EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,004 words- 0:00 – 0:02
Intro
- SPSpeaker
[upbeat music]
- 0:02 – 1:23
Rand Paul in Austin + why his COVID hearings mattered
- SPSpeaker
Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. [upbeat music] Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. [upbeat music]
- JRJoe Rogan
Nice to meet you, sir.
- SPSpeaker
Thanks for having me.
- JRJoe Rogan
My pleasure.
- SPSpeaker
Great to be in Austin, you know? [chuckles]
- JRJoe Rogan
Have you been here be- you've been here before.
- SPSpeaker
You know, I grew up in Texas, and so we used to come up here, uh, for live music. I went to Baylor, and there was no music, no dancing. If you wanted to hear some live music, you came to Austin. So I've been here many times.
- JRJoe Rogan
Nice. It's a great spot. Uh, so here's your book, Deception: The Great Cover-Up. You were, uh, a lone voice of reason during the pandemic that, uh, you know, for me, y- you were extremely valuable, and, uh, I was cheering you on every step of the way. When you were grilling Anthony Fauci, "With all due respect, you do not know what you are talking about" That, that guy was driving me fucking crazy. It was, it was mind-numbing how many people were going along with it and how many people just accepted what he was saying, ignored all the evidence that pointed to gain-of-function research, didn't freak out when it was quite obvious that he was lying about gain-of-function research, and I just thank God that you were grilling him, and at least it was on the record, and we could all watch it and see it.
- 1:23 – 3:09
Kids, school closures, and Sweden: early pandemic tradeoffs
- SPSpeaker
One of the greatest tragedies, and we knew this f- within days, was that children weren't getting sick, but that should have been used to our advantage. Children did not get sick. No child without a healthy, uh, without a health issue really died. Zero.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, they got sick, but it wasn't dangerous for them.
- SPSpeaker
Right. But they, they-
- JRJoe Rogan
My kids both got it.
- SPSpeaker
Right, but most of them had a very mild illness, and the point is, is that we knew this in China in the first couple of weeks, and we could have left the schools open, and some countries left the schools open. For the most part, Sweden left their schools open and treated this completely different and turned out with a similar... Everybody wound up with a similar death rate, with primarily the people dying were people who were older and overweight or both.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. And well, the, the argument was, "You're gonna bring it home, and you're gonna infect your grandma, and she's gonna die."
- SPSpeaker
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
That was the-
- SPSpeaker
The argument didn't really hold water, though, because everybody got it anyway. And so-
- JRJoe Rogan
But we didn't know that in the beginning, right?
- SPSpeaker
Well-
- JRJoe Rogan
In the beginning, they were lying, and they were saying that... Although we now know that there was no data that showed that the vaccine-
- SPSpeaker
Right
- JRJoe Rogan
... stopped infection-
- SPSpeaker
Right
- JRJoe Rogan
... stopped transmission.
- SPSpeaker
But here's another thought: You could have said, "Yeah, kids could take it to their grandparents, so until the kid has gotten it and recovered for two weeks, tell them not to visit their grandparents." You know what I mean? And-
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, the problem was the people that live with their grandparents.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah, I know.
- JRJoe Rogan
You know?
- SPSpeaker
And there would be, there would be the exceptions to the rule, but most of the people, the death rate we already knew in China was very, very small once you added in the kids. Initially, they were saying it was a three percent death rate, which would have been, instead of one million people, you know, would have been significantly more. Three million people may have died, but they knew the death rate was less than that in China early on. But part of the reason they thought it was so high is they weren't counting all the asymptomatic cases. You know, they knew how many people were sick and how many people died, but the denominator
- 3:09 – 5:33
Natural immunity: what was known, what was denied, and why it mattered
- SPSpeaker
was the number of people who actually were sick or who actually got the infection, but they weren't counting millions of people. And, uh, but Anthony Fauci denied this at every step. He denied that natural immunity would protect you, and one of my favorite quotes was from a guy named Martin Kulldorff. He was an epidemiologist-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, I know who he is
- SPSpeaker
... at Harvard, who ended up getting fired. But recently, he tweeted out, it was about a year or two ago, he said, "Well, we knew about natural immunity from the time of the Athenian plague in 436 BC, and we knew that knowledge until 2020, then we lost all knowledge [chuckles] of natural immunity. But the good news is, in 2025, we're starting to get back that knowledge." But this was... Anthony Fauci knew better. You know, he, he, he couldn't even read his own basic immunology books about, you know, m- the fact that you do develop immunity. Is it perfect? No. Can you get COVID more than once? Yes, but I defy you to tell me somebody who got it the second time, who died the second time. You know what I mean?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- SPSpeaker
People got it less severely so the second time they got it, if they got it at all.
- JRJoe Rogan
Much less severely so. I got it twice, and the second time, I couldn't even believe it was actually COVID.
- SPSpeaker
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
It was back when we were testing every day. We would test all the guests. We'd test all the staff-
- SPSpeaker
Right
- JRJoe Rogan
... before we did the show, and I came in, and I had the sniffles.
- SPSpeaker
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's it. And they said, "Do you have COVID?" And I was like, "This is hilarious." [chuckles]
- SPSpeaker
And I understand you did so well because your personal doctor was Sanjay Gupta.
- JRJoe Rogan
Bah! [laughing]
- SPSpeaker
[laughing] That is... That clip of you and, and he on the program is my favorite clip of all time. [chuckles]
- JRJoe Rogan
I don't know what he thought was gonna happen.
- SPSpeaker
[laughing]
- JRJoe Rogan
I think he just thought he was gonna come in here, and CNN was gonna send their medical mercenary in with all his knowledge.
- SPSpeaker
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
But y- you can't argue with someone when you can't use facts.
- SPSpeaker
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
So he didn't have any facts at his disposal, and he was working for a network that was openly lying about me taking veterinary medicine. Like, the whole thing was-
- SPSpeaker
Right
- JRJoe Rogan
... surreal. And for someone who is, you know, up until 2020, I mean, I was reasonably distrustful of mainstream news, but in a normal way.
- SPSpeaker
Mm.
- JRJoe Rogan
Like, I'm sure they bend things a little bit or twist things a little bit.
- SPSpeaker
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
I, I would have never thought I would watch a campaign against me like that, where every night it was horse dewormer, horse dewormer-
- SPSpeaker
Right
- JRJoe Rogan
... Joe Rogan, dangerous conspiracy theories, COVID denier, vaccine denier. I was like, "This is f-... fascinating!
- 5:33 – 2:22:20
Treatments and incentives: steroids vs remdesivir, and what Fauci dismissed
- SPSpeaker
I think it, it brings up a broader question, too, that when people tell you there's a consensus, and because the consensus exists, you cannot object. I think that's a real danger to openness, to new ideas, but it's also a danger in medicine. And, and in medicine to say, "This is the consensus, and we're not going to do this." So in the first month of this, maybe first or second month, Fauci comes in, and I said, "You know, many people who die from the flesh-eating bacteria, which is not the same, but it's a serious illness, the- what they give them to try to treat them to prevent death and loss of limbs is high-dose IV steroids." And I had a friend whose life was saved. He didn't lose any of his limbs, and he had this terrible illness. And so I asked Anthony Fauci, I said, "Do you think there's a chance, as they're getting very, very sick and their lungs are filling up with fluid, that we could try high-dose IV steroids like we do in other infections?" He says, "Oh, no, no, we've tried that." Turns out, and we, we mention this in the book, the best treatment when you are just about to go on the ventilator or on the ventilator, when you have a 50% chance of dying at that point, was IV steroids, an old generic medicine that, uh, big pharma doesn't make much money off of.
