Transcript of #2542 - Steve Hilton New

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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night.

All day. Come on, man, what's going on?

For people who don't know, you and I have been friends for, God, more than 10 years. Yeah, how many years has it been?

I think it's 14. I think it's the year we got here, which is 14, 2012.

Yeah, when we moved from England, we met in Hawaii on the beach with our kids.

Okay, so what's your memory? I was just thinking about that because I have a very particular memory of that.

Um, my memory was, uh, that my children and your children were playing on the beach. Exactly, that's how we met. It was just, they were like digging in sand. They were real little, they were the same age. And, uh, then we just said hi.

Yeah, but I remember that. Okay, I have a slightly different memory.

Okay, what's your—

which is like, that's exactly right about the kids. Yeah, two girls for you, two boys for me. And your wife was there first before— yes, I think I was in the gym, and then I just remember, just like, remember, I've just moved from England and it's a whole different world and a different culture. And I just remember you walking down the beach. I remember I'd never seen anyone like this before. Just like the— it was just an amazing cultural moment.

And then you'd never seen anyone walk on the beach?

No, just the way you were, you know, you're, you know, just the way— I remember thinking, who's this guy? I remember I'd never heard of you. And then I was explaining, um, to people I'd met, oh, George Joe Rogan? You met Joe Rogan? It was just an amazing thing. And then the other thing that makes me laugh doing this is that we then did the podcast. Yes, at some point around then.

This is before you had any aspirations of running for governor or anything.

Exactly. It was a long time ago. I just moved here. I was teaching at Stanford, just having a very normal kind of, yeah, low-key life, and I really remember doing the podcast not knowing what a podcast was. I literally didn't know. So we came in and I, again, I— my experience was I'd been in England, um, you know, I'd worked in business, run a restaurant or two, that kind of thing. But most recently I've been in politics and government and started in the media. I was aware of all of that. And so, you know, it wasn't like I was completely naive, but I didn't know what a podcast was. And I literally thought it was like a radio show or something. I remember coming in, this is back in LA, and we sat down and we were chatting for a few minutes. And I literally was thinking, when's the next guest coming? This seems to be going on a really long time. And it's like 10 minutes and then 15. Wow, this is a long time. Normally you get like 10, 15 minutes maximum, right? Half an hour. What? An hour? 3 hours! I couldn't believe it.

Well, back then—

I really didn't know.

No one knew what a podcast was.

Right.

So what year was it that Steve was on? Episode 509, 20— it was June, July 3rd of 2014. 2014? Yeah. Whoa.

Okay.

2014, episode what-o-nine? 509, so we were already— 509? Yeah. 509. So we've had 2,000 podcasts since then.

Incredible.

And wow, the other thing— years, that's the other thing I go— that's crazy.

It's crazy. The other thing, just remembering, you know, I'd never really done anything public. I was like a behind-the-scenes guy, right, in politics and government. And I just come out of that, and I was very kind of cautious about everything. And, and, and you were just talking like you do, which again I didn't really know. Um, and you were— it was— I remember thinking, God, this is like— we're talking about sex and you were cursed. I was like, wow, what is this? Like, this is so different to anything I've ever encountered before. But there we are.

Yeah, nobody was listening back then. It was nice. You could get away with so much more. You could just talk and not worry about it.

And also social media was not as I don't think you worry about it when you're talking.

No. Well, I don't pay attention. That's the key. That's the key to my success.

Right.

This is like, don't listen to anybody, what anybody has to say about you. Just keep moving. Keep moving and don't pay attention.

I think that's obviously worked.

Well, I think there's a lot of people out there that are crippled by other people's opinions. I think there's a genuine benefit to having a bunch of other people's opinions of you, and you get to see feedback, but There's just way too many bad faith actors on the internet. There's way too many people that have the least charitable takes on everybody.

Mm-hmm.

The worst, the worst, like, public narration, like public narratives that they want to promote about anyone or anything about any subject. There's far too many people like that, and it's a poison well. Yeah, it's like if you went to a restaurant and you knew that 20% of their food would literally fucking kill you, would you ever eat there? No. Well, that's like Twitter.

Yeah.

20% of the people there are fucking poisonous. They're like a coral snake.

But it's so funny because like, I've just, you know, been— so when we met, I was just, you know, like kind of a regular citizen teaching at Stanford or whatever. Then I started a business, then I got more public. I went to Fox, hosted a show. Then I'm a candidate. And as that's happened, you get more prominent. And so you look at these comments, and I never know whether to look. But the thing that I really— just makes me laugh now, it's like I'm always tempted to do it and I never do it. Like the really idiotic, just pure abuse. Like, I don't know, like I do— I put something out there, and now there's a lot more of this. I'm a candidate. It's like 'Go back to England, you fucking cunt!' Or, 'You bald whatever!' And like, I always want to write, 'Good point,' or something. Because it's just so tempting, and I never have. Maybe I should.

Well, there's a lot of sad—

Because it just makes me laugh.

There's a lot of sad, angry people out there that are just lashing out. And unfortunately, those are overly represented online because those are the type of people that have the time to make comments. But then you also have to take into consideration, whenever you're involved in anything political, as you obviously are because you're running for governor of California, there's a lot of the people that are engaging with your content that are not real people.

They are even actual bots.

100%.

Okay, that part I never have in my mind.

You don't?

No, I should. I— but I— it's a good point.

Keep going. Oh, it's a tremendous amount. It's not a small amount. Right. It's a huge amount.

Does Elon—

There's nothing you can do about it. It was pointing attention when he was buying Twitter. So when he was buying Twitter, Twitter was alleging that there was only 5%, 5% of Twitter with bots. But see if you can find that article again. There's a former FBI, um, God, he did something with digital intelligence and he did a forensic analysis of Twitter and he said it's probably 80%.

80?

80!

Jeez.

8-0. So it's a bunch of bots yelling at you. And by bots, okay, some of them I think now, and this is at the time, so this is 2022. When did he buy Twitter? 2023, 2024, 2024?

I think older than—

was it 24?

I don't remember.

I think it was like somewhere around 23, 24. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So back then AI was not as much of an issue. Right? Like, AI is— you can automate anything now. So the claim that 80% of Twitter originates from a 2022 assessment by cybersecurity expert Dan Woods. While official company filings have historically— excuse me— historically claimed fake accounts represent under 5%, independent estimates and security specialists suggest real figures are higher. Though an exact 80% total remains heavily debated. It's very debated, but if you read the article, He goes over— it's, uh, it's very meticulous, like the way he's describing what— it's not like he's pulling it out of his ass. He's— he did it. So what they did, what Twitter did to come up with 5% was they just grabbed a random 100 tweets. But also they're trying to sell it for fucking billions of dollars.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. They want to sell it for—

what was it, like $40 billion? Yeah, something crazy, wasn't it?

I don't remember the numbers.

Wasn't it $40 billion? Fucking insane amount of money for this, what is now just chaos, you know, it's funny. So there's that, and so this guy's saying 80%. So again, this is a few years ago, so you're dealing with actual humans who are doing it. So you have these state-sponsored groups that are— there's these bot farms, and what these bot farms are, you— I don't know if you've ever seen them, but people have like gone inside and filmed them, like whistleblowers. And what they literally have is like rows and rows of Android phones that are all connected to like— phones without keyboards. Yes. And they'll type one thing and that one thing gets tweeted by hundreds and hundreds of phones. And there's many of these places. And this was back before you get AI to automate things for you. Now you could do a thing where you can essentially start a campaign online, like say, Steve Hilton's a cunt, pass it on. And literally they will— you could hire a company and this company has bots that will go out there and promote that Steve Hilton is a cunt and they will put it everywhere.

They'll hire people, they'll pay people. This is another thing. Yeah, there's a bunch of like really bad actors, really bad faith actors on Twitter. That are paid to post things. And these people have been called out many times by other people that are independent journalists that say, isn't it crazy that all these people use the same language at the same time?

Yeah, the same language at the same time.

They're getting paid. They're getting paid quite a bit of money. Israel pays people. They've been pretty open about it, you know, and they were saying that we have to win the digital war against what they call it, the Woke Reich, which is hilarious. So there's that. So, so you, you have to like, when you're engaging, like, I know real people on Twitter. I know real people that I read their posts and I know there's real independent journalists, but there's a tremendous amount of just utter horseshit.

Yeah.

I don't have time. I have no time for that.

I mean, I look at it. So, you know, you're running around, you're doing all these things for the campaign, whatever. So I don't have too much time. It's the one I look at. But there's all the other, you know, there's Instagram and all the rest, and I don't even look at those. But on X, you know, for a few hours, you know, if you add it up, probably half an hour in the morning, maybe half an hour in the middle of the day, half an hour at the end of the day, and you look at it then and you just find out what's going on. I think it's pretty good for news, like things that are happening.

It's the best thing in the world for news.

So that's why I check in with it. Yeah, you kind of see what's happening.

I do that. I go to the front page, like what's going on, what are the news stories. But as soon as it gets to people's opinions on things, blah blah blah, I just think it's fun.

Honestly, the abuse stuff, it just makes me laugh. I think it's so kind of—

that's good. Well, you've always been really good digitally. Like, for people that don't know, like I said, Steve and I have known each other for a long time. Uh, I mean, we're, we're good friends. Like, we've taken our families to Disneyland. Yeah, like, we've slept over each other's homes. This is, again, way before you were running for governor. We— I know you, and you know me, and you know my family. We know each other. And you've always had no phone. You were always impossible to reach. I used to have to get a hold of your wife to get a hold of you.

Exactly.

It was hilarious. For a while, I don't even know if you've had a fucking email for a while.

I did have email. I always had email.

Yeah, you— but you never had anything on you to check that email. So like—

Exactly.

I remember that one time in San Diego where you—

Don't tell me. I always said, it's fine, nothing ever goes wrong.

Are you gonna laugh? No, no, one time it went wrong. Your wife was so mad at you because she couldn't get a hold of you. You fucking vanished. But this was the thing is like you were well aware that it is a toxic element in your life and it's distracting. It keeps you from being present. It keeps you from being in the moment. And it's very hard to have discipline and just put it down. And I'm really good at it, but then I'm not. And then some days I'm not. I just find myself on the toilet for 20 minutes watching murder videos.

It's like, what?

Because my Instagram— It's actually really good right now.

Um, well, actually, what you mean, like true crime stuff?

Oh, horrible things. So one of my best friends, Tom Segura, he and I have had this tradition over the last few years of sending each other the worst fucking shit that we find online to each other just to freak each other out first thing in the morning. Like, first thing in the morning, I wake up and Tom sent me— like, the other day I sent him, these two guys were trying to rob an ATM machine and, uh, The guy's pulling on it and they wrapped a chain around it and they had a car.

Sounds like a movie, like some ridiculous scene in a movie.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the car was pulling the ATM machine out and the guy got trapped under it and dragged with sparks and blood. I mean, it's fucking horrific. And I mean, I've seen so many people get executed. Hundreds. Instagram is terrible at removing that stuff. I don't know if I spend far less time on X because X is so much opinions. It's so, it's so much of it is just text. Instagram, for me, it's a lot of it is very interesting. Like, I find interesting historical facts, interesting scientific discoveries, cool stuff.

There's a lot of— it seems to be just generally when I'm around, you know, I'm on planes a lot and, and like all the time, and you see people. So just, and just watching people, Instagram seems to be the thing You know, I'm not watching what they're looking at. You can see the logo and you can see that seems to be what people are most consuming.

Yeah. On the Instagram, I think it's probably the biggest one. Maybe TikTok's probably the biggest. Yeah. And TikTok, I don't know what's the biggest, but they're all, they're both pretty big and it's, it's just my TikTok's probably younger. Yeah, I think, but there's a lot of older people on TikTok too. Now it's just very addictive. TikTok, when you open it up, it immediately starts playing you something. Yeah, that's different. You know, like Instagram, it opens the page and you go, so what's going on? And you have to like put in a little effort. TikTok's like, gotcha! Like immediately as soon as you open up the app, it's like, gotcha, here's another one, here's another one, here's another one. Next thing you know, an hour's gone by and you've wasted it.

I remember when I first read about it like years ago, TikTok, I think maybe even wasn't called TikTok, it was ByteDance were doing it and it was music video.

Is there something?

Yeah. And that's how it started.

It started with—

you could make your own video to music or something to do with music was the focus.

Well, the original TikTok was a bunch of people dancing.

Yeah, that's right. It was to do—

exactly. Yeah, they were dancing and lip-syncing.

And I remember reading and they were talking about how viral it's gotten and this thing is going to take over. So I was like, oh yeah, that can't be. That's not going to happen. And then now look where we are.

Amazing.

Hmm.

Well, what's really interesting is China, where TikTok originated, they have a completely different TikTok. Exactly. Their TikTok is curated to like martial arts demonstrations, scientific discoveries. It's all athletic achievements, music. Yeah, exactly. It's all like enriching.

Shows you can do that.

Yeah, and kids aren't even allowed on it after 10:00 PM. So like you have to put in your age when you do it at 10:00 PM, it bricks you. Go to work, bitch. Go to sleep. Get up in the morning. And now, now TikTok does that, or the—

I can't remember.

I've read that the Chinese version of TikTok So the Chinese version makes them do that. Yeah, they're smart. Like, it's not good to censor people, but if you want to have a society that's not captured by horseshit, yes, that's the way to do it.

So I remember back— so I'm Hungarian, my parents are Hungarian. When I was a kid, I was born in England, but we'd go back to Hungary. And this thing I always remember being really pissed off about when I was a kid, um, not that the TV— this is before anything, it was just TV. So all you had was television. But on Mondays in Hungary, there was no television because they wanted people to do other stuff.

Just on Monday?

Yeah, it was something— maybe I'm getting this wrong— and it was like, go out, talk to each other, do stuff, sports, whatever. It was just— and it was communist regime, so they can do whatever they want, right? But you think, you know, they were thinking—

I prefer freedom.

But well, that's what I think all about all of this is so hard. Like, even when you look at like just today, there's the, um, this massive trial, this Meta trial going on. Meta, it's a lawsuit. Today's the first day of the trial.

What is the trial about?

They're suing Meta for $1.4 trillion.

Trillion?

Trillion. Trillion with a T. Whoa. I mean, they're not going to get that, but that's the claim. It was just today.

Claims that addicted children to social media.

Huh. And they're doing this through lawsuits. And the— and I'm just so torn over this because I've got a very strong point of view about all of this and kids.

Yes.

But there's something about this that doesn't feel right in terms of just going after these big platforms, because in the end, I think it's the phones. It's the— there'll be something else. If it's not Meta, it'll be another thing.

Yes.

I mean, I wrote about this year, like 2015. So soon after we did that show, I was probably working on it at the time. I had a book called— I published a book called More Human: Designing a World Where People Come First. And the kind of main thing in the book was everything's too big and bureaucratic and centralized, and we've got to get back to the human scale. So it's mainly about other kinds of policy areas. But I did write about this thing and kids and tech. And I said at the time, we, you know, kids under 16, I said then shouldn't have smartphones. You can give them other phones to stay in touch, but smartphones, bad idea. It's the screens. And so I see all this going on and I think, yeah, have a go at Meta or whatever, WhatsApp or YouTube. I think they're coming for as well.

They're coming for YouTube. That's interesting.

Definitely. Yeah, they are. There's already been a couple.

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I think it's the screens though.

Right, but the screen's the problem, right? It's not the content creators.

That's what I'm— that's what I'm—

and then if they are coming after YouTube, then they're gonna come after me, right? Because like, I'm making people addicted to listening to people talk.

Exactly.

How are you gonna say that that's bad? Uh, the 4 states seek substantial financial penalties. Reports differ on the precise figure, with recent reporting is describing the state's position as roughly $200 billion, while Meta has cited a possible exposure as high as $1.4 trillion. The ultimate penalty, if Meta loses, would be determined by the court. They also want court-ordered changes to Facebook and Instagram, potentially including parental verification for teen accounts, changes to recommendation algorithms characterized as dopamine manipulating, removing or limiting like counts. Infinite scroll, autoplay, appearance-altering filters, multiple accounts, and disappearing content such as stories. What? People love that.

I know. So they're trying to really micromanage.

Yeah, but disappearing content such as stories is kind of interesting sometimes. Like my friend Adam Greentree. Yeah, he's a bow hunter and he goes hunting and he's— his Instagram stories like depict each day of these hunts. And it's really fascinating because he takes these crazy adventures where he goes deep into the Colorado Rockies by himself for like 28 days. And he's like camping out in the snow and it's cool. It's cool to watch. So it's not all negative. So our AI sponsor Perplexity, who is, uh, we've pulled this information from, is saying that a loss could mean not only a very large financial judgment, but also mandated product redesigns affecting how minors and potentially all users experience Instagram and Facebook. See, the problem is, as soon as the government gets involved in mandating product redesigns— yes, we're fucked. I agree, because they're not going to make it good for us.

Totally agree.

There's not a chance in hell. Yeah, it's just manipulating. It's, it's— they're getting involved, and they'll probably get them to give them some money.

And then, and then it— when you start getting— and you could just imagine these bureaucrats sitting around micromanaging. They've got too much of that already.

100%. Yeah. One of the things that we—

so I get it's a problem, but this isn't the way to go.

No, no. You know, there's a relaunch of MySpace that is— really? Yes. And so MySpace is apparently attempting to relaunch and be algorithm-free. And this is their idea. They're thinking the algorithms are designed to keep you engaged and get you dependent. And get you hooked, and they're doing it by making you outraged for the most part, right? And what they want to say is, look, why don't you just find what you want to find and we'll have it on here? Okay, which is probably a lot better. Yeah, because, you know, my feed would be all things only that I'm interested in, not things that piss me off.

