Michael Shellenberger

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience.

I had a friend just send me a similar video from Ohio where his mom took and thought it was some orbs flying over and it looked honestly weirder than this. And he found out a couple hours later it was a memorial service and it was a bunch of lanterns that got left up in the air.

That's why I just say it looks like it's the fire and maybe wind blowing.

Look, there's like two or three things that come together here, and they're starting to fly together. That looks more like aliens to me, but they found out it was lanterns.

I was looking for one earlier. There's one that's clearly a CGI that I didn't want to get confused in there.

That could be the moon. I don't know.

I'm not sure which one is the real case of it. I'll be honest with you.

I think this one on the... I think that's fake, but I'm not sure. That looks like CGI effects. That looks super fake. That looks like a ghost. That might be a ghost. If it is CGI, it's pretty good. Is that CGI? I don't know what that is.

50%?

Right.

2018.

Since we're paused, I have an update on your story that's been published already. Oh, what is it? People found out on Google there was some mentions of that back, they think, when Grush brought it up in 2023. And since that was made public on Twitter, it seems that Google has removed those searches. What? Yeah. This is for the name of the- We're keeping this in.

I was going to bring it up when we came up with this. This is Immaculate Conception? Yeah, there's the screenshot someone took of a spike. Wow. I guess it doesn't say the exact date. I was trying to find it and tried to recreate it too. And then like an hour later, the spike's gone.

Whoa.

I don't know. It says zero there. So it's hard to say. It could have been a Google Trend blip that people were trying to make something more out of. But it is a weird, you know, it's weird.

And what we discovered is that they were part of the blowback of U.S. counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, counterpopulism that was – pushed abroad with the Arab Spring and then the color revolutions in Eastern Europe and came back.

And that those characters that led the censorship, disinformation, lawfare, and other dirty tricks that they used for regime change abroad brought those tactics and strategies to the United States and weaponized them against Trump, MAGA, Republicans. And again, you play stupid games, win stupid prizes, and that's what they got.

And so when they broke open AID, suddenly it was available for all of us to see. And there's been some very good research and scholarship by some of our allies on what was going on there and making sense of it. And so we've been in a process of sense-making as a country for about whatever it's been, a week, a week and a half, about what exactly is this agency doing wrong?

How did it become so deranged that it would use the weapons of regime change against our own democratically elected president from 2016 to 2020, including, you know, many of us suspect but can't yet prove in January 6th? How did that happen? And then the subsequent question is, what do we do now?

I mean, Jordan, after we've spent billions of dollars creating this elaborate foreign policy establishment, otherwise known as the blob, which includes many academic journals, academic divisions of universities, whole think tanks, parts of the federal government. Nobody has theorized what comes now. Nobody has theorized what happens if the United States shuts down its main agency for soft power.

That's what USAID was, Agency for National Development. It was just a mechanism of soft power alongside the CIA. It was really supposed to be State Department, AID, CIA, all supposed to be run by the National Security Council, all supposed to be run by the President of the United States. What happens when that's not there anymore? And I think there's some real questions.

I mean, I'm fairly anti-interventionist, anti-imperialist, have been really for all my adult life. But there's a real vacuum that does get created. The critics of what they've done are not wrong in being concerned about, well, what happens when Russia and China... move into those places. And maybe that's fine. I mean, let the Chinese get involved in trying to build nations in Africa.

But I do think it raises some existential questions about what is the United States? What is the United States in the world? Because we are entering, as you mentioned, 75 to 80 years of Pax Americana, where the United States has been holding together a global system. And people talk about multipolarity, but China and Russia are not the United States. I mean, we are still the center of action.

We have all the talent. We have the AI. We have all the energy. We remain the most secure country in the world, not just because of our nuclear weapons and military, but also because we're protected on both coastlines by huge bodies of water. So, I mean, the United States is still arguably the big superpower. Obviously, China's a superpower, but it's not...

it's not playing anything, you can't even imagine China playing anything close to the role of the United States played after World War II. So we're in a moment of, You know, we're just trying to figure out what's going on. I think everybody's trying to figure out what's going on. And much less, we've got to spend some time figuring out what do we want the United States to be. And J.D.

Vance and Trump are further along in that thinking than anybody. But honestly, it's not like there's a consensus even within the Republican Party about what the United States' role in the world should be in this post-Pax Americana, post-Cold War period. Yeah.

65%.

Yeah, well, there's a lot there. I mean, I think to start with, we say, we hear a lot, waste, fraud, and abuse, right? as though they're kind of all equal. Waste is inevitable to any system. You try to reduce it, but one of the things we find is that you can waste more energy trying to reduce waste.

It's often why when you go to these studies of buildings and whatever, there's a high level of energy efficiency. You can always get more efficiency out of a building. And they always go, well, if we put more energy and time into reducing efficiency, yeah, but then you wouldn't be running your business anymore, right? So there's like, you can waste time trying to deal with the waste.

Then there's fraud. That's bad. That shows... not just a kind of, you know, I think people tend to think of fraud like, oh, the police haven't done a good enough job or the police are corrupted. It represents a weakening and corruption of the body, of the system, that you're actually, as you said before, there's always parasites, there's always viruses.

When the host becomes vulnerable and weakened and old and prone to disease is when you're prone to fraud. And then you get... the worst of them all by far, which is abuse, by which is abuse of power. And we are coming out of a period of extreme abuse of powers. I mean, we can debate the period of time that's relevant. I think the last 12 years, we should think of it as a woke reign of terror.

meaning a period of great fear, certainly universities, media, wokeism. I mean, it really, it starts with Black Lives Matter, ends with the election of President Trump in 2024. That was a period of abuse of power. Every single major institution, medical power, educational power, media power, political power. And what gets revealed when Elon and Trump break open the U.S.

government is we see this agency that was always there in their peripheral vision. Everybody sort of knew about, but you kind of forgot about, USAID, Agency for International Development. And what opens up is a bunch of, you know, things that you had forgotten but are important to remember. The first is that human economic development, prosperity, growth comes from within.

It comes from the core values of within, namely delayed gratification, hard work, saving on principle, waiting to get married until you can afford your own home and sustain your own family, which means, you know, healthy marriage. sublimation, that those things are the recipe.

The Congo. Yeah, I mean, I think that that picture that you're describing is the same one that Harvey Mansfield lays out in his wonderful book, Manliness, where he has three levels of masculinity. The first is weak men who are incapable of defending themselves and others. Manly men, who are strong men who look down on the weak men, but will also abuse their power.

And then the gentleman, who has the power of the manly man, but keeps it in reserve to protect his family, you know, his bride, his children, his family, his nation, etc. civilization, but he's not going to abuse his power. So we've seen a regression where civilization was created by gentlemen, as you said.

They became gentlemen, in the process of creating civilization, they become gentlemen, or in the process of becoming gentlemen, they create civilization, which is to say a society based on universal rules, on the view of humans as all equal under first God and then equal under the law. and that everybody has these fundamental inalienable human rights.

This is the basis of what we call Western civilization, and it's a civilization of gentlemen. Well, we've seen a mass derangement over the last 12 years, but particularly with the election of Trump, you saw a derangement occurring in every institution. And what happens with USAID,

And within the intelligence communities and the foreign policy establishment is a massive derangement and abuse of power where the gentlemen stop being gentlemen. They become aggressive manly men, and they decide that they know what's best, and they can't stand all this democracy, which they dismiss as populism, and they describe populism as its opposite.

They project onto populism, totalitarianism, and in the name of preventing totalitarianism, create a censorship industrial complex, which was already, we know, was international. U.S., U.K., U.S., Brazil, U.S., Europe.

Canada involved in it, particularly the Five Eyes, all run, all coming out of the intelligence community because they're the ones that had run the censorship and disinformation operations, again, in Arab Spring and then the color revolutions. They turn all that back on the United States, first with the Russiagate conspiracy theory,

This idea that Trump is secretly controlled through a sex blackmail operation by Putin. Second, through the dismissal of COVID origins, then you see with the Hunter Biden laptop, an elaborate conspiracy theory that the laptop is a Russian information operation as opposed to which they knew it was not because the FBI had the laptop seven months earlier and used it.

Basically, Jedi mind trick brainwashing to pre-bunk or program the journalists and the social media companies into thinking that a future story about Hunter Biden and Burisma would be a Russian hack and leak operation and spreading disinformation in advance, programming people and then demanding censorship on the basis of it.

And I think we're going to find out a lot more about January 6th as well as a kind of construction rather than something organic. A clear decision was made at a minimum to not provide adequate security. We know that for sure because the Capitol Police chief has has written a whole book on it. And so you look at that series of events and you also look at what the U.S.

security state had done in places like Brazil and the Philippines and other parts of the world. And of course, this goes back decades.

And it's a clear counter-populist effort run by these deep state organizations, run by people who had lost their minds, you know, who have all the rational abilities, but they had lost, they had Trump derangement syndrome and turned their enormous powers, their incredible psychological, sociological, political, technological powers against their own people to undermine democracy and attack free speech.

And gentlemen. Yeah.

Well, I mean, look, Jordan, I think it's a huge moment. You know, we obviously had a massively historic election that also signified a change in the media environment of which you've been a really fundamental part.

It was chaos. It was contradictory. The only natural resource is trust. You know, Jordan, I'm filled with a lot of optimism.

Yeah, no, I mean, I think we're—this really—I mean, this is why I was so excited to talk to you, Jordan, because I think—well, we talked last time also about narcissism and nihilism and— I think since it's almost been a year and we've been working on our book still that gets at these issues, I think we have a better picture of what's happened.

And you – first of all, when you have your liberal democratic civilization with respect for human dignity and human equality and free speech threatened, you get more grounded. I mean I've been –

I was concerned around the ways in which the most civilized people, the elites, have been undermining civilization since really my first and second book, both on the environment and homelessness, undermining, for example, the security of a city, making cities dangerous again. We just saw in Los Angeles, I've been writing about defunding the police for years.

We just learned in Los Angeles that they had been defunding the fire department. That's how far the degradation of civilization had gone. And I knew as soon as it happened that there would be voices right away who would say that there was nothing that could have been done about it because humans were doomed by climate change. How could we possibly protect ourselves from a fire?

I mean, who could ever imagine there being fires in the most fiery part of the United States, right? Like, I mean, it's insane. But I think we have a better picture now, Jordan, too, where, you know, you get this really precious, I mean, just this tiny moment of this thing we call the Enlightenment.

I think we saw today, Vice President JD Vance gave a major speech at the Munich Security Summit in Munich, Germany, where he very strongly articulated what I think you could argue is the new national conservative case which included grave concerns around losing Europe to mass migration. It included a strong defense of free speech. And this is now the second time that I think he has intimated.

Of course, it comes out of 1,500 years of Christianity, but we get this period, really, 17th century, 18th century, really, 18th century, right? Where there have been all these wars and everyone's, you know, Hobbes and everybody's tired of them. And they're like, we have to have order. You have to have civilization.

Then Locke comes in and amends that and says, you also have to protect the citizenry from each other. But you have still a picture of what it means to be a citizen, right? And it is tied to this idea of being a gentleman. And we're also trying to teach this at University of Austin.

But it's a picture that a citizen, it's not just something, yes, you're a citizen by fact of being born in that nation. Yes, but there is this older idea of the citizen, which came from older Europe. Which was that to be a citizen was something that was a privilege and an honor, and it came with some intense responsibilities. And you're in service. So you sort of say, what is it?

The gentleman is in service of civilization, of peace, of prosperity, of freedom, of reproduction, continuing the civilization, continuing. There's a picture of an evolution of human consciousness here.

As we've talked about before, that gets into trouble when the stories that Christians had told start to get challenged by Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, we get to the crisis of meaning, we get to nihilism, the death of God. We had two first bad waves of a totalitarian nihilistic response to the death of God in fascism and communism.

They get repressed and we push away, but then we get this thing we call wokeism, and it develops and develops after the fall of communism, really starting in the early 90s, and then fully comes to its just deranged, mad power with the woke reign of terror exercising this just wanton aggression and nihilism. Yeah.

This time, I think he was softer than the first time that Europe's move towards totalitarianism, particularly this mass censorship that they wanna impose on our social media companies and on us, on our voice in Europe, that that was not only unacceptable, but that it puts our alliance in danger. I mean, he specifically said, It puts NATO in danger.

Well, yeah, I mean, I think that there was this forgetting, there was a hubris that we didn't need these thousands of years of inherited virtues and values anymore. The hedonism manifests, you know, the feeling of power is sort of the ultimate hedonistic thrill. And as you said, it's empty, and it's also completely free of all of the wisdom of these past traditions.

I mean, every wisdom tradition, I think by definition, has in it that lesson of the line between good and evil runs through the hearts of all men, right? You know, be careful when fighting with monsters that you not become one. You see the speck in your neighbor's eye. Beware of the attractions of power. Right.

The true wisdom traditions are always emphasizing our mortality, warning of hubris, emphasizing humility and honesty and these really simple basic virtues. And yes, do they change over time? Of course. But yet they also mean the same thing. That all gets forgotten, and so you get this kind of secular post-Cold War establishment. And I mean, you know, just exactly what it sounds like.

So I think the Europeans today got a sense of the depth of which America cares about free speech, that free speech for us is a must have, not a nice to have. In Europe, it feels like it may be more like a nice to have.

Media, university, foreign policy, intelligence community. Because remember, the intelligence community is full of very intelligent people, and they're the children of light. Just exactly what Reinhold Niebuhr warned against in his famous... lectures from the 1940s that liberals imagine they're children of light. They can do no harm. We're just going to go into these countries and help them.

Just going to go in there and help them. Then we're going to help them decide who to get elected. And you got married to some of the darker forces, which was the CIA and starting to try to control who gets elected in Italy and then in Greece. And you go all the way from the 40s on. And, you know, it has a huge moral victory with the fall of communism. You know, the U.S.

foreign policy has this huge moral victory. We then have 9-11 and a kind of You know, an early sense of moral righteousness, and then it descends into the horrors of Iraq. And then, frankly, we went and overthrew a bunch of governments in the Middle East, surreptitiously, Eastern Europe. And it was a maniacal, I think it was just a power trip, as we would say.