- JRJoe Rogan
Which steroids in particular were they using?
- SPSpeaker
Uh, it's, it's called Solu-Medrol, but it's just IV steroids, and it was a 36% percent reduction in death, which is pretty significant when you're in the ICU. The people in the ICU were very, very sick. It was a, a, a third of them had a reduction in death by, by taking IV steroids, but he was dismissing it from the very beginning and already acting like, "Oh, I know it's not going to work, and we're gonna try remdesivir," which turned out not to work very well.
- JRJoe Rogan
Not only that, it gives people kidney failure.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, I mean, he has a history of using medicine that has already been through the approval rating with, you know, what they did with AZT during the-
- SPSpeaker
Right
- JRJoe Rogan
... the pandemic of AIDS.
- SPSpeaker
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
And, uh, that, that proved to be horrific, a, a terrible disaster. It's just amazing that the same guy ran the same playbook, you know?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. No, and it, it was really sad, and the other thing about natural immunity that needed to be brought up is, so all the people that were declared essential kept working. Like, if you worked in a meat processing factory, these are hardworking people. Many of them, you know, they're, they're busting their butt all day long, and there'd be, like, 296 people at a meat packing f- place in Missouri. All of them got COVID. Most of them survived, but what we should have been telling them is, "Two weeks after you got it, come back to work. You don't have to wear a mask now. You've had it. You have immunity. You won't spread it to your family. And guess what? All the unknown about whether you're gonna die or not, you survived, [chuckles] and you're done."
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- SPSpeaker
But instead, we told people, "You might get it again, and you still might die, and you've got to wear a mask all day long," when in reality, we should have been celebrating the people who recovered and letting them have their freedom back.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, there was also this kooky thing where after you got over the disease, they wanted you to get vaccinated-
- SPSpeaker
Hmm
- JRJoe Rogan
... which was strange. It was almost like you-- they wanted you to join the team.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Like, take the blood oath.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. I, I met a man in Orange County, and his mom was, like, 83, and she was very sick, and she ultimately died during C- during- from COVID, probably. But she went to the hospital with COVID. They wouldn't admit her until she was vaccinated for COVID while she had COVID, which is actually against all recommendations, and this is the problem with the mass vaccination thing. If you're going to Walgreens, do you think they ask you if you've had COVID recently before they gave you a shot? And so really, the, the best medical recommendation for a young person is, one, you don't need the COVID vaccine, but you certainly shouldn't be taking it close to when you've had an infection because you've got an immune response that's going against the disease. Then you add in another stimulant to it, that's actually related to an increase in the rate of the heart inflammation that comes along with vaccinating some of the young people.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, there's also the weirdness of the, uh, what, what happened during the Reagan administration with vaccines, where they're no longer liable-
- SPSpeaker
Right
- JRJoe Rogan
... for any vaccine injuries. And when you call this a vaccine, it's very different than any vaccine that had ever been used before, but yet you have all of these injuries that people have no recourse.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. My dad was in Congress at the time and voted against, you know, g- giving them the liability protection, and he also was there when they had the swine flu epidemic, and in that, more people died from the swine flu vaccine, and I think there were no deaths from swine flu. They said, "Oh, it's gonna take over the world, and, you know, we're gonna lose, you know, 5% of our public." Nobody died. The, um, epidemic quickly stopped, but then several people got Guillain-Barré, and a few people died from the vaccine. And I'm not against vaccines. Look, there, there are m- many miracles to vaccines, but they should be used judiciously, and the risks and benefit for each individual... And it turns out COVID had an age differential that was more significant probably than any disease we've ever seen. It really was an old person's disease.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, an old person and people with comorbidities.
- SPSpeaker
Exactly.
- JRJoe Rogan
It was really bad for obese people, but, uh, you know, the disease aside, what, what was it like for you to watch this play being run? Because that's essentially what it was. It was like there was a play being run, and you had to follow whatever their narrative was to the T, or you'd be attacked. You'd, you-- I mean, uh, and you would see these people that were acting like soldiers for, -
- SPSpeaker
Hmm
- JRJoe Rogan
... for the pharmaceutical drug complex. I mean, they would-
- SPSpeaker
Right
- JRJoe Rogan
... they would go out there and just brutally attack anybody who deviated from the narrative, say the most awful things, talk about how you, there's blood on your hands, and, like-
- 8:25 – 20:20
Vaccines: liability shields, mandates after infection, and myocarditis risk-benefit
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. I, I met a man in Orange County, and his mom was, like, 83, and she was very sick, and she ultimately died during C- during- from COVID, probably. But she went to the hospital with COVID. They wouldn't admit her until she was vaccinated for COVID while she had COVID, which is actually against all recommendations, and this is the problem with the mass vaccination thing. If you're going to Walgreens, do you think they ask you if you've had COVID recently before they gave you a shot? And so really, the, the best medical recommendation for a young person is, one, you don't need the COVID vaccine, but you certainly shouldn't be taking it close to when you've had an infection because you've got an immune response that's going against the disease. Then you add in another stimulant to it, that's actually related to an increase in the rate of the heart inflammation that comes along with vaccinating some of the young people.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, there's also the weirdness of the, uh, what, what happened during the Reagan administration with vaccines, where they're no longer liable-
- SPSpeaker
Right
- JRJoe Rogan
... for any vaccine injuries. And when you call this a vaccine, it's very different than any vaccine that had ever been used before, but yet you have all of these injuries that people have no recourse.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. My dad was in Congress at the time and voted against, you know, g- giving them the liability protection, and he also was there when they had the swine flu epidemic, and in that, more people died from the swine flu vaccine, and I think there were no deaths from swine flu. They said, "Oh, it's gonna take over the world, and, you know, we're gonna lose, you know, 5% of our public." Nobody died. The, um, epidemic quickly stopped, but then several people got Guillain-Barré, and a few people died from the vaccine. And I'm not against vaccines. Look, there, there are m- many miracles to vaccines, but they should be used judiciously, and the risks and benefit for each individual... And it turns out COVID had an age differential that was more significant probably than any disease we've ever seen. It really was an old person's disease.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, an old person and people with comorbidities.
- SPSpeaker
Exactly.
- JRJoe Rogan
It was really bad for obese people, but, uh, you know, the disease aside, what, what was it like for you to watch this play being run? Because that's essentially what it was. It was like there was a play being run, and you had to follow whatever their narrative was to the T, or you'd be attacked. You'd, you-- I mean, uh, and you would see these people that were acting like soldiers for, -
- SPSpeaker
Hmm
- JRJoe Rogan
... for the pharmaceutical drug complex. I mean, they would-
- SPSpeaker
Right
- JRJoe Rogan
... they would go out there and just brutally attack anybody who deviated from the narrative, say the most awful things, talk about how you, there's blood on your hands, and, like-
- SPSpeaker
Right
- JRJoe Rogan
... it was very strange.
