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Joe Rogan Experience #2465 - Michael Shellenberger

Michael Shellenberger is an author, journalist, and founder of Civilization Works. He is the CBR Chair of Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech at the University of Austin. His books include “Apocalypse Never" and “San Fransicko." https://www.public.news https://www.shellenberger.org Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan. Visible. Live in the know. https://www.visible.com/catfished Now This is Taxes. Visit https://turbotax.intuit.com

Joe RoganhostMichael Shellenbergerguest
Mar 10, 20262h 57mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 0:02

    Intro

    1. SP

      [upbeat music]

  2. 0:02 – 4:32

    Iran strike fallout: Trump’s decision-making and a new foreign-policy era

    1. SP

      Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.

    2. JR

      The Joe Rogan Experience.

    3. SP

      Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. [upbeat music]

    4. JR

      Good to see you, sir.

    5. MS

      Thanks for having me back.

    6. JR

      My pleasure.

    7. MS

      Nice.

    8. JR

      Always.

    9. MS

      Yeah.

    10. JR

      So much crazy shit going on in the world.

    11. MS

      Yeah.

    12. JR

      Even, and even before we scheduled this, like, uh, m- more crazy stuff has happened. The war broke out, all kinds of things.

    13. MS

      Yeah. How are you, uh, how are you feeling about the President Trump?

    14. JR

      That's an open-ended question.

    15. MS

      [laughs]

    16. JR

      Um-

    17. MS

      Do you text with him and talk to him?

    18. JR

      Occasionally. Yeah, occasionally he'll send me a text. I g- I get these, like, Truth Social posts of, uh, you know, things that he's saying. But this whole fucking Iran thing, man, like, did you see this coming?

    19. MS

      No. [sighs] Definitely. I don't know. I mean, who did? Uh, I mean, when did he even decide? You know, their national security strategy they put out in November basically just said, "We've degraded their capacity. It's a win." There was no sense in which there would be additional action. I think it ushers in a new paradigm completely. The older post-war era is just over. Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, articulated at the World Economic Forum probably better than the Trump administration did, saying very clearly that older rules-based order is gone. You saw AOC try to sort of articulate it, but she sort of fell apart at the Munich Security Conference in F- in February. So this is an administration that is... I mean, and I don't even think they're thinking. I wrote a piece, and I decided not to publish it because I was sort of like, decapitation doesn't really work for regime change. But it's not clear that they're really out for regime change, or they're just asserting power, shaking up things. I mean, some of it's art of the deal, changing the person that we're negotiating with. That's Venezuela and Iran. Is it really gonna change those regimes? I don't, I don't think most people don't think so, but that, I'm not sure that that's what they're going for. They're just going for an assertion of American power in service of American interests, and then what happens in Iran, what happens in Venezuela, I don't think they care that much about. At least they're not behaving as though they do.

    20. JR

      Well, the, none, neither thing made any sense to me. The Venezuela thing, uh, I mean, look, they wanted him out forever, and he d- he definitely stole the election to get in there in the first place, and he was a dictator, but at least that one was at least c- clean. They go in, kidnap him, get him out. This one's nuts, like, and what's happening in Tel Aviv. It's, it's hard to know what's real and what's not because there's a lot of, uh, fake video going around and a lot of weird posts on X, so it's, you know, when I do peek in, it's hard to know, and you have to listen to Grok, and then G- Grok's d- dismantling a lot of the, uh, fake videos.

    21. MS

      Mm-hmm. What, what, what are the fake videos that you're thinking of in Tel Aviv?

    22. JR

      There's just, like, fake, fake videos of, you know, a, like, an insane amount of bombs dropping down on the city.

    23. MS

      Mm.

    24. JR

      But it seems like there's a massive amount of destruction in Tel Aviv.

    25. MS

      Yeah, I haven't checked in lately, but I'm assuming. Was that just today or?

    26. JR

      Yesterday.

    27. MS

      Yeah.

    28. JR

      Yeah.

    29. MS

      Um-

    30. JR

      Yeah

  3. 4:32 – 11:06

    What the U.S. is trying to achieve in Iran (and why it feels incoherent)

    1. JR

      Which just doesn't make any sense to me, unless we're acting on someone else's interests, like particularly Israel's interests. It does- just didn't make any sense to me. Like, if they had supposedly dismantled their chances of making the nuclear bomb, whether or not that's true or... I mean, it's so hard to know.

    2. MS

      He was unsatisfied, and just like, he was like, "I'm not getting anywhere in these [chuckles] negotiations, and I'm gonna replace the person I'm negotiating with." It's, it's just, you know, sh- turn over the table, like, change things up. You're not getting anywhere. And you could crit- you could say he was too impatient. He sh- I mean, their view was the Democrats were too patient with Iran. They kept trying with Iran. Iran, they weren't giving them what they wanted. I'm not defending it. I'm just saying th- I think that's what explains it. They, they haven't done a very good job explaining it because I think that it just sounds, to some extent, like what it is, which is that it's, they're acting without... They're sort of like, "Well, does it result in regime change in Iran? We don't know. They might say that we want that or whatever," but that's not ultimately... They're not, they're not acting on the basis of achieving regime change.

    3. JR

      Which just seems so insane based on what he ran on. I mean, this is why a lot of people feel betrayed, right? He ran on no more wars, end these stupid, senseless wars, and then we have one that we can't even really clearly define why we did it.

    4. MS

      Well, but he said he's against endless wars.

    5. JR

      Well, they're all-

    6. MS

      Running against endless wars

    7. JR

      ... listen, man. They're all endless.

    8. MS

      Well, if we ever-

    9. JR

      Do, did you ever hear Rumsfeld talk about Iraq when it first happened?

    10. MS

      Tell me.

    11. JR

      They w- they were talking about, like, six weeks. Six weeks.

    12. MS

      Oh, yeah.

    13. JR

      Six weeks.

    14. MS

      Yeah, but they put, uh, that was ground force, and I know that they've not ruled that out. For me, that would be-

    15. JR

      They have?

    16. MS

      Um, they have not.

    17. JR

      Oh, okay. Got it.

    18. MS

      My understanding is that they have not. Yeah.

    19. JR

      I thought you said in now.

    20. MS

      Yeah.

    21. JR

      Have now.

    22. MS

      No. Um, but they don't seem eager to go into... I mean, my... I, I criticize the Venezuela, uh, action because I sort of was like, "How are you possibly gonna run Venezuela?" And then I think a little bit more time passed and I was like, "Oh, they're not, they're not gonna try to run Venezuela. Like, that's not what this is." Um, they wanted to get-

    23. JR

      No, they just wanted to take over the oil.

    24. MS

      Yeah, and, and even there, I mean, the oil, it's not significant at any global level. I don't... It's hard... I don't even think it's really about the oil. I don't think it's about the oil. I don't think it's about the oil in Iran either.

    25. JR

      Well, the oil reserves are significant. It's just the, the type of oil and how to extract it is extremely difficult.

    26. MS

      Oh, it's the worst, Joe. It's in the am- Like, the big, uh, big abundant reserves are in the Amazon, so you're talking about... What a nightmare. It's super far away. It's terrible. You had a guerrilla conflict. If you had a guerrilla conflict break out around those oil facilities, I mean, it's already more expensive 'cause you have to heat up that particular type of... It's, you know, it's really heavy oils. To heat it up to get it out of the ground, then you have to heat it to transport. It's a total nightmare. I just... I mean, and as a conservationist, I would say [laughs] that would be the last place I'd want to see us getting oil from. There's a lot of other places that have, have oil. We shouldn't be going into the Amazon.