Well, that was the big change they made to the news feed versus what you were doing, and incredibly con—

incredibly like potent in its impact on children in particular. And me, I'm a child, I'm a little kid, I fucking— I get hooked. We all get hooked. You get hooked on nonsense and just paying attention to stupid things, and it just eats time. Yeah, and that's what is— that's the commodity. The commodity is your attention.

Yeah, exactly. But you've got— with, with— I hear actually all the time, it's not discussed like a political issue, like we talk about gas prices, whatever. But then I've done a lot of events last, whatever, year and a half, like really a lot, thousands and thousands of people sometimes, big events, small roundtables. You hear a lot of people and they— the first set of things they talk to you about are what you might— because they think you're a candidate, this is politics, let's talk about taxes and gas prices and the kinds of things that you think they, you know, sort of assume to be part of the political conversation. But then when you raise something like that, like the kids and the screens, that totally changes the conversation. And suddenly they're like intense and kind of really kind of angry in a totally different way.

In what way?

It's like, what are we supposed to do? It's, it's like for parents, it's like with the screens and the social media and then the video games and now it's AI and they're talking to AI and then the AI is doing the homework. Like, what are we supposed to do?

I'm glad you brought up video games because video games are far more addictive than social media.

Yes.

Yes. Video games are insanely addictive and no one's trying to get rid of that.

Exactly.

It's because these things can change the way people think. They can change public opinion and they can move people in, in certain directions. I attribute it to the rise of, you know, the Democratic socialists. I attribute it to the rise. I mean, it's a lot of this manipulation. These ideas, like people are really getting, oh, maybe being socialist is cool. Yeah, like this is all coming out of social media, 100%. It's not natural that people are sitting around, you know, reading Marx and going, what a great idea, like let's implement this. They're not doing that. Yes, very few of these quote-unquote Marxists that you find on social media are even aware of the consequences, the historical consequences of these these strategies and what it ultimately leads to, which is like checkers. It's like real simple. Like, you're gonna have a military that controls everything you do. As soon as you give up everything to the state, well, the state has the guns and you have nothing.

Exactly.

And then they tell you what to do.

They tell you what to do.

It sucks. It doesn't mean that that's the way to do it because capitalism is brutal. Yeah, capitalism needs some fucking guardrails. That's for sure.

Everything needs to be— but you've got Like, no, I totally agree. Like, I always joke about it, but it's kind of true. It's like Mamdani with the state-run grocery stores. Like, we had that when I was a kid. I literally went to them in Hungary. It was a communist state. There was only state-run grocery stores. I saw them. There's one like at the end of the block where my grandma lived, and I would go there in the morning to get the whatever it was, and it's just terrible. You know, like, it's really—

I'm very torn on social safety nets. I think we should have them because I think a person who is down on their luck, where things go wrong, like a woman who has children and her husband dies and she doesn't have an income, and now, oh my God, I have to feed these children. Yeah, we should have social safety nets. I also think social safety nets encourage people to rely on them and have zero ambition. I think both those things are true.

Well, that's why I'm so— I've always been against— I can see the argument for, but I've always been against this universal basic income. Type thing. There's an argument for it where it's like quite a low level, and the original guy that I think used to argue for that was on the right, Milton Friedman.

Yes.

And Charles Murray, I think, also argued for it coming from the right, but their version of it was to replace everything else. So you wouldn't have any other benefits, you wouldn't have any other government services.

Right, no Medicaid, no nothing.

Just an amount of money based from— it's very simple, less bureaucratic, and that's it. But this is not what's being argued.

No, I think that would actually probably be like financially more efficient because you would radically reduce the amount of government.

Exactly. And the bureaucracy.

Yes, radically reduce the amount of people that have control over other people. Exactly. You would say, listen, we're gonna cut out the middleman and just give the money to people. That's not a bad idea.

So I had a— I got in— it was very funny in that, like, you say these things before you ever Imagine being a candidate and they come back and, and it gets sort of twisted.

Part of the problem with welfare is, and this is gonna sound completely like I'm contradicting myself, but it's not enough money. You barely live.

But this is what I was saying, exactly what I was saying. So I was in that book, I think in that book, the 2015 book More Human, I had this idea based on what you're talking about, which is actually for a lot of people things like, like the minimum wage, for example, is just— you can't live on it, especially like in California now, right? But in a lot of places it's so low, the costs are so high, can't live on it. And there's a lot of people working really hard, like not lazy on the couch playing video, seriously hard-working people, often two jobs, who can't live on what they make. It's like really wrong, I think. If you work so hard, you should be able to live on it. So I had this idea which was the Business-friendly living wage. And the idea was you increase the minimum wage to a living wage, which is calculated—

what do you think that would be?

Well, in, in, in Cali, it's by area, it's different everywhere. You know, in, in California, in a lot of places would be incredibly high, you know, 30, 40, you know, a lot of really high level, $30 or $40 an hour. Well, because you've got now in certain counties in California more than I think it goes up the whole time. The official government level for low income is $100,000 a year. Low income.

Isn't that crazy?

Crazy, because cost is—

when I was a kid, if you made $100,000, you were killing it. I know, like, my dad makes $100 grand, like, whoa.

Okay, so when I— in my campaign, I had this, like, one of my first things was no state income tax under $100 grand. I call it the working class tax. A lot of people Nationally said, that's so high, why are you rewarding rich people? Actually, the feedback we got in the primary was that's too low. And there's a ton of people in California making, I don't know, $120,000, that sort of thing, who can barely live, 'cause everything's so expensive if you're in LA or somewhere expensive. So we've raised it to $150,000 tax-free. But going back to the living wage thing, that's obviously really tough for a business to pay that kind of level. I used to run— I ran a restaurant, you know, you'd be killed by that kind of high thing. But at the same time as you've got businesses paying people for full-time work that they can't live on, the businesses are also paying taxes, payroll tax, all this stuff they're paying to the government. And then the government is taking it and handing it back to the workers in benefits and welfare. So my thing was, why don't you just cut out the middleman?

And have the businesses pay the workers, not the government. And then the net effect for business is about the same. Well, that would be the goal. So they're paying their workers more, but they're not paying taxes.

Is it the same amount? Like, are they literally— that doesn't make any sense, because like, what is minimum wage in California right now?

Well, it's just gone up. It depends where you're looking. So, so—

$15?

No, $16 and a bit, and then for fast food it's $20. And they wanted it for—

that was a recent thing, right? And a lot of people pushed back against that, and it wound up— they wound up cutting a lot of jobs.

Yeah, that went through.

So it's $20 for fast food workers, and then it immediately cut a bunch of jobs.

Exactly. And put in automation.

And I feel like there's got to be some jobs that are entry-level jobs for kids.

Yes. And that's really important.

They used to be supposed to make a living off of that. You're supposed to be a kid that's learning how to work. You show up on time, you know, you get your paycheck, you realize the taxes get cut out of it. You're like, what?

Exactly.

All that stuff. Like, it's good for kids to have. But once you get past entry-level jobs, then okay, like if someone's a landscaper or someone's like doing— this is a job, you work 40 hours a week. Paying someone $15 an hour to work 40 hours a week is kind of brutal.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

Horrible.

Exactly.

You barely can get by.

But because we've built all of this bureaucracy, certainly in Cali— all I really know is California— and just the level of the government in all its forms is so big, you're paying all these taxes, and the taxes are coming out in all these hidden ways. Gas taxes, housing taxes that they don't call a housing tax, but it's there. Everywhere you look, they've got these things that they're charging you, right? But which makes everything more expensive. And what, what do you get for it? This bloated bureaucratic government that's not actually helping, and it's actually making it harder to run a business, harder to build anything. And so I think that's— and this is the— I used to call it this doom loop, that the Democrats who are in charge, even they, they get it, right? They get that people are really struggling, people can't afford stuff. So what's their response? Oh, we gotta, you know, make— give them more welfare benefits. We gotta take— put taxes up in order to get more money to redistribute. But that just makes everything more expensive. They never think about, well, why don't we just cut the costs? Why don't we just reduce the amount that we're taking so that people can have more?

Yeah, but then they would have to cut out their slush fund, because that's really what it is. It's a big-ass, big-ass slush fund. One of the things that we pointed out was that the number of people that, uh, moving to California and even living in California, it shrank, but government doubled.

Yes, it's— there's so many insane facts like that, right?

Where they say, oh, we've created so many jobs. Like, really? Have you? Have you really created an actual job, or have you figured out another way to increase the government and make more taxes work for whatever the fuck—

exactly—

NGO you have or nonprofit you have. Or like someone pointed out that there's this guy, this guy, these really funny reels on Instagram and how much things cost versus like what you could get for. And, you know, he was talking about like some new thing they're doing for the convention center. It's like a $5 billion renovation. And he was like listing all the different things. And one of them that you could give, like, every single person on Skid Row some fucking preposterous amount of money. And it's— you just realize like, oh, they don't want to fix any of this. Like the people that are working for the homeless, he was talking about the average salary was like $800,000.

There was just one last week. This woman runs a homeless nonprofit, $1.6 million a year salary. Homeless nonprofit.

Nonprofit.

Exactly.

That's what she's killing it.

Exactly. There's another one.

She's a millionaire.

There's another one yesterday. He's like, I don't know, some business like— but it's again, it's a nonprofit, $2.6 million a year. You know, it's just—

and here's the most important thing. The homelessness only got worse. Exactly. Like in the private sector, imagine if you were a CEO of a company that was just losing insane amounts of money and never completing its tasks, never doing what it set out to do. I know.

This is the main thing. I think it's like the more I look at it, the more insane it is. And everyone just looks at it and I don't— no one's ever pointed this stuff out. Like, they all just— the government just makes everything so expensive in California. Everyone says, oh, it's so expensive. What are we going to do?

We'd better give them more welfare benefits because we better have a billionaire wealth tax.

Billionaire wealth tax.

Steal money from the most— the richest people without addressing fraud and waste at all.

But by the way, the richest people already pay. About half the income tax, the top 1%.

Yes. So there's a small number of people in California alone that are responsible for an extraordinary amount of the tax base. Yeah, just a very small number of people, and you're scaring them away. And they just—

they don't have that mentality of cutting costs like any normal business.

They get paid no matter what. Exactly. This is what I said at during COVID I said I think the mayor should get paid dependent upon the GDP of the city. Yeah, so like if the city— like if you lose 70% of the restaurants, which like Los Angeles did during— yes, Garcetti should have lost 70% of his paycheck. You should— if you lose like 70% of businesses, you should lose 70% of your income. And I guarantee you they would be more friendly to business if that happened.

But this— but exactly. And they don't care. And this is what happens, I think, when you've got this one-party rule thing that's been going on for 16 years now. They've run everything. They don't care because they think they'll be in power forever. And it just doesn't matter.

And it seems like they will. Like, look what they did to Spencer Pratt.

I know it's crazy.

And what they did to Spencer Pratt was so transparent that even Democrats admit there's something weird about the fact that Nithya Raman all of a sudden got way more votes than Karen Bass, way more in the mail-ins. And people voted for an increase in taxes.

I know, it's just—

that doesn't make any sense. Nobody votes for an increase in taxes.

And actually, in recent years in California, anything like that has been voted down.

Right. And just in the last few years, it was only the mail-in ballots that turned it.

Well, look, they— this is the—

I would say fucking dirty people.

Well, people bring it up the whole time, and I say, yeah, whatever. This is the— it's— they've made it legal, right? This is not illegal. And, and the scam is so bad. We've looked into a few of these, uh, we were just, you know, through the year we've been looking, we're following some of this money. Um, it's just everywhere you look. So cannabis, right? They legalized cannabis, Prop 64 in California, and there's a tax. And the tax is— part of the selling it to the public was, we're going to have the tax and it's going to pay for substance abuse prevention. Isn't that nice? Yeah. So then they— so we looked into it. $350 million of that goes to this nonprofit with some nice-sounding name about health. And then you actually track the money They give out these little grants, million each, million here, $750,000 there, to 500 or so other nonprofits. And then you look at what they do— voter registration, ballot harvesting, all of this shit. I mean, this is what they do, stealing money, and it's— and we're paying for it. And there's so many examples. We've just found a few of them.

I mean, remember, they've doubled the budget of California, more than double, in the last 10 years. These are the numbers. This year the budget is just over $350 billion, the total budget. 10 years ago it was $170 billion, and everything's worse.

Crazy.

It's so bad. There's my other favorite example is that— and there's so many, I just— every day you learn about these crazy things. Prisons, right? They've been shutting the prisons, which I totally disagree with because whatever, that's a different story. But in the time they, they basically cut the prison population— it's not quite half, but nearly— the budget has doubled.

Well, I mean, what is so transparent? Like, look what they did in Los Angeles with the fire relief money.

Yes, yeah, Fire Aid. That was disgusting. So disgusting. Yet people, good-hearted people, wanting to help, their own money— that's supposed to be charity.

Yes.

And it's going into this political slush fund.

It went all of it into nonprofits.

Yeah.

And not just one nonprofit, like 200 different nonprofits.

Exactly.

Spencer Pratt laid it all out, like how they do and what they do. And no money went to anybody who lost their home.

None.

And which is— should be illegal. That's not—

they legalized all of this. That's the point. And so I always say, yeah, we've got this system, but there's only one answer in advance of being able to get in power and do something about it is We just got to get every vote. We've got to get every vote. And I know people look at this race and say, well, you're never going to win. It's hopeless. I don't think that's true. I think that actually people are really pissed off if you give them a sense that we can really— this is not a hopeless cause. And I think we're showing that we've just got to— I mean, he's— I've got this guy running against me who's just a complete joke. I mean, he's—

who is it?

He's called Javier Becerra. He was Biden's Health Secretary. He was— I mean, I, I want to say one thing before I say the most important thing about him, but since we've been just been having a go at him telling the truth about what he did as Biden's Health Secretary, his score has been coming down with not that much effort from us. And we don't have money, we're a scrappy startup, right? They've got this big machine, the government unions, they just, you know, roll on. He's, he's like, the first poll that came out in the, in the race was just after the primary. It looks, it's over, what's the point, you know, 61-36. He had 61, I had 36. The next one is like 55, this is just the other week, 55, I think I had 37. There's one we just heard about where the gap's under 10%. So no one wants this to go on in California. There's a majority who want to get rid of this. But it's just been this sense that it's impossible and we just have to put up with it or leave. And I think we got to— if we change that attitude, I think people are going to vote this regime out.

It's so bad.

Anyway, the thing we've seen, the map, the electoral map that they put out from 2020 versus 2024, and the difference being you look at all the counties that went red. Yeah, that used to be blue where people are freaked out. The problem is these high population urban areas where people live in these liberal bubbles, which is— Los Angeles is the craziest version of that.

And Los Angeles County is 23% of the vote in all of California.

Let's put this into perplexity. Ask perplexity how many people in Los Angeles are on SSRIs.

Oh, okay. I didn't think that's where you were going.

I would like to know.

Okay.

I— well, I think there's a lot of people that are— they're medicated, and it's, it's part of what helps them agree to this nonsense is that they're in this zombie catatonic state from antidepressants and antipsychotics and anti-this and anti-that and anxiety medication, and they're fucking cloudy. They don't see things, and they're surrounded by this echo chamber of people that only agree with them. No reliable public count of current SSRI users specifically in Los Angeles, but a reasonable rough estimate for Los Angeles County is on the order of 500,000 to 700,000 adults. Not a precise head— precise headcount. Now, how many people are in Los Angeles?

There's 10 million in the county.

Okay, I think that's way low. I think that's way low. I bet it's 10 times that. I bet it's everyone. I think— no, all bullshit aside, I bet there's a few million. Los Angeles County has roughly 7.8 to 8 million adults. If about 11 to 17% take antidepressants, roughly 60 to 70% of antidepressant users take an SSRI. The implied range is 530 to 950, so maybe a million. I think it's probably a few million. I know a lot of people that are on them, man. A lot. I think it's like more represented in Los Angeles. There's also this idea that you need a medication because you have an imbalance. You need medication.

This overmedicating, it's really bad.

Well, also the imbalance thing has been disproven. Yeah, it's not real. That's not what it is. And then there's also, there's a reality of your physical being, okay? If you live a sedentary lifestyle, you eat terrible food, your physical body is going to feel like shit. And you're not gonna be happy. That's just how it works as a human being.

Totally right.

That's it.

It's like if you're feeling down or pissed off, like, literally, don't— do some exercise.

My friend Hasan Ahmad, who's a— you'll see him tonight at the Mothership, hilarious comedian— he has a great bit about like the people that are in these commercials that are playing basketball. They take the medication, now they're playing basketball and drinking water and having fun. He goes, yeah, that's the actual solution to depression. Yes, it's not taking the antidepressant, right? It's fucking do something athletic.

Yes, get active.

Water, have a community that you enjoy hanging out with. Like, that's what keeps people from being depressed. And they've been sold this bill of goods that you have a chemical imbalance in your brain. Well, that, that narrative completely was never supported by science and has now been completely dismissed. Yeah, that's not true.

We're just doing it still. I mean, funnily enough, that was what I, I, I— one of the chapters in that book, 2015 book More Human, was about health, and it was all that. That's what I wrote about, which is this is crazy. We've got— and in fact, when I was in 10 Downing Street, you, you know, you— I was the senior advisor to the Prime Minister, and you're getting— and mainly I focused on domestic policy. That's what I focused on. And you're there, you're at, you know, in 10 Downing Street, you get meeting— you can have meetings with kind of everyone will come in and have a meeting. And I was really focused. You've got the National Health Service, which is what the left want here, the Medicare the single-payer healthcare, whatever. That's what there is in the UK, and it's funded by the government, by taxpayers, 100%. And so it's part of the budget, which is one of the problems. It's always competing for money against everything else. And so there's a real reason to try and get the cost down because you're funding it out of the budget for everything else. And so health promotion is, or should be, a really big part of it.