These guys are getting off on their power. And so that when Trump gets elected, I mean, they just couldn't. They just couldn't allow a nationalist and populist to just rule. They just couldn't allow it. They had to invent this elaborate story about how he was Hitler and it was fascism and it was and there was going to be, you know, this was just like, I mean, it was insane.

There was like no evidence to support any of it. It was a complete projection of their own totalitarian fantasies on Trump. And, I mean, it's just out of Shakespeare.

It's out of Greek tragedy, Jordan, where, of course, I mean, I think everybody on the right in the United States right now is secretly—they won't say it, but they're secretly happy that Trump lost in 2020 because he comes into much more power now than he would have had in 2020, capable of eliminating—

You know, basically our most important, you know, intelligence cut out, our most important, you know, covert, overt, you know, regime change agency.

And I think you finally got administration that's just saying, hey, we're not going to tolerate this censorship and totalitarianism that you're imposing on our companies and attempting to impose on our people.

Yeah, and hope. Well, let's hope. We'll hope.

And so... No, I mean, look, it's an incredible story. It's an incredible story arc. I just don't think Trump really believed in God until he almost died from a bullet. I mean, all of which remains mysterious, unsolved. You have maybe the greatest innovator in American history working to reform government. You have...

That is a good question. I am not sure. I believe he did say at the beginning of the speech that they had met, but the audience should check on that. It was a second strong—he actually gave a prior speech as well that was also strong. But yeah, this was a big speech. Of course, there was an assault by a terrorist in Germany. I believe less than 48 hours ago, very dramatic moment.

These incredible story arcs with Tulsi and Bobby coming from the left, even the radical left, really, if you're being honest, coming to this place, which, you know, to kind of even get that story arc of our villains in the story, you know, the characters who have been abusing power in the ways that we've been looking at. These are people who forgot what America was. I mean...

The United States has been very reluctant to do foreign entanglements. I mean, the rise of the media industrial complex, of the kind of mass media complex, it's so recent. It's 100 years old in the United States. It sort of gets created by U.S. elites in order to persuade young men to go fight in World War I. That was when we really start with government propaganda.

By the time you get after, you know, World War II, of course, it just goes on steroids. You get out after World War II. But the media is very controlled after World War II all the way through the rise of social media. But you have the people running those foreign policy institutions, Jordan. I mean—

and I mean the whole foreign policy establishment, just think big, you know, the elites, let's just say all of them, they forgot what America was about. They forgot that, like, literally free speech is number one, literally and figuratively. Like, you don't mess with that. That is the third rail of American life.

If you start to step on someone else's free speech rights in the United States, this is a country that defends the... It's like, as far as I can tell, I can't find another country that allows Nazis to march in neighborhoods of Holocaust survivors. That is... U.S. law from Supreme Court, from the Brandenburg decision in the 1960s, reinforced in the Skokie decision.

That's how seriously we take that. These guys went and messed with the First Amendment. They then went and tried to incarcerate their political opponent, making up just phony thing after phony thing about him misstating, him misdescribing the payment to the porn star, and that that was somehow...

Five felonies or that somehow he had some papers, you know, even though he's the only person that can declassify, I mean, it can sort of declassify documents. Somehow he took some papers to his house and it merited an FBI raid. on the house of a former president, these are bonkers behaviors. You look at them in retrospect, that is a kind of madness.

These are people that forgot what the United States was, and they had got conditioned to thinking that their power, they thought that they were the United States. They thought that in their narcissism and their nihilism and power, but they forgot that, like, you just go back to that period of 1776, The founders of our country were hardcore.

They were hardcore in their demand for democracy and free speech. Our establishment forgot it. They turned on their own people. They became swept up in their power, their narcissism, their elitism, their nihilism. And I mean, I love this. I mean, I'm in a great mood. I mean, I mean, this is, by the way, I also want to say we're headed to ARC. We have seen the complete collapse.

destruction of the World Economic Forum. It has no legitimacy. It's embarrassing for world leaders to go there. It's run by a cartoon character villain, a character who's literally in Joe Rogan's toilet. Like you go to do a Joe Rogan podcast, he's in the toilet. That's how seriously In the pop culture, he is a ridiculous villain.

World Economic Forum, because I know you founded ARC in part, I'm sure you had a lot of motivations, but certainly in part as a counterweight to world. You're not the counterweight. ARC is not the counterweight anymore.

ARC is the main event for intellectual life in the West oriented around a continuation and, first of all, a celebration of human specialness, a continuation of Western civilization as the best and only way to to help all humans achieve their internal potential. It's this, I mean, so for me, what a year for ARK.

I mean, and it's a moment to kind of, I think you look back and it's not January, but you knew the Janus phase. You look back, you look forward, we're clearly entering a new era, you know, and it's not totally clear what it is at all. And look at what we've got on our table. We're coming to a new era. It's a new media ecosystem. You get elected in different ways. It's social media and podcasting.

You have to be able to sit. In 1960, you had to be able to be handsome on television. That's what the television revolution was about. The podcasting revolution is you must be able to sit for three hours with Joe Rogan and answer questions. And if you are unable to do that, as Kamala Harris was, you can't be president. OK, so you've got to have some intellectual fortitude and stamina.

And then we've got this massive technological question in front of us in terms of AI. We have two wars that are about to be wound down, need to be wound down. Big questions around NATO. Existential questions around our commitment to NATO. So I can't think of a kind of, you know, more important—I mean, I think it was prescient to set up ARC— I think Ark has so much gravity as a center for this.

I don't have the latest in terms of deaths and injuries, but it was he opens with that. He expressed his, of course, great concern and sympathy for the Germans and then pivoted right away to saying, look, you've got a big mass migration problem and we have it, too. And we've got to have we've got to get control of our countries. And I think he also said,

It is the twilight. It's not even the twilight of the idols. We are zero dark 30 of the idols, and I think we're coming to daybreak. A new dawn is coming, but it's still very dark.

And I think he really spoke for Americans this way, certainly for me, which is that we actually really love Europe. Like, you know, Americans really care about Europe. Like, not just as a tourist destination, we care about it as an idea, as the birthplace of the Enlightenment.

And look at where then the revolution comes from. I mean, certainly there's been, I think you can argue there's been some return to some spirituality. There's been some return to, you know, some appreciation of marriage. But the real revolution is around the nation state and binding us together as a nation. That is what did it and what is doing it around the world.

And nationalism in its modern form, I'll say, there's a debate about nationalism. how long it goes back, but nationalism in its modern form is fundamentally democratic because what is nationalism if I follow Leah Greenfield's

definition, nationalism is a common people, a common citizen bound by a sense of equality, that we're all, you might be rich, I might be poor, you might be smart, I might be dumb, we're all Americans, or we're all British, and that that comes with entailments. There are consequences of of your national identity, but it is fundamentally democratic.

I mean, for us Americans, Europe is where our ideas that our country was founded on were born, but they were never fully realized until you got to the United States and until you had Thomas Jefferson insist against Alexandra Hamilton that we were going to have a Bill of Rights

Once you're a citizen, you have a say, you have a vote. And so what got eroded with the snobbery, the elitism, the hubris, the pride, the arrogance of our elites,

and this is out of Toynbee and this is how civilizations fail, the creative class or the elites in a civilization start to identify with the elites in a different civilization and also sympathize and want to bring in the working people of another nation. Well, that's exactly what we saw happen in these Western countries where the allegiances between with other elites

you know, mediated by organizations like the World Economic Forum or the United Nations or any one of these elitist organizations.

And so you've seen this beautiful populist nationalist backlash to it that says, no, we have thousands of years or hundreds of years of a national tradition that's special, that hands us a set of virtues and values that have sustained us and our families and our societies. And no, it wasn't all oppressive. It wasn't all colonialist or patriarchal or like it was a beautiful- Power predicated.

Yeah, it wasn't all just based on might makes right. It was also based on a very strong sense of principles created by gentlemen in a civilized way.

Incredible, incredible history of progress.

And that the first thing was going to be free speech and that we weren't going to mess around about it, that this was number one, that we didn't want to have a country without having this guarantee.

And like I said, I just think I don't think Europeans understand the depth of our commitment to that, that really when they start threatening our free speech rights, as they've been increasingly doing, they need to know that they are threatening their security. That it really makes—we're tired. America is tired. Like, we're very, very tired.

Yeah, it's the pride of the gentleman that they've earned. Andrew Tate's not a gentleman.

Yeah, I mean, I think to your point of we've— We now know that the greatest pleasures come from delaying gratification and that hedonism is actually a poor strategy to gain pleasure, that happiness is something that comes as a side effect in pursuing happiness. Pursuing your bliss, in the words of the great Joseph Campbell, or at least life's purpose, living a meaningful life.

And so what got stripped out of this globalist WEF vision was a vision that had just stripped every nation of its core meanings. It just had basically... just it had not just disregarded it had started they had all turned on their own incredible traditions as somehow as evil that these incredible national traditions and I'm with you on the subsidiarity concept by the way I love that

I want the French to be the most French. I love France. I don't want France to be like some universal monoculture. Which, by the way, it's so ironic. I mean, it's a whole other story.

Yes. Well, I hope that this prodding that the president's doing is... I hope that the prodding is actually inspiring a healthy response from Canada to say, because I think the question goes to Canada goes great under the Trudeau vision that Canada is just part of this global monoculture. Well, then who cares if you become part of the United States?

That's just one step in towards becoming part of a global government. I mean, you know what? It's just it's it's a soullessness issue. that got exposed, that, you know, that creeped in. And you realize, like, when you get down to what is a nation, it's got a soul, it's got a culture, it's got a set of traditions, it's got a set of values. And they're meaningful. And they give life's meaning.

It's upsetting to go 20 years of hearing stories of veterans, almost all of whom appear to have PTSD in some way, the combat ones, the struggles they have. I mean, I was with a veteran who lost friends in Afghanistan the day that Biden pulled out, which was a disgrace. So America is tired now. We love Europe. We believe in Europe, but they're testing our patience.

They give something to aspire to. And so to just go and denigrate them, as has been done for decades, as just slavery and oppression and these, you know, these... singularities of singularity, it's all just, you know, the modernity and civilization just culminated in the Holocaust and the atomic bomb and climate apocalypse.

I just think we have, I think that the great thing that's occurred is at least in the United States, I think that is now repudiated and that the left isn't going to find, Democrats aren't going to find any success there. I think you're going to see a victory by AFD in Germany this month. It won't probably be first, but they're going to make a huge victory.

It looks like Nigel Farage's party is coming very strong, certainly in France. So I think we could be seeing a re... And I don't think it's as... I think the funny way it's manifesting is that it's very moderate in...

Actually, you know, like this rebalancing, I mean, they can call it radical, but what was radical, the extremist was what the establishment was pursuing in the name of countering populism, in the name of countering the return of democracy. So, you know, Jordan, I'm filled with. A lot of optimism. I mean, just the executive orders.

Last time I was here with you, we were dealing with the sterilization and mutilation of children. I mean, that's where things got. The elites got to the point where they said, no, no, we're going to go ahead and sterilize and mutilate your children. And look, here's a peer reviewed science article telling you that it's good. I mean, that is how far things went.

And to see it snap back in the way that it snapped back, I can't help but be filled with a sense of optimism. I don't think we have a lot of visibility still in terms of what comes next. But I mean, I think what I'm also getting in the conversation is the sense that you do have to have this faith. You do have to affirm human life. You have to say humans are good.

There's something special about us on this earth. It's a beautiful earth. There's a lot of wonderful other species, but there's something special about humankind. We have a specific responsibility. Human Western liberal democratic civilization has been the high point in that. And that really the alternative is just might makes right. It's the Hobbesian world.

And we don't want to go, I think the American people have said, we don't want to go back to that. We don't want to go live in a world where every president gets put into prison by the next president or where committees of experts decide what the truth is. So for me, it's just, you know, I just kind of look at it and I go, it's a completely open plane now.

And, you know, we're not seeing these reactionary totalitarian forces able to even respond to what's been happening.

And I think we finally have an administration that can communicate the depth of our concern around their push towards censorship. And they're really they pioneered it. They developed it. A lot of it was, you know, we've certainly done our part to bring it there. But anyway. Western Europe is currently the greatest threat to free speech in the West.

I'm in Austin for a few more hours, and then I fly to London.

And I think they need to understand that that's a big problem when it comes to U.S.-European relations.

I think the last 12 years, we should think of it as a woke reign of terror. I mean, really, it starts with Black Lives Matter, ends with the election of President Trump. We discover, thanks to the Twitter files, the existence of this elaborate censorship industrial complex complete with government-run disinformation efforts. How much of government spending is wasted? You know, it's classic Elon.

That's right. Well, of course, it's happening at a moment when I think Europe has started to at least comprehend just how behind it is on technology. The speech that J.D. Vance gave a couple of days ago was on AI, at least ostensibly on AI, and how the framing that they want, the Trump administration wants, is of technology.

AI as possibility, as potential, as innovation, not as apocalypse, repression, you know, the sort of the European approach to try to gain control over the technology. Yeah, good luck. Yeah. I mean, so, look, you know, America is, I mean, sounds so corny, but I mean, America's back in just a big way.

I mean, you've just got a character there in the White House that is, they are moving faster than anybody. I mean, I was just there talking to folks, you know, it was... various places, and everybody's surprised at how fast they're moving. And of course, Elon has accelerated that, the number of things that are happening.

The thing that we were ostensibly going to talk about today, for example, not to, we don't have to go to it right away, but just the whole reason there's a debate in the United States right now about the United States Agency for International Development, USAID, is simply because Elon was seeking to basically gain access to the

the computer systems, the servers, the buildings themselves that these agencies occupy. And that was the agency that wouldn't give them access. It wouldn't give them clearance. So that was when, you know, Trump just, they just shut it down. They just were like, if we can't get...

We were the democratically – he's the democratically elected president of the United States who has full authority, according to Article 2 of the U.S. Constitution, over every single executive branch agency, and that includes Agency for International Development, when they are refusing access to the representative of the president of the United States, who happens to be our greatest technologist –

They just were like, fine, if you're gonna play that, you know, play stupid games, win stupid prizes. And the stupid prize they got was that they got shut down, including pulling back all of their people. And I only mentioned it to say, What you're seeing them bringing into government, which none of us could have imagined, is first of all, this awareness that you can't really reform institutions.

