Joe Rogan Experience #2341 - Bernie Sanders

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The Joe Rogan Experience.

Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (instrumental music) Mr. Sanders, it's great to see you.

Good to be with you, Joe.

(laughs) Great to be... you've got a bunch of notes.

Not all that much. No.

Have you prepared for this?

I am well prepared.

Well, it's a good time for you to be in here 'cause the, the world's gone haywire.

Yes.

Yeah. What are your thoughts on this?

I think, (sighs) I start off with, Joe, trying to take a deep breath and doing what is not often done, where are we as a country today? What's going well? What's not going well? And I don't think... we don't have, we don't have that kind of basic discussion and, and to my mind, I think in America today, we are facing more serious crises than we have in the modern history of our country. This is a pivotal moment in American history and what happens now will depend, determine the lives of our kids and future generations.

(smacks lips) What specifically concerns you?

I'll tell you what concerns me, the issue of wealth and power. All right. I'm kind of old-fashioned and I believe in democracy, and I believe that everybody should have a, a good shot at living a decent life. And what I worry about right now, and this is an issue, Joe, and it's part of the problem, that it just ain't talked about very much. And I, and I applaud, by the way, you and the other podcasters who give people the time to really seriously discuss things rather than seven-second sound bites, you know? But if you take a look at where we are as a nation today, the system is not working. It's broken. It ain't working for ordinary human beings. See, you have an America today where we have more income and wealth inequality than we've ever had in the history of this country. That's just the fact. Uh, you have, um, one man, uh, Mr. Musk, uh, owning more wealth than the bottom 52% of American families. One man, 52% of the American families. You got the top 1% owning more wealth than the bottom 93%. You got CEOs of large corporations making 350 times what their workers make. And meanwhile, in this richest country in the history of the world, working class people are getting decimated. Today... and again, we don't talk about it in Congress for reasons that I'm hope I can get into.

Yeah.

We don't talk about it in the corporate media. 60%, six, zero percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Now, I grew up in a family... I don't know your background, but I grew up in a family lived paycheck to paycheck. And anyone who lives paycheck to paycheck understands that every single day is a struggle, you know? You gotta figure out how you feed the kids, rents, cost of housing in America off the charts, healthcare off the charts. So right now, as we talk, there are people worrying, "My landlord, you know, is gonna raise my rent by 20%. What the hell do I do? Where do I go? How do I... what, what schools do my kid go to? How do I buy decent food for my kids? My mother is ill. How do I afford prescription drugs for my mother? Uh, my car breaks down." You know? So you, you know, if you have money, no one thinks of it. Your car breaks down, go to the mechanic, get it fixed. You know what? A lot of people don't have a thousand bucks in the bank right now. If you don't have a thousand bucks, your car breaks down, how do you get to work? If you don't get to work, you get fired. If you get fired, your whole life is disrupted. 60% of American-