- SPSpeaker
... Well, i- i- the, the, the belief in the vaccines and the belief that you should do it was like a religious belief, and that's the way they treated it. So if you didn't believe in it, you were a, you were someone to be demonized as a non-believer. You were to be cast out-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
And you weren't patriotic if you weren't wearing a mask, and even if I've already had it, I'm walking down the hallway, you know, between the office buildings and the Capitol, and all those reporters, they're 22 years old. Most of them are journalist majors. They never had a science course in their life, and they're lecturing me about why I should be wearing a mask, and it's like, I already had the disease. I've been-- I've healed up three weeks. I don't need to wear a mask. I'm, I've got immunity. "Well, how do you know that?" But even in the beginning when they said they didn't know, they did know. We had a, a outbreak in 2003. It was a different coronavirus. It was the first SARS virus, but we knew that those people, 17 years later, still had T-cells and still had immunity to it. One of the-- my favorite stories, and we include this in the book, was there was a woman, and she was 102. She goes to the hospital, and they bring her family in. They're talking to her daughter, who's 85, says: "We don't think your mom's gonna make it." And she said, "Have you met my mom?" And they said, "Well..." And she survived. But while she was there, they decided to test her for antibodies to the Spanish flu, because when she was six months old, her mother was coming across the Atlantic. Her mom died from the Spanish flu. She got it, survived. They tested her 100 years later. She still had antibodies to the Spanish flu. So immunity lasts a long damn time.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow, that's crazy.
- SPSpeaker
[chuckles]
- JRJoe Rogan
But w- w- what was it like being in the government and, and seeing a- all this play out and that it was illogical, it, it didn't make any sense, but yet everyone was following the playbook?
- SPSpeaker
Um, well, people without any kind of scientific background were lecturing people. Uh, Sherrod Brown, Sherrod Brown from Ohio, was a senator. He was the worst. He would stop the proceedings and start pointing and yelling at me for not having a mask. In the House, they made him wear the mask, and so you got everybody in there with a mask. I got the, the infection, like, in March of 2020, so I got it just as it came over. I'm all healed up. I volunteered in the hospital when I was done 'cause I had immunity, and at that time, you're right, we didn't know everything, and there were some risks to the orderlies and nurses. So when they had to rotate patients that were on the ventilator, I would go in and help them, so one less person had to go in the room because I had immunity, and everybody acknowledged that I did at my local hospital. They didn't ask... There was no vaccine at the time anyway, and so but they all acknowledged that, "Oh, this is great. He's coming in, he has immunity, and he can help take the place of someone else who's having to, to risk being in the room when we move patients around."
- JRJoe Rogan
One of my favorite scenes was, uh, there was a musical performance where there was a bunch of flutists-
- SPSpeaker
[chuckles]
- JRJoe Rogan
... and they had masks on with a hole cut out so they could play their flute-
- SPSpeaker
[laughing]
- JRJoe Rogan
-through the mask. I was like-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah
- JRJoe Rogan
... "This is wild." I mean-
- SPSpeaker
Well, yeah. Explain to me the science of that I can eat my peanuts for 20 minutes on the plane, and w- my favorite is the some of the flight attendants were great. Some of them would actually come up to me and pass messages. I would get a little folded-up message, "Thank you for what you're doing. Thank you for challenging Fauci." But then some of them were Karens, and it brings out the worst in you. A little bit of power can bring out the worst in people, and some of them were, you know, "Sir, you're not eating your peanuts faster. Eat your peanuts faster. You need to put your mask on in between peanuts."
- JRJoe Rogan
They don't really serve peanuts on planes anymore.
- 20:20 – 23:46
Masking, “six feet,” and public-health mandates as harmful guidance
- SPSpeaker
... for seventy years, abused the civil liberties of people protesting for civil rights. He abused, uh, the liberty and pers- the privacy of people protesting the Vietnam War, and so Hoover was a terrible person with his longevity. I think Fauci ranks right up there with his disregard for people's privacy. But even the stuff about the masks, do you know that we studied pandemics for a decade? Bill Gates has been given gazillions of dollars, and he's gotten the government to spend money, and when we studied pandemics, all the way up until 2020, there was never a recommendation for masks among the public for respiratory virus.
- JRJoe Rogan
He recommended against-
- SPSpeaker
[chuckles]
- JRJoe Rogan
Fauci recommended against masks in a very public interview. That was a video where he was talking about, you know, it's not gonna help you, and worse, maybe you'll mess with your face, and-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah, well, the, uh, the good one was the-- it was that Birdwell woman. She was in the administration, and she writes him a letter in January. She says, "I have to go to a conference. Should I wear a mask?" And he writes back to her, "Uh, no, we've, we've done all the studies, and there's no evidence that for a respiratory virus, it works." And it turns out almost all the masks, the cloth masks, you know, you've heard all this, the pores were bigger than the virus.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
The virus goes through them. The surgical mask, a little better, but if you have these big gaps on either side, you think the virus isn't going around the mask? And it probably goes through that mask also. The N95 mask, if you're a doctor or nurse and you're going in and out of a room, and you wash your hands and throw away the mask, there probably is some value. So in the, in the hospital, they recommended this. But one of the reasons Anthony Fauci was such a danger is what he recommended was actually dangerous. So he's wearing a Washington Nationals cloth mask to show people, or he's wearing a Black Lives Matter mask to show people he cares. But if that's the advice, and you're seventy-five years old, and your wife has COVID, and you're going into her room to take her food, and you wear a cloth mask, you are risking getting COVID and dying yourself. He didn't tell-- he gave us the wrong advice, and then people thought they were safe with a cloth mask, so they're actually doing something they shouldn't do. Or they're, you know, eighty-five years old, and they're going to church, but they're wearing a cloth mask. Well, know that you probably shouldn't go to church, frankly. You shouldn't be told you can't go to church, but actually, the advice early on to avoid crowds and stay home if you were older or vulnerable. But the kids should have just gone to school and tried to stay away from, you know, people. But eventually, it happened anyway. It, it went everywhere. There was no stopping this virus.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, there's never been a respiratory virus that stopped with a vaccine anyway, right?
- SPSpeaker
No. The, the flu vaccine doesn't really stop with it either, and I'm trying to get more statistics on the, on the flu vaccine as well to see if it's accurate, because I think they lie to us every year about... You know, they say, "Oh, well, it was a, you know, it wasn't this, it wa- it wasn't even the same ca- category or type, but you're getting some crossover effect." Uh, I think most of the time, that is, um, being inflated. What they're, what they're telling you is not actually true, and I'm trying to get them at the CDC to study all of this again because they have the power and the numbers to look at large numbers. And let's be objective and tell people, you know, "What is the odds next year the flu vaccine will work for you?" And we used to say: "Well, it might not work, but if you're at risk, go ahead and take it." So it used to be over fifty or over sixty-five. Now, they want everybody to take the flu vaccine, and it probably, i- it is probably better, unless your child has an immunodeficiency disease, to go ahead and get these and develop immunity over time.
- 23:46 – 28:00
Pharma money and conflicts: royalties, committees, incentives, and transparency
- JRJoe Rogan
... And what do you think is going on? Like, why are they recommending this? Is this purely a profit thing?
