#2542 - Steve Hilton

The Joe Rogan experience. Train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. Come on man, what's going on? For people who don't know you and I have been friends for more than ten years.

I think it's fourteen years. I think it's the year we got here. Which is fourteen, twenty, twelve. We met and why on the beach with our kids. Okay so what's your memory?

I was just thinking about that because I have a very particular memory of that. My memory was that my children and your children were playing on the beach. Exactly. That's how we met. It was just they were digging in sand, they were real little, they were the same age.

And then we just said hi. Yeah but I remember, I've had a slightly different memory. Okay which is like that's exactly right about the kids. Yeah. Two girls for you, two boys for me.

And your wife was there first before. Yes. I think I was in the gym. And I just remember, I've just moved from England. And it's a whole different world and a different culture.

And I just remember you walking down the beach and I've never seen anyone like this before. Just like it was just an amazing cultural moment. And then you never seen anyone walking on the beach. Well just the way you were, you know, just the way I remember thinking, who's this guy? I remember I'd never heard of you.

And then I was explaining to people like, oh Joe, Joe, Joe, Joe, Joe, Joe, Joe, Joe, Joe, Joe. It was just an amazing thing. And then the other thing that makes me laugh doing this is that we then did the podcast. Yes. At some point around then.

This is before you had any aspirations running for governor or anything like that. Exactly. I just moved, I was teaching at Stanford. Just at my very normal kind of Loki life. And I really remember doing the podcast not knowing what a podcast was.

I literally didn't know. So we came in. My experience was I'd been in England. I'd worked in business, run a restaurant or two, that kind of thing. But most recently I'd been in politics and government.

And so I'd in the media. I was aware of all of that. And so wasn't like I was completely naive, but I didn't know what a podcast was. And I literally thought it was like a radio show or something. I remember coming in, this was back in LA, and we sat down and we were chatting for a few minutes.

And I literally was thinking, when's the next guest coming? This seems to be going on a really long time. And it's like 10 minutes and then 15, wow, this is a long time. Not normally you get like 10, 15 minutes maximum. It's 15 minutes maximum.

Half an hour. What? Three hours. I couldn't believe it. Well back then.

I really didn't know. No one knew what a podcast was. So what year was it that Steve was on? I was at 509, 20, I was June, July 3rd of 2014. 2014?

Yeah. Whoa. 2014, episode 509. We're already 509. Yeah.

509. So we've had 2000 podcasts since then. Incredible. Wow. The other years.

That's 12 years ago. That's crazy. It's crazy. The other thing. The other thing.

I was like a behind the scenes guy in politics and government. And I just come out of that. And I was very cautious about everything. And you were just talking like you do. Which again, I didn't really know.

And I remember thinking, God, this is like, we're talking about sex. And you were cursed. I was like, wow. What is this? Like, this is so different to anything I've ever encountered before.

But there we are. Yeah. Nobody was listening back then. It was nice. You could get away with so much more.

You could just talk and not worry about it. And also, so media was not as changed. I don't think you worry about it when you're talking. No. Well, I don't pay attention.

That's the key. That's the key to my success. Right. This is like, don't listen to anybody. What anybody else to say about you?

Just keep moving. Keep moving and don't pay attention. I think that's obviously works. Well, I think there's a lot of people out there that are crippled by other people's opinions. I think there's a genuine benefit to having a bunch of other people's opinions of you.

And you get to see feedback. But there's just way too many bad faith actors on the internet. There's way too many people that have the least charitable takes on everybody. The worst, the worst, like, public narration. Like, public narratives that they want to promote about anyone or anything about any subject.

There's far too many people like that. And it's a poison well. It's like, if you went to a restaurant and you knew that 20% of their food would literally fucking kill you, would you ever eat there? No. Well, that's like Twitter.

20% of the people there are fucking poisonous. They're like a chorus. It's so funny. I've just, you know, been, so when we met, I was just, you know, kind of a regular citizen teaching at Stanford, whatever, and then I started a business. Then I got more public.

I went to Fox hosted a show. I was on my candidate and as that's happened, you get more prominent. And so you look at these comments and I never know whether to look, but the thing that I really just makes me laugh now, well, it's like, I'm always tempted to do it and I never do it. Like the really idiotic, just pure abuse. Like, I don't know, I put something out there, and now there's a lot more of this.

And the candidate's like, go back to England, you fucking cunt. You fall, whatever. And like, I always want to write good point. It's just so tempting. And I never have.

Maybe I should. I love. There's a lot of sad, angry people out there that are just lashing out. And unfortunately, those are overly represented online because those are the type of people that have the time to make comments. But then you also have to take into consideration, whenever you're involved in anything political as you obviously are, because you're running for Governor of California, there's a lot of the people that are engaging with your content that are not real people.

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Okay, that part. I never have in my mind. You don't? No, I should. It's a good point.

Oh, it's a tremendous amount. It's not a small amount. It's a huge amount. There's nothing you can do about it. There's plenty of attention when he was buying Twitter.

So when he was buying Twitter, Twitter was alleging that there was only 5%, 5% of Twitter with bots. But see if you find that article again. There's a former FBI, he did something with digital intelligence, and he did a forensic analysis of Twitter, and he said it's probably 80%. 80. 80.

So it's a bunch of bots yelling at you and buy bots. Okay, some of them I think now, and this is at the time, so this is 2022. When did he buy Twitter? 2023, 2024? 2024?

I think I'll hold it. 24? I think I'll remember. I think it was like somewhere in 2324. Yeah, okay.

So back then, AI was not as much of an issue, right? Like AI's. Yes. Automate anything now. So the claim that 80% of Twitter was originally for a 2022 assessment by cybersecurity expert Dan Woods, while official company filings have a store, historically claimed fake accounts represent under 5% independent estimates and security specialists suggest real figures are higher.

Those an exact 80% total remains heavily debated. It's very debated. But if you read the article, he goes over, it's very meticulous, like the way he's describing what it's not like pulling it out of his ass. He did it. So what they did with Twitter did to come up with 5%, was they just grabbed a random 100 tweets.

But also they're trying to sell it for fucking billions of dollars. Yeah, exactly. I was like 40 billion. Yeah. Something crazy, wasn't it?

I don't remember the numbers. It wasn't it 40 billion dollars? Fucking insane amount of money for this. Because now, just chaos, you know, it's funny. So there's that.

And so this guy's saying 80%. So again, this is a few years ago, so you're dealing with actual humans who are doing it. So you have these state sponsored groups that are, there's these bot farms and what these bot farms are, I don't know if you've ever seen them, but people have gone inside and filmed them, like whistleblowers. And what they literally have is like rows and rows of Android phones that are all connected to like people. So those are without people.

Yes. And they'll type one thing. And that one thing gets tweeted by hundreds and hundreds of phones. And there's many of these places. And this was back before you get AI to automate things for you.

Now that you could do a thing where you can essentially start a campaign online, like say Steve Hilton's a cunt, pass it on. And literally they will, you could hire a company. And this company has bots that will go out there and promote that Steve Hilton is a cunt. And they will put it everywhere. They'll hire people.

They'll pay people. This is another thing. There's a bunch of like really bad actors, really bad faith actors on Twitter that are paid to post things. And these people have been called out many times by other people that are independent journalists that say, isn't it crazy that all these people use the same verbiage. Exactly.

They're getting paid quite a bit of money. Israel pays people. They've been pretty open about it. You know, and they were saying that we have to win the digital war against what they call the woke Reich, which is hilarious. So there's that.

So you have to like, when you're engaged, like I know real people on Twitter, I know real people that I read their posts and I know there's real independent journalists. There's a tremendous amount of just utter horseshit. I don't have time. I have no time for it. No, I mean, I look at it.

So, you know, you're running around, you're doing all these things for the campaign, whatever. So I don't have too much time. It's the one I look at, but there's all the other, you know, there's Instagram and all the rest. And I don't even look at those. But well, next, you know, for a few hours, you know, if you add it up probably half an hour in the morning, maybe half an hour in the middle of the day, half an hour at the end of the day, and you look at it then and you just find out what's going on.

I think it's pretty good for news. Like things that are happening. It's the best thing I've ever heard for news. So that's why I check in with you. You kind of see what's happening.

I do that. I go to the front page, like what's going on? It's good. Well, you've always been really good digitally. Like for people that don't know, like I said, Steve and I have known each other for a long time.

I mean, we're good friends. Like we've taken our families to Disneyland. We've slept over each other's homes. This is, again, way before you're running for governor. I know you and you know me and you know my family.

We know each other. And you've always had no phone. You were always impossible to reach. I just have to get ahold of your wife. It's hilarious.

For a while. I don't even know if you've had a fucking email for awhile. I always had email. Yeah. But you never had anything on you to check that email.

So like, one time in San Diego. I always said, it's fine. Nothing ever goes wrong. Are you going to not find a way wrong your wife is so mad at you? Because you could go home and you fucking bad at it.

But this was the thing is like you were well aware that it is a toxic element in your life. It is distracting. It keeps you from being present. It keeps you from being in the moment. And it's very hard to have discipline and just put it down.

And I'm really good at it. But then I'm not. And then some days I'm not. I just find myself on the toilet for 20 minutes. Watch a murder video.

Because my Instagram, it's actually really good right now. Well, actually, you mean like true crime stuff? Oh, horrible things. So one of my best friends, Tom Sogura. He and I have had this tradition over the last few years of sending each other the worst fucking shit that we find online.

Just to freak each other out first thing in the morning. Like first thing in the morning I wake up and Tom sent me. Like the other day I sent him, these two guys were trying to rob an ATM machine. And the guy's pulling on it and they wrapped a chain around it and they had a car. It sounds like a movie.

That was pulling. Yeah, yeah. So the car was pulling the ATM machine out and the guy got trapped under it and dragged with sparks and blood. I mean, it's fucking horrific. And I mean, I've seen so many people get executed.

Hundreds. And Instagram is terrible at removing that stuff. I don't know if I spend far less time on X because X is so much opinions. It's so much of it is just text. Instagram, for me, it's a lot of it is very interesting.

Like I find interesting historical facts, interesting scientific discoveries, cool stuff. It seems to be just generally when I'm around, you know, I'm on planes a lot and like all the time and you see people. So just just watching people, Instagram seems to be the thing, you know, I'm not watching what they're looking at. You can see the logo and you can see that seems to be what people are most consuming. Yes.

I think it's probably the biggest one. Maybe TikTok's probably the biggest. Yeah, TikTok. I don't know what's the biggest. But they're both pretty big and it's just mindless.

TikTok will be younger. Yeah, I think. But there's a lot of older people on TikTok too now. It's just very addictive. TikTok, when you open it up, it immediately starts playing you something.

That's different. You know, like Instagram, it opens the page and you go, so what's going on? And you have to like put in a little effort. TikTok's like, gotcha. Like immediately as soon as you open up the app, it's like, gotcha.

Here's another one. Here's another one. Next, you know, an hour's gonna buy and you've wasted it. I remember when I first read about it, like years ago, TikTok. I think it maybe wasn't cool TikTok.

It was like, Mike Duns were doing it and it was music video. It was something too. And that started. It started with, you could make your own video to music or something to music was the focus. Well, the original TikTok was a bunch of people dancing.

That's right. It was a TikTok thing. Yeah, they were dancing and lip-syncing. And I remember reading and they were talking about how viral it's gotten them. This thing is gonna take over.

So it's not like, oh yeah, that can't be, that's not gonna happen. And then they look where we are. Amazing. Well, what's really interesting is China, where TikTok originated, they have it completely different TikToks. Yeah, exactly.

Their TikTok is curated to like martial arts demonstrations, scientific discoveries. It's all athletes doing music. Exactly. Exactly. In rich games, you can do that.

Yeah, and kids aren't even allowed on it after 10 PM. So you have to put in your age when you do it at 10 PM, it breaks you. Go to work, bitch. Go to sleep. Get up the morning and now.

TikTok does that. I don't remember. I've read that. The Chinese version of TikTok. So the Chinese version.

And the government makes them do that. They're smart. Like it's not good to censor people, but if you want to have a society that's not captured by horseshit, that's the way to do it. So I remember back, so I'm Hungarian. My parents are Hungarian.

When I was a kid, I was born in England, but we'd go back to Hungary. And this thing I always remember being really pissed off about when I was a kid. Not that the TV was before anything. It was just TV. It's all you had was television.

But on Mondays, in Hungary, there was no television because they wanted people to do other stuff. Just on Monday? Yeah. It was something I'm getting. And it was like, go out, talk to each other, do stuff, sports, whatever.

It was just, and it's communist regime, so they can do whatever they want. But you think, you know, they were thinking. I prefer freedom. But that's what I think all about all of this is so hard. Like even when you look at, like just today, there's the massive trial, this meta trial.

What's going on? It's a lawsuit. Today's the first day of the trial. They're suing meta for $1.4 trillion. Trillion.

Trillion with a T. I mean, I'm going to get that, but that's the claim. It was just today. Claims that addicted children are social media. And they're doing this through lawsuits.

And I'm just so torn over this because I've got a very strong point of view about all of this and kids. But there's something about this that doesn't feel right in terms of just going after these big platforms. Because in the end, I think it's the phones. It's the, there'll be something else if it's not meta, it'll be another thing. Yes.

I mean, I wrote about this, like 2015. So soon after we did that, I was probably working on it at the time. I had a book, I published a book called More Human, Designing a World Where People Come First. And the kind of main thing in the book was everything's too big and bureaucratic and centralizing. We've got to get back to the human scales.

It's mainly about other kinds of policy areas. But I did write about this thing in kids. And tech and I said at the time, we, you know, kids under 16, I said then, shouldn't have smartphones. You can give them other phones to stay in touch, but smartphones bad idea is the screens. And so I see all this going on.

And I think, yeah, have a go at meta or whatever. What's up or YouTube I think they're coming for as well. They're coming for YouTube. That's definitely, yeah, they are. There's already been a couple.

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Check it out. This ad and the products being advertised are intended for a United States audience. Well, that's like coming for television though. I know. It's user created television.

I think it's the screens though. Right. But the screens the problem, right? It's not the content creators. That's what I mean.

And then if they are coming after YouTube, then they're coming after me, right? Because I'm making people addicted to listening to people talk. Exactly. That's what I'm talking about. The four states seek substantial financial penalties.

Reports differ on the precise figure with recent reporting describing the state's position as roughly 200 billion. While meta has cited a possible exposure as high as 1.4 trillion, the ultimate penalty if meta loses would be determined by the court. They also want court-ordered changes to Facebook and Instagram, potentially including parental verification for teen accounts, changes to recommendation algorithms characterized as dopamine manipulating, removing or limiting light counts, infinite scroll, auto play, appearance, altering filters, multiple accounts and disappearing content such as stories. But people love that. So they're trying to really mic for a man.

Yeah, but disappearing content such as stories is kind of interesting sometimes. My friend Adam Greentree, he's a bow hunter and he goes hunting and his Instagram stories depict each day of these hunts. It's really fascinating because he takes these crazy adventures where he goes deep into the Colorado Rockies by himself for 28 days and he's camping out in the snow and it's cool to watch. So it's not all negative. So our AI sponsor, Proplexity, who we pulled this information from is saying that a loss could mean not only a very large financial judgment but also mandated product redesigns affecting how miners and potentially all users experience Instagram and Facebook.

See the problem is as soon as the government gets involved in mandating product redesigns, we're fucked because they're not going to make it good for us. I totally agree. That's what I'm saying. It's just manipulating. They're getting involved and they'll probably get them to give them some money.

And when you start getting, and you could imagine these bureaucrats sitting around microman, they've got too much of that already. 100%. Yeah, one of the things that we put. So I get it's a problem but this isn't the way to go. No.

There's a relaunch of MySpace that is up. And so MySpace is apparently attempting to relaunch and be algorithm free. And this is their idea. They're thinking the algorithms are designed to keep you engaged and get you dependent and get you hooked. And they're doing it by making your outrage for the most part.

And what they want to say is like, why don't you just find what you want to find and we'll have it on here. Which is probably a lot better because my feed would be all things only that I'm interested in. Not things that piss me off. That was the big change they made to the news feed versus what you were doing. And incredibly incredibly potent in its impact on children in particular.