    27. JR

      So what, if anything, makes sense to you about this attack in Iran?

    28. MS

      I don't know that it... I'm, I'm not, I'm not sure what I think of it. I mean, I don't, I don't like it. I don't like... I mean, the whole older system was that you had this international... US Security Council would have to agree. The Congress would have to agree. That's all gone now. I mean, it's just a totally different... This guy is just acting. You know, he says he's not getting where they want to get in the negotiations with the Iranians, so he says, "We have some leverage over you, and we're gonna use it." Similarly-

    29. JR

      But clearly Israel wanted this for a long time.

    30. MS

      Israel has its own motivations, I think.

  4. 11:06 – 20:17

    Terror risks at home and the border: escalation meets immigration vulnerabilities

    1. JR

      Did you, um, read the thing today that came out that they're, they're discussing some sort of elite transmission that seems to be, uh, an activation of terror cells?

    2. MS

      Iranians have?

    3. JR

      Yeah.

    4. MS

      I'm not s- no, but I'm not surprised.

    5. JR

      Right.

    6. MS

      Sounds bad. [laughs]

    7. JR

      Yeah.

    8. MS

      That's one of the things that obviously... That was the first thing I thought of was like, "Oh, great, are we gonna get a bunch of Iranian suicide bombers in the United States now?" It's obviously-

    9. JR

      Well, I don't know if it's gonna be suicide bombers, but I would imagine it would be something a little bit more destructive than that.

    10. MS

      Could be. Um, I don't know what they can get in. I mean, there's... Sean Ryan's been having folks on that say that-

    11. JR

      Yeah

    12. MS

      ... people are getting in with, with heavy artillery. I just don't know the status of it. Um-

    13. JR

      Well, the real problem is-

    14. MS

      They can do a lo-

    15. JR

      ... for four years, the border was wide open.

    16. MS

      Oh, yeah.

    17. JR

      And definitely some people from the Middle East got through, and we have no idea, like, what is wai- I mean, I mean, I'm sure there's some intelligence agencies that have an understanding of what the threat is.

    18. MS

      I hope so. I mean, I think we see that these terrorists are able to do an incredible amount of damage with pretty simple rifles. You know, and sometimes, uh, was it the French, uh, the, the club, the, um, that particular terrorist action, there were other people that were using bombs that, like, only killed one or two people, but the guys with the machine guns were able to gun down, like, dozens of people. So certainly it's ter- that's scary. I think w- none of us want-- I think that's where a lot of Americans, when it happened, the reason so many people were against it, I believe a majority is against it, is because you're like, "Great, what are we..." You know, f-first of all, is it gonna be another endless war? And second of all, are we gonna get a bunch of terrorist, um, actions here? I think if we did, I don't think support for the war goes up. I think it goes down.

    19. JR

      Oh, for sure. Yeah. I mean, it's just such a fuck... It, it mean, the whole, the whole situation internationally has been so tense already with what's going on in Gaza, with what's going on in Ukraine. It's like, and to add this to the pile, it's like... I mean, it, it genuinely feels like there's a real possibility that we might be entering World War III.

    20. MS

      How would that... What would that look like?

    21. JR

      Psh, I don't know. I, well, I never expected Iran to start attacking. You know, they, they launched bombs into UAE, Dubai. I mean, where else? There's gonna be a couple other places.

    22. MS

      I think they expected that, though, right?

    23. JR

      Really?

    24. MS

      I mean, it makes Iran look... Iran looks pretty isolated. I mean, I will say, you know, I was totally, obviously, [chuckles] maybe not obviously, but very much on the left and was opposed to all the stuff Reagan was doing. I remember-

    25. JR

      Mm-hmm

    26. MS

      ... even, even in the '80s. But it's like he really did... I'm not gonna say he was the maj- the only reason. There was obviously a bunch of weakening within. But I mean, he really did push back against communism. He challenged the entire foreign policy establishment on the basic view of just, um, you know, of just, of just kind of keeping it, you know, keeping the, keeping the communists where they were. And instead, Reagan really pushed back against it and said, "There's gotta be regime change." It was sort of almost at a moral... Certainly, there was a defense buildup, but a moral argument, and I think it had a big impact, um, and to bring down communism. So I'm... You know, the Iranian, it's, it's... I'm, I'm, obviously have very mixed feelings about it. The Iranian regime is just so evil and so awful that, you know, you're, you're, you're... Every time you see videos of people taking these courageous actions, you're like, "Somebody bring that regime down." On the other hand, that country is pretty... The fo- the people of that country are pretty radical, and the Shah in 1979, I just spent last night watching all the old, old "60 Minutes" from the '70s. They're amazing. But the, the Shah was really modernizing the country. There was a lot of wealth coming in. There was a lot of more inequality. There was also a lot more state repression, uh, from his intelligence services. Uh, but the country was, you know, full of radical Muslims who wanted, you know, that when all that instability, they wanted to revert back to, you know, a radical Islamicist regime, and that's still... Now, I've seen other estimates that say that, you know, the current regime is incredibly unpopular in Iran, but, you know, how that works out, it's really hard to say. But there is something... I, I caution my own... I, I talk back to my own anti-interventionist instincts when I think about Reagan just being like, "You know, we're not gonna do just containment strategy anymore. We're actually gonna talk back to communism because people deserve to be free." And, uh, now is everything better for... You know, is everything fine in Russia? Maybe not, but I mean, communism was just awful, you know, just a totally soul-killing, you know, crushing, you know, a giant lie. I mean, it's awful totalitarianism. So I think we have to kinda keep that in mind, and especially when you're in a moment of just such incredible chaos like we're in now. I tell my students, I'm like, "You get to live through one of the most interesting moments in history, certainly in the last 80 years," because the entire paradigm where the United States had these allies, and everything's gonna go through the Security Council, and we're gonna try to make it through the UN, and there's gotta get agreements and all this stuff, that's just gone. I mean, it's just, it's gone to the part where they don't even... Where you're kinda like, "How are you... What's gonna happen inside Iran?" They're like, "That's not our concern. We hope that there's a, an overthrow of the government, but they're, they're not, we're not, like, gonna necessarily commit to that."

    27. JR

      Well, they're also calling on the people to rise up, which is... You know, I mean, look, look at what they did with the protesters. I mean, they killed thousands of people.

