Joe Rogan Experience #1668 - Krystal & Saagar

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   (drum roll) Joe Rogan podcast,…

   1. NANarrator0:00

      (drum roll) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

   2. NANarrator0:04

      The Joe Rogan Experience.

   3. JRJoe Rogan0:06

      Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (instrumental music) We're rolling. So, uh, you guys have a new show. (laughs)

   4. SESaagar Enjeti0:17

      (laughs)

   5. KBKrystal Ball0:18

      Hey, Joe. What's up?

   6. JRJoe Rogan0:19

      I just wanna say, I told you. I knew it was gonna work.

   7. KBKrystal Ball0:22

      Yeah. You were-

   8. SESaagar Enjeti0:22

      It never would've happened without you. I-

   9. JRJoe Rogan0:24

      I knew it was gonna work. I was like, "Why are you, like, trapped?" Yeah.

   10. KBKrystal Ball0:27

       I mean, uh, it really is actually true. We've been thinking about going independent for a while, because it's just more consistent with our values. The Hill takes money from all kinds of people-

   11. SESaagar Enjeti0:36

       Mm-hmm.

   12. KBKrystal Ball0:36

       ... that are very contrary to the things that we've been talking about. But you know, it's scary to... I got kids. I got, you know, bills-

   13. SESaagar Enjeti0:43

       Health insurance, yeah.

   14. KBKrystal Ball0:44

       ... to handle, the health insurance, all this stuff.

   15. JRJoe Rogan0:45

       Yeah, yeah. (laughs)

   16. KBKrystal Ball0:45

       And so, I think especially during COVID when we couldn't actually directly interact with the audience in person, it's hard to know how real it is. So, when we talked to you and we were like, "Uh, we're thinking about it. We're kinda nervous," and you were s- you weren't just like, "Maybe," you were like, "Yes, do this," it actually really did help us to make the move. So thank you.

   17. SESaagar Enjeti1:05

       No, no question.

   18. JRJoe Rogan1:06

       I am the terrible person to take advice like that from 'cause I'm always like, "Jump!"

   19. SESaagar Enjeti1:10

       Yeah.

   20. KBKrystal Ball1:10

       (laughs)

   21. JRJoe Rogan1:10

       Fucking jump!

   22. KBKrystal Ball1:11

       Well, in this case-

   23. JRJoe Rogan1:11

       No, but you were right.

   24. KBKrystal Ball1:11

       ... it was the right call, so...

   25. JRJoe Rogan1:14

       (laughs)

   26. SESaagar Enjeti1:14

       It was-

   27. KBKrystal Ball1:14

       ... broken clock or whatever.

   28. SESaagar Enjeti1:15

       It's really scary. Um, and it's one of those things where, we were telling you this before, where you're like, you don't know, uh, if you're, you're like, "Am I gonna miss this?" You have these guys. You have the support. Like, I don't have to-

   29. JRJoe Rogan1:25

       Yeah.

   30. SESaagar Enjeti1:25

       ... deal with all this, like, administrative stuff and, like, set design and upload. But honestly, we love it so much. Like, we, we wrapped, I think, our second show, so we could finally hang out. And I w- I, I text her. I was like, "This is amazing! Like, we're free!"
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   Yeah. That was- …