Me. I'm a little kid. I get hooked. We are get hooked. You get hooked on nonsense and just paying attention to stupid things.

And it just eats time. And that's what is that's the commodity. The commodities are attention. Yeah, exactly. But you've got with I hear actually all the time.

It's not discussed like a political issue like we talk about gas prices or whatever. But then I've done a lot of events the last whatever year and a half like really a lot. Thousands and thousands of people sometimes big events small round tables you hear a lot people. And the first set of things they talk to you about what you might think you're a candidate. This is politics.

Let's talk about taxes and gas prices and the kinds of things that you think they sort of assume to be part of the political conversation. But then when you raise something like that, like the kids and the screens, they totally change the conversation. And suddenly they're like intense and kind of really kind of angry in a totally different way. What were it? It's like what are we supposed to do?

It's like with the parents. It's like with the screens and the social media and then the video games and now it's AI and then AI is doing the homework. Like what are we supposed to do? I'm glad you brought up video games because video games are far more addictive than social media. Yes.

Video games are insanely addictive and no one's trying to get rid of that. Exactly. It's because these things can change the way people think. They can change public opinion and they can move people in certain directions. I attribute it to the rise of the Democratic socialists.

I attribute it to the rise. I mean it's a lot of this manipulation. These ideas like people are really getting, oh maybe being socialist school. This is all coming out of social media. 100%.

It's not natural that people are sitting around reading marks and going what a great idea. Let's implement this. They're not doing that. Very few of these quote unquote marks that you find on social media are even aware of the consequences, historical consequences of these strategies and what it ultimately leads to which is like checkers. It's like real simple.

You're going to have a military that controls everything you do. As soon as you give up everything to the state, well the state has the guns and you have nothing and then they tell you what to do. It sucks. It doesn't mean that that's the way to do it because capitalism is brutal. Yeah capitalism needs some fucking guardrails.

That's what you know everything needs to be. But you've got like, no I totally always joke about it. It's kind of true. I'm done with the state run grocery stores. We had that.

I literally went to them in Hungary. It was a communist state. There was only state run grocery stores. There's one at the end of the block where my grandma lived and I would go there in the morning to get whatever it was. It's terrible.

It's really... I'm very torn on social safety nets. I think we should have them because I think a person who's down on their luck where things go wrong like a woman who has children and her husband dies and she doesn't have an income and now oh my god I have to feed these children. Yeah, we should have social safety nets. I also think social safety nets encourage people to rely on them and have zero ambition.

I think both those things are true. Well that's why I'm so... I've always been against... I can see the argument for but I've always been against this universal basic income type thing. There's an argument for it where it's like quite a low level and the original guy I think used to argue for that was on the right, Milton Friedman.

And Charles Murray I think also argued for it. Coming from the right but their version of it was to replace everything else. So you wouldn't have any other benefits. You wouldn't have any other government services. No Medicaid, no nothing.

Just an amount of money. It's very simple. Less bureaucratic. And that's it. I think that would be more efficient because you would radically reduce the amount of government.

Exactly and that would be a rock risk. Yes. Radically reduce the amount of people that have control over other people. Exactly. You would say listen we're going to cut out the middle man and just give money to people.

That's not a bad idea. So I had a very funny thing that you say these things before you ever imagine being a candidate and they come back and get sort of twisted. Part of the problem with welfare is, and this is going to sound completely contradict to myself, but it's not enough money. It barely lives. Well this is what I was saying.

So I was in that book. I think in that book the 2015 book More Human. I had this idea based on what you're talking about, which is actually for a lot of people things like the minimum wage for example is just you can't live on it, especially like in California now. But in a lot of places it's so low the cost is so high you can't live on it. And there's a lot of people working really hard, like not lazy on the couch playing video.

Seriously hard working people often do jobs who can't live on what they make. It's like really wrong I think. If you work so hard you should be able to live on it. So I had this idea which was the business friendly living wage. And the idea was you increase the minimum wage to a living wage which is calculated based.

What do you think that would be? Well in Cali, it's by area. It's different everywhere. You know in California a lot of places are being incredibly high. You know really high level.

Thirty or forty dollars an hour. Well because you've got now in certain counties in California more than I think it goes up the whole time. The official government level for low income is a hundred thousand dollars an year. Low income. Isn't that crazy?

Crazy because cost is... When I was a kid if you made a hundred thousand bucks you were killing it. I know. I guess that makes a hundred grand. Okay so in my campaign I had this one of my first things was no state income tax under a hundred grand.

I got the working class tax. A lot of people nationally said that's so high. You're rewarding rich people. Actually the feedback we got in the primary was that's too low. And there's a ton of people in California making out in a hundred and twenty.

That sort of thing. You can barely live. Because everything's so expensive you're in LA or somewhere expensive. So we raised it to a hundred and fifty tax free. But going back to the living wage thing that's obviously really tough for a business.

To pay that kind of level. I used to run by a restaurant. You know you'd be killed by that kind of high thing. But at the same time as you've got businesses paying people for full time work that they can't live on. The businesses are also paying taxes.

Payroll tax all this stuff. They're paying to the government. And then the government is taking it and handing it back to the workers in benefits and welfare. So my thing was why don't you just cut out the middleman and have the businesses pay the workers, not the government. And then the net effect for business is about the same.

Well that would be the goal. So they're paying their workers more. Is it the same amount? Like are they literate? That doesn't make any sense.

Because what is minimum wage in California right now? Well it's just gone up. It depends where you're looking. So $15. No, $16 and a bit.

And then for fast food it's $20. And they wanted it for health care workers. That was a thing. Right. And a lot of people pushed back against that and they wound up cutting a lot of jobs.

Yeah, that went through. So it's $20 for fast food workers. And then immediately cut a bunch of jobs. Exactly. And put in automation.

I feel like there's got to be some jobs that are entry level jobs for kids. Yes. And that's really important. They're not supposed to make a living off of that. You're supposed to be a kid that's learning how to work.

You show up on time. You know, you get your paycheck, you realize the taxes get cut out of it. You're like, what? Exactly. All that stuff.

Like it's good for kids to have. But once you get past entry level jobs, then okay, like if someone's a landscaper or someone's like doing this is a job, you work 40 hours a week paying someone $15 an hour to work 40 hours a week is kind of brutal. Yeah. Exactly. You barely can get by.

But because we've built all of this bureaucracy, certainly, well, I really know it's California. And just the level of the government in all its forms is so big, you're paying all these taxes and the taxes are coming out in all these hidden ways. Gas taxes, housing taxes that they don't call a housing tax, but it's everywhere you look, they've got these things that they're charging you, which makes everything more expensive. And what do you get for it? This bloated bureaucratic government that's not actually helping it.

It's actually making it harder to build anything. So I think that's, and this is, I used to call it this doom loop that the Democrats who in charge, even they get it, right? They get that people are really struggling. People can't afford stuff. So what's their response?

Oh, we got to, you know, make, give them more welfare, we got to take, put taxes up in order to get more money to redistribute. But that just makes everything more expensive. They never think about, well, why don't we just cut the costs? Why don't we just reduce the amount that we're taking so that people can have more? Yeah, but then they would have to cut out their slush fund because that's really what it is.

It's a big ass, big ass, big ass, slush fund. So what we pointed out was that the number of people that are moving to California and even living in California, it shrank, but government doubled. Yes. There's so many insane facts like that. Right, well, they say, oh, we've created so many jobs.

Like really? Have you created actual job or have you figured out another way to increase the government and make more taxes, work for whatever the fuck NGO you have or nonprofit you have or, like someone pointed out that there's this guy, this guy's really funny reels on Instagram and how much things cost versus what you could get for. And he was talking about some new thing they're doing for the convention center. It's a $5 billion renovation and he was listing all the other things. One of them that you could give every single person on Skid Row some fucking preposterous amount of money.

And you just realize, oh, they don't want to fix any of this. The people that are working for the homeless was talking about the average salary. It was $800,000. That was just one last week. This woman runs a homeless nonprofit, $1.6 million.

I hope there's no profit. Non-profit. Exactly. She's a millionaire. There's another one yesterday.

He's like, I don't know, some business like, it's again, it's a nonprofit, $2.6 million. Yeah, you know, it's just. And here's the most important thing. The homelessness only got worse. Like in the private sector, imagine if you were a CEO of a company that was just losing insane amounts of money and never completing its tasks, never doing anything.

I know. This is the main thing. I think it's like the more I look at it, the more insane it is. And everyone just looks at it and no one's ever pointed this stuff out. Like they all just, the government just makes everything so expensive in California.

Everyone says, oh, it's so expensive. What are we going to do? We'd better give them more welfare benefits. We'd better have a billionaire wealth tax. Really?

Well, they're stealing money from the richest people without addressing fraud and waste at all. By the way, the richest people already pay about half the income tax, the top 1%. Yes. So there's a small number of people in California alone that are responsible for an extraordinary amount of the tax base. Yeah.

Just a very small number of people. And you're scaring them away. But they just, they don't have that mentality of cutting costs. Because normal businesses. They paid no matter what.

Exactly. This is what I said during COVID. The mayor should get paid dependent upon the GDP of the city. Yeah. So like if you lose 70% of the restaurants, which like Los Angeles did during, Garcetti should have lost 70% of his paycheck.

You should, you lose like 70% of businesses. You should lose 70% of your income. And I guarantee you, they would be more friendly to business if that happened. But this, but exactly. And they don't care.

And this is what happens. I think when you've got this one party rule thing that's been going off as 16 years now, they run everything. They don't care because they think they'll be in power forever. And it just doesn't matter. And it seems like they will.

I know it's crazy. Well, they did. Spencer Pratt was so transparent that even Democrats admit there's something weird about the fact that Nithya Raman, all of a sudden got way more votes than Karen Bass, way more than the mail-ins and people voted for an increase in taxes. I know. It's just that doesn't make any sense.

Nobody votes for an increase in taxes. And actually in recent years in California, anything like that has been voted down. And just, in the last years, only the mail-in ballots that turned it. Well, they, this is the second. It's fucking dirty.

People, well, people bring it up the whole time. And I say, yeah, whatever. This is the, they've made it legal, right? This is not illegal. And the scam is so bad.

We've looked into a few of these. We were just, you know, through the year we've been looking, we're following some of this money. It's just everywhere you look. So cannabis, right? They legalize cannabis, Prop 64 in California.

And there's a tax. And the tax is part of selling it to the public was we're going to have the tax and it's going to pay for substance abuse prevention. Isn't that nice? Yeah. So then they, so we looked into it.

$350 million of that goes to this nonprofit with some nice sounding name about health. And then you actually track the money. They give out these little grants, million each, million here, 750,000 to 500 or so, other nonprofits. And then you look at what they do, voter registration, ballot harvesting, all of this shit. I mean, this is what they do.

And it's, and we're paying for it. And there's so many examples. We've just found a few of them. I mean, remember, they've doubled the budget of California more than the last 10 years. These are the numbers.

This year, the budget is just over 350 billion, the total budget. Ten years ago, it was 170. And everything's worse. Crazy. It's sober.

My other favorite example is that, and there's so many. I just, every day you learn about these crazy things. Prisons, right? They've been shutting the prisons, which I totally disagree with, because whatever, that's a different story. But in the time they basically cut the prison population, it's not quite half, but nearly.

The budget has doubled. It's just, well, I mean, it's so transparent. Look what they did in Los Angeles with the fire relief money. Yes. Yeah, fire rate.

That was disgusting. So disgusting. You had people, good-hearted people wanting to help their own money. That's supposed to be charity. Yes.

And it's going into this political society. It went all of it into nonprofits. Yeah. It went all of it into one nonprofit, like 200 different nonprofits. Exactly.

Spencer Pratt laid it all out, like how they did and went into it. And no money went to anybody who lost their home. None. And which is, should be illegal. That's not fire relief.

They legalized all of this. That's the point. And so I always say, yeah, we've got this system, but there's only one answer in advance of being able to get in power and do something about it is, we just got to get every vote. We've got to get every vote. And I know, I know, people look at this race and say, well, you're never going to win.

It's hopeless. I don't think that's true. I think that actually people are really pissed off if you give them a sense that we can do something. This is not a hopeless cause. And I think we're showing that we just got to put, I mean, his, I've got this guy running against me.

He's just a complete joke coming. He's, who was it? He's called Javier Becerra. He was Biden's health secretary. He was, I mean, I want to say one thing before I'd say the most important thing about him.

But since we've been just been having a go at him telling the truth about what he did as Biden's health secretary, his score has been coming down with not that much effort from us. And we don't have money. We're a scrappy startup, right? They've got this big machine, the government unions. They just, you know, roll on.

It's, he's like the first poll that came out in the, in the race was just off the primary. It looks, it's over. What's the point? You know, 61, 36. He had 61.

I had 36. The next one is like 55. This is just the other week, 55. I think I had 37. There's one we just heard about where the gap's under 10%.

So no one wants this to go on in California. There's a majority who want to get rid of this. But it's just been this sense that it's impossible. And we just have to put up with it or leave. And I think we got it.

If we change that attitude, I think people are going to vote this, this regime out. It's so bad. We've seen the map, the electoral map that they put out from 2020 versus 2024. And the difference being you look at all the counties that went red. Yeah.

That used to be blue where people are freaked out. The problem is these high population urban areas where people live in these liberal bubbles, which is Los Angeles is the craziest version of that. And Los Angeles County is 23% of the vote in the world of California. Let's put this into perplexity. As perplexity, how many people in Los Angeles are on SSRIs?

Okay. I didn't think that's where you were going. I'd like to know. Well, I think there's a lot of people that are, they're medicated. And it's part of what helps them agree to this nonsense is that they're in this zombie catatonic state from antidepressants and anti-psychotics and anti-this and anti-that and anxiety medication.

And they're fucking cloudy. They don't see things. And they're surrounded by this echo chamber of people that only agree with them. No reliable public count of current SSRI users specifically in Los Angeles. But a reasonable, rough estimate for Los Angeles County is on the order of 500,000 to 700,000 adults, not a precise head count.

Now how many people are in Los Angeles? It's 10 million in the county. Okay. I think that's way low. I think that's way low.

I bet it's 10 times that. I bet it's everyone. I think, no, the awful shit aside, I bet there's a few million. Los Angeles County has roughly 7.8 to 8 million adults. We're live in Los Angeles.

If about 11 to 17% take antidepressants, roughly 60 to 70% of anti-depressant users take an SSRI, the implied range is 530 to 950. So maybe a million. I think it's probably a few million. I know a lot of people that are on a man. I think it's like more represented in Los Angeles.

There's also this idea that you need a medication because you have an imbalance. And that's just so cool. It's over, it's really bad. Well, also, the imbalance thing has been disproven. It's not real.

It's not what it is. And then there's also, there's a reality of your physical being. Okay. If you will live a sedentary lifestyle, you eat terrible food. Your physical body is going to feel like shit and you're not going to be happy.

That's just how it works as a human being. Totally right. That's it. It's like if you're feeling down or pissed off, like literally don't do some exercise. My friend, Asana Anamand, who's a, you'll see him tonight at the mothership, Polaris Communion.

He has a great bit about like the people that are in these commercials that are playing basketball. They take the medication, another playing basketball and drinking water and having fun. Yeah, that's the actual solution to depression. It's not taking the energy. It's fucking do something athletic.

Yes. Get active, drink water, have a community that you enjoy hanging out with. That's what keeps people from being depressed. And they've been sold as billy goods that you have a chemical imbalance in your brain. Well, that narrative was never supported by science and has now been completely dismissed.

That's not true. But we're just doing it still. I mean, funnily enough, that was what I, one of the chapters in that book 2015, but more human was about health. And it was all that. That's what I wrote about, which is this is crazy.

We've got, and in fact, when I was in 10 Downing Street, you, you know, I was senior advisor to the Prime Minister and you're getting a mainly focused on domestic policy. That's why I focused on. And you're there. You're at, you know, in 10 Downing Street, you get meeting, you can have meetings with kind of everyone will come in and have a meeting. And I was really focused.

We got the National Health Service, which is what the left one here, the Medicare for the single payer health care, whatever. That's what there is in the UK. And it's funded by the government by taxpayers, 100%. And so it's part of the budget, which is one of the problems. It's always competing for money against everything else.

