I’m fascinated by dialogue and film and the
0:08:04 contrast that that dialogue has with, say, podcasts. Because podcasts is a single take,
0:08:13 if you will. It’s sort of a genuine, relaxed conversation. It’s not really planned. There’s
0:08:20 not a script. And so it’s a single take. And now you take film. And depending on the director,
0:08:30 you’re doing five, 10, 20, 30 takes on a single piece of dialogue. And you’re crafting that with
0:08:37 the lighting, with the mood, with the intensity of the faces of the actors and the music, all of that.
0:08:43 And the final results, honestly, is looking for the same kind of thing. It’s looking for something
0:08:53 real. Now, great interviews, great conversations arrive at that something real, like an improvised
0:09:00 dance, let’s say. And sort of great film arises something real, like a great choreographed dance.
0:09:07 And it still does have similar elements. Like I think about with lighting and all the kinds of
0:09:16 things I have very little idea about. But as someone who can appreciate it, I can reach out
0:09:23 towards that and try to achieve that in some kind of way to really see a person to really bring out
0:09:31 the beauty of that person is something I would love to do. And I listen to a lot of great
0:09:39 interviewers in podcasts. And I’m just in awe inspired, truly, truly inspired and humbled.
0:09:44 There’s just so, so many people that do a much, much better job than me. And I learned from them,
0:09:51 I’m inspired by them. It’s just great. I think I really enjoy just being a fan. Masterclass lets
0:09:57 me be a fan of all these cool people. Get unlimited access to every masterclass and get an additional
0:10:06 15% off an annual membership at masterclass.com/lexpod. That’s masterclass.com/lexpod. This episode
0:10:12 is brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix. My favorite flavor
0:10:19 is watermelon salt. But there’s a bunch of other flavors that are great. And like I said, when I’m
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0:10:43 you just, I mean, you’re drained from water. Just, just, you know, I don’t know. I don’t know how many
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0:11:07 electrolytes, it’s quite incredible. And the same is actually true when you’re fasting. And it’s been
0:11:12 actually a while since I’ve fasted for more than 24 hours. So most days I fast, I guess you could say
0:11:19 24 hours, I eat one meal a day, you know, 22 hours or whatever it is, 23 hours. But what I do even
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0:11:46 In this episode, we jank, we talk a lot about capitalism. Now, I think I disagree with him.
0:11:54 And I do in the episode, and I’ll have to really think through it. And really my favorite episodes
0:12:02 is when I’m really challenged to think and learn for weeks and months afterwards. But I don’t think
0:12:10 our capitalist system is as broken as Jank suggests. So he feels that companies have completely
0:12:22 captured our politicians, our government. But I think that a significant number of companies
0:12:29 have undue influence on our politicians. But not as much as Jank says, and I have a lot of hope.
0:12:36 Primarily underlying that hope is a kind of sense that even among the politicians,
0:12:41 there’s integrity. Not every politician, but a lot of them. I don’t think that money can
0:12:49 so easily buy the human heart. Can so easily corrupt the values of the people who want to serve.
0:12:54 So I don’t know. I just think if you want to make money, you’re not going to go into politics.
0:13:02 There’s a lot easier ways, cleaner ways, more pleasant ways to make money. It’s just such a dirty
0:13:10 game. And I think you go in that game to try to help. So anyway, but yes, corporatism is a very
0:13:16 serious problem. So the way out to me is great companies, quite honestly, and celebrating those
0:13:20 companies. And that’s something I try to do. Call out bullshit, call out shitty behavior
0:13:25 on the parts of companies when they do it, but celebrate companies when they do great stuff.
0:13:34 Anyway, underlying the flourishing of our nation is great companies and the very system of capitalism.
0:13:40 So if you’re running a company, you should be using the best tools for the job of running that
0:13:47 company because it is an incredible machine with so many moving pieces. And so it’s not an easy job
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0:14:07 This is a Lex Freeman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
0:14:12 And now, dear friends, here’s Cenk Yuger.
0:14:33 You wrote a book, a manifesto, that outlines the progressive vision for America. So
0:14:37 the big question, what are some defining ideas of progressivism?
0:14:43 Yes. So in order to do that, Lex, we got to talk about where we are in the political spectrum.
0:14:49 And in fact, there’s two different spectrums now. People often think of left, right. And that’s
0:14:55 true that exists. But layered on top of that is now populist versus establishment. So
0:15:05 I’m center left on the left, right spectrum. But I’m all the way on the populist end of the
0:15:11 second spectrum. So where does progressivism lie within that? Well, I would argue that it’s
0:15:20 exactly in those places. It’s populist and it’s on the left. But it is not far left. So far left
0:15:26 is a different animal. And we could talk about that in a little bit. So in terms of what makes a
0:15:33 progressive, so expand the circle of liberty and justice for all and equality of opportunity.
0:15:40 Now, people will say, well, that seems pretty broad and all American. But is it? Think about it.
0:15:46 So expand the circle of liberty. Everybody’s in favor of that, right? No, absolutely not. So
0:15:51 certainly the King of England was not in favor of expanding the circle of liberty and the Founding
0:15:56 Father said, we’re going to expand it. And they expanded it to property white men. And then
0:16:02 their progressives, because they expanded the circle of liberty, they then from then on,
0:16:06 as we were perfecting the union, progressives always say, expand it further, include women,
0:16:12 include people without property, include all races, and at every turn, conservatives fight
0:16:17 against it. So that doesn’t mean if you’re a conservative today, you don’t want to include
0:16:23 women or minorities, et cetera. But today, you would say, for example, well, I don’t want to
0:16:28 expand the circle of liberty to, for example, undocumented immigrants. And maybe you’re right
0:16:33 about that. And we could have that discussion in terms of a specific philosophy. And I don’t believe
0:16:37 that undocumented immigrants should immediately be citizens or anything along those lines.
0:16:42 But I do believe in expanding liberty overall. And the contours of that are what’s interesting.
0:16:47 And then you say justice for all. Everybody’s for justice. No, right now, marijuana possession
0:16:52 is still illegal in a lot of parts of the country. Now a lot of right-wingers and left-wingers agree
0:16:57 that it should be legal. But for my entire lifetime, black people have been arrested at about
0:17:04 3.7 times the rate of white people. And the entire country has been fine with it. So is that justice?
0:17:09 No, they smoke. White people, black people smoke marijuana at the same rate. Black people get
0:17:14 arrested about four times the rate. That is an injustice that an enormous percentage of the
0:17:19 country was comfortable with. Well, progressives aren’t comfortable with it. We want justice for
0:17:23 all. So the quality of opportunity is an interesting one because the far left will say,
0:17:31 at least some portions of them will say, equality of results, right? So progressives just want a
0:17:38 fair chance. So free college education, but afterwards, you don’t get to have exact same
0:17:42 results as either the wealthiest person or we’re not all going to be equal. We don’t have equal
0:17:47 talents, skills, abilities, et cetera. There’s a lot of questions that can ask that. So on the
0:17:54 circle of liberty, yes, so expanding the number of people whose freedoms are protected. But what
0:18:01 about the magnitude of freedom for each individual person? So expanding the freedom of the individual
0:18:06 and protecting the freedoms of the individual. It seems like progressives are more willing
0:18:11 to expand the size of government where government can do all kinds of regulation,
0:18:16 all kinds of controls in the individual. So Lex, what we’re probably going to talk about a lot
0:18:24 today is balance. And so a lot of people think, oh, I’m on the right, I’m on the left. And that
0:18:30 comes with a certain preset ideology. So the right is always correct. The left is always correct.
0:18:36 So there’s two problems with that. Number one, how could you possibly believe in a preset ideology
0:18:42 if you’re an independent thinker? It’s literally, by definition, not possible. If you say I lent
0:18:48 my brain to an ideology that was created 80 years ago or eight years ago or 800 years ago,
0:18:53 and I’m not going to change it, you’re saying, I don’t think for myself. I bought into a culture
0:18:58 and, by the way, there’s a lot of different forms of culture you could buy into, religion, politics,
0:19:06 sometimes racial, etc. So that’s why you need actually balance. The second reason you need
0:19:11 balance, other than independent thought, is because the answer is almost never black and white.
0:19:17 And that gets into a really interesting nuance because mainstream media, in my opinion, is the
0:19:24 matrix. And its job is to delude you into thinking corporate rule is great for you. And we should
0:19:32 never change it. And the status quo is wonderful. So they have created a false middle. What mainstream
0:19:40 media calls moderate is actually, in my opinion, extremist corporate ideology. So for example,
0:19:44 they’ll say Joe Manchin is a moderate. None of his positions are moderate other than potentially
0:19:49 gun control in West Virginia. He’s not for gun control. The people of West Virginia are not
0:19:54 for gun control, generally speaking. And he uses that, and they usually have these shiny objects
0:19:59 where they’re like, you see this? I’m a moderate because of guns. Or I’m a moderate because I’m
0:20:03 a Democrat from West Virginia. But wait, let’s look at your positions. You’re against paid family
0:20:09 leave. That pulls at 84%. So you’re a radical corporatist who say that women should be forced
0:20:15 back into work the day after they have birth. You’re against the higher minimum wage. You’re
0:20:24 for every corporate position, and they all pull at 33% or less. So Joe Manchin is not at all a
0:20:28 moderate. And this applies to almost every corporate Republican and every corporate Democrat.
0:20:34 They’re all extremists in supporting what I call corporatism. So you have to get to a balance in
0:20:38 order to get to the right answer. So that’s an interesting distinction here. So you’re actually,
0:20:43 as far as I understand pro-capitalism, which is an interesting place to be. That’s the thing that
0:20:50 probably makes you center left, and then still populist. You’re full of beautiful contradictions,
0:20:56 let’s say this, which will be great to untangle. But what’s the difference between corporatism and
0:21:03 capitalism? Is there a difference? So I really believe in capitalism. I don’t think that there’s
0:21:09 really a second choice. Where it gets super interesting is the distinction between capitalism
0:21:15 and socialism, because that’s not at all as clear as people think it is. And people often
0:21:21 say socialism and communism as synonyms when they’re not synonyms, right? And so I view it as
0:21:28 there’s basically four distinct areas. It’s obviously a spectrum. Everything is a spectrum,
0:21:33 right? On one end, you have communism on the left. And on the other end, you have corporatism
0:21:39 on the right, okay? And I would argue that capitalism is in the middle. And so communism,
0:21:46 we know, state owns all property. You’re not allowed to have private property. So I will piss
0:21:52 off a lot of people in this show. And so I’m asking for their patience, please hear me out.
0:21:58 And because don’t worry, I’m going to piss off the other side too, okay? So communism makes
0:22:04 no sense at all, totally opposed to human nature. It never works. It always evolves into
0:22:11 dictatorship, because it is not built for human nature. It we’re never going to act like that.
0:22:18 It’s not in our DNA. You could try to wish it into existence and they have. And it never works.
0:22:25 And it’s because once you have almost no rules in terms of, oh, we’re all equal. And even though
0:22:33 communism eventually winds up having an enormous amount of rules, right? It creates a power vacuum
0:22:38 when you say, Hey, there’s no structure of power here, right? We’re all equal. It’s a flat line.
0:22:44 One guy usually gets up because that’s human nature and goes, I don’t think so. I think if
0:22:48 you’re going to leave a power vacuum, I’m going to take that power vacuum. That’s actually a really
0:22:55 interesting way to put it. Because when everyone is equal, nobody is in power and human nature is
0:22:59 such that there’s everybody’s that there’s a will to power. So when you create a power vacuum,
0:23:05 somebody’s going to to fill it. So the alternative is to have people in power, but there’s a balance
0:23:09 of power. And then there’s like a democratic system that elects the people in power and
0:23:15 keeps churning and rotating. That is exactly it. Like you got it exactly right in my opinion. Okay.
0:23:23 So that’s why communism never works and can never work. So they it’s an idea of like,
0:23:27 we’re all going to work as hard as we possibly can and take only what we need.
0:23:33 Where? When? When has that ever happened in the history of humanity? Right? We’re just not built
0:23:38 that way. So okay, we can get into that debate with my friends on the left, etc. Now, corporatism
0:23:43 is just as extreme and just as dangerous. And that is basically what we have in America now.
0:23:49 What we have in America now, and this is another giant trick that the matrix played on everybody,
0:23:56 that they they did in a shell game. And all of a sudden extreme corporates like Manchin and almost
0:24:01 every Republican in the Senate are moderates. Oh my God, Mitch McConnell all of a sudden is a
0:24:07 moderate and etc. As long as you’re not a populist, populists are never moderate. Okay.
0:24:13 But if you love corporations and corporate tax cuts and everything in favor of corporations,
0:24:16 you’re magically called a moderate when you actually according to the polling have super
0:24:21 extreme positions that the American people hate. And by the way, that’s part of the reason for the
0:24:28 rise of Trump and come back to that. Okay. But the second shell game is taking out capitalism,
0:24:33 putting in corporatism, but still calling it capitalism. Okay. So what is corporatism?
0:24:39 It is when corporations slowly take over the system and create monopoly and oligopoly power.
0:24:48 So that snuffs out equality of opportunity. So how do they do that? When people say the
0:24:54 the system is rigged, they oftentimes can’t explain it that well. And then mainstream media
0:25:02 goes, Oh, your sound conspiratorial rigged. Yeah, I wonder how. Yeah, super easy to explain it.
0:25:08 Here’s one of dozens of examples, carried interest loophole. So that is for hedge funds,
0:25:15 private equity, the top people on Wall Street, that’s part of their income, they get two and 20,
0:25:22 right? So 2% is a flat fee, no matter what happens to the fund. And 20% of the profits of the fund
0:25:27 goes back to the people who invested it. It’s not their money. It’s not their investment.
0:25:32 What they’re getting is actually just income. It should be taxed at the highest rate.
0:25:36 But it’s because of this loophole, it’s taxed at a much lower rate at around 20%.
0:25:45 So do you know what income level you go above 20% if you’re a regular Joe? It’s at $84,000 a year.
0:25:52 So these billionaires are getting the same tax rate as people making $84,000 a year.
0:25:58 It’s unbelievably unfair. And that’s corporatism taking over and starting to rig the rules. I’m
0:26:03 going to pay less taxes, you’re going to pay more taxes. Okay. So again, I can give you dozens of
0:26:09 those examples. And mergers so that they get to oligopoly power. That’s how you rig a system,
0:26:14 lowering the corporate tax rates, making sure that there is no real minimum wage,
0:26:20 making sure there’s no universal healthcare. We all get become indentured servants of corporations.
0:26:24 They take away power from the average guy, give it to the most powerful people in the world.
0:26:31 But the most important distinction, Lex, is that corporatism hates competition.
0:26:37 It wants monopoly and oligopoly power. Whereas capitalism loves competition
0:26:44 and wants to free markets. And I remember, we started Young Turks back in 2002. So we’ve been
0:26:53 around for 22 years, longest running daily show on the internet ever. And so we were pre-Iraq war.
0:26:56 And the Iraq war starts and Dick Cheney starts handing out no bid contracts.
0:27:04 I’m like, what part of capitalism is a no bid contract? You can’t negotiate drug prices.
0:27:12 The most anti-free market thing I have ever heard. It’s almost like communism for corporations.
0:27:19 They get everything, you get nothing, right? So it’s preposterous, it’s awful,
0:27:26 and it kills the free markets and it’s killing this country. And it is the main ideology and
0:27:32 religion of the establishment. Are all companies built the same here? So when you say corporatism,
0:27:41 it seems like just looking here at the list of by industry lobbyists, it seems like there are
0:27:48 certain industries that are worse offenders than others, like pharmaceuticals, like insurance,
0:27:58 oil and gas. So it seems to me, it feels wrong to just throw all companies into the same bucket
0:28:03 of like they’re all guilty. No, they’re not all guilty. So let’s make a bunch of distinctions
0:28:09 here. So first of all, can you, first of all, are they quote unquote guilty? No, they’re doing
0:28:13 something that is logical and natural, right? So if you’re a company, do you want to pay higher
0:28:17 taxes or lower taxes? Of course you want to pay lower taxes, right? Do you want to have higher
0:28:21 employee costs or lower employee costs? Of course you want lower employee costs, right?
0:28:28 So but the government needs to understand that and protect us from that power that they are
0:28:34 going to exercise to get to those results. And if you, if you think free markets is there is no
0:28:41 government, you, you read it wrong, go read, go back and reread Adam Smith. He says you must
0:28:46 protect against monopoly power. If you do not protect against monopoly power, you will have
0:28:53 no free markets and he’s absolutely right. So the second distinction is between small business
0:28:57 and big business. That’s why Republicans will always be like, oh, we’re doing this for small
0:29:02 business. That’s why we got the biggest oil companies in the world, $30 billion in subsidies.
0:29:08 What happened to small business, right? So I run a small business and so if people were to say like,
0:29:14 hey, maybe there should be exemptions for some of the regulations. If your company has less than
0:29:19 five employees, 10 employees, 50 employees, et cetera, there’s some logic in that because
0:29:23 businesses have different stages of growth and they have different interests and different
0:29:29 needs in those stages of growth. And we want to facilitate small business growth because that’s
0:29:35 great for the economy. That’s great for markets, freedom, et cetera. But the bigger corporations,
0:29:40 even there, there’s a third distinction. It isn’t that there are certain industries that are worse.
0:29:47 There’s just that there are industries that are better at lobbying. So anyone who like right now,
0:29:51 number one donor in Washington, a lot of people make a mistake. They think it’s
0:29:57 APAC or they think it’s the oil companies or the banks. No, it’s big pharma. Okay. And who has the
0:30:04 most power in this country? Big pharma. So we can’t even negotiate the drug prices. I mean,
0:30:07 look, guys, think about it this way. That’s like saying, okay, here’s a bottle of water.
0:30:14 And normally in the free market, that would cost about a dollar, right? And for Medicare,
0:30:18 the drug companies come in and go, no, I’m not charging a dollar for that water. I’m charging
0:30:23 $100. And the government has to say, yes, sir, thank you, sir. Of course, sir, we’ll pay $100.
0:30:30 That’s why compared to communism, because I can’t imagine anything more diametrically opposed
0:30:36 to the free market than you, the consumer have to pay whatever the hell a corporation charges.
0:30:42 That’s insanity, let alone the patents, let alone the fact that the American people pay for the
0:30:47 research, and then they make billions of dollars off of it, and we get nothing but robbed by them.
0:30:52 So it’s about lobby power. Oil companies have huge lobby power, defense contractors have huge
0:30:57 lobby power. It’s not that they’re more evil, it’s just that they have figured out the game better,
0:31:03 and they have basically taken the influence they need to capture the market, capture the government,
0:31:06 and snuff out all competition. Or a lot of companies.
0:31:16 Figured out the game better. So I think a lot of companies are good at winning the right way
0:31:22 by building better products, by making people happier with the work they’re doing,
0:31:27 and winning at the game of capitalism. And then there’s other companies that win at the game of
0:31:32 lobbying. And I just want to draw that distinction, because I think it’s a small subset of companies
0:31:36 that are playing the game of lobbying. It’s a big pharma.
0:31:41 So Lex, first of all, you have to set rules for what makes sense, not, oh, I don’t like this
0:31:46 industry, or I don’t like this company, or hey, this company’s not doing that much lobbying at this
0:31:51 point. They will later when they realize what’s going on. So for example, in my opinion, APAC
0:31:56 has totally bought almost all of Congress. And so now other countries are going to wake up and go,
0:32:03 wait, you could just buy the American government. So APAC is going to spend about $100 million in
0:32:09 this cycle, and then they’re getting $26 billion back. So every country in the world is soon going
0:32:15 to realize, oh, take American citizens that live there, get them a tremendous amount of money,
0:32:21 and just buy the US government. But for corporations, they’ve already realized that on a massive
0:32:28 scale. So for example, in the two industries you gave, automotive. So in New Jersey, about a decade
0:32:36 ago or so, one of the most powerful lobbies is car dealerships. So at the national level, you got
0:32:40 pharma, and you’ve got defense contractors, et cetera. At the local level, guys who have huge
0:32:46 power, number one is utilities. Number two is real estate. And then car dealerships are hilariously
0:32:52 among the top, right? Because it’s local businesses that are financing the politicians at the local
0:33:00 level. So they passed a law saying that you have to sell through dealerships, but Tesla doesn’t
0:33:05 sell through dealerships. And it was intended to bully, intimidate, and push out Tesla out of the
0:33:11 market. They then did that in a number of different states throughout the country. So does that make
0:33:16 any sense in a democracy? Of course not. Why do you have to sell your product through a specific
0:33:20 vehicle or medium? You can sell it any way you like. That’s the most anti-free market thing
0:33:26 possible. Why? It was just total utter corruption. But it’s not, but it’s perfectly legal. The
0:33:31 Supreme Court legalized bribery. So then what happened in that case? So then Elon came in
0:33:37 and gave campaign contributions and reversed it. So now we’re in a battle where it’s an open
0:33:42 auction, right? Different companies are buying different politicians, and then they’re pretending
0:33:50 to have debates about principles and ideas, etc. So now let’s look at tech. In the beginning,
0:33:55 Facebook was not spending any money in politics, or almost any money in politics. So what happens?
0:34:01 They’re getting hammered. They get pulled into congressional hearings, and Facebook’s got fake
0:34:07 news, and oh my god, all this trouble from Facebook. Then Facebook does the logical thing. Oh,
0:34:11 it turns out I need to grease these sons of bitches, okay? So then they hire a whole bunch of
0:34:17 Republicans consultants. They go grease all the Republicans and most of the corporate Democrats.
0:34:22 And then all of a sudden, we’re no longer talking about Facebook at all. And Facebook are angels.
0:34:28 And now we’ve turned our attention to who? Facebook’s top competitor, TikTok. Funny how
0:34:35 that works, okay? And by the way, then Donald Trump goes, oh, and TikTok’s big dangerous company,
0:34:42 they’re working with China, okay? And then Jeff Yaz comes in on this cycle, part owner of TikTok,
0:34:47 and he doesn’t want TikTok banished, of course, right? So he gives Trump a couple of million
0:34:53 dollars. Trump turns around the next day and goes, we love TikTok. TikTok’s a good company, right?
0:35:00 So that’s a big contributor to influencing what politicians say and what they think. But it’s
0:35:05 not the entire thing, right? No, it is. It’s 98%. I’ll go on mainstream media and they’ll be like,
0:35:10 oh, I see what you’re saying. I can see how that influences politicians about 10%. I’m like, no,
0:35:18 no, it’s 98%. So a lot of good people think it’s 50/50. They have principles and they have money.
0:35:23 No, they have money and there’s major principles. That’s why I wanted to clarify 98Tube.
0:35:28 Okay, so how do we fix it? So it’s really interesting and nice that you’re pro-capitalism
0:35:36 and anti-corporatism. So how do we create a system where the free market can rule,
0:35:42 where capitalism can rule, we can have these vibrant flourishing of all these companies competing
0:35:48 against each other and creating awesome stuff? Yeah, so in the book, I call it democratic capitalism,
0:35:52 as opposed to Bernie’s democratic socialism, right? We can get into that distinction in a minute.
0:36:01 So as Adam Smith said, and anyone who studies capitalism knows, you need the government to
0:36:07 protect the market as well as the people. Why do we have cops? Because if we don’t have cops,
0:36:11 somebody’s going to go, well, I like Lex’s equipment. Why don’t I just go into his house and take it?
0:36:16 So you need the cops to protect you and that’s the government. So people say, oh, I hate big
0:36:21 government. Do you? It depends, right? If your house is getting robbed, all of a sudden you like
0:36:26 the government, but you also need cops on Wall Street because if you allow insider trading,
0:36:29 the powerful are going to rob you blind and the little guy is going to get screwed. So that’s
0:36:36 this easy example. And so if you don’t have those cops, the bad guys are going to take over,
0:36:42 they’re going to set the rules, rig the rules in their favor. So that’s why you need regulation.
0:36:47 And so the Republicans on purpose made regulation a dirty word. They’re like, all
0:36:53 regulation is bad. And then sometimes on the left, people fall for the trap of all regulation is
0:37:00 good. Guy I liken has a great analogy on this. Matt Stolar, he’s one of the original, I would
0:37:06 argue, progressives. And there’s about four of us. I’m sure there’s more, but that have stayed true
0:37:14 to the original meaning of progressivism and populism. Me, Matt Stolar, David Sarota, Ryan Grimm.
0:37:20 Okay. And it used to be in that original blogger group, there was guys like Glenn Greenwald and
0:37:26 other interesting cats, right? But they went in different directions. So Matt has a great line.
0:37:34 If somebody comes up to you and says, how big a pipe do you want? There is no answer for that.
0:37:39 It depends on the job, doesn’t it? Right? What are we doing? What are we building? I’m going to
0:37:45 tell you the size of the pipe, depending on the project. So when people say, are you in favor
0:37:49 of regulation or against it? That’s an absurd question. Of course you need regulation. It just
0:37:58 means laws, right? So don’t kill your neighbor is a regulation, right? So my idea is a simple one
0:38:03 and one we’re going to keep coming back to balance. So when my dad was a small business owner in New
0:38:11 Jersey and they inspected the elevator six times a year, that was over-regulation. And I said to
0:38:16 my dad, so should they not inspected at all? I’m a young kid growing up. And he said, no, no, no,
0:38:20 you got inspected at least twice a year. I said, why? He said, because in Turkey, sometimes they
0:38:27 don’t inspect it and then the elevator falls. Okay. So, so bounds are reason, correct regulation to
0:38:32 protect the markets and to protect the American people. Yeah, but finding the right level of
0:38:36 regulation, especially in, for example, in tech, something I’m much more familiar with is very
0:38:42 difficult because people in Congress are living in the 20th century before the internet was
0:38:49 invented. So like, how are they supposed to come up with regulations? Yeah, that’s the idea of the
0:38:55 free market is you should be able to sort of compete the market regulates. And then the government
0:39:01 can step in and protect the market from forming monopolies, for example, which is easier to do.
0:39:05 Yeah, but that’s their former regulation. Right. But then there’s like more check and
0:39:10 elevator twice a year. That’s a more sort of specific watching, micromanaging.
0:39:20 So Lex, here’s the deal. There is no way around the laws are made by politicians. Okay. So, and so
0:39:25 you can’t give up then and go, oh, it’s a bunch of schmucks. I think most politicians are just
0:39:30 servants for the donor class. All right. The, you know, the media makes it sound like they’re the
0:39:35 best of us. Oh, they deserve a lot of honor and respect and they kiss their ass, etc. I think
0:39:39 generally speaking, they’re usually the worst of us, especially in this corporate structure,
0:39:46 right? Because they’re the guys who their number one talent is. Yes, sir. No, sir. What would you
0:39:52 like me to do with your donor money, sir? Absolutely. I’ll serve you completely or 98%. Right. So in
0:39:57 this structure, the politicians are the worst of us. But at some point, you need somebody elected
0:40:03 to be your representative to do democratic capitalism so that you have capitalism, but it’s
0:40:09 checked by the government on behalf of the people. It’s the people that are saying these are the
0:40:16 rules of the land and you have to abide by them. So how do you get to the best possible answer?
0:40:23 Which is related to an earlier question you asked, Lex, which is the number one thing you have to do
0:40:30 is get big money out of politics. Everything else is near impossible as long as we are drowned in
0:40:35 money and whoever has more money wins. And by the way, when it comes to legislation, again,
0:40:40 that’s true about 98% of the time. We predict things ahead of time. People are like, wow,
0:40:43 how did you know that that bill wasn’t going to pass or was going to pass? It’s the easiest thing
0:40:49 in the world. And we literally teach our audience on the young Turks, watch, you’ll be able to see
0:40:55 for yourself. And now like our members comment in, they do these predictions, they’re almost always
0:41:00 right, right? Because it’s so simple, follow the money. So if you get big money out of politics,
0:41:07 and I can explain how to do that in a sec, then you’re at a place where you got your best shot
0:41:12 and honest representatives that are going to try their best to get to the right answer. Are they
0:41:16 going to get to the right answer out of the gate? Usually not. So they pass a law, there’s something
0:41:22 wrong with the law. They then fix that part. It’s a pendulum. You know, you don’t want it to swing
0:41:27 too wildly, but you do need a little bit of oscillation in that pendulum to get to the right
0:41:34 balance. By the way, I was listening to Joe Biden from when he was like 30 years old, the speeches,
0:41:41 he was eloquent as hell. It’s fun to listen to actually. And he has a speech he gives, or just
0:41:45 maybe a conversation in Congress, I’m not sure where, where he talks about how corrupt the whole
0:41:53 system is. And he’s really honest and fun. And that Joe Biden is great, by the way. That guy,
0:41:59 I mean, age sucks. You know, people get older. But he was talking quite honestly about having
0:42:05 to suck up to all these rich people, and that he couldn’t really suck up to the really rich people.
0:42:13 They said, come back to us 10 years later, when you’re more integrated into the system.
0:42:18 But he was really honest about it. And he’s saying that’s, that’s how it is. That’s what
0:42:20 we have to do. And that really sucks that that’s what we have to do.
0:42:27 Yeah. So we did a video on our TikTok channel then and now of Joe Biden. This is when I was
0:42:33 trying to push Biden out. We should say you’re one of the people early on saying Biden needs to
0:42:38 step down. Yeah, I started about a year ago because I was positive that Biden had a 0% chance of winning.