People talk about that, but really you have to just shut them down and build something fresh. That's the only way you can get the old guard out and you have to have new leadership and a new constitution or a new set of rules. but also that you don't really know what's going on until you move fast and break things.

And so like, this is something that I experienced too, which is like, you just have to go out there and sort of do things in the world to figure out what is the federal government You sort of think you know what the federal government is because we have lists of agencies and employees and whatever. But we saw with the U.S. Agency for International Development, we didn't know what they were doing.

And then they would be like, oh, yeah, okay, well, about the remedies, oh, there's a mayoral race coming up. I think it was in the – it was like in the summer, you know, that these focus groups were held. Caruso versus Bass. Caruso versus Bass. And they hadn't really been thinking a ton about it, but there's a moment there where you see it dawns on the white focus group participants.

And they were not like recruiting like leftists or Democrats or anything. It was just supposed to be a mixed group of swing voters. Yeah. and they just as soon as it dawned on them that there was a black woman running they were like oh well i mean that's i mean got a vote for the black woman like it was the most racist like you would think like in the in the most racist moments in american history

you know, the stereotypes that we would have, you know, about the South or whatever, you know, reconstruction or something like people would not be as open and honest about it, but they were just like openly like, well, we have to vote for the black woman. And then in the rest of the focus group,

A lot of them knew who Caruso was because he's famous for these really spectacular housing developments. And also they're kind of calling them malls is a kind of beautiful outdoor shopping centers with lawns. And you can get fantastic restaurants and you can have the kids can play freely on these lawns. I mean, it's sort of tragic because, of course, it's all private. It's not public spaces.

But nonetheless, you feel safe. You go in there. It's an amazing place. So they knew him for that. I want these white participants. I was watching them through basically over the next hour, hour and a half. Explaining why Caruso was a bad guy for just running against this black woman, like it was just outrageous. And what is he trying to do? He's trying to make money.

I mean, which is just crazy because, of course, he's just, you know, like he's like a billionaire. I mean, he's self-made and. extraordinarily successful person and clearly running for mayor is an altruistic act. So it was just appalling. So, of course, I mean, I have to say, you know... What is that?

they said we're headed towards a super dangerous moment um the next day the national weather service los angeles held a briefing to underscore that point the day after that the mayor flew to ghana i mean it's crazy like you would have public press conferences yeah these were oh i mean it's absolutely public and it goes to the politicians first but it's all said publicly it's the national weather service so

The more hatred I express towards white people, the better I am as a human being.

Oh, yeah. The nihilism. Obviously, this is a very old story about decadence and of comfort, and you start to kind of believe – I mean, there's something really checked out from reality about the whole thing. I mean, first of all, it's the stories that get told are just, you know, like absurd, like 1619 being the founding of America. That's just obviously wrong.

The country was founded, you know, our Constitution in 1789, Declaration of Independence in 1776. And not only that, but like slavery was never at the heart of the United States.

It was always, it was a whole place committed to, it was English Americans or the American English, as they were referred to, wanting to create a country the first time that was just founded on the enlightenment ideals of freedom and of free expression. I mean, so important. They put us the first amendment, they insist on a bill of rights.

So you just get this completely twisted, you know, disinformation story about the United States that gets embraced. Yeah, it's nihilism. But embraced by whites. Yeah.

I mean, it's end of civilization sort of ideology, isn't it?

No, and when you read the old- And it is the whites, too. Oh, yeah. No, because the Latinos, I mean, they're sort of- They're like, what? Yeah, for sure. They're like more working class. They're more Christian. They're more, they love America more. They remember where they came from more. I agree.

So, yeah, I mean, it's also, yeah, so it's just in some ways it's an old story of a civilization just at its end. I mean, including all the transgenderism. I mean, that's, you know, that's the Camille Polly is famous writing about how that shows up at the end of civilizations. Yeah.

And so, you know, if you read Toynbee, it's like one of the characteristics is when the elites stop the creative class of elites, which is, I mean, Los Angeles, they stop identifying with their own working class and they start to identify with, you know, with outsiders, basically with people from foreigners from outside the country. That's another sign of a civilization at its end.

So that was like literally on the first or second, the governor should have called out the National Guard. He should have called all of our neighboring states. He should have called Canada and Mexico, asked for all their backup help. They should have started circling C-130s that are especially retrofitted that can dump the fire retardant or water.

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They should have had helicopters circling to see where the fires were. It should have been immediate mobilization.

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I mean, it's a cliche, but like a lot of cliches, there's a lot of truth to it, is the good times make soft men and soft men make bad times. So, I mean, there's obviously been a huge correction in the United States, which is, you know, welcome, which is a sort of re-embrace of the ideals of the United States. I mean, let's hope that this has been a wake-up call for the people of Los Angeles.

I mean, it's... they are reaping what they sowed and the people of California are reaping what we sowed. And, you know, that is, you know, I mean, it's really quite symbolic. You know, it's like the neighborhoods of the of the elites in Los Angeles that are really that really got the most effective that are having to flee.

And but again, I mean, part of the reason I wanted to come on, I've been writing about it every day and trying to surface the stories of the utility, the water utility executives. And I've got a story coming out later today from a firefighter who, you know, like basically just described, I mean, the firefighters, of course, the men and women on the ground doing the hard work, they're blameless.

But I mean, the destruction, there's 29 fire departments in Los Angeles, including LA County Fire Department. You know, there's 88 cities, and people don't realize, like Los Angeles is a city, but then there's a much larger county around it with 88 cities in it. And not all of them have fire departments. In fact, most of them don't, right?

So the ones that don't have their own fire departments, they depend on LA County Fire Department. And it's been this way for a long time, so it's not like it can't work, but it definitely introduces a level of complexity into it. I mean, the priorities of these fire departments, it's not just like a social media meme. I mean, it really has been DEI.

Like, it really has been the priority of these fire departments. The first priority of the fire departments should be to put out fires and keep people safe and save lives. But the first priority has been DEI.

I mean, I mean, what are the chances, right? That like all three of these executives are, I mean... You know, it's like it's also sort of like I mean, it's it's funny because the way that the the defenders of it sort of talk about it is as though they're imposing equality. Actually, they're demanding that that it not be based on merit.

Yeah, and because there's so many ignitions, because of really these two factors, mostly the electrical wires brushing up against vegetation and triggering a fire, that's kind of one of the main ones. The other one is homeless people starting fires all over LA. Half of all fires put out by the LA Fire Department are started by homeless people. It's been that way for years.

I mean, first of all, there was never any evidence that the fire departments were like systematically or structurally excluding qualified people. I mean, it's not to say that never happened. There wasn't some racism. I mean, of course there is. But it's like. They got into a situation where people are getting promoted who were not as qualified as other people on basis of race.

I mean, that is anathema to the American system. And by the way, the people of California have now twice rejected racial preferences. One of them in 1996, I believe, and then the other, again, in 20—was it 2018, I believe?

Well, yeah, and they haven't. No, they haven't. I mean, the spirit of California, I mean, there's a true spirit of California that I do think is very American, which is really egalitarianism. I mean, the American creed, If you believe Daniel Bell's analysis of it, you know, it's liberty, it's laissez-faire, it's individualism, and it's egalitarianism. That's the state I grew up in.

It was the most American of all states. That's right. It's not equity. It's equality of opportunity.

That seemed like a great system to me. It's great. I mean, that's what I love. I mean, it's the part I love about California. It's like, I lived on the East Coast for like a year. It was a traumatic experience. You'd go to parties and someone would be like, oh, what school did you go to? Oh, totally. Totally. And then they'd be kind of looking over your shoulder and you're like, well, what?

Like, who cares what school I went to? Like, you know, who am I? Exactly. Where are my passions? Exactly. So that was like I was like, wow, that is like that is weird. You know, in California, it's like, what's your jam, dude? You know, it's like really like, what are you into? You know, it's that's like the best of it. Who are you as a person? Yeah. Who are you as a person? It's the human.

You know, it's like obviously there you can get culty and whatever. But I mean, it is the best of that human potential.

Right. Your decency. Which is actually radical individual responsibility.

Yeah. I mean, that was always, for me, it was like, you know, Viktor Frankl, who wrote Man's Search for Meaning, was this incredibly Holocaust survivor. The whole thing was like, you know, being in a death camp shouldn't control how I think about the world. I mean, that's about as radical of an individual mentality as... point of view.

And now, of course, that's viewed as very right-wing and very unsympathetic and whatever. But Viktor Frankl was just loved by the existentialist California left in the 60s. I mean, he would sell out these huge auditorium in Berkeley and they would, you know, they'd go to Esalen. And so, I mean, you go from that to basically nobody taking responsibility. I mean, it's incredible.

Is it not? That's so well-spoken. No, no, it's totally brilliantly well-spoken. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, it's like we, in our next book, we're working on this idea of these singularities, meaning like these just awful events in the past, the Holocaust, slavery, indigenous genocide. Yes. And they become like gods for secular people. They become like super present.

Like, you know, there's – it's just everything that we do is affected by slavery and, you know, everything. This is indigenous land. I mean, I was going through the – I was just going through all of like the various documents over the years of like water and fire and disaster in Los Angeles. And they like all open with land acknowledgments. You know, you're just like, well, yeah, but –

Literally, you think that white people don't belong here. That is literally what you're saying in those land acknowledgments. You're saying, we don't belong here. And you may have seen, there's a clip that went viral on social media with the deputy fire chief of Los Angeles.

Where she's sort of saying, oh, yeah, people will ask me, you know, can you carry my husband out of a house, you know, in danger? And she's like, well, you know, your husband got himself in a place that he shouldn't have been. That was her response. It was like.

Well, you know, it turns out meth heads love to start fires. You know, there's just every drug has its kind of weird element to it. But meth heads love starting fires. They love destroying things like meth is like the drug of nihilism. So it's like perfect drug for L.A. and California at the moment. So it's not these are not cooking fires.

It's crazy. Crazy. You're like, yeah, that's literally your job is to be able to carry someone. Can you imagine, like, someone being like, oh, yeah, your father, your elderly father, you know, we couldn't carry him out of the house. And he shouldn't have been in that house when it was burned down.

Well, she shouldn't have been wearing a skirt. Right. Yeah. I mean, like, what? Yeah. That's like the left campaign. Like when I was in college, like that was the whole don't blame the victim. That was the whole thing. Of course, they're all. Which I would kind of agree with, by the way.

I know. She should have been fired as soon as that came out. I mean, and Gavin Newsom should have called for her to be fired. The mayor should have called for her to be fired. She's still in that job. I mean... That's dangerous. It's a violation of firefighter ethics. That person is a danger.

In other words, she's going around suggesting to all of her people that work for her that they're not responsible for saving. But I think it reflects the mentality, which is a nihilistic mentality, which is that we don't belong here. We stole this land. And this is this let Malibu burn. I mean, it is...

definition definitionally nihilism i mean it's anti-civilization nihilism you know there's sort of two forms of nihilism one of them is basically anti-civilization anti-human anti you know modern life and it stems from this earlier nihilism which is that life has no meaning we're just like animals in the famous russian novel fathers and sons by turd you know the the nihilistic character

dissects a frog and says, we're just like this frog. You know, we're just matter. You know, we're just dead matter, just this assembly. So it's a very dark, nihilistic story that then leads to this just, yeah, nihilistic anti-civilization ideology, which became very fashionable.

I mean, City of Quartz, the Mike Davis book, I mean, it was a very fashionable book to read in places like Pacific Palisades and Hollywood and Santa Monica and and Venice. So yeah, I think it's, you know, I hope it's a wake-up call. I don't know if it will be, but it is a completely preventable disaster. Fires are definitely not completely preventable, but that level of destruction absolutely is.

And anybody who says that it's that it is not preventable, should be as far away from power as possible. Like anybody who believes that it was inevitable to lose 10,000 homes and buildings in Los Angeles over a week, they should be very far away from political power. They should not be in charge of any fire department because it ends up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So I've taken you right to 50,000 Feet.

No, it's not caused by climate change. I mean, certainly warmer weathers, all else being equal, makes the wood, you know, drier. But there is no change in precipitation over since 1877. They've kept very good records of rainfall, annual rainfall in the Los Angeles basin. And it's unchanged. Really? There are. I know it's incredible. There's wet years and dry years. You know, you look at it.

I just posted on X. It's just people can go look at it. It's from the Almanac. Yeah. No change in precipitation at all in Los Angeles. There have been Santa Ana winds in January many times in the past. There have been, you know, and by the way, this is a dry year now, but the last two years were very heavy rains. Too heavy. Yeah. Mudslide heavy. Yeah. And so, you know, it's extremes.

I mean, that's why California is so beautiful. It's a place of extremes. And so we, you know, we adapt to that. I mean, you know. But there's been no, in the aggregate, change in rainfall in 140 years. No, absolutely not.

It's actually a remarkably stable climate.

Yeah.

No, totally fine. Yeah, what could go wrong?

Yeah. I mean, it's stable climate with these amazing extremes. So like, you know, you'll just get these, I mean, the best, I mean, for my favorite weather is like after like, you know, three days of just intense rains and you're just like trying to make sure that your house isn't flooded and, you know, the mud's everywhere. It's just the dogs are bringing in mud.

And then the sun comes out and it's just heaven on earth. I mean, that's why we're in California, right? You're just like, ah. So we love those. We love those extremes. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think that's part of the, I mean, it's so funny because it's like, the reversion back to these, you know, people are cursing the weather. You know, they're blaming the weather.

That's why we do human sacrifice. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, another one was literally just before I got here, the legislature got to its very important work of passing a bill just now that sets aside $50 million for California to sue Trump. Like literally, and they were in a special session. That they kept going. They were in a special session to figure out how to sue Trump while L.A.

is burning. And meanwhile, Gavin's going out there all the time being like, oh, well, boy, it'd be really terrible if, you know, if Trump, you know, withheld disaster aid or heaven forbid, you know, required that we, you know, get our shit together. I'm not sure I'm allowed to say in your podcast, get our things together. Yeah.

Psychopathy, yeah. I mean, for sure. I mean, look, meth makes you psychopathic. It makes you psychotic. It's meth-induced psychosis. But, I mean, yeah, and all the crazy... I mean, people behave... I mean, things that people do on meth, I mean, it is like...