And so there's a real reason to try and get the cost down because you're funding it out of the budget for everything else. And so health promotion is, or should be a really big part of it. And I wanted to really do much more on that, that you should actually use the National Health Service to try and make people healthy instead of all the sickness stuff. So I had all these meetings trying to understand, you know, the Royal College of this, the Royal College of that, all the cancer people, all they all came in. It was so hilarious after kind of months of these meetings of like, what do we need to do to make people healthy?

It's the simple basic things in the end. What you just said, like diet, nutrition, exactly. Eat healthy, take health and size, sleep enough. From moderate water. Exactly.

All of those things. So genius is science and whatever. Honestly, it's so basic. But then I'm not just saying today there's this awful story about the mother who killed the children. Awful story.

And she had really bad depression, post-partum depression and was asking for help and all this. And they just kept giving her this medication. And she was saying, I think there are texts to her mother saying this new medication they've got me on is really making me feel even more anxiety and I don't know what's going on to help help help. And they showed all the medication she was on in the run up to this. It's shocking.

It's shocking. Just the amount of stuff they're loading her up with that must have. 100% over the age. 100% I mean, look at the commercials for these things. And then you see the possible side effects.

Like who in their right mind would take something for depression which has side effects which causes suicidal ideation? What? I thought you were curing depression. Your side effect is I might want to kill myself? It's like this is a cure for depression too.

Blow your brains out. No more depression. Like it's a cartel. It's a cartel in the United States. I mean, it is a sanctioned tax.

It's publicly traded. It's a fucking cartel. And they buy off politicians and they pass the regulations. Well, it's the thing I see not just on this but on everything. Again, it's just an eye open.

I kind of suspected it. But when you see just how cynical it is, this kind of corrupt, I don't know what you want to call machine politics, I don't know, in Sacramento where they literally buy what they want. They buy the legislators that pass the bills that help their interest, whatever it is. And that's why nothing really changes. No one knows what's going on.

No one follows it. There's all these laws they pass that end up with things happening in the real world that normal person would say, how did that happen? Exactly. Well, three years ago someone put in a bill that was probably written by the lobbyist for whoever it was. Even the legislator, who put their name on it, probably never read it.

And then suddenly it's the law and all these bad things happen. And that's what's going on. Now, what could you do differently if you get an office? Like how much of this crazy entangled machine can you unwind? Yeah, not what I thought about it.

People wake up, they go, Steve Hilton's making a lot of sense. Let's vote him in. And then even the liberals, like Steve really run out and vote you in. It's got to be too big to rig, because that's the thing. Yes, exactly.

Because the mail-in ballots, by the way, can you believe? I know we're getting to it. Did you see Kamala Harris the other day? No. She was at some conference or whatever doing her sort of, maybe I'll run for president.

Yeah, good luck. I know. The last one was pretty successful for only spending $1.4 billion. I know. She's very good at every single swing state.

It's very funny. I sort of talk about a lot because my guy, Pissera, he was asked the same question. That she was asked. Do you remember when she went on the view? And it was like, what would you do?

She said, oh, nothing comes to mind. Really? You haven't thought of it. So he was asked. But, Pissera, my opponent, he was on CNN.

The guy says, look, it's obvious things aren't going well. To be fair, the interview said, look, we've got the highest unemployment rate in America. By the way, no one can believe it. We have the highest unemployment rate of all 50 states. Highest poverty rate, cost of living is a nightmare.

What would you have done differently? He says, well, it can't be that bad because people are still coming to the table. They're coming to Disneyland and the beaches. That's what he said. And then, they said, no policy changes?

Anyway, Carmilla was at this thing the other day. And she starts talking about the election and how... I don't know if she wasn't aware that Trump and Maga had this slogan that was a massive part of their thing, too big drink. So she starts saying it as if it was a completely new thing. She said it the other day.

The thing that we have to do is make sure we get a really... We've got to get everywhere. To coin a phrase, we have to make it too big to rig. Like she said it. No way.

She said it. Yeah. No idea what she's talking about. Like, I don't know what amount of election fraud there is, but it's not zero. It's not zero.

It's never been zero. And the real weird one for me was how many more votes Biden got in 2020 than any other president ever. We have a lot of work to do because, you know, these folks are cheating. They're trying to rig the system. They're trying to draw maps, all of it.

What, you mean, stuff that the Democrats are already done? Exactly. It's so hilarious. It's crazy. We have to make it too big to rig.

We have to turn out in big numbers to jump all over these obstacles. They're trying to throw our way. We have to make it too big to rig. What are you saying? Like, how are they cheating?

Like, how is she alleging they're cheating? The idea that that's the best they can do is so insane. It's so wild. It's so wild. And it's because if you want to run for politician, they will, if you don't follow their narrative and their plan to a fucking tee, they're going to come for you and they're going to destroy you.

And it's usually some creepy sexual thing. They're going to find someone who says that you did something to them in college or high school or whatever it is. And they'll come up with as many things and throw them your ways, as many things as they can find and they get rid of you and they get rid of all of them. I mean, lucky they don't think I've got any chance of winning. I think that's why they haven't done that.

But just on that, though, it's interesting. I think this whole system, this corrupt thing that I've encountered and I don't want to lose your question about what I would do. I've thought about that a lot. But it's just, it's sort of amazing, but not amazing. I knew it was like this.

But to see it is something else. The scale of it. Yes. So even things you might not imagine like, okay, a couple of years. So there's the chamber of commerce, right?

It's called Cal Chamber in California. And it's all the big businesses. And it's running a business in California is an absolute nightmare. That's why they're all leafing. That's why Elon left.

That's why so many companies live. Ever last in and out. And every day there's a new one that's announced. And then every day I meet business owners, big, small, medium, all set who say we're just hanging on to see if you can make it. And if you don't wear out, right?

Every chief executive magazine has an annual survey of business conditions. Like I think it was out in April, California, 50th out of 50 states. Okay. And I think it's been like that for 12, 13 years. So it's like a disaster that what's going on.

The Becerra who's running against the other 50 states for business clients. So Alaska's better. Every state in America is better. North Dakota, South Dakota, Florida, Tennessee. All right.

So you would think that when you've got a choice between two people, right, one of whom explicitly says I'm not going to change anything. That's Becerra. And me who's someone with business, most of my career has been in business. When you do the ballot, you're allowed three words to describe yourself. I actually wanted to do it fairly because I've done a bunch of different things.

And so I went through every year since I left Oxford, 1990s, 36 years. And the majority of my career has been in business. And most of those years running my own businesses. So I put small business on that's the three what small business own. And like in a choice between that, you would think the California Chamber of Commerce, which represents business, would obviously want the guy who's pro business instead of the guy who's got to keep up this.

Anyway, we have the money still there for now and they're getting that money. Well, this is this kind of piece, all of that crowd, right? And we have these endorsement meetings and then they pick him. They endorse it. They are the guy.

And then they say, we think that statement was so full of shit. It was like, oh, it's time for unifying, some completely bullshit political thing. Of course, because I went in there and I said, we've got to change direction. The policies are hurting business, whatever. I just said what I think.

And they went for him because all they actually care about is the power. And they think he's going to win. And so they want to be in with him. And then the other one that was like that, that was in a way even more shocking was the police. So the police, whatever, it's called police, poor act, the police officers association, something that you know.

That same kind of thing. You go to them and you try and get their endorsement. By the way, I said at the beginning this whole process, it's a waste of time because they will only care about their thing that they want to get more money for whatever it is. And so I don't want to give them that because that's wrong. And so they weren't endorsement.

I'm just telling it. Sure enough. This meeting. And I'm completely on the side of the law and order thing. It's gone crazy.

The defund the police. The insanity of how they deal with crime. We've got to reverse all that. And he's not said anything about that. He's just more of the same insanity.

They endorse him. And then they told us why. Because he promised to deliver on the one thing they really cared about, which is some bill that would increase their pensions. Why don't you agree to that bill? Because the pension, one of the reasons that the taxes are so high and the, and the, everything is like, for example, you look at schools.

Everywhere I go, parents are saying, what's going on? We pay the highest taxes anywhere. They pay the same income tax, property tax, all these taxes. And then we have to pay. The schools are asking us to pay like basic supplies, like paper, books, like cleaning materials.

And the lottery money is supposed to go to schools as well. And they're saying what is going on? Parents are really furious about it. One of the reasons is because of the way they've done the pensions for the teachers. You know, you want people to have good retirement.

That's true. But like a fifth, I think is about a fifth of the money before it's even spent in the schools goes to the pensions. It's a really, really bad situation. I'm torn because I think they deserve pensions. They take the police.

And I think they what percentage of the budget. I mean, think about, listen, let's talk about money that's gone to places where it vanished. Like the homeless. $24 billion. Yeah, at least.

And even though they've tried to get an audit of it, knew some vetoed that. Stop them. Exactly. Exactly. And in LA, there was a parallel in LA.

There was a lawsuit that ended up with a judge demanding a similar audit. And the estimate was just for LA. It was $2 billion. And Karen Bass vetoed the audit in LA. Let's imagine that $2 billion instead went to fund the police.

Yes. Better training, you know, better conditions, better morale. Better pensions, higher quality of people that you're hiring. Totally agree with that. We need to massive increase the numbers of police.

Right. Now imagine what an impact that would have on the campmates, on enforcing these laws. You already have laws. They're just not enforcing it. You're not supposed to.

The homeless instruments are illegal. They're illegal. That's always saying my first point on my plan is enforce the law. They're illegal. Well, imagine what it's done to real estate in downtown.

You know, I was a downtown real estate group, business group that filed that lawsuit that I was talking about for LA. Exactly. Los Angeles is the only place in the country that has a useless downtown. It's amazing. I mean, I forgive me if you have a great business in downtown and you love the funky aspect of being, there's wonderful restaurants in downtown.

I've traveled to them, but it's fucking sketchy. It's my kids' wants to get donuts in downtown and we're walking the street like every step of the way. You're like, is this guy going to attack us? Is that guy crazy? Literally.

We got in from somewhere down to a staying downtown right by City Hall and got in quite late. I wanted something to eat. The hotel didn't have one of them. So I just walk around trying to find it. It's a Saturday night.

It's not super late. It's like 8.9 p.m. It's unbelievable. Zombies, the stink of like... Yeah.

It's just a shit and piss everywhere. And it's a public health problem. And you walk around and you think high-foys this is possible. How is this possible? It's the second city of America with the richest country in the world.

This is with the richest state. I mean, you're being ripped off like that and this is what we end up with. Let's talk about just the security on the police. I mean, LAPD is saying that by the time the Olympics is two years away, they will have half the number of officers that they should have. Half.

And yeah, our taxes are the highest in the country. They've just increased the taxes in LA. Local sales tax going off. What I was getting to was imagine Skid Row. So Skid Row is roughly 50-something blocks.

So 50 blocks where no one wants to buy a building. 50 blocks where no one wants to put up a business. No one wants to lease a building for 10 years if it's in camp that's right in front of it. You can't even clean them up. You can't tell them to move.

You can't ask them to not shit on your porch. It's just unbelievable. There's nothing you can do. So just think about all the tax revenue that's being lost, all the business being lost, and all of those areas in downtown that is completely unsafe and contaminated. It's just unbelievable.

The last time I went, I've been a few times, we went with this. They destroyed the word non-profit now. I don't even want to say that. Like an actual charity. It's a real one.

A real one. It started off, they were trying to save the dogs. And what they're doing with the dogs is just unbelievable. Using the dogs to test their drugs. So use the dogs to make sure the dogs don't have to do the dogs.

Anyway, so they started off with that. It was just a woman who's driving by and saw a dog in distress. This was a few years ago and around that has built this beautiful charity. We were there on a Sunday, they're giving out clothes and stuff to help people. And she knows all the people.

But this time, for some reason, I was even more infuriated than before. Because it's like, if you're the mayor of LA or the governor of California, and this is going on, what are you doing? How can you do anything else before cleaning this up? It's so scary. What was there when they got there and it's sort of accepted that's just so bad.

It's always going to be there. It's been bad for a long time. Yeah. You know, I did Fear Factor in Downtown LA. We filmed a lot of our episodes in Downtown LA because there was a lot of abandoned buildings.

Because it's a big part of it. But also, Los Angeles lost a lot of its manufacturing, just kind of like evaporated, for whatever reason. So one time I was driving home and I took the wrong turn. And I was like, what the fuck is this? It was just an entire street filled with people in cardboard boxes and tents and garbage everywhere.

Just piles everywhere. I was like, this is great. And this was like 2004, 2005 maybe. It was bad back then. It's just tucked away into this old place.

We looked at it, there was a documentary about the Cecil Hotel because there was a woman who drowned in one of the tanks and apparently they thought that she was murdered. But then when they got to surveillance footage, it seems like she had a schizophrenic episode and she stopped taking her medication and she jumped into the tank and drowned in there. So it was this whole thing of what the Cecil Hotel used to be like and that these people that come from other countries that go, oh, we're going to rent this hotel in Downtown LA. Must be nice. It's a historic hotel.

It's been around since 1835, whatever the fuck it is. Oh, this should be great. And then you get there. You're like, holy fuck. You're in the middle of Skid Row.

And it was part of the documentary explaining how bad this area got. It's so bad. And also there's something about the, just the squallet, the filth, the total disrespect. They have medieval diseases that are emerging. We haven't seen in like a hundred years.

It's unbelievable. And I just think that it's amazing to me. It's truly amazing that this just rolls on and nothing happens. Right. It's on a state and national emergency scandal of the highest.

But no one goes there. That's the thing. As long as it stays contained, this was what this documentary was alleging, is that the practice of moving people to Skid Row started a long time ago. And what it was, was to clean up Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, they'd find vagrants, they'd grab them, bring them to Downtown, drop them off there. That's how it got started.

And then they kept them there. They literally contained them there. Not anymore. No, I don't have to. Well, they don't have to because now they know this is the place where you can get drugs and you can get food.

And you get drugs from the government. I mean, that's the point. You got them. They give them drugs. They give them opioids.

They give them opioids as a substitute for fentanyl. So what kind of opioids? I don't know. Which is not really technically an opiate. I can't remember what he went there.

They went there. They let us in actually. We tried to film inside. There's a guy just did get inside. Christopher Rufo from Manhattan Institute.

And he made a film about the crack pipes. They're giving out whatever. They give out crack pipes. Yeah, he did a little, I mean, I don't know if that was a, he made of, I don't know. I didn't see it myself.

Caring for those people. But it's just ridiculous. I see the whole state, like probably not many people do. And just there's something about the degradation, the squalor in so many places. Not everywhere, of course.

It's beautiful. I love California. But mainly hills and still, still a lot of places. Yeah, but there's a whole lot more breaking and entering. Exactly.

A whole lot more home invasions. A whole lot more crime. A whole lot more crime. I mean, that's why we, one of the things, they can't, we're just trying to make a difference here. You know, you've got one particular thing with these home invasions.

They're all wearing masks now. It's like a really big part of which didn't used to be the case. And so we've been working on a plan that if you get enhancements for your sentencing, just give yourself up. Because we've got to try and, there's no interest in trying to stop this stuff. There seems to be an interest in letting people out of jail who've committed violent crimes, which I would only do if I wanted to destroy a city.

It's crazy. If you wanted to destroy a city, you would do it exactly the way they're doing it. And then the other people are the most progressive DAs who are willing to let people out, no matter what. And then you use a bunch of words, like racism, systemic racism, whatever, discrimination. Yeah, that's the reason why Mike has robbed 99 people over the last 12 years.

And the one thing that's good news though, is the new DAs, pretty good. He's good. He's good. I supported him. He's doing the other night.

So he's really doing a good job, shows that you can make a change, actually. I mean, look, he's up against the whole system and the political system, which is still captured by that kind of insane ideology. And so much of what you see going wrong in California is exactly that. It's ideology over anything that's practical. Yes.

And it's also you have to adhere to the narrative. Yes. Or you will be punished. And so everyone's scared. So they say a bunch of things that they think make sense.