0:42:45 And and it turned out, by the way, two days before he dropped out, his inside advisors inside the
0:42:50 White House said, yeah, near 0% chance of winning. So we were right all along. You got a lot of
0:42:55 criticism for that, by the way. But yeah, yeah, we can come back to that. Yes, I did. And which
0:43:03 makes it Tuesday for me. Get a lot of criticism for everything. And by the way, Democratic Party,
0:43:10 you’re welcome. So, but Biden’s a really interesting example. I’m really glad you brought it up. So
0:43:16 the video on TikTok was just showing Biden then Biden now. And you’re right, Biden was so dynamic.
0:43:21 When you see how dynamic he was, we did like side by side, right? And then you see him now going
0:43:26 like, you know, get married eventually. Anyways, right, you’re like, Oh, that’s not the same guy,
0:43:31 I get it, right? So and I got like 5 million views because because it resonates. They’re like,
0:43:35 yeah, yeah, of course, right. But when he first started to the point you were making likes,
0:43:40 he want to, in fact, I know, because I talked to him about this, his very first bill was
0:43:47 anti corruption. Why? Because at that point, everything changes in 1976, 78, the Supreme
0:43:52 Court decisions that basically legalized bribery. But remember, Biden is ancient. So he’s coming
0:43:57 into politics at a time when money has not yet drowned politics. And in fact, the American
0:44:03 population is super pissed about the fact that it’s begun, they don’t like corruption. So early
0:44:09 Biden, because he’s reading the room is very anti corruption. And the first bill he proposes is to
0:44:17 get money out of politics. Okay. But as Biden goes on for his epic 200 year career in Washington,
0:44:22 he starts to get not more conservative, more corporate, because he’s just taken more and more
0:44:29 money by the middle of his career. He has a nickname, the Senator from MBNA. Okay, MBNA was a
0:44:34 credit card company based in Delaware. The reason he had that nickname is because there isn’t anything
0:44:39 Joe Biden wouldn’t have done for credit card companies and corporations based in Delaware,
0:44:47 which are almost all corporations. Okay, so he became the most corporate Senator in the country,
0:44:53 and hence the most beloved by corporate media. And corporate media has protected him his entire
0:44:59 career until about a month ago. So for example, in the primaries, both in 2020 and 2024, if you
0:45:04 said the Senator from MBNA, I guarantee you almost no one in the audience has heard of it. If you
0:45:09 heard of it, good job, you know, politics really well. Okay. But the reason you didn’t hear of it
0:45:14 is because the mainstream media wouldn’t say that’s outrageous of Joe Biden to be such a corporate
0:45:18 stooge. They’d say that’s outrageous of you to point out something that’s true and something
0:45:24 we reported on earlier. Okay. And so they protected him at all costs. Now, finally,
0:45:32 when you get to this version of Joe Biden, we, he can’t talk, he can’t walk. He’s, he bears no
0:45:38 resemblance to the young guy who came in saying that money and politics was a problem. Now he’s
0:45:43 saying money and politics is the solution. And in 2020, he said, well, I can raise more money
0:45:49 than Bernie. I can kiss corporate ass better than Bernie. I’m the biggest corporate ass kisser in
0:45:53 the world. So I’m going to raise a billion dollars and you need to support me. Now, of course, he
0:45:57 doesn’t say it in those words, but that was a message to the establishment and Buttigieg,
0:46:03 Klobuchar, Obama, Clyburn, everybody goes, oh, that’s right. Biden, Biden, Biden, Biden, not Bernie.
0:46:09 I don’t know that there’s anybody in the country who instinctually dislikes Bernie more than Barack
0:46:14 Obama. Oh, that’s an interesting, I’m not taking that tangent at this moment. Let’s, because you
0:46:19 mentioned mainstream media. What’s the motivation for mainstream media to be corporatist also?
0:46:25 So first of all, they’re giant corporations. So they’re all multi-billion-dollar corporations.
0:46:31 In the old days, we had an incredible number of media outlets. So you go to San Francisco,
0:46:35 there’d be at least two papers, and there’d be a paper boy, and I’m going all the way back,
0:46:38 paper boy on each corner, and they’re competing with one another. Literally,
0:46:43 they’d be catty corner, right? And one guy’s going, oh, here are all these details. They’re
0:46:47 trying to get an audience. They’re trying to get people interested. So they’re populist. They’re
0:46:54 interesting. They’re muckrakers. They’re challenging the government. Fast forward to now, or not now,
0:47:02 but about a decade ago, five years ago in that ballpark, in that ballpark. Now, there’s only six
0:47:07 giant media corporations left, and it’s an oligopoly, right? And they’re all multi-billion
0:47:13 dollar corporations. They all want tax cuts. Half of them are also, especially about 20 years ago,
0:47:18 during the Iraq war, half of them are defense contractors. So they’re just using the news as
0:47:24 marketing to start wars, like the Iraq war, and then GE, which owned MSNBC, makes a tremendous
0:47:30 amount of money. So much more money from war than it does from media, that media is a good
0:47:36 marketing spend for these corporations. Now, that’s part of it, that they themselves want
0:47:42 the same exact thing as the rest of corporations do for corporate rule, lower tax cuts, deregulation,
0:47:47 so they can merge, et cetera. But the second part of it is arguably even more important.
0:47:55 So where does all that money and politics go? So for example, in 2022, it’s just a midterm election,
0:48:03 not no presidential should be lower spending. A ridiculous $17 billion are spent on the
0:48:10 election cycle. Where does the $17 billion go? Almost all of it goes into corporate media,
0:48:14 mainstream media, television, newspapers, radio. They’re buying ads like nuts.
0:48:20 So we have a reporter at TYT, David Schuster. He used to work at MSNBC, Fox News, et cetera.
0:48:26 And David once did a piece about money and politics at a local NBC news station, and his
0:48:35 editor or GM spiked the story. And David goes into his office and asks him, “Why? This story is
0:48:40 true. It’s a huge part of politics. If we’re going to report on this issue, we got to tell
0:48:44 you what’s actually happening.” So he says, “David, come here.” It puts his arm around his shoulders,
0:48:50 takes him to the big newsroom, and he goes, “You see all this? Money and politics paid for that.”
0:48:58 That’s really fascinating. So big corporations are giving money to politicians through different
0:49:05 channels, and then the politicians are spending that money on mainstream media. And so there’s
0:49:11 a vicious cycle where it’s in the interest of the mainstream media not to criticize the
0:49:17 very corporations that are feeding that cycle. It’s not actually direct. It’s not like corporations
0:49:24 are… Because I was thinking one of the ways is direct advertisement. Pharmaceuticals obviously
0:49:30 advertise a lot on mainstream media, but there’s also indirect, which is giving the politicians
0:49:39 money or super PACs and the super PACs that spend money on the… That’s why mainstream media never
0:49:46 talks about the number one factor in politics, which is money. As we talked about earlier,
0:49:51 we see it with our own eyes, open auction, any country, any company, anybody that has money,
0:49:56 the politicians will now literally say, “I am now working for this guy,” as Trump says,
0:50:02 because he gave me a strong endorsement, which means a lot of money. And the press never covers
0:50:08 it, almost never. So you’re telling me you’re doing an article on the infrastructure build
0:50:15 or build back better, et cetera, and you’re not going to mention the enormous amount of money
0:50:22 that every lobbyist spent on that bill? That’s absurd. That’s absurd. That’s 98% of the ballgame.
0:50:26 And the reason they hide the ball is because they don’t want you to know this whole thing
0:50:31 is based on the money that they are receiving. And by the way, one more thing about that, Alex,
0:50:40 it’s that the ads themselves, actually, they work and they work pretty well, but that’s not
0:50:47 the main reason you spend money on ads. You spend the money on ads to get friendly coverage from
0:50:52 the content, from the free media that you’re getting from that same outlet. And so since
0:51:00 every newspaper and every news television station and network knows that the Democratic Party and
0:51:05 the Republican Party are their top clients, they’re going to get billions of dollars from them.
0:51:09 They never really criticized the Republican and Democratic Party. On the other hand,
0:51:15 if you’re an outsider, they’ll rip your face off. That’s also really interesting. So if you’re an
0:51:21 advertiser, if you’re a big farmer and you’re advertising, it’s not that the advertisement
0:51:28 works. It’s that the hosts are too afraid, not explicitly, just even implicitly. They’re
0:51:33 self-censoring. They’re not going to have any guests that are like controversial anti-big
0:51:37 farmer or they’re not going to make any jokes about big farming. They’re not going to make,
0:51:42 and that continues and expands. That’s really interesting.
0:51:50 Sometimes it’s super direct. When I was a host on MSNBC, I had a company that I was criticizing in
0:51:55 my script and management looked at it. And by the way, I used to go off-promptor a lot and it
0:52:00 drove them crazy. Not because I wasn’t good at it. I think my ratings went up whenever I went off
0:52:06 prompter, but because they couldn’t pre-approve the script. And what do they want to pre-approve?
0:52:10 Hey, are you going to criticize one of our sponsors, one of our advertisers, et cetera?
0:52:18 We had a giant fight over it and the compromise was I moved them lower in the script but kept
0:52:23 them in the story. So sometimes it’s super direct like that, but way more often,
0:52:32 it’s implicit. It’s indirect. You don’t have to say it. I give you a spectacular example of it
0:52:39 so that you get a sense of how it works implicitly. Since G is a giant defense contractor, they own
0:52:44 MSNBC at the time of the Iraq war. They fired everyone who was against the Iraq war on air.
0:52:49 So Phil Donahue, Jesse Ventura, Ashley Banfield, but Ashley Banfield, they did something different
0:52:56 with. She was a rising star at the time. She goes and gives a speech in Kansas. Not really
0:53:01 even having a policy position, but just talking about the actual cost of this Iraq war
0:53:07 and how we should be really careful. They hate that. So they take their rising star
0:53:11 and they take her off air. And she goes, okay, good. Let me out of my contract. It’s okay.
0:53:15 I’ll go because she was such a star at that time. She could have easily gotten somewhere else.
0:53:19 And they go, no, we’re not going to let you out of your contract. Why not? You’re going to pay me
0:53:24 to do nothing? Yeah. Not only that, we’re moving your office. Where are you moving it to? They
0:53:31 literally moved it into a closet. And they made sure that everybody in the building saw her getting
0:53:37 taken off the air and moved into a closet. The closet is the memo, right? That’s the memo to
0:53:43 the whole building. You better shut up and do as you’re told. Okay. So that way I don’t have to
0:53:49 tell you and get myself in trouble. It’s super obvious. There are guardrails here and you are
0:53:54 not allowed to go beyond acceptable thought. And acceptable thought is our sponsors are great,
0:54:00 politicians are great, the powerful are great. So how do we begin to fix that? And what exactly
0:54:05 we’re fixing is that the influence of the lobbyists, the influence of, it feels like there’s,
0:54:14 companies have found different ways to achieve influence. So how do we get money out of politics?
0:54:20 So it’s very difficult, but doable. And we will do it. But in order to do it, the populace left
0:54:25 and the populace right have to unite. And by the way, that is why we have the cultural wars.
0:54:31 That’s why you’re voting for Trump. No chance. Okay. So we can get into that in a minute.
0:54:36 So the cultural wars are meant to divide us. If we get united, we have enough leverage and
0:54:41 power to be able to do it. But you can’t do it through a normal bill. Because if you do it in a
0:54:47 bill, the whole point of capturing the Supreme Court was to make sure that they kill any piece
0:54:50 of legislation that would protect the American people. You’re saying the Supreme Court is also
0:54:57 captured by this? Oh, 100%. So, okay. So let me explain. Again, people for the uninitiated,
0:55:01 they think, oh, that sounds conspiratorial. Well, in this case, that’s actually somewhat true,
0:55:07 because people now know about this. It’s the Powell memo, right? The most infamous political
0:55:13 memo in history, Lewis Powell writes a memo for the Chamber of Commerce in 1971. That’s basically
0:55:18 a blueprint for how the Chamber of Commerce can take over the government. And Lewis Powell explains
0:55:22 one of the most important things you have to do is take over the media. But even more important
0:55:27 than that is taking over the Supreme Court. Because the Supreme Court is the ultimate arbiter
0:55:35 of what is allowed and not allowed. And he says, we need, quote, activist judges
0:55:43 to help business interests on the court. Okay. And then Nixon reads the memo and goes,
0:55:47 that sounds like a really good idea. How about I put you on the Supreme Court? And he puts Lewis
0:55:52 Powell, the guy who wrote the memo, on the Supreme Court, where he’s the deciding vote
0:56:00 in Bellotti and Buckley. So Bellotti’s, those two decisions are 76 and 78. And what they say is,
0:56:08 yeah, yeah, I read the Constitution and it says that money is speech. No, it isn’t. And no, it
0:56:13 didn’t. That’s not even close to true. They just made it up. And they said, okay, in corporations,
0:56:19 they’re human beings. No, they’re not. That’s preposterous, right? And they have the same
0:56:28 inalienable rights as human beings and citizens do. And money is speech and speech is an
0:56:33 inalienable right. So corporations can spend unlimited money in politics. And there goes our
0:56:39 democracy gone. Okay. So citizens united just shot a dead horse with a gatling gun and made it worse
0:56:45 and put it on steroids. But it was already dead in 78. So that’s why every chart you see for the
0:56:52 rest of your life, you’ll see this, every chart and about the American economy starts to diverge
0:57:01 in 1978. So until 38 to 78, we have golden 40 years of economic prosperity. We create the greatest
0:57:08 middle class the world has ever seen. And our productivity sky high, but our wages match our
0:57:15 productivity. After 78, productivity is still sky high best in the world. Okay, sometimes people
0:57:22 who are the American workers lazy, not remotely true, we work our ass off, okay, but wages flat
0:57:28 line. And they’ve been flat lining for about 50 years straight. And the reason is because the
0:57:33 Supreme Court made bribery legal. So in order to get past the Supreme Court, you only have one
0:57:38 choice. That’s an amendment. And so you have to get an amendment. Amendments are very difficult.
0:57:46 But so for example, you, you need two thirds of Congress to even propose the amendment. So well,
0:57:50 why would Congress propose an amendment that would take away their own power, right? Because
0:57:55 almost everybody in Congress got there through corruption. Their main talent is I can kiss
0:58:00 corporate ass better than you can, right? So I they take the most amount of person with more
0:58:05 money in Congress was 95% of the time, right? But the good news is the founding fathers were
0:58:11 geniuses. And they put in a second outlet, they said, or two thirds of the states can call for a
0:58:17 convention where you can propose an amendment. And after an amendment is proposed, then three
0:58:22 quarters of the states have to ratify. That’s what makes it so difficult. Because getting three
0:58:27 quarters of the states, there’s so many red states, so many blue states, getting three quarters of the
0:58:32 states, they agree is near impossible. But there is one issue that the whole country agrees on 93%
0:58:38 of Americans believe that politicians serve their donors and not their voters. So this is
0:58:43 the one thing we can unite on if we unite on this, we push our states to call for a convention,
0:58:49 we all go to the convention together, we bring democracy alive, and we propose amendments to
0:58:54 the Constitution. And the best amendment gets three quarters of the states to ratify, you go
0:59:02 above the Supreme Court, and you solve the whole thing. So if 93% of people want this, why hasn’t
0:59:08 it happened yet? I mean, the obvious answer is there’s corporate control of the media and the
0:59:13 politicians, but it seems like our current system and the megaphone that a president has,
0:59:20 we should be able to kind of unite the populist left and right. So it shouldn’t be that difficult
0:59:28 to do. Like, why hasn’t a person like Trump with a billionaire or on the left a rich businessman
0:59:34 run just on this and win? Well, eventually they will, right? And so that’s why I actually have a
0:59:39 lot of hope, even though things seem super dark right now. So, and that’s why I was for Bernie,
0:59:44 and so I can come back to that. But why hasn’t Trump done it as easy? He’s like, what am I, a
0:59:49 sucker? The guy gives me money, I do what the guy wants. Why would I get rid of that? That’s
0:59:54 how I got into power. And so that’s how I’m doing it now. I get go to Mary Mendel’s sentence to give
0:59:59 me a hundred million dollars and I’ll let Israel annex the West Bank, right? So I’ll go to the oil
1:00:03 companies and give me a billion dollars and I’ll give you tax subsidies. I’ll let you drill. I’ll
1:00:08 take away a regulation. Why would I stop that? You think he likes money more than he likes being
1:00:16 popular? Because there’s a big part of him as a populist in the sense that like he loves being
1:00:22 admired by large masses of people. Yeah. So, and you’re absolutely right. But that is the fault
1:00:31 of MAGA. And so MAGA, you’re screwing populists in a way that is infuriating, okay? And smart
1:00:36 libertarians like Dave Smith have figured this out. And that’s why he’s just as mad at Trump as I am.
1:00:45 And it’s because he took a populist movement and he redirected it for his own personal gain.
1:00:50 MAGA, figure it out. Come on, right? And so if you say, oh, you think Democrats have figured out
1:00:54 that these, no, they largely haven’t figured it out either. And I think there’s blue MAGA,
1:00:58 and I could talk about that as well. But for those of us on the populist left,
1:01:03 yeah, we’re not enamored by politicians. And for example, when Bernie does the wrong thing,
1:01:08 we call him out. Well, I’m not, Bernie’s not my goddamn uncle. I don’t like him for some
1:01:12 personality reason. It’s not a cult of personality. You do the right thing I love you for. You do
1:01:16 the wrong thing. I’m gonna kick your ass for it, right? So, but Donald Trump does this massive,
1:01:20 ridiculous corruption over and over again. And MAGA is like, I’m here for it. Love it.
1:01:24 As long as you’re doing the corruption, I’m okay with it. What does Trump say about getting
1:01:29 money out of politics? Does he he says nothing about it? Go and MAGA, why haven’t you held him
1:01:35 to account? Like, so when Bernie, it helped Biden take out $15 minimum wage from the Senate bill
1:01:41 on the first bill that was introduced in the Biden administration, we went nuts. We did a petition.
1:01:47 We sent in videos to Bernie, our audience going, don’t kill it, Bernie, don’t kill it. And so,
1:01:52 Bernie then reintroduced it as an amendment. It got voted down, but he did the right thing, right?
1:01:58 That is us holding our top leader accountable and saying, you better get back on track, okay?
1:02:03 Because we’re not here for you and your personal self and grant a grandisement. We’re here for
1:02:09 policy, right? And if MAGA was actually here for policy, they would have absolutely leveled Trump
1:02:14 on the fact that he, I mean, remember what he ran on, drain the swamp. That’s why he won in 2016,
1:02:21 right? So I predicted on ABC right after the DNC and Hillary Clinton was up 10, 12 points,
1:02:26 whatever she was. And I said, Trump would win, okay? And the whole panel laughed out loud,
1:02:32 right? They’re like, get a load of this crazy guy. I said, he’s a populist who seems to hate
1:02:42 the establishment in a populist time. And so, and drain the swamp is a great slogan. And I knew
1:02:49 he would win when he was in a Republican debate. And he said, I paid all these guys before I paid
1:02:54 them and they did whatever I wanted. And I was like, that’s so true, right? And people will love
1:02:57 that. And especially Republican voters will love that. I actually have a lot of respect
1:03:00 for Republican voters because they actually genuinely hate corruption.
1:03:08 So what would an amendment look like that helps prevent money being an influence in politics?
1:03:11 So I started a group called Wolfpack.
1:03:13 Nice name.
1:03:19 Thank you, wolf-pack.com. And the reason why I named a Wolfpack is because everyone in Washington,
1:03:25 I knew would hate that name. It’s a populist name. And everybody in Washington is snickers.
1:03:30 You’re supposed to name it Americans for America and just trick people, etc. No, no, no.
1:03:34 Wolfpack means we’re coming for you. We’re not coming for you in a weirdo,
1:03:39 physical or violent way. We’re coming for you in a Democratic way. So we’re going to go to those
1:03:44 houses. We’re going to get them to propose a convention and we did it in five states.
1:03:47 But then the Democratic Party started beating us back. We’ll get to that.
1:03:55 And so we are going to overturn your apple cart and we’re going to put the American people back
1:04:01 in charge. So what does the amendment say? Number one, a lot of people will have different opinions
1:04:04 on what it should say and that’s what you sort out in a convention. So for example, one of the
1:04:10 things that conservatives can propose, which makes sense, is term limits. Because the reason why
1:04:15 these super old politicians are in charge is because they provide a return on investment.
1:04:20 So you know if you give to Biden, Pelosi or McConnell, they’re going to deliver for you.
1:04:23 They love that return on investment. They don’t want to risk it on a new guy.
1:04:30 The new guy might have principles or you know, might want to actually do a little bit for his
1:04:38 voters. Whereas these old, you know, and every corrupt system has these old guys hanging around
1:04:45 that help maintain power, etc. So my particular proposal in the amendments would be a couple
1:04:51 of things. One is end private financing of elections. So if and look, if you’re a business
1:04:58 person, you’re a capitalist, you know this with absolute certainty. If somebody signs your check,
1:05:04 that’s the person you work for, right? So if private interests are funding politicians,
1:05:09 the politicians will serve private interests. And then you’re going to get into a fight like
1:05:16 Elon did in New Jersey, where the car dealerships and Tesla are getting into an auction. Can I hear
1:05:21 100,000 a million, two million, three million, right? And now you got to go bribe the government
1:05:27 official, that’s called a campaign contribution. And this is a terrible system, right? And the
1:05:32 private financing go to complete public financing of elections. That’s when the conservatives,
1:05:37 because they’ve been propagandized by corporate media. Yes, mainstream media got into your head too,
1:05:42 and right wing media got into your head too. And right wing media also financed by a lot of this
1:05:47 corrupt interest. And so they tell you, Oh, you don’t want to publicly finance. Oh my God,
1:05:51 you’d be spending like a billion dollars on politicians. Brother, they’re spending trillions
1:05:56 of dollars on your money because they’re financed by the guys that they’re giving all of your money
1:06:01 to. So can you educate me? Does that prevent something like Citizen United? So like super
1:06:07 packs are all gone in this case? So all gone. So indirect funding is also indirect funding is gone.
1:06:12 Direct funding is gone. You have to set up some thresholds. Not everybody can just get money
1:06:18 to run. You have to prove that you have some sort of popular support. So signature gathering,
1:06:24 you would still allow for small money donations like up to $100, something along those lines.
1:06:29 That’s not 5000 or whatever it is now. Yeah, I think 5000 is too high. But those are fine debates.
1:06:33 Yeah, you know, but you basically want to create an incentive. Everything is about incentives and
1:06:38 disincentives. Again, capitalists realize it’s better than anyone else, right? So you want to
1:06:45 set up an incentive to serve your voters, not your donors. So if you take away private donors,
1:06:50 well, there goes that incentive. And that’s gigantic, right? And then if you set up small
1:06:55 grassroots funding as a way to get past the threshold to get the funding to run an election,
1:07:00 well, then good because then you’re serving small donors, which are generally voters,
1:07:06 right? So that’s what you want. And ending private financing is critical. But the second thing is
1:07:12 ending corporate personhood. So this is where you get into a lot of fights, because you have
1:07:18 two reasons. One is some folks have a principled position against it. And they say, well, I mean,
1:07:26 the Sierra Club is technically a corporation, ACLU is technically a corporation. And so if you
1:07:32 end corporate personhood, then they, you know, that could endanger their existence, right? No,
1:07:37 it doesn’t endanger their existence at all, right? So it doesn’t endanger GM or GE’s existence. It
1:07:42 doesn’t endanger anybody’s existence. Corporations exist. We’re not trying to take them away. I
1:07:47 would never do that, right? That’s not smart. That’s not workable, etc. We’re just saying they
1:07:53 don’t have constitutional rights. So they have the rights that we give them. And by the way,
1:08:00 read The Founding Fathers is also in my book. They hated corporations. The American Revolution
1:08:06 was partly against the British East India Company. And so the Tea Party in Boston
1:08:11 was against that corporation. They threw their tea overboard. It was not against the British
1:08:17 monarchy. And so they, and all the Founding Fathers warned us over and over again,
1:08:24 watch out for corporations, okay? Because once they form, they will amass money and power and
1:08:31 look to kill off democracy. And they were totally right. That’s exactly what happened. And so it’s
1:08:36 not that you don’t have them. It’s that you, through democratic capitalism, you limit their power.
1:08:40 They definitely, you can give them a bunch of rights. You say, hey, you have a right to exist.
1:08:45 You have a right to do this, this and this, okay? But you do not have constitutional rights
1:08:53 of a citizen. And so you don’t have the right to speak to a politician by giving them a billion
1:08:59 dollars. And you believe that the people will be able to find the right policies to regulate
1:09:04 and tax the corporations such that capitalism can flourish still?
1:09:10 Yes. You know why? Because I’m a real populist and I believe in the people. So I drive the
1:09:16 establishment crazy because they don’t believe in the people. They think, oh, check, have you
1:09:20 seen MAGA? Have you seen these guys? Have you seen the radicals on the left? We’re so much smarter.
1:09:25 Well, you know how many Ivy League degrees we have, right? And we know what we’re doing. No,
1:09:32 you don’t. No, you’re, everybody to some degree looks out for their own interests, right? Why I
1:09:38 like capitalism and why I love democracy is because it’s the wisdom of the crowd. And so in the long
1:09:42 run, the crowd is right. Oftentimes in the short term, we’re wrong, okay? But the wisdom of the
1:09:48 crowd in the long run is much, much better than the elites that run things. The elites say, well,
1:09:52 we’re so smart and educated. So we’re going to know better what’s good for you. No, brother,
1:09:57 you’re going to know what’s better for you. And so here’s something that a lot of people get wrong
1:10:02 on the populist left and right. They think, oh, those guys are evil. They’re not evil. I met them.
1:10:07 I worked at MSNBC. I worked on cable. I went to Wharton, you know, Columbia Law. I know a lot
1:10:13 of those guys. And so they’re not at all evil. They don’t even know that they’re mainly serving
1:10:18 their own interests. They just naturally do it, right? And so they think the carrot interest loop
1:10:24 hole makes a lot of sense, right? They think corporate tax cuts makes a lot of sense. You
1:10:29 not getting higher wages. You not having healthcare makes a lot of sense. It doesn’t make any goddamn
1:10:34 sense, but they get themselves to believe it. And that’s another portion of the invisible hand
1:10:39 on the market. So there’s problems with every, every path. So the elite, like you mentioned,
1:10:45 can be corrupted by greed, by power and so on. But the crowd, I agree with you, by the way,
1:10:49 about the wisdom of the crowd versus the wisdom of the elite, but the crowd can be captured by
1:10:56 charismatic leader. So the problem with populism, and I’m probably a populist myself, the problem
1:11:02 with populism is it, it can be and has been throughout history captured by bad people.
1:11:07 But if you say to me, trust elites or trust the people, I’m going to trust the people
1:11:12 every single time. Well, that’s why you’re such an interesting, I don’t want to say contradiction,
1:11:21 but there’s a tension that creates the balance. So to me, in the way you’re speaking might result
1:11:28 in hurting capitalism. So it’s easy to in fighting corporatism to, to hurt companies.
1:11:34 So to go too far the other way. Yeah, of course, of course. And so like when you talked about
1:11:40 corporate tax, so what’s, what’s the magic, what’s the magic number for the corporate tax?
1:11:48 Because if it’s too high, the companies leave. Yeah, companies have so much power right now.
1:11:54 This pendulum has swung so far. And we’re guys, we’re almost out of time, the windows closing,
1:11:59 the minute private equity buys all of our homes, the residential real estate market,
1:12:05 we’re screwed, we’re indentured servants forever. Okay, there goes wealth creation for the average
1:12:12 American. So your right likes this is that it’s not a contradiction, it’s a tension that is
1:12:18 inevitable to get to balance. The reason why people kind of can’t figure me out, they’re like,
1:12:24 well, you’re on the left, but you’re a capitalist, etc. That’s not a contradiction,
1:12:29 that’s getting to the right balance. And in order to do that, like if you say, well,
1:12:34 if we change the system, I’m afraid of change, because what if the pendulum swings too far in
1:12:41 the other direction, right? Well, then you would be opposed to change at all times. So if you do
1:12:48 that, it actually reminds me of the Biden fight, right? So I’m like, guys, he has, he has almost
1:12:54 no chance of winning. He stands for the establishment, he can’t talk. But then the number one pushback
1:13:02 I’d get from Democrats was, yeah, but what if we change? It’s so scary. We don’t know about Kamala
1:13:07 Harris. What if it’s not Kamala Harris? It’s so scary. Don’t change. And I’m like, yeah, but
1:13:15 if you say change might be worse, it also might be better. And you’re at zero. Anything is better,
1:13:23 right? And right now, in terms of corruption in America, we’re at 98% corruption. So we got 2%
1:13:31 decency left. Brother, this is when you want change. And so to, and, and, and Lex, if you
1:13:36 actually have wisdom of the crowd, just like a supply and demand, and how it works in economics,
1:13:43 it works the same way in a functioning democracy, you go too far, you come back in. So for example,
1:13:49 when Reagan came into office, me and my dad, my family, we were Republicans. Why? At that point,
1:13:56 the highest marginal tax rate was at 70%. 70% is too high, right? Now they, then he brought it
1:14:02 all the way down to 28%. That’s too low, right? So, and, and, but, and that’s how the, the system
1:14:07 modulates itself. Already, we were headed towards corruption. And because it’s the 80s now, we’re
1:14:14 past 78, magic 78 marker, right? So, and, and even Carter was way more conservative economically
1:14:19 than people realize because we’re already getting past it by the time it’s in his administration.