   1. SESaagar Enjeti15:00

      that are on there. Ev- everything's tracking your movements, steps, bathroom breaks as well. So, the warehouses are also very large, so let's say you technically have a 20-minute break, it might take you 10 minutes to actually walk to the break room and back. So, you actually have what, like, a two-minute break while you're in there. And the whole thing around Amazon and why everyone should care is because Amazon under the pandemic exploded. Their stock price went up from, I think, 1,000 or so to a couple, 3,000. Bezos personally, his wealth increased by $70 billion. Amazon is now the second-largest employer in the United States. And this is incredibly important because as more Amazon market adoption happens, they are basically going to become the employer of choice. Whatever your grocery store or whatever was in your small town, these are the rural working class Americans, this is their only job. So, when you have one company which has all of this overwhelming power over rural working Americans and even suburban Americans, because this is Amazon's strategy. Dayton, Ohio is a good example. Alec MacGillis, he wrote a great book on Amazon, shout out to him, talked about how Dayton was like this Silicon Valley of America in the 1900s, and s- you know, it's manufacturing, middle-class jobs. Now, Dayton's prized economic value comes from the fact that it's one day's drive from one-third of the US population, so it's a great place for cardboard. So, everybody there is also involved in creating cardboard and other Amazon infrastructure. So, the Amazonification, so to speak, or whatever, of America makes it so that if y- let's say 30 years ago, you grew up in your town, you may have to go to Walmart, H-E-B were here, you know, I grew up here in Texas, Kroger as well, McDonald's, something like that. Now, it's basically like McDonald's, Dairy Queen, and Amazon. And when Amazon is the prime market employer, they are the sole determiner of market conditions increasingly. So, it's Walmart and Amazon, which are number two. And we're talking about millions of people who are now working at this company. So, people are like, "Why do you guys talk so much about Amazon?" Because I can see the trends. This company's not going anywhere. Look, props to them, like, they're ... I love Amazon. Like, I order a lot of stuff on Amazon. But increasingly becoming aware of the price of what it takes to do overnight delivery to your house at 4:00 AM in the morning, or increasingly becoming aware of the fact that they are basically on this mission to drive price down as much as possible and squeeze as much out of their workforce, that is where it's troubling. What was the furniture thing that we just covered?

   2. KBKrystal Ball17:27

      Yeah. That was-

   3. SESaagar Enjeti17:27

      This was crazy.

   4. KBKrystal Ball17:28

      Well, and did you see their delivery drivers-

   5. SESaagar Enjeti17:30

      Yeah.

   6. KBKrystal Ball17:31

      ... have so f- are so like, the, the demands are so intense, they're having to pee in bottles and shit in bags.

   7. SESaagar Enjeti17:36

      Right. And they admitted that-

   8. KBKrystal Ball17:37

      Was it the-

   9. JRJoe Rogan17:37

      Shit in bags?

   10. SESaagar Enjeti17:38

       Oh.

   11. KBKrystal Ball17:38

       Literally. Yeah, they literally-

   12. JRJoe Rogan17:38

       That's where I draw the line. I don't really care if a guy has to pee in a bottle-

   13. KBKrystal Ball17:42

       Right.

   14. JRJoe Rogan17:42

       But if a gal has to pee-

   15. KBKrystal Ball17:43

       Pee in a bottle. (laughs)

   16. JRJoe Rogan17:44

       ... in like a dog bowl-

   17. SESaagar Enjeti17:44

       (laughs)

   18. KBKrystal Ball17:45

       Right. That's sounds bad.

   19. JRJoe Rogan17:45

       ... I'm like, this seems-

   20. KBKrystal Ball17:47

       Yeah. I mean, and that's the thing, is like-

   21. SESaagar Enjeti17:49

       This seems wrong.

   22. KBKrystal Ball17:49

       ... I would like to click the button that's like-

   23. JRJoe Rogan17:51

       Yeah.

   24. KBKrystal Ball17:51

       ... "I'll pay a little bit more if you can promise me no driver had to shit in a bag in order to get this-"

   25. JRJoe Rogan17:56

       Yeah.

   26. SESaagar Enjeti17:56

       Yeah.

   27. JRJoe Rogan17:56

       We- We kind of glossed over this thing-

   28. KBKrystal Ball17:58

       Y-

   29. JRJoe Rogan17:58

       ... where you said that Jeff Bezos-

   30. SESaagar Enjeti17:59

       Oh, right.
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   Right. …

   1. SESaagar Enjeti30:00

      you don't have a lot of power.

   2. KBKrystal Ball30:02

      Right.