There was a really, like, for example of it, there was a Democrat state legislator. I think somewhere like Santa Cruz, somewhere like that, there's a couple of years ago who voted the wrong way on a bill that one of the government unions was pushing. I can't remember the details, but it was like, offended that maybe it was the university teacher, something like that. A Democrat. And then they then funded the campaign of the Republican just to teach them not to step out of line.

It's amazing. Well, there's a bunch of Republicans that they like to call rhinos, you know, that Republican name only. There's a lot of those folks that are basically Trojan horses. You know, I think we have a real problem in this country where there's only two parties. You know, I just, I think it's crazy.

There's so many people like me, for instance, that agree with a lot of the things that the left pushes and agree with many of the things that the right pushes, but things that some of the things that the right pushes are fucking ridiculous. And some of the things that the left pushes are fucking ridiculous, but you're just just, yeah. And you're defined by the worst members of each party. You're defined by the dumbest mag of people versus the fucking, you know, the Portland people. It's like these are these are your options.

You have to be completely ridiculous people who believe in non-binary folk and then you've people that are, you know, think this is a Christian nation and we should kick out all the Muslims. Yeah. So we, it's interesting because I thought about this when, well, not that. I didn't think about it that much, but there are a few people, because I think for what I'm about to say, it doesn't work, but a few people say, oh, you should run as an independent. You shouldn't run as an independent.

Yeah. And you know, I am independent minded and I've never run for office. I'm not part of this machine. I'll just say what I think, especially because no one thinks I'm going to win. I'm like, well, I'll just go for it.

Say what I think. But I, exactly right. You won't win. You won't win. There's just no way.

He was telling me that he was going to run as an independent. I was like, shush. Yeah. Michael, you fucking can't win. You know Michael, he's fantastic.

He's great. And he ran for governor twice as an independent. Yeah. And I remember, I tried to help. I put him on my show.

I think he wasn't going to win. Yeah. I mean, it's good for his career. Okay. And he gives him an opportunity to speak his mind.

He says a lot of very, very interesting and intelligent things. Yes. He's great. Yeah. I mean, he's, he's great at exposing a lot of horseshit.

Yeah. You know, he's really good at that. And he's very meticulous. He's a good journalist. I really believe that I can win.

For real? Well, you might be able to, because California's that fucked. California's that fucked. I think there's a lot of people. Look, we lived in a very liberal area when I lived in California.

Everyone was very liberal. And it was normal. It was like, it was normal liberal. What it used to mean? Like you believed in gay rights.

You believed in women's rights. You believed in civil rights. Normal stuff. You believed in a social safety net. Normal stuff.

Like that was what it used to mean to be a liberal. Bill Clinton liberal. That's from like the 90s. If you listen to Bill Clinton talk today, he sounds like he's running for a Republican. No, but an immigration.

Yes. And I think that's what I was saying before, which was so, it's like, we can't have all these illegal immigrants and we have to, and it was about the health. Can we, we can't be giving free health care to illegal immigrants? Because we cannot have incentives for more illegal immigrants to come. Republican talking point.

Amazing. But it just shows you it's all bullshit. It's not real. Like this idea that if you're on the left, you're supporting science. You're supporting civil rights.

They're telling you that to get your vote so they can steal money. That's all it is. As soon as you accept that, you realize like, oh, both parties are completely full of shit. They just fuck you in different ways. There's definitely, one thing I've noticed, there's in, yeah, in the most of, in Sacramento, in the legislature, I think they're just, I don't know, either they don't believe it or they've just been beaten down.

And so you've had this, they've just gone along with it. But actually now you've got a few Republicans in California and their friends of mine, and we're working together. You know, if you've heard of any of the people like Carl DeMio, David Tong, about Alima Sator, the new leader in the assembly really actually have got this, you know, we're real kind of friends and allies in fighting back against the corruption. The big thing I think that you learn when you do is the interest groups, the big business, the big unions, they just completely capture the government. And I think it's fair to say the Republicans have been part of that.

But there's a group of us now who really don't buy it and we're fighting back. I think we can make a big difference if we get, you know, if we can, they've got a two-thirds majority in the legislature. They call it super majority. It's been like that for more than 10 years. So they can do whatever they want the Democrats and the Republicans have been kind of irrelevant.

If we can just, you know, win a few more seats so they don't have a super majority. And if I can get it late, and then we can start to chip away at it, for sure. I think it's important to not let either party have complete and total control. That's exactly right. And I don't think it's right.

I don't think this is just the Democrats. I think if the Republicans are in the same position, we have another unique set of corruption and problems that would be similar. They'd be finding other ways to steal money. Yeah. I mean, this is the fundamental 100% agree.

I mean, that's what I say to Democrats. And we, you know, we can see it in some of the numbers. I'm doing well with independence. We're getting Democrats come to my events. One of the things I say is like, it's just not healthy.

They have one party running everything. And for the last 16 years, in California, they've had all the statewide elected positions, Governor and other ones, Attorney General, whatever, two-thirds majority in both legislative chambers, every big city, every big county, the state Supreme Court, six-one, Democrat appointees, they just rub a stamp, whatever they want. And it's just not healthy. And it gets into this mentality of arrogance where they just feel they can do whatever they want and no one's ever going to, you know, stop them. Yeah.

That's where we're at. And again, if the Republicans were in the same position of power, you'd have another different set of problems. That was probably very similar because it's just how people operate when they have control. When they have complete, it's just like if you have an authoritarian government. Yes.

That's exactly right. Similar kind of a situation. You have no one's challenging your position of power and you have to do whatever you want to do. And then you have a bunch of people that funded your campaign and you have a bunch of money. And then they're helping you out with this and business deals to your own goal.

And this and that. Yeah. You're right. You're still just now in Hungary with Victor Orban. So I know Hungary well because it's my family still live there.

And if only 16 years he was in power, saying the amount of time as the Democrats in California, and by the end, it's all exactly what you're talking about. Like just unbelievable levels of corruption. And it's always if they have total control, they're going to be corrupt. Especially if they don't have any oversight. If they can just get away with it.

Like this homeless thing where they've lost the 24 billion dollars and the government can say, no, don't look at that stamp. You can veto that. How is that legal? How is it legal that you could veto something that is? No, and actually the amazing thing about that is that it was even the Democrat supermajority that did that.

So the process with the state auditor, it was the Republican legislator that asked the state auditor to look at it. So it's initiated by Republican. State auditor publishes the report 24 billion missing. The legislature as a whole, which is two thirds, Democrat run, said, we need a proper audit. It was everyone crazy.

Yeah, because those Democrats weren't completely corrupt. It's amazing. You don't have to be completely corrupt and not look into that. It's amazing. And then the bullshit excuses that they come, oh, it's not necessary because of them.

They're like, oh, it's not necessary to look at where 24 billion dollars went. And it not just didn't work, but homelessness increased by substantial marginal. Well, because the money, the answer to the question is very often when we say that term homeless industrial complex. What is it? You look at it.

It's not too much to do. You've got the nonprofits, like we talked about, that just keep getting the money. But they've actually made it illegal to solve the problem. So it's not much okay. It's illegal for the state money to go to any of these organizations that require any kind of response from the homeless person.

So you can't require addiction treatment, recovery, anything like that, job-trink, nothing. It's illegal. It's called housing first. So like, obviously, when you've got 80% and the fentanyl is a really big part. The idea that it's a housing issue is so preposterous too.

So you've got the nonprofit. But then the other part of it, which is where actually the bulk of the money is going, are these crony developers. There's a very small group of developers, house builders, that build these apartment units. They call it permanent supportive housing, the other, you know, shelter. And they're charging up to, I mean, a low-ball estimate, about 600,000.

There are some in the Bay Area that are $900,000 a million per unit to build, right? I've got a friend that builds apartments in the Bay Area, right? You know, he said, without all the government bullshit that goes around it, the layers of nonsense that they put in, if it's taxpayer money, the union contracts that you've got to use this kind of material, the environmental, all this stuff. You could build it for a quarter, like 250,000 per door, they call it four times as much. That's where the money's going.

And then you get the unit, whatever, they put the homeless person in there who's still addicted to fentanyl. And as I went, again, with a real charity in Venice, we went around. A guy who's a recovered addict, recovering addict, and 23 years clean, and he's actually trying to help people. He actually hires, you know, he rents Airbnb's, and he does group recovery, and they have a recovery program they do together. He says, like, these guys that are getting the permanent supportive housing, it's like a second home, because they're going back to the street to buy drugs, deal drugs, because they're addicts.

And you're not changing the behavior. They're addicts and they're mentally ill, and so there's a massive influx of homeless people during the Reagan administration, where they kind of open the doors of the mental institutions. And we're not going to fund this anymore, which is for public health and safety, that is a fucking terrible idea. Yeah, and then the other thing about that, I completely agree, is that they then that's been incorporated, that idea that you can't have mental institutions and say no sign. There's this kind of general sense that that's barbaric, and you don't want people in these institutions, and it's better to have them cared in the community.

So that's incorporating it into Medicaid. And so often with government, you've got to look at the money flows, and one of the things that's still there is this rule called IMD, institutions of mental disease. And the IMD rule is that there's no reimbursement from federal Medicaid to any treatment that happens in a facility with more than 16 beds. It's a very specific limit, 16 beds, because it's all based on this philosophy of we don't want big mental institutions. So that means that there's no incentive to have modern, large-scale mental health care, because that's all these small things, because you don't get any money back.

I think people are also rightly suspicious of the potential for a medical health industrial complex. Definitely. And I don't think of how many people. Imagine if you've ever seen that video over there's a guy who gets pulled over and the cops on the spot tell him that he's been evaluated as being mentally unwell, and he needs to come in. And the guy is completely calm and rational when he's talking to him.

And he's like, well, make an appointment and I'll go and get evaluated. And he's like, no, we're going to bring you in. He's like, what are you saying? Well, you've been deemed unwell. He's like, by who?

I don't have. There's no ruling against me. It's really interesting. So apparently there's more to it. And this video went viral.

Apparently there have been some videos of this guy where he posted online where he's acting kind of loony. I saw a couple of them. I was like, yeah, that's a little problematic. But it could also be he's acting out on camera. I don't know if he's doing this in real life, just because someone's doing it in videos.

So a lot of people act out in video just for attention. Or maybe that's how he blows off steam, says, wild shit. I don't know what the fuck he's saying. So the video is very disturbing because in that moment, if these police officers in Canada are supposed to be evaluating someone who doesn't have an official psych evaluation where he's been brought in and they said, you know, you have to be institutionalized. So that hasn't happened.

And so they're pulling this guy over. That's down. And based on his interaction with them, he is completely calm and rational. In fact, like, charitably so because they're saying something totally preposterous. And he's not yelling.

He doesn't raise his voice. He's coherent. He's articulate. I want you to watch it because it's not crazy. Jamie, I'm sure you could find it.

That's really terrifying. But let's just look at the actual video itself because the video itself is bizarre. Because without any context, and again, I think there is some context. There are habits of videos where you act nutty. And this guy might just be manic depressive where he's capable of keeping it together, like to pretend he's normal when the cops are there.

But then as soon as he's on his own, no one's watching, he goes insane. That is possible. But did they have any prior knowledge of him? Yes. What was that basically?

Someone had told them that he's off the rails so they went in to go get him. But the thing is, shouldn't there be like some sort of an official psychiatric evaluation? Conservative influencer? Ah, he's a conservative asshole. Being held captive in Canadian...

Okay, let's watch the video. Put your headphones on. Because the video's kind of cooking. And this is Dr. Emery. He's a resident psychiatrist.

Senior resident is on a rotation with the CAR 87. We're part of the program that includes Vancouver Coastal Health and the Vancouver Police. And what we do is we go to people when there's different reasons that come out. Every case is a little different and we go to people to see them where they are, especially if there's been issues with trying to find them and talk to them. So in your case, I think you were certified under the mental health act.

Just, I don't know how long ago, but maybe three weeks ago or four weeks ago, were you aware of that? Dr. Taylor saw you in a cafe. She didn't certify you. I think he filmed part of it.

Okay. And this is Dr. Emery. He's a resident. And then she spoke with your family, got some more information.

And you know, you have to turn that on. So just one sec. What the officer just told me is that you and I can set up a meeting and we can chat then. So why don't we do that, okay? I'm not turning the camera off. I have a legal right to keep the camera on.

If you don't want to make the appointment now, we can do it another time. But that's what the officer just asked that we do. So why don't we do that? So I'm going to certify you under the mental health act. I'm going to bring you to the hospital to do testing on you.

And you're going to talk to a psychiatrist in a controlled environment because we don't believe that you're going to attend an appointment. I've never been given a chance to attend an appointment. So he's certified. I've never been given a chance to attend an appointment. What is going on? I was never given a psyche val or nothing. He just looked at me and said you're certified.

Okay. So I don't know why, but it's up to the doctor. So if you didn't even give me an eval, he just looked at me and said I'm certified. Please consider what you're doing and please leave the book. I'm more than happy to come in for employment. I'm happy to go through and do everything properly.

Okay. I just I've been completely compliant with anything. That's his fault. You're interacting with me at a very. So I had some eggs and stuff for breakfast this morning.

We didn't put drinks. I had to tape this up because my windowed in out of drinks. And so all night there's just light beaming into my room. So I couldn't sleep last night. So I demanded that if they give me tape and stuff to put my windows to that I could sleep tonight.

I'm like one of the only rooms that has no drapes. Shanger law baby. How fucking strange is crazy. Strange. So here's the thing. Like this doctor ran into him somewhere and said I'm certifying you based on what right.

And is he really a conservative influencer or is that a narrative? Like I don't understand what that means. Like if you are quote unquote conservative and you have a thousand people on your Instagram and you rant and rave, you know, in a manic depressive manner. Is that are you a conservative influencer now or is that like rage bait to get them to say like, but here's the thing. Like Canada has socialized medicine and they also have insane government over each.

Exactly. And if there was someone who was a rabble rouser online and that person happened to be acting a little cookie, wouldn't that be a great time? But meanwhile, how many fucking liberal, this is Vancouver, which is like Portland on steroids. Like how many kooky fucking people on the left are being pulled into mental hospitals and making similar videos? Fucking zero, which is a little odd, but it doesn't mean that this guy's not a little off the rails.

Because the videos that I saw, see if you can find some videos of him, they might have been pulled from the internet. But a bunch of people were saying, hold on, there's more to this and we're showing somebody, here's the other problem. I don't know if those videos are real. Those videos could be AI. You know, in this day and age, it's almost impossible to tell.

You could say, you have video of this guy, you could say, have this guy scream shit stuff about what you need to go for a giant end in the middle of his back. Or you could say anything. You could say anything. The new Subaru Cross Trek Hybrid is the most fuel efficient cross trek yet. That means less time filling your tank and more time filling your day.

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But this is why you've got to be so careful about authoritarianism. Yes. Keeping into government. That right there. First of all, I don't like his backseat. All that shit.

That looks a little kooky. That fits that he might be losing his marbles. If he's got stacks of stuff, unless he's leaving an office and moving stuff and putting his backseat temporarily. It's a weird sign when the entire backseat is filled with boxes and trash. He might be losing your marbles. But he did sound like there's no, in my eyes, listening to him talk.

There's no indication that this guy's a threat to himself and he must be institutionalized. That guy's more than capable of speaking in a very rational manner. So even if he's nuts, he's not that nuts. There's a lot of nutting. Yes, much more dangerous.

To me, this is very, like we're talking earlier about the medicalization and everything. And there's a trend here of this inhumanity that is really, really dark. I mean, did you see the, I don't know if you followed the back and forth with the AI guys on regulating AI and whether AI is positive or negative, that whole debate? Which did you see Amadeh, the anthropic guy? But in the last few days, there was this, I think it was on one of the other, on all end.

That's right. Someone was talking about him wanting to have, like, hyping up the doom scenario from AI. These guys that are hyping up the doom of AI are the actual people that were working on it. This is Amadeh who's the CEO and the founder of anthropic. And he replied, and so the argument was he's hyping it up because he wants regulation, government regulation, that will protect the kind of big incumbents against, you know, competition.

That was the argument. And then he replied to the argument by saying he's had some stuff about regulation, then he did long post on X. And the first one was about the regulation. The second one was about actually, I'm not that. I'm not Mr. Doom when it comes to AI.