    28. MS

      And look at Iran and Venezuela, they don't have internal... The, the opposition is not united. There's not a united opposition with a united figure. I mean, remember, it was so interesting watching '79 when these protests against the Shah were going on. They're, the, the left and the Islamicists made an alliance in Iran, something I'm very... It's something really interesting topic I st- only starting to explore right now, but they made an alliance. So they'd be holding up Ayat- you know, they'd be holding up the Ayatollah Khomeini pictures in the street. Like, they had their guy. And the left was like, "Look, we're just gonna, you know, go with this guy." I think he was making promises to the left around allowing, you know, more, you know, liberalism, and then they came in and just consolidated into this really hard-line Islamicist regime. But they had a guy. We don't have... They don't... You know, we don't have a guy in, in Venezuela. We don't have a guy in Iran. I don't know if there's anybody in Cuba really. You know, the... In the older regime under, like, the Biden, the open society people, the open society establishment, they had somebody for Venezuela, this Machado woman. But Trump gets up there, and he just goes, "Yeah, she doesn't have enough support, so she's not with us. Gone." You know? [chuckles] Like, they recognize that they don't have... There's nobody with a opposition, you know, street cred that can come into power, so I think they... And they know that. They're not, like, unaware of that. So I think some of the, like, "Oh, they should rise up," and whatever, it's a little half-hearted. I don't know that they believe that that's gonna happen. They're certainly not... They don't seem to be offering them, you know, material support.

    29. JR

      Right. So it's just a symbolic gesture to talk about it.

    30. MS

      Sounds like it. And I mean, I, in this kind of the, this beautiful collapse of communism, which occurred so peacefully with the Berlin Wall and the guard, eventually just sort of like it's just in the vibes.

  5. 20:17 – 24:07

    AI and autonomous weapons: Big Tech, DoD partnerships, and a nationalist industrial strategy

    1. JR

      We're also in a realm where AI is going to be powering autonomous weapons, if not already.

    2. MS

      I mean, that, I mean, that is going on. That is so interesting, this thing with Anthropic and the DoD and what's happening there. That is really interesting.

    3. JR

      So initially Anthropic was hesitant to allow them to use autonomous weapons, right?

    4. MS

      I don't know the status of it, but you saw the OpenAI, the head of OpenAI Autonomous, uh, it was au- she was the head of autonomous weapons, I think. I'm not... Don't, don't get me exactly right. But she just quit like a couple of days ago. It was on X, and it was just like a huge story. So you have a bunch of... You have a s- you have, you have a, a rift in between... Now I'm, now I think, um, you know, Sam and Elon are both on board and wanna keep working with the DoD, but it looks like Anthropic broke and, you know, and then it, and then Hegseth was like, "Well, but then we're gonna punish you for this." [chuckles] Uh, that's very consistent with a kinda nationalist vision, which is that, which the Trump administration has, which is that your security strategy, your economic strategy, your border strategy, it's all a sing- your industrial strategy, it's all a single thing. Your trade strategy, it's all a single thing. And I think for Trump it's just you're either asserting power and dema- and using your leverage and demanding more, or you're engaged in managed decline. You're just giving up, you know? And I, part of me, I'm of mixed minds on it because on the one hand, I'm with the kind of... I kinda go, "Let's invest at home. We have all the, you know, we have skid row to clean up. You know, uh, we should be focused on that, not on trying to do regime change or bombing other countries or creating other problems." On the other hand, I think there's something right about defending the West. I mean, defending Western civilization, you know? Uh, defending our s- our institutions, our norms, our liberal values, and, and nobody's done that. And we just had a guy in power that was, that opened our borders, that kinda gave a blank check to Ukraine. It seems like at a minimum with Trump you have somebody that is taking responsibility in ways where Biden would be like, "Well, we're gonna do what the, you know, we're gonna work with our allies," and it was just all kind of... Like, it was like, it was all kinda gonna be decided in this, in this, you know, what Curtis Yarvin famously calls the cathedral. You know, just the, the, the single thing of the media and the think tanks and the academics and, and Trump was like, "It's not working, and the working class, uh, of this country elected me to, to show strength and to demand a better return on our investment in terms of protecting our allies for our people." So that part of it I think is really overdue and really necessary, an assertion of why the West is special, why we need to defend the West. Um, is bombing Iran and replacing the, you know, the Khomeini with his son is... Mashad, you know, is what's happening in Venezuela, is that the right approach to that? I don't know. But I think we were... The system was, was failing. I mean, the open society system, which is supposed to be this liberal, you know, uh, you know, system of tolerance, it became intolerant. It became totalitarian. It created a censorship-industrial complex. They, they weaponized the intelligence communities. We, you know, started getting ourselves into conflicts that we... that was not clear why we were in them, including Venezuel- I mean, sorry, including, um, Ukraine. I mean, with Ukraine it's like that war only continues because we continue to, to arm it. Like, if we stopped, if we just were like, "Let's just have the... Just, you know, just cut a deal wherever the border is right now," and you're just like, "That's where it's gonna stop," then you can... I mean, I don't know. I'm not sure what's preventing that from Trump. I think he's annoyed with Putin, but yeah, I mean, my view is, like, I don't see an interest in that war, um, continuing. I don't know how it's in the interest of the working, of working-class Americans or Americans, and I have the same questions about Iran and Venezuela and Cuba, but I think that is a totally different paradigm than the one that we had from 1945 to 2024.

  6. 24:07 – 30:06

    Voting rules, IDs, and mail-in ballots: narratives vs. incentives

    1. JR

      But the, the idea of tolerance for, you know, with the last administration, that seems just to be a narrative. I, it, it seemed to be a political strategy of keeping the borders open to in- in- increase populations in blue states, raise the census, get more congressional seats, and then a path to citizenship where you'd have permanent voters. That's what it seems like. And then there's also a ton of Medicaid fraud that's wrapped up in that that we're now seeing.

    2. MS

      Yeah, I think that's part of it. I mean, there were-- The Times did a piece on why Biden left the borders open, and it was a-

    3. JR

      What was their...

    4. MS

      It was a funny piece. Like, there was this... It, it was... You know, part of it, he's so out of it, right? Like, there were just... It was not clear, like, there wasn't clear there was, like, a meeting where he was like, "Yeah, we're gonna just do this thing." They kind of concluded that, uh, I think Cecilia Muñoz, who's one of the, um, more moderate advocates and was in the Obama administration, I think she said something like, "Biden just wanted to give the left... just felt like he wanted to give the left what they wanted," and that's what, you know, the Soros think tanks and the, you know, the prog- the very progressive immigration groups have been ad- you know, have been advocating. He did the same thing on climate, so it makes sense. I know Elon talks a lot about how, oh, it's about importing voters and whatnot. Maybe, um, but it's not even clear that that's a good- that's a strategy that's gonna work. You know-

    5. JR

      Why not?

    6. MS

      Well, because first of all, we don't know that Latinos... Like, why are like... Why do we assume Latinos are all gonna, you know, vote for Democrats?

    7. JR

      Well, if you've got them all on Medicaid and Social Security.

    8. MS

      The numbers there are... It's, it's actually more compli- Europe is definitely the case that you have higher rates of crime and higher rates of social services among migrants. Here are y- Latino migrants traditionally, you know, be, you know, really thrive. You know, they do much better than, than the mostly Muslim immigrants in Europe. Um, so I, you know, I'm skept- I mean, the other thing I... The other statistic that I learned, uh, from David Shore, who's, like, the, one of the top Democrat pollsters, when he was talking to Ezra Klein after the 2024 elections, he was like, "If all eligible voters had voted, Trump would've won by three percentage points rather than 1.5." So it's also... So I always think it's kind of funny 'cause the Republicans are always, like, trying to make it harder for people to vote, but under that calculation anyway, and maybe it's just Trump, maybe other Republicans won't go do it-

    9. JR

      When you say harder for people to vote, y- what do you mean? You mean mail-in voting?