And I wanted to really do much more on that, that you should actually use the National Health Service to try and make people healthy instead of all the sickness stuff. So I had all these meetings, um, trying to understand, you know, the Royal College of this, the Royal College of that, all the cancer people, all— they all came in. It was so hilarious after kind of months of these meetings of like, what do we need to do to make people healthy? It's the simple basic things in the end. What you just said. It's like diet, nutrition. Exactly. Eat healthy, take exercise, sleep enough, um, drink a lot of water. Exactly. Yeah, all of those things. Like, all these geniuses of science and whatever. I said, honestly, it's so basic. Um, but then, and I was just seeing today, there's this awful story about the mother who killed the children. Ugh, awful story. The mother and, and she had really bad depression after postpartum depression and was asking for help and all this, and they just kept giving her this medication. And she was saying, I think there are texts to her mother saying, this new medication they've got me on is really making me feel even more anxiety, and I don't know what's going on.

Help, help, help. And they, and they, they showed all the medication she was on in the run-up to this. It's shocking, like so shocking, just the amount of stuff they're loading her up with that must have sent her over the edge.

100%. I mean, when you look at the commercials for these things and then you see the possible side effects, like who in their right mind would take something for depression which has side effects which causes suicidal ideation. What? I thought you were curing depression. Your side effect is I might want to kill myself? Like, it's like, this is a cure for depression too. Blow your brains out. No more depression. Like, it's a cartel. It's a cartel in the United States. I mean, it is a sanctioned tax— it's publicly traded. It's a fucking cartel, and they buy off politicians and they pass through regulations.

I see not just on this but on, on everything. Again, it's just an eye-opener. I kind of suspected it, but when you see just how cynical it is, this kind of corrupt— I don't know what you want to call, you know, machine politics, this— I don't know. In Sacramento where they literally buy what they want. They buy the legislators that pass the bills that help their interest, whatever it is.

Yeah.

And that's why nothing really changes and no one knows what's going on. No one follows it. There's all these laws they passed that end up with things happening in the real world that normal person would say, how the fuck did that happen?

Exactly.

Well, that's, you know, 3 years ago someone put in a bill that was probably written by the lobbyist for whoever it was, that even the legislator who put their name on it probably never read it. And then suddenly it's the law and all these bad things happen. And that's what's going on.

Now, what could you do differently if you get in office? Like, how much of this crazy entangled machine can you unwind?

No, let's imagine. Yeah, yeah, no, let's imagine.

I've thought of people wake up, they go, Steve Hilton's making a lot of sense, let's vote him in. And then even the liberals like secretly run out and vote you in. It's got to be too big to rig because that's the thing. Yes, because the, the mail-in ballots—

by the way, can you, can you believe— and I will get into it— but did you see Kamala Harris the other day? No, she was at some conference or whatever doing her sort of, maybe I'll run for president.

Yeah, good luck. Jeez, I know the last one was pretty successful for only spending $1 $1.4 billion.

I know, she's very good candidate.

She lost every single swing state.

It's very funny, I sort of talk about it a lot because my guy, Becerra, he was asked the same question that she was asked. You remember when she went on The View?

Right, right.

And it was like, what would you do different? She's, oh, nothing comes to mind. Really? You haven't thought? So he was asked, but Sarah, my opponent, and the guy, he was on CNN, the guy says, look, it's obvious things aren't going well. To be fair, the interviewer said, look, we got the highest, I can't, he listed a few of the things, highest unemployment rate in America, which by the way, no one can believe, but we have the highest unemployment rate of all 50 states, highest poverty rate, cost of living's a nightmare. You know, what would you have done differently? Um, he says, well, it can't be that bad because people are still coming to Disneyland and the beaches. That's what he said. And then he said, well, so no policy changes? No. Anyway, Carmela was at this thing the other day and she starts talking about the election and how— and I don't know if she wasn't aware that Trump And MAGA had this slogan that was a massive part of their thing, too big to rig. So she starts saying it as if it was a completely new thing. She said it the other day, you know, the thing that we have to do is make sure we get a really, you know, we got to get everybody, you know, to coin a phrase, we have to make it too big to rig.

Like she said, no way.

She said it.

No way. Yeah. So she's alleging that it was rigged the last time.

I have no idea what she's talking about.

Like, I don't know what amount of election fraud there is, but it's not zero.

It's not zero.

It's never been zero. And the real weird one for me was how many more votes Biden got in 2020 than any other president ever. We have a lot of work to do because, you know, these folks are cheating. They're trying to rig the system. They're trying to draw maps, all of it. What, you mean stuff that the Democrats have already done?

Exactly, it's so hilarious.

This is crazy. We have to make it too big to rig. We have to turn out in big numbers, jump all over these obstacles they're trying to throw our way. We have to make it too big to rig. What are you saying? Like, how are they cheating? Like, how is she alleging they're cheating? Look at her face. The idea that that's the best they can do is so insane. It's so wild. It's so wild. And it's because if you want to run for politician, they will— if you don't follow their narrative and their plan to a fucking T, they're gonna come for you and they're gonna destroy you. And it's usually some creepy sexual thing, or they're gonna find someone who says that you did something to them in college or high school or whatever it is. And they'll come up with as many things and throw them your way, as many things as they can find and they get rid of you and they get rid of all of them.

I mean, lucky they don't think I've got any chance of winning. I think that's why they haven't done that. But just, just on that though, it's, it's interesting. It makes me think this, this whole system, this corrupt thing that I've encountered— and I don't want to lose your question about, um, what I would do, because I've thought about that a lot— but it just, it's a, it's sort of amazing but not amazing. I knew it was like this but to see it is something else.

The scale of it.

Yes. So even things you might not imagine, like, um, okay, a couple of— so there's the Chamber of Commerce, right? It's called Cal Chamber in California, and it's all the big businesses. And like, it's a— running a business in California is an absolute nightmare. That's why they're all leaving. That's why Elon left. That's why so many companies—

they lost in and out And every day there's a new one that's announced.

And then every day I meet business owners, big, small, medium, all set, who say, we're just hanging on to see if you can make it. And if you don't, we're out, right? Every day. Chief Executive magazine has an annual survey of business conditions. But like, yeah, I think it was out in April, California, 50th out of 50 states. Okay, and I think it's been like that for 12, 13 years. So it's like a disaster that what's going on. The Becerra who's running against—

50th out of 50 states for business climate. So Alaska's better, every state in America is better. North Dakota, South Dakota, Florida, Tennessee.

All right, so, so you would think, you would think that when you've got a choice between two people, right, one of whom is explicitly says, I'm not going to change anything. That's Becerra. And me, who's someone with business— most of my career has been in business. When you do the ballot, you're allowed 3 words to describe yourself. I actually wanted to do it fairly because I've done a bunch of different things. And so I went through every year since I left Oxford, 1990, it's 36 years, and the majority of my career has been in business. And most of those years running my own businesses. So I, I put small business owner. That's the three words: small business owner. And like, in a choice between that, you would think the California Chamber of Commerce, which represents business, would obviously want the guy who's pro-business instead of the guy who's going to keep up this—

anyway, there's the money still there for now, and they're getting that money.

Well, there is the— there's this—

what it is, this kind of—

yes, it's all of that crowd, right? And we have these endorsement meetings, and then they pick him— they, they endorse the other guy, and then they say, we think— that statement was so full of shit. It was like, oh, we— it's time for unifying, blah blah, some completely bullshit political thing. Now, of course, because I went in there and I said, we got to change direction, these policies are hurting business, whatever. I just said what I think. And they went for him because they— all they actually care about is the power, and they think he's going to win, and so they want to be in with him.

Yeah.

And then the other one that was like that, that was in a way even more shocking, was the police. So the police, whatever it's called, police— PORAC, the Police Officers Association, something— their union, that same kind of thing. They— you, you go to them and you, you know, try and get their endorsement. I, by the way, I said at the beginning of this whole process, it's a waste of time because they, they, they will only care about their thing, that they want to get more money for whatever it is. And so I don't want to give them that because that's wrong. And so they won't endorse me. I'm just telling you, sure enough, we have this meeting and I'm completely on the side of the law and order thing. It's gone crazy, the defund the police the insanity of how they deal with crime. We got to reverse all that, prison closures, all these things. And he's not said anything about that. He's just more of the same insanity. They endorse him. And then they told us why, because he promised to deliver on the one thing they really cared about, which is some bill that would increase their pensions.

Why don't you agree to that bill?

Because we— the pension— one of the reasons that the taxes are so high and the— and everything is like, for example, you look at schools. Everywhere I go, parents are saying, what's going on? We pay the highest taxes anywhere, like state income tax, property tax, all these taxes, and then we have to pay The schools are asking us to pay for basic supplies like paper, books, like cleaning materials. And the lottery money is supposed to go to schools as well. And they're saying, what is going on? Parents are really furious about it. One of the reasons is because of the way they've done the pensions for the teachers. You know, you want people to have good retirement, that's true. But like a fifth, I think it's about a fifth of the money before it's even spent in the schools goes to the pensions. It's a really, really bad situation.

I'm torn because I think they deserve pensions, particularly the police. And I think I'd like to know what percentage of the budget— I mean, think about, listen, let's, let's talk about money that's gone to places where it vanished, like the homeless. $24 billion. Yeah, at least, at least. And even though they've tried to get an audit of it, Newsom vetoed that, stopped them from doing it.

He vetoed it, exactly.

Twice, right?

And, and, and in LA, there was a parallel in LA. There was a lawsuit that ended up with the judge demanding a similar audit, and the estimate was just for LA, it was $2 billion, and Karen Bass vetoed the audit in LA.

Let's imagine that $2 billion instead went to fund the police. Yes. Better training, you know, better conditions, better morale, better pensions, higher quality of people that you're hiring.

Totally agree with that. We need to massively increase the numbers of police right now.

Imagine what an impact that would have on the encampments, on enforcing these laws. Like, you already have laws, they're just not enforcing.

100%.

You're not supposed to—

the homeless encampments are illegal.

They're illegal.

That's always saying— my first point on my plan is enforce the law. They're illegal.

Well, imagine what it's done to real estate in downtown.

You know, it was the Downtown Real Estate Group, business group, that filed that lawsuit that I was talking about for LA. Exactly.

Los Angeles is the only place in the country that has a useless downtown.

It's amazing.

One of the biggest cities in the— and I forgive— I mean, forgive me if you have a great business in downtown and you love the funky aspect of being There's wonderful restaurants in downtown. I've traveled to them, but it's fucking sketchy. It's scary. I took my kids once to get donuts in downtown, and we were walking on the street, like, every step of the way you're like, is this guy gonna attack us? Is that guy crazy?

I literally had it the other night. We got in from somewhere down to— we're staying downtown right by City Hall and got in quite late. I wanted something to eat. The hotel didn't have anything, whatever. And so I just walk around and trying to find— it's a Saturday night, but it's not super late, it's like 8, 9 PM. It's just unbelievable.

Zombies.

Zombies. The stink of like shit and piss. Yeah, I mean, it's disgusting.

Shit and piss everywhere, and it's a public health problem.

And you walk around and you think, how is this possible? It's the second city of America. We're the richest country in the world. This is— and we're the richest state. I mean, you're being ripped off. —like that, and this is what we end up with.

Let's talk about just Skid Row.

But I agree with you on the police. I mean, LAPD is saying that by the time the Olympics is 2 years away, they will have half the number of officers that they should have. Half. And yet our taxes are the highest in the country. That's correct. They've just increased the taxes in LA. Local sales tax gone up.

What I was getting to was imagine Skid Row. So Skid Row is roughly 50-something blocks, right? Yeah, so 50 blocks where no one wants to buy a building, 50 blocks where no one wants to put up a business. No one wants to lease a building for 10 years if it's— you've got encampments right in front of it. Like, what? You can't even clean them up. You can't tell them to move. You can't ask them to not shit on your porch. It's just unbelievable. There's nothing you could do. So just think about all the tax revenue that's being lost, all the business being lost, and all of those areas in downtown that is completely unsafe and contaminated. It's just unbelievable.

The last time I went I've been a few times. We went with this— I don't— I— they've sort of destroyed the word nonprofit now. I don't even want to say that. Like an actual charity, like a really nice— a real one, a real one who'd done beautiful work. It started off, they were trying to save the dogs, and what they're doing with the dogs is just unbelievable, using the dogs to test their drugs.

They use the dogs to make sure the drugs don't have to—

disgusting. Anyway, so they started off with that. It was just a woman who's driving by and saw a dog in distress This is a few years ago, and around that has built this beautiful charity. It's going there. We were there on a Sunday. They're giving out clothes and stuff, trying to help people, and she knows all the people. But this time, for some reason, I was even more infuriated than before, because it's like, if you're the mayor of LA or the governor of California and this is going on, what are you doing? How can you do anything else right before cleaning this up?

It's so What was there when they got there, and it's sort of accepted that Skid Row in particular is always gonna be there. It's so bad. It's been bad for a long time. Yeah, you know, I did Fear Factor in downtown LA. We filmed a lot of our episodes in downtown LA because there was a lot of abandoned buildings because it's Skid Row. That's a big part of it. But also Los Angeles lost a lot of its manufacturing, just kind of like evaporated for whatever reasons. So one time I was driving home and I took the wrong turn. And I was like, what the fuck is this? It was just an entire street filled with people in cardboard boxes and tents and garbage everywhere, just piles everywhere. I was like, this is great. And this was like 2004. Yeah, 2005 maybe. Yeah, it was bad back then. It's just tucked away into this old place. Yeah, we looked at it. There's a documentary about the Cecil Hotel. Because there was a woman who drowned in one of the tanks, and apparently they thought that she was murdered. But then when they got the surveillance footage, it seems like she had a schizophrenic episode.

She stopped taking her medication and she jumped into the tank and drowned in there. So it was this whole thing of what the Cecil Hotel used to be like, and that these people that come from other countries, they go, oh, we're gonna rent this hotel in downtown LA and must be nice. It's a historic hotel. It's been around since 1835 or whatever the fuck it is. Yeah. Oh, this should be great. And then you get there, you're like, holy fuck, you're in the middle of Skid Row. And it was part of the documentary was explaining how bad this area got.

It's so bad. And, and it's also— there's something about the— they're just— the squalor, the filth, the, the just just total disrespect.

They have medieval diseases that are emerging.

Yeah, we haven't seen in like 100 years. It's unbelievable. And I just think that it's amazing to me, it's truly amazing that, that this just rolls on and like nothing happens, right?

It's not a state and national emergency.

Scandal of the highest propor—

you know, but no one goes there. That's the thing. As long as it stays contained— is this— this was what this documentary was alleging, is that the practice of moving people to Skid Row started a long time ago. And what it was is to clean up Los Angeles and Beverly Hills. They'd find vagrants, they'd grab them, bring them to downtown, drop them off there.

That's how it got started.

And then they kept them there. They literally contained them there.

Yeah, but not anymore. I mean, you see everywhere.

Well, they don't have to. 'Cause now they know this is the place where you can go and you can get drugs and you can get food.

And you get drugs from the government.

I mean, that's the point. The government gives them drugs?

Yes, they do, from this, what's called, you know, this harm reduction, they call it. What do they give them? What drugs? They give, they're opioids. They give them opioids as a substitute for fentanyl. That's dangerous.

So what kind of opioids? Are they giving them like methadone? Which is not really technically an opiate.

I can't remember. We went there, they wouldn't let us in, actually. We tried to film inside. There's a guy just did get inside, Christopher Ruffo from Manhattan Institute, and, and he got— and he made a film about the crack pipes they're giving out, or whatever. They give out crack? Yeah, he did a little— I mean, I don't know if that was a— he made of— I don't know, I didn't see it myself, caring for those people. But it's just ridiculous. You've got— but it's everywhere. It's not just Skid Row. That's the thing that's so like this. I mean, I'm on the road the whole time. I see the whole state like probably not many people do. And just— there's something about the degradation, the squalor in so many— not everywhere, of course. It's beautiful. I love California.

Like, Beverly Hills is gorgeous still.

There's still a lot of places.

Yeah, but even a whole lot more breaking and entering. Exactly. A whole lot more home invasions.

The home invasion is a huge thing. I mean, that's why we— one of the things, again, we're just trying to make a difference here. You know, you've got, um, one particular thing with these home invasions, they're all wearing masks now. It's like a really big part, which didn't used to be the case. And so we've been working on a plan that if you get enhancements for your sentencing just for covering yourself up, because we've got to try and— there's just like, there's no interest in trying to—

not only that, there seems to be an interest in letting people out of jail who've committed violent crimes, which I I would only do if I wanted to destroy a city. It's crazy. If you wanted to destroy a city, you would do it exactly the way they're doing it. And then the other thing is the most progressive DAs who are willing to let people out no matter what. And then you use a bunch of words like racism, systemic racism, whatever, discrimination. This is the reason why Mike has robbed 99 people over the last 12 years. And, and that—

well, the one thing that's good news though is the new DA is pretty good. Nathan. Oh, that's good. He's good, he's good. I supported him. He's— I saw him the other night, so he's really doing a good job. Shows that you can make a change, actually, right? Um, I mean, look, he's up against the whole system and the political system, which is still captured by that kind of insane ideology. And so much of what you see going wrong in California is exactly that, is ideology over anything that's practical.