I've always said it can be really positive. And one of the things he pointed to was this essay that he wrote called, Machines of Love in Grace, 14,000 words. And that was his response to, like, being characterised as Mr. Negative. When you look at this thing, it's so dark.

Like, he's going on about, well, there'll be no, we can foresee a time when human beings can't make useful contributions to the economy. And the people won't have much to do. And then they can play video games. And then at one point, there's the thing that made me think of it when he was raising, well, what are kids going to do? And they're saying, he starts going about, we have things like Ritalin.

And we know how to medicate people when they're depressed. So it's fine if they don't have a sense of Ritalin. If they don't have a sense of worth, well, numb them. Literally, that's what he wrote. And that's what he pointed to as him being this positive.

It's just terrifying. So this is recently, this is within the last week. Okay. What is his position in the company? The CEO is the founder of Anthropic. Like the main big two, the programmers, though, are the ones that are leaving and writing poetry.

They're giving up on society and they're hiding and waiting. You know, you hear about that. There's one lead programmer that read, he wrote some, like, basically a statement as he was leaving, explaining the impending doom that is coming to civilization. And he's checking out and he's going to write it out and see what happens. But he left the United States. I think he went to Ireland or something like that.

He's going to write poetry. Okay. Like, okay. Like, I mean, this is an existential crisis. This guy's having while he's working on it.

Well, he's working on this thing and realizing this thing is conscious. And that's one of the things that I feel is so odd about the two that have been most negative are Amadeh, Dario Amadeh, he's anthropic. And Sam Altman, open AI. They're the most negative. We'll have been. And if you believe half the things they're saying,

then why are you doing it? Then if you think this is the end of the human, whatever, I know they dialed it back a bit. But why would you keep building something? Did you assume it's so bad? When Peter Thiel got asked, without the human race should survive, what did he say?

He paused for like 15 seconds. I didn't read this, but what he says. The dimension of Ritalin is like a good thing. We figured out how to improve ourselves with things like Ritalin and using AI could potentially make it even better. That AI will make Ritalin even better. So we'll just do awesome drugs.

We'll find better versions of drugs that are better than Ritalin. Instead of people finding meaning and purpose in life, we'll just not know how it's being talked about. What is he saying? Why is he using Ritalin? It's not nothing to do and work in meaning discussion.

It appears as speculation. It's just about the future of neuroscience. Oh, I see what you're saying. So what they're saying, they're talking about increasing the potency or making these things more effective for mental health interventions using AI. So Yargis at AI driven biology could enable much greater cognitive and mental health interventions than those available today.

That's really wonderful, if true. I personally know people that have been saved by SSRIs. I'm not a blanket SSRIs are bad. I have a friend that was really depressed and suicidal and I got him a psychiatrist and he eventually got his life back in gear, ween himself off him now. So who knows? That guy could have made a hasty decision and taken his own life and if he was in Canada, they might have probably fucking encouraged it.

So he's fine now. It's just the problem is they're ridiculously over prescribed and there's another solution. The other solution is a natural human solution. It doesn't involve medication, it involves exercise and nutrition and community. We can all encourage that for free.

You know, fucking do push ups and bodyweight squats. It doesn't cost you a nickel. You don't have to go to a pharmacy. All these things are already here. Like why are we developing addictive chemical solutions?

These are all addictive. Every one of them. I have a good body right now. Got off of them. He was doing great and I was back on him again.

Because he's fucked. His system's fucked because he's been on for 20 years. And it's scary because I know people that have been on them that have done rash things and they just don't feel like they are themselves anymore. So the weird sexual side effects, the numbness of the genitals, inability to have orgasms. There's a lot of fucking weird shit in that way when there's another solution.

That's what's so weird. There's some interesting context. According to Snopes, that guy was arrested after he posted this. After he posted what? This document. This is not solicitation.

If you find this document unattended, do not remove it from the property where it's placed. Unless you're the owner of said property removing this document making criminally liable for indictable offense carrying a penalty of up to 10 years in prison. So what is this? It's on Google Docs. It's just the brief explanation that's talking about how China and Canada are corrupt and making a dick care.

China and the corrupt Canadian government are trying to turn Vancouver into a dictatorship police state. China's been classified as high risk adversary by all long term democratic security alliances, NATO, NORAD, the Five Eyes Alliance, the Canadian Center for Cybersecurity, even Carney himself during elections. Carney has committed treason via secret Chinese policing and law enforcement, MOU, illegal Chinese police stations in Vancouver selling Vancouver to China via the Aboriginal peoples on drip. Well, is he right? So that's right. I have no idea if he's right or not. But that's, it was saying he was not maybe an influencer, but a commentator got like 67,000 followers on Instagram.

And this could be why they're saying he's nuts. Right, I guess. Because he's uncovering some shit that's probably going on. I could have said this is not exactly out of the mainstream to be... Listen, the fucking mayor of Arcadia in California, they just found out it was a Chinese spy. The mayor of a city in California.

Well, just today, there was more about Swalwell and Fang Fang, the Chinese spy. The guy wanted to be governor and he's like, I don't know. I wanted to make the joke. I was like, the very first debate, the very first DV debate. You know, you're kind of getting ready to think.

And I really wanted to make a sort of Fang Fang Fang bang bang joke joke joke. No, Fang Fang Fang. Oh, yeah, it's an obvious joke, right? So he admitted to physical relations? He denied it for years. Yeah, for years. So just today, he admitted it?

I think it's just in the news today. I don't know. Well, was he trying to make a comeback? No, no, no. I'm trying to bang this by. Whoopsies. I knew I really wanted to make this joke about the Fang Fang.

It's just so... You can't resist it, right? It's a funny name. Exactly. Fang Fang, bang, whatever.

Anyway, so, and then he didn't show up and I said, well, he denied that it's... Can I really say that? If you've got to be fair, you've got to try to be accurate. Good for you. But then he didn't show up to the debate because he claimed that there was... I don't know.

I had some vote or whatever. Well, I never got to debate him. The idea that this kid in Canada is being brought into mental health evaluation in prison because he's uncovering that. That's not unprecedented. That's believable. I don't know if it's true. He might also have been a little kooky.

I don't know if the videos that I saw are real, but the videos that I... again, especially considering what we're talking about now. If you were trying to make someone look insane that was uncovering some real serious corruption with a foreign government. Which is possible. Of course it's possible. And also it's America, right? We're in a huge country. It's like beautifully crazy in many ways.

People can think what then they've got the internet. And you get people... Honestly, all the time, people are giving me... they shut things in my hand and envelope and I open it up every single time because half the time, it's something that's... something conspiratorial that isn't right or doesn't seem right.

But the point is that they actually are useful. Well, that makes me think about something in a different way. But the point is that, yes, there's lots of people out there with... some what crazy ideas. You can't lock them all up.

It's not just that. There's lots of real corruption. As this guy posts this. And as they're in an investigation, do we know whether or not this is an act? Has it been completely debunked? Because if it has, oh, well then, maybe you're right. Maybe he's crazy.

Or if it turns out that everything he's saying is true, maybe he's a slightly crazy person who's also uncovering the truth. Which is like, sometimes it takes obsessive people. That was the premise of that Mel Gibson movie. Remember? Yeah. He was crazy but he was actually right. No, I think it was called conspiracy theory.

Yeah, was that with Julie Roberts? Yeah. It was fun. That's great. Yeah. He was like a nutty dude who was on the thing.

He's basically like Alex Jones. That sounds really interesting. It was good, but I love that. You know, for the time. A little dated. You go watch it today. You're like, well, one of the things that I've owned the road the whole time.

Like long drive to California. And so, find some of these... even now and again, you just want something. So there's a lot of movies, it turns out, that are big parts of American culture that I haven't seen. We watched, what was it, the other night? Super bad. I never seen it. It's so good. It's one of the best comedies of all time.

It was so good. I've never seen it. I unfortunately tried watching with my kids when they were 10 and 12. I'm curious what's down. Watch this. And then shut it off after three minutes. Sorry. I forgot. I forgot.

Really? Right. It's not just funny and I kind of slapped it with a bit of that, but it was just really clever. To see where my kids just sit in class drawing dicks. It's so funny.

By the way, could not make that movie today. And the people who would not make that movie today. So my friend Eric, he's on my team. We become good friends. He's... you met him.

That's exactly what we were saying. Like, you could make it. They got captured. They got captured. That's the problem with being on the team of the left. They got captured by an ideology that destroyed comedy.

In their world. They cannot do that kind of comedy anymore. No, we believe that you support all the things these people are saying. It's just showing a ridiculous human being who's saying some crazy shit and it makes you laugh. It's not changing the fucking world. It's not altering anybody's opinions.

It's not going to force people to do anything that they wouldn't ordinarily do. No good person is going to watch that movie and want to go out and do bad things. It's not how it works. It's just a piece of art. It's just like Bob Marley didn't really shoot the sheriff.

It's a piece of art. It's a piece of art. And it's a piece of art that we have fucked up. It's particularly movies because movies are attached to Hollywood. And then stand up comedy fortunately has an out.

And because of the internet, we don't need a Hollywood anymore. But because of that, we now get labeled right wing. Especially Stan's comedy that's not adherent. And I don't want to call it anti-woe because that's silly. Because it's not anti-woe because it's just comedy.

It's just like, woke doesn't allow certain... It should be anti-establishment. And when the establishment is taken over by an ideology, it happens to be that. But you go the other way. When it's the people in power. It's supposed to be against the people in power.

It's supposed to be what is funny. What is funny? What is funny? Across the board. And as soon as you say no, you can't make fun of this anymore. Like why? Why?

It's a religion. It's basically like it's blasphemy to make fun of whatever you decide. It's a ridiculous, it's weird. And that killed that kind of movie. Yeah. Yeah. Those fucking movies were everywhere. The hangover. There was always a movie like that.

A lot of them. We were just talking about it. Yeah. A centura pet detective saw a chemist. It was about a transgender woman and you find out she was transgender and everybody throws up.

You remember? No. What about Agent Turipine? What about Detective? No. I know we go to do a list for the ron.

That's obviously watching Monty Hall over there. Fucking Benny Hill reruns. My favourite Benny Hill thing. I'm not saying this. But someone at the front of mine at Fox called a she's called Kennedy's very funny.

And she used to always do you remember Janet Yellen? Yes. She was there. She always called her Benny Hill. And then the minute I saw that, I saw a picture of the next time, I just couldn't care.

Kennedy was an MTV VJ. She's great. And then she became a Republican talking head on Fox. I was like, that's nuts. She's a really libertarian though.

But isn't it interesting? Like someone's like on MTV with like a girl with glasses on, like a progressive for sure. And then winds up on, but she's cool. She's libertarian. She seems very smart.

She's great, very funny. She does freedom fest. She's like that's a big part of that. The libertarian. She's great.

How'd she go from being a VJ? Like here's the next fucking, She's from Elegia. She's very young. She's great. She's a gorgeous.

Yeah, that's funny. But I love the comedy thing. Like that's another joy actually. So I used to really, so Eric's really to Louis C. K.

So I've seen a bit of him, obviously. But I've watched a lot now. He's so great. I mean, we've really enjoyed that. Brilliant.

Brilliant. Brilliant. And yeah, did some fucking, I know those weird like it, but the way they described it was so different than the actual acts themselves. But also his response to it was brilliant. That show where he addressed it.

It was so good. He had a weird kink where he wanted people to watch him jerk off and he would ask them. And if they said yes, he would do it. I don't think he should do that. I think it seems crazy to be standing in front of a couple of girls and jerking off from him.

But I'm not him. Okay. And I also didn't say if I said no, open the door, let me out. And then you wouldn't let me out. That's a different story.

But that's not what anybody was alleging. It's just kind of gross and weird. And I think he would probably admit to that. But you know, he did. I mean, yeah, it's very funny.

I can't remember exactly. But the first big show he did after that, when he sort of retries from like being his art away from it. He's like, what you got to judge. Like, what is he? As long as he's not done, what like Bill Cosby did.

That's a completely different thing. It's systematic, like really machine like a predatory thing that was just ongoing. It was a weird kink. Yeah. He had a weird kink he went and jerked off in front of people.

Okay. It's, it's, so look, I get the people to be upset. And if you don't want to watch this comedy more, I get that too. That's fine. Everybody has, that's your product.

But like the comedy itself is some of the best comedy that's ever been written. It's exactly. Ever been done. Yeah. He's one of the best ever to it.

I mean, if you have a top whatever group of comedians. He and you're kind of gang here. How do you like? Well, he's in New York. But he actually helped me design the club.

Okay. So I was bare bones and we went over the club and he gave me a bunch of great suggestions and I implemented all of them. The smaller, our rooms are named after the nuclear bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So it's a fat man and little boy or a rooms. There's a reason for that.

The reason is actually that the, because it's the comedy mothership. It's a UFO based comedy club. The UFOs really started showing up in America after the nuclear bomb. So once the nuclear weapons program was implemented in the 1940, the amount of UFO sightings went through the roof and the real big ones were like Roswell, New Mexico, which is 47. So right after the war.

They started. So this is like part of UFO folklore. So that's why we did it. That's why we named him after the nuclear bomb and not making light of people dying in horrific nuclear bombs. So he told me to make the stage smaller in the little room.

It was a great idea. I was like, right, why is the stage so big? Small room? And then he also said, it was already a low ceiling. He's like, can you lower it more?

I'm like, we can lower it like right to the top of that door. It's like, you should do that. And he gave me some advice on the sound deadening of the room and what to do and make it, you know, how to make the sound crystal clear and just great. Awesome advice. And the beautiful thing about that club is I took advice from every comedian that was in town.

I bring them there. I don't tell me what you think. If you wanted to design a comedy club, I'll literally let you, just tell me what you think. And we ran through a vote. So there's a whole group of us.

And it was like me and Brian Simpson and Ron White and Tony Hinchcliffe and all these guys that were good friends of mine that we performed with all the time. We all just sat around and none of the ideas were like, I think we should do this. I didn't do that with any of them. I said, tell me what you guys want to do. And they were like, you should have this.

Like, OK, we'll do that. Great. And then we should see the guy on stage. OK, let's do that. What else?

And everything anybody said we did, we should have free mental health services for all the employees. So we did that. So free availability for counseling, psychiatry. We have that. Psychologists.

They can all go to counselors. So that's free. Health care. Take care of everything. Give the comedians way more money than any other club does.

We did that. We just like, what does everybody want? What does everybody want? What does everybody want? Let's do it in a way.

We're just trying to make the best thing possible. We're not doing it like let's make the most money. We're just trying to not lose money. So let's just do it that way. And it worked.

Because of people like Louis C. K. Yeah. All these people that came by and gave us advice and told us what they think. Fantastic.

So yeah, so Louis, great. I love him. He's a fucking really smart guy, but like a lot of smart guys. He's fucking weird. You know, a lot of people.

I think that about these A. I want to be a comedian. You have to be a fucking weirdo. You know, they're all just weird in different ways. Chappelle's weird in his way.

You know, Chris Rock's weird in his way, Hinchcliffe's weird in his way. They're all weird. Shane's weird. Everyone's an incredible thing to do, honestly. Just it's like really in a tiny way, I'm not even comparing it.

But I'm comparing this in terms of what I'm doing, which is you got to go there and you've got, I don't know, I just a few the other just in the last few days, you've got hundreds of people and you've got to entertain them. Now I'm mainly talking about politics, which is much easier because you've got, you know, material that's just obvious and out there in its bullet. But it's, you've got to keep them entertained. You can't be boring. You can't like, and you know, you've got to give a good show.

Yes. And so the thought of doing that and being funny, all of it, instead of what I do, which is throw in the odd joke, you know, political joke or something, self-deprecating joke, you know, that's just, that's nothing. But it's not focusing on that. If you focus on that, you could do it. No, but I'm just saying, I now really appreciate how hard it is.

Just, just it is and it isn't. Joe Diaz has the greatest thing. It goes, it's the fucking hardest, easiest thing you'll ever do. Because when you're flowing, it's easy. You know, when you're up there and you're killing, it's so easy.