1:14:24 But the bottom line is, yes, you’re going, whenever you have real wisdom of the crowd,
1:14:28 whether it’s in business or in politics, you’re going to have fluctuation. You’re going to have
1:14:34 that pendulum swinging back and forth. You don’t want wild swings, communism, corporatism, right?
1:14:38 You want to get to, hey, where, where’s the right balance here between capitalism
1:14:46 and what people think is socialism? Yeah, so I guess I agree with most of the things you said
1:14:54 about the corruption. I just wish there would be more celebration of the fact that capitalism and
1:14:59 some incredible companies in the history of the 20th century has created so much wealth,
1:15:03 so much innovation that has increased the quality of life on average. They’ve also increased the
1:15:07 wealth and equality and exploitation of the workers and this kind of stuff. But you, you
1:15:14 want to not forget to celebrate the awesomeness that companies have also brought outside the
1:15:21 political sphere, just in creating awesome stuff. Look, I run a company. And so I don’t want companies
1:15:26 to go away. And, and I don’t want you to hate all companies. I think Young Turks is a wonderful
1:15:30 company, right? We provide great healthcare, we take care of our employees, we care about the
1:15:37 community, etc. And we’re building a whole nation online on, on those principles in the right way
1:15:44 to run a company, right? But guys, we’re at the wrong part of the pendulum. The companies have
1:15:51 overwhelming power and they’re crushing us. We’re like that scene in Star Wars with the trash
1:15:57 compactors closing in on them, the walls are closing in. We’re almost out of time because
1:16:02 they’ve captured the government almost entirely. They’re only serving corporate interests. We’ve
1:16:07 got to get back into balance before it’s too late. And that’s why I care so much about structural
1:16:16 issues. So I formed Justice Democrats. So that’s AOC, etc. Right? That’s people know it as the
1:16:21 squad. They know it as Justice Democrats, etc. One of the co-founders of that. And my number one rule
1:16:27 was no corporate PAC money. Okay, so you’re not allowed to take corporate PAC money. By the way,
1:16:32 now Matt Gaetz and Josh Hawley have stopped taking corporate PAC money, and they’ve become to some
1:16:39 degree on economic issues, genuine populace. It’s amazing. It happens overnight. All of a sudden,
1:16:43 they’re holding, they’re talking about holding corporations accountable, etc. Now, Justice
1:16:49 Democrats wind up having other problems. They got too deep into social issues, not economic issues.
1:16:56 There’s a general sort of criticism of billionaires, right? This idea. Now, you could say that
1:17:01 billionaires are avoiding taxes and they’re not getting taxed enough. But I think under that flag
1:17:10 of criticizing billionaires is criticizing all companies that do epic shit, that build stuff.
1:17:14 Oh, okay. So great stuff. That’s what I’m worried about. I don’t hear enough,
1:17:21 like genuine. I like celebrating people. I like celebrating ideas. I just don’t hear enough
1:17:28 genuine celebration of companies when they do cool things. No, okay. So are you right? Not
1:17:35 about companies, but about capitalism? Yes. Because you look at life expectancy 200 years ago,
1:17:40 and you look at it now, and you go, “Wow, holy shit. We did amazing things.”
1:17:47 And what happened in the last 200 years? We went from dictatorships more towards democracy,
1:17:54 wisdom of the crowd. We went from serfs and indentured servants and a nobility that holds the
1:18:01 land to more towards capitalism. And boom, the crowd is right. Things go really well.
1:18:07 The advances in medicine are amazing. And medicine is a great example. And on our show,
1:18:12 I point all those things out and I say, “Look, we hate the drug companies because
1:18:15 of how they’ve captured the government, right? But we don’t hate the drug companies for creating
1:18:20 great drugs. Those drugs save lives. They just saved my life. They saved countless millions
1:18:26 upon millions of lives. So the right idea isn’t shut down drug companies. The right idea is don’t
1:18:34 let them buy the government, right? And I know we get back into our instinctual shells. So on the
1:18:40 left, they’ll be, “Oh, we should get rid of all billionaires.” Why? Like, how does that fix the
1:18:46 system? Tell me how it fixes the system. And I’m all ears, right? My solution is end private
1:18:50 financing. Then you can be a billionaire all you like. You can’t buy the government, right?
1:18:56 That’s a more logical way to go about it. I’ve never worn an “eat the rich” shirt and it drives me
1:19:02 crazy. I’m like, you would have eaten FDR, right? And FDR is the best president, most populous
1:19:08 president, in my opinion. And so, no, there’s wonderful rich people. Of course, of course,
1:19:12 there’s a range of humanity, right? But you don’t want to get rid of the rich. You don’t want to
1:19:16 get rid of companies. But you also don’t want to let them control everything. So, okay, I’ll give
1:19:21 you an example that’s really, and that informs a lot of how I think about things, which is my dad.
1:19:28 So my dad was a farmer in southeastern Turkey, near the Syrian border. No money. In fact, his dad
1:19:36 died when he was six months old, and so they were saddled with debt. And no electricity in his house,
1:19:42 like as poor as poor gets. And he wound up living the American dream. And so,
1:19:49 how did he do that? What made the difference? Well, what made the difference is opportunity,
1:20:00 right? So, I’m a populous because my dad was in the masses, right? And the elites say the masses
1:20:06 are no good. We’re smart, you’re not. We’re educated, you’re not. We at Meritocracy, we talk
1:20:12 about that. We have earned merit. And if you’re a poor middle class, you have not earned merit,
1:20:19 okay? You’re useless and worthless. And I hate that. So what did Turkey do back in the 1960s,
1:20:24 that liberated my dad? They provided free college education. You had to test into it,
1:20:31 okay? But the top 15% got a free college education at the best colleges in Turkey.
1:20:37 So, my uncle saved all of our lives when he came to my dad and said, “Do you like working on this
1:20:42 farm?” And my dad was like, “Fuck no, right? It’s super hot. It’s super hard. They gotta get up at
1:20:48 four in the morning. If they’re lucky, the next store gives them a mule. If they’re not, they gotta
1:20:55 carry the shit themselves, okay?” So my uncle told them, “Work just as hard in school and you’ll be
1:21:01 able to get a house, a car, pretty girls, etc.” So my dad works his ass off, gets in the school,
1:21:06 and he comes out a mechanical engineer and starts his own company. He creates a company in Turkey,
1:21:12 hires hundreds of people. He then moves to America, creates a company here, hires tons of people,
1:21:18 right? So do I hate companies? No, my dad set up two companies and I saw how much it benefited
1:21:24 people. I saw how much employees would come up to my dad 20, 30 years later in the street and hug
1:21:29 him. And they’d tell me as a young kid, “Your dad’s the most fair boss we ever had and we love him
1:21:34 for it,” right? That’s how you run a company. And he taught me the value of hard work. But the reason
1:21:43 I brought up here is because he taught me, look, skill and ability is a genetic lottery. So you’re
1:21:48 not going to just get the rich to win all the genetic lottery. No, there’s going to be tons
1:21:54 of poor kids and middle-class kids who are just as good if not better. You have to provide them
1:22:01 the opportunity, the fair chance to succeed. You have to believe in them. So this isn’t
1:22:06 about disempowering anyone. It’s about empowering all of those kids who are doing the right thing
1:22:11 or smart and want to work hard so they could build their own companies and add to their economy.
1:22:18 What in general is your view on meritocracy? So I love meritocracy. I wish that we lived
1:22:23 in a meritocracy and I want to drive towards living in a meritocracy. So that’s why I don’t
1:22:28 like your quality of results. So, okay, now people that are on the left will get super mad at that
1:22:32 and go, “What do you mean?” Well, okay, brother, let’s say you’re at work and you got one guy
1:22:38 who’s working his ass off, another guy that’s going, “I don’t care. I’m not going to do it,”
1:22:42 right? Well, the guy who works super hard has to pick up the slack. Now, he’s working twice as
1:22:48 hard, right? And now you want the same results. You want the same salary as that guy? No, brother,
1:22:54 no. He’s working twice, four times, ten times harder than you. That’s not fair. Fairness matters.
1:22:59 I lived, we wound up, I mean, we were in the suburbs of Jersey, but we wound up in Freehold
1:23:04 eventually and we lived across a farm, which is kind of in Central Jersey, it happens, right?
1:23:12 And it was called Fair Chance Farm. I was like, “This is amazing,” right? And I love that.
1:23:19 That’s the essence of America and that’s what I want to go back to. So, we’ve got to create that
1:23:26 opportunity of not just because it’s the moral thing to do, but because it’s also the economically
1:23:34 smart thing to do. If you enable all those great people that are in lower income classes and middle
1:23:40 income classes, you’re going to get a much better economy, a much stronger democracy. So, that’s
1:23:46 the direction we got. So, again, it’s about balance. But what do you think about DEI policies?
1:23:56 Say, in academia and companies, so the movement as it has evolved, where’s that on the balance?
1:24:05 Is that how far is it pushing towards equality of outcome versus equality of opportunity?
1:24:08 Okay, so now we’re getting into social issues, right? So, this is where we all
1:24:14 rip each other apart and then the people at the top laugh their ass off at us and go,
1:24:20 “We got to fighting over trans issues. They’re killing each other. It’s hilarious and they’re
1:24:25 so busy, they don’t realize we’re running the place,” right? Okay, but let’s engage. Some people
1:24:31 will look at DEI and go, “Well, that just gives me an opportunity. Just like anyone else, I love
1:24:38 DEI.” Another person will look at it and go, “No, that says that you should be picked above me,
1:24:43 and I hate DEI,” right? So, the reality of DEI is a little bit more complicated.
1:24:49 But you got to go back. So, first, did we need affirmative action in the 1960s? Definitely.
1:24:56 Why? All the firefighter jobs in South Carolina, as an example, are going to white guys. All the
1:25:01 Longshoremen jobs in New York, LA, wherever you have it, are all going to white guys,
1:25:06 because that’s how the system was. Yes, also in the North, right? So, we now are in a civil
1:25:13 rights area. We decide we’re going to go towards equality. Minorities, in that case, mainly Black
1:25:18 Americans, had to find a way to break in. Like, if you’re a Longshoreman and it’s a good job,
1:25:22 you naturally want to pass it on to your son. I get your instinct. I don’t hate you for it,
1:25:27 right? But we got to let Black kids also have a shot at it, right? So, you need it in the beginning.
1:25:33 But, at a certain point, you have to phase it out. So, when I was growing up, it’s now in the
1:25:38 late ’80s, early ’90s, I hated affirmative action. And I’ve been principled on it from day one
1:25:44 and to this day. I’m not in favor of affirmative action. I say it on the show all the time. Why?
1:25:53 I’m a minority. Being a Turk, I grew up Muslim. I’m an atheist now. But generally speaking,
1:25:59 a Muslim is certainly a minority in America and pretty much a hated one overall. So,
1:26:04 but I didn’t check off Muslim or Turkish or any ethnicity when I applied to college,
1:26:10 because I believe in a meritocracy, as we were talking about. But we don’t really have a meritocracy
1:26:17 now. So, I can come back to that. But right now, so I didn’t check it off because I didn’t want an
1:26:24 unfair advantage. Because I want to earn it. I want to earn it. So, now I’m in law school and
1:26:30 I’m hanging out with right-wingers because at that point, I’m a Republican. And one of the guys says
1:26:36 to me about one of our Black student going to Columbia. He says, “Oh, I wonder how he got in here.”
1:26:43 God, that is the problem with affirmative action. It devalues the accomplishments of
1:26:48 every minority in the country. You have to transition away from it. If you don’t,
1:26:54 it sets up a caste system. And that caste system is lethal to democracy. So,
1:27:01 does DEI go too far in some instances? Yes. But is it a boogeyman that’s going to take all the
1:27:07 white jobs and make them Black? Trump would say Black jobs, right? And give minorities too much
1:27:13 power, et cetera. No, the idea isn’t to rob you and to give all the opportunity to minorities.
1:27:18 The idea is to make it equal. But as the pendulum swings, did it swing too far in some directions?
1:27:23 Yes. So, the left can’t acknowledge that and the right thinks can’t acknowledge that. Of course,
1:27:28 at some point, you’ve got to give a chance for others to break in so they have a fair chance.
1:27:33 By the way, Michelle Obama had a good line about the Black jobs and the DNC speech where
1:27:38 somebody should tell Trump that the presidency might be just one of those Black jobs.
1:27:44 Anyway, but why do you think the left doesn’t acknowledge when DEI gets ridiculous,
1:27:51 which in certain places at a large scale has gotten ridiculous?
1:27:58 Because people are taught to just be in the tribe they’re in and to believe in 100%.
1:28:05 Like, I’ve gotten kicked out of every tribe. I might be the most attack man in internet history,
1:28:10 partly because we’ve been around forever and partly because I disagree with every part of the
1:28:14 political spectrum because I believe in independent thought. And the minute you vary a little bit,
1:28:25 people go nuts. And so, the far left tribe is going to go with their preset ideology just like
1:28:31 the far right tribe is. So, for example, on trans issues, we’ve protected trans people
1:28:37 for over 20 years in the young Turks. We fought for equality for trans people and for all LGBTQ
1:28:44 people. For two decades, we did it way before anyone else did. When Biden came out in favor
1:28:49 of gay marriage in 2013, we’re like, this is comically late. So, like, we’re all supposed
1:28:53 to like congratulate him in the year 2013 that these things gay people should have the same
1:28:58 rights as straight people. And then he had to push Obama to get there, right? So,
1:29:07 on the other hand, I’m like, guys, if you allow trans women to go into professional sports,
1:29:11 not at the high school level, but professional sports, but let’s say they go into MMA or boxing
1:29:20 and a trans woman, I mean, it happens in boxing, it happens in MMA, punches a biological woman so
1:29:28 hard that she kills her, right? So, you’re going to set back trans rights 50 years. I’m not trying
1:29:33 to hurt you. I’m trying to help you. You have to do bounds of reason. So, when I say simple things
1:29:39 like that, and I say you give LeBron James every hormone blocker on planet earth, he’s still going
1:29:46 to dominate the WNBA, okay? It would be comical. He might score 100 points a night, okay? And
1:29:53 they’ll say, oh, that’s outrageous. And some have called me Nazi for saying that trans women or
1:29:58 that professional leagues should make their own decisions on whether they allow trans women in
1:30:04 or not. So, why do they say that? Because they’re so besieged, they think we cannot give an inch,
1:30:10 we cannot give any ground. If you give any ground, you’re a Nazi, okay? So, we’ve got to get out of
1:30:18 that mindset. You can’t function in a democracy and be in an extreme position and expect the rest
1:30:23 of the country to go towards your extreme position. So, why do you think we are not in the
1:30:29 meritocracy? So, because of the corruption, it’s so, for example, but there’s also, but
1:30:37 remember, corporate media is the matrix. And they plug you into cable, right, in the old days. Now,
1:30:42 it’s a little bit different because of online media. But especially 10 years ago, and remember,
1:30:47 we started 22 years ago, so I’ve been losing my mind over how obvious corporate media corruption
1:30:52 has been for decades now, right? But no one acknowledged it until online media got stronger.
1:30:58 But one of the myths that corporate media creates is the myth of meritocracy. Not that
1:31:05 meritocracy can’t exist or shouldn’t exist, but they pretend it exists today. So, the problem with
1:31:11 that myth, Lex, is that it gets people thinking, well, if they’re already rich, they must have
1:31:19 merited it by definition. So, all the rich have merit. And the reverse of that, if you’re poor,
1:31:26 middle class, well, you must not have merited wealth. So, you’re no good. We don’t have to listen to
1:31:35 you. And that’s a really dangerous, awful idea. And so, if we get to meritocracy one day, I’ll
1:31:41 be the happiest person in America. But right now, it’s, look, here, I’ll give you an example that
1:31:47 I put in the book. And it’s not us, this other folks did this YouTube video. I can’t even quite
1:31:52 find who they were, but it was a brilliant video. And they said, okay, we’re going to do 100-yard
1:31:57 race. But hold on, before we start, anyone who has two parents take two steps forward. Anyone who
1:32:03 has went to college, take another two steps forward. Anyone who doesn’t have bills to pay for
1:32:07 education anymore, take two steps forward. They do all these things, right? And then, at the end,
1:32:12 before they start, somebody’s 20 yards from the finish line, and a lot of people are still at
1:32:17 the starting line. And then they go, okay, now we’re going to run a race. And the guy who’s right
1:32:24 next to the finish line wins. And they go, meritocracy. Okay. So the challenge there is to
1:32:28 know which disparities when you just freeze the system and observe are actually a result of some
1:32:34 kind of discrimination or a flaw in the system versus the result of meritocracy of the better
1:32:40 runner being ahead. That’s right. There are some parts that are easy to solve, Lex. So,
1:32:47 you know, if you donated to a politician and he gave you a billion-dollar subsidy,
1:32:52 that’s not meritocracy, right? So if you follow the money, you can see the flaws in the system.
1:32:57 Exactly. And so, and again, nothing’s ever perfect at any snapshot of history, right,
1:33:02 or of the moment. You’re going to be at some point in the pendulum swing. But if you let,
1:33:07 if you trust the people and you let the pendulum swing, but not wildly,
1:33:10 then you’re going to get to the right answers in the long run.
1:33:18 So you think this woke mind virus that the right refers to is a problem, but not a big problem?
1:33:29 No. So the right wing drives me crazy. So look, guys, your instincts of populism is correct. Your
1:33:35 instincts of anti-corruption is correct, right? And I love you for it. And so, and in a lot of
1:33:40 ways, the right wing voters figured out that the whole system screwed before left-wing voters did.
1:33:43 I shouldn’t say left-wing voters because progressives and left-wing have been saying it for
1:33:49 not only decades, but maybe centuries, right? But Democratic voters. A lot of Democratic voters,
1:33:54 some of them actually like this current system. Some of them, a lot of them have been tricked into
1:33:59 liking this current system. And the left should be fighting against corruption harder than the right.
1:34:04 But right now, unfortunately, that’s not the case. So there’s a lot that I like about right-wing
1:34:12 voters, okay? But you guys get tricked on social issues so easily, right? So how many people are
1:34:20 involved in trans high school sports and a girl who should have finished first in that track
1:34:26 race in the middle of Indiana finished second? First of all, this is the big crime. And how
1:34:32 many people are involved? About 7, 13 out of a country of 330 million people. And you can’t see
1:34:42 that that’s a distraction, right? So and everything that is like bait that the right-wing media puts
1:34:48 out there, they run after. I mean, Tucker Carlson doing insane segments about M&M should be sexier.
1:34:56 Mr. Potato Head has gender issues. Guys, get out of there. Get out of there. It’s a trap, okay?
1:35:01 Yeah, that doesn’t mean that there, absolutely. It doesn’t mean that there’s larger scale
1:35:09 issues with things like DEI that aren’t so fun to talk about or viral to talk about and anecdotal
1:35:16 scale. There is, DEI does create a culture of fear with cancer culture. And it does create a kind of
1:35:24 culture that limits the freedom of expression. And it does limit the meritocracy in another way.
1:35:32 So you’re basically saying, forget all these other problems. Money is the biggest problem.
1:35:38 So first of all, on AOC, as an example, and I don’t mean to pick on her, but she won through the
1:35:45 great work of her and Shorikat Chakrabarti and Corbin Trent and others who were leaders of the
1:35:51 just Democrats that went and helped her campaign. They were critical help. And we all told her the
1:35:58 same thing. So it’s not about me, me, me. And so we all said, you’ve got to challenge the establishment
1:36:02 and you’ve got to work on money and politics first. Because if you don’t work on money and politics
1:36:08 and you don’t fix that, you’re going to lose on almost all other issues. But she didn’t believe us
1:36:14 because it’s uncomfortable. And all the progressives that went into Congress, they drive me crazy.
1:36:18 They think, oh, no, no, you’re exaggerating. No, these are, and the minute they get in,
1:36:23 all of a sudden, my colleagues, right, your colleagues hate you, and they’re going to drive
1:36:29 you out. You’re a sucker. And in Jamal Bohman, Corey Bush, what did they do? They drove them out,
1:36:35 Marie Newman drove them out, right? And because they’re not on your side, they’re not your colleagues.
1:36:39 And what happened to $15 Minute Wage? And I remember talking to one of those congresspeople,
1:36:44 I won’t leave out the name, and saying, hey, you know, they’re not going to do $15 Minute Wage.
1:36:49 And he’s like, oh, Jank, you’re out of the loop. Nancy Pelosi assured us that they are going to
1:36:55 do $15 Minute Wage. I’m like, I love you, but you’re totally wrong. Moneyed interests are not
1:37:02 going to do $15 Minute Wage. You have to start fighting now, right? And they didn’t get it.
1:37:06 So they lost on almost all those issues, because it’s all about incentives and disincentives and
1:37:11 rules. If you don’t fix the rules, you’re going to constantly run into the same brick wall.
1:37:14 Now, the second issue that we were talking about is in the culture wars,
1:37:21 the rest of us are stuck between the two extreme two percenters, right, on both sides.
1:37:28 So the two percenter on the left goes, you know, if you’re a white woman, you need to shut up and
1:37:34 listen now, okay? That’s ridiculous. No, you don’t. If you’re a white woman, you have every right to
1:37:40 speak out, you have every right that every other human being has. And so would I love for all of
1:37:44 us to listen to one another, to have empathy for one another, and go, hey, I wonder how a right
1:37:48 winger thinks about this. I wonder how a left winger thinks about this. I wonder why they
1:37:53 think that way, right? I love that and I want that. So I want you to listen, but I don’t want you to
1:38:01 shut up. So that two percent gets extreme and I don’t like it. But on the right wing, you got your
1:38:05 two percent who think that that’s all that’s happening on the left. And that’s all that’s
1:38:10 happening in American politics. And they think the entire left believes that tiny two percent,
1:38:15 right? And so they hate the left and they’re like, oh, I’m not going to shut up. I’m not going to wear
1:38:20 a mask. I’m not going to do any of these things. And I’m not going to do anything. That’s a freedom.
1:38:25 And then a Republican comes along and goes, oh, yeah, that thing you call freedom. That’s
1:38:30 deregulation for corporations because you shouldn’t really have freedom. Companies should have
1:38:36 freedom, right? And then the guy goes, yeah, freedom for AxonMobil. No, brother, they tricked you.
1:38:41 Yeah, the two percent on each side is a useful distraction for, yes, for the corruption of the
1:38:47 politicians via money. Still, I’m talking about the 96% that remains in the middle and the impact
1:38:52 that DEI policy says on them. Yeah, so here’s where it gets absurd. I’ll give you a good example
1:39:02 of absurdity. So in a school, I believe in California, they noticed that Latino students
1:39:08 were not doing as well in AP and honors classes. So they canceled AP and honors classes. Oh,
1:39:15 come on, what are you doing? That’s nuts. No, your job is to help them get better grades,
1:39:21 get better opportunity, etc. That’s the harder thing to do and the right thing to do. Your job
1:39:27 isn’t, I’m going to make everything equal by taking away the opportunity for higher achievement
1:39:31 for other students. If that’s what you’re doing and you think you’re on the left, you’re not
1:39:36 really on the left. I actually think that’s like an authoritarian position that a no progressive
1:39:42 in their right mind would be in favor of. But it’s all definitional. So here’s another example
1:39:46 of definitional, communism. Like they say, oh my god, Kamala Harris is a communist.
1:39:52 Well, when you’re telling on yourself, brothers and sisters, when you say that,
1:39:58 that means A, I don’t know what communism means, and B, I don’t have any idea what’s going on in
1:40:05 American politics. Kamala Harris is a corporatist. That’s her problem. Not that she’s a communist,
1:40:11 she’s on the other end of the spectrum, right? The idea that Kamala Harris would come into office
1:40:15 and say, that’s it, there’s no more private property. We’re going to take all of your homes
1:40:20 and this down government property, all your cars, etc. She was not going to get within a billion
1:40:25 miles of that. Her donors would never allow her to get within a billion miles of that.
1:40:29 That is so preposterous that when you say something like that, it’s disqualifying.
1:40:34 Like I can’t debate someone who thinks that Democrats are communists when they’re actually
1:40:40 largely corporatists. Do you see what I’m saying? Yeah. So let’s go there. So when people call her
1:40:46 communist, they’re usually referring to certain kinds of policies. So do you think, I mean,
1:40:52 I think it’s a ridiculous label to assign to Kamala Harris, especially given the history of
1:40:58 communism in the 20th century and what those economic and political policies have led to the
1:41:04 scale of suffering that led to. And it just degrades the meaning of the word, right? But
1:41:10 to take that seriously, why is she not a communist? So you said she’s not a communist because she’s
1:41:18 a corporatist. Okay, but that can’t be, okay, everybody in politics is a corporatist.
1:41:22 Almost. Almost everybody in politics is a corporatist. But that doesn’t mean
1:41:27 the corporations have completely bought their mind. They have an influence on their mind and
1:41:33 issues that matter to those corporations. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Outside of that, they’re still
1:41:39 thinking for the voters because they still have to win the votes. Barely. Okay. So here,
1:41:44 let me give you an example. So you see what I’m saying. So if you just wanted votes,
1:41:50 you would do a lot of what Tim Walsh did. Okay. And by the way, a lot of what Bernie did,
1:41:57 that’s why Bernie, who had no media coverage, went from like 2% in 2015 to by the end,
1:42:02 about 48% because he was just doing things that were popular, right? And that American people
1:42:06 wanted, et cetera, right? Because he’s not controlled by corporations. By the way, neither
1:42:11 is Tom Massey on the right wing side, on the Republican side, right? So it’s not all, that’s
1:42:15 why I always say almost all, right? So if you’re doing things that are popular, people love it.
1:42:21 So today, what would Kamala Harris do if she actually just wanted to win, right? So number one,
1:42:30 she was trying to pass paid family leave right now. Why? It pulls at 84% and even 74% of Republicans
1:42:36 want it. Why? Because it says, hey, when you have a baby, you should get 12 weeks off, bond with
1:42:43 your baby. Right now, in a lot of states that don’t have paid family leave, you have to go back
1:42:47 to work the very next day, or you have to use all of your sick days, all your vacation days,
1:42:53 just to have one or two weeks with your baby, right? So conservatives love paid family leave,
1:42:58 liberals love paid family leave. That’s why it pulls so high. So why isn’t she proposing it?
1:43:03 It’s not in our economic plan. Tim Walsh already passed it in Minnesota. He showed how easy it was.
1:43:07 If you want votes, and then you know what’s going to happen if you propose paid family leave,
1:43:12 the Republicans are going to go, no, our beloved corporations don’t want to spend another dollar
1:43:18 on moms, right? And they fall for that trap and then you’re in an infinitely better shape. So why
1:43:24 does she do it? She doesn’t do it because her corporate donors don’t want her to do it. $15
1:43:29 minimum wage layup over 2/3 of the country wants it because it not only gives you higher wages for
1:43:33 minimum wage folks, but it pushes wages up for others. And what do the elites say?
1:43:37 Oh, that’s going to drive up inflation. No, you shouldn’t get paid anymore. Wait,
1:43:42 wait, wait, hold on. So you’re saying all other prices should go up, but the only thing that
1:43:49 shouldn’t go up is our wages? No, our wages should go up. Okay. So these are all easy ones. Here’s
1:43:54 another one, anti-corruption. Why is she running on getting money out of politics? It pulls it over
1:44:01 90%. Why isn’t Trump running on it anymore? He won when he ran on it in 2016. He didn’t mean a word
1:44:06 of it, but he ran on it. It was smart. They don’t do it because their corporate donors
1:44:10 take their heads off if they do it. So in contradiction to that, why did she propose to
1:44:18 raise the corporate tax rate from whatever, 21% to 28%? Because that’s easy because that is
1:44:25 something that’s super popular and she’s not going to do it. That’s why. So guys, this is where I
1:44:31 break the hearts of BlueMaga. BlueMaga thinks, oh my God, these Democrats, they’re angels and the
1:44:37 right wingers and the Republicans are evil and they work for big business, but not Kamala Harris,
1:44:44 not Joe Biden, right? Okay. Well, Donald Trump took the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%.
1:44:49 So that’s trillions of dollars that got transferred because guys, you got to understand
1:44:56 if the corporations don’t pay it, we have to pay it because we’re running up these giant deficits
1:45:00 and eventually either they’re going to, not eventually they keep raising our taxes in different
1:45:06 ways that you’re not noticing. They keep increasing fees and fines and different ways for the government
1:45:10 to collect money. So we’re paying for it. And on top of that, eventually they’re going to cut
1:45:13 your social security and Medicare because they’re going to say, oh, we don’t have any options left
1:45:17 anymore. Yeah, you don’t have any options left anymore because you kept giving trillions of dollars
1:45:22 in tax cuts to corporations. So we’re going to have to pay for that. So then Trump, then Biden
1:45:27 says, oh my God, I’m going to bring corporate taxes back up to 28%. I’m like, wait, hold on.
1:45:33 They were at 35. You already did a slide of hand and said 28. Okay. Then he gets into office
1:45:41 and Manchin says, no, 25. That’s the highest I’ll go. And he goes, okay, fine, 25. And then while
1:45:47 you’re not looking, they just dump it. They don’t even do 25. It’s still a 21. So hear me now,
1:45:51 quote me later. I do predictions on the show all the time because you should hold me accountable.