Yes. Yeah, and it's also you have to adhere to the narrative.

Yes.

Or you will be punished. And so everyone's scared, so they say a bunch of things that they, you know, yeah, they, they think make sense.

There was a really like unbelievable example of it. There was a, a Democrat state legislator, I think somewhere like Santa Cruz, somewhere like that. This is a couple of years ago, who voted the wrong way on a bill that one of the government unions was pushing. I can't remember the details, but it was that he like offended the— maybe it was the university teachers, something like that. Um, a Democrat. And then they then funded the campaign of the Republican just to teach them not to step out of line.

It's amazing, just Well, there's a bunch of Republicans that, you know, they like to call RINOs, you know, that, you know, Republican in name only. There's a lot of those folks that it's— they're basically Trojan horses, you know. Like, I think we have a real problem in this country where there's only two parties, you know. I just— I think it's crazy. There's so many people like me, for instance, that agree with a lot of the things that the left pushes and agree with many of the things that the right pushes. But things that— some of the things the right pushes are fucking ridiculous, and some of the things the left pushes are fucking ridiculous. But you choices. Yeah. And you're defined by the worst members of each party. You're defined by the dumbest MAGA people versus the fucking, you know, the Portland people. It's like, these are, these are your options. You have to be completely ridiculous people who believe in non-binary folk. And then you've people that are, you know, think this is a Christian nation and we should kick out all the Muslims.

Like, yeah. So we, it's, it's interesting because I thought about this when Not that I didn't think about it that much, but there are a few people— because I think for what I'm about to say, it doesn't work— but a few people say, oh, you should run as an independent, you shouldn't run as a Republican. Yeah, and you know, I am independent-minded, and I've never run for office. I'm not part of this machine. I don't— I'll just say what I think, especially because no one thinks I'm going to win. I might as well just go for it, say what I think. But, um, I— exactly right, you won't win. Yeah, you won't win. There's just no way.

Like when Bobby Kennedy was telling me that he was gonna run as an independent, I was like, sheesh. Yeah, like, sure, Michael Shellenberg, you fucking can't win.

Do you know Michael Shellenberg? He's fantastic. Yeah, he's great. And he ran for governor twice as an independent. Yeah. And I remember, you know, I tried to help. I put him on my show.

He knew he wasn't gonna win.

Do you think that was the—

but yeah, I mean, he's, you know, it's good for his career. Okay. And it gives him an opportunity to speak his mind. He says a lot of very, very interesting and intelligent things. Yes, he's great. Yeah, I mean, he's, he's great at exposing a lot of horseshit. Yeah, you know, he's really good at that, and he's very meticulous, a good journalist.

No, I'm really doing it because I, I don't, don't laugh. I really believe that I can win for real.

Well, you might be able to because California is that fucked. California is that fucked that I think there's a lot of, look, we lived in a very liberal area when I lived in California. Everyone was very liberal, and it was normal. It was like, it was normal liberal, like what it used to mean. Like you believed in gay rights, you believed in women's rights, you believed in civil rights. Normal stuff. You believed in a social safety net. Normal stuff. Like that was what it used to mean to be a liberal. Bill Clinton liberal. That's right. From like the '90s. If you listen to Bill Clinton talk today, he sounds like he's running for Republican.

No, but, and on immigration, have you seen these clips that people—

Yes, yes. He's more MAGA. Hillary was the most MAGA. All right. She literally—

there's one the other day where she was that I hadn't seen before, which was so— it's like, we can't have all these illegal immigrants, and we have to— and it was about the healthcare. We can't be giving free healthcare to illegal immigrants because we cannot have incentives for more illegal immigrants to come.

Republican talking point. Amazing. Crazy. But it just shows you it's all bullshit. It's not real. Like, this idea that if you're on the left, you're supporting science, you're supporting civil rights, you're supporting— they're telling you that to get your vote so they can steal money. That's all it is. That's— as soon as you accept that, you realize like, oh, both parties are completely full of shit. They just fuck you in different ways.

There's definitely one thing I've noticed. There's, um, in— yeah, in the most of— in Sacramento, that in the legislature, they've I think they're just, I don't know, either they don't believe it or they've just been beaten down. And so you've had this, they've just gone along with it. But actually now you've got a few Republicans in California and they're friends of mine and we're working together. You wouldn't have heard of any of them, you know, people like Carl DeMaio, David Tangipahle, Ali Macedo, the new leader in the assembly, really actually have got this, you know, we're real kind of friends and allies in fighting back against the corruption. That's the big thing I think that you learn when you do— is the interest groups, the big business, the big unions, they just completely captured the government. And I think it's fair to say the Republicans have been part of that. But there's a group of us now who really don't buy it and we're fighting back. I think we can make a big difference. Difference. If we get, you know, if we can— they've got a two-thirds majority in the legislature. They call it a supermajority.

It's been like that for more than 10 years. So they can do whatever they want, the Democrats, and the Republicans have been kind of irrelevant. If we can just, you know, win a few more seats so they don't have a supermajority, and if I can get elected, and then we can start to chip away at it for sure.

I think it's important to not let either party have complete and total control. That's exactly right. And I don't think that's right. I don't I don't think this is just the Democrats. I think if the Republicans are in the same position, we have another unique set of corruption and problems that would be similar. Yeah, they'd be finding other ways to steal money. I mean, this is the fundament—

100% agree. I mean, that's what I say to Democrats, and we, you know, we can see in some of the numbers I'm doing well with independents. We're getting Democrats come to my events. One of the things I say is like, it's just not healthy to have one party running everything. And for the last 16 years, they— in California, they've had all the statewide elected positions, governor and the other ones, attorney general, whatever, two-thirds majority in both legislative chambers, every big city, every big county, the state Supreme Court, 6-1 Democrat appointees. They just rubber stamp what— whatever they want. And it's just not healthy. And it gets into this mentality of arrogance where they just feel they can do whatever they want and no one's ever gonna, you know, stop them. Yeah, that's where we're at.

And again, if the Republicans were in the same position of power, you'd have another different set of problems that was probably very similar because it's just how people operate when there's— when they have control, when they have complete— it's just like if you have an authoritarian government. Yes, that's exactly right. Similar kind of a situation. You have no, no one No one's challenging your position of power, and you get to do whatever you want to do. And then you have a bunch of people that funded your campaign and gave you a bunch of money, and then they're helping you out with this, and business deals to your uncle, and this and that.

Yeah, just now in Hungary with Viktor Orbán. So I know Hungary well because it's— my family still live there. And funnily enough, it was 16 years he was in power, same amount of time as the Democrats in California. And by the end It's all exactly what you're talking about, like just unbelievable levels of corruption.

Yeah, and it's always— if they have total control, you're gonna be corrupt, especially if they don't have any oversight, if they can just get away with it. Like this homeless thing where they've lost the $24 billion and the governor could say, nope, don't look into that. Stamp. You could veto that. How are you— how is that legal? How is it legal that you could veto something?

Yeah, and actually the amazing thing about that is that It was even the Democrat supermajority that did that, right? So the process was the state auditor, it was a Republican legislator that asked the state auditor to look at it. So it was initiated by a Republican. State auditor publishes the report, $24 billion missing. The legislature as a whole, which is two-thirds Democrat-run, said, "We need a proper audit." It was these guys. It was the Democrats.

Yes. It was everyone. Yeah, because those Democrats weren't completely corrupt.

It's amazing, you know, they like—

You'd have to be completely corrupt to not look into that. I know, it's amazing.

And then the bullshit excuse that they come out, oh, it's not necessary because of—

Oh, it's not necessary to look at where $24 billion went and not just didn't work, but homelessness increased by substantial margin.

Well, because the money— the answer to the question is very obvious. —when we say that term homeless industrial complex, what is it? You look at it, it's basically got two parts to it. You've got the nonprofits, like we talked about, that just keep getting the money for, you know, they've actually made it illegal to solve the problem. So they've— no, I'm not joking. They've— it's illegal to— for state money to go to any of these organizations that require any kind of response from the homeless person. So you can't require, uh, addiction treatment, recovery, anything like that, job training, nothing. It's illegal. It's called Housing First. So like, obviously when you've got 80%— and the fentanyl is a really big part—

the idea that it's a housing issue is so preposterous too. So you get—

so you've got nonprofits, but then the other part of it, which is where actually the bulk of the money is going, these crony developers the, uh, there's a very small group of developers, house builders that build these apartment units. They called it permanent supportive housing, the other, you know, shelter. And they're, they're charging up to, I mean, a lowball estimate is about $600,000. There are some in LA, in the Bay Area that are $900,000, $1 million per unit to build. Right? I've got a friend that builds apartments in the Bay Area, right? You know, he said without all the government bullshit that goes around it, the layers of nonsense that they put in if it's taxpayer money, the union contracts that you've got to use this kind of material, the environmental, all this stuff, you could build it for a quarter, like $250,000 per door. They call it 4 times as much. That's where the money's going. And then You get the unit, whatever, they put the homeless person in there who's still addicted to fentanyl. And as I went again with a real charity in Venice, we went around a guy who's a recovered addict, recovering addict, and 23 years clean, and he's actually trying to help people.

He actually hired, you know, he rents Airbnbs and he does group recovery, and they have a, you know, recovery program they do together. He says, like, these guys that are getting the permanent supportive housing, it's like a second home because they're going back to the street to buy drugs, deal drugs, because they're addicts. Yeah. And you're not changing the behavior.

They're addicts and they're mentally ill. And so there's a massive influx of homeless people during the Reagan administration where they kind of like open the doors of the mental institution. Exactly. Well, we're not going to fund this anymore. Which is for public health and safety, that is a fucking terrible idea.

Yeah. And they— but then the other thing about that, I completely agree, is that they then— that's been incorporated, that idea that you can't have, um, mental institutions, insane asylums. There's this kind of general sense that that's barbaric and you don't want people in these institutions and it's better to have them cared in the community. So that's incorporated into Medicaid. And so often with government, you've got to look at the money flows. And one of the things that's still there is this rule called IMD, Institutions of Mental Disease. And the IMD rule is that there's no reimbursement from federal Medicaid to any treatment that happens in a facility with more than 16 beds. It's a very specific limit, 16 beds. Because they don't— it's all based on this philosophy of we don't want big mental institutions. Okay, so that means that there's no incentive to have modern large-scale mental health care because that's all these small things, because you don't get any money back.

I think people are also rightly suspicious of the potential for a medical health industrial complex. Definitely. And then that was— think of how many people— imagine if they could just— like, have you ever seen that video of there's a guy who gets pulled over and the cops on the spot tell him that he's been evaluated as being mentally unwell and he needs to come in? And the guy is completely calm and rational when he's talking to him, and he's like, well, make an appointment and I'll go and get evaluated. And he's like, no, we're gonna bring you in. He's He's like, what are you saying? Well, you've been deemed unwell. He's like, by who? I don't have— there's no ruling against me. It's really interesting. So apparently there's more to it. And this video went viral. Apparently there have been some videos of this guy where he posted online where he's acting kind of loony. I saw a couple of them. I was like, yeah, that's a little problem, a little problematic, but could also be he's acting out on camera. I don't know if he's doing this in real life, like just because someone's doing it in video.

So like a lot of people act out in video just for attention, or maybe that's how he blows off steam, says wild shit like, you know, we need to eat the earth, or I don't know what the fuck he's saying. So there's— but the video is very disturbing because in that moment, if these police officers in Canada are supposed to be evaluating someone who doesn't have an official psych evaluation where he's been brought in and they just said, you know, you have to be institutionalized So that hasn't happened. And so they're pulling this guy over, and based on his interaction with them, he is completely calm and rational. In fact, like, charitably so, because they're saying something fucking totally preposterous, and he's not yelling. He doesn't raise his voice. He's coherent. He's articulate. I want you to watch it because it's kind of crazy. Yeah, that's terrifying. Jamie, I'm sure you could find it. Yeah, I was trying to find the update though.

That's really terrifying.

But let's just look at the actual video itself. Because the video itself is bizarre. Because without any context, and again, I think there is some context, there have been some videos where he acted nutty, and this guy might just be manic-depressive where he's capable of keeping it together, like to pretend he's normal when the cops are there, but then as soon as he's on his own, as no one's watching, he goes insane.

That is possible. But what were they— did they have any prior knowledge of him? What was that based on? They would—

someone had told them that he's off the rails, so they went in to go get him. But the thing is, shouldn't there be like some sort of an official psychiatric evaluation? Conservative influencer. Ah, he's a conservative influencer being held captive in Canadian— I don't know if that's real or not. I just was trying to wait so I could get to the video here. Okay, well, let's, let's watch the video. Put your headphones on because the video is kind of kooky. And this is Dr. Emery. He's a resident psychiatrist, senior resident. He's on a rotation with the CAR 87. We're part of a a program that includes Vancouver Coastal Health and, um, uh, the Vancouver Police. And what we do is we go to people, uh, when there's different reasons that come up. Every case is a little different, and we go to people to see them where they are, especially if there's been issues with trying to find them and talk to them. So in, in your case, um, I think You were certified under the Mental Health Act just— I don't know how long ago, but like maybe 3 weeks ago or 4 weeks ago.

Were you aware that Dr. Taylor saw you in a cafe? She didn't certify you. I think you filmed part of it. Yeah. Okay. And this is Dr. Emery. He's a— uh, and then she, um, uh, spoke with your family, um, got some more information. And, um, you know, you're gonna have to turn that off. Just one, one sec. What the officer just told me is that, um, you know, you and I can set up a meeting and we can chat then. So why don't we do that? Okay. Yeah, I'm not turning the camera off. I have a legal right to keep the camera on. If you don't want to make the appointment now, we can do it at another time. But, um, I, you know, that's what the officer just asked that we do, so why don't we do that? So I'm going to certify you under the Mental Health Act. We're going to bring you to a hospital, do testing on you, and, um, you're going to talk to a psychiatrist and a controlled environment because we don't believe that you're going to attend an appointment. You've been— I won't attend. I've never been given a chance to attend an appointment.

So he's certified? He's certified? I've never been, uh, and then certified? I've never been given a chance to attend an appointment. What is going on? I haven't— I was never given a psyche vow or nothing. He just looked at me and said, you're certified. Yeah, okay, so I don't know why, but it's up to the doctor.

So if you— but no, he didn't even give me a—

he didn't even give me an eval. He just looked at me and said, I'm certified. Man. You know, please, please consider what you're doing, and please think about the fact that I'm more than happy to come in for an appointment. I'm happy to go through and do everything properly, okay? I just— I've been completely compliant with everything. Yes, you've been really good with me, Nicholas, but listen, that's his call, and unfortunately we can't— he hasn't talked to him. You're interacting with me at a very regular— I've never given a chance. So I had some eggs and stuff for breakfast this morning. Yeah. They didn't put drapes, so I had to tape this up because my window didn't have drapes. And so all night there's just light beaming into my room, so I couldn't sleep last night. So I demanded that they give me tape and stuff to put on my windows so that I could sleep tonight. I'm like one of the only rooms that has no drapes. Shangri-La, baby. So I had some— How fucking strange. This is crazy strange. So here's the thing. Like, this doctor ran into him somewhere. Yeah. And said, I'm certifying you.

Based on what? That's insane. And is he really a conservative influencer or is that a narrative? Like, I don't understand what that means. Like, if you are quote unquote conservative and you have 1,000 people on your Instagram and you rant and rave, you know, in a manic-depressive manner. Is that— are you a conservative influencer now, or is that like rage bait to get them to say like— but here's the thing, like, Canada has socialized medicine and they also have insane government overreach. Exactly. And if there was someone who was a rabble-rouser online and that person happened to be acting a little kooky, wouldn't that be a great time? But meanwhile, how many fucking liberal— this is Vancouver, which is like Portland on steroids. Like, how many kooky fucking people on the left are being pulled into mental hospitals and making these similar videos? Fucking zero. Which is a little odd, but it doesn't mean that this guy's not a little off the rails, because the videos that I saw— see if you can find some videos of him off— they might have been pulled from the internet, but a bunch of people were saying, hold on, there's more to this.

And they were showing some of the— here's the other problem: I don't know if those videos are real. Those videos could be AI. You know, in this day and age, it's almost impossible to tell. You could say you have video of this guy, you'd say, have this guy screaming shit stuff about needing a vagina in the middle of his back. You could have anything, you could say anything.

But this is why you gotta be so careful about authoritarianism creeping into government. Yes, really, is that right there?

First of all, I don't like his backseat. Seat, all that shit, like boxes and stuff. That looks a little kooky. Like, that fits that he might be losing his marbles if he's got, you know, stacks of stuff. Unless he's like leaving an office and moving stuff and put it in his back seat temporarily. It's a weird sign when the entire back seat is filled with boxes and trash. You might be losing your marbles. Um, but he did sound like— there's no— in my eyes, listening to him talk, There's no indication that this guy's a threat to himself and he must be institutionalized. That guy's more than capable of speaking in a very rational manner. So even if he's nuts, he's not that nuts. There's a lot of nutty people.

Yes, who are much more dangerous. There's— to me, this is very like— we're talking about the medicalization and everything, and there's a trend here of this inhumanity. That is really, really dark. I mean, did you see the, um, I don't know if you follow the back and forth on, you know, with the AI guys on, um, regulating AI and whether AI is positive or negative, that whole debate, which, uh, which— did you see Amadei, the Anthropic guy? What it is, just in the last few days there was this— he, he was— it was, I think it was on, on one of the other, on All In. That's right. Someone, someone was talking about him wanting to have government, like hyping up the doom scenario from, from, from AI.