And then literally he's like, we're going to sue him for implementing the agenda he was elected on by a majority of the American people.

It would be amazing. It would be amazing if we had that. It's going to happen. There was sort of an idea that Karen Bass, because she was black and because she came from the left, would be able to do things that a white guy wouldn't be able to do. That was part of the reasoning for her. She didn't do it. I mean, she's just I mean, look, she's very people have to remember she's very radical.

I mean, and I get it. I mean, I was like I was there. I left it. But, you know, she went to Cuba a bunch of times and, you know, like admired Castro and. you kind of thought, well, maybe that was behind her, but it's not. You know, it really isn't.

I mean, the thing where, like, you literally get a warning that the whole city's going to go up in flames, and you're like, oh, I really got to be in Ghana for the inauguration of the new president. I mean, look at where your head's at. I mean, she talks about it. She just loves going to Africa all the time. I love going to Africa, but... I do, too. You're, like...

You're like the mayor of like... It's just silly and selfish, really. It's really narcissistic.

Yeah, of course. Yeah. I mean, she gets I mean, they so the other thing was she did cut the fire department budget. OK, she just cut it. I mean, she just it just happened. And then literally denying it. I know. So she literally goes up at a press conference and it was word salad. I mean, it was quite impressive. I mean, she was sort of like like you were like. what did she just say?

It's like they behave with like superhuman crazy powers, the levels of violence, the assaults, the, I mean, you just, when you interview people, particularly people in recovery that describe being on meth, I mean, they're just awake for like weeks at a time. Like it's not even clear how they get any sleep at all. So that's just, that madness has continued. And, you know, and Mayor Bass, who's the-

I mean, she's kind of, she goes, she goes, well, that was, you know, it would kind of be like, well, that was different because we just approved this other money. And she would basically just, it was a non sequitur. I mean, she's describing a totally different salary negotiation. They cut 17.5 million from the budget.

And not only that, but then they had this internal memo that leaked that said that they were looking to cut another 48.8 million, another 49 million. From the fire, from the fire, from the fire department, which had already was already decimated. Um, I mean, there's a whole story on this.

No, it's crazy. So, so then like, so they do that. And of course the LA times and Politico and I can't remember other people. They all come out and they go, they go, did she cut the budget? You know, it's complicated, you know? I mean, it's amazing. You know, it's complicated, which is like, yeah, yeah, she did cut.

She did cut the budget, but nobody, the media was not being honest with people about what was really going on until the The fire chief, the lesbians, L.A. County fire chief, to her credit. She was being actually she was being grilled by a local Fox television reporter who was just doing a great job, actually. I mean, just to be handed the local TV, actually, some of the best reporting still.

Great local television. I don't know why. No, I think I agree with you. Yeah. It's fallen off in the Bay Area. They did a little bit better in Oakland when things get really crazy. But she just kept going after her. She just kept asking her over and over again about the about the budget cuts. And she was kind of having a high. Finally, she was just like, yeah, yeah, she did. She cut that money.

And she's like, and did it matter? Yeah, yeah, it mattered. You know, she had sent a letter. I mean, there was a letter from, I think it was December 4th that the fire chief had sent, which said specifically, this is going to reduce our ability to deal with wildfires. She said it twice. Yes, she said it twice in the letter.

So it was a little bit like, okay, you were on the record saying it was going to hurt your ability. So, but then she was like, yes, yes, it did hurt our ability.

um to deal with it then she just was like i think at that point the fire chief she was just like all right you know like um the gloves are off so she goes on cbs and on cnn and reiterates it and with very strong language ice was able to get into this piece that will come out um shortly i was able to get into the weeds a little bit on it but basically there's a hundred fire trucks that are currently um

In the maintenance shop that are just need to be fixed. There's a hundred fire trucks missing. The person I interviewed was like, we could go buy, we could have bought for a hundred million dollars. We could have bought, you know, like a hundred or two hundred.

you know, kind of used fire trucks or whatever, just get fire trucks from wherever, maintain them, and just put them in different points all around the city. You wouldn't necessarily have the staff to deal with them, but you could then, as soon as you get that fire warning, again, on January 1st or January 2nd, you can just fly in firefighters from around the country, from around the world.

You'd just be like, look, we're just going to bring everybody in We don't know what's going to happen. And then they can just go. He was this person was like, you know, we could put like 30 of them at Dodger Stadium. You know, you could just like put these fire trucks that are well maintained, you know.

But so she was like because I didn't quite understand it either because she was like, we didn't have the money for the mechanics. And you're like, well, why do you like what do you need the mechanics for? Well, you need the mechanics to maintain the fire engines. Right.

So, I mean, this is what, you know, it's like when civilization breaks down, it breaks down in like just a million small ways, you know. So, you know, is there some DEI part of it? Yeah, there was. They were promoting people not based on merit. Is there budget cuts? Absolutely. I mean, they didn't, you know, and what goes wrong when you don't have those budget cuts? Everything.

You know, I mean, the other complaint I've heard, you know, is just that. It's just the advanced thinking. It's just getting people that can kind of be thinking in advance. That's where their focus is. That's where their priority is.

So the problem with the DEI is that when you're just orienting an entire organizational culture towards racial and sex quotas rather than towards, okay, you know, what about the Santa Ana wins and the fire risk and whatever? It's just we all know that, like, It's not just time in the day, it's also mind time. It's like, what do you think about when you take a shower?

What do you think about when you're putting on your shoes? Like, where is your head at? Their head has been in the clouds around, you know, DEI, the larger society, ESG, climate, homelessness. I mean... I mean, the list goes on and on. But it was on homelessness. We now know, because the state audit came out, $24 billion on homelessness since Gavin took office in 2019.

Tucker, homelessness in California increased by 40% under Gavin. Can you believe that? I mean, 40%. Because everyone goes, it's such a curious mystery as to we spent all this money on homelessness. And yet, it just increased. It's like, well, yeah, because you spent money incentivizing and subsidizing homelessness. You spent all this money to attract people from all over the United States.

I mean, I interview people in California that are on the streets, and it's like, nobody's from California. I mean, they come in.

Oh, they want to be. See, the thing is like homeless people, they're always lonely, you know? And so they're, obviously these are people in a really bad way and they're eager to tell their story. They have a lot to say. They're not, most of them are not dumb. Some of them are not dumb at all. I was shocked by that. Oh, no. And they do lie, like, at the beginning.

So, I mean, you have to... The secret to all great interviews, as you know more than anybody, is you need to have a long time. Yes. Because people tell the... They lie at first, and then the truth comes out. So, like, you'll interview people, and you'll be like, you're like, where are you from, brother? And they'll be like, oh, I was raised here.

And then you get, like, 30 minutes in the interview, they're like, oh, I'm from Arkansas, you know? I'm from Texas or whatever. So, yeah, I mean... So, yeah, they're from all over. They come, you know, the most famous one I did was with James Church. He had tattoos on his face, and he was just incredible. I just love that interview so much.

Not totally. I mean, I think homeless people are going to often start fires for a lot of different reasons. I mean, drugs can start fires, but the meth heads are like into fire. Like it's a big part of meth culture. It's just starting things on fire. No one sees this in theological terms. It's like this. I know it's amazing.

I think it was like an hour, hour and a half with him, just holding my iPhone up to him while he's talking. But he was the one who was like... you know, if I'm being honest, you know, they pay people to be homeless here. And I was like, what do you mean by that?

You know, and he's like, well, he's like, I get 650 bucks a month, you know, in cash welfare to be homeless here, plus a couple of hundred bucks more in food stamps. It's a great deal. And he was like, I got Netflix on my phone. I watch Amazon, you know, I watch Amazon Prime TV on my phone. You know, I still, Electric City from the light pole right here, That video, I will say, is very satisfying.

I do think that played a pretty big role in the voters of San Francisco voting to get rid of cash welfare for homeless people.

Yeah. No, it's satanic.

I mean, because it's – Because you weren't a reporter. You weren't working for a newspaper or a TV station. No. I mean, look, for me, this is the golden age of journalism. It is so much fun. Because, like, basically, I can go into every story – And you discover that people aren't really doing reporting. I showed up at the guy.

Yeah. It's awful. So, but you know, you kind of go, I mean, so first of all, that problem should have been dealt with obviously years ago, it should never have been allowed. So, but that they knew on January 1st, January 2nd, that the fires were coming. Like it was inevitable that there would be fires.

I showed up at the house that the guy lived in, the guy that assaulted Nancy Pelosi's husband. Yes. Just to give you a sense of where journalism is at. And I show up and I'm like, I'm just happy to be there. And there's all these journalists there. It was like a bunch of like local TV news and like the local print, whatever. And I was like, I just kind of like, oh, hey, what's the call?

He lived out in Berkeley, right? Yeah, he's in Berkeley. Yeah. Black Lives Matter flag in front, you know, you know, abandoned school bus. They were really, it was really terrible environment. But, and I was like, oh, I was like, so I was like, have you guys already, I was kind of like worried. I was like, I got here late.

And I was like, so you guys already like knocked on all the doors of the neighbors. And they were just like, looked at me and they were like, no, we're like not ready. I can't remember what one of them said. He was like, oh, we don't want to be like rude or something, or that would be like inappropriate. I was like, and at that moment I was like, oh God, this is going to be great.

And I just like went and knocked on all the doors and I get all the information like, oh, yeah, they would around naked out there and they would be on drugs all the time. And yeah, they were like all left wing. And it was like, you know, I was like, oh, this is amazing. Like, there's no competition.

Like it's you know, I got on the I got on the White House briefing just recently, the White House briefing on UAPs, which you and I are both interested in on the drones. And it was just like, you can kind of go into these stories, you just start talking to people and you just realize journalists aren't really, they're not really journalists.

They're more like kind of the people that would run for like class president or something. They're kind of goody two-shoes types. They're ass kissers, yes. Yeah, they're actually very authoritative. I mean, they're the ones that wanted all the censorship. Of course. Of course. So they're not that old picture of journalists. It's like this kind of cantankerous and like, you know, crabby.

And they got rid of all those people. Anti-authoritarian. Anti-authoritarian. Yeah. Difficult people. I'm the son of one of those. Yeah. Yeah. I grew up on this. Classic. Right. That's like the greatest. I mean, there's like and you realize it's essential to the functioning of civilization to have a bunch of disagreeable people running around asking impertinent questions. Exactly.

So, with this one, it was like, yeah, so, I mean, you basically get, like, when you just look at the coverage of the fires, I mean, it was like the reporters that are going out and doing it, it's like their whole thing is like, oh, we've got to make sure that the right wing doesn't take advantage of this situation to push their agenda. Like, literally, that's how they think about it.

So, they're out there running cover for the – I mean, it's amazing, you know. Somebody did, like, a little meme on it, but it's like that thing where it's like – Yeah, it used to be that the reporter would be holding the microphone up to the politicians and being like, answer my questions. And now they're demanding that the people defend themselves for their terrible votes.

It's like a complete reversal.

Like there was like zero doubt among anybody that knows anything about fire in Los Angeles, that the fires were coming, the fires were coming. So then like the governor should have been there, the mayor should have been there. Literally, it's all about prevention, in part because by the time the fire trucks are having to weave their way up those little hills of the Pacific Palisades, it's over.

No, of course. I mean, it's really... I mean, you say of course, but like... No, I know. Well, no, I know. I wrote San Francisco because it was literally like... Because I knew drugs. Like, you know... Me too. I know drugs. You know, I made three friends from high school. I became homeless addicts. Two are dead. It's like, you know, I'm, you know, I happily avoided personally all the hard ones.

But you saw your friends, like, you know, you'd leave you. Wow, you guys have the same math. You know, it's like, that's bad. What time did you go to high school? Greeley, Colorado. Yeah. You know, yeah. So, you know, my parents are psychologists. I remember just being around my aunt had schizophrenia. You know, I've told the story a long time, so I don't want to bore you.

But basically, it was like it was just kind of like, so wait, everyone just thinks that this is like a housing problem. Like, that's just crazy. So, you know, you sort of needed to I needed to go do all those interviews. But I mean, really, the first homelessness epidemic, the first time that we're modern homelessness was in the early 80s.

And it was just, it was basically all it was was a combination of the emptying, the final closure of all the mental hospitals where they literally, literally dumped people on the streets. Like I thought that that was, that sounded like an exaggeration when I first started. They literally were putting, you know, schizophrenics and stuff on the streets. And then the crack epidemic.

Like that's all it was. It was just those two things. And then, of course, then, you know, left-wing mayor of San Francisco and others are like, oh, well, we can't, like, we can't, like, require that people not camp outside. They're poor. The left, in reaction to Reagan, then took up homelessness as something that they claimed was caused by Reagan.

Like, I mean, he'd been in office for, like, whatever, two or three years, and they would just make ridiculous claims, you know, the Reagan budget, you know, that's why he's on the street. Yeah. So it really gets used – so it becomes viewed by the left early on as a political propaganda tool. I also blame the comics, by the way. I mean, and just I'll name them.

Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg. They did this whole thing. You may remember Comic Relief. Yeah. Where they framed the whole thing as a problem of poverty, which is just – it's just – It's just such a disservice to the people on the street who need an intervention.

For addicts, there's a natural progression where you, whether from trauma or just because you enjoyed getting high, your addiction gets in the way of your job and you stop going to work, and you often live at home with your parents or with friends. You lie, steal, and cheat from them repeatedly. They give you multiple warnings. They finally kick you out. That's often the route to homelessness.

You end up on the street. That's the moment where the society, the family and friends were not able to impose an intervention. So the way it should work is that you end up, you go out camp on the street and the cop goes, hey, you can't camp here.

And they go, what am I supposed to do? And they're like, well, we're going to take you to jail or you can go to rehab. Like those are your two choices, two choices. A natural intervention is imposed in that situation. What progressives and Democrats did for 40 years is they just removed the intervention in the name of compassion. The most compassionate thing is to impose the intervention.

I mean, the thing that's most common, I'll even find this with like harm reduction workers. I was just with some harm reduction workers in California. In Skid Row. And one of them was telling me the whole usual thing. Oh, you can't make somebody get clean. They have to hit their own bottom, like whatever. And I was like, and they were like, I used to run around here, you know, on meth.