1:45:55 You should hold all your pundits accountable. If you held all your pundits accountable, we’d be
1:46:01 the last man standing. And that’s kind of what happened. Okay. So I guarantee you she will not
1:46:06 increase corporate taxes. So would the same be the case for price controls or the anti-price
1:46:12 gouging that she’s supposed to? So it’s not price controls, it’s price gouging. It is price controls,
1:46:16 but I mean, minimum wage is price controls also. Now we’re going to get into a lot of
1:46:22 minutiae, but I’ll try to keep it broad. So price controls are a disaster. They never work. If you
1:46:27 say, oh, here’s a banana. It has to stay at a dollar a pound and make up a number, right?
1:46:32 Well, supply and demand is going to move. And then that’s going to, and so the minute it moves to
1:46:36 $2 at where the price should be, then you’re going to run into shortages. So we all know this,
1:46:41 it’s a bad idea, right? But are there laws against price gouging? There already are,
1:46:48 and they’re a good idea. So why? Like you have a natural disaster, all of a sudden the water that
1:46:53 was a dollar, now they’re charging $100. The government has to come in, democratic capitalism,
1:46:58 they come in and go, no, I’m going to protect the people. So you’re not allowed to price gouge,
1:47:02 you know, maybe charge $2, et cetera, but you’re not going to charge $100. But it is temporary.
1:47:08 We get that done, we end the problem there, and then we bring it back to a normal supply and
1:47:15 demand, okay? So that’s what she’s proposing. That’s all political because the price gouging has
1:47:21 already passed. They did it in ’21 and ’22. And so now the grocery stores are actually a low margin
1:47:26 business. She says grocery stores, that’s how I know she doesn’t mean it, because the grocery
1:47:30 stores weren’t the problem, consumer goods were the problem, those companies.
1:47:34 She’s following the polls where most people will say that the groceries are too expensive,
1:47:39 so she’s just basically saying the most popular thing, yeah.
1:47:44 100%. And you could tell in which proposals she means it and which proposals she doesn’t,
1:47:52 because of the framing, right? So this is a mediocre example, but in housing, she said,
1:48:00 “We have to stop private equity from buying houses in bulk.” I’m curious that they put
1:48:05 the word “in bulk” there. Why does it have to be in bulk? Why don’t we just stop them from
1:48:09 buying any residential home? Like you could set up normal boundaries, right? For example,
1:48:15 Charlie Kirk was on The Young Turks this week. By the way, sorry to take that tangent. I really
1:48:19 enjoyed that conversation. I really enjoyed that you talked to… That was like civil.
1:48:24 You guys disagreed pretty intensely, but there was a lot of respect. I really enjoyed that.
1:48:25 Thank you, brother.
1:48:28 That was beautiful. You and Charlie Kirk and I think Anna was there.
1:48:37 Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, quick tangent. Look, I’ve done a lot of yelling online,
1:48:46 okay. And I yell when A, there’s an issue that you should be passionate about. 40,000 people,
1:48:52 25,000 women and children slaughtered in Gaza. If you’re not emotionally upset by that and you
1:48:57 think it’s no big deal, I think that’s a problem. But when you add gas lighting on top, that’s what
1:49:03 drives me crazy. And then when you add filibustering on top, then that sets me off. So for all my life,
1:49:07 right wing has gone on cable and filibustered. They take up so much more time than the left-wing
1:49:13 guests. And the left-wing guests always goes, “Okay, well, I’m offended. He’s taking up too much
1:49:17 time. No, brother, go over the top. Go over the top. You’re not going to talk over me. I’m going
1:49:26 to talk over you, okay?” And then when you gaslight and you go, “Oh, no, 1,200 people in Israel being
1:49:31 killed is awful,” which it is. But 40,000 people being killed in Gaza is no big deal. We should
1:49:36 keep giving them money, keep killing, keep killing. And that that’s normal. No, it’s not normal. I’m
1:49:42 not going to let you say it’s normal. That’s nuts, okay? When we were against the Iraq war,
1:49:46 there was only two shows that were on the air nationally that were against the Iraq war, us
1:49:54 and Democracy Now with Amy Goodman. And at the time, I used to yell all the time because mainstream
1:49:59 media would gaslight the fuck out of us. We’re going to be greeted as liberators. Me and Ben
1:50:03 Manquitz on the air. Ben doesn’t yell as much. He’s now the host of Turner Classic Movies. But
1:50:10 he’s saying it in a calm way. I’m saying it in a screaming way. We’re not going to be greeted as
1:50:16 liberators when you drop a bomb on someone’s head. They don’t greet you as a liberator. Stop saying
1:50:21 insane things. And 7 out of 10 Americans thought that Saddam Hussein had personally attacked us
1:50:28 on 9/11. We got lied into that war by corporate media, okay? Now there’s a couple of good things
1:50:34 that Trump has done. One is get people to realize corporate media is the matrix, right? And so now
1:50:38 and get them to an anti-war position. He himself doesn’t have an anti-war position,
1:50:42 but his voters do, and that’s a positive. We can come back to that. But these days, the reason
1:50:48 why the Charlie Kirk conversations are going great, and Rudy Giuliani and Mike Lindell. And
1:50:55 historically though, we’ve been, go back, again, 10 years, 20 years, we’ve always been respectful
1:50:59 when someone comes on our show and we have a debate. As long as they’re not yelling,
1:51:04 I matched a tenor of the host, right? You and I are having a reasonable conversation. I’m not
1:51:10 raising my voice. I’m not yelling at you for no reason, right? So now when Charlie’s not going
1:51:18 to battle anymore for like talking points, I’m shutting off my mind, all I’m doing is yelling
1:51:22 at you, then I’m going to yell back at him. But now he’s saying, okay, let’s have a reasonable
1:51:27 conversation. Great, I love it. I love reasonable conversation. It was great. It was refreshing.
1:51:34 And what were we talking about? You buying up housing. Yes. So Charlie, when he was on, said,
1:51:38 hey, listen, you know, I think that there should be a cap, though, I forget if he said $10 billion
1:51:43 or $100 billion in assets. If you have less than that, you should be still be able to do real estate
1:51:48 as an investment, even if it’s residential. But above that, he gets to, okay, that’s good. No
1:51:54 problem. We can have a debate about that when we figure out is the right number, 10, 125, no problem.
1:51:59 You could put in reasonable limitations. But we got to get them to stop buying their homes.
1:52:05 So when Kamala Harris says, oh, we’ll stop them from buying homes in bulk, I’m like, okay,
1:52:09 there’s the loophole. And so they’re going to use that loophole. And besides, which it’s not going
1:52:15 to pass, Wall Street owns the government. So there’s no way corporate Republicans and Democrats,
1:52:20 which are about 98% of politicians, are going to limit private equity. And so when do we ever get
1:52:27 a little bit of change? When Democrats are in charge, they do five to 15% of their agenda.
1:52:36 And that’s not because they’re warmhearted. It’s a release valve, right? Oh, see, under Obama,
1:52:43 we got about 5% change. And what was that? That was Obamacare, right? That was most of the change
1:52:49 that we got. And what’s the greatest part of Obamacare? And now a lot of right wing also agree,
1:52:52 almost all of right wing agree about this portion, which is they got rid of the
1:52:59 bias against preexisting conditions. Why did they do that particularly? Because the country was
1:53:05 about to get in a fucking rage. We all have preexisting conditions. If you deny me when
1:53:10 I’m sick, what the fuck’s the point of insurance, right? And the anger had gotten to a nuclear level.
1:53:15 So they’re like, release valve, get rid of preexisting conditions. Let’s go back to just
1:53:21 milking them regularly. And oh, by the way, put in a mandate so that they have to buy it from us,
1:53:26 right? Do you know who originally came up with Obamacare? The Heritage Foundation.
1:53:32 It was their proposal. Romney did it in Massachusetts. It was called Romney Care.
1:53:37 So I think this is a super important election. But I’ve earned the credibility to be able to
1:53:42 say that. Because in 2012, I said this is a largely unimportant election. Mitt Romney and
1:53:51 Barack Obama’s policies on economic issues are near identical. Obamacare was literally Romney Care.
1:53:55 Right now the left says, oh, the Heritage Foundation, it’s so dangerous. Project 2025.
1:54:00 Well, brother, they’re the ones who wrote Obamacare. And you say that’s the greatest
1:54:07 change in the world, right? So that’s why the Democrats, yeah, I’ll take the 10% change overall.
1:54:14 I think Biden did about 15%. Obama did 5%. But they’re gonna, they’ll also march you backwards
1:54:19 by deregulating like Clinton did and Obama did the bank bailouts like Obama did. But 10% is
1:54:24 better than 0%. But it’s not to help you. It’s the release valve. So the system keeps going.
1:54:27 Is it possible to steal man the case that,
1:54:37 that not all politicians are corporatists? Or maybe how would you approach that? For example,
1:54:43 this podcast has a bunch of sponsors. I give zero fucks about what they think about what I’m
1:54:48 saying. Like they have zero control over me. Maybe you could say that’s not, that’s because it’s not
1:54:56 a lot of money. Or maybe, maybe I’m a unique person or something like this. But I just think
1:55:01 it’s possible to have, and I would like to believe a lot of politicians that this way,
1:55:09 that they have ideas. And while they take money, they kind of see it as a game that, you know,
1:55:15 you accept the money, kind of go to certain parties, hug people and so on. But it doesn’t
1:55:21 actually fundamentally compromise your integrity on issues you actually care about.
1:55:27 I can steal man almost anything. I can steal man Trump. I can steal man conservatives easily,
1:55:34 right? Corporate politicians, the hard one. So first, it’s not all politicians. We can
1:55:41 start out nice and easy. Tom Massie, now Holly and Gates, taking, not taking corporate PAC money.
1:55:46 Bernie, the squad, they don’t take corporate PAC money. You could disagree on either end of those
1:55:54 folks on social issues. But generally, they are a thousand times less corrupt. They’re more honest.
1:55:59 And part of the reason you might hate the squad is because they’re so honest. They tell you
1:56:02 their real opinion on social issues that you really disagree with. A lot of the corporate
1:56:06 politicians won’t do that because they’re trying to get as many votes as possible so they can
1:56:10 fillate their donors when they get into office and do all their favors for them.
1:56:14 Okay. But you see, I’m already falling apart on the steelmaking of corporate politicians.
1:56:20 Let’s zoom in on that. So if you take corporate PAC money, you’re that’s it. You’re you’re
1:56:24 corrupted. Can you imagine yourself, say you’re a politician, you’re a president.
1:56:31 You’re a human being. You’re a person with integrity. You’re a person who thinks about the
1:56:38 world. You’re saying if I was a corporate PAC and I give you a billion dollars, you still you’d be,
1:56:43 I could tell you anything. So Lex, everything is a spectrum. Humanity is a spectrum. So can you
1:56:51 find outliers who could take corporate PAC money and still be principled enough to resist its lure?
1:56:56 Yeah. And and I would hope that I would be a person like that, but I wouldn’t take corporate
1:57:02 PAC money. But if you force me to, I think I would still stay principled and do it. Could you find
1:57:09 10, 20 other people in the country? Yeah. But on average, that is not what will happen. What
1:57:14 will happen is they will take the money and do exactly as they are told.
1:57:21 I think most people have integrity. Okay. Okay. So what I’m more worried about is when you take
1:57:27 corporate PAC money, it’s not that you are immediately sold is over time. Over time. That’s
1:57:34 true. So yeah, I get it. But I wonder if the integrity that I think most people have can
1:57:44 withstand the gradual slippery slope of the effect of corporate money, which if what I’m
1:57:49 saying is true, then most people have integrity. One of the ways to solve the effect of corporate
1:57:55 money is term limits because it takes time to corrupt people. You can’t buy them immediately.
1:58:02 And then the term limits for the listener. Cenk is shaking his head.
1:58:07 Yeah. So look, you’re right that over time it gets way worse. And as we talked about earlier,
1:58:12 Biden’s a great example of that. Comes in anti-corruption, winds up being totally pro-corruption
1:58:18 by the end. But he was also here for almost all of it as we started in a world that was not run
1:58:24 by money in politics and is now completely run by money in politics. So does it get worse over
1:58:29 time? Cinnamon is a Christian cinnamon. Arizona is a great example that comes in as a progressive,
1:58:36 doesn’t want to take back money, cares about the average person, etc. Over time,
1:58:43 she becomes the biggest corporatist in the Senate and a total disaster. But if you say that the
1:58:49 majority of politicians have been, I don’t know if this is what you’re saying, majority of politicians
1:58:56 have integrity? No, let’s start at the majority of human beings. And I think that politicians
1:59:06 are not a special group of sociopaths. They lean a little bit towards that direction,
1:59:10 but they’re not like only sociopaths go into politics. It’s like you have to have some
1:59:15 sociopathic qualities, I think, to go into politics, but they’re not completely sociopath.
1:59:22 I think they do have integrity because sometimes for very selfish reasons, it’s not all about money,
1:59:28 even for a selfish person, for a narcissist. It’s also about being recognized for having
1:59:34 had positive impact on the world. Yeah, I get it. But all right, so let’s break it down.
1:59:39 So first, human beings, then we’ll get the politicians. Do human beings have integrity?
1:59:46 Well, it’s a spectrum. So some people have enormous integrity, some people have no integrity.
1:59:52 So there is not one type or character, right? So some people have a ton of empathy for other
1:59:58 human beings, and they literally feel it. Like I feel the pain of someone else. And I’m not alone,
2:00:03 most people feel the pain of someone else. If you see it on video, a baby being hurt,
2:00:10 an overwhelming majority of human beings will go, “No!” Right? You have empathy,
2:00:15 that’s a natural feeling that you have. Some people have no empathy because they’re on the
2:00:22 extreme end of the spectrum, serial killers and Donald Trump. Okay. And so I’m partly joking,
2:00:29 but not really. He has never demonstrated any empathy that I have ever seen for any other human
2:00:33 being. I’m going to trigger some right-wingers because they think every terrible thing he said
2:00:39 is out of context or joking or not real or fake news. But his chief of staff didn’t make it up.
2:00:45 He called the people who went into the military suckers and losers. Why? Why did he say that?
2:00:49 Just hang with me for a second, don’t have your head explode, okay? I’m not saying the
2:00:54 likes, I’m saying the right-wingers out there, right? So the reason is because if you’re like
2:01:01 Trump and you literally don’t feel the empathy, you think, “Why the hell would I go in the military?
2:01:06 Get killed for someone else.” What a sucker! No, I’m going to stay out of the military,
2:01:09 I’m going to stay alive, I’m going to make a ton of money and I’m going to look out for myself.
2:01:16 And he assumes, because everybody does this, you assume that everyone thinks like you do,
2:01:22 but they don’t. So Trump assumes everybody’s as much of a dirtbag as he is and because he doesn’t
2:01:28 feel it, he doesn’t feel the empathy. And so he’s like, “Yeah, you’d be an idiot, a sucker and a
2:01:33 loser to go into the military and have a sacrifice for other people.” So you see this spectrum.
2:01:36 Even if you think Trump’s not on that end and you think I’m wrong about that, you get that
2:01:42 there are people on that end, right? So you have a spectrum of integrity, empathy, etc.
2:01:47 That’s what I would call your hardware. You layer on top of that your software, okay? And the
2:01:54 software is cultural influences. Your parents, media, your friends, all these are cultural influences.
2:02:01 So now when you’re in certain industries, they value more integrity. So
2:02:07 religious leaders, if you’re doing it right, which is also very rare, right? But if you’re doing it
2:02:12 right, you’re supposed to have empathy for the poor, the needy, the whole flock, right? So that
2:02:19 profession is incentivizing you towards empathy and integrity, okay? And even then,
2:02:26 a giant amount of people abuse it, right? But okay, good. In politics, it creates incentives
2:02:34 for the opposite, no integrity. And that software, to your point, over time, gets stronger and
2:02:39 stronger and stronger until it takes over. Now, you might have someone with a lot of integrity,
2:02:46 like Tom Massey, right? A little Republican from Kentucky. And whether I agree with him or disagree
2:02:51 with him on policy, I get that the brother is actually doing it based on principles.
2:02:55 And there isn’t any amount of money you can give Tom Massey for him to change his principles.
2:03:00 Why? He’s on the principled end of the spectrum as a human being, right? So is Bernie. They’re on
2:03:07 the same part of that spectrum, right? But for most people, the great majority of the spectrum,
2:03:12 if you overload them with software that incentivizes them to not have integrity,
2:03:17 they will succumb. And now let’s switch to politicians in particular. Why do I think that
2:03:25 they’re, on average, far more likely to be on the sociopathic part of the spectrum? Because
2:03:31 of the incentives and disincentives. So this changes every congressional cycle. And when
2:03:36 just Democrats were winning a lot, it got all the way down to 87.5%. But on average,
2:03:41 for congressional elections, the person with more money wins 95% of the time. It doesn’t
2:03:46 matter if they’re a liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, or any ideology they
2:03:54 have, 95%. Okay. So now let’s say you got the 5% that went in that are not hooked on the money.
2:03:58 Well, they’re going to get a primary challenge, then they’re going to get a general election
2:04:04 challenge. And 95% of the time, the one with more money wins. So eventually, this system cycles
2:04:12 through until almost only the corrupt are left. Wait, hold on a second. Is that real? 95%. So if
2:04:24 you have more money, 95% of the time you win, huh? Yes. I’d like to believe that’s less the case,
2:04:30 for example, for higher you get. Yes, that’s true. You’re right. So you know why? So the
2:04:37 presidential race is ironically in some ways the least corrupt. So let’s dive into why. If you’re
2:04:41 running a local race anywhere in the country, you’re going to get almost no press coverage,
2:04:46 meaning congressional race, right? If you’re running a Senate race in the middle of Montana,
2:04:52 you’re going to get almost no media coverage. So that’s where your money in politics has the most
2:04:57 effect, because then you could just buy the airwaves. You outspend the other guy, you get all
2:05:01 the ads plus you get the friendly media coverage because you just bought a couple of million
2:05:06 dollars of ads in the middle of Montana. So the local news loves you, the TV stations, the radio
2:05:11 stations, the papers. So some of the papers are principal, they might say, oh no, but overall
2:05:15 they’re not calling you a radical, they’re not calling you anything, and you’re buying those
2:05:20 races. But when you get to the presidential race, that’s much harder. Because presidential race,
2:05:28 you have earned media, free media that overwhelms paid media. Perfect examples, 2016. Hillary Clinton
2:05:35 outraises Trump by about two to one, but she loses anyway. Why? Because Trump got almost twice as much
2:05:40 earned media as she did. And the earned media is better. It’s inside the content, right? It is
2:05:47 definitely better. So in a presidential election, as long as you got past the primary, you could
2:05:55 actually win with not that much money. And that’s part of the reason why I have hope, Lex. Because
2:06:00 all you got to do is get past a Republican or Democratic primary. And that’s very, very, very
2:06:06 difficult, but Trump did it, right? Now he took it in the wrong direction, but he did leave a
2:06:11 blueprint for how to do it. And so once you get to the general election, you’re off to the race,
2:06:16 you could do any goddamn thing you like, okay? You could be super popular, you don’t have to give a
2:06:20 shit about the donors, you can get into office, you could bully your own party and the other party
2:06:24 into doing what you want. And you can get everything done, you could even get money out of politics.
2:06:30 So don’t lose hope. I mean, we even started Operation Hope at TYT. And our first project
2:06:34 was to knock Biden out. And everybody said you guys are nuts. That’s totally impossible.
2:06:39 And we knocked Biden out, right? Did we do it alone? Of course not. We were a small part of it,
2:06:46 right? But we laid the groundwork for hope. And we laid the groundwork for when he flopped in the
2:06:52 debate, people had already been told, remember, he’s bad, he’s old, he’s not right. And the debate
2:06:56 proved it. If we hadn’t done that groundwork, and not just the young Turks, obviously, but
2:07:02 Axelrod and Carville and Nate Silver and Ezra Klein, et cetera, Charlemagne the God, John
2:07:09 Stewart, all these people helped a lot so that when the debate happened, it confirmed the idea
2:07:15 that out there that he was too old and couldn’t do it. So my point is hope is, if you lose hope,
2:07:20 you’re done for, then they’re definitely going to win, right? Hope is the most dangerous thing in
2:07:25 the world for the elites. So whether you’re right wing or left wing, I need you to have hope and I
2:07:30 need you to understand it’s not misplaced. We just got to get past the primary and we’re going to
2:07:35 turn this whole thing around. So you’re basically a presidential candidate who’s a populist who
2:07:45 in part runs on getting money out of politics. Okay, well, let’s talk about Donald Trump.
2:07:54 So to me, the two biggest criticisms of Trump is the fake election scheme. Out of that whole
2:07:59 2020 election, the fake election scheme is the thing that really bothers me. And then the second
2:08:08 thing across a larger time scale is the counterproductive division that he’s created in, let’s
2:08:15 say our public discourse. What are your top five criticisms of Trump? Okay, so number one, I have
2:08:21 the same exact thing as you. The fake election scheme is unacceptable, totally disqualifying.
2:08:27 So the fake election scheme was a literal coup attempt. So he doesn’t win the election. For
2:08:32 folks who don’t know, I need to explain why it’s a coup attempt, because you just throw out words
2:08:36 and then people get triggered by the words and then they go into their separate corners, right?
2:08:44 So the January 6th rioters, they were not going to keep the building. That was not a coup attempt.
2:08:50 It’s not like, oh, the MAGA guys have the building. I guess they win, right? No, that was never going
2:08:56 to happen. So what was the point of the January 6th riot? It was to delay the proceedings. Why did
2:08:59 it matter that they were going to delay the proceedings? Because if you can’t certify the
2:09:04 election, they wanted general confusion and chaos so that the Republicans in Congress could say,
2:09:08 well, we don’t know who won, so we’re going to have to kick it back to the states.
2:09:13 In the states, they had the fake electors ready. And remember, the fake electors are not Trump’s
2:09:19 electors. Both candidates have a slate of electors, Biden’s electors and Trump’s electors. They go to
2:09:27 the Trump electors first in this plan and half the Trump electors go, no, I’m not going to pretend
2:09:31 Trump won the election when he didn’t win the election. So they’re like, shit, now we’ve got to
2:09:36 come up with fake electors, okay? So they enlist these Republicans to go, yeah, I’ll pretend Trump won,
2:09:41 right? And so they sign a piece of paper. That’s fraud and that’s why a lot of them are
2:09:49 now being prosecuted in the different states. And so the idea is the Republican legislature,
2:09:55 legislators then go, we’re sending these new electors in and we think Trump won Arizona and
2:10:01 Georgia and Wisconsin, right? That was the idea. That was the plan. And then you come back to the
2:10:08 House at that point when there are two different sets of electors, the rule constitutional rule is
2:10:14 the House decides, but the House decides not on a majority because the Democrats had the majority
2:10:20 at the time. They decide on a majority of the states. They vote by state and the Republicans
2:10:25 had the majority of the states. So in that way, you steal the election even though Trump didn’t
2:10:32 win, you install them back in as president. That is a frontal assault on democracy. And I loathe it
2:10:38 and then Trump on top just blabbers out. Well, sometimes you have, if there’s massive fraud
2:10:43 in an election, in other words, I think I won. I don’t even think that I’m just saying that I won,
2:10:49 right? He says you can terminate any rule regulation or article even in the Constitution.
2:10:54 No, brother, you cannot terminate the Constitution because you’d like to do a fake
2:11:01 electors scheme and do a coup against America. Fuck you. Okay, so I’m never going to allow
2:11:07 this want to be tyrant to go back into the White House and endanger our system. And so you want
2:11:13 to endanger the corrupt system? I’m the guy. Okay, let’s go get that corrupt system and tear it down.
2:11:18 If you want to endanger the real system, democracy, capitalism, the Constitution,
2:11:23 then I’m your biggest enemy. So I’m never going to take that risk. And you see it every time he
2:11:29 goes to talk to a dictator. Look, guys, I’m asking you to be principled, right? I asked the left of
2:11:35 that and we drive away some of our audience when we do that. So we got the balls to do that to our
2:11:41 own side. So for the right wing, be honest, if it was Joe Biden or Barack Obama or Kamala Harris,
2:11:49 that went and wrote quote unquote love letters to a Communist dictator who runs concentration camps.
2:11:56 You would say, “Communist, we knew it. Look at that.” And Trump literally says about Kim Jong-un,
2:12:02 “We wrote love letters to one another. We fell in love.” If a Democrat said that,
2:12:09 they’d be politically decapitated, right? Their career would be instantly over, right? But Trump,
2:12:14 whatever is Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, I don’t get into Russia, Russia, Russia. But it’s just
2:12:22 that he’s a strong man, right? Kim Jong-un or any Victor Orban, Duterte in the Philippines,
2:12:30 anytime it’s a strong man that says, “Screw our Constitution. Screw our rules. I want total loyalty
2:12:36 to one person.” Trump loves him. He loves him. He said once, he’s like, “Oh, it’s great. You go to
2:12:43 North Korea or China,” and when the leader walks in, everybody applauds, and everybody
2:12:47 listens to what he says. That’s how it should be here. No, brother, that’s not how it should be here.
2:12:54 You hate democracy. You want to be the sole guy in charge. As a populist, you should loathe Donald Trump.
2:12:59 I agree on the fake election scheme. Can you steal man and maybe educate me on,
2:13:07 there’s a book rigged that I started reading. Is there any degree to which the election was rigged
2:13:13 or elections in general are rigged? I think the book rigged. The main case they make is not that
2:13:21 there’s some shady, fake ballots. It’s more the impact of mainstream media and the impact of big tech.
2:13:28 So, rigged is another one of those words that triggers people and is ill-defined, right? So,
2:13:36 let’s begin to define it. So, the worst case of rigged is we actually change the votes, right?
2:13:41 So, a lot of Trump people think that that’s what happened. Nonsense. That didn’t happen at all.
2:13:48 So, then you move, and by the way, some on the left thought the votes were changed in the 2016
2:13:55 primary and it was literally rigged against Bernie. No, that did not happen. That is a massive
2:14:01 crime and is very risky and is relatively easy to get caught. People who are in power are not
2:14:06 interested in getting caught. They’re not interested in going to jail, etc. It is a very extreme thing.
2:14:13 Could it happen? Yes, it could happen. Have I seen any evidence of it happening in my lifetime? Not really.
2:14:19 Given how much people hate this, you probably just need to find evidence of one time,
2:14:26 like one vote being changed where you can trace them saying something in some room,
2:14:31 somewhere, that would just explode. That evidence just doesn’t seem to be there.
2:14:36 And by the way, for the right-wing who say verify the vote, god damn right, verify the vote, right?
2:14:40 So, you want to have different proposals like paper ballots, recounts, and recounts, which by
2:14:46 the way, you had not paper ballots, but the three recounts and a hand recount in Georgia and so many
2:14:51 of these swing states, he lost, he lost, he lost. There was no significant voter fraud.
2:14:59 Now, second thing in terms of rigging is voter fraud. So, and the right-wing believes, oh my
2:15:04 god, there’s voter fraud everywhere. Not remotely true. Heritage Foundation does a study. They want
2:15:09 to prove it so badly. And it turns out, no matter how much they moved the numbers, the final number
2:15:21 they got was, it happens 0.000006% of the time. Okay. It almost never happens. They found like
2:15:27 31 instances over a decade or two decades. So, it’s- What counts as voter fraud?
2:15:31 So, a lot of times these days, it’ll be Republicans who do it because it’ll be, and it’s
2:15:36 not nefarious. It’s a knucklehead who goes in and says, “Oh, I heard they are having
2:15:40 non-documentary, the illegals vote. So, I voted for me and my mom even though she’s dead.”
2:15:46 But that’s fair. They’re doing it. No, brother, that’s not fair. That’s not how it works. You’re
2:15:51 under arrest. So, what about non-citizens voting? So, it’s preposterous. Of course,
2:15:57 non-citizens shouldn’t vote and they don’t vote. But there’s not, you don’t have to prove citizenship
2:16:02 when you’re voting, right? No, you do. I mean, it depends on what you mean by prove and when you
2:16:10 vote, right? So, you’re not allowed to vote as an undocumented immigrant. So, that happens up front
2:16:14 when you go to like, again, it’s a hall of mirrors. Like, there’s so many different ways
2:16:19 to create mirages. So, the Republicans will say, “Well, when you go to the voting booth,
2:16:24 they don’t make you show a passport.” Yeah, that’s true, but you showed it earlier when
2:16:30 you registered, right? And so, and we can get into voter ID laws. There’s all sorts of things,
2:16:34 but we got to, we’ll speed up the spectrum, right? So, these things almost never happen.
2:16:39 Voter fraud happens super rarely and not enough to swing elections. And by the way, sometimes,
2:16:42 if there is an issue, they’ll redo an election. There is actually a process for that. And it
2:16:47 happened in North Carolina because Republicans did voter fraud in this one district, okay? And it
2:16:52 wasn’t the candidate himself. It was this campaign person and they did ballot harvesting and then,
2:16:56 but ballot harvesting, again, it depends on what you mean. If you’re just collecting ballots,
2:17:02 that’s okay. He changed the ballots. That’s not okay. And so, they had to redo that election.
2:17:09 So, now, the real place where it gets rigged is before elections. And there’s two main ways that
2:17:17 things get rigged. One is almost exclusively, no, that’s not fair. I was going to say Republicans,
2:17:21 but Democrats do it too in a different way. So, Republicans will come in like Brian Kemp is the
2:17:27 king of this in Georgia. So, he was against Trump doing it ex post facto. He’s like, “No, you idiot.