These guys that are hyping up the doom of AI are the actual people that were working on it. This is Dario Amadei, who's the CEO.

Yeah. And the founder of Anthropic. X, and he replied. And so the argument was he's hyping it up because he wants regulation, government regulation, that will protect the kind of big incumbents against, you know, competition. That was the argument. And then he replied to the argument by saying— he's had some stuff about regulation, then he did long posts on X, and the first one was about the regulation, but the second one was about actually, I'm not that I'm not Mr. Doom when it comes to AI. I've always said it can be really positive. And one of the things he pointed to was this essay that he wrote called Machines of Loving Grace, 14,000 words. And that was his response to like being characterized as Mr. Negative. When you look at this thing, it's so dark. Like he's going on about, well, there'll be no, um, we can foresee a time when humans human beings can't make useful contributions to the economy, um, and that people won't have much to do, and then they can play video games. And then at one point, this is what the thing that made me think of it, um, when he was raising, well, what are kids going to do, and there's— he starts going about, we have things like Ritalin and we know how to medicate people when they're depressed, so it's fine if they don't have a sense of Ritalin.

Are you kidding me? If they don't have a sense of worth, we'll numb them.

Literally, that's what he wrote. Yeah. And, and that's what he pointed to as him being Mr. Positive. It's just terrifying. So this is recently? This is last— within the last week.

Okay. And what is his position in the company?

CEO— is the founder of Anthropic. Okay. Like the main—

the big two. The programmers though are the ones that are leaving and writing poetry. They're giving up on society and they're hiding and waiting. You know, you hear about that. There's one lead programmer that read— he wrote some, like, basically a statement as he was leaving explaining the impending doom that is coming to civilization and how he's checking out and he's going to ride it out and see what happens. But he left the United States. I think he went to Ireland or somewhere like that. Okay. He said he's going to write poetry. Okay, like, okay, like, I mean, this is an existential crisis this guy's happening— having while he's working, while he's working on it, working on this thing and realizing this thing is conscious.

Well, that's one of the things that I feel is so odd about the, the two that have been most negative are, um, Amadei, Dario Amadei, he's Anthropic, and Sam Altman, OpenAI. Yeah, they're the most negative, or have been. And if you believe half the things they're saying, their lives are like, well, why are you doing it then if you think this is the end of the human whatever? I know they have dialed it back a bit, but why would you keep building something?

Did you see when Peter Thiel got asked whether or not the human race should survive? He paused for like fucking 15 seconds, like, um, um, I didn't read this, but complexity says The mention of Ritalin is like a good thing. Like, yeah, figured out how to improve ourselves with things like Ritalin, and using AI could potentially make it even better. I mean, come on, that AI will make Ritalin even better. No, no, no, just be on awesome drugs. No. Yeah, that will find better versions of drugs that are better than Ritalin. So instead of people finding meaning and purpose in life, just not how it's being talked about. Well, what is he saying? That says, right, why is he using Ritalin? It's not in the nothing to do and work and meaning discussion at appears the speculation is just about the future of neuroscience. Oh, I see what you're saying. So what they're saying, they're, they're talking about increasing the potency or making these things more effective for mental health interventions using AI. Okay, so he argues that AI-driven biology could enable much greater cognitive and mental health interventions than those available today. That's really wonderful if true, right?

Like, I, I personally know people that have been saved by SSRIs. Like, I'm not, I'm not a blanket, mm-hmm, SSRIs are bad. I have a friend that was severely depressed and suicidal, and I got him a psychiatrist, and he got him out, and he eventually got his life back in gear, weaned himself off them. Now he's great. So like, who knows, that guy could have made a hasty decision and taken his own life. And if he was in Canada, they might have probably fucking encouraged it, right? So he's fine now. It's just the problem is they're ridiculously overprescribed. Yeah, and there's another solution. The other solution is a natural human solution. Exactly. It doesn't involve medication. It involves exercise and nutrition and community. Exactly. And we can all encourage that for free. You know, you can fucking do push-ups and bodyweight squats. Doesn't cost you a nickel. You don't have to go to a pharmacy. Like, all these things, all these things are already here. Like, why are we developing addictive chemical solutions? Yes. Because they're all addictive. Every one of them. They're I have a good buddy right now who got off of them.

He's doing great, and now he's back on them again because he is— it just— his— he's fucked. His system's fucked because he's been on it for 20 years. And it's scary because I know people that have been on them that have done rash things, and then they just— they don't feel like they're themselves anymore. And then there's also the weird sexual side effects, the numbing— numbness of the genitals, inability to have orgasms. There's a lot of fucking weird shit attached to it when there's another solution. That's what's so— here's some interesting context. According to Snopes, that guy was arrested after he posted— oh, the Vancouver thing— after he posted what, this document? This is not solicitation. If you find this document unattended, do not remove it from the property where it was placed unless you're the owner of said property. Removing this document makes you criminally liable for indictable offense carrying a penalty of up to 10 years in prison. So what is this document? It's on Google Docs. It's just the brief, like, explanation. It's talking about how China and Canada are corrupt and making a dictator police state. It says China and the corrupt Canadian government are trying to turn Vancouver into a dictatorship police state.

China has been classified as high-risk adversary by all long-term democratic security alliances: NATO, NORAD, the Five Eyes Alliance, the Canadian Center for Cybersecurity, even Carney himself during elections. Carney has committed treason via secret Chinese policing and law enforcement MOU, illegal Chinese police stations in Vancouver, selling Vancouver to China via the Aboriginal Peoples' UNDRIP. Well, is he right? So that's right. I have no idea if he's right or not, but that's— it was saying he was not maybe an influencer, but a commentator. He had like 67,000 followers on Instagram. Oh, and this could be why they're saying he's nuts, right? I guess because he's, he's uncovering some shit that's probably going on. I was gonna say, this is not exactly out of the mainstream to be— Listen, the fucking mayor of Arcadia in California, they just found out, was a Chinese spy. The mayor of a city in California.

Just today there was more about Swalwell and Fang Fang, the Chinese spy.

Yeah, the guy wanted to be governor.

He's like shacked up with a spy. I wanted to make the joke. So the very first debate, the very first TV debate You know, you're kind of getting ready, you think, and I really wanted to make a sort of Fang Fang Bang Bang joke. Fang Fang Gang Bang. You know, it's an obvious joke, right?

So he admitted to physical relations? He denied it for years.

All the time, denied it.

So just today he admitted it?

I think it's just in the news today.

I don't know what happened. Well, was he trying to make a comeback?

Yeah, I swung bang the spy. Whoopsies. But anyway, I really wanted to make this joke. Book, um, about him, you know, the Fang Fang. It's just so—

you can't resist it, right? It's a funny name. Exactly.

Fang Fang Bang, whatever. Anyway, so, and then he didn't show up, and then, and I think, well, he denied that. It's— can I really say that, you know? Right. You've got to be fair. You've got to try and be good for you. So, but then he didn't show up to the debate because he claimed that there was— I don't know, he had some vote or whatever.

Well, I never got to debate him. The idea that this kid in, in Canada is being brought into for mental health evaluation in prison because he's uncovering that, that's not unprecedented. That's, that's believable. I don't know if it's true. He might also have been a little kooky. Mm-hmm. This is, again, I don't know if the videos that I saw are real, but the videos that I— again, especially considering what we're talking about now, if you were trying to make someone look insane that was uncovering some real serious corruption with a foreign government, right? Which is possible. Of course it's possible.

And also, it's America, right? We're in a huge country. It's like beautifully crazy in many ways. Yes, people can think what— then they've got the internet, and you get people— was, you know, honestly, all the time people are giving me things, you know, they, they shove things in my hand or an envelope, whatever, and I open it up every single time, because half the time it's something that's, you know, something conspiratorial that isn't right or doesn't seem right. And other times it's like really good ideas. But the point is that they actually are useful, or they make me think about something in a different way. But the point is that yes, there's lots of people out there with somewhat crazy ideas. You can't lock them all up.

It's not just that. There's lots of real corruption. Yes, this guy posts this and has there been an investigation? Do we know whether or not this is an act? Has it been completely debunked? Because if it has, oh well, then maybe you're right. Maybe he's crazy. Or if it turns out that everything he's saying is true, maybe he's a slightly crazy person who's also uncovering the truth. Exactly, right?

Exactly. Sometimes it takes obsessive people.

That was the premise of that Mel Gibson movie. Yeah. Yeah, he was crazy, but he was actually right.

No, which one?

I think it was called Conspiracy Theory. Yeah. Yeah, was that with Julia Roberts? Yeah, it was fun. That's great. Yeah, I haven't seen it. He was like a nutty dude who was on to things. He's basically like Alex Jones. That sounds really interesting. It was good. I love that, you know, for the time. A little dated. You go watch today, you're like, yeah, well, we do—

I— we want— one of the things, I went on the road the whole time, like long drives. It's California. And so I find some of these, you know, every now and again you just want something You know, so the— I— you want— there's a lot of movies, it turns out, that are big parts of American culture that I haven't seen. We watched— what was it the other night? Superbad. I'd never seen it.

I've never seen it. It's so good. It's one of the best comedies of all time.

It's so good, and I've never seen it.

I unfortunately tried watching with my kids when they were 10 and 12. I'm like, here, sit down, watch this, and then we shut it off after 3 minutes. Like, this is— sorry. I forgot. Oh good.

Yeah, brilliant, right? I mean, it's not really like funny and a kind of slapstick with a bit of that, but it was just really clever to see where the kids just sitting in class drawing dicks.

It's really funny, by the way. Could not make that movie today, and the people that made that movie would not make that movie today.

We were literally talking about— so my friend Eric, who you just— he's on my team, we've become good friends. He's a You met him earlier. Like, that's exactly what we're saying.

Like, they couldn't make it. They got captured. That's the problem with being on the team of the left. They got captured by an ideology that destroyed comedy in their world, right? They cannot do that kind of comedy anymore. Yeah, nobody believes that you support all the things these people are saying. It's just showing a ridiculous human being who's saying some crazy shit, and it makes you laugh. It's not changing the fucking world. It's not altering anybody's opinions, and it's not gonna force people to do anything that they wouldn't ordinarily do. No good person is gonna watch that movie and want to go out and do bad things. That's not how it works. It's just a piece of art. It's just like, you know, Bob Marley didn't really shoot the sheriff, okay? It's a fucking piece of art. It's a piece of art, and it's a piece of art that we have fucked up. It's particularly movies, because movies are attached to Hollywood. And then stand-up comedy fortunately has an out. And because of the internet, we don't need Hollywood anymore. So because of that, we now get labeled right-wing, especially stand-up comedy that's like not adherent.

And I don't want to call it anti-woke because that's silly because it's not anti-woke, it's just comedy. Yeah, it's just like woke doesn't allow certain subjects.

It's just— it should be anti-establishment. Establishment. And the— when the establishment is taken over by an ideology, it happens to be that. But you go the other way when it's the people in power. It's supposed to be against the people in power.

It's supposed to be what is funny. What is funny? Fair enough. What is funny? Yeah, across the board. And as soon as you say no, you can't make fun of this anymore. Yeah. Why? Yeah, why? It's a religion. It's basically like it's blasphemy to make fun of whatever you— whatever you decide. Yeah. And that killed that kind of movie. Yeah, yeah, those fucking movies were everywhere. Yeah, The Hangover. There was always a movie like that. Fucking, there's so many.

And a lot of them I haven't seen. We were just talking about it the other night.

Yeah, the Ace Ventura: Pet Detective premise was about a transgender woman, and you find out she was transgender and everybody throws up.

Do you remember? No, I haven't seen—

I honestly never saw Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.

No, I know we got to do a list for the road.

Is he watching Monty Hall over there? Fucking Benny Hill reruns.

My favorite Benny Hill thing— Benny Hill was like— I'm not saying this, but I couldn't— like, the first— there's someone at— there's a friend of mine at Fox called— she's called Kennedy. She's very fun. And she, um, used to always— do you remember Janet Yellen? Yes, she was there. She always called her Benny Hill. And then the minute I saw that, that I saw a picture of the next time, I just couldn't get out of my mind.

Kennedy was an MTV VJ. She's great. And then she became a Republican talking head on Fox.

I was like, that's nuts. She's a real libertarian though.

But isn't it interesting? Yeah. Like someone's like on MTV with like a girl with glasses on, you're like, oh, progressive for sure. And then winds up on But she's cool.

She's libertarian. She seems very smart. She, she's great, very funny. She does, um, Freedom Fest. She's like, that's a— she's a big part of that, the libertarian thing. Okay, she's great.

How'd she go from being a VJ, like, I don't know, here's the next fucking, you know, she's from LA, she's very young, she's great.

She used to call Janet Yellen Betty Hill.

That's funny. But I love—

no, the comedy thing, like, that's another joy actually, um, So I used to really— so Eric's really into Louis C.K., so I've— I'd seen a bit of him, obviously, but I've watched a lot now. He's so great. I mean, we've really enjoyed that.

Brilliant comedian. Brilliant, brilliant. And, and yeah, did some fucking ridiculous weird shit, but, but the way they described it was so different than the actual acts themselves.

Also, his response to it was brilliant. That show where he addresses uh-huh, was so good.

He had a weird kink where he wanted people to watch him jerk off, and he would ask them, and if they said yes, he would do it. Look, I don't think you should do that. I think it seems crazy to be standing in front of a couple of girls and jerking off in front of them, but I'm not him, okay? And I also didn't say— if I said no, open the door, let me out, and then you wouldn't let me out, that's a different story. But that's not what anybody is alleging. It's just kind of gross and weird, and I think he would probably admit to that.

But, you know, he did, and he had a very funny— I thought it was brilliant. I can't remember exactly, but the first big show he did after that, when he sort of returned from like being—

his art though is like what you got to judge, like what is he— as long as he's not done did what like Bill Cosby did, like that, that's a completely different thing.

Yeah, it wouldn't seem that it was a kind of systematic, like, really machine-like predatory thing that was just an ongoing—

it was a weird kink. Yeah, he had a weird kink. You want to jerk off in front of people, like, okay, it, it, it's— so look, I get that people would be upset, and if you don't want to watch this comedy more, I get that too. That's fine. Everybody has— that's your prerogative. But like, the comedy itself is some of the best comedy that's ever been written. It's— it's exactly— ever been done. Yeah, he's one of the best to ever do it. I mean, if you have a top whatever group of comedians—

Is he in your kind of gang here? How do you like—

Well, he's in New York, but he actually helped me design the club. Okay, cool. He came when it was bare bones, and we went over the club, and he gave me a bunch of great suggestions, and I implemented all of them. The smaller— our rooms are named after the nuclear bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So it's Fat Man and Little Boy are our rooms. There's a reason for that. The reason is actually that the— because it's the Comedy Mothership, it's a UFO-based comedy club. The UFOs really started showing up in America after the nuclear bomb. So once the nuclear weapons program was implemented in the 1940s, The amount of UFO sightings went through the roof, and the real big ones were like Roswell, New Mexico, which is '47. So right after the war, they start— so this is like part of UFO folklore. So that's why we did it. That's why we named him after the nuclear— and not making light of people dying in horrific nuclear bombs. So he told me to make the stage smaller in the little room. It was a great idea. I was like, right, why is the stage so big?

Small room. And then he also said, can you— it was already a low ceiling. He's like, can you lower it more? I'm like, we can lower it like right to the top of that door. It's like, you should do that. And he gave me some advice on sound deadening in the room and what to do and make it, you know, how to make the sound crystal clear and just great, awesome advice. And I— the beautiful thing about that club is I took advice from every comedian that was in town. I'd bring them there. Yeah, tell me what you think. What would you want? Like, if you wanted to design a comedy club, like I'll literally let you, like, just tell me what you think. And we ran it through a vote. So there's a whole group of us, and it was like me and Brian Simpson and Ron Wyatt, Tony Hinchcliffe, and, and all these guys that were good friends of mine that we performed with all the time. I— we all just sat around. None of the ideas were like, I think we should do this. I didn't do that with any of them.

I said, tell me what you guys want to do. Like, and they were like, you should have this. Like, okay, we'll do that. Great. We should have monitors in the green room. We should see the guy on stage. Okay, let's do that. We did that. What else? And everything anybody said, we did. We should have free mental health services for all the employees. So we did that. So free availability for counseling, psychiatry, we have that. Or psychologists, they can, they can all go to counselors. So it's, that's free healthcare. Take care of everything. Give the comedians way more money than any other club does. We did that. We just like, what do we, what do we need? What does everybody want? What does everybody want? Let's do it and let's do it in a way where we're just trying to make the best thing possible. Possible. We're not doing it like, let's make the most money. Yeah, we're just trying to not lose money. So let's just do it that way. And it worked. And it worked because of people like Louis C.K. Yeah, and all these people that came by and gave us advice and told us, you know, what they think.

Fantastic. So yeah, so Louis is great. I love him. He's fucking really smart guy. But like a lot of smart guys, he's fucking weird. You know, a lot of people—

I think that about these AI people.

You want to be a great comedian, you have to be a fucking weirdo. You know, they're all just weird in different ways. Chappelle's weird in his way, you know, Chris Rock's weird in his way, Hinchcliffe's weird in his way. They're all weird. Shane's weird.