It was an Asian American woman who was doing this. And I was like, oh, wow. I was like, what did it finally take you for you to get clean? She was like, well, I went to prison. You know, it's like, well, right.

I mean, so the other thing to keep in mind is that— Okay, well, so that's the first thing, is that they just have to mobilize in advance.

And they're like the, by the way, the recovering addicts are like the greatest people. I mean, they're the funniest, most honest people.

Yeah.

100%.

They've all died in some way. Yeah.

It's why it's so beautiful. Beautiful places are dangerous. That's exactly right. So— So that's like the main event. I mean, because I knew, my first thing I did is I was like, look, they're going to come out and say it was inevitable. And that's just a total lie. Because of global warming. Yeah, because of global warming and, I mean, anyway, there's so many places to go here.

I mean, you've done more on this than I have much more, but it's sort of coming back a little bit. People talk about meth induced psychosis now more, but

yeah it's uh it's really psychosis oh yeah and the weed now it's just so potent and dangerous and yeah so but you as a someone who still lives in california does anybody do you ever hear people say that like why are we paying people to use drugs like should it surprise us that things are falling apart i mean i do think i do think that the the conversation has changed a bit um i'll take some credit for it with san francisco and the videos in particular um

But yeah, it's just still that thing where it's like they kind of go, but yeah, but there's a black woman running for mayor. And it just, it's like the singularity. It's like when I always say that, it's like this just, it's just hovering over people. It's a race thing. Yeah, it's really about race in a really important sense. And then the guilt.

It's like the dealers are all immigrants from Central America. We can't do anything about it. Right. Oh, Sanctuary State, Sanctuary City. That's part of what they're going to sue on. Yeah.

yeah i mean i think that it's just um yeah it's a big trap i mean i think that it's funny because you know we're a guilt culture and so you know like you know japan's a shame culture yes and you know guilt is this um incredibly important part of the christian tradition yes well you stop believing in original sin and you stop believing in christianity you still apparently there's still this deep desire to feel that guilt and to sort of

show it as well. In other words, it is a social part of it. People wanted to see in that focus, they wanted other people to see in that focus group that they felt guilty. You know, it was very important to them.

Wow, that's really interesting. Yeah. Well, then they talk about it that way. Even when you talk to the activists that justify it, they're like, well, that's a, you know, those people are suffering because of capitalism. Exactly. And, you know, slavery and white supremacy. But the whole point of Christianity is, no, no, no, you suffer.

Right. Well, it's the part of it that's just really satanic. I mean, not to be theological about it, but it's just a complete reversal of the traditional Christian process. It's just, yeah, it's exactly, it's making other people. Atone for your sins. Yeah, it's crazy. It's unfortunate. It's so bad. And they're sort of on display.

You know, it's the it's the it's really if you kind of read it, I mean, it's like it's like it's like they want to they want it to be on display. They want to sort of show it. And that's why they insist that they not be arrested or mandated treatment. It's wild. It is like, you know, like you go to Skid Row and it's still like a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

You know, it's just like, you just can't, you still can't believe it. I mean, you still can't believe there's a person lying there, you know, sweating profusely, passed out. You can't tell if they're alive or dead. You don't know, like, do I do an intervention? And it's just, it's really breaking down. Yeah. These are human beings.

But just on the most practical sense, they knew the fires were coming and they didn't do anything. The mayor leaves the country. She flies to Ghana after having promised not to leave the country, by the way, as mayor. She's traveled at least six times out of the country and she promised not to travel. Why is it important the mayor be there? Aren't there other people in charge?

It's a healthy response, by the way. Absolutely it is. Absolutely it is. Those are the people that end up getting off the street. You raise the bottom instead of lowering the bottom.

Yeah.

Well, there's 88 cities and there's 29 fire departments in counting the county. No, no, that's fine. But, yeah, so like literally like once the fire starts, I didn't even understand this until I started investigating it. The county fire chief has to call all these cities and be like, hey, can you send a couple of trucks? We're putting together a strike team.

You know, can you send some engines or whatever? And they have to call around and they're like, okay, we're all going to meet. The fire's like blazing away. And they're like, okay, well, we're all going to meet, you know, wherever, you know, Sepulveda or whatever the streets are in LA. You know, we'll meet in this place and we'll all get together and we'll sync the radios and we'll develop a plan.

I mean, this is all happening like while the city's burning. I mean, it's madness, right? The other thing is that it's, I mean, there's like- So they didn't have any preparation for this?

I mean, there might've been something that we, but obviously if there was, it wasn't enough. I mean, it's a little bit like when they go, when the people that are like, when the nihilists are defending what happened, they're like, well, there was nothing else we could have done or we did everything we could have. It's like, well, no, obviously you didn't. Like, it doesn't matter what it is.

It obviously was, there's only one right answer, which is that you didn't do enough. You know, the fatalism is, You know, it's a way to disavow responsibility on the one hand. Again, I think it expresses that nihilism. But I think it's like people just have been out of practice. But you have to – this is part of the journalism too.

Because it's a command. It's an emergency command situation. She has to be able to issue orders and to, you know, waive regulations and make things happen. The governor has to be doing that. They didn't do that. They should have had, by the way, they should get the fire trucks up into the fire areas. Right. They can also start, you know, they can start clearing brush.

You know, it's that you kind of – it has to be like, no, no, we're not accepting that as an answer. Like the right attitude for the journalist – Is to basically be no excuses. Of course. It makes for like, I mean, maybe the journalists are being too much of a hard ass and too much of a dick about it. Maybe they need to be a little bit whatever. That's fine. That's their role.

It's like your role is to be the prosecutor against the on the case of the failure. Your role is to be the investigator.

Yeah, the public defender or the prosecutor or the politician, you know. But your point is to be like, oh, no, that can't be right. Because when they go, well, we ran out of water. Well, why did you run out of water? Well, there wasn't enough water. No, well, why wasn't it? Well, because actually it turned out one of the reservoirs didn't have any water in it.

Isn't it your job to make sure there's enough water? You know, I mean, and this is what they do when they go after Trump and stuff. Is that like, because Trump will often be like directionally correct. Right. You know, like, oh, but Trump was referring to the wrong kind of reservoir. You know, the other reservoirs were full. Right.

It's like, okay, fine, but the reservoir right next to the Pacific Palisades was empty. So, you know, the basic intuition, which is, I think, I often talk about the importance of, you know, like if you're defending civilization, it's a physical thing, right? So I'm always thinking of myself as like... Like there's a physicalism in my worldview, which is like, okay, that's a person. That's a body.

They're in somewhere they shouldn't be. They need to be somewhere else. So we can have a debate about how to move them somewhere else. That's a totally reasonable debate to have. But they can't be there. They can't be there because they're creating fires. They're breaking the law. They're hurting themselves and others. Similarly, there wasn't water there. There needed to be more water.

And if you go, okay, well, let's say that they had – All the reservoirs, the potable water reservoirs, let's say they had all been full and they'd still run out of water. Well, then there was some other problem you needed to solve. Maybe you needed more reservoirs or maybe you needed the preparation there.

So you just have to have, I mean, you know, the Bukele type that you'd want to see or somebody. You just have to have somebody that's just like literally no excuses all the way down the line.

Oh, well, this is, yeah, this is exactly, it's like, first of all, it's like, I mean, it's just so symbolic. It's the city of angels, you know? So it's like, we're up here and you want it, like the wealthier you get in LA, and I guess with some exceptions like Venice Beach, but mostly you're getting up higher. Oh, yeah. You're moving up, up, up, up, up.

You're trying to get away from- To the cliffs of Malibu. Yeah. And you end up in the heavens and people talk about, I live in a little tree house. I mean, I get it. I love it. It's like, I live in the Berkeley Hills. I'm not like, you know, but it's like, I'm above all that. I'm away from all that. Like, I'm connected to nature up here, but also, you know, away from all the, you know, the plebes.

And so you actually, I think they do, it's that whole thing. We talk about people being in a bubble. You know, I mean, it's like the most bubbly place in the world, except for that it's not. And you're in a massive fire zone that must be constantly managed. There's consequences of living in these spectacular places. But you've got people that are, it's the whole industry is a fantasy industry.

I mean, it's just exists to construct a fantasy reality. And yeah, you would hope that people would be able to compartmentalize. Yeah, my day job is constructing fantasies that we charge. you know, $20 to stream. But I know that when I go home that like all the brush has to be cleared around my house and I have to vote for candidates that are physicalists. I mean, look at physicalists. Yeah.

They can start, you know, but literally they could just be in those neighborhoods just sitting there for days at a time waiting for the fires to happen, put them out as soon as they happen. I'm not saying that they would have been able to prevent all the fires from happening, but you remember like the big fire in 1993, I think it was Laguna Beach.

I mean, I don't, I mean, I don't know if that's the right word. There's something there. Yeah. Important. They're fantasists. I mean, the other people. I mean, I don't want to use the word idealist because there's too many other connotations to it. But it's just the difference between being your heads up in the clouds as opposed to just being really... You need the firefighter view of the world.

You need the cop view of the world. Frankly, you need the homeless guy's view. The homeless people... I mean, they're high a lot, so they're switching in and out, but they have to get their physical needs met.

I'm sure. Yeah. No, I think that's right. And also, like, parents, we all, I did it too, so I'm not, like, judging. But, like, we talk too much to the kids. Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. And you see, like, new parents talking to their kid, and the kid's like, what? It's like the peanuts is right. Like, what they hear is the wah-wah, wah-wah. It's so true.

As opposed to, like, could you set the table, you know? Could you, you know, like, the kids like, I mean, the kids like to have a job. They want to have a chore. Chores are super, like, kids love that, you know? And so, you know, you're teaching the kids to clean the classroom every morning. Yes. I mean, the problem is the specialization and the wealth. They sort of get disconnected from it.

Do you know what I mean, though? That's why I'm laughing. And dogs, too. People do it with their dogs. You ever see people with like, you know, whatever. I live in the Berkeley Hills. It's like, you know, older ladies and their dogs and they're just like blah, blah, blah with the dogs. It's like, well, you're not holding the leash tight enough, lady.

You know, you rewarded the dog when he did something bad. You should have rewarded it when it came to you. Anyway, so all these things break down. So deep and true.

Yeah, I think it's because it's like people say things like practical, which is good and pragmatic. But some pragmatic got started to mean things like making shitty political compromises. Do you know what I mean? Or it's an American linguistic tradition or philosophical tradition.

But yeah, physicalist, it's like, yeah, somebody's got to clean up all the, you know, if you have all the homeless people, you're going to have to spend millions of dollars on cleaning up crap. Right. All the time.

And, you know, the homeless, one of the things you probably have observed is that I think it's like probably a compensating mechanism, but they're just, they're obsessed with collecting tons and tons of garbage. Yes, yes. So they'll, you know, you'll clean up these homeless encampments and you'll be like, oh, wow. Yeah, they're not minimalists. No, no, they're not living the Zen lifestyle.

or maybe it was Malibu as well, but it was like 700 homes. We're at 10,000, you know, structures at this point, homes and buildings gone, you know, 200,000 people evacuated. I mean, it's like, it's madness. It never needed to get to that level. Okay, so that's the first thing. They just needed to have been there before the fire started.

No, it's not banging Ulfsen life. It's like very much. No, no, it's very cluttered, you know. And so they're probably over it. But so, yeah, I mean, they need, you need to, we need to reimpose some limits. You know, there's a, I'm also, I just became really obsessed with the scholar I just discovered who wrote a trilogy on nationalism named Leah Greenfeld. Highly recommend her books.

Her first book is called Nationalism. Second book is called Spirit of Capitalism. And the third book is called Mind, Madness, and Modernity. And these books are just incredible. But basically, it's actually L-I-A-H and then Greenfeld. Common spelling. Yeah. L-I-A-H. L-I-A-H. Yeah, she's a Russian. I think she's a Russian Jew who went to Israel, lived in Israel for a long time.

And then her mentor was Edward Schills, the sociologist. Yeah. So she's a sociologist, but the nationalism book is beautiful. I mean, it's like the famous book on nationalism is called Imaginary Communities by Benedict Anderson, and he's a Marxist. And so it's all the whole thing is like him trying to explain how nationalism, why it's so powerful when Marx thought it should wither away.

And but she describes now so she defines nationalism. The picture that people have of nationalism is completely wrong. Yes. She describes nationalism as a sovereign community of fundamentally equal individuals who have a shared identity. And so she's like nationalism is fundamentally democratic. Now, you might have some systems that are nationalist, but they don't have proper democracy.

But really, the basic idea is that egalitarian idea that we're Americans, we live here, we have the same solidarity. I've also become – I'll come back to the Greenfield, but I've also been obsessed with Hannah Arendt, who I had never read until recently. I don't think you're allowed to read her anymore. Well, I know.

She's too honest. Well, yeah, yeah. She was very, well, it's really in, I read her two books. One is the On Totalitarianism book and the other one is Eichmann in Jerusalem. Eichmann in Jerusalem, it's rough because she describes how the Jewish council participated with the Nazis. I mean, that was what was really controversial there.

But what really blew me away from reading Hannah Arendt, because I was coming to the nationalism conversation. I mean, self-confession, because I should have been reading nationalism starting in 2016.

But, you know, I finally was reading on it and it was like, she was like, nationalism is a barrier to totalitarianism because totalitarianism is attempting to destroy all relationships between people other than the relationship with the state. Exactly. Exactly. And so religion, nationalism, you know, the classic de Tocqueville associative ties. You know, all of that is a threat to totalitarianism.

And so that really struck me. And Leah Greenfield kind of, she has, I just interviewed her, so she has like a difference of opinion with Arendt on this issue. But nonetheless, I was just struck by how

And they didn't do that because the politicians are just, they're focused on themselves. They're focused on the next political office they wanna get. So that was the first thing. The second thing is the water runs out, right?

I don't know what the right, I must like, like for me, like nationalism, because I come from the left, you know, from the radical left, and we would code our socialist yearnings as the public interest.

You know, Ralph Nader kind of took all of the Chomsky and left-wing views of the early 60s and packaged them for moderate, he kind of made it all seem very reasonable, you know, and the environmentalists did the same thing. So the brilliance of the left in general, but the radical left in particular, Was of just cross-dressing as mainstream issues.