   3. SESaagar Enjeti30:02

      And so, we have to go back to a scenario where workers have some power in negotiation. Look, I think shareholder capitalism has run amok. We have a lot of problems. That being said, there's a lot, obviously, to the engine of why we are the preeminent world economy and the preeminent society. The problem is that it's become unchecked, is that basically 1975, 1980s and so onward, the shareholder march, that's what led us to the China problem. These are the... Wall Street and the shareholder class are the ones, they knew that it was gonna screw working class jobs here in the US. They're the ones who pushed for more free trade with China, and then the political class are the ones who said, "Not only is shit gonna be cheaper," 'cause that was the trade-off. They were like, "Shit's gonna be cheaper in America." Congratulations, it's all cheaper. We also lost our entire middle class, especially in the industrial Midwest. But China's gonna become more liberal and free and open. And that was a total failure. Instead, we have imported Chinese autocracy to our country. Fucking John Cena, LeBron James, and James Harden are on the side of the CCP over their own citizens. Shaq is the only guy who spoke up for Daryl Morey-

   4. KBKrystal Ball31:11

      (laughs)

   5. SESaagar Enjeti31:11

      ... whenever it came to... Shaq-

   6. KBKrystal Ball31:13

      I love Shaq.

   7. SESaagar Enjeti31:13

      ... who was like the face of America, you know? It's like, it's totally crazy.

   8. KBKrystal Ball31:17

      The Chinese, the Chinese understand us better than we do in some ways.

   9. SESaagar Enjeti31:20

      Yeah.

   10. KBKrystal Ball31:20

       Because they, they get that, like, money is the weak spot, and so you ask what the answer is. I mean, look, it's, it's not straightforward, but basically there's two pieces. There's a policy piece that Saagar's talking about, you know, giving workers, rebalancing the scales. There used to be a balance on the scales where workers... they had more power within the workplace. You had, um, fewer of these gigantic firms that just controlled the entire market. So there's a, there's a policy piece here that's extraordinarily important. There's also a societal choice. Like, do we want to put-... cheaper, cheaper, cheaper as the only thing that we care about, right? It is that fundamental choice of, like, if you can click the button on Amazon that's like, "I'll pay a little more," or, "I'll wait, like, an extra half a day for the worker to be able to feed their family and, like, live a decent life-"

   11. JRJoe Rogan32:04

       Mm-hmm.

   12. KBKrystal Ball32:04

       "... and not have to shit in a bag," do we want to make that choice? Because right now, the whole structure of society is basically set up to cater to, frankly, people like us who are doing well and we want to have everything at our fingertips, as cheap as possible, as soon as possible, every experience, et cetera, et cetera. And it's become wildly unbalanced so that if not a majority, close to a majority of the population, it- it really is very hard to live. Um, housing prices are going insanely up, so the idea of a working-class family affording a home anywhere in America is just wildly out of reach. That's the one way that you can basically build wealth in America. You have no choice in terms of employers, so if you hate Amazon or they fire you or whatever, you're fucked because there's nothing else in your town because everything's else been sucked out to China-

   13. JRJoe Rogan32:51

       Especially during the co- the coronavirus pandemic.

   14. SESaagar Enjeti32:53

       Yes!

   15. KBKrystal Ball32:53

       Oh, absolutely! It was a disaster.

   16. SESaagar Enjeti32:53

       And they're the only ones hiring.

   17. JRJoe Rogan32:55

       Yeah.

   18. KBKrystal Ball32:55

       A disaster.

   19. JRJoe Rogan32:56

       So many businesses are gone and so many big corporations have gotten bigger.

   20. KBKrystal Ball32:59

       100%. And this was-

   21. JRJoe Rogan33:01

       It's really scary.

   22. KBKrystal Ball33:01

       ... so predi- You, I mean, we all saw this-

   23. JRJoe Rogan33:04

       Yeah.

   24. KBKrystal Ball33:04

       ... coming at the very beginning. We knew it was gonna b- be a bonanza for the people who already had everything.

   25. JRJoe Rogan33:10

       But it's not just-

   26. KBKrystal Ball33:11

       And that's exactly what happened.

   27. JRJoe Rogan33:11

       I don't think it's just us.

   28. SESaagar Enjeti33:13

       Yeah.

   29. KBKrystal Ball33:13

       Yeah.

   30. JRJoe Rogan33:13

       I think they knew it too.
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   So, this is actually-…

   1. SESaagar Enjeti45:00

      Fauci and Dr. Shi, who is the head of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, they're playing fucking games. Fauci and Rand Paul, when Rand Paul was pressing him, he was like, "We did not fund gain-of-function research." He's trying to define it as explicitly what he wa- what is on the record as him funding. Dr. Shi is the same thing. "We were not doing gain-of-function research-"

   2. KBKrystal Ball45:21

      So, this is actually-

   3. SESaagar Enjeti45:22

      "... here at the lab."