It's hard constructing the material. I was gonna say a lot of preparation. There's a lot of preparation and there's a lot of time you have to spend alone thinking. And then you have to spend a lot of time bullshitting with your friends. Because sometimes like the green room conversations, some of us like Brian Simpson said something the other day and we're like, right that down, right that down for each other.

Right dude, that's a bit, that's 100% a bit. And he started doing it on stage and it's killing. Like that happens too. And it's like the camaraderie and the fun of like being together like a bruise comedy. But you also need time in front of the fucking computer or the notebook.

You need to be sitting there going over your stuff. If you don't do that, you're not gonna come up with new material. And then you have to try it out. And you have to be willing to like trot it out there. You have this idea, it's only existed in your head.

You're kind of convinced that there's something there but you're not totally sure. You're like, what do you think about this? And you just throw it out there and sometimes it's great. And it's like 50-50. Sometimes it's dog shit.

It's 50-50 to what I bring to the stage where there's even got life. But writing it down, it's like not even it's like, you know, it's like the Canadian healthcare system for me. It's like what? What? It's 20.

It's just really, no, I think it's, well, I totally appreciate what you're saying. But it's very, I mean to me it seems the ultimate. You're just putting yourself out there. You're definitely putting yourself out there. But you're also doing it this way too.

Like when you're having conversations, maybe you're putting yourself out there even more. Because you're actually putting out your opinions and some of them you had no idea you were gonna discuss. So you're just trotting it out there thinking out loud in front of millions of people like we're doing right now. When you're doing stand up, like I know these by the time anyone sees me perform at a club where they're paying money, most of those bits I've been doing. So I've been like I'm just trying to add to them and hone them and same the right way and move the order around and expand.

That's why I love about it because I really do love it. And that's why I've really enjoyed, like I said, Eric really into it. And just he's showing me a lot of comedians that I didn't know about. And I just, I love words and language anyway, you know, I've written, but in completely different, I've written books and whatever TV scripts when I did my show, that kind of thing. So I really appreciate language.

And I love just how changing the order of a word or whatever can just make something work or not work. Oh yeah. I love changing the order of a word, changing the way you do it. Sometimes you do it, like Louis used to do that where he would like reverse a joke, like turn it around and then maybe he would like take it and do his best joke and open with it. So that his jokes afterwards had to get better to follow his best joke.

Yeah, it's a constant little fucking laboratory up there. And you need the audience in order to find the life. Do you need to see their faces? Like can you see or the lights too much in your face? You can see most of the first few rows.

Right. Because that's important, must be. It helps. It definitely helps. It's not just listening to the volume of laughs, is it?

Like what is it? Ah, there's both things, but obviously they're there to have a good time. But my job's easier because I'm going on after they're already laughing, right? So there's been a few people on before me, everybody's having a good time. And then you're basically just connecting with them.

You know, you find them, what's up? How are you? You like let them get comfortable, you connect with them, and then you're just doing the material. You're just finding the reality. You have to be like, whatever you're saying, you have to be 100% thinking about that thing on.

You can't be thinking and then I'm going to say it like, no, you have to be thinking about the thing. And that's it. That's the primary thought. You know the pacing of it. You know what's coming next, but you don't think about what's coming next.

You think about the thing. That's where preparation's important. You have to make sure you have a set list and order. But you also have to be flexible because there's going to be moments where you want to dive out of that set order and something might happen in the audience or something might come up. And you have another thing.

And you're like, this would go better right here. So I'll shove this in here. And then you have to remember your order and go, I didn't do this. I'll put that later. It's not the same.

But there's a similarity because I do all these things and you've got bits really, which is my thing on high speed rail. And there's a long version of it and a short version of it. And then suddenly you'll find yourself doing it even though I hadn't intended to. And then, oh shit, that's really long. So it's not the same, but it's similar.

And I definitely find... Trump does bits. Oh yeah. And he just on for so long. Remember when he did this impromptu bit about Biden losing himself on stage, just wandering around not knowing where he was?

It's like, you're doing stand up. Exactly. Exactly. But I find it much better. I much prefer it when you're closer to the people.

Like physically, when you can... You're not on some stage. You're not on some stage. You know, that kind of thing. Yeah, comedy clubs the way to do it.

That's the real way. However, there's something very intimate about doing an arena in the round. Okay. So I've done a bunch of those where you're standing on a circular stage in the center of the people. And what's intimate about that is all the people over here are looking at all the people over here.

Everybody sees everybody. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. You see each other. It's the right way to do it. Because that way everybody's seeing everybody else having fun.

They're closer than you think they are. They're all right there. There's a lot of them. But it all, the comedy like sprays out to the outer edges. But the center hive all around the stage was just thousands of people.

And the 16,000 see the arena. You're looking in the eyes of 6,000 people. Plus. And it's like they're all seeing each other. It's very intimate.

Oddly. Great. It's fun. As opposed to like a big arena when you're standing on a very high stage and the people are all out there. It feels crazy.

Yeah, exactly. That's very detached. That's not my favorite. That's my least favorite. It's an arena where it's just a flat stage and you're not surrounded by them.

I agree. It feels like you're just delivering something rather than connecting. Exactly. But a theater can be pretty intimate too. Like especially when you're used to doing arenas.

If I do like a 3,000 see theater. It's kind of intimate. It's like it's all what you're comfortable with too. That's a part of it too. Are you comfortable with all these people staring at you?

You see that's the weird thing. I would never have done it before. And suddenly you have all these. I mean I love the response. But it is weird because I've gone from nothing to this.

And you go into rooms like hundreds of people like you. What's the biggest crowd you've had to speak in front of? Well probably when I did Meghan Kelly's show. When Meghan Kelly was here. Not here in California.

And I did a spot there. I did the announcements. It was an arena in Bakersville. The announcement for the UFC weigh-ins. So I see the weigh-ins at the Ellipse on the White House.

So it was 80,000 people. That was fucking nuts. That was the most people I've ever talked to. And that was a very different way of talking because all I'm doing is reading people's names and their official weights very easy. It's just hyping it up, getting everybody pumped up.

You know, like, Ilya, Tolporeani comes out, everybody goes crazy. It's easy. But it's the vibe, the feeling of 80,000 people is fucking nuts. It's a weird feeling. You know, Shane Gillis, my buddy, just did stand up.

So 76,000. Philadelphia, right? Yeah. A fucking football stadium. That had to be insanity.

You could do that easy if you wanted to. It's a crazy thing to do. I don't know if I could do that easy. It's not easy. He broke the world record.

And it's huge. And he's really funny. He's like one of the funniest guys ever. Yeah, that's a good example. I've never seen him before.

Maybe I'll get him to come down tonight. I don't know if he's there. Oh, my God. It's one of my... I would request it from him all the time.

I'm like, please do that bit. It's so funny about George Washington's false teeth being made out of lead. It's such a crazy bit. It's so good. He's a great comedian.

And that's all he cares about. That's what he loves. And he's like all in. And just an awesome guy, too. When you're around him, he's just so fun.

And everyone always smiles around. He's contagious. He's a contagious party. Great. Fun guy.

But we're really lucky that there's a lot of those guys here now. This is a giant hive of them now. Well, you've built that. Well, we all did. We all came here.

No, I hear what you're saying that they contributed. But they had to be here for me to be able to do it. This is not a thing that I could have ever done and said, hey, everybody moved here now. It would never work. They had to already be here.

Everybody moved here before I even had a club. A lot of them did. Yeah. Like, Segura moved here before I had a club. It was an endemic thing.

Yes. Like getting out of places with ridiculous. Yeah, getting out of places and going to a place where you can actually perform. We're all addicts. You know, stand up comedy is a very, very addictive thing.

And if there's a place where you can go where you can do it and your friends already live there. For me, it was Ron White. And it was also there's a thing about the freeness of this city, like the freeness of Texas. The freedom that you had here to be able to go to a restaurant, your businesses could stay open. They didn't put the same kind of restrictions.

They had a small lockdown for a short amount of time and they went, okay, let's get back to work and they did. And California is like, we're going on time! We're still driving around their cars with now. I know. It's so crazy.

I remember it's certainly thinking about this. I was reminded of all of this. Because of the Fauci stuff the other day. The Fauci stuff. That's really awesome.

Because I did this show in Fox News. would never say I'm a journalist, right? Ever. It was an opinion show. I just said what I thought.

But I did do some, like one piece of journalism, like actual journalism, which is the Fauci stuff. It's infuriating, you know, the origin of the virus. I really did, you know, lay that all out in the way that no one else did, because I had these people on US Stanford. I taught at Stanford. So a lot of that information about Fauci and the origin and all of that, I had, and people helped me piece it together. And it's just infuriating that he's still infuriating. Well, the most infuriating to me

thing was that he knew about the miscarriages during the first trimester. He knew about that. And he was still promoting it for pregnant women. Like how many women listened to him and got vaccinated and then had a miscarriage. We don't even know what the numbers are, right? Because those are never

reported as vaccine injuries. We have no idea. Just in fact, I mean, I was listening to who did you have on the other week? That lady who wrote the book, you got into it with her, she had a book you talking about? I can't remember. She's like an investigative. Any Jacobson? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

She about the germ warfare about my watch warfare. So I just listened to that. And then I did that. We didn't really get into it. Like we didn't argue a little bit on just on the origins and the gain of function and all of that. Oh, well, she just probably was trying to be politically correct

and probably not. Well, anyway, I don't know. Well, I remember thinking is I wanted to is that it's still not I don't think understood how directly Fauci was implicated. Like it's still, you hear this language of, oh, he you know, he funded the gain of fun. He pushed it. This was his

thing. Yeah. He really, really was the main global champion of gain of function. Not only that, he enforced the narrative that this was not a lab leak and that allowed talking about it as a lab leak was racist. Yes. The thing that I remember when I first laid that out and it was, you know,

it's still on the way on my Wikipedia. I pushed the conspiracy theory that, you know, Fauci did the virus, but he did that. Well, I was trying to show people like when they say, well, why would he do something like that? He was really the main advocate. There's a PC wrote. I would start with this,

which is I think it's December 2011, because gain of function a bit around a few years, they started with the ferrets or whatever and they had this new technique, Ralph Barrett, all of that. Yeah. And then it became very controversial in the scientific community. A whole bunch of scientists saying this is crazy. This is going to lead to a pattern.

Yeah. People saying that. Yeah. And Fauci argued back and he wrote this piece at the end of 2011 with the other guy, Francis Collins, who ran the NIH saying, engineering, I think it's almost exactly engineering, a potentially dangerous virus in the laboratory. He's a risk worth taking.

He wrote that. Like he was pushing this stuff. And like the thing that everyone, it was his initiative. It wasn't, he like passively funded this thing that some other minions were doing. This was his big thing. Yeah. It's just outrageous that it hasn't been.

And he broke the rules. That's the other part that people forget that a bomber in 2014 put a moratorium on it, which included stuff that was already in train, which included the project that led to COVID. And then again, people often say, well, Trump lifted the moratorium. He did, but he put back a new thing, which was, it was called the potential pandemic pathogens thing protocol, which said that when you renew a project, it should go to independent review. He broke that as well.

So he broke the rules to push this. And he's like, still not really had to pay any price for him. Unless you say his reputation. This episode is brought to you by Wild Horse Nine, only in theaters November 6th, earning rave reviews of the Toronto International Film Festival. Don't miss this wildly entertaining movie that critics are calling easily one of the best films of the year, starring John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell, Steve Busceini, Parker Posey, and Tom Waits, and written and directed by Camille Ward winner Martin McDonough. See, Wild Horse Nine, only in

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Well, the reputation, but he's also so old that he's not working anymore anyway. But the thing about it was that pardon that gave him a pardon for crimes that he had not been convicted for, which had never happened before. A preemptive pardon for and also for 10 whole years or everything he did, he could have been eating babies for 10 years and like, pardon. And then when you have a pardon, you're not supposed to be able to plead the fifth and yet he pleases the fifth with everything, including the color of his fucking tie. It's disgusting. He's a strange guy. And the fact that he was

a hero really shows how sick people were in 2020 looking for some sort of a solution. But they didn't know his history. They didn't know he did during the AIDS crisis. Yeah. He's a scary person. He scares Americans of it. And the thing that I'm also really

get really pissed off about still is when you hear the conversation around this, on that going back now to the lockdowns and all of that and the school closures that was such a disaster businesses, and people say, well, we didn't really know. And it was early and we were just being, we did know it's not true. I did a piece March 2020. Like right, it was in the before the end of 15 days to slow this bread right at the beginning, because I got to know through Stanford, Jay Batacharya, John Eunidis, all these guys that were speaking out, they did a blood, whatever, call it, Sarah Prevalence thing in Santa Clara County where this whole thing started, proving everything that we know. And including what about you now, we know from the whatever this diary, you as well, those Santa Clara County, is this the two doctors that they went public with this and then they lost their license and this is Jay and John Eunidis, they were the so he and I know about Jay. And the crazy thing about him was that he was one of

the people that was kicked off a Twitter, correct? Yes. Yeah. Which is when worse than that, kicked out, really persecuted by Stanford. They need to be held accountable. That was a crazy

thing. So the first lockdown in the country was Santa Clara County in one of the Bay Area counties. Then the next day, the other Bay Area counties did it and then after that Gavin did state why it's well started. And the woman who pushed it was the public health, go ahead and talk about this, the public health director or whatever of Santa Clara County, Sarah Cody. And she was married to the head of Stanford Medicine. And Jay spoke out against what was going on with actual data. They

did a study of what was happening in the community that proved that the case fatality rate was far lower than what they're saying. But it was also in the leaked emails. All of these, he was aware that it was far lower. And he was still promoting it. Exactly. But the point is that this is again,

corruption, because he was speaking out against the lockdowns that were pushed by this woman, Sarah Cody, her husband who was head of Stanford Medicine persecuted Jay. He was treated so badly, they suspended him, they accused him of a head of some bullshit investigation into him outrageous that no one's ever done anything about that as far as I can tell, Stanford. No, it's, it's creepy to watch that top down power in action when you know that they're lying. And we're seeing these lines, mass shootings and emails. Yeah, the fauci thing is very creepy. It just shows you why he was pushing for that pardon.

But then there's the question of whether or not that pardon is even legitimate because it's all auto pen stuff. Yeah. And Biden was out of his fucking mind. Like it didn't. Well, I think I always think is also this the state level. So it's a federal pardon. So states are going to, but then there's

this immunity if you're doing stuff in your public role, you can't be sued for that or something. I don't well, I mean, he lives in hell. I mean, he knows. But I think he's a bit of a sociopath. I think there's something about him. Like when he was prescribing people AZT for AIDS, he's a doctor. He's well aware

that AZT was pulled as a cancer medication because it was killing people quicker than cancer. They're using it as chemotherapy. People are dying faster. And so they already had this FDA approved drug. And so this new gay cancer, they literally were calling it the gay cancer first. They just

started giving it to them like what we have a medication for it. And then there's fauci's on records saying the reason why we prescribe AZT is because it's the only medicine that's both safe and effective. Effective of what? Effective killing asymptomatic people. They were also using the same playbook that they used during COVID by using these testing methods that had an enormous amount of false positives.

Like Kerry Mullis himself was there's a video of him. He's a guy invented PCR testing. He's talking about fauci's talking about he's like he's a bureaucrat. You guys full of shit. He doesn't know that you should never use a PCR to determine whether or not someone is ill. He's like it's not how it works

because if you ramp up the cycles enough, you could find anything. And that's what they did during COVID. They found like it's 80 something percent false positives. Fortunately, a lot of those people weren't forced to take AZT. But there's a lot of people that turned positive for HIV that probably didn't have it at all.

They gave them AZT and they were fucking dead. And this is the he's the villain in the Dallas Buyers Club that moved with Matthew McConaughey. That's all about people who have AIDS seeking alternative treatments and being denied them because he was trying to find a vaccine for it even back then. They were testing the vaccine for it on fucking foster kids and killing them in New York. It's all in RFK Junior's book. They get if his book lies, how come he has a suit? It's really amazing

how it's able to get away with stuff that's truly evil. Yeah, I mean testing the AIDS vaccine on foster kids is crazy. And then dying is crazy. But this joke, the AZT thing is crazy. I don't know how what determines when the sort of media mindset towards something or whatever. That means that

this story gets attention and massive. Oh, it's really simple. It's really simple. Pharmaceutical drug commercials. All that would change if they're not allowed to advertise.