So, it became... So, really, what is the socialist movement became a consumer rights public interest. The women's rights movement. Yep. And you get these really radical ideologies. I mean, I'm just obsessed with this... The ways in which, like... So, Marxism... You look back on it, it's like, wow, I can't believe the things I believed in.

Marxism has this idea that the capitalists, like what's distinct about them is that they're just super greedy and they're thieves and that they're stealing from their workers. And there's really no difference between the entrepreneur, the capitalist entrepreneur like Elon Musk or Thomas Edison or Henry Ford and their workers. They're just meaner and they steal from them.

And it's like, it's just an amazingly audacious lie because whenever you go and actually study an entrepreneur, What's incredible is that it's not just that they are doing, it's not like they're the best at what they're doing. They're the best at like 12 different things.

You may remember when Trump and Elon were beginning their bromance, Trump goes, he goes, you know, I asked you, I was like, I was like, what is that you're really good at? You know, you can see it was like probably a question that Trump is used to asking people that he interviews for a job or something. And he goes, turned out it was a lot of different things. Yeah.

You know, and it's like, well, yeah, like, I mean, because, of course, like with Thomas Edison, oh, we invent the light bulb. He didn't invent the light bulb. He improved it. He invented a viable economic model for electricity production. I mean, he invented the electrical grid. He found the customers. I mean, one of the things that impresses me so much with with Elon is like, I'll see him.

So that was the, and then you hear people go, oh, well, there's nothing you can do because like once the homes are burned down, like the water lines, you can see the pictures, you know, the water like will be spilling out, you know, of the homes. And so that lowered the water pressure.

You'll see him out there and he'll be selling electricity. You know, which is kind of I mean, selling is sort of the worst part of our jobs in some ways. I mean, you can do with pleasure and you can do it with Verve and stuff. But but, you know, you kind of like I do it. I mean, I'm always like subscribe now, you know, and you're like, you have to do it like it's part of the work.

But I'm always like, wow, Elon is he's the richest man in the world. He's probably he may be the greatest innovator in American history, certainly top three. And he's still out there having to hawk his products, and he does it great. He's an amazing job of it. Like, one of the innovations was, you know, he just become the biggest user of Twitter rather than buying paid ads.

But so this gigantic lie from Marx, which is that the – first of all, the entrepreneur, the capitalist is just a meaner version of the worker as opposed to this, you know, this Schumpeterian genius. Yes. And Schumpeter comes along, and then his – the other big lie, and then Schumpeter points it out, is that the owner of the company and the workers have the same fundamental interest.

In other words, Elon Musk's employees and Elon have the same interest. They want to expand their markets. They want to expand their products. So to put them opposed is just so – it's just so dishonest, and it's so reminiscent of what – You can say feminism or radical feminism, but this idea that the interests of women are opposed by men, that women and men have different interests.

And of course, you trace it back, it all goes back to Simone de Beauvoir, who's a Marxist writing in the post-war period. I guess it was like the 40s, her book came out, The Second Sex. But she's just taking this totally idiotic Marxist framework and and applying it to women and men.

that was a total lie there is something called the santa ines water reservoir which is the potable water meaning the drinking water that also goes into the fire hydrant system because the fire hydrant you know the the fire hydrant system is the drinking water system it's the same thing there's the exact same system that reservoir was empty and it was the second largest of the 10 potable water reservoirs that serve la county

It's the basis of life itself. Of course. So it is like really you trace back like the emergence of nihilism. It really is in Marxism. It's in feminism. And then they successfully cross-dress for decades and they get so good at it. This is the famous long march through institutions or what they call cultural Marxism. But they basically dress themselves up as, you know, basically civil rights.

I mean, because once you get equal rights, the work is done. Same thing with gays and lesbians. But then the radical left activists then go and grab all those trappings. Because we started the conversation, this may seem like a digression, but it's important, I think, for normies and everybody to understand I mean, it took a long time for me to get it, but it was like, oh, right.

Like the people that call themselves environmentalists are actually just radical leftists, slightly different from Marx because they're actually into Malthus, this totally dystopian anti-human view. But the genius of the left is that they are so successful at masking their real agenda behind something else. You know, we just want equality for people of color.

We just want to create equal opportunity for migrants. No, their agenda is the destruction of civilization. I know. And it's working in L.A.

Do you know what I mean? Well, and also, I think the physicalist distinction works on that as well. I mean, here you have I did an interview with a terrific scientist I mentioned, and he's just like, you know, when you're dealing with fires, the main event is what is happening on the ground. And the climate extremists are out there basically saying, no, no, no, ignore this whole physical reality.

We just need to reorganize the entire global economy. Exactly. Exactly. We can't stop these fires, let Malibu burn, but give us control over the driver of the economy. I mean, it's such madness. Exactly. And it's the opposite. And they don't care. I mean, what what's the pollution generated by these fires? Oh, it's so much.

I mean, I don't know the numbers off the top of my head, but it's massive. And dangerous, right? Well, yeah. I mean, oh, my gosh, the air in L.A. now. I mean, my daughter's in college there. I'm worried about her. I mean, it is absolutely toxic air. I mean, of course it is. And you have a lot of electric cars, and you have a lot of batteries going up.

We don't know what that stuff is playing out in terms of particulate matter. So, no, it's awful. I mean, ostensibly, you'll get— you know, tree growth and the carbon will be, you know, reabsorbed and those plants will be reabsorbed. But yeah, no, I mean, it is... I'm not talking about carbon. I mean, like, poison in the air and water. Oh, for sure.

I mean, think of all the houses with all the plastic and electricity burning. It's terrible. No, for sure. I mean... Yeah, it's a chance to get regrounded, I think. A chance to, I mean, you know, it is also an interesting moment, right? Because Hollywood, it's just producing garbage. It is just, it is incredible how bad the cultural production is.

Just at a straight, like any of you are someone that just loves pop culture, like you just love Steven Spielberg. We're not getting that level of quality. I mean, we tried to watch something on Netflix. It's just awful. And it's because they're all trying to fit it in artistry and creativity is transgressive. It's supposed to be, it's supposed to be break.

there let me make one distinction here because there's actually two kinds of reservoirs there's the reservoir with the snow melt water these really big lakes basically um and then there's the and that's that's the um unpurified water and then those and then they purify it and then they feed into these reservoirs where they store the water for for all sorts of reasons for emergencies so that is an absolute crime that that santa ines reservoir

I mean, that's actually where you want your, I want my transgression in my art, not in my civilization. I want a really boring civilization and really transgressive art, but it's become the opposite. The art has become

boring and conformist and authoritarian and the civilization has gotten completely transgressive so people are not where they need to be the laws are not being enforced so i mean part of you go god i do hope it is a wake-up call it was five years ago this month that people started to drop dead in the central chinese city of wuhan

Oh, I mean, that's kind of the standard. That's like the norm in Los Angeles, isn't it? I mean... Even when there's not a fire burning. No, of course. It's terrible. I mean, I don't know if you saw the arrest. I guess they had a couple of guys. They found a couple of guys looting Kamala's house, and then they let them go. Of course, of course.

They found the guy that set one of the fires, the homeless guy that set one of the fires, and they let him go. I mean, it is – it's amazing. I mean, the comedians like all their best materials just, you know, in the news already.

Oh yeah, for sure. And then, and then they let them go. And then that became widely publicized. Well, guess what? You know, this is the thing that people have to understand, you know, criminals, you know, they read the news. Like criminals are very online. It's not like criminals don't know what's going on.

And we have these amazing, there's these amazing, like, I think it was like phone calls between people in the Oakland jails and their friends. And they're like, basically, Auntie Pam, the name of the DA, they're like, Auntie Pam's going to make sure we, you know, get off. You know, they all know where the laws are not being enforced. What's their job? Of course. Yeah. They're rational actors.

You know, the irrational ones are the rest of us. They're the ones trying to live there.

I mean, they did – I think they are backing off a little bit from it. I think that they're a little trapped, which is great, which is that on the one hand, they can't accept responsibility because they know that if they accept responsibility, then it's just – then their political futures are doomed. Right.

On the other hand, by not accepting responsibility and passing the buck, that also becomes obvious to people. So, you know, they should all go. I mean, remember, like, you know, New Orleans, like, that mayor was out of there. I mean, like... Ray Nagin was there for that. Yeah. So, that should be what happens.

Why? Because first of all, it's right next to the Pacific Palisades. So for people that don't know, Pacific Palisades, of course, is like right near, it's on your way to Malibu. It's like the last big neighborhood before you get to the- And they're Palisades. They're over the water. Yeah. That's right. And so they have a reservoir.

Yeah.

That's depressing.

Well, there's no vision for it at all, you know, and we don't have anybody visionary in there. I mean, I think we had this guy, Rick Caruso, as you were mentioning, who ran for mayor. I mean, someone found, you know, there is a video of him calling for increasing the fire department budget. I mean, kind of like, what else do you need to know at this point? Can that overcome the...

I do think that the woke trance was broken. I mean, Trump broke it. I do, for sure. And look at that. I mean, look at the catastrophe that the news media is in and the success that people like you and I are having and Joe Rogan being the most influential. Yeah. He's like the new Walter Cronkite. Yeah. He's where Mark Zuckerberg goes to confess his sins. Exactly. So it's a different world.

I do have some hope for it. I mean, the thing about the United States that's so different from Europe is just that literally they I'm becoming like an old man because I'm talking about how great the founding fathers were. But but it's like literally they created this incredible system that if you have free speech.

If you can protect your free speech, which we've, I think, succeeded in doing, you bake it in, you remind people of its importance, you then are, I think, going to be able to self-correct in ways that places that allow higher levels of censorship are simply not going to be able to do. Right. I mean, just look at this impact that Elon is having right now. It's incredible.

I was on some social media chat group and somebody was like, how come we're all talking about the British grooming gangs? It's like, because Elon decided that that was an issue, the AFD in Germany may end up, you know, I mean, I think they're going to come in at least second in the elections next month because Elon has mainstreamed them. Of course. So that gives me a lot of hope.

You look at the Google Maps and you look at where the Santinese Reservoir is, it's right next to like a few thousand feet from Pacific Palisades. And it's above, it's really high up. And so if you had had water coming from that, the firefighters would have had plenty of water. It would not have, they would have had the water pressure, even if you had lost some homes and had those, the water out.

You've got a platform now that is still just the... I mean, we always knew that the media had that agenda setting power. Yes. But it's amazing to sort of see it so dramatically. You only can really see it when it shifts from the mainstream news media. We were we were writing last summer about how

believe there's five active fires right now and these are ignition driven fires meaning that this these are all this is all shopper all or you know uh scrubland you know brush area so this isn't this is different than the sierra forests right these are not forest fires Yeah, these are not forest fires.

the sovereign in the United States, meaning like the true power center in the United States was the news media. That is now, in my view, clearly shifted to Axe. It's just, I think you said something recently. I think I saw a clip of you saying the same thing. I mean, it's just clear like that is where... It dominates everything. It's just everything, you know? And like Blue Sky gave it a...

They gave it a shot, but nobody can go on there. It's too mad. It's too insane. So I think it can be very, very positive. You know, I always compare Acts to, you know, it's like when the printing press first shows up in the end of the 15th century for like about 100 years, the Catholic Church is like, the printing press is great. You know, we can print Bibles and give them out to all the priests.

It's very cheap. The Catholic Church loved the printing press. And then Martin Luther got a hold of the printing press. And it was just, for the next five centuries, it was game over. I mean, the best history of the printing press, she goes back, I think it's an Oxford history, she goes back and just looks at its impact.

And she comes back and she's just like, after years of study or whatever, and she's like, oh, we knew it was a big deal But it's a much bigger deal than we thought. It's not just the Protestant Reformation. It is that it's also the scientific revolution. It's the industrial revolution. It's nationalism and it's democracy.

I mean, so you get a huge epical change with this shift of communications technologies and social media. We knew it. I mean, we, you know, Martin Gurry famously wrote this book, Revolt to the Public. about the game-changing aspects of social media just on the Arab Spring, you know, which is now 14 years ago.

But in some senses, it really just didn't get its power until Elon came in, bought it, and held strong against people calling him a racist anti-Semite for two years. I mean, it was just crazy. It was like two years of the media just... Making him out to be the devil incarnate. And he held strong. And he ended up breaking the news media. I mean, they're just not getting the traffic. They're done.

It's over. Yeah. It's over.

The weather, the wind moved.

They're the first. They're the first ones to shift. No, you're right. Right? You're right. Yeah, because they're covering the news. Like, they know, they're the first ones that know when the winds are coming. The principle plays no role.

So, I mean, so two major reasons.

It's amazing. It really reveals, doesn't it, the herd animals, so.

um failures the first was the failure to aggressively respond days in advance even though they had very clear warnings the second was the reservoir was empty one reporter has reported that the that the uh the firefighters had not been warned by the los angeles department of water and power that that reservoir was empty if that's true that's just additionally scandalous but

Well, yeah. I mean, how can they stop it, though? I don't know. I'm just feeling a little paranoid right now. No, no, I am too.

No, I know. I know. No, I totally do, too. You're like, when's the penny going to drop? Yeah, kind of. Well, yeah. And I also kind of go, are they really going to disclose all the stuff that they have? I mean, we were going down, we just did a, actually, I don't know if we published it yet, but we were just going down the list of all the files that we want. Exactly.

Because, you know, people are like, oh, can we have the Twitter files for the government? You're like, yes. So what? I mean, there's so much in there, right? So Russiagate. You know, the Russia collusion hoax, COVID origins, COVID vaccines, Hunter Biden laptop. Yeah. I mean, I'm assuming there's just a bunch of stuff on Russia, Ukraine that's there.

I mean, remember, because they keep leaking, they go, they go, there's no bio labs in Ukraine. They're like, well, there were some, we were doing some help with the bio.