Everyone's an incredible thing to do, honestly. Just, it's like really in a tiny way— I'm not even comparing it, but I'm comparing this in terms of what I'm doing, which is you got to go there and you've got— I don't know, I just did a few the other— just in the last few days you've got hundreds of people and you gotta entertain them. Now I'm mainly talking about politics, which is much easier because you've got, you know, material that's just obvious and out there, and it's political, but it's the other end. You've got to keep them entertained. You can't be boring. You can't like— and it's, you know, you've got to give a good show. Yes. And so the thought of doing that and being funny for all of it instead of what I do, which is throw in the odd joke, you know, political joke or something, or self-deprecating joke, you know. Right. But that's just— that's nothing. But it's the idea.

You're not focusing on that. If you focus on that, you could do it.

No, but I'm just saying, I now really appreciate how hard it is. Just—

just— it is and it isn't. Joey Diaz has the greatest saying. He goes, it's the fucking hardest, easiest thing you'll ever do. Okay. Because when you're flowing, it's easy, you know, when you're up there and you're killing, it's so easy. It's hard constructing the material. I was gonna say, a lot of preparation. There's a lot of preparation, and there's a lot of time you have to spend alone thinking, and then you have to spend a lot of time bullshitting with your friends because sometimes, like, the green room conversations— yeah, some of us, like, Bryan Simpson said something the other day and we're like, write that down. Yeah, yeah, that's great. Each other, like, right, dude, that's a bit, that's 100% a bit. And he started doing it on stage and it's killing. Like, that happens too. And it's like the camaraderie and the fun of like being together, like, it brews comedy. Yeah, but you also need time in front of the fucking computer or the notebook. You need to be sitting there going over your stuff. If you don't do that, you're not gonna come up with new material. And then you have to try it out, and you have to be willing to like trot it out there.

You have this idea that's only existed in your head. Yeah. And you're kind of convinced that there's something there, but you're not totally sure. You're like, what do you think about this? And you just throw it out there, and sometimes it's great, and it's like 50/50. Sometimes it's dogshit. And by— it's 50/50 to what I bring to the stage, whether it's even got life. But writing it down, it's like, not even— it's like, you know, it's like the Canadian healthcare system for MAiD. It's like, what, 1 out of 20? 1 out of 20 is any good. No, I think it's just really—

no, I think it's— well, I totally appreciate what you're saying, but it's very— I mean, to me it seems the ultimate— you're just putting yourself out there.

You're definitely putting yourself out there, but you're also doing it this way too. Like, when you're having conversations, maybe you're putting yourself out there even more because you're actually putting out your opinions, and some of them you had no idea you were going to discuss. Right, so you're just trotting it out there thinking out loud in front of millions of people like we're doing right now. When you're doing stand-up, like, I know these— by the time anyone sees me perform at a club where they're paying money, most of those bits I've been doing. So I've been like, I'm just trying to add to them and hone them and say them the right way and move the order around.

That's what I also love about it because that's— I really do love it. And that's why I've really enjoyed— like I said, Eric's really into it, and, um, just he's shown me a lot of comedians I didn't know about. And it's— I just, I love words and language anyway, you know. I've written, but in completely different— I've written books and whatever, TV scripts when I did my show, that kind of thing. So I really appreciate language, and, and I love the— just how changing the order of a word or whatever can just make something work or not work.

Oh yeah, changing the order of a word, changing the way you do— sometimes you do a joke like Louis used to do that where he would like reverse a joke, like turn it around, and then maybe he would like take it and do his best joke and open with it so that his jokes afterwards had to get better, right? Follow his best joke. Yeah, it's a constant little fucking laboratory up there, and you need the audience. Yes, in order to find the life.

Do you see their faces? Like, can you see, or the light's too much in your face? Can you see?

You can see most of the first few rows.

Right, because that's important, must be. It helps.

Yeah, it definitely helps.

It's not just listening to the volume of laughs, is it? Like, what is it?

There's both things, but obviously they're there to have a good time. But my job's easier because I'm going on after they're already laughing, right? So there's been a few people on before me, everybody's having a good time. And then you're basically just connecting with them. You know, you find them. What's up? How are you? You, you, you like let them get comfortable. You connect with them, and then you're just doing the material. You're just finding the reality. You have to be like, whatever you're saying, you have to be 100% thinking about that thing. Oh yes, you can't be thinking, and then I'm gonna say it like that. No, you have to be thinking about the thing. Yeah, and that's it. That's the primary thought. You know the pacing of it. You know what's coming next, but you don't think about what's coming next. You think about the thing. Yeah, that's where preparation is important. They have to make sure that you exactly have a set list and order, but you also have to be flexible because there's gonna be moments where you want to like dive out of that set order and something might happen in the audience or something might come up and you have another thing, another take, and you're like, this would go better right here, so I'll shove this in here.

And then you have to remember your order and go, I didn't do this, I'll put that later.

It's so fun. It's It's, it's not the same, but there's a similarity because, you know, I do all these things and you, and you've got bits really, which is my thing on high-speed rail. And, you know, I— and sometimes, and there's a long version of it and a short version of it, and, and like, and then suddenly you'll find yourself doing it even though I hadn't intended to, right? And then, oh, oh shit, that's like really long and I've got to finish, like, what am I going to cut?

So it's very of—

I mean, it's not the same, but it's similar. It's similar. And I definitely find Trump does bits. Oh yeah. And he— I mean, it goes on for so—

I'm never doing that long. But, um, remember when he just did this impromptu bit about Biden losing himself on stage, just wandering around not knowing where he was? It's like he's doing stand-up.

Like, everyone's laughing. Exactly. But I find it much better. I much prefer it when you can— you're closer to the people. Like physically, when you can— you're not on some stage miles away, you know, that kind of—

yeah, comedy club's the way to do it. That's the real way. However, there's something very intimate about doing an arena in the round. Okay, so I've done a bunch of those where you're standing on a circular stage in the center of the people, and what's intimate about that is all the people over here are looking at all the people over here. Everybody sees everybody.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, interesting.

You see each other. It's the right way to do it because that way everybody's seeing everybody else having fun, and they're a lot closer than you think they are. They're all right there. There's a lot of them, but it all— the comedy like sprays out to the outer edges. Yeah. But the center hive all around the stage, which is thousands of people. Yeah. In a 16,000-seat arena, you're looking in the eyes of 6,000 people. Plus, yeah, and they're— and it's like they're all seeing each other. It's very intimate, oddly. Great. Yeah, it's fun, as opposed to like a big arena when you're standing on a very high stage and the people are all out there. Yeah, feels crazy. Yeah, that feels very detached. That's, that's a different— that's not my favorite. That's my least favorite, is an arena where it's just a flat stage and you're not like surrounded by them. Them.

Yeah, I, I agree. It feels like you're just delivering something rather than connecting.

Exactly. But a theater can be pretty intimate too, like especially when you're used to doing arenas. If I do like a 3,000-seat theater, it's okay, it's kind of intimate. It's like, it's all what you're comfortable with too. That's a part of it too. It's like, are you comfortable with all these people staring at you?

Well, I never— you see, that's the weird thing. I would never have suddenly I'm doing— I've never done it before, right? And suddenly you have all these, you know, and it's amazing. I mean, I love the response, but it's— it is weird because I've gone from nothing to— right, this. And you go in a room, there's like hundreds of people like cheering.

What's the biggest crowd you've had to speak in front of? Probably—

well, probably when I did Megyn Kelly's show, when Megyn Kelly was here. Yeah, not here, in California. And, um, I did I did a spot there.

I did the announcement.

Bakersfield. It was in an arena in Bakersfield.

The announcement for the UFC weigh-ins. So the— I emceed the weigh-ins at the Ellipse on the White House. Oh, so it was 80,000 people. That was fucking nuts. That was the most people I've ever talked to, right? And that was a very different way of talking because all I'm doing is reading people's names and their official weights. Very easy. Easy. Yeah, you know, it's just hyping it up, getting everybody pumped up. Yeah, you know, you know, like, ladies and gentlemen, Ilya Topuria! And he comes out, everybody goes crazy. It's easy, but it's the vibe, the feeling of 80,000 people is fucking nuts. Yeah, it's a weird feeling, you know. Shane Gillis, my buddy, just did stand-up. I heard he sold 76,000. Philadelphia, right? Yeah, yeah, fill a fucking football stadium. That had to be insane.

You could do that easy if you wanted to. It's— it's— you'd get the people.

It's a crazy thing to do. I don't know if I could do that easy. It's not easy. He broke the world record, like, and Shane's huge, and he's really funny. He's like one of the funniest guys. Yeah, that's a good example.

I'd never seen him before.

Maybe I'll get him to come down tonight. I don't know if he's there. I mean, if he's in town, he's dad.

That was the first one.

That was the first one. So many good bits. It was a bit about George Washington's museum. I don't think so. Oh my God. It's one of my— I would request it from him all the time, like, please do that bit. It's so funny about George Washington's false teeth being made out of lead. It's such— because they were— it's such a crazy bit. It's so good. He's, he's a great comedian. Yeah, and that's all he cares about. That's what he loves, and he's like all in and just an awesome guy too. When you're around him, he's just so fun, and like everyone always smiles. You're around him, he's having— he's, he's like, he's contagious, you know. He's a contagious party. Great fun guy. But like, we're really lucky that there's a lot of those guys here now, you know. This is like, this is a giant hive of them now. Well, you've built that. Well, we all did. Yeah, you know, we all came.

No, I hear what you're saying, that they contributed.

But well, we are— they had to be here for me to be able to do it. This is not a thing that I could have ever done and said, hey, everybody move here now. It's not— it would have never worked. They had to already be here. Everybody moved here before I even had a club. A lot of them. Okay. Yeah, like Segura moved here before I had a club.

Was that a pandemic thing? Yes, like getting out of places was ridiculous.

Yeah, getting out of places and going to a place where you can actually perform. We're all addicts, you know. Stand-up comedy is a very, very addictive thing. And if there's a place where you can go where you can do it and your friends already live there— and for me it was Ron Weiser. And it was also— there's a thing about the freeness of this city, like the freeness of Texas, the freedom that you had here to be able to go to a restaurant. Your businesses could stay open. They didn't put the same kind of restrictions. They had a small lockdown for a short amount of time, and they went, okay, let's get back to work. And they did. And California's like, we're gonna die!

Fuck it. Oh, I know. Still driving around their cars with masks on. I know. I know, it's so crazy. I remember, it's so funny thinking about, because all this, I was reminded of all this because of the Fauci stuff the other day.

Yeah, the Fauci stuff, that's wild.

Because I was really, honestly, I mean, I'm, you know, I did this show on Fox News. I would never say I'm a journalist, right, ever. Um, it was an opinion show, I just said what I thought. But I did do some, I would like one piece of journalism, like actual journalism, which is the Fauci stuff. It's infuriating, you know, the origin of the virus. I really did, you know, lay that all out in a way that no one else did because I had these people I knew at Stanford. I taught at Stanford, so a lot of that information about Fauci and the origin and the— all of that I had, and people helped me piece it together. And it's just infuriating that he's still infuriating.

Well, and the thing that's most infuriating to me, thing, was that he knew about the miscarriage. Miscarriages during the first trimester. He knew about that and, uh, he was still promoting it for pregnant women. Like, how many women listened to him and got vaccinated and then had a miscarriage? I mean, we don't even know what the numbers are, right? Because those are never reported as vaccine injuries. We have no idea.

Just— I mean, I was listening to— who did you have on the other week? Um, that lady who wrote the book, but you got into it with her. She had a book you're talking about. I can't remember. She's like an investigative Annie Jacobson? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

She— about the, uh, germ warfare, about biological warfare.

So I was just listening to that, and then I did—

like, you didn't really get into it, like, a little bit on the—

just on the origins and the gain of function and all of that.

Oh, well, she just probably was trying to be politically correct and probably not— well, anyway, still trying to sell books or something.

I don't know. All I remember thinking is I wanted to— is that it's still not, I don't think, understood how directly Fauci was implicated. Like, it's still— you hear this language of, oh, he, you know, he funded the gain of— no, he in— he pushed it. This was his thing. Yeah, he really, really was the main global champion of gain of function.

Not only that, he enforced the narrative narrative that this was not a lab leak and that a lab— talking about it as a lab leak was racist. Yes, he did.

The thing that everyone— I remember when I first laid that out, and it was, you know, it's still on the— on my Wikipedia, like, I pushed the conspiracy theory that, you know, Fauci did the virus. But he did the— the— I always try and show people, like, when they say, well, why would he do something like that? He was really the main advocate. There's a piece he wrote— I would start with this, which is, I think it's December 2011, because gain-of-function had been around a few years. They started with the ferrets or whatever, and they had this new technique, Ralph Baric and all of that. Yeah. And then it became very controversial in the scientific community. You had a whole bunch of scientists saying this is crazy. This is going to lead to a pandemic. You have people saying that. Yeah. And Fauci argued back and he wrote this piece at the end of 2011 with the other guy, Francis Collins, who ran the NIH, saying that, uh, engineering— I think it's almost exactly engineering a potentially dangerous virus in the laboratory is a risk worth taking. He wrote that, like, he was pushing this stuff.

And like, the thing that everyone It was his initiative. It wasn't he's like passively funded this thing that some other minions were doing. This was his big thing. It's just outrageous that it hasn't been. And he broke the rules. That's the other part that people forget, that Obama in 2014 put a moratorium on it, which included stuff that was already in train, which included the project that led to COVID. And then again, people often say, well, Trump lifted the moratorium. He did, but he put back a new thing which was— it was called the Potential Pandemic Pathogens thing, protocol, which said that when you renew a project, it should go to independent review. He broke that as well. So he broke the rules to push this, and he's like still not really had to pay any price for it, unless you say his reputation.

Well, the reputation, but he's also so old that he's not working anymore anyway. But the thing about it was that pardon that gave him a pardon for crimes that he had not been convicted for, which had never happened before, a preemptive pardon for— and also for 10 whole years for everything he did. He could have been eating babies for 10 years and like, no, pardon, fine. And then when you have a pardon, you're not supposed to be able to plead the Fifth, and yet he plays the Fifth with everything, including the color of his fucking tie. It's just disgusting. He's a strange guy, and the fact that he was a hero really shows how sick people were in 2020, looking for some sort of a solution, but they didn't know his history. They didn't know what he did during the AIDS crisis. Yeah, he's a scary person.

Yeah, he scares me. Arrogance of it. And the thing that I'm also really get really pissed off about still is when you hear the conversation around this, on that going back now to the lockdowns and all of that and the school closures that was such a disaster, businesses, churches, and people say, well, we didn't really know and it was early and we were just being— we did know. It's not true. I did a piece March 2020, like right, it was in the before the end of 15 Days to Slow the Spread, right at the beginning. Because I got to know through Stanford, Jay Bhattacharya, John Ioannidis, all these guys that were speaking out. They did a blood, whatever, call it seroprevalence thing in Santa Clara County where this whole thing started, proving everything that we now knew, and including what Fauci, now we know from the whatever, the diary, knew as well.

Those Santa Clara County, is this the two doctors that they went public with this and then they lost their license?

And no, this is different. This is, uh, Jay Jay and John Ioannidis. They were the—

so Ioannidis— I know about Jay, and then, and the crazy thing about him was that he was one of the people that was kicked off of Twitter, correct? Yes.

Yeah, which is— what, when worse than that, kicked out, really persecuted by Stanford. Yeah, they need to be held accountable. That was a crazy thing. So the first lockdown in the country was Santa Clara County. In one of the Bay Area counties. Then the next day, the other Bay Area counties did it. And then after that, Gavin did statewide. That's where it started. And the woman who pushed it was the public health— God, I haven't talked about this for ages— the public health director or whatever of Santa Clara County, Sarah Cody. And she was married to the head of Stanford Medicine. And Jay spoke out against what was going on with actual data. They did a study of what was happening in the community that proved that the case fatality rate was far lower than what they're saying.

Well, it was also in the leaked emails. All of this, he was aware that it was far lower and he was still promoting it.

Exactly. But the point is that this is again corruption because he was speaking out against the lockdowns that were pushed by this woman, Sarah Cody. Her husband, who was head of Stanford Medicine, persecuted Jay. He was treated so badly. They suspended him. They accused him of— they had some bullshit investigation into him. Outrageous that no one's ever done anything about that, as far as I can tell, with Stanford.

No, it's, uh, it's creepy to watch that top-down power in action when you know that they're lying. And when you're seeing these lying messages and emails, yeah. Yeah, the Fauci thing is very creepy. It just shows you why he was pushing for that pardon. But then there's the question of whether or not that pardon's even legitimate because it's all auto pen stuff. Yeah. And Biden was out of his fucking mind.

Like, I know. But the thing I always think is also this, um, the state level— so it's a federal pardon, right? So states are gonna— but then there's this immunity if you're doing stuff in your public role. You can't be sued for that or something. I don't know.

Well, I mean, he lives in hell. I mean, he knows, but I think he's a bit of a sociopath. I think there's something about him. Like when he was prescribing people AZT for AIDS, he's a doctor. He's well aware that AZT was pulled as a cancer medication because it was killing people quicker than cancer. They were using it as chemotherapy and people are dying faster. And so they already had this FDA-approved drug drug. And so this new gay cancer— I mean, they literally were calling it the gay cancer at first— they just started giving it to them. Like, well, we have a medication for it. And then Fauci's on record saying the reason why we prescribe AZT is because it's the only medicine that's both safe and effective. Effective at what? Effective killing asymptomatic people? They were also using the same playbook that they used during COVID by using these testing methods that had an enormous amount of false positives. Like, Kary Mullis himself was— there's a video of him. He's the guy who invented PCR testing. He's talking about Fauci. Fauci doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about. He's like, he's a bureaucrat.