- SPSpeaker
Um, I think if they were here, they would argue that it's, it's, it's science and it isn't for profit, but they argue vigorously against revealing if they're receiving money from Big Pharma. So what I ask is, if you're on the vaccine committee and you're gonna recommend that every child get a COVID vaccine, shouldn't you have to release whether you get royalties, you know, from Big Pharma? And Anthony Fauci, in committee, said, "We don't have to do it. The law," and he quoted the law, "says we don't have to do it." So for two, three, four years now, I'm still trying to get this passed. I've gotten all the Republicans to agree to it, and I've gotten all the Democrats but two or three, and I'm still trying to get it passed unanimously. But it would say, if you're a government scientist and you get royalties from Pfizer or from one of the big companies, you have to actually, uh, list it on a form, and really, you should be then recused from voting.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, well, also, why, why are doctors allowed to be financially incentivized?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah, that, that should be un- that should be considered to be unethical or-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes
- SPSpeaker
... inappropriate. We did change some of the things with pharma and gifts to doctors about 10 years ago. It is better than it used to be as far as gifts to doctors, except for then they, they don't call this a gift. I think this should be under the gift ban. You should not be get- getting paid to use certain, uh, choose certain things, because I, I think it, it's-- really, I think it's actually malpractice to give children the COVID vaccine.
- JRJoe Rogan
Are you aware of, uh, Mary Talley Bodin?
- SPSpeaker
Yep.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. You know her story?
- SPSpeaker
Not a lot. I've met her before, I think.
- JRJoe Rogan
She told me that if... You know, she has a small practice that's in, like, a strip mall, I believe, outside of Houston. She said that in her small practice, if she had vaccinated everyone, she would have been compensated $1.5 million.
- SPSpeaker
It's, it's a significant amount of money, yeah, and the people I've listed-
- JRJoe Rogan
That's crazy!
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. No, it's insane, and it's the-- it's, it's the one sort of exception to... We have all these things preventing kickbacks to doctors, except for vaccines, and that's somehow exempt. Um, so yeah. Now, we've looked at whether legislation could fix this, and I don't think we've found a good answer, but I have definitely looked to see if there's a way Congress can try to fix this.
- JRJoe Rogan
What's amazing to me is how many people in the general public are not skeptical, how many people in the general public will hear this kind of conversation, and immediately their hackles get up, and they want to argue against this. [gasps] "Vaccines have saved more-- vaccines are so important."
- SPSpeaker
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
"Vac- ah!"
- SPSpeaker
Um-
- JRJoe Rogan
They get-- And there's-- they have no information. They have- they've done no research. They've never looked at it objectively. They don't understand the whole history of compensation and, and w- w- what happened with the, the immunity.
- SPSpeaker
So in the, in the book, I tell the tor- story of George Washington, one, to let people know I'm not against, and the smallpox vaccine was amazing. And in George Washington's day, it was actually live, so that what you did is, if you'd had smallpox and you were doing pretty well, and you survived, and you didn't have a bad case, you had a minor case, you had four or five pocks, not a lot, uh, as you were recovering, they'd open a scab, take pus from your arm, stab somebody else's arm, and take the pus from your infection and stick it into someone else. That's a live vaccine. That's, that's crazy. But... And they did have some people die from it, but the death rate from smallpox was one out of three, and when it would show up in Boston, you'd have, like, 20,000 people die, and the whole town would get it. It was terrible, and so people actually chose, but people weren't being forced to do it. But the George Washington case is very instructive. Martha wants to come visit him at the camps, at the war camps, and there were more deaths in the Revolutionary War from disease than there were from bullets. He says, "You can't come until you're vaccinated for smallpox." It wouldn't vaccinate. It was called inoculated because you're getting stuck with a disease, not a vaccine. And, uh, but people say, "Well, I guess Washington took it, too, if he believed so much in this." Well, it's like, no, 'cause he'd already had smallpox. He got smallpox when he was 15 in Barbados. They understood immunity. We have understood immunity for thousands of years, and yet it just went out the window with Anthony Fauci saying, "Well, we just don't know. We just won't-- We just don't know." We do know. W- we don't always know how perfect it's gonna be, but we do know that nobody got COVID the second time around and had a worse case the second time around.
- 28:00 – 45:14
Fauci accountability: gain-of-function, records destruction, and the pardon controversy
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, one thing we do know is that when Biden left office, he was granted this biz- very bizarre pardon-
- SPSpeaker
[chuckles] Yeah
- JRJoe Rogan
... where he got a pardon that goes back to 2014 for crimes he was never accused of-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah
- JRJoe Rogan
... never convicted. I mean, is that-- it's gotta be one of the first times that anybody's ever been pardoned for-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah, and I, I think it should be challenged, and so we have, um... Under the Biden administration, I sent criminal referrals for Anthony Fauci to Merrick Garland, um, twice, and I sent them evidence that he had lied to Congress, which was a felony. They just ignored me. I've been working with Bobby Kennedy, and he's been very helpful on this. I have good relationship with him. He's given us a lot of information, and we've looked at the communications, and in Anthony Fauci's communications, we now have evidence that he was telling people, like Francis Collins, "Read this and destroy it." Well, you can't do that. The executive branch, when they communicate, they're required to keep their communications, and they're required to do it on government devices. So we have this evidence, and I've summarized it again in a criminal referral to, uh, Trump's attorney general, and I still haven't gotten action. But there's a couple reasons we should do it. One, he, he shouldn't get away with lying. He shouldn't get away with destroying records. But two, we should check the pardon. Is an autopen pardon valid? And is a pardon a retrospective pardon back 10 years that doesn't mention a crime? Can you, can you give people a pardon for everything they did in a 10-year period? I can't imagine, and I think the court might narrow that, but it doesn't happen unless the, the Trump Justice Department will do something, and I've, I've been sending them referrals, and I can't get them to do anything. Um, I can't guarantee they'll win. They might lose, but they ought to go to court. Take this, take it to court.
- JRJoe Rogan
[lips smack] When y- you were having that conversation with him about gain-of-function research, which clearly, gain-of-function research was being done at the Wuhan lab-
- SPSpeaker
Right
- JRJoe Rogan
... what, uh-- and he was just standing in front saying that under the definition of gain-of-function research, that that does not qualify.... What was that like?
- SPSpeaker
I- I- We all knew he was lying, and he was parsing words. He was, uh, trying to have a semantics type of argument. But one of the reasons we know he's lying, and one of the things that I presented as evidence, is there was a group, uh, text chain on February 1st of 2020. So you have all these virologists who are saying privately it came from the lab and publicly it didn't. You have them all communicating, but one of the things Anthony Fauci says about the Wuhan lab is, he says: "We know it's, we know it's, um, it's, it's dangerous and possible 'cause we know they're doing gain-of-function research, so we're funding them." He would never admit we're funding them, 'cause we were funding EcoHealth-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right
- SPSpeaker
... this intermediary. So he said, "Oh, we're not funding them. Well, we're funding them through EcoHealth. It's not gain-of-function," except for then he says the experiments they're doing are gain-of-function. And so I think everything about it was dishonest. He got away with it because people in the scientific community still to this day defend him, and people on the left made it a partisan- I don't know why this is a Republican-Democrat issue, but all of the main networks still defend him. You know, he was given a million-dollar prize? Some nonprofit, uh, gave him a million-dollar prize. A- Well, how does a bureaucrat get to accept a, a million-dollar prize while they're working for the government?
- JRJoe Rogan
You tell me.
- SPSpeaker
[chuckles]
- JRJoe Rogan
You work for the government. [laughing]
- SPSpeaker
Then when he leaves the government, he gets twenty-four/seven limo service and security. He's got people in front of his home stopping traffic like you do for a president getting in the car, which I'm okay for former presidents, but that's about it. You know, Anthony Fauci should have never got this. I will say that Trump ended it, you know, and everybody said, "Oh, he'll be, he'll be killed." And it's like, you know, I guarantee a lot of us have more threats than Anthony Fauci has, and none of us have a, a limo picking us up every day.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, I'm sure he has threats.