2:17:32 We don’t cheat after the election. We cheat before the election.” Okay? So, they’ll go, “Well, I mean,
2:17:35 you got to clear out the voter rolls every once in a while.” And that’s true because people die,
2:17:39 people move, and you got to clean out the voter rolls. So, then they come in and they go,
2:17:44 “We will clean them out, mainly in black areas.” Okay? Oh, look at that. There goes a couple of
2:17:49 million black voters. Well, some of those, I suppose, are real voters, but they’ll have to
2:17:55 reregister, and then they’ll find that out on election day. And oh, well, now, sorry, you couldn’t
2:18:01 vote this time. Remember to reregister next time. And so, do they go, “Hey, we’re going to take black
2:18:07 people off the voter rolls?” No. What they do is, “We’re having more issues in these districts.”
2:18:13 Right? Here’s another way they do it. How many voting boosts do you have in the area? So, primarily,
2:18:18 Republican areas will get tons of voting boosts, so you don’t have to wait in line.
2:18:24 You go in, you vote, you go to work, no problem. You’re in a black area in a Republican state,
2:18:30 all of a sudden, “Hey, look, that’s city.” Well, we sent you four voting boosts. “Oh,
2:18:33 you got a million people there? Well, what are you going to do? I guess you got to wait
2:18:36 in line the whole day. You can’t go to work, et cetera.” So, that’s the way…
2:18:43 I refuse to believe it’s only the Republicans that do that. I would say…
2:18:47 So, that’s why I paused. Yeah. That just seems too obvious to do by both.
2:18:54 Yeah. No, no. The Democrats are so weak, like they mainly don’t do that, but they do do
2:18:58 the third thing, which is gerrymandering. So, both Republicans and Democrats…
2:19:02 Also, their favorite flavors of messing with the vote. Okay.
2:19:08 Yeah. So, gerrymandering is the best way to rig an election. That way, the politicians pick their
2:19:14 voters instead of the voters picking their politicians. So, all these districts are so
2:19:19 heavily gerrymandered that the incumbent almost can’t lose. They’ll push most of the
2:19:24 voters into one district, most of the voters in another district, because they don’t want
2:19:35 competition. So, then you’re screwed. The vote isn’t rigged, but the district is rigged
2:19:43 so that the incumbent wins almost no matter what. So, that’s why we’ve gotten so polarized,
2:19:49 because the gerrymandering creates 90% of seats that are safe. So, they don’t have to compromise.
2:19:53 They don’t have to get to a middle. They could just be extreme on either side,
2:19:57 because they already locked it up. Okay. So, that’s the number one way to rig an election.
2:20:02 Now, finally, the last part of it is maybe the most important, maybe even more important,
2:20:08 than gerrymandering. And that’s the media. So, it just happened to RFK Jr. It happened
2:20:14 to Bernie in 2015. It happens to any outsider, right or left. The media, if you’re an outsider,
2:20:21 will say, “Well, radical, number one, they don’t platform you.” So, they’re not going to have you
2:20:24 on to begin with. Nobody’s even going to find out about you. If nobody finds out about you,
2:20:32 you’re done for, right? So, Bernie broke through that because he was so popular, and the rallies
2:20:38 were so huge that local news couldn’t help but cover him. Jesus Christ, what are all these people
2:20:41 doing in the middle of the city, right? And he slowly broke through that. But do you know
2:20:46 that in 2015, as he’s doing this miraculous run against Hillary Clinton, nobody thinks he has
2:20:54 a chance? And here comes Bernie, and he’s almost at 48%. He had seven seconds of coverage on ABC
2:21:00 that year. They just will not put you on. That is the number one way they ring an election.
2:21:08 Bobby Kennedy Jr. is sitting at 20% in a primary, no town hall. 20% is a giant number, right? And
2:21:12 you’re not going to do a town hall. You’re not going to do a debate. 12% in the general election,
2:21:19 a giant number in a general election, no town hall, no debate. If no one finds out about you,
2:21:25 they don’t know to vote for you, right? If they don’t find out your policies. Corporate media
2:21:30 rigs elections more than anything else in the world. Now, this is something you’ve been a bit
2:21:35 controversial about. But the general sort of standard belief is that there’s a left-leaning
2:21:42 bias in the mainstream media because, as I think studies show, a large majority of journalists
2:21:49 are left-leaning, and then that there’s a bias in big tech. Employees of big tech companies
2:21:56 from search engines to social media are left-leaning. And there, that’s a huge majority is left-leaning.
2:22:04 So the conventional wisdom is that there is a bias towards the left. First of all,
2:22:10 I think you’ve argued that that’s not true, that there’s a bias in the other direction.
2:22:14 But whether there’s a bias or not, do you think that, how big of an impact that has
2:22:19 on the result of the election? Okay, so let’s break that down. Tech and
2:22:24 media are totally different. So let’s do media first and we’ll do tech. So on mainstream media,
2:22:31 corporate media, and I actually think that right-wing media like Fox News is part of
2:22:38 corporate media. They just play good cop, bad cop. And so in that realm, the bias is not right or
2:22:43 left, except on social issues. Okay, so that’s where that image comes from. On social issues,
2:22:51 yes, the media is generally on the left. And right-wing, sorry, but this started in the 1960s,
2:22:55 and the right-wing got super mad at mainstream media saying that black people were equal to white
2:23:01 people. That’s not the case anymore. Okay, right-wing, calm down. I’m not calling you all racist.
2:23:05 But in the 1960s, were there racism? Was there racism? Of course! Of course, they wouldn’t even
2:23:09 let black kids into the schools, right? There was massive segregation in the South, but a lot
2:23:13 in the North as well. And at that point, in mainstream media says, well, I mean, they are
2:23:20 citizens. They should have equal rights. And the right-wing goes, bias! Okay, yeah, I mean,
2:23:23 you’re kind of right. It is a bias. It is a bias towards equality in that case.
2:23:30 But that is perceived as on the left. Now, fast forward to today, you don’t have that on the
2:23:36 racial issues as obviously as much as we had it back then, but on gay marriage that existed for
2:23:41 a long time, where the media is like, well, they kind of should have the same rights as
2:23:47 straight people, right? And the right-wing went, bias! Right? So, okay, you’re kind of right about
2:23:54 that. But at the same time, I would argue their position is correct, right? So, can they go too
2:24:00 far? Of course, they can go too far. Okay, now, but that’s not the main deal, guys. That’s to distract
2:24:05 you. The main deal is economic issues. And again, we say it ahead of time, and you can see if we’re
2:24:12 right or wrong, right? So, we will tell folks, when we get to an economic bill, you will see,
2:24:17 all of a sudden, the guys who theoretically disagree, Fox News and MSNBC close ranks.
2:24:21 And you just saw it happen with price gouging. That issue of price gouging? All of a sudden,
2:24:26 there’s a lot of MSNBC hosts, CNN hosts, Washington Post writes an op-ed against it,
2:24:30 and everybody panics who’s like, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You can’t control anything a corporation
2:24:34 does. This is wrong! This is wrong!” Right? Oh, what happened? I thought you guys were hated each
2:24:39 other. All of a sudden, you totally agree. Fascinating. Okay? Same thing happened on
2:24:42 increasing wages. When they were talking about increasing the minimum wage,
2:24:49 Stephanie ruled, giants screed against it on MSNBC. All of a sudden, Fox News and MSNBC agree, right?
2:24:55 Do not touch beloved corporations. So, now that gets us to our real bias. It’s not left or right.
2:25:01 It’s pro-corporate for all the reasons we talked about before. Corporate media, corporate politicians.
2:25:05 So, if you don’t believe me today, whether you’re on the right or the left,
2:25:12 watch. Next time on Economic Issue, where do they fall? How do they react? When any time it’s a
2:25:18 corporate issue, where does the media go? Right? So, that’s the real bias of the media. And so,
2:25:24 since the real bias of the media is pro-corporations, that is not a left-wing position. That is
2:25:28 considered more of a right-wing position. I even think that’s a misnomer, because to be fair to
2:25:34 right-wing voters, they’re not pro-corporations. They’re not pro-big business. They’re not pro-corruption.
2:25:39 But the Republican politicians are, so it gets framed as a right-wing issue, right? So, if you
2:25:46 think that the corporate media is too populist, you just don’t get it. They aren’t. They hate populism.
2:25:54 So, now when you turn to tech. So, tech’s a complicated one, because, yeah, people write the
2:25:59 code. If they’re left-wingers, they’re going to have certain assumptions, and they might write
2:26:07 that into the codes of the rules. And so, but they’re also, generally speaking, wealthy. They’re
2:26:12 usually white. They’re usually male. And those biases also get going. And there’s a lot of people
2:26:18 on the left who object to that bias, right? Okay, but that’s a fair and interesting conversation,
2:26:22 and one we have to be careful of, and one we could hopefully find a middle ground on.
2:26:28 But that’s not the major problem. The major reason why big tech gets attacked is because
2:26:36 they are competitors of who. Social media competes with mainstream media. So, mainstream media has
2:26:43 been attacking big tech from day one, pretending that it’s a, they’re really concerned. Yeah,
2:26:48 they’re really concerned, because that’s their competition, and they’re getting their ass handed
2:26:55 to them. So, I did a story on the Young Turks about CNN article about all the dangers of social
2:27:03 media. I’m like, guys, this is written by their advertising department, okay? And in fact,
2:27:07 they go to the advertisers and they find a random video on YouTube or Facebook,
2:27:14 right out of billions of videos. And they’re like, look at your ad is on this video. Do you denounce
2:27:19 and reject every big tech company and every member of social media? And the advertisers are like,
2:27:28 yeah, I do, right? Meanwhile, they’re doing Milf Island on TV. Okay, I didn’t know that.
2:27:36 There’s literally a show that came out recently, where it’s moms and their sons and they fuck each
2:27:41 other. Oh, wow. Okay, they don’t, they don’t have sex with their mom. They have sex with a different
2:27:47 mom, or they date, but then the show is, oh, then they go off into a corner, etc. Right?
2:27:54 I’m like, you’re doing this kind of like the worst degrading, ridiculous, immoral programming.
2:27:58 And then you found a video on YouTube that has a problem. Get the fuck out of here. You’re just
2:28:05 trying to kneecap your competition. Let’s talk about the saga of Joe Biden. So over the past year,
2:28:12 over the past few months, can you just rewind? Where have you maybe tell the story of Joe Biden,
2:28:21 as you see from the election perspective? Yeah, so about a year ago, I, I’m looking at the polling.
2:28:28 And first of all, I have eyes, right? And ears. So whenever I see Biden, I’m like, this is a disaster.
2:28:34 And then I go and talk to real people. And when I say real people, I mean, not in politics. That’s
2:28:40 not their job, right? Because people involved in politics for media have a certain perspective,
2:28:47 and it’s colored by all the exchanges in mainstream media, social media, etc. Real people aren’t on
2:28:54 Twitter having political fights. They’re not watching CNN religiously, etc. Whenever I was at
2:28:59 a barbecue, you guys all Democrats and some barbecues. Yeah. What do you guys think of Joe Biden?
2:29:07 Like almost in unison, too old. Every real person said too old. So I look at what real people are
2:29:11 saying. That’s why I thought Trump was going to win in 2016. I go in the middle of Ohio. I can’t
2:29:18 see a Hillary Clinton sign for hundreds of miles, right? It’s Trump paraphernalia everywhere, right?
2:29:23 So that’s not end all be all. You could say it’s anecdotal, but you begin to collect data points,
2:29:28 right? But then the real data points are in polling. Okay, so now I’m looking at Biden polling.
2:29:35 He’s in the 30s. No incumbent in the 30s has ever come back to win. So I’m like, it’s already over.
2:29:41 Then all of a sudden, oh my God, Trump takes the lead with Latinos. It’s double over.
2:29:47 By the later in the process, Trump took the lead with young voters. I’m like, this is the most
2:29:55 over-election in history. A Democrat cannot win if they’re not winning young voters. That’s impossible.
2:30:02 Trump’s cutting into his lead with black voters. This thing is over, right? And I go tell people
2:30:08 and they’re like, you’re crazy. Why do they think I’m crazy? Because MSNBC is lying to them 24/7,
2:30:15 telling them that Joe Biden created sliced bread and the wheel and fire. And my favorite
2:30:22 target point was he’s a dynamo behind the scenes. I’m like, okay, let me get this right. It’s like
2:30:27 an SNL skit, right? I’m like, so behind the scenes is like, all right, Sally, get me the memo on that
2:30:31 and we’re okay. We’re going to do this and I’m in command of the material. Then he goes in front
2:30:38 of the cameras. Anyways, why would any politician do that? Why would they be terrible in front of
2:30:43 the camera and great off camera? That doesn’t make any sense. But once you get people enough
2:30:50 propaganda and MSNBC created Blue Maga, right, they’ll believe anything. So they believe that
2:30:56 Biden was dynamic and young, and that he was the best possible candidate to beat Donald Trump,
2:31:00 when in reality, he was about the only Democrat who couldn’t beat Donald Trump.
2:31:08 So number one, I don’t cosign on a bullshit. I don’t care which side you’re on. Number two,
2:31:13 as you heard earlier, I can’t have Trump winning. It endangers the country. It endangers our
2:31:19 constitution, etc. So I’m going to do something about it. And so I start something called Operation
2:31:25 Hope on the Young Turks. And we ask the audience, what should we do, right? So there’s different
2:31:31 projects in Operation Hope. But the first project that pops up is not Biden out of the race. Okay.
2:31:38 And so then I ask our paying members on TYT, I say, guys, you’re going to vote, and then I’m
2:31:42 going to do what you tell me to do. If you say, no, I like Biden, or I think Biden’s the best
2:31:47 candidate, or even if he isn’t, we’re not going to be able to win on this. So don’t do it, right?
2:31:57 Should I enter the primary against Biden? Okay. 7624, go, enter, right? I’m a populist. You tell
2:32:02 me to go. You’re my paying members. You’re my boss. I’m going to go. Okay. So I enter the primary.
2:32:06 Now, I’m not born in the country. So people are going to freak out about that. I’m a talk show
2:32:14 host. Like the establishment media despises me, right? So I’m not going to get any air time. In
2:32:21 fact, we consider hiring the top booking agent in New York. We talk to him and he says, well,
2:32:25 you know, I’m actually in New York this week. And he says, I’m going to go talk to those guys.
2:32:30 And I’ll come, I’ll come back to you. And he was really decent. Because normally,
2:32:35 you know, he charges a lot. Just take the money, right? And go, oh, yeah, I’ll get you on. But
2:32:40 he was a wonderful guy. He said, I talked to them, you’re banned. So don’t, don’t do it. Like
2:32:45 you’re not, you’re banned at CNN, you’re banned at MSNBC. And I think you’re banned on Fox News,
2:32:52 but I’m not sure. Okay. So, so long odds, why do you do it? Because if you think we’re going to
2:32:58 crash into the iceberg, you might as well bum rush the captain’s course, right? I’m lunging at the
2:33:03 wheel. So what difference can I make? Well, I can make a difference by going on every show on
2:33:08 planet earth and going, he’s too old. He’s in the thirties. He has no chance of winning. No chance
2:33:14 of winning. I go on Charlemagne show, breakfast club, right? Charlemagne agrees. All of a sudden,
2:33:18 we’re having buzz. And then people go, oh, Charlemagne said he has no chance of winning.
2:33:22 Then Charlemagne’s on the daily show talks to John Stuart. John Stuart does a segment. Not,
2:33:27 this is not necessarily causal, but buzz is building, right? So then John Stuart does a segment,
2:33:32 if you remember, and people got super pissed at him, too old, can’t win. And all in that buzz is
2:33:39 building. Meanwhile, unrelated to us, David Axelrod and James Carville. And I’m like, guys, figure
2:33:46 it out. Who does Axelrod speak for? The top advisor for Barack Obama. Who is James Carville the top
2:33:52 advisor for? The Clintons. This is the Clintons and the Obama sending their emissaries to say,
2:33:59 we can read a poll, he’s going to lose, change direction. So when the debate happens, we laid
2:34:05 the groundwork. If we hadn’t laid the groundwork, debate would have been the first time that blue
2:34:11 MAGA would have thought, oh, maybe Biden can’t win, right? But since all of us said it and strange
2:34:17 bedfellows, I loathe Nancy Pelosi, but she was on our side. I got a lot of issues with Bill Maher.
2:34:22 He was on our side, right? I got a lot of issues with Axelrod and Carville, and they were on our
2:34:29 side. So the people who believed in objective reality kind of independently made a plan,
2:34:35 let’s show people objective reality. And we did and we drove them out and it made all the difference.
2:34:38 So you think he stepped down voluntarily or was he forced out?
2:34:45 Both. So again, it depends on what you mean. So was he forced out? Of course he was forced out.
2:34:50 You think he just woke up? He’s like, oh yeah, you know what? Screw my legacy. I don’t want to be
2:34:54 a two-term president. I’ll just drop out for no reason. No, we forced them out. Of course we did,
2:34:59 right? And when I say we, I had a tiny, tiny, tiny role, the people who had the major roles,
2:35:06 Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and all those folks. But even they were not the main driving force.
2:35:12 The number one driving force were the donors. What is the source of power of Bernie or Massey,
2:35:18 the people, right? What is the source of power for Biden? The donors. The donors made Biden,
2:35:22 he is the donor’s candidate, and the donors, that’s why he told the donors, nothing will
2:35:30 fundamentally change. That is, like you can, if you say like, no, Cenk, I think you’re too extreme
2:35:36 that Biden works for the donors 98%. I don’t think he only works for the 80% or 55%. Fine,
2:35:41 we could have that debate. But you can’t argue that it isn’t his source of power. And you can’t
2:35:45 argue it anymore, even if you were going to argue it earlier, because once the donors said,
2:35:49 we’re not giving you any more money, he didn’t have any options. He couldn’t, he couldn’t go on.
2:35:55 So, but was he forced out at like knife point or something? No. So was it voluntary? Yeah,
2:36:01 ultimately, if Biden decided to stay in, there was nothing we could do about it. And so he had to
2:36:06 voluntarily make that decision, but he voluntarily made it because he had no choice left. Yeah, I
2:36:15 wish he stepped down voluntarily from a place of strength. So I think, I think presidents,
2:36:22 I think politicians in general, especially at the highest levels want legacy. Now, to me, at least,
2:36:28 one of the greatest things you could do is to walk away from at the top. I mean, George Washington,
2:36:34 to walk away from power, is I think universally respected, especially if you got a good speech
2:36:42 to go with it, and you do it really well, not in some kind of cynical or calculator, some kind of
2:36:47 transactional way, but just like as a great leader, and maybe be a little bit even more dramatic than
2:36:53 you need to be in doing it. Yeah, I thought that would be a beautiful moment. And then launch
2:37:02 a some kind of democratic process for electing a different option. Not only did I agree with
2:37:10 you 100%, I reached one of his top advisors, one of the guys you see in the press all the time,
2:37:15 as in his inner circle. I never said that before, because we were in the middle of it, and I’m never
2:37:22 going to betray anyone’s confidence, and I’ll never say who it was. Okay, but he was gracious enough
2:37:28 to meet with me as I was about to enter the primary. And look, it’s smart too, because get
2:37:33 information, intelligence, etc. What is this guy going to be trouble or not trouble, right?
2:37:38 But at least he took the meeting. And the case I made is exactly the one you just said, Lex.
2:37:41 I said, if he drops this about 10 months ago, I said, if he drops out now,
2:37:48 they build statues of them, right? The Democrats, you’re right, when you hate him, I get it. But
2:37:54 the Democrats would have said he beat Trump and protected democracy in 2020. And he steps down
2:38:01 graciously now to make sure we beat Trump again in 2024. And he lets go of power voluntarily.
2:38:09 He’s going to be a hero, an absolute hero. But if he doesn’t, you’re going to force all of us
2:38:14 to kick the living crap out of him, and tell everybody he’s an egomaniac, which he is,
2:38:19 and he’s doing this for two so that he could be, if you don’t know Washington in that bubble,
2:38:24 if you’re a one-term president, you’re a loser. If you’re a two-term president, you have a legacy
2:38:32 in your historic. He’s running for one reason, one reason only. My legacy. I will be a two-term
2:38:37 president. I will be considered historic. I’m like, brother, now you’re going to be considered a
2:38:42 villain, the villain of the story. You’re handing it right back to Trump. You’re not going to win.
2:38:47 And you know, look at the numbers. Any political professional knows you’re not going to win.
2:38:52 So you have hero or villain and you get to choose. But if you think you’re going to be a hero and be
2:38:56 Trump, that is not a choice you have. That is not going to happen. And they didn’t believe us.
2:38:58 But by then, they did.
2:39:05 Well, you’re troubled by the how Kamala Harris was selected after he stepped down.
2:39:14 Yes and no. So I argued for an open convention. And so if Biden had stepped down when we were
2:39:20 trying to get people into the primary knock them out, then that would have been a perfect solution.
2:39:26 Then all the governors could go in. Walsh, Bashir, Whitmer, Kamala Harris goes in, obviously.
2:39:32 They have a real primary. At that point, me and later Dean Phillips came in. Me, Dean, and I mean,
2:39:35 Mary, I wouldn’t drop out. Me and Dean would definitely drop out. Because our whole point was
2:39:40 get other people on the race, make sure we win, right? So, okay, then you would have had a great
2:39:46 primary. It would have been the right way to do it both morally, you know, constitutionally, etc.
2:39:50 But also as a matter of politics, because you would have gotten a lot of coverage for your
2:39:55 young, exciting candidates. And you would have legitimized the idea that you’re protecting
2:40:00 democracy. Okay, so that didn’t happen because of Biden. It is what it is. So now when Biden drops
2:40:05 out, at least do a vestige of democracy. Go to the commission and do what it’s designed to do,
2:40:10 which is pick a candidate. Ezra Klein made a great case for this in the New York Times podcast
2:40:16 that he did. That made a huge difference. And he was great for doing that. So I believe in an
2:40:21 opening event. But I know Democrats, they love to anoint because they don’t trust the people.
2:40:27 So they think the elites are geniuses. Don’t worry, we’ll pick the right candidate. Yeah,
2:40:31 I remember when you picked Hillary Clinton, had that workout, right? And I remember when you said
2:40:36 Joe Biden was the right candidate in 2024, had that workout, do not anoint. Right. So but in the
2:40:44 end, they didn’t. So what happened was, Biden does the first announcement, he either forgot or on
2:40:49 purpose didn’t put Kamala Harris in there. So there’s all this kumbaya now. No, they don’t like
2:40:54 each other. Okay, and Biden’s been screwing her over the entire time she’s been vice president.
2:40:59 So he doesn’t put her in the original statement. And I’m like, whoa, I do a live video on media.
2:41:03 I’m like, Kamala Harris is not in the statement, right? In the middle of my video,
2:41:07 they put out a second one. Okay, fine. Kamala Harris, right? Because that’s too much for the
2:41:13 president not to endorse it. You think he was like really like somebody like stormed into the room?
2:41:19 I said, you absolutely must. I don’t know. I wasn’t there, but probably, right? Or they plan,
2:41:24 I don’t know. But the bottom line is, it was glaring that he didn’t put her in the first letter.
2:41:31 Okay, so he had to put her in the second one. Fine, no problem. But Obama, Pelosi and Schumer
2:41:38 did not endorse Kamala Harris. That’s huge. Normally, the Democrats would all endorse her
2:41:43 and would all say, she’s anointed. Shut up, everybody. And then MSNBC would scream, shut up,
2:41:49 shut up. She’s anointed, right? But they didn’t do that. So then Kamala Harris had to win over the
2:41:54 delegates. And I thought she would win them over in the convention, but she locked them up in two
2:41:59 days. And I know because I know delegates because I ran. And the delegates are calling me saying,
2:42:06 she’s getting on a Zoom right now with us, right? She went to all the states and worked her ass off
2:42:12 and locked up enough delegates to get the nomination in two days. Yeah, but come on,
2:42:21 it’s Biden endorsed. Of course. So why is that? And of course, why not say sort of lay out walls
2:42:27 in Shapiro and Kamala Harris and the options that say, well, it’s like at least a facade of
2:42:33 democracy of a democratic process. There’s what should happen and what is likely to happen.
2:42:39 So should Biden not have endorsed? Yeah, of course. I think Biden should have done the same thing as
2:42:44 Obama and Pelosi and not endorse and say, hey, we’d love to have a process where we figure out
2:42:48 who the right nominee is. And at that point, I’m really worried about Kamala Harris because
2:42:54 she’s doing word salads nonstop, right? So I’m like, don’t make the same mistake we did before
2:42:59 and just pick someone out of a hat. Test them, test them. You get stronger candidates when you
2:43:06 test them. The authoritarian nature of the DNC drives me crazy. They don’t believe in testing
2:43:10 candidates. They don’t believe in letting their own voters decide. And look, when we were in the
2:43:15 primary, they canceled the Florida election. And then, and they took me, Dean and Marianne
2:43:19 off the ballot in North Carolina and Tennessee. I’m like, guys, if you’re going to make a case
2:43:23 for democracy in the general election, and you cancel elections in the primaries,
2:43:30 do you not get how ridiculous you look, how hypocritical you look, right? So I didn’t want
2:43:36 them to Biden to endorse anyone, but I’m shocked that they didn’t all endorse her because normally
2:43:43 what happens is they all endorse. So if bottom line Lex is, did she like earning in a perfect
2:43:49 system not even close, right? But did she earn it enough in this imperfect way where at least
2:43:56 she showed some degree of competence that assuaged my concerns? Yes. So because a normal Democrat
2:44:01 would bungle that they wouldn’t go talk like Hillary Clinton, when they talked to the delegates,
2:44:06 she would assume that she’s the queen and that they would all bow their heads. She would, you know,
2:44:12 so the fact that she did elementary politics correct for Democrats is like a big win.
2:44:21 It just really frustrated me because it smelled of the same thing of fucking over Bernie in 2015,
2:44:29 ’16, and RFK and just the anointing aspect. Now, they seem to have gotten lucky in the situation
2:44:34 that it’s very possible that Kamala Harris would have been selected through a democratic process.
2:44:41 But I have to say, listening to the speeches at the DNC, Wallace was amazing. Shapiro was really
2:44:46 strong and Kamala actually was much better as compared to her as a candidate previously,
2:44:49 but personally don’t think she would have been the result of a democratic process.
2:44:54 So you don’t often give your opinions, but when you give the opinions, I actually agree 90,
2:44:59 like a huge percentage of the time in this conversation. So I fought for Shapiro in the
2:45:03 primer and when she was trying to pick for a VP because I thought there’s no way she’s going to
2:45:08 pick walls, he’s way too not just progressive, but more importantly populist, right? So I didn’t
2:45:12 think she’d go in that direction. And Shapiro actually did a bunch of populist things in Pennsylvania.
2:45:16 That’s part of the reason why he’s so popular in Pennsylvania. He looks like a smooth talking
2:45:22 politician, but his actions are pretty good. And so Shapiro was great. Wallace was great.
2:45:28 The Obamas are legendary. Even Clinton at his advanced age makes terrific points in a speech
2:45:34 where you go, well, that one’s hard to argue with, right? And so they all, I’m shocked at the
2:45:40 competence of the DNC, shocked at it. But of all those likes, so you can give a good speech,
2:45:46 and the Obamas give a mean speech. But I saw Obama as president, you know, he didn’t deliver on that.
2:45:54 So, but the one guy that stood out is Wallace. And the reason is, because he’s a real person.
2:46:00 Yeah, real person, populist. We all got to work towards picking the most genuine candidates.
2:46:06 So here, on the right wing side, for example, I would prefer Marjorie Taylor Greene to a Mitch
2:46:13 McConnell any day. Marjorie Taylor Greene is genuine. She might be genuinely nuts. I don’t
2:46:19 agree with her. She might be even more right wing than others. But I believe that she means it.
2:46:25 And I’ll take that any day over a fraud corporates like Mitch McConnell, who’s just going to do
2:46:31 what is donor’s command of them, et cetera. I got to ask you, because I also love Bernie still
2:46:37 got it. I love Bernie. I always have. I enjoyed his, I think he might still do it, but I enjoyed
2:46:43 his conversations with Tom Hartman. He’s a genuine one, like Bernie, even though you disagree with
2:46:49 him. That’s a genuine human being. Yep. So just talk about that. Is it trouble you that he’s been
2:46:56 fucked over in 2015, 16, and again, 2020, he seems to be, and why does it keep like
2:47:04 forgiving people? Yeah. So I love Bernie for the same reason you’re saying it,
2:47:08 because he’s a real person. He’s a populist. He means it. And that is so rare in politics.
2:47:14 I feel like I’m diogenes and I went looking for the one honest man and found it in Bernie.
2:47:20 And so I did a video in 2013 saying Bernie Sanders can beat Hillary Clinton in a primary.
2:47:27 In 2013, that video exists, because why did I think that? I didn’t say it of any of the
2:47:32 corporate politicians and the guys who were supposed to challenger and stuff, because populist
2:47:38 and honest, right? And the country’s dying for an honest populist, dying for it, right? So love
2:47:44 the brother. Now, that doesn’t mean that he’s right on strategy. And he drives me crazy on
2:47:52 strategy. So two elements of that. Number one, in 2016 and in 2020, for God’s sake, attack your
2:47:59 opponent. You said something about Trump that I disagree with, where I’m defending Trump, okay?