    10. MS

      Just... Yeah, just the whole effort to-

    11. JR

      Yeah, but that's... But the problem-

    12. MS

      Yeah

    13. JR

      ... is mail-in voting has always been a f- vector for fraud.

    14. MS

      Uh, that's... It may be. I don't know how much of it there is. Um, I've seen different things on it.

    15. JR

      That, that goes back, like, decades, people-

    16. MS

      Yeah

    17. JR

      ... have been talking about mail-in voting just being too open to fraud.

    18. MS

      Well, but then the, but then... Maybe, but then the question is, does it really benefit [laughs] ... I mean, in other words, if David Shore is right, if everybody who could vote had voted, Trump would've won, like, basically by twice the margin.

    19. JR

      Yeah. Well, I don't know if that's necessarily true, but when I see laws like what California has where you're not allowed to show ID, there's only... I mean, I've tried, tried to find some sort of charitable way where that would make sense other than you wanna open the door for fraud. There's nothing.

    20. MS

      Well, no.

    21. JR

      This, this narrative that they say, "Oh, poor people don't have, like..." You see Kamala Harris [laughs] . They don't-

    22. MS

      People believe that dude

    23. JR

      ... they don't have a Xerox machine, like-

    24. MS

      No, but Dem- You ever see the thing, I think it was a guy, I don't know if he did it for free press, a guy was going around interviewing, um... Well, first he interviewed liberals at, like, I think UC Berkeley, and he was like, you know, "Do you think that you should have to have an ID to vote?" And they were like, "No, because Black people don't have IDs," and like-

    25. JR

      That's just because-

    26. MS

      And then he goes-

    27. JR

      ... they're hearing that on NPR.

    28. MS

      No, no, I know. Of course, but they believe that.

    29. JR

      Yeah.

    30. MS

      I mean, but then, uh, the interviewers that saw that, it's an incredible video 'cause then he goes to, like... I think he goes to Harlem or he goes to, like, a Black neighborhood in New York, and he was just ax- asking Black people, he's like, "Do you have an ID on you?" And it was like everybody was like, "Yeah. Like, what's the matter with you?"

  7. 30:06 – 34:57

    ICE raids and Minneapolis: escalation, optics, and organized protest dynamics

    1. MS

      Yeah, and, and Americans were on board with closing the borders, and then when it came time to actually asking all the, getting those folks to leave that came in, the, all [laughs] the support disappeared, right? I mean-

    2. JR

      Well, it's not asking them to leave. It's showing up at Home Depot and just rounding people up and raiding places and going to restaurants and pulling people out of their houses and... I think people got very uncomfortable with the idea of militarized police wearing masks on the street.

    3. MS

      Yeah.

    4. JR

      And then when you find out that these guys have only been trained for seven weeks-

    5. MS

      Yeah

    6. JR

      ... and there's, they get a, a $50,000 signing bonus, and then you find out that a giant percentage of them are Latino, which is kind of crazy. You know, like the two guys who shot that guy in Minnesota, they're both Latino

    7. MS

      And the, yeah, I mean, that's what you get when you have completely untrained, unprepared people-

    8. JR

      Well, that whole-

    9. MS

      ... disasters like that

    10. JR

      ... the whole Minnesota thing with Alex Peretti is a c- complete clusterfuck. I still not have, have not seen verification of whether or not the, the, the, the s- the narrative that makes sense is true, but the narrative that makes sense was that there was an accidental discharge of his gun as they were pulling it away from him.

    11. MS

      Mm.

    12. JR

      And then that led to them thinking that maybe he still had the gun on him, 'cause you're in the chaos of arresting someone.

    13. MS

      Right.

    14. JR

      Someone says he has a gun, a gun goes off, and then they shoot the guy.

    15. MS

      Yeah.

    16. JR

      Um-

    17. MS

      I bet when you go... I bet when they do the proper evaluation of it, they're gonna find multiple mistakes-

    18. JR

      I'm sure

    19. MS

      ... by the law enforcement in that situation.

    20. JR

      Um, well, that, and then there was the thing with the woman who got shot, where you have a guy who had almost been run over just a couple of weeks before-

    21. MS

      Oh

    22. JR

      ... had been dragged in his car. The guy who shot her-

    23. MS

      Oh

    24. JR

      ... had been dragged by another vehicle.

    25. MS

      Oh, I didn't see that. That's fascinating.

    26. JR

      I think he got dragged, like, 300 feet too.

    27. MS

      Oh.

    28. JR

      Something crazy.

    29. MS

      Oh.

    30. JR

      So when a car is coming at him, you could imagine this guy's got some PTSD from that, and-

  8. 34:57 – 45:13

    The SIG P320 controversy and ‘two things can be true’ about accountability

    1. JR

      Do you know the story about the gun that he was carrying?

    2. MS

      No.

    3. JR

      Okay. So he's carrying a gun called a SIG P320, which is notorious for accidental discharges.

    4. MS

      Mm.

    5. JR

      Not, not meaning... There's lawsuits all over the place. There's videos of cops in precincts bending over to pick something up, and the gun goes off in his holster. There's a, a ton of these. So I don't know if this is completely accurate, because this is obviously the fog of chaos of these type of altercations and situations, but there's a video that many people have reviewed, and it's their conclusion that if you watch the video, when one of the ICE officers removes his gun, even though he does not have his finger on the trigger, has his hand on the gun and his fingers on the slide, as he's moving off, it appears the gun goes off. Now, they've zoomed in on it and shown that it does look like the gun's going off, and it does correspond with the sound of a gunshot.

    6. MS

      Okay.

    7. JR

      It's, it's just hard to know.

    8. MS

      There is a sound. You hear a gunshot in the video?

    9. JR

      Yes, but I don't know if it's legitimate. It's hard to know.

    10. MS

      Yeah.

    11. JR

      But if, but if it was any other gun, like say if it was a Glock, I would say that doesn't make any sense. His finger's not on the trigger. It's not gonna go off. But that gun is notorious for going off. There's a guy online that he, he shows a video where he takes the gun, and he manipulates the slide, and it goes off.

    12. MS

      Oh, yeah.

    13. JR

      And, and it goes off without nothing touching the trigger. No one, no one's pulling on it. It's just if you have... The other problem is people alter guns, okay? So the issue with the SIG was they f- they had, I, I believe up to 2017, they had a lighter trigger, and this lighter trigger, if the gun was dropped or if something happened to it, it was going off. And they determined it's-The gun does not have an internal safety like some other guns do.

    14. MS

      Mm.

    15. JR

      It's... I, I'm not an expert, so I don't know exactly what the trigger mechanism is, but my understanding is that the trigger mechanism is different than their other guns. Like they have another gun that's notoriously reliable, it's a SIG P365. You could drop that gun, it's not gonna go off.

    16. MS

      Mm.

    17. JR

      It's not known for accidental discharge. But the 320 is known, and there's tons of videos of people demonstrating this online. There's a video where they're on a range and a gun goes off in a guy's holster, and the range instructor says, "What the fuck just happened?" And this guy, he, he points to this g- you know, the, the gun that went off, and he said, "Is that a SIG?" And he goes, "Yeah." He goes, "Get that fucking thing off the range." So it's, it's that notorious.

    18. MS

      Right.