- SPSpeaker
Um-
- JRJoe Rogan
I'm sure Anthony Fauci has threats, and I think he probably, you know, should be concerned.
- SPSpeaker
But so, uh, yeah, but the government-
- JRJoe Rogan
Just based on what everybody knows.
- SPSpeaker
Right, but the government doesn't... You know, you're a famous person.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- SPSpeaker
Government doesn't pay for your limousine.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. Right.
- SPSpeaker
He shouldn't have a limousine paid for by the government with twenty-four/seven security.
- JRJoe Rogan
No, no, I agree. I mean, it's-- Also, how much money did he make? Do we know?
- SPSpeaker
We know he got the million-dollar prize. We know he made more than the president towards the end. He was making $450,000 a year, but his wife, if he ever had an ethical problem, you know who he went to, his wife. His wife was in charge of, uh, bioethics for the NIH. So if it was a question of whether or not his royalties were a conflict, he would ask his wife to find out if he was acting unethically. She made about two fifty, so they're really making a combined seven hundred, which I don't-- I'm not against money. You work hard, people pay you money, I'm all for it, but I am against the government paying bureaucrats that kind of money, and so... And he really-- There, there should be term limits for people in those positions. You shouldn't be there for 40 years. So he appointed all the people beneath him, and he stacked the deck. And, you know, I asked the question, and this was an email from Francis Collins to Anthony Fauci. He says, "Take him down," talking about Jay Bhattacharya, the head of the NIH now, talking about, uh, Martin Kulldorff, and then an epidemiologist from Oxford. "Take them down." And so when I have scientists come before my committee, I'll ask them the first question: "Have you ever, or would you ever, send another scientist a note saying to take down a fellow scientist you disagreed with?" My goodness, what kind of-- That sounds like the mafia or something.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
Doesn't sound like someone who's supposed to be above the fray, objective scientist.
- 45:14 – 54:31
From vaccines to cannabis: Texas hemp ban, McConnell, and market competition
- JRJoe Rogan
And they've just recently outlawed all the hemp stuff, and I've been fighting this for the last two months. But all the hemp products, I know Texas actually has a lot, they're all going to be banned within one year now.
- SPSpeaker
Now, how did that get passed?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mitch McConnell.
- SPSpeaker
How is that guy still around when he just freezes up every now and again?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
He locks up like Windows 95.
- JRJoe Rogan
[chuckles] He is, uh, very, very powerful, and a lot of people owe him. You know, he raised money for decades, hundreds of millions of dollars, passed it out to the lesser-known senators and helped them get elected when they would get challenges, and so then they all owe him. And so I forced an amendment, and it's funny, then the people on the internet go, "Why are you doing this? The government shut down. Why are you gumming up the works with a vote on a, on hemp?" Because they stuck it on the bill to reopen the government. It's not my choice to talk about-
- SPSpeaker
Right ... hemp at that time. That was my only choice, and so I brought forward an amendment. I got, like, twenty-something votes, and seventy of them voted, but they voted to set the limit and to change the, the amount of THC in the plant. So all the plants are illegal now. All the seeds are illegal. There's a real industry of farmers who grow this. Um, and the thing is, who, who are we to tell somebody who can't sleep at night that an Ambien's better for them than, than taking a hemp gummy to go to sleep at night? Or a veteran who could take Percocet or some kind of psychotropic drug or who has anxiety or post-traumatic stress, and we're gonna tell them they can't take a hemp gummy. I, I think it's, uh, insane and very much, uh, you know, this presumption that we know what's best for everyone.
- JRJoe Rogan
Is this the alcohol lobby? Like, what i- what is the motivation?
- SPSpeaker
There was a little bit of the alcohol lobby and the cannabis lobby. The cannabis people hate the [chuckles] hemp people. The-
- JRJoe Rogan
The cannabis people hate the hemp people?
- SPSpeaker
Well, it's complicated. The cannabis industry develops state by state, and you really can't make a marijuana product in Colorado and sell it in Kentucky. It can't go across state lines. The hemp, because it was legalized nationally, um, they've-- they were selling it across state lines, so we have big, uh, companies now that sell the hemp gummies. You can order them through the mail across state lines until this law came about, and McConnell always felt it was an unintended consequence, and some of the growth might have been, but I don't think it was... There were some bad products out there, and all of us, including the hemp industry, said, "All right, let's, let's regulate this. Let's not have one hundred milligram gummies." The more traditional is sort of like five milligrams. That's in a drink or in a gummy that people would take.
- JRJoe Rogan
Reasonable.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah, and, and, and I think... I, I haven't taken it. I, I'm for the freedom to take it, but I just-- I, I sleep pretty good. But, uh, so it's not really something I can attest to exactly how it works, but people who do take it tell me that, that to have one of the drinks say it might be like drinking a beer or maybe not even drinking a beer when you drink one of these, uh, THC drinks.
- JRJoe Rogan
So the cannabis businesses in the states where it's legal don't want it legal nationally?
- JRJoe Rogan
... because then it would interfere with their business, because you'd be able to order it through the mail.
- SPSpeaker
Well, they'd probably accept it if we'd legalize cannabis nationally, and then they would compete with hemp.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- SPSpeaker
But what was going on is we haven't legalized cannabis nationally, we've legalized it state by state. But I don't think even if your state has legal adult use and another one does-
- JRJoe Rogan
You-
- SPSpeaker
-I don't think you can transfer it across the state lines.
- JRJoe Rogan
You're saying hemp, but you really mean THC.
- SPSpeaker
Uh, that's-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right
- SPSpeaker
-for marijuana. That, that's, that's-
- JRJoe Rogan
CBD, CBD and THC, correct?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. CBD has a little bit of THC in it, and so do the hemp gummies have some THC in it, and then the drinks, too. It's about five milligrams-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right
- SPSpeaker
... in a lot of the different dose. There are different doses, but that's essentially-
- JRJoe Rogan
And so all of those are gonna be illegal?
- 54:31 – 1:05:10
How government incentives distort policy: banks, Fed interest on reserves, and regulation capture
- SPSpeaker
I know this is gonna be shocking to you, but that's the story of government.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
Most things that come out in government, if you look beneath the surface, they all, they all have pretty names, they have acronyms, say, patriotism, the Patriot Act. How-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- SPSpeaker
You must be anti-patriotic if you're not for the Patriot Act. But most of the things they say, it's the opposite, or someone has put something forward that really is about... Like, let's say it's a banking regulation. You say, "This is gonna protect the poor people." But it turns out the banking regulation is easier paid for and absorbed by big banks. And so what happens to your small local bank, and you say, "How come all the small banks get gobbled up by big banks?" It's 'cause you put regulations on that who favored? The big banks favor the regulations 'cause it puts the small bank out of business, they get absorbed by the big bank, and then the new banks trying to come in can't afford the compliance cost. Um, right now, one of the extraordinary things we're doing with, with banks, and I don't think many people know this, the Federal Reserve is now paying interest to big banks on keeping reserves at the Federal Reserve. There's $3 trillion there. Last year, the big banks, primarily the big banks in New York, got $187 billion in interest. Previously, that interest would go back to the Treasury to offset the debt. That's about ten percent of our debt. So our debt is ten percent worse because we're now paying, and we never did this before 2010. We never paid interest on, on reserves. And what it means to pay interest on reserves is that it's an incentive for the Fed just to leave it there. Why loan it to you if you're expanding a business, when I can just leave it here and get four percent? It also keeps interest rates from going down, 'cause if the Fed pays the big bank four percent, are they gonna loan it to you for three and a half when it can just sit at the Fed and gain four? So it's, it's kind of, you know... President Trump always wants what he wants, and sometimes he wants good things, but he, you know, may not go about it the best way. He wants interest rates to be lower. I think most people do. But one way to make interest lower is tell the Fed they can't pay interest, uh, to these big banks.