We're one of two countries in the fucking world that allow pharmaceutical drugs to advertise on television. One of them is New Zealand and they're far more restrictive than us. And because of that, you have ads that you see that are playing on CNN that are not even for a drug that's commonly used for some weird conditions. But they don't have to be plapped. You know, Pisswade, you've got the condition. That's what they're really doing is not selling

drugs. What they're really doing is making sure that CNN doesn't ever talk shit about the pharmaceutical drug companies and doesn't do any stories on the adverse side effects and doesn't do any stories about how many of them get pulled by the FDA that initially get approved and they find such horrific side effects, they have to pull them because it's a large percentage. It's fucking nuts, man. And it's who was it that brought it up that was explaining how, you know, he had figured out a long time ago that the reason why they spend so much money on advertising is not because they're trying to sell drugs. They're trying to buy these networks. It makes sense. It's an enormous part

of their ad budget, right? And they spend so much money on television. And who the fuck is watching CNN at this stage of the game? You know, what are their numbers? Their numbers are pretty piss poor for the amount of money that these drug companies are spending. And then you see so many

ads, so many for this. And everyone's always had a barbecue. They're always having fun. They're having fun and like, there was a brilliant parody that Nicole Shanahan did when she was with Bobby running. She did a brilliant one for TDS. Do you suffer from TDS Trump's arrangement,

or that she did like a barman? That's really, really, really great. That's so crazy. But the thing I was thinking of when you like the, you know, you're really dark human consequences. So like, you know, obviously I'm focused on it because he's my opponent. But it's the story of Becerra and

the kids, the migrant kids, it's a story that I bring it up to people. And a lot of people have never heard about it. Like literally no idea. What is it? When he was Bobby, he had job Bobby's job.

And Bobby had his job at HHS secretary. And you had, it was during the four years you had the open board. And the way it works is that millions of people come across the open board. We don't know exactly how many. But the kid unaccompanied kids are the responsibility of HHS. That's how the system

works. So he was responsible for them. And the total number we know, because it's recorded, 479,000 kids, under company kids without parents. It's an amazing number in the four years of the Biden administration. All of those kids were like Javier Becerra's responsibility. So they had, they were

overwhelmed. They set up these camps. Do you know any of this? They have these camps. They set up to process the kids. In Florida, Texas, there were three in California. And the point was to try and

get the kids to a safe sponsor relative, someone who looked after them. And they had so many, they were overwhelmed. And there's really bad stuff going on in the camps. There were reports of sexual abuse, the older kids, you know, some of the older kids were like, you know, 17-year-old, rough, you know, some were gang members, whatever. So there was all this shit going on in the camps. Sexual

abuse, physical abuse, it was bad. And it was like pictures of, you know, like we went to one, then Pomona, one of the exhibition halls, like 150 kids on cots. It was bad. And so Becerra, once these kids out because it looks bad and they'd gone on and on about kids in cages with Trump. And so he basically, we've now got these whistle plows coming forward. And the New York Times

reported it. The New York Times broke this story. But it's just basically not gone anywhere. They did it in 2023. The, he dismantled the vetting that was supposed to put the kids with a safe place.

And so they lost track of thousands of kids. And many went to child sex traffickers, slave labor, child labor traffickers, just horrific stories. You had, what was the rationale for it? Because they were they weren't moving them out of the camps quickly enough. So we had a whistle blower come to us because these people said, how can he be government? Who said, we were supposed to connect the kids with

the responsible adult, check their identity, ID checks, home visits, all this. But the instruction was it's going too slowly. We got to get the kids out. She said, speed over safety. And so when they raised flags about it, like 200 kids sent to an address that turned out to be a contain a lot, like not a real address. It's just a front for traffickers. A kid sent to a woman who was

in wanted by Interpol, like a gang member, like just crazy. So when they raised those stories, they were fired. Like it's really terrible what happened. And still, I mean, HHS just published them because they were still responsible. Numbers from, I think it was two weeks ago, that there's 330,000 that they're still missing. They don't know where they are. 40 kids died. Like it's really bad. And

yet it's like Fauci's like, he's the candidate for governor. No one's really calling him out. It's amazing to me. It's really bad, Joe. Honestly, you've got that is crazy. You've got to be

responsible for that many kids and say speed over safety. So there's a story again, we're still about to forget some people. You know, this woman said she was a caseworker, a Pomona. And Bessera actually visited that camp, visited, did a photo of whatever and he's going on about how we're doing a good job of finding safe places, whatever. And then the interviewer, I was at the taping. She

didn't, she's in a job where she doesn't want retaliation. So I was there for the two hours, we take the conversation. And the interviewer asks her, did anything change after Bessera's visit? She said, yeah, everything was at the speed up. And they had strike teams that were set up to tell us, don't check that, you know, when she would say, this idea is obviously a fake idea for this person, like the photos like a selfie is obviously fake. Don't worry, just send them quick, get them

out. She's surprised. And this even the New York Times story had a boy who she had a few examples because she tracked them down. She wanted to put it surprise for it. A kid who ended up in, I don't know, meatpacking plant 13, 14 year old had his arm ripped off. Oh, our girl, one of those, she came

forward as a whistleblower, she's a victim. She was on camera. She said, she's telling the story, she was like put on a plane. And they said, you know what happens? They didn't let her take her stuff. She

was met at the other end. There's three guys. They picked, she has no idea who these people are. She's from, I think, Guadamot, who's the else. Gets in a car with three guys, no idea.

Take into a house. She has to work 20 hours a day, sleep on the floor with four guys in a room. She said, girl from, you know, it's just, and there's so many of these stories. Bobby, the way Bobby puts it is that Becerra turned HHS into the largest child trafficking operation in history. Oh, fuck. Yeah, exactly. And this guy's running for a car. I remember honestly Joe, like,

when we did these debates, you know, you did a lot and not just debates, but forums and you meet. And I thought he's a nice, you know, I'd see him. We chat backstage or whatever. And I thought, you know, he's kind of nothing. He's a bureaucrat type person. Nice guy, perfectly nice smiley.

He's a nice, amiable guy. And I just thought he's like an amiable non-entity. But the more you learn about this, it's like really bad. Because it's a classic thing with these career politicians. Obviously, all that mattered was I don't want to look bad. I don't, we've got all these kids.

They're in these camps. The media has access to them. It's really looking making me look bad. Get these kids out. It's just shocking. Oh my God. It's shocking. That's so evil. Yeah, it is.

So it's also really racist. All of them were letting, okay. Yeah, because you think about it. If that was all kids from Norway, little young boys and girls from Norway, do you think they would treat them the same way? So Pomona, where this camp was, there was three in California, Long Beach, San Diego and Pomona. So the caseworker who did what she was, she said, there's a notorious child

sex trafficking street area near there. She said, before this, most of the girls were African-American black girls. After the camp, suddenly it was all Latino girls. It was just so obvious that that was what was happening. Child sex trafficking. Well, if there's child sex traffickers and there's such an

obvious vulnerability, like hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied kids making across the border, of course, they're going to sneak in. Exactly. The whole thing was insane. Can I just do one other thing? The boy, I mean, they took away their, they had these papers that they would send them off with. And it had a line that had information on it, which included a hotline that they set up.

If the kids felt they were in danger, they took on a trafficking hotline. There were 65,000 unanswered calls to the hotline. It was just a bullshit like thing that didn't work. And again, the people who pointed that out were fired. Oh my God. It's really bad. It's like to me, the people that pointed it out

were fired. It's just, this is to me, I've been in and around politics, me, to govern one way or another for long time. I've never seen anything like this. And he's like, it doesn't even seem like it could be real. That's what I thought. The numbers are so crazy. It seems like some sort of conspiracy

theory is easily disproven. Exactly. Well, in the first reporting of it was the New York Times, 2023. Holy shit. And everything that's coming out is it's worse even than that. What do you think

was going on with the whole open border? I think that they, it's, I think they believed that any kind of restriction on immigration is racist. And therefore, it was part of the ideology around that. That we can't put people are coming and they're fleeing bad conditions. And you can't stop them because it's racist to put restrictions on immigration. I think that's what it was mainly.

Okay. So that is a great way to justify flying people into swing states and then trying to turn them into citizens, which is what they were actively talking about doing. Pelosi talked about that, Schumer talked about that. They talked about getting these people citizenship, which means those people can vote. There's also moving them into these swing states. And if you move into the

swing states, the census doesn't count whether or not you're a citizen. The census counts whether or not you're a human being. And so it changes the number of congressional seats that are available. So there's that. And then there's also putting these people on free healthcare and giving them money and setting them up. And then if you can get those people to vote eventually,

you've got to build in voter and you could change like I never thought about that. Whatever million people got in over the last four years, they're not going to vote for Trump. How many of those people vote if you let those people vote, how many of those people are going to vote for the Republicans that wanted to get rid of them with ICE and how many of them are going to vote for the Democrats that wanted to fund them and help them get across the border. It's pretty simple. Even if you don't get all of them, you're going to get most of them. Do you think that I mean,

I hear that over from this? What do you want? Thanks. It seems to me that's so dark and cynical. Well, if they wanted to do the whole country, what they've done to California and have complete and total control with one party, well, they've already done it in a state. Why not just implement it

through the entire country? In California, you can't show ID. It's illegal. That's great. Why would you do that? Why would you do that? There's only one reason you want to cheat.

And now they've got and we've got voter ID on the ballot in November in California, which is crazy that you have to ask for that. Exactly. And the attorney general, this guy, Bonter, I don't know if he's been following, he's doing the Paramount lawsuit. He's like the total political hack. All he ever does, like we got out of control, crime and all this shit.

All he does. And the same with, by the way, by the way, I keep coming up on my opponent, he was attorney general of California appointed. He didn't get elected. All he talks about in terms of his record. And he was attorney during the time when crime exploded is how many times he sued Trump. But this guy, Bonter, now, there was this ballot initiative, there is a ballot

initiative on November for voter ID. He just changed the description. Did you see this? No. So it had a kind of accurate description of what it was. You know, this measure,

you know, I got the ballot and the voter information. This measure will require people to show a blah, blah, blah. And that was approved by the whole system. And just in time before they start printing them, he, because the attorney general who decides, changed it to say, like, the most negative possible thing. This, I mean, I haven't got the exact words you can find it, but it was like, this measure prohibits voting unless you have, and it goes on to make it sound really good. It's like, it's so cynical. This is just what they do. Yeah. Well, they were trying

to get people to look at it in terms of looking at it through their ideological lens, rather than through a practical lens. But it's also like, it's so crazy that you have to have ID for almost everything. Oh, it's crazy. And they say, oh, it's so discriminatory. Like, what's talking about? That's racist. Yeah, what about driving a car? You have to have a license to drive

a car? What about, you know, check into a hotel? I mean, every night, I'm a different Hamptonan. Because that's where we stay. ID. Yeah, you have to show ID to buy booze. It's like,

IDs everywhere. It's normal. It's like, we need to know that you're real. It's a very, when you watch them defend their opposition to it, it really, I mean, I'm generally not I really drew try and see the best, you know, that's just their ideology, whatever. Then it's not really cynical. But when you see the way they wriggle and squirm over voter ID, it's like,

what other explanation is that? Exactly. It really, it's such a ridiculous thing to be opposed to. It's pretty clear. It's pretty clear that there's an advantage. And the advantage is definitely on

the side of the Democrats, the voter ID advantage. It's just, it's just crazy. It's just, it's just, we have lost our fucking collective minds. And, you know, it doesn't help when, you know, this administration is in this war with Iran that makes no fucking sense whatsoever. And everybody's like, oh, so you look at that, like, it just builds up the other sides argument.

Well, that's what they say. Okay. Well, that's what they say. Okay. I'm out.

No matter what. Example. Massive thing in California for everyone is just gas prices, highest in the country, by far. Higher than Hawaii in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, even though we have abundant oil reserves. And California is like so insane. They're literally shipping in, they're shutting down California oil

production, shipping it in from halfway around the world, like 80% now ship from Iraq. And the Amazon rainforest, like Gavin goes to the Amazon rainforest to the climate conference, the lecture everyone about climate, because of his climate policies, oil drilling in the Amazon is now being increased to provide California soil. Anyway, so crazy. So they do all these things like right now, you know, and it's all as a direct result of what they've done, right, the gas prices are so high, and it's regular working people who are screwed, like people drive their cars and trucks, and Dave, it's not the climate war is, you know, in their laptops, in Marin County, do you know what I mean?

Anyway, the war is now, they're go to response. So you make a point about gas prices. Oh, it's Trump's war. And of course, it's true that the war has increased gas prices everywhere, but it's still $2 higher in California than anywhere else. But it lets them off the hook.

Well, it's just indicative of the same problem that you're going to have whenever a single party is running a state for that long unchecked, just like you were talking about, hungry, or it's just like it could be anywhere, you fill in the blank anywhere in the world where you get power and you get complete control. And then you just tax the fuck out of people and then you keep increasing government, which they keep doing. It's pretty wild. We're changing this law, make it cheaper, or that be even harder to do. California gas because it uses unique strictly regulated clean burning boutique blend mandated by the California Air Resources Board to reduce smog and greenhouse gas emissions, specialized fuel must be refined locally on an energy island because no pipelines connect the state to outside fuel networks. It's just more of the same. So that this is important. So

see that California Air Resources Board, CARB, that's the main agency that's driving the cost of everything high when it comes to energy gas and electric. And actually now your earlier question, what can you do? There's basically four reasons the gas prices are the highest in the country. One is the gas tax, which is the highest in the country. That I can't do anything about as governor. That's the legislature. They just increased it. So you've got all these Democrats

running around saying affordability, we have to do something about the affordability crisis. They just increase the gas tax in California. So just it's so ridiculous. But that's the first thing I can't do anything about directly. All the other things you can, it's partly that, is the regulations on the refinery. But it's also these hidden taxes. Like you've got the low carbon fuels, they

will sound good. The low carbon fuel standard cap and invest, they call it the cap and invest, that's funding high speed rail. These are basically taxes on gas, the energy industry's pay. Then you've got the fact that we're importing all this oil rather than producing it. So instead of producing it in California, in the cleanest regulated standards anywhere in the world, which is what we have because we've got all these regulations and sending it in a nice pipeline, just 100 or so miles from New Bakersfield, Kern County, to the refineries in Long Beach and Torrance.

We are, what I said earlier, shipping it in, because there's no pipeline from outside California, bringing it on tankers from the number one in the Middle East is Iraq. Bernie immense amounts of fuel all along the way. Yes, because they run on bunker fuel, which is the most dirty form of oil. So they are, this is an accurate statement, they are increasing carbon emissions in the name of climate. They're climate warriors fighting fossil fuels. It's just fucking crazy. Yeah, but it's the ideology. It's not even,

it's so funny, I used to sort of talk about their climate policies, not even the climate policies, it's climate posturing. It's like they want to look as if they're doing something. Yes, it's a part of the ideology, like you said. It's part of the doctrine, the religious doctrine that is left. You have to say that climate change is real. Science is science. You have to say a bunch of things.

Love is love. You have to say a bunch of things. It's like house. That's literally virtue signaling. It's not just virtue signaling. It's kind of religious doctrine. It's a religious signal.

It's not just an actual phrase, but that's what it is. And it's kind of religious, and like Mark Andries has talked about this. It's kind of like a cult. Like if you don't follow it, you are excommunicated. Yeah. And I did a conference the other day in Sacramento where I went up.

And there's something about it. It was the smugness was so, I normally try and be reasonable and just make my arguments and sort of. There was something about this. It was a kind of climate thing. Things I agree with it was green energy. I'm all for that. Whatever. Great. Let's have

innovation. I'm not against any of that. I'm against the windmills. The insane windmills. Like totally inefficient. And then they have to go into landfills. And they only last a certain

amount of years. And then you have to take them down and bury them in the earth where they never degrade. And they catch fire and it's like, I think kill birds. Have you heard the latest though? This is the, it's actually one of my bits to go back to the thing because it's so crazy.