Oh, it's so much pent-up stuff. So much. I mean, we're supposed... Yeah, we have the JFK files, the UFO files, UAP files, I was just to say.

and this is someone who's pushing disclosure by the way this is not i know i don't know yeah i'm worried that it's bad news well that's the point it's bad yeah i'm worried it's bad really bad news yeah do you think that's true well i don't know no i'm not even saying it because i don't know if it's true and it is bad it's super bad

I mean, it seems like the dominant two theories are now that it's non-human intelligence or that we or our adversaries have mastered anti-gravity technology. The other scenarios of some kind of new plasma or... You know, it's just kind of the phenomenon doesn't seem to be showing up in that way.

One of the things that we think probably happened is that they had been required to build, have a cover for the clean, for the Santinese Reservoir, which is the potable water, the cover to prevent the water from being contaminated in the old days, like the 50s and 60s. You know, birds would poop in those reservoirs and they would just put a bunch of chlorine in them.

yeah i mean you know and i it's hard i mean um you know they i covered the new jersey drone situation i went to jersey and interviewed a bunch of people i mean the weirdest for me the weirdest moment is where you have john kirby the defense department spokesperson and mayorkas basically on the same day or the same 48 hours just um when they were asked about they just came out affirmatively and they were like well we're definitely not getting any drones over the military bases or other sensitive sites and you're like

I was like, why would you lie about that? I couldn't because, of course, all else being equal, I think that people don't want to lie. Politicians don't want to lie because it just creates more work or hassle for them. It complicates your life. It complicates your life. Honesty is the best policy. So why would they lie about that? Especially because the Wall Street Journal had like –

They did this huge piece about all of the drone, so-called, by the way, unidentified anomalous drone flyovers over the military bases and sensitive sites, which includes nuclear plants. I mean, part of my interest in this was always, you know, I was trying to save Diablo Canyon in California. They kept getting drone flyovers.

Also, Palo Verde, which is our biggest nuclear plant, three beautiful reactors there in Arizona, like a lot of... Drone flyovers. I'm also from Northeast Colorado, which is where, you know, the ICBMs are a lot of their whole did this exact same drone situation. I believe it was December. I want to say December 2019.

And they had this whole interagency task force and they were like, they were like, oh, we're going to put a plane up and they kind of put a plane up and you're watching me like. You're like, well, why are they not scrambling jets? Like, what are we like? What are we doing here? Like, this is really bizarre. It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't.

I can't figure it out because I think the other issue is that they may not know. I mean, OK, well, so to finish that story. So then drone migrants do that. I go out and I'm just like, like, that's the weirdest lie because like it was just it's been heavily reported. I mean, the drones. I mean, the.

The drones over sensitive military bases is really well reported, and some of the best reporting was by a publication called The War Zone, which I highly recommend. Very good, serious investigative reporting. They don't believe it's aliens at all. Like, they're just openly, like, anti-alien. They're like, this is – and I think it's –

Well, anyway, for whatever reason, they're just like, this is Chinese or Russian or whatever. They're not taking it seriously. But they do some of the best reporting because they're kind of because they can't figure out why the military is being so weird about it. So then Trump comes out and he goes, they know what it is. I don't know why they're not telling anybody.

And I'm going to tell everybody on the 20th. I mean, first of all, I'm really happy that they're going to disclose. And I want to raise expectations about what the Trump administration is going to do. We want the data. And I mean, someone was criticizing me because they were like, oh, because I came out. I said, oh, I'm confident the Trump administration is going to share the data.

And they're like, that just shows that Schellenberger is, you know, it's like pro-Trump and whatever. And I was like, no, I'm just like pro-disclosure. I want the expectations to be high because they should be high. There is so much information they're not releasing. So, you know, they were over Bedminster. And he's talked about it twice now, by the way. He's distressed about it, obviously.

He's worried about it. So we're either headed for a pretty epic moment of disclosure. There's another part of me that worries. Okay, so it seems like, yeah, they could do disclosure and we could find out what it is. There could be aliens. If it's aliens, that's just a whole can of worms. And then you have to be like, do we talk to them? And if so, who's doing that? Do you think we have? No.

I genuinely don't know. I genuinely don't know. I mean, there's this guy named, I can't remember his first name, Stringfield. He wrote this incredible thick book of UAP crashes, crash retrievals. And he started doing it, I want to say, 50s or 60s. And I think he went for like multiple decades. And you just sit down with that book and it is like...

And then we decided, well, that the water was still had a lot of, you know, it still was not not particularly clean. So we wanted to be cleaner. So you just put a cover over it, which is a kind of plastic or rubber lining. it appears that there was a tear in that. They had to repair it. They should not have removed that water ever during a fire season.

it's impressive i mean if it's a hoax it's just um one of the greatest hoaxes of all times you know like other hoaxes um you know like the protocols of the elders of zion or whatever they're they're really bad like they're really you're just like this is like the dumbest hoax ever like most hoaxes are not that sophisticated with all these details unless people interviewed of course roswell was the big case but it's only apparently one of them there's others

So there is this incredible, you know, gray literature never published by any academic press, by really a little bit of commercial nonfiction. Obviously, you have David Grush and Lou Elizondo. I testified in front of Congress on this in November. I guess I was in December or November and, you know, two people, the two guys from the military, when we were asked, what are they?

Two guys said non-human intelligence. And then me and the NASA guy said, we don't know. Because I just don't. I mean, I just. What do you think the drones over in New Jersey were? I mean, look, let's just look at the possibility that they're human. They didn't get a single one of them. They didn't down a single one of them. Not a single one of them crashed. And there was a lot of them.

And there was a lot of, look, there's a lot of mistaken sightings. You know, it is easy to mistake things. It's totally natural. But there was also, I mean, I interviewed mayors, two mayors, One of them was like, I had an SUV-sized drone flying over my house. Another one said he was going to a Fox News interview in New York.

The car came for me, walks out his door, and there's one hovering right over him. And he felt like it was watching him, like it was there monitoring him. I mean, that's weird stuff. So we can't get a single drone down. They're over military bases. They can't seem to get any of them. You know, do I think the Chinese could be behind or the Chinese?

I mean, when the Chinese decide to like encroach in the South China Sea, when they decide, you know how they'll like warn the United States occasionally, you're flying over our airspace. It's all super calculated and like... It's like a performance. The Chinese are like, we're messing with you, like you all kind of know.

And they're doing it in ways where they don't want it to escalate, but they want to get a little bit more of that space. It's all super calculated. Now, there was the balloon. Are there Chinese balloons? Yeah. But I mean, to be buzzing our military bases, it's just so aggressive.

Now, when I've said that before, I've had other people point out, they go, well, they're aggressive with the cyber attacks, right? I guess that's true. As a physicalist, I guess I kind of go flying your drones over U.S. military bases and nuclear plants, that is just a level of aggression that just doesn't seem characteristic of the Chinese. Unless you were – well, of course I agree with you.

If you need to make that repair, you do need to drain right before you do the repair, but you would make that drain. The people that I interviewed said, said, look, it would take days, if not a couple of weeks to repair it. It was empty for at least a year. So it was sitting there for a year.

Yeah. I mean, I don't know. That just doesn't it just I just got to say it's just it's so aggressive. And and also but the other thing is that like, you know, reckless actually seems really reckless. And the Chinese have not been seeking confrontations like that for the most part. Now, Jesse Michaels, who is doing some of the best reporting on this issue of UAPs, he's doing YouTube videos.

He just did a documentary that was incredible. I think it's like a couple of hours, highly recommended, that goes through the very long history of unidentified anomalous phenomena over U.S. military bases, including all these cases of – several cases of them shutting down –

missile system like a 65 year long history yeah yeah and there was this famous press conference with like missileers and others from military bases in Washington DC I want to say in the 90s maybe maybe 80s so you know like that predates Any of the Chinese stuff by far predates all the drones. So that was going on for a really long time.

I mean, if you just kind of if you step back and you look at it, it looks like a very like what is it communicating on a very basic level? It's definitely communicating dominance.

You can read it in a lot of different ways, and that's similar to what the Navy pilots said around the tic-tac interactions off both coasts, is that these were phenomena or objects, whatever you want to call them, or craft, that were just demonstrating dominance over our craft. They were able to do things that our craft weren't doing.

Yeah. Then the question would be, so if it is NHI, then the question is, are they communicating something? If they are communicating something, why would they only be doing it in that way? If you're trying to demonstrate your strength and adversary or something, you're trying to send some message, why would you just do that? Because there's nothing that we can do with that information.

So then you have to wonder, okay, if it is NHI and it's behaving in that way. Non-human intelligence. Yeah, non-human intelligence. Then is there some – is there actually some other communication going on that we don't know about? And, of course, there's just a long history and there's all these crazy stories of presidents. I mean, going back to Eisenhower –

And the person I interviewed who works as a senior executive at a different water utility in California said, if we had any of our reservoirs empty, we would be super nervous the entire time. And you would also then have backup water systems.

I genuinely don't know. I mean, I might be more shocked if they were human-made because of their behaviors and they never were able to get one. I did have somebody tell me recently that they had heard... I mean, again, it's always secondhand. It's so untrustworthy. But somebody told me that... that the military got one of the orbs, the famous orbs, and opened it up, and it was Chinese.

I mean, if that's the case, then somebody has mastered anti-gravity, and that's almost harder for me to believe than that it's NHI, because... I mean, it's just I mean, I don't know. I mean, look, we have a I mean, here's the I literally I go back and forth. You see me doing it in the same conversation. But we have these huge black budgets in the military. I mean, just gigantic.

And they've been there for decades. So is it possible to cover up something like that? I think it might be. I mean, I'm much more after having covered the Hunter Biden laptop and. I mean, Russiagate too, but really the Hunter Biden laptop, I was just impressed by how many people were involved in the conspiracy to cover it up.

I mean, you had the FBI getting it, covering it up, basically working with Aspen Institute to run a disinformation campaign. By the way, this is Vivian Schiller and Garrett Graff run the disinformation campaign aimed at persuading journalists in advance of the release of the Hunter Biden laptop that it was a Russian information operation.

Garrett Graff is the guy that goes and does the big UFO book. So these things all I mean, this was very weird. So he comes out with a big book on UFOs. I think it was last year's called UFO Garrett Graff. This is somebody that is famously close with the intelligence community. His other books were on Watergate and on 9-11. The book... And both of which were totally legitimate. No, for sure.

And I'm sure the official story is everything we need to know. So, you know, you sort of go... And what was his conclusion on UFOs? Well, it was very... It's the... The narrative is that they don't know what they are. So he doesn't fully... He's not like a debunker, like these guys who are like, oh, we can explain everything. So he's much more sophisticated than that.

But it's basically a debunking. It's basically that... It's basically that it's just all the typical explanations and then maybe some U.S. military programs. But he also just says that he just argues that the U.S. military doesn't know what it is. I don't believe Garrett Graff.

so it's like any catastrophe you know you just have multiple errors occurring in advance and at the moment um and then the fires and then the actual ignitions you can't completely prevent ignitions but you can significantly reduce them one would be to not allow people to camp outside all over uh los angeles uh los angeles county with

And the reason I don't believe Garrett Graff is because I saw him participate in a disinformation campaign on Hunter Biden laptop. And I know for a fact there's something else going on. at that Aspen Institute program. And Aspen Institute, of course, is a massive U.S. government-funded NGO that cosplays as a kind of bourgeois gab fest.

So there I mean, so I'm like that was for me, that was all came out on the Twitter files. I discovered that in the Twitter files. And for me, it was like pulling back the curtain.

And you actually have as a journalist like you, we have the emails, you know, like you have the documents, you have the tabletop exercise where they're brainwashing journalists into believing a lie about the Hunter Biden laptop.

that was so sophisticated of that because they basically go and brainwash journalists before the story comes out because they know they're listening to giuliani you know their fbi tap on juliana they're listening to julian they had they knew they had to go brainwash the journalists they go get all the journalists from all the major outlets plus the social media platforms in these seminars where they program them

Um, I mean, that was like, for me, it was like, wow, there's like a secret government. Like it was like, there's some, there's like a whole, there's like a whole, it's a very, and it was very just sophisticated. I don't know what else to describe it. Like it was very, everything seemed very careful. Also with all the censorship stuff, you see these limited hangouts, right?

Where limited hangouts are kind of like the public relations of a country.

covert operation of like a covert propaganda operation where like after they get caught they can be like oh no we were totally honest about what we were doing we were talking about it but they do these weird limited hangouts you'll see these people that clearly look like either directly intelligence community or their intermediaries having these conversations they put on youtube and like they're like but it's like you know a couple hundred views like they're not promoting them in any way and

And so you just kind of go, wow, there's like a whole creepy, like, world of disinformation.

Have you noticed that? Yeah. Yeah, no, I know. And you only can understand it when you see the whole big picture because there's no smoking guns ever. So there's never something you can, I mean, a hunter buying a laptop got us about as close to as a smoking gun as you can get. And it helped because it was, what helped to expose it was that you, it was partisan.

And so it was a particular partisan weaponization. My concern with the UAPs, I mean, it's now I guess the strength and a weakness is that it's become bipartisan in terms of the desire. I mean, it was really I mean, Tucker, the weirdest experience I've had, I've testified now like 12 times or 13 times in front of Congress last few years.

The weirdest experience I've had was on UAPs, seeing the Democrats and Republicans basically being aligned in wanting to get to the bottom of the UAP thing. I mean, it's beautiful. I've never seen it. I was like, I've never heard of bipartisanship. Never thought I would see it in the wild. So that is exciting.

On the other hand, I suspect that there is also some bipartisan group that's trying to prevent that information. There's no doubt about that. So, I mean, look, I mean, it is... I mean, what is gonna happen? I mean, part of me is, maybe it's my defensive pessimism on it, because like everybody else, I want the information.

Part of me is like, there's just no way they're gonna let that information out. It's just something is too, there's something about the UAP thing, like the JFK thing, where there's some secret there, That they are really, there is some group of people that really don't want us to know. So, you know. Well, that's a fact. Yes.

somewhere around, I think it's 40 to 60,000 homeless people in the whole county. Madness. And then the other is the electrical wires that brush up against the vegetation and create fire. With that, you want to clear the vegetation from around the wires. That's obvious. And then you can also just stop. I mean, this is a not great solution, but you could certainly do it in a pinch if you need to.

I mean, how about the clip where Pompeo is being interviewed about the JFK files? And then he like literally mid-sentence goes, but I mean, I've also seen the UFO files. And it was like, well, why did you just switch from like what made you think of the UFO files on the JFK files? I don't know. I mean, so anyway, is there a secret? Have we developed anti-gravity?