   4. KBKrystal Ball45:22

      ... this is actually ... This is amazing.

   5. SESaagar Enjeti45:24

      Yeah.

   6. KBKrystal Ball45:24

      I don't know if you caught. She d- did an email interview with the New York Times-

   7. SESaagar Enjeti45:28

      Yeah.

   8. KBKrystal Ball45:28

      ... which was mostly, I mean, it was just, you know-

   9. SESaagar Enjeti45:29

      It's bullshit, yeah.

   10. KBKrystal Ball45:30

       ... the standard, like, state party line from China. But they asked her about gain-of-function research. And I'm sure your listeners mostly know, know that gain-of-function research is basically modifying these to see what ... How can we make these pathogens more dangerous, right? And it's very ... It's in and of itself very dangerous, because these things do leak from labs, um, relatively routinely. And she says, "We were not doing gain-of-function research, because what we were doing wasn't making it more virulent or dangerous. It was seeing if it could jump from species to species." I'm sorry. Isn't that, like, the definition of making it more dangerous for us?

   11. SESaagar Enjeti46:08

       (laughs)

   12. KBKrystal Ball46:08

       Seeing if you can make it jump into our species? Like, that seems like that's pretty dangerous. So-

   13. SESaagar Enjeti46:13

       So how does Fauci-

   14. KBKrystal Ball46:13

       ... they're trying to play these games, saying it's not technically-

   15. JRJoe Rogan46:15

       Yeah.

   16. SESaagar Enjeti46:15

       Yeah.

   17. KBKrystal Ball46:15

       ... gain-of-function research.

   18. JRJoe Rogan46:15

       How does Fauci get away with standing there under oath and saying-

   19. SESaagar Enjeti46:20

       Media, right?

   20. KBKrystal Ball46:21

       100%.

   21. SESaagar Enjeti46:21

       It's m- It's all media pressure-

   22. KBKrystal Ball46:22

       Well-

   23. SESaagar Enjeti46:22

       Which is, he's the god.

   24. KBKrystal Ball46:23

       It's the, it's the anti-Trump derangement sem- syndrome, right? Fauci was put up as, like, the anti-Trump guy, and he became this liberal icon. I mean, there are these signs (laughs) in Washington, DC, in people's yards ... I don't know if you have them here, but-

   25. JRJoe Rogan46:38

       Yeah.

   26. KBKrystal Ball46:38

       ... it's literally his face on a sign, and like, "Thank you, Dr. Fauci."

   27. SESaagar Enjeti46:43

       "Thank you, Dr. Fauci."

   28. JRJoe Rogan46:43

       Jesus.

   29. SESaagar Enjeti46:44

       This is what we're dealing with, Joe.

   30. KBKrystal Ball46:45

       That's the level-
5. 1:00:00 – 1:06:22

   Well- …

   1. SESaagar Enjeti1:00:00

      I would believe you, Joe. But knowing how these things work, I know that this commission would be some sort of bullshit re- like the Benghazi report before it, or many of these others. The way that the politics works around it, it will dominate the news cycle. And I... Here's the thing though. Washington actually is a zero sum game. Like, when I'm talking about mutual exclusivity, it actually is. Senate floor time is the most precious thing in DC. So, whatever the driving conversation of the DC is that day, it is actually detracting from somewhere else because these people take vacations literally every other day, their August recess is coming up, all of this. So, when we focus on... I mean, look, the presidency, like the presidency is really about 100 days. And after that you're, like, running for the midterms, and after that you're running for re-election. In terms of the last, what, I think, like, 75, 80 years of the American presidency, the vast majority of major legislation moves in the first couple of months of the administration, and then that's it. You're totally dead. And so for the fact that January 6th continues to dominate American politics, I agree with you. It's completely important. And if it was a real commission, yes, but I know that there are these titanic other issues moving within American politics and that are getting zero attention. Lab leak is actually number one. May- maybe somebody should go and ask a Democratic senator whether they believe in the lab leak theory or not. These... So this is the... Mutual exclusivity is because the CNN reporter must ask this because he needs to give his bosses something to air on the nightly news that day, which is part of the editorial agenda.