2:48:05 You don’t like what he did to the public discourse. No, I don’t mind it. I would, and I’ll tell you
2:48:13 why, because at least he got a little bit past the fakeness. Like he’s a con man and he’s a fraud
2:48:16 overall and he does everything for his own interest, but at least he doesn’t speak like a
2:48:23 bullshitting politician, right? And he’s not wrong that you have to bully your own party to
2:48:30 amass enough power to get things done. And he showed that that’s possible. So the problem with
2:48:34 the Democrats is civility. So my whole life, they’re like, “Oh, no, no, no, don’t say anything.
2:48:41 Let’s lose with civility,” right? So for example, in debates on, you know, whether it’s on TV online
2:48:48 or whatever, Democrats or people on the left are always saying, “I’m offended. I never get offended.”
2:48:56 No, after I’m done, you’re going to be offended, okay? Fight back. Fighting back wins. And we
2:49:02 couldn’t get Bernie to fight back. In 2020, he was one state away. He won the first three states.
2:49:08 He crushed the Nevada. All we needed was South Carolina. But in order to get South Carolina,
2:49:12 we all knew. Everybody on his campaign, everyone who’s in progressive media,
2:49:17 we all knew you’ve got to attack Biden. If you don’t, they’re just going to tsunami you. You
2:49:23 know, corporate medias and the corporate politicians are going to run rough shot over you. You have
2:49:29 to make the case against them. And so two times Bernie flinched. One in 2016 in the Brooklyn debate,
2:49:33 they asked, “Did the money that Hillary Clinton taken from the banks affect her votes?”
2:49:40 And he said, “No.” Of course it affected her votes. Of course it did. You have to say yes,
2:49:44 and you have to show it and prove it. The bankruptcy bill. When she was first lady,
2:49:49 she was totally in favor of the American people and against the bankruptcy bill because it
2:49:56 has the banks. You can’t discharge any debts. You know, credit card debt and bank debt,
2:50:00 et cetera. It’s an awful bill. It’s one of the most corporate bills. She was on the right side
2:50:05 as a first lady. She becomes a senator, takes banker money, and all of a sudden she flips
2:50:11 over to the banker side. “Say it, Bernie. For God’s sake, say it.” Right? Then in one of the debates
2:50:19 in 2020, his team prepares attacks against Biden. They’re not personal. They’re not like, I,
2:50:25 you can sense by now, if I’m in a political race, my objective is rip the other guys’
2:50:34 face off. Politically, rhetorically, never physically. But I would get it to a point
2:50:37 where they’d think, “I don’t know if I’m going to vote for Cenk, but I know I’m not voting for
2:50:42 the other guy. Okay, so you got to do that if you want to win.” So they prepare this. He says,
2:50:49 “I’m going to do it.” He goes on the podium and doesn’t do it because he can’t. He’s too damn nice.
2:50:53 He just can’t attack the other guy. Now, that’s problem number one in strategy.
2:50:57 Problem number two is something you alluded to. So Biden gets in office. Bernie thinks they’re
2:51:04 friends. They’re not friends. Biden’s just using him. So he uses him to get the credibility,
2:51:11 and then he eviscerates 85% of the progressive proposals that Bernie put forward. Biden throws
2:51:17 away $15 minimum wage that was Bernie’s signature issue, doesn’t even propose the public option,
2:51:23 dumps paid family for no reason. I can go on and on. And Bernie cosigns on it because he
2:51:28 thinks he’s in an alliance. He thinks Biden’s on his side, and he thinks we’re going to get
2:51:33 things done. And to be fair to Bernie, like I said earlier, Obama got only 5% of his agenda
2:51:40 passed, and Biden got 15%. Okay, so you’re right, Bernie. You got three times more than
2:51:44 under Obama, but you’re wrong. That is not fundamental change. And without fundamental
2:51:50 change, we’re screwed. Let me ask you about another impressive speech, AOC.
2:51:56 Is it possible that she’s the future of the party, future president?
2:52:07 No. So AOC, in my opinion, lost her way. And so… In which way? So it’s tough talking about these
2:52:13 things because people take it so personally, right? And that’s why you’ll see very few politicians
2:52:20 on our shows. Because we give super tough interviews, and the words aren’t in the street,
2:52:25 right? Like, don’t go to young Turks. They’ll ask you super hard questions, right? So the only
2:52:30 couple do it. Like, Ro Khanna does it. He’s brave. We’ll get into shouting matches, sometimes in the
2:52:34 middle of bills and stuff. But at least he’s there to defend his position. I respect him for that.
2:52:38 Tim Ryan, a little bit more of a conservative Democrat when he was in the house. He would
2:52:43 take on any debate, et cetera. So there’s a couple of good guys that do it, but generally they don’t.
2:52:52 So this relates to AOC because when AOC is running, we do 34 videos on her. We get her millions of views.
2:52:59 We founded Just Democrats and now launched it on the show. Our audience, Ryan Grimm,
2:53:06 documents it in one of his books. Our audience raises $2.5 million for those progressive candidates
2:53:13 overall. And at that point, AOC and all those Rashida Tlaib, et cetera, they’re all dying to
2:53:16 come on a young Turks. Makes sense. I would too, of course, and it’s not because it’s the young
2:53:21 Turks and any media outlet. And most media outlets, almost all the media outlets reject them.
2:53:28 We cover AOC more than all the other press combined, right? And she wins for a number of
2:53:32 reasons. That’s one of the reasons, but there’s many others and she did a terrific job herself.
2:53:41 She then takes Joycott and Corbin, who were the, Joycott was the head of Just Democrats and Corbin
2:53:46 was communications director for Just Democrats. Then Joycott made one of the most brilliant
2:53:51 political decisions in arguably in American history. He said, he called me and he said,
2:53:56 “Jank, I’m going to go from head of Just Democrats to running AOC’s campaign.”
2:54:01 And I’m like, “Well, the other candidates are going to get pissed and you’re staking the entire
2:54:05 enterprise on one candidate.” And I’m like, “Joycott, I’m not in it. I’m doing the media
2:54:11 arm. You’re in the trenches. You’re the guy making the decisions. So I’m going to trust
2:54:18 whatever you say. You sure?” And he said, “Yeah, I’m sure.” So him and Corbin go over to AOC’s
2:54:25 campaign. AOC then wins, that miraculous win. Then she hires Joycott to be her chief of staff
2:54:30 and she hires Corbin to be her communications director. Within six months, they’re gone.
2:54:34 And once they’re gone, AOC then goes on an establishment path.
2:54:41 Because why were they gone? Oh, they insulted one of her colleagues. Yeah, that colleague who’s a
2:54:47 total corporatist and was selling out one of our policy proposals. If you don’t call out your own
2:54:52 side, you’re never going to get anything done. But if you call out your own side, you become
2:54:58 persona non grata and it is super uncomfortable. And we couldn’t get them to do things that were
2:55:03 uncomfortable. Now, she’s going to find that outrageous and she’s going to be very offended
2:55:08 by that. And she’s going to point to a bunch of things she did that were uncomfortable.
2:55:14 And to be fair to her, she has. Until that speech, she was pretty good on Palestine
2:55:18 when we desperately needed it. She was pretty good on a bunch of issues. Cory Bush did that
2:55:24 campaign on evictions, et cetera, on the capital stats. That was great. AOC’s original sit-in
2:55:29 in Pelosi’s office. At that point, we’re all still on the same team. It’s a spectacular success.
2:55:35 Me, Corbett and Shortcott are saying, “Do it again, do it again. Now don’t abuse it. Don’t
2:55:40 be a clown and do it every other day.” But when it matters, you need to be able to challenge Pelosi.
2:55:49 In my opinion, she just got to a point where she got exhausted being uncomfortable. It’s really
2:55:55 hard. The media hates you and they keep pounding away and calling you a radical and you’re destroying
2:56:02 the Democratic Party, you’re destroying unity. Whereas, if you go along, all of a sudden,
2:56:08 you’re a queen. And now, all of a sudden, the mainstream media is saying, “Oh, AOC.” She could
2:56:13 be the progress. I mean, there’s some degree to which you want to sometimes bide your time and
2:56:21 just rest a bit. I think, from my perspective, maybe you can educate me. She seems like a legit,
2:56:31 progressive, legit, even populist, charismatic, young. A lot of time to develop the game of
2:56:37 politics, how to play it well enough to avoid the bullshit. I guess she doesn’t take corporate
2:56:44 pack money. That’s right. No, she’s still true on that. As far as just looking over the next few
2:56:51 elections, who’s going to be Iranian? Who’s going to be a real player? Timmy seems like an
2:57:01 obvious person that’s going to be in the race. So, while I fight for the ideal, I’m very practical.
2:57:14 So, for example, she wins, and then one cycle later, after 2020, there’s these guys who want to
2:57:21 quote unquote force the vote. And it was on the speakership of Nancy Pelosi, and they wanted to
2:57:26 use it to get Medicare for all. I’m like, guys, forcing a vote is a terrific idea.
2:57:33 On the speakership, who’s your alternative? Oh, we don’t have an alternative. Already,
2:57:40 giant red flag. What’s the issue you’re looking to have them vote on? Medicare for all. Oh,
2:57:46 you don’t know politics. So, I love Medicare for all. We have to get Medicare for all. But if
2:57:52 that’s the first one you put up, without gaining any leverage, you’re going to get slaughtered.
2:57:58 Put up something easy, force a vote on $15 minimum wage, or pick another one that’s easy,
2:58:03 paid family leave. These are all polling great. Because if you force a vote on that, you could
2:58:08 actually win. And if you win, you gain leverage. And then you do the next one and the next one.
2:58:13 And then you do Medicare for all, not bullshit gradualism that the corporate Democrats do,
2:58:19 but actually strategically, practically building up power and leverage and using it at the right
2:58:25 times. So, if I thought that’s what AOC was doing, I would love it. So, I don’t need her to force a
2:58:31 vote on Medicare for all. I don’t need her to go on some wild tangents that don’t make any sense and
2:58:38 is only going to diminish your power. But when they eviscerated all the progressive proposals
2:58:44 and build back better, how did that happen? Manchin and Sinema used every ounce of leverage
2:58:50 they had. They said, “I’m just not going to vote for it. I don’t care. The status quo is
2:58:56 perfect for my donors, so I don’t need you. I vote no. Now, take out everything I want.”
2:59:08 And Biden did. Progressives had to push back and say, “Here is two to three proposals. Not
2:59:14 everything, not everything. Two to three proposals. They all poll over 70 percent. They’re all no
2:59:19 brainers and they’re all things that Joe Biden promised. We want those in the bill, otherwise
2:59:25 we’re voting no.” At that point, what would have happened is the media would have exploded and they
2:59:30 would have said AOC and the rest are the scum of the earth. They’re ruining the Democratic Party.
2:59:36 We’re not going to get the bill. They’re the worst. You have to withstand that. If you cannot
2:59:42 withstand a nuclear blast for mainstream media, you’re not the person because you have to run
2:59:48 that obstacle course to get to change. If they had stood their ground, they definitely would have won
2:59:54 on one to two of those issues. Instead, they went with a strategy that was called, it was literally
3:00:04 called Trust Biden. All right. So big question. Who wins this election? Kamala or Trump and what’s
3:00:09 Kamala’s path to victory? And if you can steal man, what’s Trump’s path to victory?
3:00:16 Yeah. So there’s not enough information yet. So since I make a lot of predictions on air
3:00:24 and then brag about it unbearably, people are always, they’ll stop in the streets and they’ll
3:00:28 be like, “Predict this. Predict my marriage. Brother, I don’t know anything about your marriage.
3:00:31 How could I possibly predict something without having any information?”
3:00:38 So in the case of this campaign, right now, I got Kamala Harris at 55% chance of winning,
3:00:42 okay, which is not bad. Doesn’t mean she’s going to win by 55% because then that would be a 10-point
3:00:49 margin. That’s not going to happen, right? But I say around 51 to 55, but it’s nowhere near over
3:00:56 because of a lot of things. One, the Democrats are still seen as more establishment and people
3:01:02 hate the establishment. Two, if war breaks out in the Middle East, which is now unfortunately
3:01:09 bordering on likely, right? If that war breaks out, all bets are off.
3:01:15 Do you mean a regional war? Yeah. Iran, Israel gets to be a real thing,
3:01:20 not just a pinprick and a little bombing here and an assassination there. But no,
3:01:25 we’re going to war, right? If that happens, then all bets are off and no one has any idea who’s
3:01:29 going to win, okay? And if they’re pretending that they know, that’s ridiculous because it’s so
3:01:41 unpredictable. And then the third bogey for her is if she goes back towards south. So there’s
3:01:47 three phases of Kamala Harris’s career. She’s not necessarily any different in terms of policy.
3:01:51 You can frame it in a bad way, you can frame it in a good way. You can say,
3:01:57 oh, she’s just seeing which way the wind is blowing and then, oh, she’s a tough cop
3:02:01 prosecutor. Oh, and then she’s doing justice reform when you need people who want justice
3:02:08 reform. Oh, she’s a waffler, right? Or you could paint it as she’s pretty balanced, right? She
3:02:14 prosecuted serious criminals very harshly, but then on marijuana possession got them into rehab.
3:02:20 And you know what? That’s actually what you should do, right? So I’m not talking about policy. So
3:02:24 there you could have one of those views about Kamala Harris and I get it. I’m talking about
3:02:33 stylistically. So Kamala Harris, until the second debate in the primaries in 2020,
3:02:41 is a very competent politician who’s in line to be the next Obama, right? She’s killing it,
3:02:47 district attorney, attorney general, senator. And then the first debate, if you remember,
3:02:54 she won. She had that great line about, you know, there was a little girl on that bus that
3:02:59 was integrating the schools and that girl was me. And Biden being the knucklehead that he is,
3:03:06 he’s caught on tape going, you’re like, don’t have that reaction, brother. Okay, because she’s
3:03:12 criticizing his segregation policy on buses back in the 70s, right? So anyways, so she’s doing terrific.
3:03:21 And then after that debate, until Biden drops out, is it disaster area for Kamala Harris’s
3:03:28 career? In the primary, she starts falling apart. She can’t strategize, right? She’s for
3:03:32 Medicare for all. No, she’s not. She’s for Medicare for some. What’s Medicare for some? I don’t know,
3:03:36 right? And she goes into the next debate and Tulsi Gabbard kicks her ass and then goes into
3:03:42 the third debate, gets her ass kicked again, and she’s starting to drift away. Then at this point,
3:03:48 and this is funny, I have more votes for president than Kamala Harris does. Because Kamala Harris
3:03:54 dropped out before Iowa, because that’s how much of a disaster her campaign turned into when she
3:04:00 was leading. She was leading, right? So then she becomes vice president. And Biden, probably because
3:04:07 of that bus line, Jill Biden caught tremendous feelings over that line. Okay. So Biden’s like,
3:04:12 here, have this albatross around your neck. It’s called immigration. Good luck. I’m not going to
3:04:16 do anything about it. I’m not going to change policy, but I’m putting you in charge of it to
3:04:21 get your ass handed to you. Okay. And she does. So that’s a disaster. And then she starts doing
3:04:28 interviews where she’s like, we have to become the change, the being, but not the thing we were
3:04:32 and the unbecoming. And you’re like, what is going on? Why can neither one of them speak?
3:04:43 And so, but then the third act shocks me. So Biden steps down, she goes, grabs all those delegates
3:04:47 in a super competent way that we talked about earlier. And then she goes out and gives a speech.
3:04:51 I’m like, oh, that speech is good. Okay, here’s another one, another one. I’m like, wait a minute,
3:04:57 these are good speeches, no more word salads. Then she picks Tim Walls and shocks the world.
3:05:03 I’m like, that’s a correct VP pick. That is a miracle, right? And then she goes and does the
3:05:09 economically populist plan, all those proposals about housing that people care about,
3:05:14 grocery prices that people care about, real or not real, that is correct political strategy.
3:05:22 So this Kamala Harris is back to their original Kamala Harris, who was a very competent, skilled
3:05:29 politician. And as I was telling you offline, she’s doing, whoever’s doing her TikTok is like
3:05:36 blowing up and they’re doing risky, edgy stuff. Yes. I did not expect that from somebody that
3:05:41 kind of comes from the Biden camp of just like, be safe, be boring, all this kind of stuff.
3:05:45 So you have to give Kamala Harris ultimate credit because she’s the leader of the campaign
3:05:50 and she makes the final decisions. But there’s got, there’s apparently a couple of people inside
3:05:55 that campaign that are ass kickers. And they’re, and they have convinced her to take risk, which
3:06:01 Democrats never take. And it is correct to take risk. You cannot get to victory without risk.
3:06:09 So the vice president pick was, is the bellwether. When Hillary Clinton picked Tim Kaine, I said,
3:06:13 that’s it, she’s going to lose because Tim Kaine is playing prevent defense. He’s,
3:06:18 he’s, he’s wallpaper. I mean, he’d be lucky to be wallpaper. He’s just a white wall, right? He’s
3:06:22 just, and when he speaks, it’s white noise. He never says anything interesting. He’s the most
3:06:28 boring pick of all time. That’s saying we already won. Ha ha. Okay. If Kamala Harris had picked
3:06:33 Mark Kelly, that’s the Tim Kaine equivalent. Okay. Oh, he’s an astronaut. I don’t give a
3:06:38 shit that he’s an astronaut. What is he saying? Is he a good politician? Does he have good policies?
3:06:44 Is he exciting on the campaign trail? Is he going to add to your momentum? Mark Kelly,
3:06:49 he might be a good guy, but number one, he’s a very corporate Democrat. And number two,
3:06:55 it’s like watching grass grow. He, oh, he’s terrible at speaking if you ask me, right? So,
3:07:00 so I thought for sure she’s going to pick Mark Kelly because that’s what a normal Democrat does.
3:07:04 Or if they want to go wild and crazy, they’ll go to be sure. So I was like,
3:07:10 please let it be Shapiro because he’s at least not bad. He’s done some populist things and he’s
3:07:14 strategic. He’s really smart. I need smart candidates. Dumb candidates don’t help. They
3:07:18 don’t have a mind of their own. They can’t take risks. They’re not independent thinkers. They’re,
3:07:22 they’re going to lose. So she picks the smartest, most populous candidate. Boom,
3:07:28 boom, we got a winner. That’s a good campaign. Speaking of risks, when they debate,
3:07:34 when Kamala and Trump debate, what do you think that’s going to look like? Who do you think is
3:07:41 going to win? Oh, that’s not close. Got my hair. So yeah, unless she falls apart, unless she goes
3:07:47 back to the bad era, right? That’s risk number three. Hold on a second. Oh, I guess in a debate,
3:07:51 you don’t have, you can have pre-written. It seems like when she’s going off the top of her head
3:07:56 is when the word salad sometimes comes out. Sometimes. Yeah, we’ll have to see. Right? We’ll
3:08:00 have to see. Because she hasn’t done any tough interviews. She hasn’t really been challenged.
3:08:05 So I hope to God that doesn’t happen. That she doesn’t fall apart, you mean? Because I hope she
3:08:12 does a bunch of interviews, right? Oh, definitely, definitely. I’m like, I’m, this is going to sound
3:08:18 really funny. I’m too honest. But I am, like in the context of Kamala Harris probably shouldn’t
3:08:22 come on The Young Turks. We do a really tough interview and it would hurt her. Okay? You know,
3:08:27 like it’s tough, but like you’re pretty respectful. Maybe I just have my sort of,
3:08:34 like I’m okay with a little bit of tension. You’re pretty respectful. Even when you’re yelling,
3:08:42 there’s like respect. Like you don’t do like a gotcha type thing. There’s certain things you
3:08:48 could do. Like you said this in the past, you can say a line from the past that’s out of context.
3:08:55 It forces the other person to have to define the context. You just, you know, sort of debate type
3:09:01 tactics over and over. Like you don’t seem to do that. You just like ask them questions genuinely
3:09:06 and then you argue the point. And then you also like hear what they say. The only thing you,
3:09:09 I’ve seen you do sometimes tough that you sometimes like interrupt, like you speak over
3:09:15 the person. If they are trying to do the same. Right. Only to their filibuster. Yeah. If they’re
3:09:19 filibustering. But like that, that’s a tricky one. That’s a, yeah, that’s a tricky one. Right.
3:09:25 No, but like the problem for her coming on our show, isn’t that we would be unfair to her.
3:09:30 It’s that we would be fair. So we would ask questions. She is going to have trouble answering.
3:09:36 Other corporatists. Right. I mean like, so Biden said he was going to take the corporate tax rate
3:09:42 to 28% and he barely tried. You say you’re going to take it to 28%. Why should we trust you?
3:09:48 Right. You guys said $15 minimum wage and then you took it out of the bill. Why should we trust
3:09:53 you? Right. Those are very tough questions. She’s never going to get that in mainstream media.
3:09:58 Mainstream media is going to have faux toughness, but in reality, they’re going to be soft balls.
3:10:04 Right. And so the debates you’re right, Lex, is a little bit easier because Sarah Palin proved
3:10:12 that you could just memorize scripted talking points. And she admitted it later. She’s like,
3:10:16 she was super nervous. She memorized the talking points. And no matter what they asked,
3:10:22 she just gave the talking point, which by the way, people barely noticed because that’s what all
3:10:31 politicians do. She just admitted it. And so, no, Trump’s a disaster in a debate. He’s a one-man
3:10:37 wrecking crew of his own campaign. So any competent debater would eviscerate Donald Trump.
3:10:44 I mean, they just, on any given topic, when he says something like, here, let’s take one
3:10:49 lunatic conspiracy theory that he just had recently. And by the way, if you’re a right
3:10:55 winger and you keep getting hurt every time I say he’s a lunatic or I insult Donald Trump,
3:11:00 don’t like, you sound like a left winger. I’m offended. I’m offended. I’m offended. Get over
3:11:06 it. Get over it. Okay. So we have disagreements. Hear what the other side is saying. And by the
3:11:11 way, I say the same thing to the left. Okay. I say, you think everybody on the right’s evil?
3:11:15 You’re crazy. No, they just have a different way of looking at the world, which by the way,
3:11:20 is an interesting conversation. We should talk about that in a minute too. But so I do it to
3:11:27 both sides. But okay, Trump says, oh, I don’t think there’s anyone at Kamala Harris’s rallies.
3:11:33 It’s all the pictures are AI. Okay. So let’s say he says that in a debate because he’s liable to
3:11:40 say anything, right? You just say, okay, so you think every reporter that was there, every photographer
3:11:46 that was there, every human being that was there, they’re all lying. They have a conspiracy of
3:11:53 thousands of people, but none of them were actually there. Do you understand how insane you sound?
3:11:58 So this is a good place to, can you steal man the case for Trump?
3:12:05 Yeah. Yeah. So Trump is a massive risk because of all the things we talked about earlier. But
3:12:11 there is a percentage chance that he’s such a wild card that he overturns the whole system.
3:12:17 And that is why the establishment is a little scared of him. So if he’s in office here, I’ll
3:12:21 give you a case of Donald Trump doing something right. Something wrong first and then something
3:12:28 right. So he bombs Soleimani, the top general of Iran and kills him. That risks World War Three,
3:12:33 that risks a giant war with Iran that devolves Iran is four times the size of Iraq. If you’re
3:12:40 anti-war, you should have hated that he assassinated Soleimani. But after the assassination, Iran
3:12:44 doesn’t want to get into it even though they’re in a rage and they do a small bombing. You could
3:12:49 tell if it’s a smaller or a big one, right? So that’s them saying, we don’t really want war,
3:12:54 but for our domestic crowd, we have to bomb you back, right? And that’s when the military
3:13:01 industrial complex comes to Trump and says, no, you have to show him who’s tough and bomb this area.
3:13:07 And Trump says, no, they did a small bombing, not a large bombing. I don’t want the war.
3:13:10 I’m not going to do that bombing. That was this shining moment.
3:13:16 Yeah. For me, one of the biggest deal man for Trump is that he has both the skill
3:13:23 and the predisposition to not be a warm auger. He, I think, better than the other candidates
3:13:29 I’ve seen is able to end wars and end them. Now, you might disagree with it, but in a way where
3:13:37 there’s legitimately effective negotiation that happens. I just don’t see any other candidate
3:13:44 currently being able to sit down with Zelensky and Putin and to negotiate a peace treaty that
3:13:54 both are equally unhappy with. So on the one hand, almost all other politicians are going to be
3:14:00 controlled by the military industrial complex. And that complex wants to bleed Russia dry.
3:14:06 And that’s what the Ukraine war is doing. It’s a double win for the defense contractors. Number
3:14:13 one, every dollar we send to Ukraine is actually not going to Ukraine. It’s going to US defense
3:14:18 contractors. And then they are sending old weapons to Ukraine. The money is to build
3:14:23 new weapons for us. So a lot of people don’t know that. So the defense contractors want
3:14:29 that war to go on forever. And they’re an enormous influence on Washington. The second
3:14:35 win is they’re depleting Russia. And Russia’s gotten them themselves into a quagmire like we
3:14:42 did in Iraq and Afghanistan. And they’re bleeding out. So the military industrial complex wants
3:14:47 Russia to bleed out for as long as humanly possible. They actually care more about their own
3:14:52 interests, of course, than they do about Ukrainian interests. So in fact, there’s a good argument
3:14:58 to be made that Ukraine could have gotten a peace deal earlier. And we prevented it. So,
3:15:05 but the bottom line now is probably how a deal gets done is they let go of three more
3:15:11 areas in Ukraine. They already lost Crimea. They’d have to let go of three more regions.
3:15:18 And that is tough. Because at that point, Russia’s a little bit encouraged. Every time they do an
3:15:22 invasion, they get more land. They might not get all the land they wanted, but they get a lot of
3:15:30 land. So that’s, it’s a very difficult issue. But literally, which, which person, if they become
3:15:37 president, will end the war? Trump will end that war. Because Trump will go in and he loves Russia
3:15:43 and Putin anyway. I just disagree with him. He loves Russia. The implication of that, meaning
3:15:50 he will do whatever Putin tells him. I think he’ll do 90% of what Putin tells him. I just
3:15:57 disagree with that. I think, I think he wants to be the kind of person that says, fuck you to
3:16:03 Putin while, while patting them, while patting them on the back and being, you know, but out
3:16:08 negotiating Putin. So I don’t like talking about Russia because there’s so much emotions that go
3:16:14 into that topic. The right wing, the minute you mentioned Russia, they’re like, oh, it’s a hoax
3:16:19 and all this baggage that comes with it, et cetera. To me, Russia’s not any different than
3:16:26 Saudi Arabia or Israel for Trump. You give me money. I like you. You get by my apartments. I
3:16:31 like you, right? If you don’t give me money, I don’t like you. It’s not that complicated.
3:16:37 So, okay, take like, don’t worry about the Russia part of it. Like the bottom line is
3:16:43 Trump thinks, what do I care about those three regions of Ukraine? I want to get this thing done.
3:16:49 Right. So he’ll go and he’ll say Ukraine, we’re going to withdraw all help unless you agree to
3:16:53 a peace deal with Russia and Russia wants those three regions. That’s the peace deal.
3:17:00 That’s it. So Ukraine will lose a part of their country and we’ll get to a peace deal.
3:17:10 Yeah, I hope not. I hope not. I think Trump sees themselves and wants to be a great negotiator. So
3:17:18 and I personally want the death, the death of people to end and I think Trump would bring
3:17:25 that much faster and I disagree with you. At least that my hope is that he would negotiate
3:17:33 something that would be fair. He’s not, his anti-war record is so complicated because
3:17:40 moving the embassy in Israel and killing the top Iranian general were super provocative
3:17:45 and they could have easily triggered a giant war there. And then you know what’s going to
3:17:49 happen if you get into any kind of real war. Trump’s going to want to prove his buttons larger.
3:17:55 So then he’s going to do massive ridiculous bombings. I mean, I’m worried about nukes.
3:18:00 And so we had Giuliani on the show on the RNC and I asked him this question. I said,
3:18:06 you know, I keep saying, oh, they wouldn’t do it if I was in charge. I’m like, what does that mean?
3:18:11 Because it sounds like what it means is they wouldn’t do it because they know if they did it,
3:18:19 I would do something insane like attack Russia or use nukes. And Rudy said, yeah, that’s what it means.
3:18:25 So that means you have to at least bluff that and you have to get them to believe that he’s a madman.
3:18:31 That’s the madman theory of Nixon and Nixon and Rudy said that too. He was very clear about it.
3:18:37 But the problem is if you get your bluff called and so if you actually attack Russia, you’re
3:18:45 going to start World War Three. So that’s why, yeah, if you could, if you could just get away
3:18:52 with bluffing, maybe, but he’s playing a very dangerous game and he massively increased drone
3:18:57 strikes. On the other hand, he didn’t bomb Iran further. And on the other hand, he started the
3:19:04 process of withdrawal from Afghanistan. So not black and white, complicated record.
3:19:09 And one thing I’ll give him another piece of credit here. I think I’m taking the steelmaning
3:19:19 too far. But the credit was that he changed the rhetoric of the right wing. They went from the
3:19:28 party of Dick Cheney. War is great. And let’s see, you know, all Muslims are evil. And so he
3:19:33 hates Muslims too, but that’s a different thing, right? But like, oh, we have to attack the enemy.