    19. JR

      This one particular model, and it just happened to be the one particular model that Alex Preddy was carrying, which is fucking crazy. [slams]

    20. MS

      Well, his behavior was really reckless. I, I... and it's really hard for people to hold two ideas in their mind at the same time. Like ICE messed that up-

    21. JR

      Right

    22. MS

      ... I think clearly. And Alex Preddy, I mean, we see the earlier video, you know, where he kicks out the taillight of the ICE vehicle.

    23. JR

      Right.

    24. MS

      And he's... I mean, he's got a gun in the waistband of his, of his jacket.

    25. JR

      Mm.

    26. MS

      It's hidden by the jacket. He gets into this altercation with the police. I mean, I had to... But when I posted about it, and I didn't say this, but one of... a lot of the responses were suicide by cop. People were like, "Suicide by cop." I mean, and I'm not making that claim, but I mean, it... his behavior was... I mean, the, the recklessness of the gun choice mirrors the recklessness of his behavior in those instances. And I heard people being like, "Oh, well, he... you know, he was just defending that poor woman." There was a police officer engaged in an arrest of a person, and Alex Preddy intervened in that. I mean, I think you can mess around about it, but-

    27. JR

      Well, it was, it was a little... I don't know if it was an arrest. The police officer shoved this woman.

    28. MS

      Yeah, he put... He was in an altercation with somebody.

    29. JR

      Yes.

    30. MS

      You don't go... People... In other words, people go, "Oh, you gotta put yourself in the..." What do you think you're... Like who do... what do you think is going on here? Like-

  9. 45:13 – 1:08:43

    Homelessness as an industry: incentives, missing accountability, and ‘San Fransicko’

    1. JR

      Well, that's ... The homeless thing is nuts because the homeless thing is just a scam, and we know that basically because of California. Like, California, what, what's happened with the whole homeless budget is so insane in that they vetoed audits of these budgets. There's been $24 billion-

    2. MS

      Oh, yeah

    3. JR

      ... spent. No one knows where it went. There's no accountability. And then the homeless situation increases.

    4. MS

      Well, that's why. I mean, remember, it's like-

    5. JR

      Right

    6. MS

      ... I, it's funny, like I, my students just did a pap- We have something ... We've been working on it too, like the Canadian euthanasia program.

    7. JR

      Yeah.

    8. MS

      And it's like every year the numbers just keep going up and up, and it remind me of when you interview homeless, you know, service providers in San Francisco, they'll be like, "Yeah, no, we're doing an amazing job. Every year we serve more and more [laughs] people." It's like, right, you have in a, you have all the, you have the wrong incentives. You're trying to ... You're, you have an incentive to serve to ... You have incentive to create homelessness, and that's what they've done.

    9. JR

      Well, if you get more money if you have more homeless, your incentive is-

    10. MS

      Yes

    11. JR

      ... now not to eliminate homelessness because that's your job.

    12. MS

      Right.

    13. JR

      I mean-

    14. MS

      That's how you make all your money

    15. JR

      ... when I first was alerted to that I, I was like, "I can't believe this is real." Like, when you find out the amount of money that's involved in homelessness, like that they spent $24 billion. You say, "Okay, where did that go? Where ..." And then there's no accountability? Okay. There's no fraud? You're saying there's no fraud? Zero?

    16. MS

      Well, I wish there was fraud. I mean, somebody was sort of like, can we expose ... You know, like Nick Shirley exposed the daycare's not doing anything in Mine- like Minnesota. I was like, I wish the homeless service providers weren't doing anything. [laughs] They were ho- if they were stealing the money, then there'd be a lot less homelessness.

    17. JR

      Well, what do you ... So you think they're actually s- using the money to create-

    18. MS

      Oh, yeah

    19. JR

      ... homelessness?

    20. MS

      Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, think about like, so San Francisco was like a, between 100 and $120,000 a year per homeless person. Think San Fr- I think LA at a bargain of something more like 25,000. That's, that's just San Francisco. That doesn't count the 24, uh, billion that California gave. So that money's going to, you know, single-resident occupancy hotel owners. It's going to nonprofit service providers who are just bringing food and, you know, alcohol and drug paraphernalia to make it easier for people to do drugs, and overdose, and live in tents on the street. That's ... You're just ... It, it's very expensive to kill that many people that way. That's what San Francisco has proven.

    21. JR

      Right, but it's really about the amount of people where that's their industry.

    22. MS

      Yeah.

    23. JR

      Like, that it, there is an industry in taking care of the homeless situation and addressing the homeless situation. And, you know, Kolyan Noir, when he was on the podcast, he was explaining to me that he went to San Francisco, and he was like, "Why is it so bad up here? Do they need money?" He's like, "No, no, no." This guy, who was a lawyer, was explaining it to him. He, he's a lawyer as well. Was explaining it to him like, "No, no, these people are getting money to deal with the homeless situation, and some of them are making quarter billion dollars a year and, and more," which is just nuts. And then it's not getting better, it's only getting worse, and yet they ste- they still keep getting that money. So it's like there's zero incentive to make it better. There's an, only an incentive to make it worse. And then when you have no accountability, so there's no auditing of the money, $24 billion is a lot of fucking money. So where ... Who's getting greased up? Where's that money going?

    24. MS

      Mostly it's into the t- it's into the temporary, what they call, they call it permanent ... It's a propaganda word. Propagan- It's, uh, permanent supportive housing. It's neither permanent nor supportive. It's often warehousing addicts where they die. I mean, we know that they die at very high levels in those little, it's those little crummy, you know, single-resident occupancy rooms.

    25. JR

      Yeah.

    26. MS

      They bought a lot of motels that were, you know, low in- low income, you know, low, you know, cheap motels, converting them, having s- but they don't really ... There's no ... I mean, all that money should've gone into a centralized addiction and psychiatric care system. You know, Cal Psych is what it should've been, and instead it's just, um, it's just kind of ... Yeah, it's justBasically incentivizing people to live on the streets and use hard drugs and die in overdose.

    27. JR

      Well, it's just so crazy. I mean, if you wanted to make it better, you'd incentivize them and pay them based on the amount of people that are no longer homeless.

    28. MS

      Right. But they don't do that.

    29. JR

      But then the problem with that is, well, you're eventually gonna fix it all, and then your business is gonna go away.

    30. MS

      Right. And that's all happening... I think it's, I think it's all happening unconsciously. Like there's no room... There's no like, you know, secret room where they're rubbing their hands and being like, "Oh, we're gonna make a lot of money this way." It's just, um, you know, when you interview them, it's a very basic view. You know, it's just these people are victims. They're victims of white supremacy and capitalism, and, and to victims, everything should be given and nothing required.

  10. 1:08:43 – 1:17:32

    Is California salvageable? Governance, fires, and the politics of decline

    1. MS

      I mean, things that can't go on don't. [laughs] So I mean, you could see it, right? I mean, Matt... If, say, Matt Mahan or somebody more moderate gets in to be governor, Rick Caruso runs for LA mayor again. I mean, honestly, like, if somebody can't defeat Karen Bass after she let Los Angeles burn away, which is now, we now know for a fact was just totally preventable, absolutely preventable. I was saying at the time, but now we know. Sh- they tried to rewrite the report, but it's clear it was totally preventable.

    2. JR

      How'd they try to rewrite the r- report?