Is the new plan for windmills is offshore windmills in California in two parts. More obey off the central coast hump up in the north, including having them far out because the wind is more, but except also the ocean is deep there. So they're going to have floating windmills. Have you heard this one? No. Floating. And these windmills are, they're like big. They're like a thousand feet.

That's the height of the Eiffel Tower pretty much. Floating. And one of the proposals like 10,000. So 10,000 Eiffel towers floating off the, it's insane. Trump's just stopped it. And now they're

suing to reopen it. By the way, when energy, when we have in California today, existing natural gas fired power stations, which could provide all our more than all our electricity needs today, more than all. It's like something like 300 gigawatts. We only use about 270 something like that. But they're only, they're running these natural gas power stations at like 10, like 20% of their capacity to use as backup for the windmills and for the solar foams. If you ran them at full

capacity, well, we've already got, you don't even have to build anything. You could more than meet all our needs. But no, that's too sensible. So we have the floating windmills. And of course, we have highest electric bills in the country, apart from Hawaii, double the national average. And the reason

I got across at this conference is that they were going, you want to reduce the renewable goals or something. I just want common sense. I'm all for it. If it makes sense, if you can make it pay great. But the people who you're hurting with all of this is regular working people, not kind of elite people at a conference in Sacramento, just working class people who are just being crushed.

And I see it every day. And the struggle, you know, literally, they, the number one thing people say to me is really striking when in all these, you know, I've really met a lot of people. As I said, hundreds of events, thousands and thousands of people. They say, it's not like, oh, good luck. It's like, you have to win. There's like this intensity. It's really interesting.

Well, because they know it's slipping away. They don't want to move. And they're so it's hard. It's hard. It's hard. It's hard. It's hard. It's

definitely worse over the last 10 years. And they don't want to move. Yeah. And it's so difficult. And the fucking story, but people just, oh, and it's not even, it's so casual and cruel the way it's like, yeah, for our ideology, we'll jack up your electric bills and your gas prices. And you just

have to suck it up because we want to make ourselves feel like we're leading on climate. That's the other thing. I was, I was, I was, they were yelling at me from this conference. And I said, you tell me what is the impact of any of this on climate change? I said, I'll give you everything you're saying about climate change. Okay. Let's agree. Climate change. We've got to fight climate change.

What is this doing to fight climate change? What is the impact on global temperatures of any of this? And like, nothing. Because the answer is zero. It has zero impact on global temperatures, which is the only thing that matters. And then someone shouts out, this is where they always go.

Oh, we're leading. We have to have a leadership role. We're leading. That's it. Who's following?

No one because it's crazy. It's hurting people. All these countries are backing off. That's the one thing that China has an advantage in is that their government and their business work like that. Yeah. And the business works for the government and the government controls the businesses. It's

not a good thing. But the one advantage that they have in there, they don't do anything stupid. It's going to lose money for virtue signaling. Exactly. They open coal, coal, coal, fire plants, like crazy. Exactly. Which are, you know, part of the energy that's going into making the solar panels

that are shipped across the ocean to make these people feel good. It's true. It is true. It's wild. I mean, it's just wild. It's wild. But I mean, this is the problem with a government handling

something versus the private sector. If the private sector handled it, it would have to be profitable. It would have to make sense. And they keep saying solar is really cheap. You know, I said, great. So why do we have the highest electric bills in the country, apart from Hawaii? If it's also great.

I'm not against it. You don't have a solar panel of battery. That's great. You know, I'm not against any of this. But don't force it in a way that just raises the cost for regular working people.

Well, California just loves to regulate. They love it. It's part of the government. Have you seen the tires? The tires. Yeah. Oh, you've seen that. I was going to bring that out. Yeah.

So what is the time? Let's pull it up, Jamie. The new California regulations on tires restricting the kind of tires that you can buy. They can't help themselves. They need to justify all these jobs. There's so much government. But I just want to give you this is a good example,

California regulations approved new rules limiting what replacement tires you can buy for your car. So what is the rationale behind this approved new rules that were restrict which tires you can buy when it's time to replace them in Nana, Miss vote, California Energy Commission voted to adopt new rules that will phase out the sale of replacement tires that don't meet certain energy efficiency standards. Ultimately, about protecting consumers. I see this as a sheltering the public from higher costs in the long term, long run, excuse me, tire manufacturers and the commission staff are at odds of whether this will add to the cost of living the state. It will. Both sides

of knowledge. This will no longer allow the sale of significant portion of the tires currently sold in California. Fucking a 70%. So the center of this is a tires rolling resistance or how much energy a tire uses as it rolls down the road. Lower resistance means a vehicle uses less gas or electricity. New cars come with energy efficient tires but consumers typically replace those with

higher rolling resistance tires. I wonder if that has anything to do with performance cars. So I would imagine rolling resistance. So rolling resistance, what would that mean? Does that mean friction? Yes. Basically friction is traction. So you want more traction.

So you're basically making people buy performance tires. No, the other way around. You're killing? Yeah, the other way around. So traction is less resistance. It's more resistance.

Maximum resistance is traction. They want, they will allow the sale of tires with a maximum rolling resistance of 9.1 Newton per kiloton. It lowers it to 7.2 starting in 2033. So yeah, it's making it less traction. That's what it's saying, right? Rolling resistance. I'm not sure what it says. What they

want is the energy efficient. Ensure replacement of tires sold in California are at least as energy efficient on averages of tires that come with the truck. So my perception is that a tire with more traction would be more efficient. No, for driving. Yeah, but not for climate.

When you go into the store to buy, most people are going to buy the cheapest thing available. Right. And the cheapest thing available would have less traction, correct? It would be the cheapest thing available. Right. The thing about the cars, performance tires, they don't last as long.

Because there's a softer rubber and the softer rubber grips better. And so if you buy, that's what they want to get rid of. Those are the ones that have more traction. That's what I'm confused about. It would seem to be more energy efficient in terms of the use of the car.

That's what they're arguing it's for. But you're going to end up with these little tires that don't, I mean, all the people that want to go off road or whatever, that's what you can. You can buy off road tires? 70% of the of the tires are going to be banned. That currently sold 70%. That was one of the reporters at KCRA, Ashley Zavala, very, she's really

on all these stories, very aggressive. She's really exposing all this nonsense. And that was, I think her number 70%. Wouldn't they just make new off-road tires then? Yeah, but there wouldn't be as good. How off-road are you driving off-road?

Well, I'm not, but some people are. There's a bunch of people love driving off-road. Why are we doing this? We have road stories about how we're talking about. It's over. You've got homeless everywhere. The highest tax in country. Businesses are leaving

every single day. It's a real economic emergency. We have the highest unemployment rate in the country. We have the highest poverty rate in the country, the highest cost of living. And this is what the government's focused on. I mean, people got to wake up, right? This is insane that they're

focused on this. They're churning out absolute nonsense. The regulations, the bureaucracy, that's, this is totally unaccountable. This is some bureaucrat that's discovered a rule. Nancy Skinner, who used to represent Berkeley, found this thing in some obscure place that no one had noticed for 20 years, suddenly this bureaucratic agency decides to bring in this rule. Not no input from

the voters. But just my question is, what is this impact going to have on the car market? Like, if you sell a car that has a particular type of performance tire that no longer- I don't know. I don't know. Could we ask perplexity? Is this referring to tires with more

traction or less traction? Energy.California.gov, second sentence, unfortunately, replacement tires are often less efficient. That's why your mileage drops the first time you place your tires in the efficiency gap between new car tires and replacement tires means California drivers are paying nearly a billion dollars in additional fuel costs, which is- So are these inefficient tires less expensive? Is that what it is? Yeah, I tell them what it makes sense, right? So the more expensive tires are more efficient, which means they would have

better traction. Is that what it is? That makes sense, right? Because if it's, if the tire has less traction, that means it slips more. If it slips more, it's not as efficient. You wouldn't get as good a gas

mileage. But they're, they're doing this by climb. That's what they're saying we need to lower emissions. That's what it's all about. Because of the use of the- The 70% thing is crazy. So I just,

if you have it, let's say if you buy like a Chevy truck that's an off-road truck, right? That those are not efficient tires. So what are you going to be able to get for them now? I don't know. I mean, it's just come out. So everyone's looking into this and you just think- And there's no recourse?

No, they've just- Well, there will be one I'm there because I'm going to get rid of these people, because this is going back to the question earlier. Okay, benefits of the proposed regulation. Consumer savings, proposed regulation would save nearly one billion per year in gasoline and electricity costs. Right. Air quality by reducing fuel consumed, the proposed regulation would reduce CO2 emissions by 2.0 million metric tons per year, which the equivalent of taking 400,000 gasoline cars off California roads would also reduce other criteria, air pollutants such as nitric oxide and particulate matter. Reduced energy demand, proposed regulation would reduce California

demand for gasoline by 141 million gallons, also reduced demand for electricity by 0.9 terawatts per hour each year. Okay, the following tires are excluded from the proposed regulation minimum performance standards. Competition tires used for motorsports, winter-type snow tires, all-season winter performance tires used in retreaded tires, deep tread tires, tires designed for ATVs or other off-road vehicles, a large off-road tires for use up to 99 miles an hour, motorcycle tires, temporary spare tires, small tires with 13-inch nominal rim diameter, proposed limited production tires, tires sold for use on an emergency vehicle, high load index tires, tires not capable of sustaining speeds over 50 miles per hour and space saver tires. So it seems like there's a lot of caveats.

Look at that, that list again. Nobody believes that this is about saving money. No, it seems like they're just wanting- This is entirely the ideology for climate. This is some bullshit calculation. Is there a world where that makes sense though, where they're right and it will reduce all that gasoline and it actually will be better for everybody and you'll force people to make better tires and they're churning out low quality tires and this could be mitigated a long time ago?

Well, I don't know. I think that the reaction to it is exactly the opposite, which is here. They come again. Here, they come again. It's real. Yeah, another thing. As I said,

it's just been announced. So we've got to dig into it. But I mean, it's just to me, such a kind of crazy example of them endlessly micromanaging everything. Yeah, the market should decide. Look at these big, big problems.

California's new tire rule could wipe out 70% of what's on the shelf and Sacramento sat on the law for 23 years. So Sacramento did invent a new law on Monday. It finally read one. It wrote in 2003. I mean, it's just infuriating to- They love to tell you what to do.

Okay, so they did a thing last year. In the legislature- Remember, this is the point about there's no checks. No one's stopping anything. In the last legislative session, last year, not even the whole year, just a few months, they passed 1,118 bills. We printed them out. It was double my height.

Obviously no one's written- No one can read them. You know, no one can read them. You use some signs, most of them, like the vast majority. He hasn't read them. It has stuff like this in it.

And no one's paying attention. And the corrupt system, the interest groups that want what they want from the system, they get these bills written. And then they get passed. And then here you are 23 years later, something that's in some obscure law. That's how it all works. And the answer to the

question, like, what could you do about it? It's basically captured in these two things, like number one, all these agencies that are pushing out these rules. It's the executive branch. So as the governor, you control the executive branch. You can fire the people on these boards and you can replace them with people with some common sense. And you can actually merge them. You can reorganize them. You

can cut them back. There's a whole bunch of things you could do on the bureaucracy, because so much of this is coming out of the bureaucracy. Secondly, you can veto the legislation. And the point is always made. If they have a 2,000 majority, they can overturn a veto. That's correct. But the last time they

overturned a veto from the governor was 1979. So they don't like doing it, because suddenly they have to justify all this shit. That goes through without any scrutiny. If you veto it, if they want to overturn it, suddenly they have to make the argument. And so much of what you get in California just goes through that. Anyone noticing that's the real corruption in the system.

And so the other thing I'd say is that you also write the budget, the governor writes the budget, and send it to the legislature. And then you have to negotiate. But again, if you take out all this waste and we just announced last week, Operation Zero Waste, Council funding for high-speed rail, Council Free Health Care for illegal immigrants, all these things that we said, we do. How much has been spent on that high-speed rail? So far, total 15 billion.

Oh, that's a bargain. So the total... They've got a lot done, all right? Okay, so that was... So it was... 2008, it was supposed to be 30 billion, the total budget. And it's supposed to be open in 2020,

and it was 2.5 miles from San Francisco to LA. So the latest is it's going to be open, maybe, if you're lucky by the end of 2030s. It's going to be the new budget from 30 billion, it's now 230 billion, right? The plan, as they laughably call it, is the first bit, is San Francisco to Merced at the top of the Central Valley, on the regular train line that's already there. And then Merced at Bakersfield is the high-speed rail, and then Bakersfield to LA, a bus.

Bus. Have you heard that? That's real. It's real. That drive from Bakersfield to LA, which I've done a lot, it's already congested as fuck.

You can take that, can take two and a half hours, if you're unlucky. So it's what it's... And it's so... 230 billion for that. And then Bessera, my point, he went to Fresno the other week, he announced that he would finish it on time and on budget.

On time was six years ago. On budget, they spent... Was 120 million... No, no, no. Okay, the budget was 30, they've spent 15, and they've not laid any tracks at all.

Gavin, it's classic Gavin, it's almost my favourite. He did an event, because obviously he's running for president, he doesn't, he says embarrassing, he wants to sort of shake the narrative. So he did this press conference somewhere there with trains in the background to make it look like this is a real thing. And they haven't laid any track, and there's no plans to laid any track, but he was standing by tracks to sort of, I think, make people think there's tracks. Even the phrase that he used was to announce that we are now entering the track laying face.

Face, I could be another 10 years. It's so ridiculous. And then you're gonna have to get a bus. And the bus, it's real, that is the plan. And then it's why is that?

Because the logistics, they can't get the train through the mountains. Yeah, that's it. So you have to have a bus. Yeah, I mean, I don't actually know what the long-term plan, I can't believe that's the whole idea. I think that's just what's going to be available.

So that's just like the most tunneling has to happen on that part, so maybe they're just waiting. I think it's a long time. It's not that eventual. So the days and more tunnels. It's because they require the most tunneling of the mountain crossings with four separate tunnels to only 28 miles in length.

How much of the nature across the St. Andreas fall, which is the biggest problem. Oh, even better than the crossing earthquake. How much of nature is going to get destroyed in the production of that? But who even wants this?

I mean, tunneling through mountains. The other thing is, I spoke to someone who works with the Enon. You can check with the Enon. So he said that you could do the boring couple, I could do a tunnel. The whole thing for five billion.

I don't know if that's true. But this is such a monument to the whole thing, right? Take the money, waste it, spend it on nothing endlessly delay. How come Gavin's not running again? He can't.

He can't. He's got two terms. Two terms. It's so crazy. And you've got this pretend.

This is what's really, they're just a video that someone found of him talking in 2015 when he was lieutenant governor about what a joke the whole thing was. Yeah. Speaking very honestly about it. Yeah. And it's kind of funny and ridiculous.

Oh, look at that. He says that then. Now he says, but it's actually infuriating because they're still taking the money to pay for it. They're still pretending. And they're taking money out of it.

The funding, like I said, comes from this thing called cap and invest, which is the gas tax. It's just insane. Steve, I hope you win. We're going to wrap this up and bring it home, but I hope you win. It'll be fun.

It'll be hilarious if you win. Great. What job do you want, Joe? I don't want Joe. We'll have you decide.

I don't even like going back to California. Well, OK. The only reason I'm doing it is that you can move back. They're going to move back. I know it's too good here.

I know it's fun. I love it here. I can see that. I really hope you win. Thank you, man.

I think you have a chance. I really do. I mean, you make a lot of sense, and that's a lot. In this day and age, it's a lot. You're also actually a good guy.

Like, I know you. You're an actual good guy. You're not like some weird lizard person. You know what I mean? Like, there's some people who you are.

I've met on Sacramento. You are who you are. You are really you. I could attest to that. I know you.

Like, I've known you before. You had any political aspirations. You're the exact same person. There's a lot of these people that are just skin suits. There's skin suits over lizards.

There's lizards in there. Whether metaphorically or physically. They're fucking lizard people. And that's a real thing. So I hope you win.

You can come to my inauguration. I will. Just that commit to that. Yeah. I'll come.

I'm going to win. I'll come. All right. All right. All right.

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