The guy's full of shit. He doesn't know that you should never use a PCR to determine whether or not someone is ill. He's like, it's not how it works, because if you ramp up the cycles enough, you could find anything. And that's what they did during COVID They found like it's 80-something false positives. Fortunately, a lot of those people weren't forced to take AZT, but there's a lot of people that turned positive for HIV that probably didn't have it at all. They gave them AZT and they were fucking dead. And this is the— he's the villain in The Dallas Buyers Club, that movie with Matthew McConaughey. Yeah, it's all about people who have AIDS seeking alternative treatments and being denied them because he was trying to find a vaccine for it even back then. They were testing the vaccine for it on fucking foster kids and killing them in New York. It's all in— yeah, yeah, RFK Jr.'s book. It's— get— if his book's lies, how come he hasn't been sued?

It's really amazing how it's— they're able to get away with stuff that's truly evil. Truly evil.

Yeah, I mean, testing the AIDS vaccine on foster kids. It's crazy. And them dying, it's crazy. But it's just— the ACT thing is crazy.

I don't know how, you know, what determines, you know, when the sort of the media mindset towards something or whatever that means that this story gets attention and and massive—

oh, it's really simple. It's really simple. Pharmaceutical drug commercials. All that would change if they're not allowed to advertise. We're one of two countries in the fucking world that allow pharmaceutical drugs to advertise on television. One of them is New Zealand, and they're far more restrictive than us. And because of that, you look— you have ads that you see that are playing on CNN that are not even for a drug that's commonly used. —used for some weird condition.

But they're trying to, you know, persuade you you've got the condition.

That's so— what they're really doing is not selling drugs. What they're really doing is making sure that CNN does never talk shit about the pharmaceutical drug companies and doesn't do any stories on the adverse side effects and doesn't do any stories about how many of them get pulled by the FDA that initially get approved and they find such horrific side effects they have to pull them because it's a large percentage. It's fucking nuts, man. And it's— who was it that brought it up that was explaining how, you know, he had figured out a long time ago that the reason why they spend so much money on advertising is not because they're trying to sell drugs. They're trying to buy these networks. Interesting. What makes sense, it's an enormous part of their ad budget, right? And they spend so much money on television. And who the fuck is watching CNN at this stage of the game? You know, what are their numbers? Their numbers are pretty piss-poor for the amount of money that these drug companies are spending. And then you see so many ads, so many for this, and everyone's always at a barbecue. They're always—

I know. They're always having fun. They're having fun. And like, there was a brilliant parody that Nicole Shanahan did when she was with Bobby running— she did a brilliant one for TDF. Do you suffer from TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome? She did it like a pharma ad.

Oh, that's funny. It was really, really great.

That's so crazy. But the thing I was thinking of when you like the, you know, where you got really dark human consequences. So like, you know, obviously I'm focused on it because he's my opponent, but the story of Becerra and the kids, the migrant kids, it's a story. I bring it up to people and a lot of people have never heard about it. Like literally No idea. What is the story? When he— he was Bob— he had job— Bobby's job. And, um, Bobby Kennedy's job, HHS secretary. And you had— it was during the 4 years that you had the open border. And the way it works is that had millions of people coming across the open border. We don't know exactly how many, but the unaccompanied kids are the responsibility of HHS. That's how the system works. So he was responsible for them. And the total number, we know because it's recorded, 479,000 kids unaccompanied, unaccompanied, kids without parents. It's an amazing number in the 4 years of the Biden administration. All of those kids were by Javier Becerra's responsibility. So they had— they were overwhelmed. They set up these camps. Do you not know any of this?

Yeah, it's okay.

They have these camps camps they set up to process the kids in Florida, Texas. There are 3 in California. And the point was to try and get the kids to a safe sponsor, relative, someone who'd look after them. And they had so many, they were overwhelmed. And there's really bad stuff going on in the camps. There were reports of sexual abuse. The older kids, you know, some of the older kids were like, you know, 17-year-old You know, some were gang members, whatever. So there was all this shit going on in the camps— sexual abuse, physical abuse. It was bad. And it was like pictures of, you know, like we went to one in Pomona, one of the exhibition halls, like 150 kids on cots. It's bad. And so Becerra wants these kids out because it looks bad. And they'd gone on and on about kids in cages with Trump. And so he basically— and we've now got these whistleblowers coming forward, and the New York Times reported it. The New York Times broke this story, but it's just basically not gone anywhere. They did it in 2023, that he dismantled the vetting that was supposed to put the kids with a safe place.

And so they lost track of thousands of kids, and many went to child sex traffickers. Slave labor, child labor traffickers, just horrific stories.

You had— And what was the rationale for it?

Because they weren't moving them out of the camps quickly enough. So we had a whistleblower come to us because these people said, "How can he be governor?" who said, "We were supposed to connect the kids with the responsible adult check their identity, ID checks, home visits, all this. But the instruction was, it's going too slowly, we got to get the kids out. She said speed over safety. And so when they raise flags about it, like 200 kids sent to an address that turned out to be a container lot, like not a real address, it's just a front for traffickers, a kid sent to a woman who was wanted by Interpol, like a gang member, like just crazy. So when they raised those stories, they were fired. Like, it's really terrible what happened. And still there— I mean, HHS just published some, because they were still responsible, numbers from— I think it was 2 weeks ago— that there's 330,000 that they still miss missing. They don't know where they are. 40 kids died. Like, it's really bad. And yet it's like Fauci's like— he's the candidate for governor. No one's really calling him out on it.

It's amazing to me. It's really bad, Joe. Honestly, you've got— that is crazy.

You've got to go be responsible for that many kids and say speed over safety.

So there's a story again, the whistleblower we've put about the videos. I mean, some people, you know, this woman said she was a caseworker at Pomona, and Becerra actually visited that camp, visited, did a photo op, whatever. And he's going on about how we're doing a good job of finding safe places, whatever. Um, and then the interviewer— I was at the taping. It was— she didn't— she's in a job where she doesn't retaliation. So I was there for the 2 hours we taped the conversation, and the interviewer asks her, did anything change after Becerra's visit? She said, yeah, everything was— had to speed up, and they had strike teams that were set up to tell us don't check the— you know, when she would say, this ID is obviously a fake ID for this person, like the photos, like a selfie. It's obviously fake. Don't worry, just send them quick, get them out. She's like, really surprised. And, and this— even the New York Times story had a boy who— she had a few examples because she tracked them down. She won a Pulitzer Prize for it. Um, a kid who ended up in a, I don't know, meatpacking plant, 13, 14-year-old, had his arm ripped off.

Our girl, one of She came forward as a whistleblower, a victim. She was on camera. She said, you know, she's telling the story. She was like put on a plane and they said, you know what happens, they didn't let her take her stuff. She was met at the other end. She said there's 3 guys. They picked— she has no idea who these people are. She's from, I think, Guatemala, El Salvador. Gets in a car with 3 guys, no idea, taken to a house. She has to work 20 hours a day, sleep on the floor with 4 guys in a room. It's just a girl from— it's, you know, it's just— and there's so many of these stories. Um, Bobby, the way Bobby puts it is that Becerra turned HHS into the largest child trafficking operation in history. Holy fuck. Yeah, exactly.

And this guy's running for— he's running for governor of California.

I remember honestly, Joe, like when we did these debates, you know, you— we did a lot, and not just debates but forums, and you meet. And I thought he's a nice— you know, I'd see him, we'd chat backstage or whatever, and I thought, you know, he's kind of nothing. He's a bureaucrat type person. Nice guy, perfectly nice, smiley. He's a nice, amiable guy. And I just thought he's like an amiable non-entity. But the more you learn about this, it's like really bad, um, because it's a classic thing with these career politicians. Obviously all that mattered was, I don't want to look bad. I don't— we've got all these kids 'Kids, they're in these camps. The media has access to them. It's really look— making me look bad. Get these kids out.' It's just shocking. Oh my God, it's shocking.

That's so evil. Yeah, it is. So, and it's also really racist. All of them were Latino kids.

Yeah, because you think about it, if that was all kids from Norway, little young boys and girls from Norway, do you think they would treat them the same So Pomona, where this camp was, there were 3 in California: Long Beach, San Diego, and Pomona. So the caseworker who, who did the whistle, she was— she said, um, there's a notorious child sex trafficking street area near there. She said before this, most of the girls were African-American black girls. After the camp, suddenly it was all Latina girls. Like, it was just so obvious that that was what was happening. God, child sex trafficking.

Well, if, if there's child sex traffickers and there's such an obvious vulnerability, like hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied kids making across the border of course they're gonna sneak in. Exactly. The whole thing was insane.

Can I just have one other thing? Yes. The boy— the— I mean, they took away their— some— they had these papers that they would send them off with, and it had a line that's information on it which included a hotline that they set up if the kids felt they were in danger. To kind of trafficking hotline. There were 65,000 unanswered calls to the hotline. It's just a bullshit-like thing that didn't work. And again, the people who pointed that out were fired. Oh my God, really bad.

It's like, to me, the people that pointed it out were fired. It's just—

this is, to me, I haven't, you know, I've been in and around politics, media, government, one way or another for a long time. I've never seen anything like this.

And, and he's like, it doesn't even seem like it could be real. That's what I thought. The numbers are so crazy, it seems like some sort of a conspiracy theory that's easily disproven.

Exactly. Well, in the first reporting of it was the New York Times, 2023. Holy shit. And, and, and it— but everything that's coming out is, it's worse even than What do you think was going on with the whole open border? I think that they— it's— I, I think they believed that any kind of restriction on immigration was racist, and therefore it was part of the ideology around that, that we can't put— people are coming and they're fleeing bad conditions, and you can't stop them because it's racist to put restrictions on immigration. I think that's what it was mainly.

Okay, so that is a great way to justify flying people into swing states and then trying to turn them into citizens, which is what they were actively talking about doing. Pelosi talked about that, Schumer talked about that. They talk about got it, getting those people citizenship, which means those people can vote. There's also moving them into these swing states. And if you move them into the swing states, the census doesn't count whether or not you're a citizen. The census counts whether or not you're a human being. And so it changes the number of congressional seats that are available. So there's that. And then there's also putting these people on free healthcare and giving them money and setting them up. And then if you can get those people to vote eventually, You've got a built-in voter, and you could change— like, so I never thought— I don't know about that. Whatever million people got in over the last 4 years, they're not gonna vote for Trump.

How many—

if you can make those people vote, if you can let those people vote, how many of those people are gonna vote for the Republicans that wanted to get rid of them with ICE? And how many of them are gonna vote for the Democrats that wanted to fund them and help them get across the border? It's pretty simple. Even if you don't get all of them, you're gonna get most of them.

Do you think that— I mean, I hear that often.

This is what Elon thinks.

It seems to me that's so dark and cynical.

Well, if they wanted to do the whole country what they've done to California and have complete and total control with one party, well, they've already done it in a state. Why not just implement it through the entire country? In California, you can't show ID. I know, it's illegal. That's crazy. Why would you do that? Why would you do that? There's only one reason. You know, you want to cheat.

And now they've got— and we've got voter ID on the ballot in November in California, which is crazy that you have to ask for that. Exactly. And the Attorney General of California, this guy Bonta, I don't know if you've been following, he's doing the Paramount lawsuit. He's like a total political hack. All he ever does— like, we've got out-of-control crime and all this shit. All he does— and the same with, by the way, Becerra, my— I keep coming— I mean, he's my opponent. He was attorney general of California, appointed. He didn't get elected. All he talks about in terms of his record, and he was attorney during the time when crime exploded, is how many times he sued Trump. But this guy Bonta, now there was this ballot initiative. There is a ballot initiative on November for voter ID. He just changed the description. Did you see this? —No. —So it had a kind of accurate description of what it was. You know, this measure— you know, like on the ballot, the voter information— this measure will require people to show ID, blah, blah, blah. That was approved by the whole system and just in time before they start printing them, he— because it's the Attorney General who decides— changed it to say like the most negative possible thing.

This— I mean, I haven't got the exact words, you can find it— but it was like, this measure prohibits voting unless you have— and it goes on to make it sound really good. It's like, it's so cynical. This is just what they do.

Yeah, well, they weren't trying to get people to look at it in terms of— look at it through their ideological lens rather than through a practical But it's also like, it's so crazy that you have to have ID for almost everything.

It's crazy. And they say, oh, it's so discriminatory. Like, what are you talking about?

That's racist. Yeah, what about driving a car? You have to have a license to drive a car.

What about, you know, check into a hotel? I mean, every night I'm at a different Hampton Inn. That's where we stay.

ID. Yeah, like you have to show ID to buy booze. It's like IDs It's everywhere. It's normal. It's like, we need to know that you're real.

It's a very— when you watch them defend their opposition to it, it really— I mean, I'm generally not at all— you know, I really do try and see the best. You know, that's just their ideology, whatever. Then it's not really cynical. But when you see the way they wriggle and squirm over voter ID, it's like, what other explanation?

Is there? Exactly.

It really— it's such a ridiculous thing to be opposed to.

It's pretty clear. It's pretty clear that there's an advantage, and the advantage is definitely on the side of the Democrats. The voter ID advantage. It's, uh, it's just— it's just crazy. It's just— it's just— we have lost our fucking collective minds. And, you know, it doesn't help when, you know, this administration is in this war with Iran that makes no fucking sense whatsoever, and everyone He's like, oh, so you look at that, like, it just builds up the other side's argument. Well, that's what they say. So you have to vote them out no matter what.

Okay, perfect example. Massive thing in California for everyone is just gas prices. Highest in the country by far. Higher than Hawaii in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, even though we have abundant oil reserves in California. It's like so insane. I'm saying they're literally shipping in— they're shutting down California oil production, shipping it in from halfway around the world. Like, 80% now shipped from Iraq and the Amazon rainforest. Like, Gavin goes to the Amazon rainforest to the climate conference to lecture everyone about climate. Because of his climate policies, oil drilling in the Amazon is now being increased to provide California's oil. Anyway, so it's so crazy, but they do all these things like right now And, you know, and it's all as a direct result of what they've done, right? In that the gas prices are so high, and it's regular working people who are screwed, like people to drive their cars and trucks. Yeah, day for— it's not the climate warriors, you know, on their laptops in Marin County, do you know what I mean? Anyway, the war is now their go-to response. So you make a point about about gas prices, oh, it's Trump's war.

And of course it's true that the war has increased gas prices everywhere, but it's still $2 higher in California than anywhere else. Yeah, but it lets them off the hook.

Well, it's just indicative of the same problem that you're going to have whenever a single party is running a state for that long unchecked, just like you were talking about Hungary or It's just like it could be anywhere. You can fill in the blank anywhere in the world where you get— you get power and you get complete control, and then you just tax the fuck out of people, and then you keep increasing government, which they keep doing. It's pretty wild. Would changing this law make it cheaper? That'd be even harder to do. California gas, because it uses unique, strictly regulated, clean-burning boutique blend mandated by the California Air Resources Board to reduce smog and greenhouse gas emissions, Specialized fuel must be refined locally on an energy island because no pipelines connect the state to outside fuel networks. It's just more of the same.

So, this is important. So, see that California Air Resources Board, CARB, that's the main agency that's driving the cost of everything high when it comes to energy, gas and electric. And actually now, your earlier question, what can you do? There's basically 4 reasons that gas prices are high, the highest in the country. One is the gas tax, which is the highest in the country. That I can't do anything about as governor. That's the legislature. They just increased it. So you've got all these Democrats running around saying affordability, we have to do something about the affordability crisis. They just increased the gas tax in California. So just, it's so It's ridiculous, but that's the first thing I can't do anything about directly. All the other things you can. It's partly that, is the regulations on the refinery, but it's also these hidden taxes. Like you've got the low carbon fuels. They all sound good. The low carbon fuel standard, cap and invest, they call it the cap and invest program. That's funding high-speed rail. These are basically taxes on gas that the energy industries pay. Then you've got the fact that we're importing all this oil rather than producing it.

So instead of producing in California in the cleanest regulated standards anywhere in the world, right? Right. Which is what we have because we've got all these regulations and sending it in a nice pipeline just 100 or so miles from near Bakersfield, Kern County to the refineries in Long Beach and Torrance. We are, what I said earlier, shipping in, because there's no, like that said, there's no pipeline from outside California, bringing on tankers from, the number one in the Middle East is Iraq.

Burning immense amounts of fuel all along the way.

Yes, because they run on bunker fuel, which is the most dirty form of oil. So they are, I'm not, this is an accurate statement, they are increasing carbon emissions in the name of climate change. To make it look as if their climate war is fighting fossil fuels. It's just fucking crazy. Yeah, but it's the ideology. It's not even— it's so funny, I used to sort of talk about their climate policy. It's not even the climate policies, it's climate posturing.

It's like they want to look as if they're— yes, doing so. Well, it's, it's a part of the ideology, like you said. It's a part of the doctrine, the religious doctrine that is— yes. You have to say that climate change is real. Science is science. You have to say a bunch of things. Love is love. You have to say a bunch of things.

Yeah, it's like his house is the thing. Yeah, I would say that's literally virtue signaling.

It's not just virtue signaling, it's kind of religious doctrine. Yeah, it's a religious ideology signal.

Yes, the accurate— it's not such a catchy phrase, but that's what it is.

And it's, it's kind of religious. And like Mark Andreessen's talked about this, it's kind of like a cult. Like the if you don't follow it, you are excommunicated. Yeah.

