Joe Rogan Experience #1368 - Edward Snowden

And, uh... Okay, that'll just be-

Dude, you're very professional.

... be rolling. (laughs) You know, people are like, uh, "H- how do you live?" And, and things like that.

Yeah.

They're like, "You taking money from the Russians?" And, of course, the answer's no. But, uh, I, I do this for a living, like I, I speak. Um, I don't have a YouTube channel where it's, you know, I'm, I'm Joe Rogan, but, uh, I give speeches at universities and things like that. I do a lot of interviews. And so-

We're recording now, right?

I've got my, my own setup.

C- is it possible that you could do a YouTube channel? Would that work?

(laughs) I mean, if... Yeah. Like I, I mean, if you introduced me so like I get followers, yeah, we could do that. (laughs)

Dude, I'm all in. W- that, that could absolutely happen. Do you wanna do that? Is that something you wanna do?

Uh, no. I mean, this is a big question. So I, I came on, um, because I had just, uh, written a book, uh, called Permanent Record, um, which is the, the story of my life because that's what publishers make you do when, when you're writing your first book. Um, but it, it's more than that because I didn't just wanna talk about me. It, it's actually about the changing of technology, uh, and the changing of government in this sort of post-9/11 era, which, you know, our, our generation just sort of happened, uh, to be growing up during. Uh, and I was at the CIA and the NSA and all this stuff, but the day that the book came out, uh, the government hit me with a lawsuit, um, and they hit the publisher of the books, uh, with a, with a lawsuit, um, because they don't wanna see books like this get written. They especially don't wanna see books like this, uh, get read. Um, and so the big thing was, you know, we, we didn't know where this was going. We didn't know what was gonna happen. Um, and my publisher, of course, wanted me, uh, very badly to let people know this book existed, uh, in case the government leaned hard and hard and hard, and we didn't know where, where that's going. (laughs) Um, the government is still, uh, pursuing that case quite strongly. Um, they're more focused on the, the financial censorship side of it, uh, basically taking any money that I made from it, uh, kind of as a warning to the others, um, and getting a, uh, legal judgment against the publishers saying, you know, "You can't pay this guy," that kind of thing, more so than taking the book off the shelves. But that's not because, uh, they're okay with the book being on the shelves. It's because thankfully we, we've got the First Amendment, and so they can't. Uh, and that's a very rare and, and, and good thing. Uh, but anyway, i- in the context of that, um, uh, they were like, "Well, what about Joe Rogan?" And, you know, I, I, I'd heard about you, uh, at this point, but, you know, uh, the only thing that I had really seen that I really understood, um, had familiarity with was, like, you talking to Bernie Sanders, which, by the way, I very much appreciated, uh, hearing that, because, uh, a lot of people don't give the guy time to talk. Um-