- JRJoe Rogan
Have you ever had a conversation with him about this?
- SPSpeaker
I've been trying for, like, three months to get a conversation with Bessent, and I held up one of their, uh-- with the Secretary of Treasury, I held up [chuckles] one of their appointees last week, which is one of the things you do to get the attention of the people you want to talk to. And they've agreed to meet with me, but we're already, you know, halfway into January. But I'm trying to get a meeting with Bessent to talk to him about this idea of paying interest because they said, "Oh, it'll only take thirty billion dollars to set up the system." Then it was a trillion, now it's three trillion, and I think it just keeps growing and growing, but that money really isn't being productive, and it's a gift to these big banks.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oof! When it comes to this, uh, this THC thing, what, what can be done?
- SPSpeaker
Trump's been good on some things. You know, the whole idea of changing it from Schedule I to Schedule III-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... is an improvement. It's still illegal without a prescription, but a lot of the research with marijuana didn't happen because Schedule I's just almost impossible.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- SPSpeaker
You gotta have, like, safes and guards and everything to deal with, with a Schedule I drug, and so very little research occurred on marijuana over time. And, um, so d- lowering the schedule is a good idea. Um, state by state has kind of worked in the sense that it's allowed people to see what it's like and get used to it. Um, but some of the states have, have backtracked, and some are worried that they went too far. Um, it's harder to determine, I think, a- acute intoxication if someone's driving-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right
- SPSpeaker
... under the influence, to do a test. I, I would guess the technology should be out there, but I don't know that it's widely available.
- JRJoe Rogan
I think it would have to be a blood test, right? I, I, I don't know. If you're, if you've consumed an edible, you're not gonna be able to get something with a breathalyzer.
- SPSpeaker
I don't, I don't know that for certain. Your, your breath is amazing what it actually has in it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- SPSpeaker
So I, I don't know the answer to that, if the technology-
- JRJoe Rogan
So maybe just the-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah
- JRJoe Rogan
... the testing is not-
- SPSpeaker
W- yeah
- JRJoe Rogan
... adequate.
- SPSpeaker
Which reminds me, there's a guy in California I've met. Just, you meet extraordinary people. He's actually studying, uh, contents of what you exhale to look for cancer markers. So, I mean, they're really minute-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm
- SPSpeaker
... but he's gonna try to diagnose things like, you know, you'll hear of a friend, you know, who's, like, forty-five years old and has pancreatic cancer, or we actually have a former senator right now, Ben Sasse, who says he has Stage IV pancreatic cancer, and the reason it, it spreads before you know you have it. But he's trying to get a... And he has a test that measures markers just from what you exhale to try to pick up on cancers before they be detected.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm. So there's a possibility that they can come up with some sort of a detection method to find out if you're intoxicated?
- SPSpeaker
I think probably, and I, I don't know the technology that well.
- JRJoe Rogan
Uh, but it's either way, uh, just for responsible use for adults, it just doesn't make any sense that they would change it from what it is now and make it more restrictive.
- 1:05:10 – 1:30:25
Foreign policy: Venezuela regime change, drug-boat strikes, and war vs crime
- SPSpeaker
Yeah, and, um, I'll give you an example what I think is bizarre. So we've been, uh, blowing up these people in boats o- o- off the coast of Venezuela. They're accused of running drugs, but nobody knows their names, and nobody's put up any evidence. When we've, um, had them, September 2nd, two of them were still clinging to the wreckage. They're shipwrecked. Um, they blew them up. And so what m- I think is bizarre is I hear mostly my Republican colleagues say, "Well, um, we shouldn't have to. How do we know they're not armed?" And it's like, but, but there's this thing called presumption of innocence. They say it doesn't apply. Well, it actually always has applied on the oceans. We have always-- We've had drug interdiction, but we have always stopped boats and asked to search them. If they flee or shoot at the Coast Guard, they will get shot and blown up, but it's usually an escalatory sort of steps.... We know that when the Coast Guard boards vessels off of Miami and off of California, one in four of the boats they board don't have any drugs on them. So I, I look at my colleagues who say they're pro-life, and they, they value God's inspiration in life, but they don't give a shit about these people in the boats. And are they terrible people in the boats? I don't know. They're probably poor people in Venezuela and Colombia, and really, they say, "Well, we're at war with them. They're committing war by bringing drugs into America." They're not even coming here. They're going to these islands in the south part of the Caribbean, and the cocaine, and it's not fentanyl at all, the cocaine's going to Europe. Those little boats can't get here. Uh, no one's even asked this common question: Those boats have these four engines on them, they're outboard boats. You can probably go about 100 miles before you have to refuel.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- SPSpeaker
They're 2,000 miles from us.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- SPSpeaker
They'd have to refuel 20 times to get here. They really-- It was all a pretense and a false argument, but I guess what I don't feel connected to my Republican colleagues is that those lives don't matter at all, and we can just blow them up, and against all justice and against all laws of war, all laws of just war, we never have blown up people who were shipwrecked. It's against the military code of justice to do that, and we're doing it, and everybody just says, "Oh, well, they're drug dealers."
- JRJoe Rogan
Why do you think they were attacking those people? 'Cause I've heard a bunch of different theories, and one of the big theories was they were trying to get the cartel upset at Maduro in order to get him out of office.
- SPSpeaker
It's all been a pretense for ele- uh, arresting Maduro. So we have to set up the predicate, we gotta show you we care about drugs, and but the weird thing about it is they really care about drugs, except for the former president of Honduras, Hernández, who was given a 40-year sentence, was tried, was found guilty, he was given 40 years in a US jail, and he's let go at the same time we're arresting Maduro because we're-- he's w- attacking the United States with drugs. And then I get this stuff. I had this on air from a, a respectable journalist the other day. She said, "Well, don't you care about the kids in our country dying from fentanyl?" I said, "Of course I do, but you know, no fentanyl comes from Venezuela. Not a little bit, zero."
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, if we were really interested, we'd be attacking Mexico.
- SPSpeaker
Well, they wanna do that next.
- JRJoe Rogan
They'd attack the cartels.
- SPSpeaker
They want to bomb Mexico.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, do you think that this is-
- SPSpeaker
[chuckles]
- JRJoe Rogan
... like, sort of a predicate, like we're-- they're trying to set that up?
- SPSpeaker
I hope not. That's why I've opposed it, because, look, I have no love lost for Maduro. I wrote another book called The Case Against Socialism. I think that socialism, historically, there's been a link between socialism and state-sponsored violence, and so I- in the book, we talk about a 16-year-old girl who has a gang, and her gang's turf or territory are the dumpsters outside of restaurants to scavenge for food. That's what, uh, Maduro and Chávez did, did to Venezuela, and so I'm glad he's gone. I'm glad s- you know, I hope they choose wiser, but at the same time, if the predicate is we're going to snatch people, why don't we snatch da Silva from Brazil? Some people say Bolsonaro is unfairly in prison, may be true, and they say da Silva cheated in the election. May also be true, but should the President of the United States, no matter who or she, he or she is, have the ability, without a vote of Congress, the people's representatives, just go snatch people out of jails in Brazil and put a new government in? One, it doesn't usually work. Yeah, I'm hoping it's successful here, but, you know, we've tried it in other places. Uh, it's one of the things I liked about Donald Trump. He was against regime change in Iraq.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- SPSpeaker
He was against regime change in Libya, and it didn't work real well in Iraq or Libya.