    3. MS

      Well, the report, you know, said, "Here's all the things that the fire department should've done that didn't happen." And ultimately, you know, the mayor is the one that chooses the fire chief and fires the, the fire chief. And the mayor was war- they were warned, and she goes to, flies to Ghana for this little junket, presidential inauguration, palling around when she should've been in LA with a com- at a command, uh, headquarters, and, you know... And if she wasn't, then Gavin should've been. You know, Schwarzenegger, towards the end, end of his administration, they would just mobilize planes full of water, you know, huge, these, those huge cargo planes full of water, before there were fires just to start to circulate, just to get ready to put stuff out. This idea that L- there was this idea promoted that it was inevitable that the fires, that, oh, eventually it's just... No. Like, it's absurd. Like, of course you can protect it with adequate fire... People, "Oh, the pipes weren't big enough." No. Like, maintain your reservoirs. C- have water in them. Even the one that it was, like, was, like, not repaired yet, which should've been repaired, they could've kept, uh, they could've air gapped the pipes so that it didn't contaminate the water supply, but left it for firefighting. They didn't do that. They didn't station the engines where they needed to station them. Nobody was on... You know, it's like they're not taking responsibility. Like, they-

    4. JR

      Right

    5. MS

      ... they weren't taking responsibility for it. So y- anyway, to the point being, get a new governor, you get a better mayor of LA. You've got a guy in San Francisco now who I think has, still has a lot of potential. [laughs] I mean, this latest video, uh, you know, showing the chaos there. But you, with that, I think-

    6. JR

      Well, that's not-

    7. MS

      ... you could fix things

    8. JR

      ... him, though.

    9. MS

      Yeah, it's not his fault.

    10. JR

      His, his, you know, the criticism of him is he walked away too casually.

    11. MS

      Yeah. [laughs]

    12. JR

      That's it.

    13. MS

      Yeah, no big deal.

    14. JR

      Yeah.

    15. MS

      Yeah, so I mean, I think there is a, there is a way for California to come out, and my view is, like, look, you've got... The, it's, it's on the tech billionaires. They, they, you know, and I know some of them have left, and obviously they don't need... But the, uh, the, there's still a lot of billionaire rich guys in California that are perfectly capable of financing an alternative effort. The vote... You know, remember, 75% of San Francisco voters want to arrest people using fentanyl in public. They, they want to arrest them. Okay, that sounds so, that's so taboo and progressive. That's 75% of San Francisco voters. So the voters are not, they're not the radical left. Um, some ways they're radicalized in their hatred of Trump and the Trump derangement syndrome, but I mean, everyone like Caruso and Mahan and anybody else there will all just be able to say they hate Trump like everybody else. But-

    16. JR

      Well, I think they've seen the consequences of these policies.

    17. MS

      Oh, yeah. There's, people are s- people are really... There's, it's not like anything has changed that significantly. They will... In fact, when I interview people in San Francisco, they're a little reluctant to admit that it's gotten better because I think they don't want to take any pressure off the politicians.

    18. JR

      Mm.

    19. MS

      So I mean, I do think it's, it's rescuable. Um, but it's hard.

    20. JR

      When you say it's gotten better, like, how so?

    21. MS

      Mostly the encampments are being broken up. Now you see a little... You see more of that sort of thing that we just saw in the video where there's, like, I call them, like, a little more of, like, a nest. You know, there's just a little homeless-

    22. JR

      So it's not an entire block

    23. MS

      ... big encampments. Like, yeah, the whole block.

    24. JR

      Not like Skid Row.

    25. MS

      That's in Oakland.

    26. JR

      Yeah.

    27. MS

      That's in Skid Row.

    28. JR

      Oh, Oakland's nuts.

    29. MS

      Oakland is... Oakland might not be savable. Um, they had a chance to save themselves, and they ended up voting for the wrong person for mayor, and it's just as bad as ever. So but I think s- if you get San Francisco, LA, and a new governor in place, uh, I think you've got the makings to save it. But-

    30. JR

      Have you ever seen this video? This guy does this description of what's going on in Oakland, and then drives across the county line into the next place, and it's immediately all done, and you just see what the difference between two different forms of government and how it works.

  11. 1:17:32 – 1:33:13

    UAP disclosure expectations: what ‘release the files’ should actually mean

    1. MS

      Okay.

    2. JR

      Shall we? So what do you think about all this, uh, UAP talk? It's one thing that Trump has said that he's gonna release whatever files that they might have on UAPs, um, alien, terrestrial beings, all this jazz. Uh, I talked to Jesse Michaels about it. He is highly skeptical, and he said the people that are involved are all old guard and, you know, they're just, it's just gonna be a bunch of horseshit.

    3. MS

      Maybe. I mean, just first of all, look, I mean, I think whatever you think about the phenomenon, this is amazing. I mean, the president just said he's gonna release all these things. So I mean, after decades of saying, "We're not interested in this. We're not c- we're not following this. Uh, we're shutting down Blue Book. You know, there's nothing there." Uh, they're like, he's s- he's saying... So I mean, that right there is, is I think amazing. And I thought the whole thing was amazing. Like, Obama comes out and he goes, "Well, there's definitely aliens. Oh, but they're not under Area 51." Unless they're hiding it from presidents, which is like a well-established conspiracy theory, so to have Obama-

    4. JR

      Right

    5. MS

      ... even say that. And then Trump comes up and he goes, he goes, "Obama revealed classified information," with a little grin on his face 'cause he's, a little r- rivalry with Obama. "I might help him out by declassifying it." And then a few hours later, he did. I mean, I... What can't you like about that? I mean, I think that-

    6. JR

      Well, uh, it's theater. That's what you can't like about it.

    7. MS

      It's, it's theater, but I mean, we just had-

    8. JR

      Until something really-

    9. MS

      Yeah

    10. JR

      ... comes out, this is just another distraction-

    11. MS

      Oh

    12. JR

      ... to keep us from thinking about all the other things that are going on.

    13. MS

      But you can't be so... I mean, we should get into Epstein files too-

    14. JR

      Yes

    15. MS

      ... 'cause I do think I have a different view of Epstein now. But, um, look, I just think we've been asking for more transparency like we had in this very brief period in the mid-'70s with the Church committee hearings.

    16. JR

      Uh-huh.

    17. MS

      It really took a whole Watergate. It took something big. It's been over 50 years. We got a lot of Epstein files. Yes, there's some missing, but we got JFK files, Amelia Earhart files, and now we're gonna get some UFO files. Is it gonna be everything? Of course not. Like, there's just no way. Um, you know, but I don't think like... I think we should hold b- we should be ex- happy that, like, there is an acknowledgment that there's a lot of government files, and that there's some commitment to release them. Because I do think, like, it's easier to get new Epstein files released after you have some Epstein files released than if you have none. And I feel the same way about UFOs.

    18. JR

      Okay.So it's easier to get more UFO files-

    19. MS

      Yeah

    20. JR

      ... released, but like release the, the-- like did you-

    21. MS

      What do we want?