3:19:39 We have to start wars, et cetera. To now, Republican voters are generally anti-war and hate Dick
3:19:44 Cheney. Oh, I’ll take it. I’ll take it. So that’s a great thing that Trump did. Even if he didn’t
3:19:49 mean it, even if he does these provocative things that could lead to a much worse war, even if I’m
3:19:55 worried that he’ll be so reckless, he’ll start a bigger war. At least he did that right. And so
3:20:01 I’m happy to have our right wing brothers and sisters join us in the anti-war movement. And
3:20:08 I’m not being a jerk about it. Like, I love it. And so this is another thing the left does wrong
3:20:14 from time to time, which is, if you agree with a right winger 2%, they’ll be like, oh, welcome in.
3:20:20 Come on, vote for Trump. Come on in. Yeah, woohoo. Water’s warm, right? If you, if you disagree with
3:20:26 the left 2%, they’re like, that’s it. You’re banished and you’re a Nazi. Well, brother,
3:20:31 how are we going to win an election if you’re banishing everybody there is, right? So hold up.
3:20:38 These Republican voters are coming at your anti-war position. Take the win. No, they’re
3:20:43 MAGA and I won’t deal with them. Even when they agree with you, that doesn’t make any sense. That
3:20:48 doesn’t make any sense. Take the win, right? So when Charlie Kirk says yes to paid family leave,
3:20:54 when Patrick Bette David on his program says yes, roughly says yes to paid family leave,
3:21:03 take the win. RFK Junior, you said some positive things for a while about RFK Junior. And I think
3:21:10 you said you would even consider voting for him given the slate of people. This was at the time
3:21:16 when Biden was still in. What do you think about him? What do you think about RFK Junior?
3:21:22 As a candidate, as a person, he’s been on the show, right? Yeah. So he was on our show.
3:21:28 People love that interview. You could check it out anytime, right? And why do people love it,
3:21:32 whether they’re right or left? Because we’re fair. We actually asked him about his policy
3:21:37 positions. He explained them. I challenge him and then he explains and we give him a fair hearing.
3:21:42 But I knew Bobby a little bit before he ran when he was an environmental lawyer, right?
3:21:52 And his legal work is excellent. And he’s been on the right side of most of the issues for most
3:21:59 of his life. So, A, I like him on that. Two, on his wildlife, the dead bear and the worms and all
3:22:06 that stuff, right? So, there’s two important lessons you should get out of that. Well, one’s
3:22:10 just about Bobby, but the other one’s a general one that’s really important for you to know,
3:22:14 no matter what you think of Bobby Kennedy. On the personal front, I have a friend that’s very
3:22:20 similar to him. In fact, he’s one of my best friends. And I know why, this is my theory,
3:22:28 on why Bobby and my friend led a wildlife. Both of their dads died young. When my friend’s dad
3:22:35 died, he was 18 and his dad died in his arms. And he has a motto, “What is lived cannot be unlived.”
3:22:42 So, if I had a great time and I thought it was hilarious to dump a dead bear in Central Park,
3:22:46 then I lived it and I had a great time and nothing you could do about it, okay?
3:22:53 And sometimes that’ll get you in trouble. And sometimes you’ll have a fantastic time, right?
3:23:01 And obviously, Bobby’s dad was killed when he was young and maybe that got into his head of like,
3:23:08 “You better live strong and live an interesting life.” And so, I don’t begrudge him that. Even
3:23:14 if I begrudge some of the things that he did in that life, I get why he did it. So, I don’t hate
3:23:19 him like other people hate him for some of those personal stuff, right? So, and I like him for
3:23:25 all the things that he did positive, holding fossil fuel companies accountable, protecting
3:23:31 communities that had poison dumped into their rivers, et cetera, right? So, the thing that affects
3:23:38 everybody is when he gets like corporate media smeared the hell out of them and they didn’t
3:23:45 allow him to speak and then they did the needle in a haystack trick. So, whenever it’s an insider,
3:23:53 they find the best parts of their lives and then they amplify. So, Joe Biden is average Joe from
3:23:58 Scranton. Motherfuckers been in DC for the last 52 years. You think we don’t have eyes and ears?
3:24:04 Okay, like average Joe from Scranton, who are you kidding? So, there’s a guy named Fred Thompson,
3:24:08 who’s an actor and he was a senator from Tennessee later. And he had this great little trick that
3:24:12 he would do as a red pickup truck that he would campaign with, right? So, he looks like a regular
3:24:17 Joe, right? But he’s a millionaire actor. But here’s the funny part. He would drive the red
3:24:24 pickup truck in a limo and he would drive back from the campaign event in a limo, but the press
3:24:29 never reported the limo. They only reported him in the red pickup truck as if that’s what he drives.
3:24:37 See, that’s the theater of politics. Why? Because Fred Thompson was a corporate Republican. So,
3:24:42 they loved him. So, they go, “Yeah, sure. Yeah, red pickup truck. Oh, good old Fred Thompson, right?”
3:24:48 So, but if you’re an outsider and they don’t like you, then they’re going to look at the haystack
3:24:53 of your life and they’re going to try to find needles. So, they’ve done this to Trump. They’ve
3:25:00 done this to Bernie. They’ve done this to Bobby Kennedy Jr. And with Bobby, they’re like, “Ooh,
3:25:06 there’s some juicy needles in here, okay?” So, they find those and they go, “You see this? The only
3:25:11 thing you should know about Bobby Kennedy Jr. is that he found a dead bear and put it in Central Park.”
3:25:16 Oh, wait, wait, wait. I found another one. The other thing you should know about Bobby is that
3:25:21 he once said in a divorced deposition that he had a brainworm. By the way, it turns out that
3:25:27 affects millions of people and it’s not that big a deal, right? But look, he has a radical. Ah, he
3:25:33 is. This defines him completely. This spectacular case of that actually happened to me. So, I ran
3:25:41 for Congress in 2020 and the New York Times, LA Times, CNN, they all butchered me with needles,
3:25:48 okay? So, they said, “It is a long history of making anti-Muslim jokes.” Well, first of all,
3:25:56 they didn’t even say jokes. They said, “Anti-Muslim rhetoric.” I’m like, “I’m Muslim. I mean, I’m
3:26:01 atheist, but I grew up Muslim. My family’s Muslim. My background’s Muslim. You don’t think that’s
3:26:07 relevant in the story?” And they did it based on one joke I told about and they said, “Oh, also,
3:26:13 of course, I’m anti-Semitic.” That’s like, you start with that. That’s just baked in for everyone,
3:26:22 right? So, I made a joke about how Orthodox Jews and Muslims, they think that getting into heaven
3:26:28 is a little bit of a fashion contest, okay? So, the Orthodox Jews go in there with a Russian
3:26:33 coast from the 1800s and the giant Russian hat. You know, the Muslims go in with their robe and
3:26:40 the skull cap and stuff and God’s looking around going, “No, no, no. Oh, nice outfit. Come on in.”
3:26:46 Right? Like, do you really think the creator of the universe gives a damn what you wear, okay?
3:26:51 So, the New York Times took that and said, “Long history of being anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim.”
3:26:58 Right. Okay. So, there’s this… Oh, this is a famous one. Relatively, right? I did a joke
3:27:05 about bestiality like a dozen years ago. Very nice. So, I start out the joke nice and dry and I go,
3:27:11 “Look, is the horse going to object if he’s the one getting pleasure?” Now, Anna is my co-host.
3:27:15 She’s younger at that time and she’s like, “That seems like a bad idea, Jake.” I’m like,
3:27:20 “Of course it’s a bad idea, okay? But I’m being dry.” But some people are laughing in the studio
3:27:26 and stuff. And then I say, you know, if I was emperor of the world, I would make that legal.
3:27:32 And they cut the tape. If you watch the rest of the tape, I say, “Now, would the horse object?”
3:27:41 “No.” So, but they cut the tape. So, the New York Times… So, originally, a right-winger did
3:27:49 that and then an establishment troll in that primary started putting out those tapes to everyone.
3:27:54 Jake Tapper retweeted it. Didn’t look to see if it’s edited or not edited.
3:28:00 The New York Times implied that bestiality was part of my agenda. Jesus Christ.
3:28:06 Please tell me that’s part of your Wikipedia. That the bestiality thing is part of your…
3:28:13 I don’t know. I don’t know. But guys, so in those stories, I’m not important and even Bobby Kennedy
3:28:19 Jr. is not important. What it reveals about the media is what’s important. So, they’re going to
3:28:22 find those needles, whether it’s… And even if they don’t have the needles, you know what?
3:28:28 We’ll cut the tape before your jokes punchline. So, we’ll just run it and we’ll lie about you.
3:28:36 Who cares? And so, oh, they also said that I had David Duke on to share his anti-Semitic point of
3:28:42 view. If you watch the interview, I told David Duke, “You’re an anti-Semite. You’re a racist.
3:28:46 You’re a bigot. You’re an idiot.” It was the toughest interview he’s probably ever had in his life.
3:28:52 And other journalists got mad at that part. And they were like, “No, guys, you’re just flat
3:28:58 out lying.” Like, I watched the interview. Did any of you watch the interview? He takes the guy’s
3:29:03 head off, right? And so, the New York Times issued a correction on that one. So, they’re like, “Okay,
3:29:08 fine. He was being sarcastic when he said, “Sure, you’re not racist, Dave.” Okay.
3:29:15 Well, one of the sources of hope to all of this is there’s a lot of independent media now.
3:29:20 But mainstream media has a lot of power still and cares a lot of power. Do you think they’re
3:29:25 going to die eventually? Yeah, definitely. So, two things about that that are super important.
3:29:30 First of all, this is why I tell people to have hope. I don’t believe in false hope, right? So,
3:29:34 if you think Kamala Harris is your knight in shining armor and she’s going to come in,
3:29:37 she’s going to get money out of politics, she’s going to ignore the donors, that’s false hope.
3:29:42 That’s crazy talk, right? So, why am I in favor of Kamala Harris? I’m going to live to fight another
3:29:45 day. I’m worried that Trump’s going to end the whole thing and then we’re not going to have
3:29:51 an opportunity to actually get a populist win, right? So, and I’m encouraged by some of the
3:29:54 things she’s doing. Maybe she does even 25% of her agenda, but I’m not going to give you false
3:30:01 hope that she’s your savior, right? But I believe massively in hope. And number one, because it’s
3:30:07 true to the point that we were talking about earlier, Alex, and how last 200 years have been
3:30:13 choppy, but overall fantastic. Terrible things have happened in that time period. Some of the
3:30:17 worst things that have ever happened in history, but overall life expectancy is higher, everything
3:30:24 is, you know, incomes are higher, health is better, etc., right? So, hope is not misplaced. It’s real,
3:30:30 it’s empirical, okay? So, now we talked about how you could get money out of politics and that’s a
3:30:38 legitimate hope, but media is another place where we have huge hope. So, of all the corporate robots,
3:30:45 the most important robot is media. So, when mainstream media has you hooked in at the back
3:30:50 of your neck, you’re going to believe all these fairy tales about how politicians are nice people
3:30:53 and they’re trying to do the right thing and donor money doesn’t have any influence on them,
3:31:00 right? So, once you unplug from the matrix, well, then you begin to see, oh yeah, hey look,
3:31:03 he took the donor money, did what the donors wanted. He took the donor money, did what the
3:31:10 donors want, 98% of the time, right? So, then you see clearly. So, now what’s happening at large?
3:31:17 Mainstream media is losing their power and now online media is swarming, swarming, swarming,
3:31:23 swarming and so this goes back to why I started The Young Turks. So, let me touch on that here
3:31:31 and then we can come back to it if you want. So, in 1998, I write an email to my friends and I say,
3:31:39 “Online video is going to be television.” And unsurprisingly, and they say, “You’re nuts. That’s
3:31:46 never going to happen.” At that point, we’re still doing AOL dialogues, right? The online video barely
3:31:54 exists and television’s mammoth. I say, “Guys, it’s just a matter of logic. Like, for me, it’s,
3:32:00 there’s so many ironies. I’m known for yelling online sometimes, but in reality, I’m obsessed with
3:32:07 logic.” So, when you have gatekeepers, gatekeepers pick based on what they want, what the powerful
3:32:12 one, in that case, advertisers, politicians, et cetera, they are never going to design programming
3:32:18 as good as wisdom of the crowd. When people start doing online video, I’m like, “Boom,
3:32:23 there’s no gatekeepers. This is democratized. Wisdom of the crowd is going to win.” So,
3:32:28 if you start with no money, and let’s pick a different example, not The Young Turks. Let’s
3:32:35 say, Phil DeFranco. He’s been around forever. And he also does news. And so, Phil starts doing a show
3:32:43 and he doesn’t have any money, just like us. And so, what does he have to do to get an audience?
3:32:47 He has to do a show that is really popular. He’s got to figure out a way. How do I get
3:32:53 their attention? How do I keep their attention? And he starts doing a great show, right? And so,
3:33:00 every year, it’s us and Phil for best news show for like a decade, right? And meanwhile, I’m back
3:33:08 over at CNN, Wolf Blitzer still droning on from a teleprompter. You put Wolf Blitzer online without
3:33:13 the force of CNN with him. He gets negative seven views. No one’s interested in what Wolf
3:33:18 Blitzer has to say. It’s not personal. I don’t know the brother, right? I’m just saying institutionally,
3:33:25 logically, etc. So, I’m like, these guys are going to win. So, when YouTube starts, we go on YouTube
3:33:30 right away. We’re the first YouTube partner. So, I am literally the original YouTuber, okay?
3:33:39 Nice. Susan Wojcicki, former CEO of the late Susan Wojcicki, wonderful woman. And if that triggers
3:33:47 you again on the right, you’re wrong. She was a terrific person. And when she started her own
3:33:51 YouTube channel, I was the first interview because we were the first YouTube partner.
3:34:00 So, I love that. So, we’re in that, but let me connect it back to the hope. When mainstream media
3:34:06 has you hooked, you got no hope because you don’t have the right information. You have propaganda.
3:34:11 You have marketing. You don’t have real news. When you’re in the online world, it’s chaotic.
3:34:16 And don’t get me wrong, it’s got plenty of downsides, right? But within that chaos,
3:34:22 the truth begins to emerge. And so, for example, young Turks has had dozens of fights with different
3:34:28 creators throughout history. Why? When you’re number one in news online, the algorithm rewards
3:34:33 anyone attacking you because then you get into their algorithmic loop. It’s not an accident
3:34:38 that we’ve been attacked dozens of times. One, we’re independent thinkers. So, anyone, if we
3:34:42 don’t match their ideology, they’re going to attack us. But number two, they get in our algorithm
3:34:47 loop. It’s too hard to resist, right? So, all of a sudden, they think that we’re being funded by
3:34:53 Nancy Pelosi or the CIA and oh, we’re off to the races. There’s another fight, right? But our
3:35:02 competition’s a graveyard. And so, we’ve won almost all of those fights. Why? Because we try
3:35:09 really hard to stick with the truth, with logic, and we don’t do audience capture. Even if our
3:35:13 audience is going in one direction, we don’t think it’s right. Anna and I will come out and go,
3:35:21 “No, sorry guys, love you, but rent control is not a good idea.” Okay, et cetera. So, in that world,
3:35:27 the people, it’s going to take a while, guys. But people who are telling the truth are eventually
3:35:33 going to rise up. And when they do, now we’re free. And now, the second part is even more
3:35:39 devastating for mainstream media, because I’m a businessman, right? I keep looking at the revenue
3:35:45 for CNN, et cetera. And they have a massive problem. And people don’t realize how big the
3:35:51 problem is. That thing’s going to capsize. I don’t talk about it often because I don’t want more
3:36:00 competition. I also have a company, right? In the online world, et cetera. But I’m too
3:36:05 honest, or I got to say it. I got to say it. So, they have two revenue streams. One is ads.
3:36:09 That’s why they serve advertisers, and politicians are huge advertisers, as we mentioned.
3:36:15 The second revenue stream, depending on the company, is arguably more important,
3:36:23 which is subscribers. So, now what happens in a business normally is, so they started out low,
3:36:30 and then they got high, and now they got a ton of subscribers. At its peak, cable has 100 million
3:36:36 households, right? So, they’re raking in unbelievable money from subscriber fees,
3:36:41 and they got advertising on top. So, when you’re all the way up here, your costs start to rise.
3:36:46 Why do they rise? Because then the on-air talent has leverage. And as an example,
3:36:52 there’s many others. And so, the on-air talent, like Sean Hannity says, I do a program that brings in
3:36:58 X amount of maybe 100 million, maybe 200 million. So, give me 40 million a year. And they do.
3:37:04 Sean is making 40 million a year last I checked, okay? So, I don’t know if he’s still getting that
3:37:08 kind of money, and I’m just basing it on reporting, right? But that’s a monster. So, they have all
3:37:15 these giant costs. But the minute you go from 100 million, now where I think around 70 million,
3:37:21 you just lost a giant chunk of your revenue. Now, when your costs are higher than your revenue,
3:37:28 99, it’s been nice knowing you. Yeah, it’s going to collapse. It’s going to be painful.
3:37:33 But what we need, guys, is like, sorry, last thing on that, is we need the print guys like AP,
3:37:40 Reuters, Intercept, the lever, the Serota runs, whatever Ryan’s working on now, it’s that Ryan
3:37:47 Grimm. So, we need those badly. We need someone to collect actual information and do the best they
3:37:52 can and presenting it in an objective way. We all got to support that. So, you can’t lose text.
3:37:57 That’s so important. The TV guys are just actors. You can lose them overnight, and it won’t hurt
3:38:04 you. It’ll help you. Yeah, it’s going to be a messy battle for truth, because the reality is,
3:38:10 there’s a lot of money to be made, and a lot of attention to be gained from drama farming,
3:38:17 sort of just constantly creating drama. And sometimes drama helps find the truth,
3:38:21 like we were mentioning, but most of the time it’s just drama. It doesn’t care about the truth,
3:38:26 it just cares about drama. And then the same is like conspiracy theories. Now, some conspiracy
3:38:33 theories have value and depth, and they allow us to question the establishment of institutions,
3:38:39 but the bottom line is conspiracy theories get clicks. And so, you can just keep coming up
3:38:43 with random conspiracy theories. Many of them don’t have to be grounded in the truth at all.
3:38:49 And so, that’s the sea we’re operating in. And so, it’s a tricky space too.
3:38:54 But Lex, look at all the people who are the biggest now, because we’ve now had a couple
3:39:03 of decades at this, right? So, and I mean as an industry. So, I would argue you’re huge,
3:39:08 and you don’t do that. You don’t do the conspiracy theories. You don’t do the drama at all, right?
3:39:16 Rogan is huge. Yeah, maybe there’s drama, but he’s genuine, right? I got a lot of issues with
3:39:20 some of his policies. I mixed opinions on Joe in a lot of different ways.
3:39:27 But I don’t doubt that he’s genuine, and people can sense that, right? And he’s huge. We’re genuine,
3:39:34 we’re huge. So, this is the market beginning to work. Yeah. So, speaking of Joe, let me ask you
3:39:41 about this. Here we go. I didn’t actually know this, but when I was prepping for this conversation,
3:39:45 I saw that you actually said at some point in the past that you can beat up Rogan in a fight.
3:39:51 No, you said that you have a shot. It’s a non-zero probability. Yes. Do you still believe this?
3:39:57 Yes, but the probability is dropping. It’s dropping every day. I think it’s probably the
3:40:03 stupidest thing I’ve ever heard you say. So, I wrestled and did Jijitsu and Judo and all the
3:40:09 kinds of fighting sports my whole life. And I just observed a lot of really confident,
3:40:16 large guys roll into gyms. He’s ripped. He could deadlift. He could talk all kinds of
3:40:20 shit. And he believes he’s going to be the next world champion, and he just gets his ass kicked.
3:40:30 Yeah. Of course. Okay. And I’ve seen, like I saw this Israeli MMA fighter taking on an anti-Semite
3:40:35 who was huge and thought that, you know, he believed in like Nick Fuentes’ conspiracy theories or
3:40:40 something. And the MMA fighter dismantled him and I loved it. Okay. And then he like,
3:40:46 we tweeted back and forth, et cetera. So, guys, first, let me just assure you, I get it. So,
3:40:53 now let me tell you why I said it and then why I think it’s a non-zero chance. So,
3:41:00 Michael Smirkonish had written this blog, like, I don’t know, 10, 15 years ago on Huffington Post.
3:41:05 We’re both bloggers at that point about the wussification of America. Now, he was saying
3:41:10 the left is a bunch of wussies, right? So, I wrote a blog saying, “Hey, Michael,
3:41:15 I would rather debate you. So, if you want to debate about how we’re wussies, let’s do it. Let’s
3:41:21 find out.” But, you know, you’re mentioning physicality, right? And how you guys are tougher.
3:41:26 So, if you prefer, only in a prescribed setting, right? And we’re not going to go do it in the
3:41:30 streets like idiots, right? But if you want, we’ll have a boxing match or whatever you want.
3:41:38 And we’ll see who’s tougher. And he panicked and he cried to mommy, which is Ariana Huffington,
3:41:42 and, “Oh, Jake’s intimidating me.” Right? Okay. All right. Well, who’s the wussie now,
3:41:49 bitch? Right? So, that is not to actually get into a fight with poor Michael Smirkonish, right?
3:41:54 It’s to prove, “Hey, don’t use rhetoric like that. That’s dumb.” And this is me proving that
3:42:00 it’s dumb. Okay. So, now, Joe had said, “I forget what he said at the time.” And he said something
3:42:05 similar, right? And I’m up to here with Joe at that point. I don’t know if we’ll ever talking yet,
3:42:08 right? But… You’ve been on a show and I really… That was a good conversation.
3:42:12 It was a great conversation. That’s a while back. Yeah. I hope he has you on again.
3:42:18 Yeah. So, I get it. I bet you, I don’t like this take you have a lot. I bet you
3:42:26 he hates it because him as an MMA commentator, he gets to hear so many bros. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
3:42:33 It’s all about the mindset, bro. Now, the steelman, the point you’re making, which I do think it’s the
3:42:41 stupidest thing you’ve ever said, but the actual intent, which is whether you’re left or right,
3:42:48 there’s strong people on the left, like mentally strong, physically strong. I think the whole
3:42:53 point is not that you can beat them, but you’re willing to step, you’re willing to fight if you
3:42:59 need to. It’s 100%. So, it’s not like I believe I could beat them. It’s like I’m willing, like all
3:43:04 this shit, calling the people on the left wusses or whatever, I’m willing to step in the fight.
3:43:09 Even if I’m on train, even if I’m out of shape, I’m willing to fight. Yeah, I get it. I understand
3:43:16 that, but it’s just pick a different person. That’s why I wrote down on my genuine curiosity,
3:43:23 is if you can beat up Alex, Alex Jones versus Cenk, that the legumes, I would pay for that,
3:43:30 because you’re both untrained. You both got, I would say the spirit. No, no, he has, look,
3:43:35 I’ll give the same fairness. Yeah. I think I got an 8% chance of beating Rogan.
3:43:41 You’re lost. I know, I got it. Hold on. And I think, to be fair, Alex has an 8% chance of
3:43:46 beating me. Oh, wow. Okay. Okay, because you never know. He catches you on a lucky punch. I got
3:43:51 punched in the ear once, and you lose your balance, and then you’re in a lot of trouble, right?
3:43:58 So, I can get lucky. Alex Jones can’t get lucky. It’s me against Rogan is harder. If you said to
3:44:08 me, you don’t have 8% chance, but Alex does. Okay. I’m not gonna, it’s fine, right? So, why would it
3:44:12 does Alex stand almost no chance? He asked me. So, first of all, it’s not just because I’m big,
3:44:18 and he’s big. One, I wrestled. Are you wrestled? Yeah. If you wrestled, then you’re like, I watched
3:44:22 this show with my kids, Physical 100. It’s like a Korean show, where they try to find out who’s
3:44:27 the best athlete. They have one thing where they have to wrestle away the ball and keep it this
3:44:31 big giant ball. I’m like, every wrestler’s gonna win. Every MMA fighter’s gonna win, and every
3:44:36 time they win. And they’re like, Dad, how’d you know that? Because we get trained. We’re not gonna
3:44:42 lose to a non-wrestler in a wrestling contest. It’s not gonna happen, right? So, you can get lucky,
3:44:47 but it’s unlikely. So, one wrestling, now that was from a long time ago, but at least you know the
3:44:53 mechanics, right? Number two, I’ve gotten into about 30 actual street fights in my life, and you
3:44:57 can say street fights are not the same as MMA. Of course, that’s true. Obviously, true, right?
3:45:03 But it’s not no experience. It’s some experience. And the most important part of a street fight is
3:45:07 being able to take a punch to the face. Okay. Yeah, knowing what it feels like to get punched
3:45:11 in the face. Yeah. So, I’ve been punched in the face, I don’t know, dozens of times in my life.
3:45:18 I used to start fights by saying, I’ll let you take the first punch. Okay. So, I didn’t start the
3:45:25 fights. They just started because they’d punched me in the face. Okay. So, and then for Alex,
3:45:35 the main thing, and also true for Rogan, is it’s about willpower, right? So, if Joe has a 92%
3:45:39 chance, in my opinion, of knocking me out or beating me because he has the skill, and he’s
3:45:44 trained and he knows what he’s doing, so all the willpower in the world isn’t gonna help you if
3:45:51 you get kicked upside the hat, right? So, but in the unlikely circumstances that I’ve worn him down,
3:45:55 right, that I’m a little bit more in the ballgame because I got willpower. For Alex,
3:46:01 he doesn’t have the willpower I have. Okay. I’m, because to me, the idea of losing to Alex Jones
3:46:08 is unthinkable. I would do anything not to lose, anything. Let me just say, that’s beautiful. I
3:46:14 love this. I would pay a lot of money to watch the two of you just even like Russell. But with Joe,
3:46:23 I think, I just, I have to say, it’s like, it’s, it’s 0.0001% chance. You have a chance before you
3:46:30 even get to the mentality. And the other thing is, on the mentality side, one of the fascinating
3:46:36 things about Joe, is he’s actually a sweetheart in person like this. But there’s something that
3:46:41 takes over him when he competes. Brother, we’ve been around 22 years in the toughest industry
3:46:46 in the world. I understand. Yeah. Right. If you like, you have any idea how hard it is to run a
3:46:52 75 person company and make money online and survive after all the guys who took billions of dollars
3:46:58 went. I hear you. Tremendous willpower. So, but overall, you’re, this is not the hill I’m dying
3:47:07 on. Okay. Joe would win. I get it. I think we’re all allowed one kind of blind spot, I suppose.
3:47:14 So, you don’t think a huge, a big guy that still is in good shape, that was a wrestler
3:47:19 that’s been in a lot of street fights. You still think 0.0001. It depends on street fights, but
3:47:25 yeah, 0.001. I just see that. Yeah. And it’s such a minute disagreement because, so take me out of
3:47:29 it. So, you take out the willpower part of blah, blah, blah. I think it’s one to 2%. Yeah, he could
3:47:34 catch the guy and about, you know, get lucky. I think it’s because I’ve talked to, so I train
3:47:39 with a coach named John Donner. And we talk about this a lot. And I think technique is just such,
3:47:46 technique is the thing that also feeds the willpower. It actually builds up your confidence in the way
3:47:55 that like nothing else does in the more actionable way because you won’t need that much willpower.
3:48:01 No, I fully agree. If the technique is backed, you don’t have to be like a tough guy to win debates
3:48:06 if you’re just fucking good at debates, right? So, I think people just don’t understand the
3:48:13 value in sport and especially in combat of technique. No, great irony here is I actually
3:48:19 totally agree with that. That’s why I mentioned the physical 100. Technique’s gonna win almost
3:48:24 every time. We’re having a debate about whether it’s eight or one or 0.01. Like it’s either way,
3:48:31 technique wins. We agree. Okay, beautiful. In the one of the controversial things you’ve done,
3:48:38 in the 90s as a student at UPenn, you publicly denied the Armenian genocide,
3:48:46 which is the mass murder of over a million Armenians in 1915 and 16 in the Ottoman Empire.
3:48:52 You have since then publicly and clearly changed your mind on this.
3:48:56 Tell me the process you went through to change your mind.
3:49:03 Yeah. So, when you’re a kid, you’re taught a whole bunch of things. That’s the software
3:49:08 that we talked about earlier, right? So, cultural software is media, family, friends,
3:49:15 social media, et cetera. And so, growing up in any tribe, whether it’s a religious tribe
3:49:21 or an ethnic tribe, you’re gonna get indoctrinated into that tribe’s way of thinking. So, you take
3:49:26 a Turkish person who’s super progressive, loves Bernie, believes with all their heart and peace
3:49:32 and you tell them something about Kurds and they’ll say, “Oh, no, not those guys. They’re
3:49:36 terrible and evil and we have to do what we do to them.” You see, that’s the tribe taking over,
3:49:43 right? And so, you tell any religious person what’s wrong with the other religions, they’re like,
3:49:47 “Oh, yeah, yeah, that’s totally true.” You get to their religion, tribe takes over,
3:49:51 know how dare you, I’m offended, right? So, I grew up with Turkish propaganda. So,
3:49:56 I’ll tell you a couple of funny instances of it. When we were kids, we’d go Turkish American Day
3:50:02 Parade, I’m like 10 or 12 years old. It’s in the middle of New York because I grew up in Jersey.
3:50:09 That’s why I got to know those fights. And we would chant in Turkish, “Turkey is the biggest
3:50:14 country. There’s no other country that’s even big.” And I was like, “This is crazy.” I’m like,
3:50:19 “Dad, isn’t this crazy? America’s big, China’s big. Why are we chanting this non-sensical chant?”