- JRJoe Rogan
So what do you think changed? Why do you, why do you think they're so interested in Venezuela?
- SPSpeaker
Influence.
- JRJoe Rogan
Do you think it's just because of the oil?
- SPSpeaker
Influence, and I've, I've jokingly said that there ought to be a-
- JRJoe Rogan
... Uh, reoccurring issue that we thought was resolved with the software. We're back? Okay. All right, we're good. Um-
- SPSpeaker
Sorry, folks, the program was interrupted by the NSA. [laughing] Uh, you know, they are spying on the show to see if-
- JRJoe Rogan
So, so here's the question: Uh, the Biden administration had a $20 million... Was it $20 or $22 million bounty on Maduro?
- SPSpeaker
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
Like, they've wanted Maduro out forever. Why was that?
- SPSpeaker
Um, because, uh, you know, they d- they've, they don't have free elections.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- SPSpeaker
It's an authoritarian government. The people are suffering, so it's this idea that that's wrong and government should... A- and, and I think that's a noble concept, to want better government, more freedom for people, but I could probably list for you a dozen different countries that have autocratic rulers right now, and we could go in, and we could arrest them all and put people in place, but it sometimes backfires. For example, I think one of the things... I think there's a good feeling towards America from a lot of Venezuelans right now that are happy that Maduro is gone. But ask them again in six months if we're still controlling their oil and we're doling out a little bit of money, but the money's not going to the people, it's going to the socialist government. So you realize we've traded one socialist for another.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- 1:30:25 – 1:50:00
Budget reality: the “Penny Plan,” mandatory spending, and welfare reform via nutrition rules
- SPSpeaker
I think the first thing to acknowledge is both parties are equally guilty. The debt is the v- problem of both parties, and the spending is both parties. And there is a compromise. I tell people it's a dirty little deal that's going on right in front of your nose. The, the right, Lindsey Graham and the war hawks, want more military money.... the left, Chris Murphy and, uh, Booker, they, they want more welfare. What's the compromise? You scratch my back, I'll scratch you. I'll let you have your military money if you let me have the welfare money. So the compromise of the last fifty years is they've both grown enormously. But the budget we vote on is only one-third of the spending. Two-thirds of the spending is mandatory spending that's just on autopilot. We never vote on it. The one-third that we vote on is about $2 trillion. That's what the deficit is. So when I vote for spending, and I vote against most of it, almost all of that is borrowed. What would be the compromise that would fix it? The reverse. I would go to, um, you know, the left, my buddy Ron Wyden, who I am good friends with, and I would say, "Look, we're out of money. The interest is killing us. It's crowding everything out. What if we spend 1% less next year on welfare? And I'll tell my party they have to spend 1% less on military." If you do that across the board, you'd have to include the mandatory programs, you can balance your budget gradually over a five-year period, and I've called this the Penny Plan. And I think it's a compromise because instead of... What conservatives have typically done is they've said, "It's Sesame Street. If we can get rid of public TV and Sesame Street, we'll, we'll show those liberals and we'll balance the budget." Well, it's not enough money, and I'm not against doing it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
I voted to reduce the money, but there are some people on the left who live and die by public TV, and they think it's the greatest thing, and it's an offense to them. So rather than cut 100% of it, let's cut the- and you can balance the budget right now if you cut 6% of the military, 6% of Sesame Street, 6% of everything everybody wants, and I think you could actually do it. And I try this message out sometime. Everybody that comes to Washington wants money, and there are usually things that you can have sympathy for. So one week they come, and they wear the purple ribbons, and it's for Alzheimer's disease. Well, I have family members who have Alzheimer's. I have a great deal of sympathy, but we're $2 trillion short. So what I usually say to them is, "We're a rich country, and we should be able to spend some of our money on Alzheimer's research. But you got $100 million last year." I'm making up the number. "But let's say you got $100 million last year, and because we're short of money, everybody has to get less this year. Would it be okay if I only vote for $94 million for you next year?" And when you put it that way, and they're usually in there with tears running down their face, talking about their mom and their grandmother and Alzheimer's, and they're worried they're gonna get it. To a person, you look around the table, and they say, "Well, that sounds kind of fair. Everybody has to take a hit, right? Ninety-four percent." Almost, uh, almost everything that is like... For example, food stamps. People say, "Well, the people are gonna starve without food stamps." Well, why don't we just get rid of Coca-Cola and Pepsi? No sugar dr- uh, no sugar drinks on food stamps. That's, uh, 10% of food stamps. That'd be a 10% cut. We'll do- we'll- we're gonna spend 10% less. No one's gonna starve.
- JRJoe Rogan
Would you spend... Hold on, but would you spend less, or would you just limit the purchasing to non-
- SPSpeaker
We'll probably be lucky just to limit the purchase, but I would spend less.
- JRJoe Rogan
But you couldn't spend- but how could you spend less? You would have to give them less, and you say, "Hey, not only can you not buy sugary drinks, but now you'll have less money to buy healthy food, which is more expensive."
- SPSpeaker
Well, well, what, what, what you would do is-
- JRJoe Rogan
But you know what I'm saying?
- SPSpeaker
Well, maybe. If you had a budget, let's say it's $100 million, and next year the food stamp budget is gonna be $94 million, and you say you can't buy Coca-Cola and Pepsi and sugared drinks, they would still have to make their decisions with a little bit less, but they, on average, are spending 6% or... Yeah, I think it's about- no, I think it's about 10% of the dollars are going towards these sugared drinks. They would have to make decisions to do it, but I think even something like food stamps, they don't- there's a strong argument, "Oh, people will be hungry." Hunger is not a problem in our country. It really isn't. Our problem is too much food. It, it frankly is. There is no one starving in our country. There is food everywhere.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right, but it's not too much food. It's non-nutritious food. I mean, it's not even-
- SPSpeaker
Too much bad food.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's not even food.
- SPSpeaker
Well, you're right. [chuckles]
- JRJoe Rogan
It's things you eat that have no nutrition in it at all-
- SPSpeaker
Exactly
- JRJoe Rogan
... like Coca-Cola.
- SPSpeaker
Yes, exactly.
- JRJoe Rogan
Like candy and cookies and all the shit that you can buy with food stamps.
- SPSpeaker
And I've been talking- you can get candies. You know, you can get a bag of candy on your food stamps.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- SPSpeaker
There's no... That should- And so I've been talking about this for years, and so I had a Democrat senator who I can talk to, we're friends. We're walking down the hall, and I tell him about it. He says, "Well, that sounds reasonable, but I don't want to reduce the dollar." So what you're saying is the compromise is probably Democrats are never gonna vote to reduce the dollars. We should, but we won't get it. But even when we got- push came to shove, his staff piped up, and they said, "Oh, I thought you were a libertarian. I thought you were for choice." And I said, "I am, with your money. [chuckles] I mean, the taxpayer money. We don't let you buy alcohol."