    22. JR

      Did you-

    23. MS

      Well, I think one of it is like what do we want? And I've been, uh, you know, I respect John Greenewald a lot. He runs something called theblackvault.com where he has been FOIA-ing, he's been issuing, you know, Freedom of Information Act requests on UAP, but also a ton of other issues since the mid-'90s. So when he was like 15 years old, he became obsessed with doing, uh, FOIA requests. And he has identified a number of documents that we know exist with redactions. One of them is the UAP Task Force, which has a line that just says, "Potential explanations," you know, the first explanation is redacted, it's blacked out. The second one is, you know, some sort of natural phenomenon. Number three is blacked out, is redacted. Un-redact those.

    24. JR

      Yeah.

    25. MS

      I mean, come on, guys, you can't tell me, "Well, we have to protect our sensor data." Come on, guys. I mean, like that's not sensor data. Uh, tell us what the potential explanations are, are. On terms of the sensor data, John also made a great point. Do you remember when the, the Pentagon released the video of the Russian jet, uh, dumping fuel on a, on one of our drones? Uh, there's like a famous video-

    26. JR

      No

    27. MS

      ... where like it shows-

    28. JR

      I don't remember that

    29. MS

      ... a hostile act by the Russians dumping fuel on our drone.

    30. JR

      When was this?

  12. 1:33:13 – 1:45:59

    Crop circles, disinformation, and the ‘Mirage Men’ problem

    1. JR

      The crop circle thing's weird.

    2. MS

      Really weird, yeah.

    3. JR

      'Cause you wanna just write it off. I mean, I wanted to write it off. I'm like, "Oh, there's guys with boards. They're making designs." But then you see some of the designs and how the, the, the wheat is actually woven and how they have these exploded nodes. They're almost like they're microwaved, and they've examined these things, and it seems like there's some energy that's created these things. And also the, the sheer size and scale of some of these things with no footprints leading into them or out of them, and just the geometric precision of some of them, the- it's really weird. Like, there's, uh, of course, it's eyewitness accounts. It's hard to know if they're being accurate. But people who've flown over areas where there's nothing there, flown back two hours later and there's these football field size M- Mandelbrot sets.

    4. MS

      The, that was the Julia set over, uh, next to Stonehenge, was the one that the guy flew over and there was nothing there-

    5. JR

      Yeah

    6. MS

      ... and then like a couple of hours later there was the Julia set, which is a spectacular-

    7. JR

      Yeah, it's incredible

    8. MS

      ... fractal.

    9. JR

      Right.

    10. MS

      I'll tell you, it's even weirder-

    11. JR

      With incredible precision.

    12. MS

      Yeah.

    13. JR

      That's what's really, as much precision as you can get by folding over wheat. But-

    14. MS

      Right

    15. JR

      ... when you look at it, like, from above and it, you know, you don't get to the, the m- the micro, you, you, you're looking at these things that, like, they really do scale in a fractal way, and it's very fucking strange and difficult to reproduce. You would imagine something like that would take a long fucking time to plot out and plan. It would take multiple people. You'd have to measure and remeasure. You'd have to have some, some sort of tools and instruments not just to fold over the, the wheat, but if you're gonna interweave the wheat, like, what is your method of doing that? And how are you doing it where, you know, this one is one dimension, and then y- the next one is precisely three-fifths of that dimension, the next one is slightly... You know, and, and, and they're fractal.

    16. MS

      Well, it gets really even weirder than that. So you know how I just, I just described this case of, of, of this Air Force counterintelligence guy driving this guy, Paul Bennewitz, crazy at Kirtland Air Force.

    17. JR

      Yeah.

    18. MS

      That book is written by Mark Pilkington. Mark Pilkington is one of two guys that claim to have created all the crop circles. The other guy is a guy named John Lundberg.

    19. JR

      Oh, right, right, right.

    20. MS

      AJ, in his video about the crop circles, accuses John Lundberg, again, the cir- who's the, they call it the Circle Makers. They have a website they keep updated.

    21. JR

      Yeah.

    22. MS

      He accuses him of being a British intelligence agent, AJ does, or at least he strongly implies it.

    23. JR

      Mm.

    24. MS

      Um, and, and part of that is because there was a bunch of weird stuff on the website about MI5 and the CIA, and then Lundberg went to a school. This is all very circumstantial, so I'm not defending it. I'm just saying what AJ said. Then Lundberg went to a school that shares a courtyard with, uh, with an M- with MI- with an MI5 campus or an MI5 training area. I asked Mark. I have, like, a three, I have, like, three hours of interviews with Mark, um, who I'm really interested-- he's a really interesting person. I asked him directly if they had any connection to military intelligence. He said absolutely not. Um, it's hard to-

    25. JR

      Which is what you would say. [laughs]

    26. MS

      Well, of course you're allowed to say it if you are, but I'm not making any accusations. But yeah, I mean, he claimed that they made all of them and, you know, there's some of them. Have you ever seen the massive-- There was one that was absolutely massive.

    27. JR

      Yeah. Pull some of them up, Jamie, so we can get some-

    28. MS

      There's the Julia set, but there's another fr- there's another one that's-

    29. JR

      Pull up the Julia set

    30. MS

      ... so, it's so big. It's really hard to see, but he said that he wasn't at that one.

  13. 1:45:59 – 2:15:27

    UFOs, Christianity, and spiritual meaning: what if the ‘phenomenon’ is a control system?

    1. JR

      Well, I think what he does best is not explain it.

    2. MS

      Yeah. He doesn't-

    3. JR

      You know what I mean?

    4. MS

      Yeah

    5. JR

      It's like there really isn't an explanation, but here's what we know.

    6. MS

      He calls it a control system, though.

    7. JR

      Yeah

    8. MS

      Which is sort of like-- I asked Diana, I was like, "Is that, how is that different from God?" Um, because he's sort of a control system that is-- his, his view is that there's a control system that's evolving human consciousness, and it will manifest different things or, and that, in re- in relation with humans over time. And so he looks at the, you know, the apparition, the Maria, um, or Saint Mary apparitions in Spain and the airships of the late 19th century where people saw these things that looked like the Zeppelins even though they hadn't been invented yet. All of these things he says his view is they're sort of being sort of produced in some relationship as well with our culture. That's Vallee's argument, and that sounds a lot like God in some ways when you say control system.

    9. JR

      Right. What does that mean? Like, is it a, a higher life form that is monitoring us? Like, the- that's the, the, the secular version of religion for a lot of these people that are really interested in aliens, like, that there's some advanced being that's making sure we don't fuck everything up completely.

    10. MS

      Uh, certainly for me, that's my interest. I mean, I, um, like, again, this anthropologist, uh, Luhrmann, you know, she says-- you know, William James is this famous Harvard psychologist who wrote a book about the varieties of the religious experience in 1902, and he says everybody wants to kind of be like, "Is it real or not real? Is, like, this world just what we see?" And he says, "I think there's something more." There's not... So this, this very, you know, skeptic or debunker thing which is like, "Oh, no, it's just gotta be a b- that thing's gotta be a bird," or it's a bl- And it's like, well, but it really... You haven't ex- just calling it that. And as they point out, it's like they showed up when they wanted to. I mean, it's a pretty amazing-- If it's just a coincidence, it's a really amazing one. And so I think for me it's like, because I am a Christian, and it is hard to believe in an, in an all-powerful and all-good God because He obviously allowed the Holocaust to occur and allows terrible things to occur. But I love that, that segment, and there's-- I love-- There's another one I love right now. It's, like, a British woman in the '50s doing an interview about seeing a, what she calls a Mexican hat UFO over her house.