And I did a conference the other day in Sacramento where I went up, and there's something about it. It was— the smugness was so— I normally try and be reasonable and just, you know, make my arguments. And sort of, there was something about this. It was a kind of climate thing, and things I agree with. It was green energy. I'm all for that, whatever. Great, let's have innovation. I'm not against any of that. I am against the windmills, the insane—

oh, they're insane windmills, like totally inefficient. Yeah, and then they have to go into landfills and they only last a certain amount of years, then you have to take them down and then bury them in the earth where they never degrade and they catch fire and they kill birds.

Wait, but have you heard the latest though? This is the— it's actually one of my bits. To go back to the thing because it's so crazy, is the, is the new plan for windmills is offshore windmills in California in two parts: Morro Bay off the Central Coast, Humboldt up in the north, including having them far out because the wind is more, but except also the ocean is deep there. So they're going to have floating windmills. Have you heard this one? No, floating. And these windmills are— they're big, they're like 1,000 feet. That's the height of the Eiffel Tower, pretty much, floating. And one of the proposals, like 10,000. So 10,000 Eiffel Towers floating off the— it's insane. Trump's just stopped it, and now they're suing to reopen it. Oh, by the way, Okay, when— clean energy— when we have in California today existing natural gas-fired power stations which could provide all our— more than all our electricity needs today, more than all. It's like something like 300 gigawatt hours a year. We only use about 270, something like that. But they're only— they're running these natural gas power stations at like 10, like 20% of their capacity to use as backup for the windmills and for the solar farms.

If you ran them at full capacity, what we've already got, you don't even have to build anything, you could more than meet all our needs. But no, that's too sensible. So we have the floating windmills. And of course we have the highest electric bills in the country apart from Hawaii, double the national average. And who— and the reason I got cross at this conference conference was that they were going, you, you want to reduce the renewable goals or something? No, I just want common sense. I'm all for it if it makes sense, if you can make it pay, great. But the people who you're hurting with all of this is regular working people, not kind of elite people at a conference in Sacramento, just working-class people who are just being crushed. And I see it every day, and the struggle, you know, literally they the number one thing people say to me, it's really striking when in all these, you know, I've really met a lot of people, as I said, hundreds of events, thousands and thousands of people. They say it's not like, oh, good luck, hope you— it's like, you have to win.

There's like this intensity. It's really interesting. Well, because they know it's slipping away, they don't want to move. And they're so—

it's gotten significantly worse over the last 10 years.

And they don't want to move. Yeah, and it's so difficult. And these fucking— sorry, but people just— oh, and it's not even— it's so casual and cruel the way it's like, yeah, for our ideology, we'll jack up your electric bills and your gas prices, and you just have to suck it up because we want to make ourselves feel like we're leading on climate. That's the other thing. They were yelling at me from this conference and I said, "You tell me what is the impact of any of this on climate change." I said, "I'll give you everything you're saying about climate change, okay? Let's— I agree. Climate change, we've got to fight climate change. What is this doing to fight climate change? What is the impact on global temperatures of any of this?" And I was like, nothing, because the answer is zero. It has zero impact on global temperatures, which is the only thing that matters. And then someone shouts out, this is where they always go, oh, we're leading. We have to have a leadership role. We're leading. I said, who's following? No one, because it's crazy. It's hurting people. All these countries are backing off it.

That's the one thing that China has an advantage in, is that their government and their business work like that. Yeah, and the business works for the government, and the government exactly controls the businesses. It's not a good thing, but the one advantage that they have in there, they don't do anything stupid that's just gonna lose money for virtue signaling.

Exactly.

They open coal— coal fire plants like crazy.

Exactly, which are, you know, part of the energy that's going into making the solar panels that are shipped across the ocean to make these people feel good.

It's true. It is true. It's wild.

I mean, it's just—

wow, company— it's wild. But I mean, this is the problem with a government handling something versus the private sector. If the private sector handled it, it would have to be profitable.

It would have to make sense. And they keep saying solar is really cheap, you know. I said, great, so why do we have the highest electric bills in the country apart from Hawaii if it's also great? I'm not— again, I'm not against it. You want to have a solar panel, a battery, that's great, you know. I'm not against any of this, but don't force it in a way that just raises the cost for regular working people.

Well, California just loves to regulate. They love it. It's part of the big government.

Have you seen to just— the tires? The tires? Yeah. Oh, you've seen—

yeah, I saw it. I was gonna bring that up. Yeah. So what is the— let's pull it up, Jamie. The new California regulations on tires. Restricting the kind of tires you could buy.

It's just— they keep coming.

They can't help themselves. They can't— that's— they need to justify all these jobs. There's so much government. But I just want to give you—

this is a good example, which is all of these things.

California regulators approved new rules limiting what replacement tires you can buy for your car. So what is the rationale behind this? Approved new rules that will restrict which tires you could buy when it's time to replace them. Unanimous vote. California California Energy Commission voted to adopt new rules that will phase out the sale of replacement tires that don't meet certain energy efficiency standards. Ultimately about protecting consumers. I see this as sheltering the public from higher costs in the long term— long, long run, excuse me. Tire manufacturers and the commission staff are at odds over whether this will add to the cost of living in the state. It will. Both sides acknowledge this will no longer allow the sale of significant portion of the tires currently sold in California. Fuck. And that 70%. The report— so the center of this is a tire's rolling resistance, or how much energy a tire uses as it rolls down the road. Lower resistance means a vehicle uses less gas or electricity. New cars come with energy-efficient tires, but consumers typically replace those with higher rolling resistance tires. I wonder if that has anything to do with performance cars. So, you know, I would imagine rolling resistance.

So rolling resistance, what would that mean? Does that mean friction? Yes, basically friction. Okay, so friction is traction, so you want more traction. So you're basically making people buy performance tires? No, the other way around.

Really? Yeah, the other way around.

So traction is less resistance? It's more resistance. Maximum resistance is traction. But they want— they allow the sale of tires with a maximum rolling resistance of 9.1 Newtons per kiloton. Uh, it lowers it to 7.2 starting in 2033. So yeah, it's making it less traction. That's what it's saying, right? Rolling resistance. I'm not sure what it says.

What is— what they want is the energy efficient—

ensure replacement tires sold in California are at least as energy efficient on average as the tires that with the truck. So my perception is that a tire with more traction would be more, more efficient.

No, for driving, yeah, but not for climate.

Yeah, but when you go into the store to buy them, you just— most people are gonna buy the cheapest thing available. They're not gonna— right. And the cheapest thing available would have less traction, correct? It'd just be the cheapest thing available, right? The thing about the cars, like performance tires, they don't last as long. Because there's a softer rubber, and the softer rubber grips better. And so like, if you buy—

that's what they want to get rid of.

That's what they want to get rid of.

Yeah, but that—

but those are the ones that have more traction. That's what I'm confused about. That would seem to be more energy efficient in terms of the use of the car.

Well, that, that's what they're arguing it's for, but they are— you're gonna end up with these, these little tires that don't— I mean, all the people that want to go off-road or whatever, that's what you can't—

oh. You can't buy off-road tires?

70% of the, of the tires are going to be banned that are currently sold. 70%. That was one of the reporters at KCRA, Ashley Zavala. Very— she's really on all these stories, very aggressive. She's really exposing a lot of this nonsense. And that was the— I think her number, 70%.

Wouldn't they just make new off-road tires then? Yeah, but they wouldn't be as good. How often are you driving off-road in, you know, LA? Well, I'm not, but some people are.

There's a bunch of people who love driving off-road.

Off-road. And they like having vehicles— hold on, while he's talking.

It's over. You've got homeless everywhere, the highest tax in the country, businesses are leaving every single day. It's a real economic emergency. We have the highest unemployment rate in the country, we have the highest poverty rate in the country, the highest cost of living, and this is what the government's focused on. I mean, people, we've got to wake up, right? This is insane that they're focused on this. They're churning out absolute nonsense. The regulations, the bureaucracy, this is totally unaccountable. This is some bureaucrat that's discovered a rule. Nancy Skinner from Berkeley, used to represent Berkeley, found this thing in some obscure place that no one had noticed for 20 years. Suddenly this bureaucratic agency decides to bring in this rule. No input from the voters.

But here's my question. What is this impact going to have on the car market? If you sell a car that has a particular type of performance tire that no longer fits this—

I don't know. I don't know what—

Could we ask Perplexity, is this referring to tires with more traction or less traction? Energy.California.gov. Second sentence says, unfortunately, replacement tires are often, often less efficient. That's why your mileage drops the first time you replace your tires. An efficiency gap between new car tires and replacement tires means California drivers are paying nearly $1 billion in additional fuel costs, which is— so are these inefficient tires less expensive? Is that what it is? Yeah, I think it makes sense, right? So the more expensive tires are more efficient, which means they would have better traction. Is that what it is? That makes sense, right? Because if it's— if, if the tire has less traction, that means it slips more. If it slips more, it's not as efficient, and you wouldn't get as good a gas mileage.

But they're, they're not— they're doing this for climate. That's what they're saying. We need to lower emissions. That's what it's all about. Because of the use of the gas.

This 70% thing is crazy. So I guess if you have it, it's like, it's— let's say if you buy like a Chevy truck that's an off-road truck, right? That— those are not efficient tires. So what are you going to be able to get for them now? I don't know.

I mean, if it's— it's just come out, so everyone's looking into this. And you just think— And there's no recourse?

No, they've just—

well, there will be when I'm there, because I'm going to get rid of these people. Because this is going back to the question earlier.

Oh, okay. Benefits of the proposed regulation. Consumer savings. Proposed regulation would save nearly $1 billion per year in gasoline and electricity costs. —right. Uh, air quality. By reducing fuel consumed, the proposed regulation will reduce CO2 emissions by 2.0 million metric tons per year, which is the equivalent of taking 400,000 gasoline cars off California roads. Would also reduce other criteria air pollutants such as nitric oxide, uh, and particulate matter. Reduced energy demand. Proposed regulation would reduce California demand for gasoline by 141 million gallons also reduce demand for electricity by 0.9 terawatts per hour— each— oh, excuse me, each year. Huh. Okay. The following tires are excluded from the proposed regulation minimum performance standards: competition tires used for motorsports, winter-type snow tires, all-season winter performance tires, used and retreaded tires, deep tread tires, tires designed for ATVs or other off-road vehicles, large off-road tires for use up to 99 miles an hour, motorcycle tires, temporary spare tires, small tires with 13-inch nominal rim diameter, proposed limited production tires, tires sold for use on an emergency vehicle, high load index tires, tires not capable of sustaining speeds over 50 miles per hour, and space saver tires. So it seems like there's a lot of caveats.

No, this is because— look at that, like, that list again.

Nobody believes that this is about saving money. No, it seems like they're just— this is entirely their ideology for climate. This is some bullshit calculation.

Is there a world where that makes sense though, where they're right and it will reduce all that gasoline, it actually will be better for everybody, and you'll force people to make better tires? And, you know, they're just— they're churning out low-quality tires. And this could be mitigated a long time ago. Well, I don't know.

I think that the reaction to it is exactly the opposite, which is, here they come again.

Here they come again is real. Yeah. I mean, yet another thing.

As I said, it's just been announced. So we got to dig into it. But I mean, it's just to me, such a kind of crazy example of them endlessly micromanaging every Yeah, the market should decide.

We've got these big, big problems. California's new tire rule could wipe out 70% of what's on the shelf, and Sacramento sat on the law for 23 years. Ooh. So Sacramento didn't invent a new law on Monday, it finally read one it wrote in 2003. Okay.

I mean, it's just infuriating to me.

They love to tell you what to do. Okay, part of what California did—

so we did a thing last year. They, in the legis— remember, this is the point about there's no checks, no one's stopping anything, right? In the last legislative session last year, not even the whole year, just a few months, they passed 1,118 bills. Counted them, we printed them out. It was double my height obviously no one's read, you know, no one can read them. Newsom signs most of them, like the vast majority. He hasn't read them. It has stuff like this in it, and no one's paying attention. And the corrupt system, the interest groups that want what they want from the system, they get these bills written and then they get passed. And then here you are 23 years later, something that's in some obscure law. That's how it all works. And the answer to the question, like, what could you do about it, is basically captured in these two things. Like, number one, all these agencies that are pushing out these rules, it's the executive branch. So as the governor, you let— you control the executive branch. You can fire the people on these boards and you can replace them with people with some common sense.

And you can actually merge them, you can reorganize them, you could cut them back. There's a whole bunch of things you could do on the bureaucracy because so much of this is coming out of the bureaucracy. Secondly, you can veto the legislation. The point is always made, if they have a two-thirds majority, they can overturn a veto. That's correct, but the last time they overturned a veto from the governor was 1979. They don't like doing it because suddenly suddenly they have to justify all this shit that goes through without any scrutiny. If you veto it, they have— they can— if they want to overturn it, suddenly they have to make the argument. And so much of what you get in California just goes through without anyone noticing. That's the real corruption in the system. Oh yeah. And so the other thing I'd say is that you also write the budget. The governor writes the budget and send it to the legislature, and then you have to negotiate. But again, you know, if you take out all this waste and, you know, we just announced last week Operation Zero Waste, cancel funding for high-speed rail, cancel free healthcare for illegal immigrants, all these things that we said we'd do.

How much has been spent on that high-speed rail?

So far, total $15 billion.

Oh, that's a bargain. So the total— They've gotten a lot done though, right?

Okay, so that was— so it was supposed— 2008, it was supposed to be $30 billion, the total budget, and it's supposed to be open in 2020, and it was 2.5 hours from San Francisco to LA. So the latest is it's going to be open maybe, if you're lucky, by the end of 2030s. It's going to be— the new budget from $30 billion is now $230 billion, right? The plan, as they laughably call it, is the first bit is San Francisco to Merced at the top of the Central Valley on the regular train line that's already there. And then Merced to Bakersfield is the high-speed rail. And then Bakersfield to LA, a bus. Bus.

Have you heard that? That's real. It's real.

That drive from Bakersfield to LA, which I've done a lot, it's through the— it's already congested as fuck. You can take— that can take 2 and a half hours. Yeah, if you're unlucky. So this is what it's— and it's so crazy.

$230 billion for that.

And then Becerra, my opponent, he went to Fresno the other week. He announced that he would— that he would finish it on time and on budget. On time was 6 years ago. On budget, they've spent $120 million.

Okay, the total—

the budget was $30 million. They've spent $15 million and they've not laid any tracks at all. Gavin, it's classic Gavin. It's almost my favorite. He did an event because obviously he's running for president. He doesn't— this is embarrassing. He wants to sort of shape the narrative, so he did this press conference conference somewhere there with trains in the background to make it look like this is a real thing. And they haven't laid any track, and there's no plans to lay any track, but he was standing by tracks to sort of, I think, make people think there's tracks. But even he— the, the phrase that he used was to announce that we are now entering the track-laying phase. Phase? That could be another 10 It's so ridiculous.

And then you're gonna have to get a bus.

And the bus, it's real. That is the plan. And then— so why is that?

Because the— just logistics? They can't get the train through the mountains? Yeah, that's it. So you have to have a bus.

Yeah, I mean, oh, they— they— I don't actually know what the long-term plan— I can't believe that's the whole idea. I think that's just what's going to be available.

It says it's just like the most tunneling has to happen that part. So maybe they're just waiting.

I think it's a long— it's not the eventual—

so they'll dig some more tunnels. It says it would require the most tunneling of the mountain crossings, with 4 separate tunnels totaling 28 miles in length. How much of the nature— across the San Andreas Fault, which is the biggest problem. Oh, even better, they're going to cause an earthquake. How much of nature is going to get destroyed in the production of that?

But who even wants this?

I mean, tunneling through mountains—

the, the other thing is, so I— some— I spoke to someone who who works with Elon. Well, you can check with Elon. So he said that you could do the, the, you know, the boring company, like you do a tunnel, the whole thing for $5 billion. Now I don't know if that's true, but, um, it's— this is such a, you know, it's such a monument to the whole thing, right? Yeah. Take the money, waste it, spend it on nothing, endlessly delayed.

How come Gavin's not running again? He can't. He can't. Oh, he did.

Yeah, two terms. Yeah, yeah. It's so crazy. And you've got this pretend— this is what's really— there's just a video that someone found of him talking in 2015 when he was lieutenant governor about what a joke the whole thing was. Yeah, speaking very honestly about it. Yeah. And, and it's kind of funny and ridiculous. Oh, look at that, he says that then, now he says— but it's actually infuriating because they're still taking the money to pay for it. They're still pretending, and they're taking money out of the funding. Like I said, comes from this thing called Cap and Invest, which is the gas tax. It's just insane.

Steve, I hope you win. We got to wrap this up and bring it home, but I hope you win. It would be fun. Yeah, it would be hilarious if you win. Great.

What job do you want? I don't want a job.

We'll have you do something. I don't even like going back to California.

Well, okay, the only reason I'm doing it is that you've moved back. Bleh! I'm never gonna move back! I know, it's too good here. Yeah, I love it here. I love it here. I can see that.

I really hope you win. Thank you, man. Yeah, I think you have a chance. I really do. I mean, you make, you make a lot of sense, and that's a lot in this, in this day and age. It's a lot. You're also actually a good guy. Like I know you, you're an actual good guy, you're not like some weird lizard person, you know what I mean? Like there's some fake people.

Yes, I do, I've met a lot in Sacramento.

You are who you are, you are really you, I can attest to that, I know you, like I've known you before you had any political aspirations, you're the exact same person. There's a lot of these people that are just skin suits, they're skin suits over lizards, there's lizards in there, whether metaphorically or physically, they're fucking lizard people. And that's, that's a real thing. So I hope you win.

You can come to my inauguration. I will. Just come. Just that. Commit to that. Yeah, I'll come.

If you win, I'll come. Alright. Alright. Alright. Thank you. Bye everybody.