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- SPSpeaker
I think it's arguable that sugar drinks are as bad as buying alcohol.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's close.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
I mean, certainly in terms of health consequences.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
You know, diabetes and obesity and all the other comorbidities that come along with more obesity. But the thing is, it's like if you're asking them to buy healthy food, healthy bo- food is definitely more expensive.
- SPSpeaker
Sometimes. If you want to go to Whole-
- JRJoe Rogan
Sometimes?
- 1:50:00 – 1:59:37
AI and work: universal income debates, dignity of labor, and historical automation parallels
- SPSpeaker
But I talk to everybody every day, and they're scaring the world, saying there'll be no more jobs, and everybody will just sit around looking at each other. And I, I really- [chuckles] I don't... I hope that's not true, and I, and I... You know, they're richer and smarter than I am, maybe, but they all say it's gonna happen. But I say, "If it happens, what will also develop is secret societies, and they'll be like speakeasies, and you'll go down the stairs, you'll knock on the door, and someone will decide. You'll do the password, and you'll go inside, and you'll be able to build shit in there, and you'll be able to, like, grout bricks and put them together. You'll be able to nail wood together, secret work, because people will still wanna work. Even though there are no jobs, they will secretly wanna work."
- JRJoe Rogan
Why would, why would it be secret?
- SPSpeaker
Because the government will make it illegal. The government's stupid.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wait, wait, wait. The government will make work illegal? Is that what you're actually saying?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah, I think this is a dystopian society. Hear- bear me out. So-
- JRJoe Rogan
What novels are you reading? [laughing]
- SPSpeaker
... This is, this is- I taught a course in this. So when we have AI, people are saying the jobs disappear. Work will become so foreign, but there'll be a small remnant that searches for work, but they'll do it secretly, and after you build stuff in the little speakeasy down under with a secret password, you'll have to destroy it before the government comes.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- SPSpeaker
So that's just my theory of what's, what's going to happen.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, that's your theory.
- SPSpeaker
I might be wrong. I could be wrong.
- JRJoe Rogan
Have you ever had a conversation with Elon?
- SPSpeaker
Uh, yep.
- JRJoe Rogan
He thinks that we're gonna need universal basic income.
- SPSpeaker
Hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
And, uh, he thinks it won't actually be universal basic income. His rose-colored glasses version of it is universal high income.
- SPSpeaker
Um.
- JRJoe Rogan
Because he believes that AI is gonna create so much wealth, that there will be so much money that people won't have to work anymore. Which the, the, the-- so hear me out here. So the question is, like, is it essential that the only way you take care of yourself and feed yourself and house yourself is through work?
- SPSpeaker
No.
- JRJoe Rogan
And can people find meaning outside of work? Can they find things to do, or will they just be sitting around playing video games all day?
- SPSpeaker
So the first thing that I'll probably just acknowledge is, he may be smarter than me, and he, he's probably a little bit richer than me, so I don't discount his opinion, Elon Musk, but I hope he's wrong. And with regard to work, I think work is something so necessary, that the problems we have in our society are with the people who aren't getting the benefit of working. And so I see work, and I would mandate work for welfare programs. I don't-- If you're able-bodied, you would have to work. I wouldn't give you a penny. Everybody would have to work. But I tell people, I don't-- I'm not in favor of that as punishment. That is w- reward. Work is a reward. I can tell you that I've, I've never been unhappy. Maybe I'm lucky in the work I've had, but I've always wanted to go to work, and I've done hard jobs. I've roofed houses, I've worked on lawns, I've, I've done every job that a kid growing up in the '70s ever do, but I was never unhappy to do it, and I always felt better. If I sweat off five pounds, ten pounds in the hot sun, I felt great. And, but-
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay, you and I are very different-
- SPSpeaker
[laughing]
- JRJoe Rogan
... because my bad jobs that I had motivated me to never want to do those jobs.
- SPSpeaker
Well, yeah, I don't want, I didn't want to do them forever. You're right about that. But there are some-
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, it motivated me to find a thing in life-
- SPSpeaker
Right
- JRJoe Rogan
... that I didn't have to just work as a laborer.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. And I noticed you don't really sweat too much in this current gig you've got. [chuckles]
- JRJoe Rogan
No, this is a pretty easy gig. But, I mean, I did a lot of those kind of jobs when I was younger.
- 1:59:37 – 2:22:20
Minnesota welfare fraud, refugee benefits, and the border: audits, incentives, and sanctuary cities
- JRJoe Rogan
Uh, one of the things I wanna talk to you about is, uh, what's going on in this country right now. Um, w- well, one of the big ones, one of the big things that's in the news is this whole Minnesota thing. Um, particularly, well, there a lot of things to cover, but particularly fraud, and that they're uncovering a lot of fraud, that it seems like not only was there a lot of fraud, but a lot of these people that were getting a lot of money from this fraud were donating to politicians. There's, uh-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah
- JRJoe Rogan
... I believe, $35 million by daycares was donated to Democrats in Minnesota last year. Is that an accurate, is that an accurate number? Let's find out.
- SPSpeaker
It's extraordinary.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's one of the best things for AI.
- SPSpeaker
No, it's extraordinary.
- JRJoe Rogan
AI will give you-
- SPSpeaker
I saw a good-
- JRJoe Rogan
... good information.
- SPSpeaker
I saw a good cartoon yesterday. It was an iceberg, and the top of the iceberg was Minnesota fraud, but the iceberg beneath the surface was California.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- SPSpeaker
And can you imagine, just be- ship size-
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, they're looking into California fraud now because of Minnesota fraud, and it's... Look, just the homeless thing alone, just the fact that California spent $24 billion on the homeless, can't account for-
- SPSpeaker
Right
- JRJoe Rogan
... where the money went, and the problem just got worse.
- SPSpeaker
Well, there, there's a couple things about the refugee thing. I don't think refugees should get welfare, and I have a bill to say they shouldn't get it. If you come to this country, and your church sponsors somebody to come to it, you support them. You sign up, you sponsor them, you support them. Uh, the taxpayers shouldn't support them. The other thing is, is we did a lot of the- a lot of these people came on special visas. They weren't part of the normal. It was part of this refugee program, but they got special visas. The Somalis came because there was perpetual war in their country and famine. Um-
- JRJoe Rogan
... No evidence Minnesota daycares gave millions-
- SPSpeaker
[laughing]
- JRJoe Rogan
-to political campaigns. What is this, Yahoo News?
- SPSpeaker
[laughing]
- JRJoe Rogan
You know, who's-- I don't believe that. I, I- oh- So I don't believe they haven't given any money. This is where I got it from. Okay, the figure appears to come from a viral social media post, widely shared video alleging that the daycares... So there's- here's a problem with this: if this fraud is as widespread as it is, you're gonna get a lot of people that are covering their tracks right now.
- SPSpeaker
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
And so one of the ways to cover their tracks is to debunk things and to post stories, and-
- SPSpeaker
The-
- JRJoe Rogan
I don't think we really know how much money is missing.
- SPSpeaker
I think part of the reform is we just shouldn't give out welfare.
- JRJoe Rogan
I think-
- SPSpeaker
And this doesn't mean we shouldn't help people.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- SPSpeaker
But if you're coming to this country, and you wanna experience the greatness of this country, and someone sponsors you, they should take care of you. But what happens is, most of these charities that work on bringing refugees in, they have a big heart, they're bringing them in, but the first paperwork they fill out is signing up for welfare.
Episode duration: 2:43:37
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