    11. JR

      Mm.

    12. MS

      And the kids saw it, and she-- and everybody in the village made fun of her, and they ridiculed her, and she's like, "But it's, you know, but it's-- I saw it, and it was real." And it was like, it's like those are like our, those are spiritual, uh, experiences, I think. Um, so I don't know that, like, I want the files released from the government.

    13. JR

      Yeah

    14. MS

      I'm also skeptical that it's gonna tell us what it is because I think at some level we're not supposed to get more, much more information about what it is. I think it's-

    15. JR

      We're not ready

    16. MS

      ... something else is going on. Or maybe it's having a positive effect. I think it's, I think, uh, one of the-- Sometimes people get really mad at UFO believers. Like, skeptics get really, like, angry, like, "How do they... Well, they're so..." You know, whatever, they get so mad. And I'm always like, but, like, how often do you see them causing real harm or problems? I mean, we had one cult where they, you know, like, a few people killed themselves. But for the most part-

    17. JR

      They cut their balls off first.

    18. MS

      Yeah. Great.

    19. JR

      [laughs]

    20. MS

      So, you know, UFO-- Like, for the most part, UFO, people that are interested in UFOs, um, are dreamy seekers, spiritual, um, and I think it's, um, I, I, I think it's wrong to-- I think it's lovely and, and wonderful, and it reminds us of, you know, that we're small. On the one hand, we're humble about our knowledge, and there's just-- surrounded by mystery. I mean, your, so much of your career and this, this platform has been to allow us to talk about things that are unexplained and that, or where the explanations don't really seem to explain it. There's something more [chuckles] as-

    21. JR

      Yeah

    22. MS

      ... as, as William James would say. There's something more, and I think that the denial of anything more, this idea that, "Oh, we know everything, and we know where the..." We don't know anything.

    23. JR

      That's hubris.

    24. MS

      It's just crazy.

    25. JR

      But that, th- those people are silly. They're more silly than the believers because th- this, this idea that, like, look, if there is a-- if you have a completely novel experience, like, say, if you are Commander David Fravor and you encounter this Tic Tac-shaped object that's hovering over something that appears to be a ship that's under the water, this thing takes off at a absolutely preposterous speed that is documented both in radar and visually-

    26. MS

      Yeah

    27. JR

      ... and on camera, right? So they've got video of this thing moving. They say that it went from above 50,000 feet above sea level to sea level in less than a second, which would require more energy than the entire United States produces in a year in order to get a, an object to move that quicklyAnd it does that with no heat signature. Okay, if this is all true, just that alone. Now imagine you have this completely novel experience. And because y- I haven't had it, and you haven't had it, and Jamie hasn't had it, well, it's very simple and easy to dismiss it. But if this happened, what do you, what, what do you expect the person to do? What do you expect a decorated pilot in the, in the Navy, a guy who has a rock solid record, who is... There's nothing about him that screams that he's a kook or he's mentally ill, and when you talk to him, he's incredibly meticulous, very intelligent, very disciplined. What-

    28. MS

      Well, uh, his, uh, his, his face, it, it looks like he had a spiritual experience.

    29. JR

      Yeah.

    30. MS

      He has a smile on his face. I went to the-- When I was in Delhi, I went to the Jain temple, and I went to the Hindu temple, and I'm not Jain, I'm not Hindu. Um, but I had a look on my face that reminded me [chuckles] that sort of, that sort of, that sort of like that starry-eyed-

  14. 2:15:27 – 2:18:42

    Epstein files: code words, blackmail theories, and whether he was murdered

    1. MS

      All right.

    2. JR

      So what is your take on this?

    3. MS

      All right. Well, so I, um-

    4. JR

      You've changed your position?

    5. MS

      Yeah, I've changed. I think, I spent a bunch of time with the files. Um, I will say I think I did do a piece where I do think that the shrimp is a code word for g- for young women, um, I'm pretty sure about that.

    6. JR

      What do you think pizza's a code word for?

    7. MS

      Well, that was... Okay, so then I did a-- I did-- I had, I had wrote this article about code words in the Epstein files, and I did the shrimps, and then I had some stuff about pizza and grape juice in there, about grape soda, and my co-author, Alex, was like, "Dude, you can't go, you can't go full pizzagate." [laughs] You know, like, "You gotta, you gotta do like..." So we kept it out, and then the Times mentioned the pizza thing, so I wrote something on X about it, but I ended up taking it down because I was like, I don't really know. This one-- I mean, what we- what weirded me out the pizza one was where his urologist was like, "Take your erection dysfunction pills, and then we'll go out and get pizza and grape soda." And I was like, that is creepy, you know, as hell. Uh.

    8. JR

      Yeah.

    9. MS

      So, but I c- I don't... The shrimp one, I'm like 95% that means young women, 'cause you just see how they talk about it, and I think I proved it in my piece. There's other ones, like people are like the jerky is like cannibalism and whatever.

    10. JR

      Yeah.

    11. MS

      It's like, well, it didn't help that the, the restaurant owner was like, the restaurant's name was like Cannonball-

    12. JR

      Cannonball

    13. MS

      ... or something.

    14. JR

      Yeah.

    15. MS

      Yeah. Uh, but, um, I'm skeptical that that's what that was, so. [laughs]

    16. JR

      Well, you would be skeptical unless you were part of some of these fucking bizarre Satanic rituals, and then you would go, "Oh my God, it's real." Like there are-- Look, people have sacrificed people, right? Can we agree to that in, in, in human history?

    17. MS

      In history. Yeah, history, of course, yeah.

    18. JR

      And there have been Satanic rituals throughout history. Can we agree to that?

    19. MS

      Sure.

    20. JR

      Okay. So there has been cannibalism in history. We agree to that?

    21. MS

      Oh.

    22. JR

      Okay.

    23. MS

      Unfortunately, a lot, actually. There was a lot, yeah.

    24. JR

      Why wouldn't we think they're talking about that? We don't want to believe it, right? Is that what it is?

    25. MS

      No, I don't-

    26. JR

      We don't want to believe that these people, these multimillionaires and billionaires that go to this island and engage in all this crazy shit aren't doing something like child sacrifice or cannibalism.

    27. MS

      Well, let's start with the, let's start with the thing that I think a lot of us thought it was, which is that it was an intelligence community sex blackmail operation. That's what made it, for me, a story. I mean, a creepy guy doing creepy things, there's just, that's, we call that a dog bites man story. You know? What makes it a man bites dog story is like, is that you kind of go, wow, it's like Mossad and CIA running a honeypot. I mean, that's the premise of Ridley Webb's two-volume book, One Nation Under Blackmail. Um, but when you look at it, like we don't see that. We see, we see one case where Epstein emails himself something that sounds like it's in the voice of the Bill Gates science advisor, Boris Karshik, I believe is the name, and in it they talk about, oh, you know, it's the famous email where he says, "Oh, you know, I got STDs." Or it, it says, "You got STDs from Russian hookers or from Russian women, and then you tried to slip antibiotics or you wanted me to slip antibiotics in Melinda's drink." And Melinda like, they asked her about it. It was awful. Um, it doesn't like... That's not-- It's weird what that is. So first of all, it's not even clear what that is.

    28. JR

      Well, hold on a second. We're just talking about emails.

Episode duration: 2:57:20

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