   2. KBKrystal Ball1:01:25

      Well-

   3. SESaagar Enjeti1:01:25

      The Fox News reporter-

   4. KBKrystal Ball1:01:27

      Yeah.

   5. SESaagar Enjeti1:01:27

      ... has to do the same thing, and it comes together to mask all of these incredibly important issues. So it's... It really is a tragedy because it's like you said, I, I don't want to downplay January 6th. I actually think it was terrible and it does show, like, the power of, you know, of a, a demagogue, like, of a charlatan whenever you become president. But whenever we're focusing on that at the expense of everything else, and maybe we should even ask, "Why are these people all like mo-... Like, why are you willing to storm the Capitol for Trump?"

   6. JRJoe Rogan1:01:56

      I can help you out with that.

   7. KBKrystal Ball1:01:57

      For a fake, for a fake thing.

   8. SESaagar Enjeti1:01:57

      Yeah, yeah. Tell me. Yeah.

   9. JRJoe Rogan1:01:58

      'Cause they're idiots.

   10. SESaagar Enjeti1:01:59

       Yes. (laughs)

   11. JRJoe Rogan1:01:59

       There's a lot of idiots. It's, like, it's very easy to survive.

   12. KBKrystal Ball1:02:01

       But I think, I think... Here's the thing.

   13. JRJoe Rogan1:02:03

       That's what... But that is what it is.

   14. KBKrystal Ball1:02:04

       Here's where, here's where I really agree with you, is, um, January 6th was like a case study in all that's gone wrong in the country, right?

   15. JRJoe Rogan1:02:11

       Yeah.

   16. KBKrystal Ball1:02:11

       And you're absolutely right. I think what you said is really profound about this is a thing that happened, and now you're very likely to see similar repeats-

   17. JRJoe Rogan1:02:19

       Yeah.

   18. KBKrystal Ball1:02:19

       ... similar type of... Whether it's on the right or the left or whatever, and you just know that the, the sort of partisan commission that will come out of Washington, we know what the answer will be. The answer will be, number one, Republicans are bad and Donald Trump is bad.

   19. JRJoe Rogan1:02:33

       Yep.

   20. KBKrystal Ball1:02:33

       They will do... If you were going to really go- get to the root of what's going on, it would implicate too many Democrats as well who've been happy to play this game of mutual demonization and existential politics that only lead to, you know, these sort of horrific outcomes. And again, that doesn't take agency away from any of the people who did this shit, who are morons and, like, deserve whatever, you know, whatever punishment is appropriate. The problem is what this, what this will lead to is, number one, Donald Trump's bad. Okay, we get that. We, we all know that, and we have our feelings about it. Number two, this justifies us taking more surveillance power, creeping into your life more, demonizing the other side, quote unquote-

   21. JRJoe Rogan1:03:15

       Yes.

   22. KBKrystal Ball1:03:15

       ... even more. And so 100%. I mean, actually, you could think about our show and what we do every day as trying to get to the roots of how you end up in a fucking terrible place like January 6th.

   23. JRJoe Rogan1:03:28

       Yeah.

   24. KBKrystal Ball1:03:28

       Do I think that our political class is gonna do anything? No, of course not. Of course not, because it implicates too many of them, so they'll just search for the partisan answer. They'll search for the answer that hands them more...... power and hands the sort of surveillance state and police state more power. We're already seeing that. Joe Biden just made a big announcement about all of that.

   25. NANarrator1:03:47

       Mm-hmm. What was the announcement?

   26. KBKrystal Ball1:03:47

       And then we'll move forward. So he announced, and I, I have, haven't had a chance to read through all the details, but there's an, a new big initiative to essentially use the, um, the powers that we deployed against, uh, Islamic terrorists now against the domestic population. So treating sort of domestic extremism in the same way that we treated-

   27. NANarrator1:04:06

       How do you define domestic extremism though?

   28. SESaagar Enjeti1:04:07

       Yeah. That's a good question.

   29. KBKrystal Ball1:04:09

       So well, that's, so that's the question.

   30. NANarrator1:04:10

       Like slide the scale.

Episode duration: 3:28:12