3:50:23 Right? So, that’s the beginning of beginning to realize your indoctrination. I’m in college
3:50:29 and I read about some battle that the Ottoman Empire lost. And I’m like, “That can’t be, right?
3:50:35 The Turks have only lost one war, World War I.” And I was like, “Oh, my God, I’m an idiot.
3:50:39 I got taught that in third grade in Turkey.” Of course, that’s not true. That’s ridiculously
3:50:44 untrue, right? All those thoughts are in your head. You don’t even realize it. And so,
3:50:50 on the Armenian genocide, I read the Turkish version. And the Turkish version has all of these
3:50:55 as evidence, right? So, it’s real in that it exists. But here, I’ll give you a great example of it.
3:51:02 I think it was Colonel Chester, some random American military guy after World War I.
3:51:10 And he says about the Armenians after the mass march, the forced marches. He says,
3:51:15 “They returned the area fat and entirely unmaskered.” Okay, I’m like, “Hey, that’s an
3:51:20 American colonel that’s saying that.” So, that’s obviously true. You see, they didn’t happen,
3:51:24 right? Or at least in the way that the Armenians say. Now, as a grown-up, I look at it and I go,
3:51:27 “Are you kidding me? That guy’s obviously trying to get a contract with the Turkish government,
3:51:35 right? Nobody returns from a forced march fat and entirely unmaskered, right?” So, that’s propaganda.
3:51:44 And so, and that one was so indoctrinated that it was tough to let go. So, at Penn, I write
3:51:50 that op-ed, et cetera. And then over the course of time. And so, Anna and I disagree on things from
3:51:56 time to time. And we’ve been co-hosting now for, she’s been at the Young Turks for 18 years and
3:52:03 co-hosting for, you know, almost 18. And so, she’s Armenian. And by the way, I love America. I mean,
3:52:07 look, we came to America because we love this country, land of hope and opportunity. That’s
3:52:11 part of why I fight so hard for the average American, for the American idea. So, here’s
3:52:16 a Turk and an Armenian doing a show together and it becomes the number one online news show.
3:52:22 That’s the beauty of America, right? So, she’s telling me things and we’re having some
3:52:28 on-air discussions about it, et cetera. And then, it just dawned on me like, no, this was,
3:52:35 this too was obviously propaganda. So, at that point, once you realize that, it becomes easier.
3:52:40 That’s why I’m trying to unplug people from the matrix. Because once you realize it’s propaganda,
3:52:43 oh my God, it gets infinitely easier to start telling what’s true or not true.
3:52:49 So, maybe by way of advice, how do you know when you’re deluded by propaganda? How do you know
3:52:54 you’re not believing a kind of, how do you know when you’re not plugged into the matrix, when you’re
3:53:00 plugged into the matrix? You have to keep testing it against objective reality. Okay, they said
3:53:07 something. Did it happen or did it not happen? So, here’s an easy one. Alex Jones for a long time,
3:53:12 especially under Obama, kept saying, they’re not going to put us on FEMA camps until they’re going
3:53:15 to stop us on the FEMA camps and they’re going to put us down and they’re going to let us out.
3:53:20 I know it, I know it for sure, right? Nobody’s been in a FEMA camp. Obama left, there was no
3:53:26 FEMA camps. So, what I asked like for the right wing conspiracy guys, guys, has any of their things
3:53:32 ever come true? Like they always say all these crazy things that never, ever happened. So,
3:53:38 the third time it doesn’t happen, can you please start to wonder, maybe I’m on the wrong side,
3:53:44 maybe, but that’s not just for right wingers, that’s easy, right? But it’s also for mainstream
3:53:51 media and that’s where I get the biggest pushback and that’s where, because my tribe is, is what
3:53:58 the kids call PMC, professional management class, okay? They’re careerists, you go up the ladder,
3:54:05 you have this route, that route, etc. And so, for that class, the status quo is pretty good.
3:54:11 So, when you get, when Biden gives you 15% change, you’re like, what else do you want?
3:54:17 That’s amazing. He just course corrected a little bit, now it’s perfect, right? But for the average
3:54:24 guy who needs 100% change, not 15, they look at it and they go, what the fuck? He only did 15%
3:54:29 and everybody’s declaring him a hero, right? So, those are the hardest guys to get through on and
3:54:33 those are the guys who get most mad at me, not the right wingers, the establishment. That’s why I,
3:54:41 I’m nails on a chalkboard for them because I’m on the left, but I call out their crap and they’re
3:54:47 marketing and propaganda and that’s why I mentioned earlier, no one probably,
3:54:51 nah, he might not even consciously know it, but no one dislikes Bernie more than Obama,
3:54:57 because if Bernie got into office, he’d embarrass Obama by doing a lot more change
3:55:04 and Obama told us the change wasn’t possible, you could only get 5%. And so, if Bernie does 50%,
3:55:10 then Obama’s humiliated and his record and his legacy is ruined, right? So, I don’t think he makes
3:55:17 that conscious decision, right? But it’s subconscious, it’s a way of thinking. So, if you’re watching
3:55:25 Morning Joe, test them. He says something that Biden is for $15 minimum wage. When Biden takes it
3:55:31 out of the bill, know that Morning Joe was lying to you. He says that Biden said he was for the
3:55:36 public option, but he never even proposed it. When Morning Joe still defends him and you see
3:55:42 an objective reality, Biden didn’t actually propose that bill. You know that they’re lying to you.
3:55:45 Tested against objective reality. Did it actually happen or didn’t it?
3:55:50 I mean, there’s some of that, just to steal a man some of the conspiracy theories. Do you think
3:55:57 there’s some value to the conspiracy theories that come from the right, but actually more so come
3:56:05 from the anti-establishment? I mean, for me, there’s a lot that raise a bit of a question.
3:56:10 A lot of them could probably be explained by corporatism and the military industrial complex,
3:56:17 but there’s also a lot of them could be explained by creepiness and shadiness in human nature.
3:56:21 Epstein is an example of that. There’s a lot of ways to explain Epstein,
3:56:30 including the basic creepiness of human nature, but there could be bigger explanations. I’m
3:56:36 delying it. Sometimes when we have long, thoughtful conversations like this, I’ll say it depends a
3:56:41 lot and then people get frustrated by that, but then you’re frustrated by the world because
3:56:48 it depends. So conspiracy theories, if you say, “Are they all right or are they all wrong,”
3:56:55 already the question is wrong. So it depends. What is the conspiracy theory? So if it’s some
3:57:01 of the absurd ones we’ve mentioned here, it’s easily disproven. On the other hand,
3:57:09 there’s a conspiracy theory about JFK’s assassination. Which one is the conspiracy
3:57:15 theory that Lee Harvey Oswald from like 12 miles away shot a magic bullet that went like this and
3:57:22 hit like 13 people and came out Kennedy’s brain or that the government might have wanted to cover up
3:57:28 an assassination of the president for whatever reason. Come on. Now, of course,
3:57:32 doing hyperbole and the JFK enthusiasts will be like, “No, the bullet didn’t actually go
3:57:38 like this. It didn’t actually hit 13 people.” I’m kidding, guys. But in terms of,
3:57:44 is that conspiracy theory real that JFK was not just killed by Lee Harvey Oswald? Almost
3:57:53 certainly. And so if you read real books with tons of information, the most likely culprit is
3:57:58 Alan Dulles, the head of the CIA that he fired. Back when there was a deep state,
3:58:05 there actually was a deep state. They did coups against other countries’ leaders all the time,
3:58:10 but they tell us, “Oh, they wouldn’t do it to our own leader.” But remember, it’s not the CIA.
3:58:16 He’d left the CIA already. So I don’t know if it was X CIA guys. I don’t know if the mob was
3:58:22 involved. I don’t know any of those details, but I know things that are obvious. That bullet didn’t
3:58:30 magically hit him from over there. Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald. Jack Ruby was a mobster who
3:58:35 on the record had said that he hated Kennedy. All of a sudden, he became patriotic overnight
3:58:41 and shot the assailant who was unguarded, maybe less likely. Okay, so let’s speed up though.
3:58:47 So my point is, yes, some conspiracy theories could be true. It depends on objective reality,
3:58:56 right? You get to Epstein. Again, I always do it ahead of time because I want you to test me
3:59:02 and see, does it match objective reality? So I said the minute that it happened, you’ll have your
3:59:07 answer based on whether the video in the hallway worked or not. If the video in the hallway works,
3:59:13 there’ll be just as many conspiracy theories, but it’ll show actually who went in and didn’t go in.
3:59:19 Okay, but if the video in the hallway doesn’t work, they definitely killed him. Okay, so a couple
3:59:26 of days later, oh, the video in that particular hallway happened to not be working. And the guards
3:59:33 both happened to be on break at the same time. And the most notorious pedophile criminal in the
3:59:41 country happened to be unguarded. And that is the one time he decided to hang himself. Listen,
3:59:47 man, the only way you believe that is if you got mainstream media to get you to believe
3:59:52 that the word, that the minute the phrase conspiracy theory is mentioned, you have to shut
3:59:57 off your mind. And you have to believe whatever the media tells you. Yeah, well, it’s interesting
4:00:03 you just mentioned, do you think the CIA has not grown in power versus? No, no, they’ve greatly
4:00:09 waned in power. Interesting. So, so in the old days, the CIA has an actual deep state. And because
4:00:15 the country was run by a bunch of families, right? So you go to Yale, the scum bones thing was real,
4:00:20 right? And you go to Harvard, you go to this and half the look at the Dulles family, right?
4:00:25 Half of them go into government, the other half go into banking. Why are the Central American
4:00:32 countries called banana republics? Because we we’d America did a coup against one of those
4:00:37 countries, because a banana company wanted it. Okay, because they’re like, how dare you charge
4:00:42 whatever you want for your natural resource. We American corporations have the right to all
4:00:48 of your natural resources at the lowest possible rate. Alan, get rid of these guys. Okay. And
4:00:56 and Alan would. And so, and sometimes they would go extrajudicial, right? Like potentially with the
4:01:04 JFK assassination. So now and and by the way, you pissed off a J. Edgar Hoover, he was just
4:01:08 going to put a bullet in your head. And we were done with you. Okay, Fred Hampton, among others.
4:01:17 So, but nowadays, that’s not how the world works. So a small number of families cannot control a
4:01:24 country and an economy this size. New people pop up. Well, Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t part of those
4:01:30 families. Elon Musk wasn’t part of those families. Neither was Bezos, right? For you to believe those
4:01:35 conspiracy theories, you have to think that Bezos and Musk, etc. were like, Oh, you guys are still
4:01:43 running the country. No problem. Go ahead. Gonna do that, right? So now we’ve gotten into a system
4:01:48 where it’s the invisible hand of the market that runs the country. But unfortunately,
4:01:55 only for the powerful. And so it’s more of a machine. And they don’t do, and this is super
4:01:59 interesting in ties to what we’re talking about earlier, Lex, which is that they don’t do political
4:02:04 assassinations anymore. They do character assassinations. That’s the needle in the haystack
4:02:11 thing. So, and if you do an assassination of someone, you build up their status, they become
4:02:18 a martyr and you build up their cause. But if you do a character assassination, you smear the cause
4:02:26 with the person. And the cause goes down, not up. So the market found a better way of getting rid of
4:02:31 agitating outsiders. Well, that’s, you know, one of the conspiracy theories with Epstein is that
4:02:42 he’s a front for like, I guess CIA, and they’re getting data on people like creepy pedophile
4:02:50 kind of data that they can use to threaten character assassination. And then they put them,
4:02:57 in this way, put the people in their pockets. So look, we’re not in on it. So there’s no way we
4:03:06 can know, right? But I just always go back to logic. So he has dirt on a lot of powerful people.
4:03:13 He dies in a way that is an obvious murder and not a suicide. And then you begin to think,
4:03:20 who would have enough power to be able to get away with that crime? And that is a very limited
4:03:28 number of either people or governments, right? So that’s probably your answer without knowing
4:03:34 anything that’s internal. Yeah, that’s crazy. We don’t have the list of clients. What is the best
4:03:42 way to achieve stability and peace in Israel and Palestine in the current situation and in the
4:03:48 next five, 10 years? If people wanted to get to peace, it’s relatively straightforward. There’s
4:03:55 already a deal that was negotiated. The Saudis agreed to it. And they’re an important player in
4:04:01 this game. The Palestinians and the Israelis have initially agreed to it, even Hamas has kind of
4:04:06 agreed to it. That deal exists, and it’s just waiting on the shelf to get done, right? And it’s
4:04:12 pretty straightforward. Israel gets out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but they keep an X
4:04:18 percentage. It used to be 4%, then it went up to 6%. It’s probably a higher number now.
4:04:22 The Palestinians keep losing leverage as we go, right? So remember how hard it was
4:04:28 to get a deal on Ukraine, I thought. That’s a very complicated one. Israel’s much more
4:04:33 straightforward. Get the hell out of the occupying territories. Keep some of the God, like, those
4:04:38 settlements are the worst thing. They’re cancer. But anyway, I don’t know, there’s, but there is
4:04:42 an answer to the settlements, and it’s probably that Israel keeps them, even though that drives me
4:04:47 crazy. No right of return for Palestinians. There’ll be symbolic right of return for a couple of
4:04:52 families. And so Palestinians go, oh, no way, guys, you have no leverage. Take the deal. Take
4:04:58 the deal. Okay. So you’re not going to get a right of return. Israel’s not going to allow millions
4:05:03 of Palestinians to go and vote in Israel. It would end the Jewish state. You have to get to a
4:05:10 practical solution. So honestly, the number one person blocking it now is then Yahoo. It’s not
4:05:16 even, that’s obvious. That’s, that doesn’t take a lot of courage to say that. He says publicly,
4:05:21 I don’t want a Palestinian state. I’m against a two state solution. He’s been monstrous. He’s one
4:05:27 of the worst terrorists of my lifetime. So that’s easy. The right wing of Israel has lost its mind.
4:05:32 So the Smotrich and the Ben Gavir is openly talking about ethnic cleansing and driving them
4:05:40 into other Arab countries. I mean, this is the definition of ethnic cleansing. So, but is like,
4:05:48 I know that the Arabs are going to take the deal. Saudi Arabia cannot wait to take the deal because
4:05:53 they just want to get business going, right? Do you think Hamas takes the deal? So I had
4:05:57 ever a solution where you don’t need Hamas. But yes, Hamas would definitely take the deal.
4:06:02 Hamas already publicly said that they would even get rid of that Israel doesn’t have a right to
4:06:09 exist. But we, there’s so much propaganda in American media. It’s maddening, right? So in this
4:06:16 idea that you don’t deal with Hamas is so dumb. So the reason it’s dumb is you don’t negotiate with
4:06:22 your friends. You negotiate with your enemies. Well, I don’t want to negotiate with them. I
4:06:26 don’t like them. Well, then you’re not going to get to peace, right? But still, there is a path
4:06:34 that doesn’t include Hamas. So make a deal with Fatah that runs the best West Bank. Then they get,
4:06:39 right now, if Fatah went into Gaza Strip, they wouldn’t be able to manage it because they don’t
4:06:44 have enough credibility. They’re mainly seen as in cahoots with the occupiers, whereas Hamas is
4:06:52 hardcore and fighting against the occupiers. But if Fatah delivers a peace, not only a peace deal,
4:06:57 but a Palestinian state, then they come in as heroes. So you make the deal with them,
4:07:03 you let them run the Gaza Strip, and you empower them to drive out Hamas. That way,
4:07:08 they do your dirty work for you, in a sense, right? But good because Hamas is a terrorist
4:07:14 organization. They’re not helpful. And especially if the Palestinians get a state, the violence has
4:07:21 to stop immediately. That’s the whole point. The trade is you get a state, Israel gets safety and
4:07:27 peace. So no more rockets than Israel. No more rockets. If you do any other rockets,
4:07:33 and Israel does the barbaric thing they just did, even I would say, “Hey, brother, we had a peace
4:07:39 deal.” So if you violate a peace deal and you do a bomb, they’re going to do a bomb and their
4:07:47 bomb is much larger. And by the way, can it work? It already has worked. Israel already did it with
4:07:56 Egypt. So Egypt was a hundred times Hamas. Egypt gathered all the Arab armies and actually physically
4:08:02 invaded Israel when Israel could lose. And they did it several times. And like at the time, all,
4:08:09 not just the right, like the war hawks, but most people thought there’s no way Egypt will keep
4:08:16 that peace deal. Oh, they’re suckers. We’re giving them the Sinai Peninsula back, and then they’re
4:08:20 just going to keep bombing and attacking us. There hasn’t been a single bomb from Egypt since the
4:08:29 peace deal. Peace deals work. War gets you more war. Peace deals get your peace. And you should never,
4:08:35 this is true of all of life, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. So if you’re saying,
4:08:41 “Well, I’m not positive that a peace deal is going to be perfect,” and 12 more rockets might be fired.
4:08:47 “Well, brother, what do we have now?” Right? We have endless rockets now. If Israel’s supposed
4:08:55 to be a safe haven for Jews, and I get it, and I want it, okay, then become a safe haven. The way
4:09:02 that you’re a safe haven is stop the occupation. It’s not complicated. And the reason they’re not,
4:09:06 let’s be honest, the reason the right-wing government of Israel is not stopping the
4:09:12 occupation is because they want to take more and more land. And so they have throughout
4:09:17 time taken way more of the West Bank than they had originally. And now Netanyahu is saying,
4:09:24 “I want a corridor in the middle of Gaza, and I want a corridor at the border of Egypt.” Now,
4:09:30 we’re back to occupying Gaza, physically, let alone through power and et cetera.
4:09:40 So, Bibi has to go. Definitely. What’s the role of U.S. in making a peace deal like that happen?
4:09:48 It’s going to sound outlandish, but I can get you a ceasefire almost overnight if Bibi’s gone.
4:09:53 Because the Israeli negotiators have said publicly, please, not publicly,
4:09:59 got leaked, and it was in the Israeli press. You have to give us a little bit of wiggle room.
4:10:03 If you don’t give us a little bit of wiggle room, obviously they’re not going to do the deal.
4:10:07 And he’s like, “I know.” Right? That’s why he’s not giving them the wiggle room.
4:10:13 So, don’t ask for land in Gaza. Get the hell out of Gaza. You have a ceasefire. That’s the easy part.
4:10:19 So, the hard part is the occupation, ending the occupation. But even that, I can get it to you
4:10:26 in two months as long as Israel actually wants a deal. So, go to an election, get rid of Netanyahu,
4:10:33 put in Benny Gantz. Is Benny Gantz an angel? No. He’s the one that ordered all the bombings
4:10:41 of Gaza to begin with, right? Look, Benny Gantz has got massive war crimes on his record. So,
4:10:46 don’t worry. He’s not a softy, okay? But he’s not my favorite guy in the world, to say the least.
4:10:53 But Benny Gantz can do a peace deal if he wants to. So, look, only one group of people can actually
4:10:58 settle this. Well, there’s actually two groups of people. One is the Israeli population. You vote
4:11:04 in someone who wants to do a peace deal, you’ll get a peace deal, okay? Number two is the American
4:11:09 president. So, if I’m the American president, I’m saying in a hypothetical, right? Or any American
4:11:14 president that actually wants to get a peace deal done. You just say, “I’m going to cut the funding.”
4:11:18 Israel will do the deal immediately. They don’t say they want to cut the funding because APAC
4:11:27 gives them $100 million. It’s not complicated. Not 1% complicated. So, Lex, tell me this, okay?
4:11:33 So, if the US president said, “I’m going to cut the funding,” do you think that it might have a
4:11:38 giant problem for Netanyahu? Might it hurt his government? Might they have to go to an election?
4:11:42 Would Israeli politicians, let alone the population, begin to really, really worry
4:11:48 that they’re going to lose an enormous source of funding and weapons? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
4:11:51 So, why wouldn’t we use our leverage? It’s crazy not to use our leverage.
4:12:00 Yeah. And this is where we go back to the steel man of Trump. It feels like he’s the only one
4:12:06 crazy enough to use that leverage. But crazy, I mean, in a good kind of sense. Bold enough,
4:12:11 not giving a shit about convention, not giving a shit about pressures and money and influence and
4:12:16 all that kind of stuff. Yes, but with the biggest asterisks in the history of the world,
4:12:23 which is 12% chance he does that, and that’s great. But a huge chance he does the opposite.
4:12:31 And he goes, let’s call it 80 again, 80%. Oh, yeah, Miriam wanted me to give West Bank to Israel.
4:12:34 So, you have it, guys. Now, you’re just talking about the whole thing forever, okay?
4:12:40 Giant war. Oh, yeah, I’m going to prove how tough I am. I’m going to nuke Iran. Oh, no,
4:12:45 what are you doing? What are you doing? Like, Trump is a massive risk. He’s an enormous amount
4:12:50 of risk. If you were running a company and not a country, would you hire Trump as your CEO?
4:12:57 Everyone watching just screamed inside their heads, “No!” Okay, you would never take that kind of risk
4:13:03 with your company. You got an 80% chance the guy’s going to blow up the company? No way, no way,
4:13:08 and you know it too. Especially if you’re a businessman, you know you’re not going to hire
4:13:14 that loose cannon to run your company. It’s unacceptable risk. But you’re not wrong. We
4:13:18 talked about it earlier. But as part of that risk, there’s a sliver in there
4:13:23 that he could accidentally do the right thing. We talked a lot about hope in this conversation.
4:13:28 Zooming out, what gives you hope about the future of this whole thing of humanity,
4:13:33 not just the United States, of us humans on earth? So, why am I center left and not center
4:13:39 right? It gets to that question. So, you look at the polling, not just here in America,
4:13:44 but in almost any country. And it almost always breaks out to two-thirds or one-third, right?
4:13:53 Two-thirds of the people say, “Let’s be empathetic, let’s share, let’s be, let’s do equality, justice,
4:13:58 let’s be fair,” right? One-third goes, “No, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me,” okay? That’s just the
4:14:05 nature of humanity. And so, and usually the same third goes, “No change.” Another two-thirds go,
4:14:12 “Well, some change,” right? So, because if you don’t do any change, you’re never going to get to
4:14:16 the right answer. For the wisdom of the crowd to work, for free markets to work, for everything to
4:14:21 work, you have to keep changing because the times change and the culture changes and the situation
4:14:28 changes, right? So, that’s why there’s amendments in the Constitution, because you need to be able to
4:14:33 change the document from time to time. Be careful with it, right? But you need to allow for an avenue
4:14:40 for change. So, now, why does the one-third keep winning in so many different places? Because
4:14:46 they have more money in power. And by the way, if you’re more selfish, you’re more likely to get
4:14:51 more money in power, right? And I wish that weren’t the case, but it is. And these are not blanket
4:15:00 rules, they’re on average. So, that third winds up winning in so many circumstances. But the bottom
4:15:11 line is, we are a species that requires consent. So, I mean, I’m a Stone Cold Atheist. So, I don’t
4:15:18 think we’re kind of like apes. I think we are apes. Okay. And so, and all the scientists out
4:15:25 there are going, “Well, of course we are.” Everyone else is going, “That’s crazy.” Okay. So, when you
4:15:29 look at it as a species, different species react in different ways. Snakes have no empathy because
4:15:37 it’s not in their DNA. And that’s why we have a sense of what a snake does, right? So, for good
4:15:44 news is, for higher-level apes like us, bonobos, chimpanzees, and humans, we all roughly want
4:15:52 consent. So, a chimpanzee, for example, has a violent reputation and they are violent. And,
4:15:58 unfortunately, we’re pretty close to them. But what people don’t know is, a leader doesn’t win
4:16:05 through violence, especially for bonobos. They win by picking lice off of other chimpanzees,
4:16:09 by going and doing favors, going to a hunt, getting food, and giving it to someone else,
4:16:14 because what they’re gathering is the consent of the governed. And that’s how you become the alpha.
4:16:19 You don’t do it through physical dominance. You do it through consent. So, that’s how we’re
4:16:26 hardwired. That’s in our DNA. That two-thirds in the long run will win. And we will have empathy.
4:16:30 We will have change. And that’s the hope that we’re all looking for.
4:16:35 Hope has got the numbers, it seems like.
4:16:44 Yeah. And in fact, one more thing, Lex. Look at history. Hope and change always win.
4:16:50 And so, again, conservatives don’t catch feelings. There is a need for conservatives,
4:16:54 because you have to balance things out. If you just had even a wonderful two-thirds,
4:16:59 that still wouldn’t be the ideal system. You need a Winston Churchill if you’re
4:17:03 in the middle of World War II. You need someone to say, regulating, you know,
4:17:08 six inspections of the elevators is too many, right? So, you need that balance. And conservatives
4:17:15 have a role, and it’s a really important role. But having said that, they’re assigned to losing
4:17:20 throughout history, because they’re fighting on losing ground. A conservative says no change,
4:17:27 but the world is constantly changing. So, they’re destined to lose. That’s why the founding fathers
4:17:32 won against the British monarchy. That’s why the civil rights movement won. They didn’t win overnight.
4:17:39 It took them 100 years to get equal rights, let alone past slavery, right? So, we won on women’s
4:17:46 rights. We won on gay rights. We keep winning. But every snapshot in time makes it feel like
4:17:52 we’re losing. There’s a bad guy in charge. We aren’t living under corporate rule, etc. But in
4:18:01 the long tide of history, change always wins. So, the empathetic, generally speaking, left wing. But
4:18:06 again, don’t worry about the titles, right? People get obsessed with the labels. The two-thirds,
4:18:11 that’s empathetic. That includes a lot of right-wingers, right? You win at the end in history
4:18:20 every single time. So, we fight forward. We’re tough when we need to be. We need that willpower
4:18:25 to win any fight, right? But we’re civil and respectful to the other side because they are us.
4:18:33 So, progressives all the time, we say, “Look,” and this is like the ending of my book, which is,
4:18:40 for conservatives, you have a lot of empathy for inside the wagons. So, conservatives are great
4:18:45 to their family, generally speaking, to their community, to their church, to anyone that’s
4:18:52 inside the wagons. But they have, they set up electric fences and barbed wire around their
4:18:56 wagons. So, if you’re on the outside, you’re the others and you’re going to get electrified. And
4:19:04 it’s kind of like, right? And so, I like to think the left wing has wider wagons. So, we view the
4:19:12 world as more us and not you. But the good news of that is, if we win, we’re not going to do
4:19:17 Medicare for only the left, right? We’re going to do Medicare for all. You’re all going to get
4:19:22 universal health care. We’re going to do higher wages for all. The right wing is not going to be
4:19:32 left out. And Lex, I’m going to tell you a fun story. It’s about my family. And I’m sure that
4:19:40 parts of it are apocryphal because it’s from like 500 years ago. But it gives you a sense of the
4:19:48 old Mark Twain quote, if it’s really Mark Twain’s, of change happens really gradually and then all
4:19:56 of a sudden. So, my mom’s last name in Turkish is Yawasha. It means slowly. It’s a weird name
4:20:02 even in Turkish. And so, one day, we’re walking past the mosque in Istanbul when I’m a kid.
4:20:10 And it says on the mosque, Yawasha. We’re like, what is this? Okay. So, it’s a small little mosque
4:20:17 we go inside and my dad starts asking their mom questions. Okay. So, he says, why is the mosque
4:20:23 named that? And he said, well, do you don’t know? And he said, because my dad said my mom, my wife’s
4:20:30 name is, last name is Yawasha. He’s like, oh my God. And he’s like, your ancestor was the admiral
4:20:39 of the Ottoman Navy when they conquered Constantinople. Okay. So, grandpa from five, six hundred years
4:20:44 ago came up with the idea. So, you can’t ever conquer Constantinople because there’s a giant
4:20:49 chain underneath the Bosphorus. All the ships get stuck on the chain. There’s cannons on both sides.
4:20:54 Half the ancient navies in the world are at the bottom of the Bosphorus, right? So, hasn’t been
4:20:57 conquered in over a thousand years. Nobody thinks they can be conquered. Grandpa comes out with the
4:21:05 idea of why don’t we build giant wooden planks over land and grease them and pass our fleet
4:21:12 over land onto the other side. Everybody goes because whenever anybody proposes a new idea,
4:21:15 no matter how logical it is, they go, oh, that’s impossible. No way it’s going to work. Oh, you’re
4:21:20 crazy. This is an unconquerable city. What are you guys even doing? Every day, Mehmet the Conqueror
4:21:27 comes up to grandpa and says, all right, how’s your plan to do this project going? And grandpa says,
4:21:36 slowly. And he names him commander slowly. And one night after the whole thing’s done,
4:21:43 they pass the entire Ottoman fleet over the land, wind up in the middle of the Bosphorus,
4:21:49 and the Holy Roman Empire concedes. They surrender. Because change happens really
4:21:58 gradually and then all of a sudden. Good story. Well, Cenk, thank you for fighting for that change
4:22:04 for many years now, for over two decades now. And thank you for talking today. Appreciate it,
4:22:07 Lex. Thank you for having the conversation. Thanks for listening to this conversation
4:22:12 with Cenk Huger. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
4:22:20 And now let me leave you some words from Hannah Arendt. Totalitarianism is never content to rule
4:22:27 by external means, namely through the state and a machinery of violence. Thanks to its peculiar
4:22:33 ideology and the role assigned to it in the apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has
4:22:41 discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within. Thank you for listening.
4:22:51 I hope to see you next time.
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