I mean, we know that in the 50s, there was a whole book on it. It's very fascinating. But there was an anti-gravity program in the U.S. military with our defense contractors. It made the cover of one of the aerospace magazines. It was like there's a cover of it. And then it just disappeared. Yeah. And so you can kind of go, I mean, the official experts go, yeah, we tried that and it didn't work.

It's like, well, that's never stopped you before. Right. Like it not working, like that's like, you know, like you would keep working on it if you can do antigravity. So the other possibility is that it just went dark and they just kept doing it.

Yeah. I mean, the problem with this issue is just, it's very frustrating because it's just all secondhand. Of course it is. And so, like the 100-byte laptop is not secondhand. Like it's firsthand and I have the documents. Now, there are a bunch of really fascinating, you know, alleged U.S., secret U.S. government documents on UFOs, on alleged alien spacecraft crashes.

And that doesn't mean that you're doomed to them, but it's not the same problem that we get in the Sierras. So they're ignition-driven and they're obviously wind-driven, but there's nothing unusual. I just interviewed a climate scientist about this, or rather an environmental forest scientist about this. There's nothing unusual about this. I mean, it is somewhat unusual to get...

They're called the, you know, Majestic documents or the MJ-12 documents. And so, the story is that, you know, that one or two of these craft crashed in 1947 near Roswell, New Mexico. And that sort of begins in, you know, and there's a whole cast of characters that allegedly, you know, including Oppenheimer, were involved in that program. You know, the.

Well, why? I mean, because he was the man, you know, like he was like he was our greatest scientist, obviously the father of the atomic bomb. And and, you know, Roswell's where the where we launched the the flights to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So it's a very symbolic event. In that sense... Maybe more than symbolic? Yeah, maybe more than symbolic.

I mean, they keep flying over nuclear, like, as my wife says, she's like, your aliens really, they don't like the nuclear, you know, because I love nuclear.

So, and I'm kind of like, I'm like, well, yeah, I mean, like, and also the most ridiculous thing is when people are like, oh, yeah, they want us to give up our, you know, the people that believe in them, they go, the aliens are here and they want us to give up our nuclear weapons. It's like, doesn't sound like a good idea to me. Yeah.

The foreign space invaders would like you to give up your most powerful weapons. But those documents, I spent a bunch of time on them and I couldn't figure out how to report anything on it because, of course, of course, FBI was like, these are all debunked. They're all frauds. But there are... First of all, there's a lot more of them. You go to MajesticDocuments.com and you can look at them.

You just stop the electricity from going into those homes for some period. I mean, it's a drag. I live in the Berkeley Hills, which is also a dangerous fire zone. And when the winds are really strong, they'll just cut off power as a precaution so that to prevent an ignition.

They're amazing. I mean, if they are... And I've also had the other, and they're, by the way, in the Garrett Graff book. They're in that book. They're also in another debunking book called, by Mark Pilkington, I'm blanking on the name right now. But they all, all the people that are the debunkers deal with these documents. And their story is not that they were all hoaxes.

Their story is that they were what's called counterintelligence passage material. Right.

documents that were created by the us government but leaked to people to ostensibly be able to smoke out double agents or people like you would see them i guess it would trace these documents right like putting dye in the water to find the leak yeah yeah exactly so i mean but the thing is i mean it is like there's like one of them is a handbook of crash retrieval like for like to like that that the soldiers would ostensibly read to retrieve these crash i mean it's

They, the, if they're hoaxes, they're incredible.

I mean, like, they have, like, they have, like, they have, like, the people, like, they have, I forgot what it's called, but, like, basically, like, a manifest where they show who's checked it out and read it, and they have all these different names, and they've checked those names, and those were, like, real people at those airbases that had these...

So, and then, you know, there was one document in particular where it was a memo from JFK to the CIA Director Dulles where he says, I want to see you on this particular day. It was like July 62 or 63, I can't remember which. And now again, everyone's like, oh, that's a forgery. It's part of the MJ-12 documents or whatever. It's not real. But then they released the JFK files.

And then sure enough, we see the Dulles calendar and he had met with JFK twice that day. And nobody had known that they had had those meetings until we had that JFK memo and until we had the confirmation of the memo. So that would suggest that at least

either that document is real, the JFK memo to Dulles, or whoever forged it knew that he had met with Dulles that day and nobody else had known that. So, you know, you'd be sort of like, I guess you could still put it in the, this is why, this is the problem with this issue, is you can still, there's still plausible deniability for a lot, for all these things.

You know, you can make up a reason for why these documents are all counterintelligence passage material. Um, I don't know. That's why I just have to kind of go. I don't know. I mean, I talked to a lot of people and yeah, it's just a lot of secondhand information and the documents are secondhand.

So you kind of go there's like my world of like the Hunter Biden laptop, which still a bunch of my progressive and Democrat friends and family don't believe. You know, they still they still think the Russians were somehow involved. But like I actually have the documents and we can prove what happened there. On the UAP stuff, it's just still just surrounded in mystery.

I think the thing that – the reason I wanted to come on your show, even though I'm in the midst of a huge book deadline, is because I'm really concerned about this nihilistic discourse that there's literally nothing that could be done. I mean, that is exactly where the politicians want to go. I worry that ordinary people have that idea. The problem is – I mean, it's absurd.

He was very relaxed about it, too. I mean, I was struck that when he said it twice, he said it again recently, like last week, right? But then he said it in December. He goes, I don't know why they're not telling people what they are. They know what they are. And I was like, I mean, it was a really... He made it sound like it's no big deal. Like, we should just tell people what it is.

But if Trump knew what it is, and if it's NHI and Trump knows that, he seemed very relaxed about that. Because, of course, the main... The conventional wisdom among people that follow this who think it's NHI is that it's bad news, that it's not a great story, that if it were good news and that they were just friendly space brothers offering us...

you know, advanced tech, then, and they'd be like, and there's no strings attached or whatever, that would be a much easier story to sell. But if there's some bad news in that story, then that might explain why they're so secret. Well, clearly there's some bad news.

Well, they don't control him, obviously. So that's very nerve-wracking. I mean, how much do you think that they're just worried that he's going to pull out of NATO? How much of it is that?

So what do you, so you think he knows what it is? The UAP stuff? Yeah. I do think that, yes.

I mean, yeah, no. I mean, it's very, yeah. I mean, I say my prayers. I'm still Christian. I mean, you know, it's interesting. Joe, when I was on Joe Rogan's podcast last time, I mean, here, you know, Joe was like, I think that they're extraterrestrials. You know, he's openly saying that. Yeah, it's not. That's not the case. Well, okay, or NH, I guess NHI. Yeah.

But I mean, here you and Joe are like the two big, most influential podcasters in the country, and you both think that it's not just a government secret tech or that it's not just plasmas. And Joe's very close with Elon, loves Elon. You know, like me, and I think probably like you, believes that Elon deserves a huge amount of credit for saving free speech in this country. Yeah.

I mean, this idea that you couldn't live in Los Angeles, right? It's like – It's like you can say it about anywhere. You'd be like, oh, it's there's snowfalls in this place during winter, you know, or hurricanes. I mean, we're in an area that's Hurricane Valley, right? Like huge amounts of hurricanes. That's that's not how humans roll.

um elon says there's nothing there he never sees anything and they've got an amazing rocket system that sees a lot of things sure i've talked to elon about this a number of times okay and i'm not sure he said that okay i thought he did say that no i thought he said if i see if there's any aliens he jokes about it which is a tell um trump does too uh and they all they joke in the same way i mean i of course i love them both obviously and i feel like

Well, we do have some photos. I mean, there's that one photo of the one, I can't remember, it's like, it's in the James Fox documentary. So there are some of those, apparently. Coming through space in here. And certainly, I've been told there's a lot more of those photos and images.

And why the elusiveness then? Why the secrecy? Well, that's the question.

That's a really interesting one. That's a surprisingly interesting one, actually.

Like we're capable of living in many different environments, including with extreme weather conditions. And it's like saying I can't stop my kids from dying of tetanus.

And I don't think it's to cover up a secret weapons program. I mean, in other words, like, I don't think that's how you would do it. It's so like, yeah, I don't believe it. A secret weapons program. Yeah.

And you wouldn't need this elaborate... And also, if you're doing passage material, just to go back to those cases, why would it be that? And why would there be so much of it? Why wouldn't it be something... Anyway, it's a very curiously large body of passage material on this particular topic. Well, that's right.

Right.

Yes. Right. So there's no nihilistic agency. No, that's so nihilistic. And you trace it back. I mean, the best, the most articulate advocate of that view is a Marxist named Mike Davis, who wrote this book called City of Courts. It's a crazy nihilistic book, but he he had an essay and also this chapter in that book called Let Malibu Burn. I mean, it's classic Marxism.

There's a lot. There's a lot.

Well, I thought also that, you know, you may have seen Marc Andreessen recently said that when he met with White House officials who said that they wanted to take control over all AI, that they said to him something like, we've declassified whole areas of science since the 1950s. And I was like, that just seemed like a reference to this stuff, right?

Nice to see you.

At least to the anti-gravity, if not to some of the UAP stuff.

Well, like for a hundred years, right? Really from Darwin, nearly 150 years.

Well, it sure seemed like it. I mean, there's a really positive side of it though, which is that we haven't had these awful wars. Yes. Brutal. I mean, when you look at the death toll that was going up and up and up from wars all throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, it's awful. So, they've spared us that, but it took something apocalyptic.

Yeah.

You mean from a foreign power or? I do. Oh. Like, what's the evidence for that?

I mean, I was more struck by that on the UAP, on the drone UAP. Yeah, well, exactly. It's of a piece. Yeah.

Very weird.

Yeah.

No, it's freaking me out a little bit, honestly. I mean, I spent a bunch of time on the Livels burger. That's the guy that killed himself in the Tesla in Las Vegas. I mean, you definitely have cases of PTSD causing people to do things and people are surprised by suicides.

But yeah, it was a weird one, you know, and I was skeptical of his emails because, you know, he sent these emails to Sean Ryan. It's another excellent podcaster now. I think you've had him on or you've been on there. He's a friend of mine.

Oh, no, I did too.

No, no, for sure.

No, no, no. I was like, I was like injured because because I believe in Sean and and I didn't I'm sure he did not fake that. So, you know, and then they and then the FBI did confirm that those emails were real. On the other hand, you know, that was a weird one, too, because it felt like he was like, oh, the Chinese, those were Chinese drones. They've mastered gravedig.

kind of radical left politics is classic sort of envy or sour grapes. I mean, sour grapes goes, I can't remember the parable, but basically it's like some animal wants to eat these grapes, but they're up too high. And then he says, oh, well, those grapes were sour anyway. It's a consolation for your own personal weakness and failure. That's just, you know, let Malibu burn.

It just felt like he didn't really know what he's talking about either. So there's just a lot of.

I mean, I thought it was anti-gravity is what I've heard.

No, I felt like he was using it wrong.

Yeah. No, I mean, I guess I look at it, I just think Nietzsche really nailed it, which is that when people, you know, when people stop believing in traditional religions, they become, they unconsciously, you know, develop... you know, they develop a new sense of guilt, a new vision of the apocalypse. They invent a new soul.

I mean, people think that there's this thing called gender, which is separate from your body. It's kind of like a soul. My friend Abigail Schreier pointed that out. And so we just end up recreating Christianity, but in a deformed and deranged way. And the emergent quality of it is this destructive fire. Like,

You don't, it's actually more powerful because nobody got out there and said, you know, let's let, I mean, somebody did say, let's let Malibu burn, but that was never like the explicit policy of the government of LA. It's just something that emerges after years of budget cuts, after years of self-hating ideologies like DEI, like climate apocalypse, like the homeless apocalypse.

It's just emerges kind of deep from deep within us, from some self-destructive part of us. So for me, if there's a foreign invasion, it came through the human psyche, not from outside of it. Michael Schellenberger. How can people find you? Public.news and at Schellenberger on X. The best. Thanks for having me, Tucker. Thank you very much.

I mean, you know, you have an ideology of Marxism that is based on resentment and envy. And so then you go, well, yeah, those all those rich houses should go up in flames. It's a fantasy. I mean, it's a left wing fit. I should know. I was on the radical left, like the fantasy. You hate the rich people because you because you want their wealth and you you admire them in some level.

But, you know, you can't get it. So, I mean, this is how envy works. So you end up constructing this whole political ideology. I mean this is what Marx has done. And it's infected like the citizenry. I mean it's infected the politicians. And so there's this – I think that even though it's not consciously – the politicians aren't consciously saying – Oh, let's let Malibu burn.

That is the behaviors they have taken have had that impact. So I think that what you're seeing in real time in these fires in Los Angeles, these destructive fires, is the manifestation of a nihilistic ideology. It's an emergent quality. It happens through a million small steps.

But this heavy focus on left-wing ideology, whether it's DEI or ESG or climate apocalypse or just class resentment, manifests itself in like the most spectacular, beautiful neighborhoods just being turned into ashes and cinders.

You have a dry period and then the Santa Ana winds in January, but it's not like that never happens. I'm working my way there. Of course. The important thing to know is that the National Weather Service put out a fire warning on January 2nd and a local weatherman actually forecasted on January 1st.

Well, because, of course, they're all trapped by this ideology. I mean, these are the neighborhoods that voted overwhelmingly for Kamala, that voted overwhelmingly for Gavin Newsom, that voted overwhelmingly for Karen Bass. I mean, Tucker, I saw focus groups yesterday. In 2022, two Latinos, men and women separated, Latino group and a white group. And the Latinos were great.

I mean, they were just like, when they started talking about the mayoral race, they were like, well, what are their positions? And like, what are their policies? And what do they want to do? And whatever. They were very rational about it. They're very, as you would hope, they were self-interested. Yeah, what do I get out of this? What do I get out of these candidates? Fair, fair question.

The white, the whites... I mean, it was amazing. First of all, every focus group when the moderator would just be like, oh, hey, how's it going around here? They don't even try to lead the conversation anywhere. And everybody just starts talking about the homeless situation and the crime, which is basically continuous with homelessness.